“Been crazy about, you might say—‘crazy’ about,” Sheila said, rubbing her hands over her eyes. “But that was a long time ago, Monica.”

Evidently there were no men in her life at the present time except friends—artist friends—two or three “gentlemen farmers” in the area—acquaintances and connections in New York, Key West, Mexico, North Africa. And Paris. Sheila showed Monica the photograph of a Jamaican Parisian, as she called him—a muscular, near-bald black man, very handsome, very sure of himself, who, dressed in a paint-splattered sweater and jeans, bared his magnificent teeth at the camera. What do you think of Henri, Sheila asked Monica, nudging her as a man might nudge another man, contemplating the photograph of a sexually attractive woman, and Monica said, smiling, wondering if she were meant to smile, “Well—he’s certainly unusual. Was he a lover of yours? Is he, still—?”

But Sheila only grunted; laughed rather contemptuously; and took back the photograph. “Thus, Henri—!” she said.

When Sherill Ann and Mary Beth went out for one of their evenings on the town, it was Sheila’s task, undertaken with zest, to fend off men if they grew importunate or bullying, or overly affectionate. At Jake’s, or Hedy’s, or The Place, or Walt’s Bowling Emporium, Sheila liked to declare that they came unescorted and they intended to leave unescorted—and that was that.

As for Bud, and Billy, and Mack, and Mike—Sheila liked them so long as the conversation was amusing, the banter impersonal and breezy. She took offense, however, if one of them tried to interrogate her (“How many kids?—I thought you said three”), or if it appeared that sweet little Mary Beth was being made uncomfortable. In turn, she angered the men by muddling their names, or mixing them up (“Buzz?—oh yeah Bud—sure as hell you are Bud”), as if it scarcely mattered who was who. In the morning she frequently telephoned Monica to ask “how her head felt” and to sift through their little adventure of the night before, and it was clear then that she couldn’t distinguish one man from another—Fitch, Grady, Max—Johnny, Steve, Jeb O., Ryan. She felt sorry for them, she said. Their jobs, their marital problems, their debts; their old-fashioned swaggering machismo with nowhere to stick it.

“If you feel such contempt for them,” Monica said one morning, irritated because her head ached, and she knew she was doomed to drag herself through the day, “—why do you go out? Why do we go out?”

“I don’t feel contempt for them at all,” Sheila said. She seemed quite startled by Monica’s remark; even a little hurt. “. . . I like them and I like it that they like me.”