“Dinner?” she said.
He sighed, his blond curls sweetly ruffled. “Of course.”
He took his place at the kitchen table, and she reached across him to strike a match for the candles, her body brisk and distant, a kite too far away to chase. It was difficult to leave his desk sometimes, to remember what she’d want from him, how to be a husband.
She pulled a small glass from the cabinet and a bottle of sherry, placed them at his elbow.
“What would I do without you?” he said, but she did not turn around.
Al pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He liked to listen to Mary Frances in the kitchen, the rasp of the knife against the board and whatever thunking vegetable she was taking down. It was a habit they’d begun those last few weeks in France, their apartment so small and cold that Mary Frances had prepared supper in her overcoat. They didn’t talk — later, huddled together in front of the coal stove, they would read to each other, they would talk then — but when Al had spent the day at his desk, to be in the same room with her was often overwhelming.
He’d never seen such company between his mother and father. His mother boiled potatoes and slabs of meat, and he’d never seen his father sit and watch her, never seen him sit without doing something else: reading the paper, listening to the radio, eating, and then moving on. His mother had her hands full with himself and Herbert, brothers for whom food was fuel. And then there was his father’s church, the parishioners, the handfuls of people in and out on any given day. The community. The community had always been important to his parents.
Al felt without one now, only himself, Mary Frances, and her family.
“You know,” he said. “Larry says Fay’s boy is less a terror since he’s been talking more. More words, less screaming. Perhaps we can have them back around.”
Mary Frances laughed. Larry was their oldest friend. “But what about Fay?”
“You love Fay.”
“I love Larry. I like Fay.”
Mary Frances sectioned an orange from its membrane over a bowl to catch the juice; the quick feathering motion of her wrist. The kitchen filled with oranges.
“I doubt they’ll have more children,” Al said.
The rhythms of her knife broke, began again. “Oh, doesn’t the world have children enough? Clearly, Fay has her hands full.”
Al didn’t say anything.
She turned.
“Clearly,” he said. He spun the sherry in its glass.
In his mother’s letter yesterday, she said the X-ray treatments had done little for his father’s pain, less for his cancer. Blood was the most efficient conduit. And Herbert was still in China; it was unlikely he would ever take a wife and come back home.
The evening slipped away outside the kitchen window, the candles finding the underside of Mary Frances’s profile, her straight, true jaw. She’d paused when he mentioned children, but the mention was so buried, he couldn’t tell how to read her best. It was up to him, he supposed, to bring it up again.
He stood, pulling his shirt free from his pants. “I’ll get cleaned up,” he said, and left for the bedroom.
In the skillet, fat burned, then blackened. Mary Frances snapped to it, nudging the pan with a dishtowel. She wiped out the skillet with a piece of newspaper and began again, this time screwing her attention tight. She browned onions and garlic, and from the pot on the windowsill, chopped a few winter-sad leaves of tarragon. The smell was green and strong, and she thought of spring.
Spring in Dijon, when she and Al would hike into the mountains with the Club Alpin, the old women forever chiding her tentative steps, her newborn French: la petite violette, violette américaine. She would turn back to Al, annoyed, and he would laugh. Hardly his delicate flower. When they stopped for lunch, it was Mary Frances with the soufflé of calves’ brains, whatever was made of liver or marrow, ordering enough strong wine that everyone was laughing. The way home, the women let her be.
If she wanted calves’ brains now, she wouldn’t even know where to begin to look or how to pay. She and Al seemed to be living on vegetables and books, tobacco, quiet. She blanched a bunch of spinach and chopped it. She beat eggs with the tarragon, heated the skillet once again. There was a salad of avocados and oranges. There was a cold bottle of ale and bread. Enough, for tonight.
Her own mother had relied on cooks, on the larder and the icebox, on there always being plenty, but in France there had never been a place to store plenty, and Mary Frances had learned how to manage day to day. She supposed Al had learned too, not necessarily how he might expect to be cared for, not meat and potatoes, coffee and cake, but rather something back and forth, give and take. A conversation. She took up the dishtowel again and slid the skillet beneath the broiler. Such a conversation with Al might be the safest kind these days.
He returned to the kitchen asking if she wanted to go for drinks at the Parrishes.
Mary Frances steadied herself against the edge of the stove. He held the invitation in his hand.
“Isn’t Gigi out of town?” she said.
“I’m sure she’s back by now. A welcome home?” Al snapped the card against his palm. “We haven’t seen them in too long.”
“No,” she said. “We haven’t.”
She had been so stupid. Of course, there would still be parties. There would still be drinks and dinners and movies and card games with the Parrishes, and whatever sparkling thing that used to happen when she caught Tim’s eye across the table would never happen anymore because she had been unable to leave it at that. Because she could not leave well enough alone.
There was a fast slip in her thoughts, and suddenly Tim’s skin against her palms, as real as if she’d touched him, and then only her hands again, fishing for the last knife in the dishwater. The simplest responses failed her. She pulled the frittata from the oven, sliced wedges of it for herself and Al, dressed the salad, cracked the ale, and laid the table. Al bowed his head in thanks; what was there to do but what they’d done before? They bent to their meal, and ate.
* * *
Across the valley, dinner was already cooling in its plates. Gigi had made soup, silvery dumplings of fat floating on the surface of the bowls, a hunk of something still smoking in the kitchen. They had almost laughed, it was so bad, and called dinner off completely. Tim was too hard upon the gin to really care.
In the living room, Gigi sat at the piano, plinking out a song she was supposed to learn for the Busby Berkeley picture, the next one where she would play a girl with legs. It was the best Tim could figure it; she had no lines, no part in a story, but she and ninety-nine others like her would all put their legs together and call it a dance number. He tipped the gin into his mouth. She couldn’t play piano either. She was twenty-two years old. What difference did it make if she could sing and dance? He loved her, god, and he was sorry about Mary Frances.
The thing was, Gigi wasn’t sorry. Gigi was finished.
He went to the kitchen doorway and watched her stuttering between the singing and the playing. Her hair was lifted off the back of her neck and held with a comb. The song was about being shy.
“Here,” he said.
He rested his glass on the bench, his arms coming around her, and she accepted his closeness as she might a seamstress or a nurse. She watched his hands at the chords, her small voice free now to do the rising, and she filled her lungs, almost proud. She found the chorus, how her words were in her heart, and Tim held the last notes with her as long as she was able.
She leaned back into his chest for a moment, and thanked him.
“Can’t we talk?” he said.
She was already gathering the music, gathering herself away from him. They had talked so much these past few days, but Tim still thought there was something else he could offer her. Just one last thing.