In the end, however, there was no need for Monica to open the letter at all: Sheila spared her.

Monica gave it to her, explaining that she felt too weak, too shaky, to hear from Harold at the present time. “I don’t want to read what he has to say to me, yet I don’t want to throw it away,” Monica said, her voice trembling. She looked at Sheila with a queer faint hopeful smile. They were seated across from each other in their usual booth in the Chinese restaurant; Sheila was pouring their tea. “I don’t dare throw it away,” Monica said.

“But I’d feel like a voyeur, opening it,” Sheila said, frowning.

Monica pressed her cool hands against her face to calm herself. The subtle perfumy scent of the tea both pleased and excited her. She said: “My predicament is, I don’t want to read it and I don’t want to throw it away without reading it. . . .”

Sheila turned the envelope in her fingers. She said: “The odd thing is, I wanted to write you a letter from Washington. From this dismal antiseptic overpriced hotel in Washington. I wanted to write you a long, long letter . . . but it terrified me, you know, that if I began I wouldn’t be able to stop . . . and I’m not good at writing, my nature is too crude and blunt for language. So I didn’t write to you, Monica; and now I see that someone else did.”

“What were you going to write to me?” Monica asked, surprised.

“How would I know?—if I had written,” Sheila said, licking her lips nervously, “I’d know: doing is knowing, after all.” She turned the envelope again in her fingers as if weighing it; then, almost impulsively, she ripped it open; skimmed the letter; her eyes narrowed, a flicker of something like distaste, or repugnance, passing over her face. “Nothing,” she said in a neutral voice. Then, before Monica could draw breath to speak (she really was frightened, her breath came quick and shallow), Sheila added quickly: “But I see no reason for you to read it, Monica. Certain words, once heard, or read, insinuate themselves in our memories forever; it becomes impossible to dislodge them.”

Carefully, yet unobtrusively, as if she were performing a private little ceremony, Sheila tore Harold’s letter into several pieces. And Monica, watching, felt an extraordinary sensation of relief and pain—and hilarity as well—as if the tearing sounds had something to do with her nerves, her very soul.

The remainder of the meal, the evening, was characterized by a good deal of laughter and frivolity. Sheila told marvelous seriocomic stories about Washington, Monica interrupted with childish comments and breathless laughter. If only, Monica thought, the evening could go on, and on . . .

3

Monica wondered what Harold’s letter had contained. Still more, she wondered what Sheila’s letter would have contained.