If not for Gigi, there’s no way he’d still be living here.
But he’d promised her California, that she could be a movie star, and for god’s sake if she wasn’t about to play Barrymore’s secretary in his next picture. And if her star continued to rise, she would get better roles, where she would play another man’s wife, girlfriend, mother someone else’s children. He walked up the driveway of their house, squat and white, and he felt as if he were walking onto a set, that behind and beneath this place that looked so solid, people were working hard to make it seem real.
He left his keys on the table in the foyer next to the bowl of florist tulips, now ragged and sad in the time since Gigi left. He left his jacket on the table too, his tie and pants, skinned his white shirt over his head. He’d pick up in the morning, or the maid would on Friday; it didn’t make much difference as long as he was here alone.
* * *
He woke to the double beat at his bedroom door, a woman’s shoes falling from her hand into the parquet, one and then the other.
“You would not hear a person breaking into your own house,” she said.
He turned on the light. “Mary Frances? Are you all right?”
“The door was unlocked. I walked right in.”
His body sank against the pillows, all ribs and sockets, lean and not relaxed. She remembered he had fought in wars, that he was trained to be prepared for anything, and still he was surprised to see her. She had surprised herself.
She placed her clutch on the bureau, thought ridiculously of the folded typescript she still carried. There was nothing left to pretend that might make sense: her house in the hills was the other direction, her husband the other direction, and yet the evening seemed finally sharpened to its point. If she was going to be here, it could be for only one thing.
She unfastened her watch from her wrist and set that on the bureau too.
Tim stared at her. “You’re right,” he said. “You never blush.”
“I told you.”
“Dear, what time is it? You’re like the little girl, stayed up too late.”
It seemed like a dare.
“Mary,” he whispered. “Don’t.”
But she turned from him, her fingers at the catch of her dress, the untoothing of a zipper. She was hoping that this wasn’t as foolish as it felt, but it seemed the thing she had to do. If he didn’t want her, she needed to know it, and if this was bound to happen, it needed to be now, and if she was about to ruin everything, then goddamnit, so it was.
Behind her, she felt the bed shift beneath Tim’s weight, and then there came the barest tip of his touch between her legs.
She could not get her mouth around fast enough to take him in.
* * *
They will never, really, tell anyone about this. In the morning, at the beginning of next week, Tim will meet Gigi’s train at Union Station, and he’ll bring her a corsage. He’ll load his arms with her cases, cutting the flock of other girls, their bottled hair waved, each of them like orchids, petals thick and flashy, with their men, and their arms full too. He’ll take Gigi home. She’ll sit at the piano, her ankles crossed and tucked aside, and she’ll ask him what he’s been playing since she’s been gone.
He’ll see the moment before him: he has missed her, he has always loved her, and people do the most surprising things by accident. He’ll tell her a funny thing happened while she was away, and think of her washed in lights on that picture with Eddie Cantor, the heavy blond wig that concealed her body for the camera, a slave girl, a harem girl, her face lifted for her single moment in the shot, so like a racehorse, his Gigi, since she was thirteen. He’ll tell her a funny thing happened while she was away, that their friend Mary Frances appeared in his bed in the middle of the night, and when he says it, he’ll feel something new break over them, hot and bright and from above.
She’ll place her small white hand atop his and say it doesn’t matter. He’ll notice then how she hasn’t even removed her hat, that her small white hand is cool and ringless, the corsage heavy with lilies and their scent of powder, and he will not know what else to say.
In some small way, it is Mary Frances now who ate his words. She ate everything tonight, lush and drunk and wet, now she has her mouth at his ear, and she’s saying things to him about what she wants and how, and she is strong against him, he can feel her strength in her legs and her grip and in her mouth still at his ear, but he can’t make out words anymore, just something straining at its seams. Her slip drifts against him, and then she takes that, too, away, and they are naked.
There is nothing Mary Frances understands so much as nakedness, and looking down between them, she can’t bear to look into his face, so she looks where things make sense on him, the way each part fits into the next, how compact and practical, and she thinks of the waiter with his knife over the fish, what a marvel it is to see the works inside. She wants to keep seeing that in Tim. She is afraid of what she’ll think of if she stops.
Her fear must show for just a moment, because he says what, and stumbles on the rest of it, unable to finish the question what’s wrong, what is it, because all of it is wrong, but he asks anyway and stumbles, and nothing comes to her, nothing even to fill the space, which is growing now, pushing up between them. Oh, goddamnit, she thinks. Goddamn. Before she realizes it, she’s talking, and she nearly tells him she loves him before his mouth comes down again to cover hers, thank god, because it wasn’t love that made her want Tim, that turned her car around on the dark highway and brought her back to this moment, it wasn’t love, but rather an appetite’s demand: direct, imperative, true as love perhaps, but far more dangerous.
All she’s thinking now is don’t stop, don’t stop. Don’t stop.
* * *
She left while he was still asleep, the folded typescript from her purse next to his jacket in the hall. She rolled the car downhill before she started it, flicked the headlights before she hit the main road, headed fast along the canyon to her family’s summerhouse in Laguna, where she’d told Al she’d be all night. Funny, the things that just came naturally. When she unlocked the door and threw open the windows, the scent of eucalyptus and last year’s ashes struck her like a fist.
In a book on the shelf under the eaves upstairs was a packet of sonnets, nearly fifty, papers creased and brittle from the number of times she had unfolded them, from the way she’d carried them the winter before they got engaged, when Al was away teaching English in a boarding school in Wyoming. He’d written to her, he said, on a single long cold night, until his candles burned out and the ink froze in the well. The sonnets weren’t about her; they were for her. She could sense all he’d poured into them, even when she wasn’t entirely sure what all of it was. It made her want all that poured into herself.
She had been a lazy student, enrolled in summer school at UCLA when they first met, but she was ardent in her letters. By the time Al came home for Christmas break, he wanted to marry her and take her away from California, to France, to Dijon, where he’d been awarded a three-year fellowship. The first time they kissed, she’d fallen against him, the ground beneath her swaying like a ship. She was twenty-one.
France had been a fairy tale, an adventure, an extended honeymoon. Al was a student, and so there was no money but what they accepted from her parents, Rex and Edith. There was no time to be what Al was studying to be, a writer. Perhaps that was why one shouldn’t spend one’s time studying to be something rather than being it; there was only so much time.