Sheila invited Monica over to Edgemont to meet this prodigy but Monica begged off: she was unwell: she was preoccupied. (Also, as she did not wish to tell Sheila, she looked frankly sick; she wouldn’t have wanted anyone, especially Sheila, to see her in such a state.) Sheila went on at some length about her young artist friend, who, as it turned out, greatly admired her work . . . felt temperamentally drawn to it . . . though (“Queer, isn’t it!”) he said that Flaxman’s work generally left him cold. In company, Sheila said, Peck could sit silent and glowering for hours, but when they were alone he talked wonderfully, beautifully, for a young man with no consistent schooling he knew so much, far more, Sheila said, than she’d known at that age: Monica must meet him. (“Must I?” Monica said faintly, ironically.) Though Sheila disapproved of representational art on principle she was overwhelmed, she said, with a series of paintings Peck had done just last winter; she’d bought two of them, in fact, would be hanging them in her studio, Monica could see, of course the paintings were not strictly representational—nothing hard-edged about them, nothing photographic—they suggested dream states, perhaps—large undefined spaces in which doors were ajar, opened to various degrees, so that you could see through one door to a shadowy interior where another door, caught at a slant, was open—and so on, and so forth—and there were windows too, seen at odd oblique angles—but it wasn’t so clear as Sheila was making out, the effect of the paintings was altogether different—“Of course what interests him is problem solving in terms of space, open areas and closed, you’d see, Monica, you will see, when you come over.”

In the end Sheila brought Peck to Monica’s house uninvited, they could only stay for a few minutes, she said, they were on their way elsewhere, she was euphoric, handsome, rather loud, too restless to sit down while Peck, hardly troubling to say hello to Monica, or to look at her, sprawled lazily on the sofa, his long legs spread and his arms limp, slung over the cushions. He looked precisely his age, twenty-five; he was unshaven, sullen; clearly bored; yet irritably attentive to Sheila Trask, who paced about, talking rather too animatedly, swallowing large mouthfuls of her drink, informing Monica of the fact that he and she were having the most remarkable joint experience. . . . Each had dreams of gigantic ice islands, extinct volcanoes, dry valleys of volcanic ash . . . night skies glaring with pinpoints of intense light . . . each had dreams of blazing sunshine on snow . . . and when they spoke of these dreams each knew immediately what the other meant . . . as if they’d had the identical dreams at the identical times.

Solitude, and silence, and the fact that, there, in Antarctica, “history” had not yet begun.

When are you leaving, Monica wanted to ask.

21