Romance is ephemeral, friendships can be permanent—so Monica came to understand, during the heady years of high school and college when she’d been, certainly it was pointless to deny it, an extremely popular girl . . . or, at the very least, an extremely popular personality. Even then Monica had seen that her friends, her girl friends, might well mean more to her in the future than her boy friends; and had not a thoughtful aunt warned her she would never have the opportunity to make such intense friendships again, once adolescence was past? So Monica wrote letters; dutifully, zealously, Monica wrote letters; though it hurt her unreasonably when one of her friends failed to respond to a second or even a third letter. . . . Harold had pretended to admire Monica for her faithfulness but in truth he’d thought her effort rather naive. He carried on no friendly correspondence at all; he simply hadn’t the time; nor had he (if it came to that) the friends with whom to correspond.

“Women are different, I suppose,” Monica had said doubtfully.

So she wrote her letters. By hand. Curled up on the sofa or propped up in bed, writing slowly, with deliberate slowness, hearing her own interior voice, imagining a one-way conversation: which is better, Monica thought, than no conversation at all.

Then it happened, to Monica’s chagrin, that a letter she had mailed off to her friend Rebecca in Boston was returned—Rebecca had moved, no forwarding address—and Monica, disappointed, opened her own letter, and, reading it, was astonished at what she found: for was this voice, this smug little boastful voice, her own . . . ? It was not simply that the Monica of the letter spoke with a false ebullient air of her work and the “amicability” of her divorce, but that she managed, not once but several times, to drop the name of Sheila Trask. And so casually, as if inadvertently. Sheila Trask the well-known painter. . . . Sheila Trask who is a neighbor. . . . Sheila Trask the widow of Morton Flaxman, famous for his . . .

Sickened, Monica thrust the letter away; sat huddled, for a long time, her head in her arms.

Sheila Trask my neighbor, Sheila Trask my closest friend, Sheila Trask whom I see nearly every day and who is (or so it seems) wonderfully fond of me.

5

Monica was learning never to make inquiries, even sympathetic inquiries, about Sheila’s work.

Monica was learning never to make inquiries at all.

“It isn’t interesting,” Sheila would say coldly, “—it’s boring.”

Or, fixing Monica with her razorish lopsided smile: “You don’t really want to know, so let’s change the subject.”