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Chapters (62)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. I.
  5. 1
  6. 2
  7. 3
  8. 4
  9. 5
  10. 6
  11. 7
  12. II.
  13. 1
  14. 2
  15. 3
  16. 4
  17. 5
  18. 6
  19. 7
  20. 8
  21. 9
  22. 10
  23. III.
  24. 1
  25. 2
  26. 3
  27. 4
  28. 5
  29. 6
  30. 7
  31. 8
  32. 9
  33. IV.
  34. 1
  35. 2
  36. 3
  37. 4
  38. 5
  39. 6
  40. 7
  41. 8
  42. 9
  43. 10
  44. 11
  45. 12
  46. 13
  47. 14
  48. 15
  49. 16
  50. 17
  51. 18
  52. 19
  53. 20
  54. 21
  55. 22
  56. 23
  57. 24
  58. 25
  59. 26
  60. About the Author
  61. Also by Joyce Carol Oates
  62. About the Publisher

And it had ended, simply and irrevocably; it had burnt itself out. And that was that.

Amen, Monica thought.

She was free to make other friends—free to not make other friends—to do whatever she wished.

In Wrightsville she’d gone with her sister-in-law Esther to get her hair cut and blown dry in a style that lifted airily from her forehead and made her eyes look larger, more exotic. In Wrightsville, sequestered away in her old room, she had spent several intoxicating—and exhausting—hours poring through scrapbooks she’d kept in high school, seeking out Monica the golden girl, Monica the prom queen (her junior year: had that been the dizzying height of her social life?), so that she might take heart from these early successes. She had known how to smile, then, as these snapshots suggested—she had known how to express happiness even if she hadn’t always felt it. So, thought Monica, inspired, I will try again: I will be that girl.

To a degree, that is. For, after all, she would be thirty years old in a few months.

She postponed telephoning Keith Renwick as she’d promised. Then, one day, seeing him walking along Main Street of Olcottsville with a woman—an attractive young woman in a fur coat, wearing oversized stylish glasses—she reasoned that perhaps there was no longer any purpose in telephoning.

If he wants to talk with me, he will, Monica thought. If not, not.

Still, she felt the ignoble pang of mimetic desire: wanting someone hitherto unwanted, because, or so it appears, that person is wanted by another party.

And isn’t there always something ignoble about desire, Monica thought. Mimetic—or otherwise.

Sheila Trask’s watercolor, in its bamboo frame, set inside a beige matting: the delicate little painting Sheila had claimed to be unable now to “see.”

That work of art . . . which Monica halfway wanted to return to the artist (so her spiteful pride urged her); but which, in calmer moments, she knew she must keep. Returning it to Sheila would mean its immediate—unsentimental—destruction. And though she no longer had any feeling for Sheila Trask (she didn’t hate the woman—not at all) she felt a curious attraction for the watercolor itself.