To Sheila she said she thought it unwise, imprudent, for her to say such things—such wild vehement visionary things—in front of people who weren’t artists and who weren’t even intellectuals, but who would repeat her remarks, muddle them, even make fun of them. “Christ,” said Sheila, blinking as if dazed, “—what did I say? I don’t remember.” She ran her hands through her hair, squinting at Monica. “Morton used to be like that—he talked too much when he was talking at all—the rest of the time, he couldn’t be bothered, he’d just sit. I know I say the most contemptible sort of bullshit if I’m a little high—why don’t you kick me under the table, shut me up—I’m fucking sorry if I embarrassed you.”

Monica was touched, moved. She said, relenting: “You don’t embarrass me at all, Sheila. You know that. It’s just that these other people don’t understand you and they’re alerted to listening for things they can repeat, to add a cubit or two to their height, bragging that they know you.”

“Yes. Right. Just kick me under the table,” Sheila said, “if it happens again.”

Again, suddenly, Sheila was drinking; again, smoking too heavily.

And taking amphetamines—or so Monica gathered.

(In Tangier, Sheila said, she’d had some marvelous hashish—it had done her head good. But she’d been too cowardly to smuggle any back with her and unless she wanted to make a trip to New York City she couldn’t get anything of that quality again.)

Drunk, or high, loquacious, bright and brittle and unnervingly cheerful, Sheila sometimes said that she knew she was an artist—a genuine artist; and sometimes said that she was “probably finished.” At such times she spoke in a flat elegiac voice. She was through with her career; finished, burnt out, dead. Monica challenged her at once, Monica tried to laugh her out of her moods, but Sheila was adamant. “Careers die just like people,” she said. “Yet the wheels keep spinning. The cogs keep moving, locking and grinding in place. The old wheezing heart.”

And Monica would protest; and Sheila would fall stubbornly silent.

They were shy of touching each other, even of drawing close by accident. Monica recalled that hissed admonition of Sheila’s—I don’t care to be touched—and stiffened, herself, if, in one of her more effusive states, Sheila drew too close. She was conscious of Sheila’s warm breath, Sheila’s scent. The fact that Sheila took up so much more space than her fairly thin frame required.

Weeks passed before Sheila made any reference to Christmas; to Monica’s visit home. “How was your family?” she asked guardedly.

“Very well,” Monica said. “Very well indeed.”

“I thought that was where you’d gone—to Indiana.”

“Yes,” said Monica.