Their conversations were invariably intense, even strained, lasting well past midnight even on weeknights, and leaving Monica as depleted of energy and as nervously invigorated as if she had been exercising in the fresh air. Her senses alert, her attitude somewhat combative. . . . Waking the next morning in her bed, sleep-dazed, groggy, her energy not fully restored, Monica could remember vividly Sheila Trask’s flashing dark eyes and animated features, her laughter, her somewhat strident voice—she could remember the way things looked in Sheila’s wildly cluttered studio, or the delicate blue and white designs of the French ceramic tiles in Sheila’s kitchen, which Sheila had inlaid herself: she could remember these things clearly but she often had difficulty recalling what she and Sheila had discussed for so many hours. Sheila asked questions and Monica answered and sometimes Sheila questioned her more closely and sometimes Sheila spoke passionately. . . . The very intensity of their conversations and their occasional disagreements seemed to consume their actual words, as if such dreamlike agitation had to be surrendered by day.

Monica was to remember, however, objecting one evening to a pattern that had developed in their relationship: while she spoke freely enough, confiding to Sheila a number of things she had never told another person, Sheila invariably stiffened whenever Monica asked her about herself—about her marriage, her childhood, her family. Sheila would rub her face vigorously and mutter that Monica couldn’t possibly want to know such things—she hadn’t lived a very interesting life—she had put everything of significance into her painting—and there was nothing left over. Also, Sheila really didn’t remember very much of her life. “I’m a wheel moving along the ground,” she said, making a playful flamboyant gesture, “—I’m the present tense—where I touch the ground—only where I touch the ground—only in motion.” When she was slightly drunk she spoke in a singsong voice that was both childlike and belligerent.

Monica said sharply: “And the rest of us aren’t, in your opinion?”

“The rest of you aren’t required to be,” Sheila said.

Monica felt at this instant the woman’s sense of her natural superiority, as casually revealed as if she had tossed a coin on the table between them. But she had no reply, no declaration of her own—she sat mute, staring.

Sheila wondered if it didn’t strike Monica, from time to time, as—well, slightly inappropriate: her position as a young and very attractive woman instructor at a boy’s school? Of course the Glenkill students were highly motivated and competitive—they were said to be unusually well-behaved for boys of that age—but they were adolescents, after all, they could hardly control the drift of their thoughts, the contents of their dreams and fantasies. And, certainly, Monica must figure predominantly in their fantasies.

So Sheila observed, eying her shrewdly.