“‘Mary Beth,’ I think.”

“‘Mary Beth’?—if you say so.”

She would not consent to go drinking with Sheila, even to the most innocuous of the taverns; she was finished, she said, with that sort of thing forever. “Then I’ll be obliged to go alone,” Sheila said.

Monica said: “No.”

But Sheila evidently did go out drinking, alone, once or twice, perhaps more, hinting the day after that she’d had quite an adventure, quite . . . an interesting adventure; complaining half-humorously of being hung over. One night, she woke Monica from a sound sleep by telephoning at two in the morning from Hedy’s Café, where, she said, she’d met an extremely interesting man who had an extremely interesting buddy, both of them state troopers (off-duty), both good-looking in their own way. Wouldn’t Mary Beth like to come join them? “You’re drunk,” Monica said angrily, banging down the receiver.

Next day when Monica returned from Glenkill she found in her mailbox a skillful little crayon and charcoal drawing, an act of contrition on Sheila’s part, evidently. It was a highly stylized likeness of Monica herself, all suggestive smudges and blurs and cryptic shadows; an unsmiling likeness, indeed. La Belle Dame Sans . . . was the inscription.

4

As if nothing had changed, Sheila began to drop by Monica’s house, always with the happy excuse of being in the neighborhood; driving to Glenkill on an errand, perhaps. She even appeared once or twice at school, to see if Monica might happen to be free for lunch: no? yes? At a reception at the Greenes’ in early April—held to honor a visiting alumnus, a wealthy Boston manufacturer—Sheila showed up late, but made a strong impression, giving no quarter to the guest of honor in his good-natured denunciation of modern art. (For naturally it turned out that the gentleman knew nothing apart from a few names—Pollock, Rothko, Warhol?—Mondrian?) Another evening, in a small group gathered for dinner at the Chinese restaurant, Sheila dominated the conversation, speaking of ways of seeing that were conditioned by ways of political thinking. “If you don’t think well you can’t see well—it’s as simple as that,” Sheila said. The men in the party, Monica’s colleagues, were quite clearly attracted by Sheila without knowing how to talk to her. Did one challenge her, head-on?—or listen closely, and agree? How was it possible to get her unqualified attention?—her respect?

One of the young men asked Monica the next day if Sheila Trask was always like that.

“Always like what?” Monica said coldly.