“So you feel naked and confused, you feel intimidated — goddamnit, you should.” Tim pulled on his cigarette. “Or what’s the point.”
The point was, Al couldn’t stand nakedness and confusion, messiness, mistakes. But he could never admit as much to Tim. He nodded, staring over the bar to the mirror beyond. With his white hair, Tim looked old enough to be his father.
“You’ve read Mary Frances’s work,” Tim said. “What do you think?”
“Well,” he said. “It’s lovely. Clearly.”
“Lovely?”
Tim went on talking, but Al stopped understanding him, like a radio that had slipped out of frequency. All this time, all the size and strength and passion Tim was urging, Al thought they had been talking about The Ghost. About him. But really it had been Mary Frances all along.
When they returned to the apartment, she was still pacing the kitchen, still trapped, though there was no sign of Chantal anywhere.
“What is it?” Al said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Mary Frances?”
“Nothing. Did you boys have fun?” she said, banging a pot down to start supper.
* * *
Tim and Al sat by the fireplace, the last of the evening’s wine in their glasses. Mary Frances was in the bath. The walls of these rooms were old, the carpets thick, but Tim was in the chair closest to the bathroom door and he could hear the water moving against her body, the lift of her limbs from it and the clinging rush back into itself, a kind of suck and kiss of something slick drawn away, the sound of mouths. He wanted to be in the room with her; he didn’t have to touch her, he remembered fully. He wanted to see her face, to hear her talk. He closed his eyes: they never stopped fucking, somewhere in his brain, they never stopped. They were inexhaustible in this regard.
“That bad?” Al said.
Tim opened his eyes, his book fallen flat across his chest.
“This? No.” He looked toward the bathroom door. “Just listening. Like swans on a lake.”
“Ah,” Al said. He studied Tim, not saying anything more.
“It’s a beautiful sound. How many paintings of a woman at her toilette? I’m thinking of Degas here, the series.”
“I don’t know them.”
Tim rose to the occasion. “I’m so grateful you are here, that we will live and work together. I’m so long out of practice at companionship, and so eager. Forgive me.”
Al smiled. “Nothing to forgive.”
Tim stood and smoothed his shirt into his trousers. It was time for him to take a walk.
When Mary Frances returned from the bath, Al sat reading by the fireplace, his lanky form folded on itself, and the glasses he had taken to wearing perched on the end of his nose. He looked older with them, brittle. A draft whistled in the bedroom window.
“What are you reading?” she said.
“Oh. This.”
“Al.”
He looked at her. “Just reading.”
She draped her forearms over the back of his chair and looked over his shoulder, the newspaper, the names of generals and cities not in French. She wanted to tell him something suddenly, something it would make him happy to hear.
“I could sit with you,” she said. “You could read to me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on, Al.”
He looked at her long over the tops of his glasses, then snapped the paper out roughly. “They bombed the Plaza de Colón last week, six or seven different bombs in a single square. Sixty people dead, most of them women, most of them waiting in line for milk. And so I keep thinking about milk. Milk, mother’s milk, my mother, you. Madrid is the exact center of Spain, and it’s Spaniards in the airplanes, dropping the bombs. On their own honest-to-god mothers, see.”
She backed away from him. His head lolled against the chair, his eyes closed now.
“Where’s Tim?” he asked. “We were just talking about this, I think.” He looked at her now, lazily. His voice was even and calm. “Go find Tim for me, would you?”
She felt like such a coward, unwilling or unable to meet what Al was saying with the truth, her own truth, their truth. What was wrong with her? She went into their room, closed the door, and went to sleep.
Sleep came often and easily for Mary Frances now, a nap after lunch and perhaps another before supper, but also five or ten minutes drifting off before the fireplace, her book open in her lap and her eyes floating closed, a measure of escape. Al and Tim played cards in the kitchen, long hands of rummy and pinochle. She canned beets and ground mustards, made late apples into sauce. Al and Tim pored over the plans for the house. She knit endless cabled scarves, watch caps with brims that could be doubled, tripled around the ears. She walked the esplanade along the lake when the sun was high, basking in the thin winter light that seemed to shatter on the water.
She had slipped this life for another, where time and event and memory all blended together into some other kind of sense altogether, traveling from one fantasy to the next. Sometimes words were the conduit, and sometimes food was the conduit — cooking, eating, talking about food — but always at the other end was this imaginary life, and she realized suddenly how much time she spent there. How much time she spent there alone.
* * *
She wakes in the fan-back chair to the squeal of the front door hinges, and it takes her a few moments to place herself correctly: Switzerland, San Francisco, Sonoma. The kitchen smells of roasting birds.
The librarian returns from the carport, where he’s loaded the van full with her boxes of papers. There is a wide plunge of dark fabric between the shoulder blades of his shirt where he’s been sweating. She gives him a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, her hands too weak.
“There was much more than I realized,” he says. “Or else I’m older than I realized.”
This pleases her in some way she can’t completely account for; she has worn him out. “It’s my whole life,” she says.
“With all due respect, I’m sure you kept back a thing or two.”
This too, a pleasure. She thinks of the letters she burned, the journals after Tim died, the journals since that she and Norah sorted out and put away. She’ll burn those as well. But something in her almost tells him about them anyway, a sudden urge of trust. She stands, feeling fluid and graceful on her feet for the first time in weeks. She hardly needs her cane. She pours the straw yellow wine and offers him a glass.
“Would you like a bath?” she says. “The bathroom is the most wonderful room I have.”
He seems startled at her question, but she doesn’t let that stop her.
“We have all the time in the world,” she says.
“I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble.”
He plucks his shirt away from his chest. She can see him weigh what he thinks he should do against what he wants; she has watched so many faces. She’s always been easy to flatter, quick to flirt. It feels like a limb that needs stretching now.
She flips the switch, and the red bathroom comes to light, the drawing by Picasso, the small Miró. The portrait Tim painted of her turning away, the long white swath of her back, a thin strap across her shoulder. She pulls two clean towels from the cabinet and sets them on the chair next to the tub.
“Is there anything else you need?” she asks.
“I don’t think so.” He raises his glass and touches the rim of hers.
“Oh. What are we toasting?”
He takes off his hat finally, his thick white forelock long enough to graze his eyebrows. Her breath catches, and she tries to hide it.
“Just right now,” he says. “Just, I don’t know. A toast.”
* * *