“Except of course it isn’t,” Monica said in a low trembling voice.

Sheila made an irritated dismissive gesture.

Sheila slouched out of the room, and refused to discuss the matter further.

Sheila did not trouble to reply when Monica called after her: “Except of course it isn’t—you know very well that it isn’t.”

“If you cut down on your smoking,” Monica said severely. “And your drinking. Those God-damned pills of yours.”

“Yes,” said Sheila.

“Are you listening?—are you going to try?”

“Oh yes,” said Sheila, hiding her face in her hands.

Then there was a day, a Friday, at the end of a spectacularly busy week for Monica, when Sheila became possessed by the idea of joining a contingent of women—artists, writers, educators—who were going to China for six weeks, leaving the first of May. Anything, she said, to get out of Edgemont—out of her studio—out of her head.

The invitation from China had come to Sheila Trask by way of the State Department, many months before; she had of course turned it down without a second thought. (To be precise, she tossed the letter into a drawer without troubling to reply. “We can get perfectly good Chinese food right here in Glenkill,” she told Monica, “—why the hell travel so far.”) Now, however, she telephoned Washington a half-dozen times, she telephoned a liaison person in New York City, to see if arrangements could be made for her after all. It was an emergency! She wanted, she said, to immerse herself in Chinese culture. That inhospitable Peking climate of which she’d read—prolonged cold well into the spring, dust storms, aridity, life lived close to the bone—a region where individuality did not exist (except perhaps as pathology) and where the State swallowed everyone up and where there was not (for how could there be?) any margin for personal anguish and personal desire.

Anguish and desire, Sheila argued—aren’t they identical?

And perhaps there would be a Chinese analogue, a sister of the soul, a “Sheila Trask” in that world: Sheila herself but totally transformed, purged of her failings, her sins.

“She could teach me a good deal,” Sheila said wildly. “If it isn’t too late. A sister—there—there—on the other side of the world—if it isn’t too late—”

Fortunately, nothing came of Sheila’s sudden flurry of interest.

By the time one of her calls to the cultural exchange office in Washington was returned, she had changed her mind—it was an absurd desperate ploy. And she was in the midst of rethinking the last of her paintings, she was greatly excited, she couldn’t be disturbed: would Monica handle the call, would Monica explain?

Monica would, Monica did.

9

Suddenly, in early May, Sheila decided to give a dinner party.