The marriage and its breakup were bracketed by two opposing—yet not dissimilar—ceremonies. They too had become impersonal events. Time, which had always unfolded in an uncomplicated motion, vaguely allied with “improvement” or “progress,” had cruelly pleated: so that Monica had no sooner become accustomed to thinking of herself as a married woman than she was no longer married. She had been plunged into a tunnel and before her eyes could become accustomed to the dark she had been forced out of it again, dazed, shaken, considerably older. After eight years she was “herself” again—Jensen and not Bell—whatever that meant. Instead of sharing a three-room apartment off Sixth Avenue with a man said to be her husband she was living, alone, in a five-bedroom shingle-board farmhouse a mile beyond Glenkill, Pennsylvania. It was a region she hadn’t known existed before the previous spring: the serenity and calendar-art beauty of its rolling farmland and woodlands and unpaved roads and lanes seemed to harbor, in its very perfection, a subtle undefined threat to her sense of reality. Or to her sense of what she deserved. (“Do you think you can walk away from all this?” her husband had said, his voice trembling with hatred; and Monica had had no reply that she dared utter aloud.)

But the divorce had gone through just the same. And she was free, as he was. (By way of mutual acquaintances she had learned that he was on the West Coast, working for a cultural foundation of sorts in San Francisco. They had told her the name—the foundation was evidently supported by one of the oil conglomerates—but Monica wasn’t certain she remembered it correctly.) In Glenkill she was alone and undefined and in a curious battered way virginal again. How does it feel at the age of twenty-nine to be the object of no one’s desire, she queried herself—no one’s love, no one’s particular interest? How does it feel to be able to sleep through most of the night? To be able to work efficiently for twelve or more hours a day? Since moving into her farmhouse on the day before Labor Day Monica had experienced several voluptuous attacks of sheer anxiety—that she did not deserve her good fortune and would be punished. Then again she thought, gloating: “But I won’t be punished!—I did walk away without being struck in the back.”

How does it feel, Monica boasted to her mirror reflection, to be so exhausted you wouldn’t be capable of crying if there were any reasons to cry—?