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Chapters (62)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. I.
  5. 1
  6. 2
  7. 3
  8. 4
  9. 5
  10. 6
  11. 7
  12. II.
  13. 1
  14. 2
  15. 3
  16. 4
  17. 5
  18. 6
  19. 7
  20. 8
  21. 9
  22. 10
  23. III.
  24. 1
  25. 2
  26. 3
  27. 4
  28. 5
  29. 6
  30. 7
  31. 8
  32. 9
  33. IV.
  34. 1
  35. 2
  36. 3
  37. 4
  38. 5
  39. 6
  40. 7
  41. 8
  42. 9
  43. 10
  44. 11
  45. 12
  46. 13
  47. 14
  48. 15
  49. 16
  50. 17
  51. 18
  52. 19
  53. 20
  54. 21
  55. 22
  56. 23
  57. 24
  58. 25
  59. 26
  60. About the Author
  61. Also by Joyce Carol Oates
  62. About the Publisher

That night she dreamt of the most extraordinary painting, fluid, three-dimensional, throbbing with life: Sheila’s painting, perhaps, but only partly imagined, still in the process of being transcribed. Monica was staring at the painting yet at the same time she was in it; swimming in its sweet radiant warmth, in its fleshy-sweet erotic warmth; scarcely daring to breath because the sensation was so exquisite, so precarious, so forbidding.

And, ah!—if someone were to kiss her, harshly, impatiently, on the lips, what then—!

10

A triumph of a party!—so Monica telephoned Sheila next day, to exclaim.

“Was it?” Sheila said indifferently.

She had no interest in talking about the party, evidently; she seemed to have very nearly forgotten it.

Before they broke off their conversation Sheila asked, suddenly, if Jack Winthrop had telephoned her yet. “No,” Monica said. “He will,” Sheila said, “—and if I were you, I wouldn’t see him.”

11

Ariadne’s thread, the secrets of the labyrinth, the convolutions of the human brain. . . .

The canvases were to be completed and taken away, by van, in twelve days. Monica was on the telephone a half-dozen times in a single morning, making arrangements; her throat was hoarse with arguing.

One Sunday an assistant from the Laurence James Gallery came out to Edgemont, to meet with Sheila; and Sheila insisted that Monica be present; she couldn’t get through the visit by herself, she said. (The young man, thin, blond, nervously handsome, a chain-smoker as addicted as Sheila Trask herself, stayed and stayed and stayed . . . until there was nothing to do, Monica realized, but invite him to dinner: she would prepare something in Sheila’s kitchen for the three of them.) Since the night of the party Sheila had lost a good deal of her spirit and energy. At Monica’s insistence she was no longer taking drugs—she moved slowly, lethargically, with a sort of bodily irony that Monica thought unnerving.

(She isn’t really sick, Monica told herself carefully. It’s a stratagem of some kind, a way of making art.)