Sheila jerked the wheel and eased her car back into her own lane; it had been drifting to the left. “I am watching,” she said. But it seemed that she really couldn’t stop laughing—tears were streaming down her face, her expression was pained, contorted—and in the end Monica had to insist upon taking over. “I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right,” Sheila said, choking, sobbing, wiping at her eyes, but she surrendered the car readily enough to Monica.

Afterward Monica said: “I don’t know that it’s all that funny. It seems rather touching. As long as the child never knows. . . .”

But this set Sheila off into peals of laughter again. She pounded at her knees, yelped and choked with hilarity. And after a while Monica joined in, Monica couldn’t help herself. It was funny, somehow.

6

Now I am in control, Monica thought cautiously.

Now I know precisely what I am doing; what the perimeters of friendship must be.

By degrees, however, Monica found herself spending more and more time at Edgemont. For a while Sheila wanted her to visit her studio every afternoon; not to praise, or to make suggestions, but simply to look, in silence. (“It makes a tremendous difference to me,” Sheila admitted, “—to think that you’ll be dropping by. Just, you know, to look. To register that I exist and the paintings exist.”) Often Monica drove there directly from school, to have supper with Sheila, then to return home to her own work. Saturdays, she spent most of the afternoon at Sheila’s. And Sundays were unofficially set aside as one of their days together: she had to explain to Keith that she was never free, Sundays.

She never stayed the night at Edgemont, however. No matter how late she was in getting home, she never gave in to Sheila’s repeated invitation to spend the night. (“I have a place of my own, Sheila,” she said; and Sheila said, making a joke of it, “Why not have two places of your own . . . ?”)

Monica was upset to discover how irresponsible Sheila Trask was in terms of practical life. There were desk drawers, cabinet drawers, even kitchen cupboards stuffed with bills (paid? unpaid? long forgotten); there were letters never opened (from Internal Revenue, Merrill Lynch, one or another of Sheila’s banks, money-men, attorneys); there were requests of various kinds (would Sheila Trask be interested in a teaching position, or a position as artist-in-residence, would Sheila Trask be interested in being interviewed on television, on radio, in a national arts magazine) never answered. “How can you live like this!” Monica said, genuinely shocked. And Sheila, stricken, put her hands over her ears in a childish gesture. “Don’t tell me. Don’t frighten me,” she begged.

Nothing to be done, then, but that Monica Jensen take over. To the degree to which she could spare the time.