“They asked for Mr. Fisher.”
“Even on paper, I don’t believe you’d be mistaken for a man.”
She laughed. She was a beautiful woman by any standard, with her heavy-lidded eyes and red doll’s mouth, a pinpoint-sharp kind of beauty that was never so lovely as when she laughed and spoiled it, which she did often.
She said, “It’s good to finish something, or to feel like it’s finished. To get paid. Al had such trouble finding the job at Occidental, finding any kind of job in this day and age, and his poem—”
“Ah, the poem,” Tim said, exhaling.
“Yes. That.”
“The poem is always being written.”
She laughed again and leaned toward him, and he liked how she didn’t care to be quiet about it. She simply liked to laugh; she liked to eat and drink. He’d often thought she must like to do lots of things. Al was his closest friend, but the pleasure of Mary Frances’s company was entire.
“And what does Al think of MFK Fisher?” he said.
“Oh, I haven’t told Al. Yet. I haven’t told him. I wanted to thank you first, for all your help.”
And as though she’d reached across the table and laid her hands upon his face, he understood she had not told her husband about their dinner here tonight.
Tim looked steadily into his plate, the last mouthful beside his spoon. His thoughts drifted one upon the next; how could a woman who talked so much still seem so guarded? She must have gone to such trouble to meet him here alone. He studied her face and her gaze seemed to shudder for a moment between frames. There was so much she was still deciding about herself, so much he couldn’t know.
“You’re talented,” he said. “You’ve heard that before.”
She lifted her chin, giving him the long white architecture of her throat. “Oh, I could stand to hear it once again.”
And he didn’t stop to wonder why him and not her husband, because years ago his cousin had encouraged him to paint and write, not his father, not his teacher; there was no charting who sparked what in whom. To Al, Mary Frances’s writing would always be a hobby, like her drawing, her cooking and carving and knitting, because he did not want a wife for a rival, and really, who could blame him.
Tim told her again that she was talented, that she had discipline and a grasp of language, of reality, and they were alike in that way. Al was an academic, with his muses and inspirations, Gigi was a movie actress, but the two of them — he touched her hand — they were something else. She was writing a book that wasn’t like anything else anyone had written. He knew how it must sound, but he meant it; he’d thought as much a thousand times, watching her lean forward over her notebook when they would talk about a story, or the way she leaned into her pages as she read them aloud. If it was admiration she’d come for this evening, that was easy to provide.
But too, he felt how her hand was kinetic beneath his — if he pressed, she would press back — and in this new light he wondered new things about her, if she’d been an athlete, played an instrument, if she’d bitten her nails, sucked her thumb, if she touched herself, if she ever wore perfume, his attention traveling her body, his mouth still making praise, but now he was thinking of her shoulder blade and how it fit into her back beneath the leafy sleeve of her dress. He felt her legs shift beneath the table, the conduction of her skirt across her lap; he saw her from all sides, all parts, because that was where his talent lay. Then it was his turn to take her by surprise.
“I wouldn’t say this if Al were here. Not that it isn’t true, or that Al doesn’t know it himself. But I wouldn’t say all this in front of him.”
“And if Gigi were here?” she said.
“Oh,” he said, letting go, leaning back. “I tell Gigi everything.”
* * *
The waiter brought her trout under glass. He prized the flesh away from the spine in efficient sheets, pink and curling, though Mary Frances well knew how to use a knife; it was what a waiter did for a woman, what a woman allowed in a restaurant like this. Tim’s face, cocked against his fingers; this had become fun or funny, she wasn’t sure which, his eyes sweetly blue and blank as a baby’s. After the fish, there was quail en papillote, the parchment broken and billowing the scent of dry grass, and her mouth became slick with fat and the second glass of wine. She forgot about Al and Gigi and what would be said about this evening later, and she ate.
If she understood art, if she could write, if she was beautiful and smart and a tangle of other things still taking shape, what she was truly good at was this. She ate slowly, she sat back from her plate, she allowed her pleasure to show on her face. And she was willing, always, to try the next thing.
* * *
Watercress with lemon, a slice of cake, bitter coffee, the last of the wine: it was late when they stood to leave, the restaurant still full of people radiant as flashbulbs on their own invented time. Mary Frances felt light-headed; there had been so many endings to this evening already, so many possible moments to postpone or back out. Now it was almost over, and she’d made her announcement, thanked Tim, and nothing had really happened next. What was she waiting for?
Tim held her sweater, smoothing the shoulders after she’d slipped into it, his fingers slow to leave her nape and the dark knot of her hair. The valet had her Chrysler pulled around and lingered at their elbows, keys ready. Tim’s hand covered hers where she’d tucked into his arm.
She thought again of the afternoon tea, the elegant parlor, the white gloves of the hostess. Someone’s wife played cello, another recounted her year in China, another her love of bridge and how they must get together and have a club. No one asked her what she liked to do, and if they had, she would have lied.
Tim leaned to kiss her cheek. “I could drive you home,” he said.
Mary Frances let her shoulder into his. “But then what about you? Who would drive you home?”
“If we only lived close enough to walk.”
“Then what?”
His face, still warm from where her mouth had been.
“Mary Frances,” he said. “I am honored Al worked late tonight.”
“He might have, yes.”
“As far as Al’s concerned, we all worked late, my dear.”
He opened the Chrysler’s door and held her hand as she dipped behind the wheel, the green drape of her skirt brushing against his pant leg. He reached down for the edge of fabric that hung below the doorframe, testing it between his fingers.
“Tim?” she said.
He said good night then, or thought he did. There had been so much wine, so much talk. Her face still tipped up at him in the car window, now smeared and dappled in the lights from the restaurant’s awning, as though she were swimming under shallow water. All that deep green dress, afloat.
Tim did not hear the valet until he touched his elbow.
“Sir,” the valet said. “Shall I bring your car?”
He was a boy, really, not even old enough to shave, an oil stain on the cuff of his jacket.
Tim clapped him on the back, flushed with energy now. He loved women; he loved his wife, Mary Frances in her deep green dress and polished mouth, the clever things she said. He loved his wife, and he was glad to be going home to an empty house. He felt like running for it.
“I’ll get it myself.”
He took off up Wilshire to the lot where the restaurant parked its cars, seeming to keep pace, for a moment, alongside the creamy fender of the Chrysler, in the wake.
* * *
Night in Hollywood kept falling, caught in the lights from the Paramount lot and thrown back across the sky, and Tim drove fast up the ridge of Mulholland, the city’s swell and tow like some great sparkling sea, dipping at last into Laurel Canyon and the bungalows knit together against the hillside in the darkness. This house belonged to a producer’s mistress, next door a dancer in the corps, the real traffic signaled by a porch light left on or out, a phone ringing once and not again, the real traffic after dark between men and their lovers, because it was never night enough in Hollywood for anything but big ideas and getting caught.