“Do you have children, Mr. Fisher?”
“I don’t, no.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
Al feared he would ask why not, but he didn’t say anything, and the silence settled and split open. Al had never been judged for not having children, not by his parents or by the Kennedys. He felt something petty begin to simmer in his chest.
“It is not for everyone, I suppose.”
“No, sir.”
Klemperer pushed back from the table. He suggested a schedule beginning in February where Al would come to the house in the afternoon and instruct the children for four hours, Monday through Friday. He reached into his wallet and extracted several bills.
“A retainer.”
“It’s not necessary, Mr. Klemperer.”
“But it is. You would not have come all this way for lunch.”
Al’s face flushed. He would leave the job on the table but for the fact it would be their only money this spring. He’d leave the job on the table but for the fact he could not live his life without it, his life such as it was these days, his life as Gigi’s keeper, as a teacher without a class, a poet avoiding a poem. And how easy for Klemperer to take a day for his composing, the bills from his wallet, there was always more for some people. He told Klemperer he could show himself out.
In the ballroom there was a woman lolling in a slender gabardine skirt, her oxfords perched on one of the long white sofas, her wavy red hair fanned along the back. She was smoking a cigarette, the ashtray balanced in her upturned hand. This woman could not have been the mother of a twelve— and eight-year-old, nor did she seem particularly bothered that she’d missed lunch. She trilled her fingers at Al as he was leaving, her long freckled arm extending from her slouch with all the snap and lash of the tail of a cat.
On the street, Al took his notebook from his pocket and started with the pages he’d written on the veranda, peeling them from the binding and holding them to the wind. When he had been a student at Princeton, he’d once destroyed a thesis he’d worked on for a year and a half; sometimes there was no other way to free yourself. He did not follow where the pages fell, just kept peeling them away until he felt better, purged of the afternoon’s illusions.
Back at Tim and Gigi’s, he found Mary Frances at the stove with a dishtowel tied around her waist, her hair damp and curling at her temples. From a long board, he watched her rake a pile into the stockpot: tomatoes and garlic, orange peel and bay, the heads and spines and tails of a dozen sardines. She plunged a knife into a spider crab and split it in two, tossing it after. She hadn’t noticed Al standing behind her.
He cleared his throat, and she swung around.
“Oh, goodness,” she said.
“You’ve been busy.”
She held to his face a mortar of green pounded herbs and garlic, a rouille so sharp it made his eyes water. And then a hard loaf of bread, white fish steaks translucent as china; she put a salted almond in his mouth, a crust dipped into the stockpot, her finger. She was giddy, beautiful, his wife.
She poured the stock through a strainer, pressing on the bones and shells with the back of a wooden spoon. She poached the fish steaks, some tiny rings and tangles of squid, picking out the mussels as they opened; she toasted bread; she warmed a Delft tureen with boiling water. She set the table, handing a cold bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and a corkscrew to him.
“There’s so much in this kitchen,” she whispered.
“Is Gigi here?”
“No, not ever, I don’t think. But she’s got every kind of gadget. Look at this. Do you know what this is?” She held up a Bakelite-handled comb with a dozen tines.
Al waited.
“It’s for slicing cake,” she said.
“How’d you figure that out?”
“Who needs to slice cake like that?”
“I don’t know.” She was transfixed. Al sighed, and opened the wine.
The bouillabaisse was rich and red and spicy, as good as any they had had in France. They bent over their bowls, blowing and slurping and adding dollops of rouille, more bread, more wine. It was a meal to serve a dozen people, a feast, and Al was already full, so much food left over. Mary Frances could be so extravagant. He could feel the impatience welling in him again.
He said, “I need to see my parents in Palo Alto before tutoring starts.”
She put down her spoon. “We just got here,” she said. “We’re supposed to keep up appearances, yes? We can’t just turn around and leave.”
“I’ve only got a little more time. You could stay, though.”
“By myself?”
“I saw Klemperer today.”
Al put twenty dollars on the table. They stared at the money. She could not account for the panic such a trip caused in her, but she did not want to go, and did not want Al to leave her here with Gigi, or explain why not. The air in the kitchen went from humid to thick. Mary Frances tried to imagine that it was Rex, sick. Would she ask Al’s opinion of anything?
“I don’t know,” she said.
Al said nothing, still looking at the money.
“Whatever you think, Al.”
The front door opened, Gigi home, the tarantella of her bracelets, her keys, her high heels across the floor.
“God,” she said. “What is that smell?”
It was hard to say if her question was a positive one. Al folded the money and put it away. Mary Frances rose from the table, pulling out a chair, setting a place between them. Gigi hadn’t eaten all day. And she was bubbly and bright and smiling as though the night before, the morning after had never happened, the three of them suddenly historyless and clean.
She picked a shell from her bowl and tipped the mussel into her mouth.
“Everything you do is like an advertisement, Gigi. Al, look at her. It’s amazing.”
“You eat beautifully, Gigi.” Al didn’t look up from his plate.
Gigi smiled. “Tim says I am to tell you to stop being polite.”
“I’m sorry?” Mary Frances said.
“You’re supposed to send him your stories. He wants to show them to his sister, and he can’t if you won’t send them. He says he mentioned it.”
Mary Frances put down her spoon. “When?”
“In his letter?” Gigi looked at Al. “I left a letter…”
“Oh yes,” he said. “His letter of the other day. Yes, he did.”
Al went back to his bowl.
The phone rang, and Gigi pushed back from the table to catch it. Her voice became like music in the other room, detectable only in the higher registers. Mary Frances couldn’t look at Al any longer. She stood up and began clearing dishes, running a sink of water, anything to make noise of her own.
She wondered what Tim had said and how. The letter had been addressed to both her and Al; Tim must have assumed Al would be pleased, proud, excited. She finished the dishes and wiped down the table and counters. She swept the floor. She had not been thinking of a publisher, only of Tim, only of Tim’s attention, only of what she could keep of it now.
Al sat with his hands folded over his plate. It was not unreasonable for her to ask for the letter, but he’d gone quiet since Gigi left the room, and Mary Frances hesitated to break that. She thought about everything twice now with him: once as his wife, and once as the woman capable of what she’d done. She wondered if that would ever change.
Finally she asked, “What did Tim say?”
“I’ll find it for you. I just forgot.”
She tried to tease. “I don’t want to be rude.”
“Of course not.” But he didn’t get up for the letter either.
In the hallway, they heard Gigi hanging up the phone. Mary Frances turned back to the sink and sunk her hands into the dishwater. Behind her, Al bagged the trash and took it out to the can.