She could be funny about virtually everything, even suicide—the subject, the theory. (“As Nietzsche says, the thought of suicide can get a person through many a long night—don’t you agree?”) She was certainly funny about men. (“If a man doesn’t betray you it’s probably because he can’t.”) She smoked, she fell into fits of coughing, she was clearly drinking too much, and very likely (so Monica guessed: she didn’t dare ask) taking amphetamines. Her black eyes had acquired an unnatural glisten and her skin gave off a whitely radiant heat. Speaking, speaking rather too rapidly for Monica’s taste, she ran her hands nervously through her hair, and gestured far too flamboyantly. It was tiring, Monica thought, simply to watch: she would have liked to take hold of Sheila’s hands and make them still.

One of Sheila’s new subjects was the phenomenon of aging.

A reverse miracle, she called it.

Yes it was banal and, yes, it was tragic—the tragedy being that it was banal.

At a certain age, Sheila said, trying to be amusing, mirror-selves—“mirror-ghouls”—begin to appear. “You discover that you really were vain all along,” she said. “You were so supremely vain you never had to look—! But now you do look, more and more frequently. Because of course you can’t anticipate what you’ll see. How ravaged—that face of yours. How estranged. How terrifying.”

But Sheila didn’t sound as if she were terrified, chatting away in Monica’s presence, crossing and uncrossing her long legs, eating most of the food she had brought for Monica; draining glass after glass of wine. Monica had the idea that Sheila had stopped eating at home—that she only ate in Monica’s house, or seated across from Monica in a restaurant—and that the act of eating had become a queer little ritual to her: she ate quickly, greedily, yet in a way shamefully, as if she resented Monica watching, if Monica were not eating. (“Aren’t you hungry?—have some of this,” Sheila would say, and Monica would say, embarrassed, “Sheila, I’ve had dinner,” and Sheila would say, as if not having heard, “This stuff is so fucking expensive, somebody has to eat it: come on.”)

She spoke of getting older, always older.

The clock, she said, ran in one direction only: that was its subtle trick.

Her eyes were black, blackly moist, and the veins showed faintly blue at her temples: how strange she has become, Monica thought, staring: how beautiful!

She began to speak of her mother’s death—and then stopped.

And Monica did not dare take her up on the subject, knowing, from past experience, that Sheila could not be interrogated.