“A major exhibition, I’d thought. . . .”

Judging from Betty Connor’s tone she knew nothing of the connection between Sheila Trask and Monica, and Monica felt both relieved and obscurely angered; but rather more relieved; so it was important for her to keep her questions casual.

“Yes,” she said, “a major exhibition, or so I’d been told. . . .”

“Well,” said Betty Connor, easing past, “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never moved in that woman’s circle.”

Monica pushed her grocery cart on, Monica’s head throbbed, it was unfair, it was malicious, without informing her, without saying good-bye, it was unfair—unjust; yet of course what one might have expected; supremely Sheila Trask; supremely selfish.

“I never intrude where I’m not wanted,” Monica whispered.

As the minutes passed, however, she began to feel chilled; even clammy. Beneath her clothes she was perspiring but the dampness was cold. Like the onset of the flu—the worst strain of flu—intestinal flu—a malaise that slowly enveloped the entire body and sickened even the mind. She would have to leave, she was getting seriously sick.

Only with enormous effort did she continue. Shopping: pushing a grocery cart along the aisles of a food store: going through the routines of a life, her life: reaching with numbed fingers for familiar shapes—cans and bottles and gaily colored packages, items related in some utterly obscure and mysterious way to her well-being. These shapes, these brand names, these things: might they not be seen as calming, reassuring?—a confirmation of the fact that Monica knew very well who she was and what her tasks were and how most efficiently to execute them?

In the end she did not get sick in the A & P. The attack of nausea and faintness came later, when she was safely home.

4

One evening in early February, in Keith’s company, Monica found herself noting, with little emotion, that the textures of the world had subtly altered. What should have been shimmering, iridescent, mysterious, was now merely—surface.

An attractive surface, surely.

But surface nonetheless: two dimensions.

They were in the atrium dining room of the new Hyatt Regency in Olcottsville, a well-groomed well-mannered clearly well-suited young, or youngish, couple. In a setting of waterfalls; banks of poinsettias—red, pinkish-red, creamy-white; “appointments” of the most tasteful and unobtrusive sort. A pianist in a tuxedo, also unobtrusive, was playing romantic songs—“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” for instance—so softly as barely to interfere with the splash of fountains and the hum of conversations.