It was to the summerhouse in Laguna that she and Al returned after Dijon, and where they’d first met Tim and Gigi.
There had been a minor earthquake. When it passed, they’d tumbled out to the pebbled lane to find Gigi, the ties of her madras sundress flapping against her bare neck. A downed power line snapped and flared behind her, and when she started toward them, it was as though she’d been cracked into motion with the whip of it. Mary Frances felt Al stand up straight beside her; she stood up straighter herself.
“Dear god, California,” Gigi said. In her hands, she held the pieces of a china dog she let chunk into the dirt. “Dillwyn and Gigi Parrish.”
But there was no Dillwyn. The three of them looked behind her to the latticed porch she’d come from. “Timmy!” she called.
The Parrishes had been their constants ever since. They were renting the house next door while Tim worked on several others they owned, one in Laguna and one back in Laurel Canyon. He was older, an artist, he’d run a restaurant, he’d published a novel years before, and illustrated a handful of his famous sister’s children’s books. He knew people in New York and Hollywood; he’d hire Al to paint a fence, and they’d end up plotting a screenplay. Mary Frances remembered the evenings they talked over a bottle of wine or two, with the fire in the hearth and the wind whisking outside and Gigi like some kind of crystal chandelier, suspended overhead. She often felt she started writing just so they wouldn’t forget about her altogether.
But after a stretch of painting fences, she knew Al was relieved to be part of college life again when he got a job at Occidental starting in the fall. It had been months since they’d seen the Parrishes, since the end of summer, when they’d moved to Eagle Rock.
Mary Frances had missed this house. She had been raised, truly, at this long table by the sea; all the parlors and cooks, the teas and socials back in town, all that balanced by a summer spent scrabbling along the rocks with her sisters, Norah and Anne, their feet black with tar, their bellies full of fish their brother David pulled from his nets. The Kennedys’ Laguna. She had come here hoping for some sense of what this place might do to fix her now.
She took the path from the weathered porch through the sage and down the cliffs to the ocean. It was not warm, and the beach was curved around itself and empty, the broad neon sign for the hotel winking on and off up the coast. She sat on the bottom step nearly in the sand and watched the sea beat itself against the shore.
Behind her, she heard footsteps and turned to see another couple she knew from the summer. Every afternoon they’d sit on their blanket, the man in a short, tight bathing suit, the woman dressed like his nurse, rubbing his thick brown back with oil. Now passing her on the bottom stair, they let their conversation drop, to be picked up again once they were alone.
In summer, the man had watched her as she came from the ocean, his forearms draped over his bent knees, squinting after her into the sun. Every day he watched her pass their blanket for the stairs, her wet bathing suit somehow making her more than naked, and his eyes so constant. One day she looked back, met his stare, held it. Then, from behind, the woman rose and nipped the fat part of his hand with her teeth the way a bitch directs a pup, and he laughed, turned to the woman, smiled, spoke. Like a distant light, Mary Frances had snapped out.
Now the man walked along the water’s edge, just outside the spray, and the woman followed a half step behind, her arms folded against her gray buttoned coat. After a while, she reached out and brushed some fleck from the shoulders of his sweater. Mary Frances no longer walking past their blanket, the winter, this chill, this season had not really changed them.
Soon Mary Frances would take the steps back up the cliffs to her narrow bed beneath the eaves and sleep, and then tomorrow she would return to Al, her face windburned from this morning on the beach and fresh enough to hide behind. She would make supper, the simple kind of meal they used to eat in France, then the last of the good cognac by the fire. Al would pick up the book they were reading, Moby-Dick, and the great white whale would take them back to the sea.
It was just a night she had insisted on, with her willfulness, with her shoes in her hands. It was just a night, and back in Eagle Rock, she would feel her life nip her into place again, blurring at the edges so that she could not say if she had meant for such a night to happen or just to come close enough to watch it pass by.
* * *
Back in Eagle Rock, Al was writing the same he’d been writing for almost their entire married life together. He went to class in the morning and came home for lunch, a bottle of milk, a fried egg on rye, a kiss on her cheek before he went to his office, and that was what she saw of him until dinnertime.
She followed the rhythm of his typewriter around the house. She washed the dishes, hung the laundry, took a bath, the tap of his keys coming over the transom from his desk next door, a vibrant whickering, so loud and bright. She was afraid of what would fill her head if not this brightness, if not the clip of his typing, the crank of a fresh page.
In Dijon, Al had seemed to be thinking all the time, and even when they were first married, she never knew what he was thinking about. He could be perfectly still for minutes, his lanky legs folded under his chair, looking out the same window she sat in front of. His black coffee, his pipe, the still keys of his typewriter, and his long stare right through her over the mossy rooftops of the city. It was worse when he worked in their rooms. It was worse to see how far away he was, right next to her, than to imagine him at the café in the place, not seeing strangers around him, not even the pretty girls.
She’d slip off her velvet house shoes, cross her legs high, and wait for him to notice. She’d tap the tip of her pen against her teeth, the wet pop of her lips in the silence. She’d turn her face to the sun, arch back against her chair, and close her eyes, but she was nearly screaming in her own head, innervated, willing him to turn her way. Finally she’d snap out of her chair, the novel open in her lap clattering to the floor.
Finally, then, Al looked at her.
“Darling,” he said, reaching into the breast pocket of his coat. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it.”
And he’d press into her hand some tiny gift he’d picked for her in the market, a pair of ivory buttons, a lavender sachet, a tortoiseshell comb for her hair. He gave her something every Thursday to mark the day they first met, and turning the bauble in her palm, she would feel as if she’d forged it herself, with all her want pressing up against his lofty far-awayness.
He’d smile at her, brush his fingers across her cheek, and everything was fine again.
Now she jumped at the ringing telephone, the mailman’s knock. She lingered in the hall outside his study — Al’s chair, Al’s black typewriter, Al’s poem, the last thin light faint across the desktop — waiting to be invited in.
“Darling,” he said. “Is it so late already?”
He extended his arm for her to step inside. They looked at the scattering of work across the desk: the slips of ciphered paper, the full ashtray, the growing stack of manuscript that she would not ask again to read. She could throw a dust cloth over all of it, pack their bags, and go south to Mexico, back to France, return maybe in the spring. They had once spent a chilly holiday planning a trip to Algiers they both knew they would never take. She needed a plan like that now, a string of plans, the sort Al had always made with her before.