Monica carried the image of one or another of the men, the nameless men, around with her, at school, in her classroom, in the faculty dining room; she recalled the silly powerful downbeat of the jukebox; her sense—wholly irrational, wholly irresistible—that she was someone not quite herself, a girl, a golden girl, again, with all of her adult life ahead.

What she and Sheila did was chaste enough, wasn’t it?—and innocent. And it was certainly exhilarating. To be looked at by strangers, and admired; to arouse some hearty male desire, however anonymous and futile; to know that she seemed—though assuredly she was not—mysterious. All of my life ahead, Monica thought, her lips curling in irony. She knew it was supremely foolish yet it was exhilarating.

(She had told herself at the breakup of her marriage that she had not been hurt, not deeply hurt, it wasn’t that important, it wasn’t that significant, her divorce like her marriage was “ordinary,” “average,” a “typical” sort of suffering: Don’t take yourself too seriously, Monica! Of course Harold’s sexual interest in her had gradually declined over the years. The nine years of their “relationship.” It had begun with ferocity, a high keen rather pitiless passion, romantic if one chose to think it so, and flattering as well, for who, being fiercely desired, does not feel flattered . . . ? There was a day, however, more precisely a night, when Harold no longer looked at her, no longer required looking at her, though he continued to require a body—a legitimate female body—to make his sexual performance “normal.” Whether Monica and body were joined was a question, a tricky little question, fraught with embarrassment, which she didn’t dare ask. For there were no words. No words not thumbed-over, banal, stale. Monica could not reproach her husband after all when he betrayed her with her own body, making love—what “love” there remained to be “made”—to the flesh with which he shared a bed and a last name, while thinking, dreaming, plunging deep in his private thoughts. Perhaps, Monica thought, one of the phantom-images with whom he betrayed her was an earlier, younger Monica, mysterious and elusive, not yet his . . . ?)

But the exhilaration too was winding down.

Indeed, it was becoming too “exhilarating.”