The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  “Oh, dear,” Al said. “That sort of evening?”

  Gigi sighed and turned, the kimono shifting. Actresses. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and waited to be dismissed. Sometimes, polite conversation eluded him; he settled for countdowns instead, backward in his head from ten.

  “Al,” Gigi said. She pushed her dark glasses on top of her head. Tired, without her makeup, her face still looked like porcelain. “My father died shortly after Tim and I were married.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I hadn’t seen him in years, and I didn’t go east for the service. I didn’t even hear about it for two weeks after it happened. Heart condition.”

  Her voice had the faintest tremble in it. He leaned closer to hear her.

  “Anyway. Tim told me you were having troubles, and I just—” She tried again. “I just wanted . . .”

  “Thank you, Gigi,” Al said.

  Her hand skimmed his pant leg. Al stepped back.

  “I know Mary Frances must be such a comfort now. She’s so close to her family, I’m sure she understands. But if you want to talk, or if you need anything.”

  “Thank you, Gigi. Thank you.” His fingers beat time on the frame of the French door.

  She studied him a long moment as if sizing him for a suit, then looked away, waved her hand. He felt, at last, dismissed.

  * * *

  His papers and typewriter were just as he had left them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling somebody had been touching his things. He missed his study in Eagle Rock; he had grown used to working there, and now this house would be full of distractions it would take weeks to rise above. Gigi on the terrace, half dressed, Gigi’s friends—they were all so young, and lately youth only made him feel impatient.

  He needed to clear his darker thoughts, like Tim. He needed to go somewhere, but Mary Frances had taken the car.

  He left on foot. The winter sky was angry and gray, and the air damp, his head bent to watch his long strides, one after the other. He enjoyed the rhythm of a long walk, and let his mind loose to it. He could walk all day.

  Up into the hills, he walked to Otto Klemperer’s house, the man whose children he’d be tutoring. Without thinking about it, he knocked, and as though he were expected, the servant led him into the ballroom, where a black-coated man bent to the piano.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Fisher,” Klemperer said, without raising his head from his work. “You find me on a day I am composing.”

  “Please excuse me. I was in the neighborhood—”

  Klemperer held up his hand. “A moment, Mr. Fisher. Feng, please show Mr. Fisher to the . . .” He waved his fingers. “The veranda, yes? Lunch, Mr. Fisher?”

  “Well, yes. Thank you.”

  Al was starving. He hadn’t really eaten since yesterday. He followed Feng through the French doors, the veranda in the shade of an enormous Morgan fig tree. Below, a rippled swimming pool; in the distance, the reservoir, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, as though he might forget where he was.

  Feng brought him a cup of coffee, the door to the house like the opening of a vacuum, music rushing out to meet the air and then sealed in again. This was a familiar rhythm too; Al thought of those mornings at the Café de Paris, the way time accelerated and collapsed around his poem, his work. This is how it had felt, if not sounded: a day composing. He could have those days again. He took his notebook from his back pocket, his pencil to a blank white page.

  He drank another cup of coffee before Klemperer joined him, and Al left his notebook folded open, a mark of who he was, a writer.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fisher, for your help with my children.”

  “Of course. I look forward to meeting them.”

  “And you are living in the area now? Your letter said you were moving?”

  “Yes. My wife and I are staying with friends for the next few months.”

  Otto Klemperer lit a cigarette, his sharp face, his round black eyeglasses bearing down. He stared at Al in such a way that Al kept talking.

  “The wife of a friend, she’s in the movie business. He is . . . traveling.”

  Al felt the stupidity of this topic settling around them now, Klemperer’s first impression of him, the tutor to whom he would trust his children.

  “Ah,” Klemperer said. “I have been married for twenty-two years. Traveling is often a part of life.”

  He smiled then, a quick, well-guarded flare, and Al felt welcomed into a kind of confidence he was not prepared for. He had always valued his relationship with older men, the precision of their opinions. Tim was like that for him, a good friend but also counsel. He missed him now in a way he had not yet permitted himself to understand.

  Feng came with the plates from the kitchen, slender curls of ham wrapped around white asparagus, dark bread, a soft, runny cheese, and a bottle of pinot blanc, three glasses. He opened the wine and poured it, Klemperer looking back toward the house.

  “So,” he said with a clap of his hands. “We will not wait. Enjoy, Mr. Fisher.”

  And carefully, with exacting care, Al watched Klemperer eat every bite on his plate, and then every bite on his wife’s. He drank her wine, he discussed Amelia Earhart and how she had just landed the first flight from Hawaii to Oakland, and did Al know Oakland, and did he know Amelia Earhart? Klemperer did, and he liked her intelligence. His daughter, Britta, who was twelve, loved to fly. Christoph, eight, loved milk shakes and the idea of being buried in a tomb with all his earthly possessions. Klemperer wanted to buy them a dog while they were here in California, a big hairy dog. What were the hairiest kinds of dogs in America?

  Al looked out over the deep green swimming pool and answered Klemperer’s questions: he did not know Earhart, he’d never flown in a plane, he liked Airedales, but they were more fuzzy than hairy and they probably had those in Germany as well. The sun was warm, the food good, and Feng seemed to magically appear whenever Al’s glass was empty. This life seemed so evenhanded—vital and civilized at the same time. Al was very comfortable.

  “May I ask you a personal question, Mr. Klemperer?”

  Klemperer crossed his fork atop his knife and sat back in his chair. “Of course.”

  “Do you think a man ought to encourage his wife’s creative pursuits?”

  “Her hobbies?”

  “No. If your wife, say, wanted to conduct an orchestra, or play music professionally. Do you think it’s suitable? For a woman to be an actress, or a writer.”

  Klemperer turned the handle of his fork, considering.

  “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.

  “Oh, I might have done those dishes,” Gigi said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “But I don’t expect you to cook and clean.”

  Mary Frances turned. Gigi was inspecting her nails. She stopped, and met Mary Frances’s stare. There was no point in pretending that either of them did anything around the other without making calculations anymore.

  “I wish you hadn’t brought that up in front of Al,” Mary Frances said.

  Gigi smiled a harmless smile; she had an amazing number of smiles at the ready, and Mary Frances had no idea how to defuse an anger so carefully played out, so costumed.

  “We wouldn’t want to bother him,” Gigi said. “With our little bargains.”

  “I don’t have any bargains with you. Or Tim.”

  “Then I guess I have no idea what’s going on here. Because where I come from, that’s exactly how a girl gets a part.”

  This moment will return to Mary Frances again and again. She’ll try to write it from distances near and years away, angles droll and poignant, but she’ll never get it to seem on paper the way it feels right now—the room filled with fuel, somebody’s fingers at the match.

  Even when she sits some forty years later with her sister Norah at the round table in the kitchen of Last House, amongst the open notebooks and stapled drafts, the ca
rtons of paper she’s made over the course of her career, she thinks to try it once again. There’s one more book here, if they can find it.

  But she’s too old to start new work now; they’ll have to find it in what’s already been written. Her mind feels thinner, lacy; when her eyes get too bad to type, she reads. When they get too bad to read, she cooks. She is already thinking of the tomatoes ripening on her windowsill, how she’ll scoop them out and bake them with crumbs and anchovies and Parmesan cheese. She could eat tomatoes like that any time of day, and she would suggest lunch now, but Norah is determined to make progress. In the chair opposite, she holds her slender, knotted fingers in the spines of several books, flipping back and forth, her reading glasses low on her nose. Norah, always so steadfast.

  The new book should be about places, they’ve decided: touchstones, lodestars, sanctuaries. Norah turns again to the story of Gigi’s kitchen, the Bakelite-handled comb, the sudden, frank address.

  “There’s too much to explain,” she says, “about the three of you living there together. But it’s good writing, and familiar. It feels like something you would do.”

  “It is something I would do. I did it.”

  “But that’s what I mean, Dote. You’d hardly have to touch it.”

  Mary Frances perches her chin on her folded hand. “Which version do you mean?”

  Because in the notebooks, the drafts, she’s ended this evening several ways.

  In her favorite version, she tells Gigi to fuck off. Conversationally, without a pause or second thought, in an even voice, she tells her to fuck off, and she leaves the soapy water in the sink, the dishes, whatever stew is still left in the tureen, brushing past Gigi’s shoulder in the doorway as she goes. She speaks that way now, in curt four-letter words she probably said only in private then. Oh, so useful—the fuck off.

  Or in another, Al returns to the kitchen, the women still circling, their tempers flared as fans. Mary Frances looks at Gigi, finding a harmless smile of her own. “Tell him whatever you want,” she says, the bluff laid out to call.

  Or she says nothing. She just walks out, leaves the house and all her things in it, this life already lost to her, a fact she should have known since the moment she set foot in Tim’s bedroom. She’s become someone else—two people, a thousand. She’s become every version of herself she’ll ever write about, all capital letters and abbreviations: MFK.