“I need that drink. And two more just like it.”
“That’s my girl.” Gloria flung her armful of coats onto the drafting table in Tim’s studio and ushered them to the living room. A half-dozen pink poinsettias filled the hearth. The holidays.
* * *
Tim pulled a candy-colored V-neck over his head, a sweater Gigi had given him last Christmas because she said it made him look as if he played golf at the club. He didn’t play golf at the club and never wore the thing, but she was right, the light peach made his skin seem as if he hadn’t been drinking five days straight. He’d cut himself with the razor and tried to think it wasn’t because his hands were shaking. He pressed a pad of toilet paper to his chin. He couldn’t stay in here any longer.
When he opened the door to the bedroom, Gigi was curled over herself on the end of the bed, her face swollen and wet. It was the first he’d seen her cry since he’d met her at the train station, about all of this, the first time.
“Dear,” he said. “Please.”
“Please what?” Her voice was cool.
“I can send everybody home, Gigi. I can bring you a cup of tea, and we don’t even have to talk about it. We can sort it all out in the morning.”
As he offered this, he felt the pressure in his head lifting like weather. He realized how much he wanted her to admit this was hard. How much he would enjoy going to the living room and dispatching everyone back to their cars. Gigi has a headache. Gigi has a touch of something. He loved her so much in this moment, more than ever before, and how cruel that was.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Truly. I’m better.”
She pressed her small white hand to her cheeks, one and then the other. She smoothed the coverlet away from her hips, smoothed her smooth blue skirt. He could see her drawing herself up, her back straight, her face finding the light. He waited; her pride could still push her either way.
“I don’t know what came over me.” She smiled, and he knew how they would present themselves for the remainder of the evening. She hadn’t even asked where he had been.
And in the living room, somebody played the piano badly. Somebody delivered a punch line, and laughter broke. There was the delicate ping of ice to glass, and into this came Tim in his candy-colored sweater. The men shook his hand and clapped his back, and some of their wives leaned to kiss his cheek. Some of those wives were Gigi’s friends. Tim wondered how many of them knew what was going on.
He could see, suddenly, the invisible mapwork between these people, like the paths through this neighborhood between the houses of men and their lovers. He thought of Mary Frances, not his lover really, but now something more than what she had been. He watched her through the arches of the doorways, her voice bustling with the others: her prim, private school features, then her laughter like a low-cut blouse. Where did women like her get made?
She saw him, too; she held a glass in front of her as one might hold out a hand in greeting. He waved, and she came to sit beside him at the piano, a little too close, but what did it matter, really. Perhaps she had been drinking too.
“Your advice, Dr. Parrish?” she said. “Editorial or otherwise.” She rested her elbows on the fallboard and surveyed the room, her lips pursed, her brow inclined.
He could not rise to the occasion. “I have no idea what to say, Mary Frances.”
“All right,” she said. “First of all, you should have told me to go home.”
She was being deliberately smart, painfully so, and Tim scrubbed his face with his hands. He wished he had not waved her over. She was going to keep talking.
“It’s too late for that, though, isn’t it,” she said. “Second of all? I don’t have a second of all.”
She looked away, across the party. He studied the sheet music, the same song Gigi had been playing for weeks, studied the seam of Mary Frances’s stocking where it left her shoe. She began to hum, and then to sing the horrible, horrible song about hearts.
“Gigi has fallen in love with someone else,” he said.
“Tim.” She smiled. “That’s not funny.”
“She’s fallen in love with a man closer to her own age, and she wants to be with him. She wants a divorce.”
“Well. I hear they’re all the rage at Paramount.”
Ice rattled in her glass. It would have been worse if she said something mild, if she said something kind or comforting. “I haven’t told anyone, obviously—”
“You’re serious? Christ,” and now he could hear the bleed of liquor in her voice, each word too carefully placed.
“Yes. Well.”
“Oh, Tim. We ought to find me a conscience. There must be one of those around here somewhere.”
He put his head into his hands. He wished, suddenly, he could talk to Al, tell him everything, and also that everything was something else. Mary Frances was right, of course. He should have told her to go home, he should have been true to his wife, this was all his fault. He turned to her again, and in the second before she could collect herself, he caught a glimpse of whatever raw, throbbing thing she was trying to cover up, and his chest came loose entirely.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It’s all he seemed able to say anymore. “I’m just so goddamn tired.”
* * *
Al watched as Tim walked toward the back of the house. Mary Frances looked after him, and Al tried to guess what had been said from the wry little twist to her lips. Six years he’d watched her face, and he’d seen a thousand things stand in for surprise. It was as though she thought to be surprised would be a weakness.
Of course, Tim was in trouble. People always sent for Mary Frances when they were in trouble. Her sister Anne during her divorce, her mother when she had the flu, even strangers; in Dijon, there seemed hardly a midnight in the house on Petit Potet that didn’t bring a mincing knock at their door, the landlady’s delicate son whispering about some maudlin Prussian too full of brandy, some hysterical Czech who refused to put her clothes back on. It didn’t seem to matter that Mary Frances’s German was weaker than her French, they sent for her. And when she returned, later that night, early the next morning, she never did tell Al what the fuss had been about. He was beginning to understand there might be legions of things she managed not to tell him. Her writing had cut a small window into that.
He was grateful for Tim’s attentions to her writing, her anecdotes and sketches. Al had seen Mary Frances through the art classes and the tutoring, the days when she carved table legs; this would run its course as well, and he wanted her to be happy. Tim could make you feel brilliant when nobody else seemed to care what you were doing.
But Al didn’t think they were talking about writing tonight. If he had to guess, he’d say it was Gigi.
Truth was, Gigi was too young for Tim. Around the living room, her friends were easy to spot: glossy hair, glossy dresses, so much skin. He thought of his students, nearly Gigi’s age, the young glossy-lipped whores in Dijon. Al had liked to talk to them, to watch their pretty painted mouths at work.
Mary Frances was standing now, draining the last from her cocktail glass. Soon someone else would draw her into conversation. She was always in the midst of something: stories, admirers, audience. Those afternoons in Dijon, he remembered her waiting for him at the apartment, before she made friends or started her art classes. The cold walk from the university, he would think of her powdered and dressed, perched on the edge of the bed, then pacing to the window and back, waiting just for him, looking just like she did now.
He wanted to take her home.
He checked his watch; they couldn’t leave, not with the awkward way the evening had started. But she was still looking across the room, her mouth wet from the last of her drink, and he thought of what he could do if he took her home now. He wanted to take her home now.