The kitchen was a crime scene. The refrigerator door stood open and dripping, a tempered glass container of leftover yellowness shattered on the floor, puddles of soapy water, ammonia. The faucet was running, overspilling a bucket placed beneath the spout, but Gigi sat at the table in a pretty pink dress, high heels, her hair waved back from her face as though she were preparing for an evening’s entertainments, not just returning from them. She was smoking a cigarette, tapping her ash into a tented gum wrapper on the cherry print cloth.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s all right. I was up.” Mary Frances bent to pick up the pieces of glass at her feet. The yellowness on the floor was thick and curdled.
“I’ll get that,” Gigi said. “I’m just so clumsy tonight.”
But she sat with her hands clasped against her pink skirt, her stagy poise pronounced enough to read across the room. Mary Frances caught a bank of perfume: verbena, lemon, heavy flowers. Gigi thanked her for coming to her rescue.
“I think this will be exciting. Don’t you?” she said. “Like a pajama party. It was Timmy’s idea, of course, but immediately I could see the bright side. I owe you a great deal.”
“Oh. Al and I are happy to help.”
“But you”—Gigi reached out and put a hand to her arm—“you have made this so much easier.”
“Given time, everything gets easier.”
Gigi smiled. “Please. Make yourself at home.”
Mary Frances wished she would not say that again; this was not her home. But now it wasn’t Gigi’s either. Her perfume was overwhelming, and Mary Frances went to shut off the faucet. She pulled two juice glasses from the cabinet. She reached into a cabinet beside the sink for a pint of apple brandy that had been tucked away under the dishtowels, and from the pantry, a sleeve of Saltine crackers, a tin of pâté.
“I see Gloria visits here, too,” she said.
“With her strange bottles and jars of, I don’t know, stuff. What is that anyway?”
“Alouette, gentille Alouette. It’s skylark.”
Gigi propped her brow on the heel of her hand. Her cigarette was out. Mary Frances poured her a short brandy, herself a larger one.
“You’re so smart, Mary Frances. Just so smart. The glasses, the food — you know where everything is, how to find just what you’re looking for in my house.”
Mary Frances felt the blood in her face; she could not stop it. Gigi drew on the dead cigarette, then studied the unlit end, her expression horribly opaque.
“In my house, for goodness sake,” she said.
Mary Frances knew she ought to apologize, to thank her for her discretion or maybe burst into tears, but her mind had turned cold and quick in another direction. Gigi knew, she would tell others, and the truth would run like a ladder in a stocking. It was only a matter of time, and if there was a shape Mary Frances wanted this to take, the time was now.
“I can’t stop thinking about him,” Mary Frances said.
Gigi came fast across the table, her face bleary and willful and no longer remote, coming up on her elbows, the pink bodice of her dress gaping open. She upset the glasses, brandy rolling and dripping to the floor, and took both Mary Frances’s hands into her own.
“You know it’s not that you did what you did, right? Whatever you did. Whatever you did…” Gigi was shaking her head. “If I wanted him, I’d still have him. I could have him back.”
“But you don’t.”
Gigi laughed sharply. “What are you talking about?”
“Want him. You don’t.”
Gigi smirked at the overturned glasses, her scripted moment already spilled out.
“I feel sorry for you,” she said. She pushed herself up and away, the swish of silk and the taps of her heels steady down the dark hall.
Mary Frances looked at the mess on the table, the mess on the floor. She was sure Gigi did feel sorry for her, and angry and betrayed, but also exposed, frightened, and passionately distracted herself. Someplace in all that, Mary Frances thought she could find her sympathy. At the least, her sense of pragmatism. If Gigi sought revenge with Al, she and Al would leave her here alone, and this little arrangement to save her standing at the studio would fail; but Mary Frances knew the most dangerous thing she could do would be to say so. She balled up the cherry print cloth, took the bucket from the sink, found the mop. If she didn’t do it now, she had the feeling it would just be waiting for her in the morning.
* * *
Driving down the canyon, she passed men walking the berm of the highway, their caps pulled low against the florid sunrise, their hands in their pockets. The radio went on and on about the hitchhikers, the police officers dispatched to the state line to keep the tides back, but that didn’t seem to change the fact that people were there, and needed work, and would walk to where they thought they could get it if nobody would give them a ride. Still, Mary Frances couldn’t stop. She was alone, and this wasn’t Whittier, where everybody knew her father.
The city pushed itself out of the valley, a sleek web of boulevards and date palms and oleander, insistent, overdressed, a city like a nervous widow. She drove slowly, circling, the streets still empty of cars.
The farmer’s market was on Third and Fairfax; it gave off the stink of cows. There were knots of people, the kind who bartered for bruised tomatoes, neck bones and pork rind, their rosy children clinging to their skirts. Men leaned against the open tailgates of their trucks, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, dogs circling, and low clouds overhead, blackening with rain. She could not shop in a place like this without thinking of Dijon.
The way Al lost himself, first to his studies, then to his teaching job, his poem, she had lost herself in those market stalls, her lists, her basket clutched in her hand, her endless questions of what to do with how much. In that, Al had been the perfect companion, her fellow traveler.
The market smelled of hay and roasted nuts; she bought a newspaper cone of almonds from a woman stirring them over an open fire. She bought thick sandy leeks, a rope of garlic and a pound of tomatoes; she bought a long batard of sourdough bread, a dozen bluish speckled eggs, a jar of cream, because now she had a refrigerator and could keep such things for more than an hour or two. She lifted the paper lid of the cream and tasted it, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand; she remembered the pillowy clouds of Gruyère grated onto her piece of waxed paper at Les Halles, the cheese maker young and handsome and milk-fed himself; he tried to teach her the French for being in love with him: mon cocotte, mon chouchou, ma petit lapin, Madame, s’il vous plaît.
She walked the stalls, and on the edge of the market, a fishmonger laid out his catch on two blocks of ice: strange curled squids and spider crab, silvery piles of sardines, their eyes still sparkling, thick slabs of some white-meated fish, its head as big as a dinner plate.
“What is that?” Mary Frances asked.
“Is fish,” the man said. “Fish that swam in the sea this very morning. The fish that is the most fresh. Here.”
He took a knife from his pocket and opened the blade, spinning the fish head along the ice. He wedged the blade into the gill, sawing a clean half moon into the cheek, slipping his thumb between the flesh and skin to pull free a small pat of meat. He made a thin slice, squeezed a bit of lemon over it, and passed it across to Mary Frances on the tip of his knife.
“Eat, eat,” he said.
She took the bite. It was tender and sweet; it felt clean in her mouth. She made a sound, and the fishmonger echoed her.
“What you like?” he said, and she gestured at all of it.