Sheila was much more at ease showing Monica photographs of Morton Flaxman’s work—there were pieces by him in virtually every art museum and collection of distinction in the country—and canvases by other artists, many of them friends of her husband’s, artists who had come to prominence in the fifties: Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline. Hanging in Sheila’s living room, and drawing the eye helplessly to it, was one of de Kooning’s Woman paintings: so barbaric, so angry, so crazy in its swirls and swaths of paint, Monica laughed aloud in sheer nervousness when she first saw it: “My God, do you live with that every day—?” she asked. Sheila, however, said coldly that it was one of the most beautiful paintings ever painted.

One afternoon she took Monica into a storage space below her studio and showed her earlier things she had done herself, sketches, watercolors, oil paintings, everything unframed and much of it, Monica saw with dismay, in battered condition. Some of the work dated back to Sheila’s student days at the New York Academy of Art, much of it to the early years of her marriage. Monica flinched as Sheila, squatting awkwardly, pawed through a pile of large, soiled, dog-eared sheets of sketching paper, drawings she had done so long ago, she said, she couldn’t remember a single one—horses, trees, outcroppings of rock, uncompleted still lifes, numberless human figures, nude, male and female (including several, Monica thought, of her husband—though perhaps she was mistaken, Sheila paid them so little heed). She drew a forearm roughly across her perspiring face and said she couldn’t imagine why she kept so much junk: if she had any shame—if she had enough energy to waste—she would heap those things together and burn them.

Monica was shocked. “But these are extremely interesting things—don’t you think they’re valuable?”

“. . . Geological strata, old dead days, days and weeks and years in fact,” Sheila said, her face flushed. “So much hope and expectation . . . and sheer diligence. . . . Now I’m forced to see these things through your eyes, and my mind is absolutely blank. It’s as if a hose had swept everything clean. I don’t know what to think—I don’t even know what I’m seeing.”

“You can’t be serious,” Monica said warmly. “Anything you do, Sheila—anything you’ve done—is of value. And some of these things are extremely good.”

Sheila squinted up at her, smiling uncertainly. Her heavy eyebrows nearly met above her nose in an expression of quizzical mockery, an expression Monica particularly disliked—it made her friend look ugly.

“Are they?” Sheila said. “But why? Because someone who is well-intentioned says so?—because you say so?”

The question was not insolent, Monica realized, or even, coming from Sheila, tactless: it was asked in all sincerity: but how to reply—?

4