Al stood from the loveseat where he’d been reading to refresh their cocktails once again.
Gigi pressed her hand to her mouth. “Sleepy,” she said. “But I have to meet Doris and Nan soon. We’re going to see that Bette Davis picture, at the Pantages.”
She sounded seventeen, announcing her plans and asking permission at the same time. She’d left the night before around this time, and the night before that. She folded her cards and snapped them against the table edge. She’d been winning, Mary Frances was certain; she trailed her fingers through Gigi’s hand to fan it.
“Gin,” Mary Frances said. “You won.”
Gigi smiled. From inside her skirt pocket, she pulled a letter.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she said.
The letter was from Tim, postmarked from Delaware, addressed to Mary Frances alone; it had come in the mail, but Gigi had taken it upon herself to deliver it as dramatically as possible, full of both subterfuge and flourish. The room seemed to contract in a breath, to pant. She folded the envelope in her hand.
Al bent over a book on the loveseat. She tucked the letter into the waistband of her skirt and passed behind him for the hallway. She stopped. There, in his book, her face — the portrait her father had commissioned on her sixteenth birthday.
“Oh, Al,” she said. “Not that. Where did you find it?”
He didn’t answer her. “You were so lovely. And still, of course. But you know it for yourself now.”
“I was just a child.”
“Well. Not anymore.” His gaze stayed fast into his book as though their conversation were as idle as it seemed. She let her hands rest on the back of the loveseat for a moment, her nails rasping at the barkcloth as she turned away.
He wished she had not caught him with the portrait, but it was bound to happen sometime. He’d moved it from Keats to Milton, found himself studying the fringe of bangs across her forehead, the open way she gazed at the camera. He would’ve loved to have been the object of that brand of scrutiny, and maybe he once was. He couldn’t remember anymore.
He had lived so long in other people’s houses. As a child and then a man, a husband; in boardinghouses, at the Ranch, the summerhouse in Laguna. Now here, in what increasingly seemed like a foolish arrangement. Down the hall, the women were opening and closing doors, running water, sliding hangers on the closet bar. He could sit still and imagine what they were doing. What did it matter if he could watch over them or not?
He liked Gigi, he always had, but what she was doing to Tim was hard to stomach. She was no more going to the Pantages with somebody named Doris than Mary Frances was, and she didn’t seem to care if Al knew it. She was a woman on her way out of this house, and the motions came to her naturally. He looked back at the portrait and wondered what Gigi had looked like at sixteen. Though she was hardly older than that now.
She sashayed from the hallway, checked the sidelights by the front door, and drained the last of her martini. At the piano, she played the chords of a song, humming in the highest registers.
“What’s the part?” Al said.
Gigi let her hands fall back to her lap. “I don’t think I’ll get it.”
Al wasn’t sure how to respond. To encourage her seemed wrong, but he didn’t know anything about who got what and why. He felt suddenly, irrevocably sad. He returned to the Milton in his lap.
“Isn’t school out for you?” Gigi asked.
“I read for myself.”
“Of course. Timmy used to say that, too. If only I could act for myself, I’d get out of all these lousy auditions.”
She spoke of him so easily, as though Tim had died years ago, or been lost at sea, some disappearance she’d made peace with rather than asked for.
“Work is hard.” He sounded frosty; he heard it himself.
She sighed and looked away. Her profile was so elegant, almost defiant, the lift of her chin, the tilt of her nose in the air. He looked back down at his Milton, hoping she would just leave.
“The song is fine, anyway,” she said. “They can train you to sing.” She closed the fallboard on the piano. “What I really worry about are my legs.”
She stepped in front of him now and lifted her skirts past the tops of her stockings, the high arch of her garter belt around her shaven sex. She was looking at herself, tilting her heels so her skin would catch the lamplight. Al felt a sickening rush and lifted his gaze to meet hers.
They heard the car in the drive that Gigi had been waiting for, the engine at an idle. They heard Mary Frances cut the water in the bath. Still Gigi stood there with her skirts around her waist and Al, paralyzed. Seconds beat past. From the driveway, a tap on the horn, and she smiled, and let them fall.
* * *
It was a flat card, not a letter; he said he’d been reading an article in a magazine the other day that made him think of her, a little piece about the sand and the sea, an artist’s colony of sorts. He had found Westways at the library near his mother’s house. The piece was very good. He hoped she was proud. She turned the card over. A single line:
Write to me.
It was more haiku than conversation; he offered her nothing more in these few words than what she could make herself. But still, he’d gone to the library. He’d looked up her essay and taken the time to tell her as much.
She took off her clothes and climbed into the tub. She could hear Gigi leaving, the front door slamming as she rushed to meet whoever waited in the driveway. She sank back into the water, Tim’s card still clutched in her hand. Write to me. She had been. She did, all the time she wrote to him in her head, of what had happened and might still happen again, of what she saw that made her think of him, his razor left in the bathroom cabinet, and pulling the open blade across the soft hairs at the back of her hand, seeing his white shirt, crisp and hanging from the laundry, and burying her face in the empty chest of it, hoping for his smell, his chlorine and wet pavement and grass. The ink bloomed across the cardstock, and what rose in her gave way to that thing that tried to figure out how long, how much she would give him, now that he was asking. Now that she was here, and Al was going away.
* * *
His departure was early, and they dressed in darkness; Al whispered they could share a coffee at the station.
They did not notice the blue Hudson blocking the drive until they’d already started backing out.
Al checked his watch. He cranked around in his seat, gauging his options, and then turned back to the steering wheel. Mary Frances didn’t know what to say. She folded her hands in her lap as if she were waiting for the light to change.
“I can’t leave like this,” Al said. “I can’t leave you here alone.”
She looked back at the Hudson, as if for confirmation she was not alone.
“Your train, Al.”
“I can’t.”
“They’re in love, aren’t they?” she said. “People in love are completely full of themselves. You’re not going to stop any of this, obviously. Nothing will.”
He was still looking at the wheel. She suddenly had the feeling they could sit here for days and not get past this moment. She patted Al’s shoulder as you would the flank of a good horse.
“Cut over the lawn,” she said. “You don’t want to miss your train.”
* * *
When she got home, the Hudson was gone. Gigi’s door was ajar: on the nightstand, a cup of coffee and the newspaper collected from the front porch. The sheet was low on Gigi’s back, so slight Mary Frances could trace the basket of her ribs, a long scar, thin and red as a whip of candy, disappearing over the arch of her hip. Mary Frances had seen Gigi in bathing suits and harem costumes and had never seen this scar. She wondered how hard she had to work to keep it covered.