She has written about Tim for years now. Hasn’t she always written about Tim? He haunts her, and she lets him, she writes him into places he never was: beside her, all around her, her one true love. And because she can make Tim anything she wants, their coming together has always been cast as fated and clean, as inevitable as daylight. She has not left room for complicated feelings.
Norah lays a thin hand to her shoulder now, exchanging her vermouth for a cup of tea, so attentive these days, so good to try to help sort through it all. Her life has made so much paper, which seems as though it should be weightless until it overwhelms.
“Not this one,” she says. Norah puts the notebook on the growing pile that will never go to the library or the publisher, the notebooks and letters and scraps of her life they will burn when they are through here. For a moment it’s amazing to her that with everything she’s already written, there’s still this stack of things she cannot, will not say.
* * *
When Al found her in the kitchen the next morning, all the cookbooks were open, and Mary Frances sat disheveled amongst the stacks of them with ink on her cheek, making notes. He crouched down, and she startled.
“Sorry, sorry.” He held out his hands. He looked happy, or was he making fun of her?
She closed her notebook, pulling her bathrobe tighter around her waist. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Al spun a cookbook to read it, the cover open to an old inscription: “Improve each shining hour.”
“My grandmother’s. Her brother gave it to her on her wedding day.”
“Another little essay for Tim?” he said.
She shrugged. “They’re not really for Tim. Tim reads them. You could read them, too.”
Al held her eyes a moment longer, then stood. She remained looking at the crease in his charcoal pants. She felt he was about to pass his judgment, and she would not bow her head for it.
“We should go out for dinner tonight,” he said. “Why don’t I make a reservation in town? Why don’t you put on something pretty? Would you like that?”
“Yes. I’d like that.”
“Of course you would.”
She knew there was no money for this kind of evening, no money but what Rex had given her, but she couldn’t come out with that now without causing a fight.
Then in Al’s fingertips, there was a clean white envelope, slit at the top, addressed to MFK Fisher. “This came yesterday,” he said.
She tore into it. Westways had paid her thirty-five dollars for the story about Laguna, more money than she’d ever made in a month. She sprang into Al’s arms, and he was laughing too.
“We’ll go shopping,” she said. “I want to spend it all on treats for us. And Mother and Rex. Oh, this is so good, Al. Just perfect.”
“MFK Fisher,” he said, looking at the check in her hand.
“Thirty-five dollars,” she said.
He searched her face again, wanting something she couldn’t find to give him. “I’ll get a bath right now,” she said, and she stacked her books back in their basket.
She was excited to go out, Sardi’s perhaps, they could call Gloria and Mr. Sheekman. She felt like a party. She had been paid.
She washed quickly and slipped back into her robe, “Stormy Weather” on the radio, keeps raining all the time. She went back into the bedroom to get dressed, and in her bare feet, Al didn’t hear her coming.
There he was before the bed, his fists cocked on his hips and his feet astride, as if he were surveying a field just planted. The box and wrapping lay on the floor at his feet, the new russet dress draped across the coverlet, the skirt fanned, the slender tie looped into a bow. She watched him rub the back of his neck. What was he thinking about?
She crept back down the hallway how she’d come and took a pair of stockings from the basket of folded laundry in the kitchen. She’d wear something else tonight.
After a pleasant dinner out and another glass of wine by the fire, after Al read to her from Crime and Punishment and she knit the gusset on a sock she wanted to have ready for David’s Christmas present, after the whole evening passed easily, she returned to the bedroom and found the dress box where she’d left it in her closet. The dress and the tissue were folded back inside; Al had left no sign that things were ever otherwise.
* * *
Al packed his books into his satchel and cleared the last of his papers from the desk. The light was still good outside, and it wasn’t too cold. He could take the long way back to the house at Eagle Rock for the last time.
The dean had personally extended his apologies. It was a matter of numbers, the economy at large; Al was a fine teacher, adored by his students, respected by his colleagues, a valuable asset to Occidental. Al had known the conversation was coming, and he thanked the dean, asked about his plans for the holidays, spoke of the time he would have now for his own work. The dean was almost certain there would be a place for him in the fall, and Al hoped that was true. As the man walked away, Al ticked the months by in his head.
He had a tutoring job for the spring and summer; there were lines of men in Los Angeles waiting for jobs, for houses, for loaves of bread. He was lucky to have what he had. There would be the drama in Laurel Canyon, surely a drain on his time and patience. In the end, he would be grateful for this flexibility. He bent to check the drawers of the desk, and there was a knock at the door.
“Professor Fisher?”
It was a girl from his lecture, Miss Prescott; he tried to remember her first name but could not. The conversation would be a formal one. She clutched a composition book against her chest.
“I just had a question for you. About my essay on Keats?”
“Certainly, Miss Prescott.”
She handed him the essay, and he skimmed it, not one he had graded himself. He started to explain that his wife often made comments on his compositions in his lecture classes when he realized it wasn’t Mary Frances’s handwriting in the margins. It wasn’t a woman’s handwriting, at all.
“Miss Prescott, you’re sure this paper was written for my class?”
“Yes. Yes sir, on Keats.”
Al folded back the cover of the book and saw his name, the room and course number. He stared at it for a long moment.
“I see you made an A,” he said. “What is your question?”
The girl rattled on about a letter Al had read to them in class, one of Fanny Brawne’s, and the significance of their relationship in light of “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Al remembered: My love has made me selfish, Keats wrote. Selfish. He listened to the girl, told her what she wanted to hear, and sent her on her way. He walked home in the long winter light.
One evening last summer in Laguna, Tim and Gigi had come for dinner, and Mary Frances pulled one of her little essays from her skirt pocket, reading it almost as a toast. It had been a piece about dinner partners, who made for good ones and who did not. Al remembered laughing at her cleverness. Then later, the meal spent, he found Tim and Mary Frances in the kitchen, the essay in Tim’s hands now, and the two of them bent over it. Tim began speaking, and Mary Frances finished his sentence for him, taking the pen from his hand, scribbling in the margins of her paper. At the time, his only thought had been to open another bottle of wine.
It was dark when he reached the house at Eagle Rock. Mary Frances had the news on the radio, the elections in Czechoslovakia, seventy-four Nazis passing blank ballots. The house smelled of pork fat and sage, dinner that had probably taken all day to cook. When would she have had time to meet with Tim? What did she do with her time when he was not around?