Solstice

Joyce Carol Oates

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062795755
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An engrossing early novel from Joyce Carol Oates's earlier novels explores a fraught and perilous relationship between two women

Originally published in 1985, Solstice is the gripping story of Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask, two young women who are complete opposites yet find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. Monica is a shy, modest, and recently divorced school teacher while Sheila is a worldly, sophisticated, and nocturnal painter driven by the needs of her art. Over the months, their friendship deepens, first to love and then to a near-fatal obsession.

Engaging, dark, and mysterious, Solstice is Joyce Carol Oates's psychological masterpiece of friendship and fixation.

IV.

The Labyrinth

1

Sheila’s presents, from Morocco: a pair of silver earrings, finely wrought, that fell in exquisite loops and spirals halfway to Monica’s shoulder; a pale green scarf stitched with gold thread in arabesque designs; a necklace of chunky amethysts, topaz stones, and ornamental shells of various sizes. While Sheila watched closely Monica slipped the heavy necklace over her head, fingering the stones and shells, frowning in admiration. The necklace was exotic, she felt transformed simply by wearing it. . . . The shells resembled snail shells but they were delicately striated, and gave off a pungent odor, not at all unpleasant, that reminded Monica of brackish water. It crossed her mind too—hazily—the hour was late, she had had several glasses of red wine—that the shells might not have been thoroughly cleaned, that particles of decayed flesh remained inside, bits of nameless sea creatures, perhaps poisonous, unwise to wear so close to her face.

“Beautiful,” Sheila said, staring.

Nothing has changed, Monica told herself.

Then, in triumph: everything has changed.

Now she would be cautious—she would be in control.

Monica listened closely to Sheila’s talk of Morocco, Monica listened to discover what, precisely, had happened there; what secret adventures Sheila had had, if any. (But surely that was the purpose of running away?—to have adventures, secret or otherwise? And to speak of them, to hint of them, upon returning home?)

North Africa was a place of elemental facts, Sheila said.

Americans thought it primitive, unnerving. No doubt it was: whatever “primitive” meant. The air so remarkably dry, the sun so direct and forceful, so whitely hot, powerful . . . you spent a good deal of time watching the sky, with a sensation that something would happen there at any minute; that whatever happened on earth, even to you, must be inconsequential. A sort of communal dream.

Of course, Sheila said briskly, the North Africans, for all their religious devotion, are hardly mystics. Allah may be a mysterious deity inhabiting the sky but they themselves are nothing if not immediate, canny, physical . . . supremely physical.

The men, at least.

As for the women: Sheila hadn’t in fact become acquainted with any women Moslems. (There was a saying, which Sheila repeated with a bitter sort of zest: A woman goes out only three times during her life—once when she is born and leaves her mother’s womb, once when she marries and leaves her father’s house, and once when she dies and leaves this world.)

What about the men, Monica asked.

Sheila ignored her question, which was in fact uttered in so low a voice it might reasonably not have been heard. She went on to speak of the architecture in Tangier—the painting done by Moslems (“a sort of Abstract Expressionism, quite haunting”)—the beauty of the Mediterranean—the cypresses—Spain across the strait—the Sahara (“Do you know Hassan is fighting a Sahara war?—to put down a rebellion of some sort, he says, but it’s really for reasons of greed”)—the Moslem religion in which men and women live their lives with a continuous reference to Allah, to Allah as the arbiter and measure of all things (“a crime against another person is only a crime if it offends Allah as well—and nothing greatly matters that does not matter to him”)—the sense of isolation, heartrending solitude, which Sheila found virtually everywhere, even in the most crowded streets and bazaars.

“Still, I grew to like it. I saw that that was why I’d come—not to be alone with myself but to be alone,” Sheila said.

Monica, eyeing her closely, felt a prick of annoyance; perhaps of jealousy.

And was Sheila telling the truth?—did the woman ever speak truthfully, or only improvisationally? She had mentioned earlier, with a childlike sort of boastfulness, that, in Morocco, she’d gained back the eight or ten pounds she had lost before Christmas; she had gained back some of her “muscle tone”—this said while playfully gripping her upper arm, and then her thigh. But Monica did not see any significant change in Sheila other than the faintly golden tan, the olive-golden tan, which was already beginning to fade.

“But weren’t you in a circle of some sort,” Monica asked skeptically, “—expatriated Americans, Parisians?—artists? Weren’t you staying in a friend’s villa on the Mediterranean?”

Sheila made an impatient dismissive gesture as if such factors, mere people, counted not at all. “Some of the time, yes,” she said. “And I quite liked them—most of them. I like people, you know. But I went away by myself too, after the second week. They warned me it was dangerous—a woman, alone, there—a ‘Christian’ woman—a heretic—but it wasn’t precisely as a woman I traveled; and nothing serious ever happened.”

Monica stared at her. “Nothing serious—? But what did happen?”

“I’ll tell you another time,” Sheila said. “In any case it isn’t important. What mattered to me was being alone; being there; seeing something in the landscape, in the light, I’d never seen before.” She spoke slowly, meditatively. “Yes, it was new. I don’t think I’m deceiving myself. A way of seeing, an angle of . . . vision, you could say; a certain rhythm to seeing, as you acquire, in a foreign country, a rhythm of hearing. And now that I’m back home I don’t intend to lose it.”

2

Sheila was back at work; hard at work; and meant to be a recluse, until the paintings were finished.

But she telephoned Monica at least once a day, usually in the early evening, to inquire how things were going for Monica. (She had no news at all—nothing to report.)

So Monica was obliged to speak of committee meetings, lunches with colleagues, classes that went unusually well, or disappointed (“Now they’ve got it into their heads that Mark Twain was a racist”); an awkward hour-long conference with the parents of one of her poorer students. Matters that could not possibly be of interest to another person became, at such times, highly significant; even emblematic; for all that Monica did and said and thought seemed to represent, in Sheila’s imagination, the actions of a person of supreme though mysterious importance.

“Why are you asking me this—?” Monica broke off one evening, in embarrassment, and Sheila must have been so startled she couldn’t reply at first; then she said, “I suppose—because—if I don’t ask—you won’t tell.”

Nothing has changed, Monica thought—except my control.

For she meant, this time, to be in control.

She was already, was she not?—in control.

Yes: in control.

Control.

She quite liked the word, its classy air.

Control. Control.

“This time,” she said, “—mine.”

3

Then it was mentioned, as if casually, incidentally, that Sheila might postpone her show another time.

She couldn’t bear the pressure, she said.

She hated all she’d done. And there was no time to remedy it.

“I’m at an impasse,” she said, lightly mocking. (Monica having told her of Keith Renwick’s use of the word.) “I’m about to have a ‘crisis.’”

“Go back to work,” Monica might say, breezily, to disguise the concern she felt; or, variously, “Take off a few hours, for God’s sake—go for a ride on Parsifal—come over here for a drink.”

Sheila resumed the subject, not altogether enthusiastically, of Sherrill Ann and Mary Beth: their pals out at the Swedesboro Inn and Walt’s must be wondering where they are, right? and where are they?

Monica thought of herself in that filthy restroom, squatting over a stained toilet seat, urinating in hot shamed splashes while the bartender and “Sherrill Ann” stood guard a few feet away, on the other side of a door that wouldn’t lock. The tastes of draft beer, stale potato chips, pizza . . . the sound of country-and-western music blaring from the jukebox . . . the smell of cigarette smoke, hair oil. And there was Fitch’s face raw with hatred: an emotion Monica had well understood at the time.

“Was the name ‘Mary Beth’?” Monica asked suddenly. “Wasn’t it— ‘Marie Beth’?— ‘Merrill Beth’? I can’t remember.”

“God,” Sheila said, puzzled, “I don’t know. I thought it was ‘Mary Beth’—wasn’t it?”

“I remember your name, ‘Sherrill Ann,’ but I don’t remember my own,” Monica said.

“‘Mary Beth,’ I think.”

“‘Mary Beth’?—if you say so.”

She would not consent to go drinking with Sheila, even to the most innocuous of the taverns; she was finished, she said, with that sort of thing forever. “Then I’ll be obliged to go alone,” Sheila said.

Monica said: “No.”

But Sheila evidently did go out drinking, alone, once or twice, perhaps more, hinting the day after that she’d had quite an adventure, quite . . . an interesting adventure; complaining half-humorously of being hung over. One night, she woke Monica from a sound sleep by telephoning at two in the morning from Hedy’s Café, where, she said, she’d met an extremely interesting man who had an extremely interesting buddy, both of them state troopers (off-duty), both good-looking in their own way. Wouldn’t Mary Beth like to come join them? “You’re drunk,” Monica said angrily, banging down the receiver.

Next day when Monica returned from Glenkill she found in her mailbox a skillful little crayon and charcoal drawing, an act of contrition on Sheila’s part, evidently. It was a highly stylized likeness of Monica herself, all suggestive smudges and blurs and cryptic shadows; an unsmiling likeness, indeed. La Belle Dame Sans . . . was the inscription.

4

As if nothing had changed, Sheila began to drop by Monica’s house, always with the happy excuse of being in the neighborhood; driving to Glenkill on an errand, perhaps. She even appeared once or twice at school, to see if Monica might happen to be free for lunch: no? yes? At a reception at the Greenes’ in early April—held to honor a visiting alumnus, a wealthy Boston manufacturer—Sheila showed up late, but made a strong impression, giving no quarter to the guest of honor in his good-natured denunciation of modern art. (For naturally it turned out that the gentleman knew nothing apart from a few names—Pollock, Rothko, Warhol?—Mondrian?) Another evening, in a small group gathered for dinner at the Chinese restaurant, Sheila dominated the conversation, speaking of ways of seeing that were conditioned by ways of political thinking. “If you don’t think well you can’t see well—it’s as simple as that,” Sheila said. The men in the party, Monica’s colleagues, were quite clearly attracted by Sheila without knowing how to talk to her. Did one challenge her, head-on?—or listen closely, and agree? How was it possible to get her unqualified attention?—her respect?

One of the young men asked Monica the next day if Sheila Trask was always like that.

“Always like what?” Monica said coldly.

To Sheila she said she thought it unwise, imprudent, for her to say such things—such wild vehement visionary things—in front of people who weren’t artists and who weren’t even intellectuals, but who would repeat her remarks, muddle them, even make fun of them. “Christ,” said Sheila, blinking as if dazed, “—what did I say? I don’t remember.” She ran her hands through her hair, squinting at Monica. “Morton used to be like that—he talked too much when he was talking at all—the rest of the time, he couldn’t be bothered, he’d just sit. I know I say the most contemptible sort of bullshit if I’m a little high—why don’t you kick me under the table, shut me up—I’m fucking sorry if I embarrassed you.”

Monica was touched, moved. She said, relenting: “You don’t embarrass me at all, Sheila. You know that. It’s just that these other people don’t understand you and they’re alerted to listening for things they can repeat, to add a cubit or two to their height, bragging that they know you.”

“Yes. Right. Just kick me under the table,” Sheila said, “if it happens again.”

Again, suddenly, Sheila was drinking; again, smoking too heavily.

And taking amphetamines—or so Monica gathered.

(In Tangier, Sheila said, she’d had some marvelous hashish—it had done her head good. But she’d been too cowardly to smuggle any back with her and unless she wanted to make a trip to New York City she couldn’t ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• I. The Scar
• II. The Mirror-Ghoul
• III. “Holiday”
• IV. The Labyrinth
• About the Author
• Also by Joyce Carol Oates
• Copyright
• About the Publisher