The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  She stayed out of Gigi’s way. Her friends came to the house, other chorus girls and actresses, all of them as young as she was, slender as switches, their hair every shade of blond imaginable. They passed around eyelash curlers and lipstick, cinched and beaded dresses, draped their clothes around the living room as though it were a costume closet: somebody had a date and needed a sweater, a skirt, a pair of stockings without runs, it came off another girl’s body, as if one were as good as another. Mary Frances lingered in the kitchen just to listen to them talk.

  The talk was constant, wrapped in nudge and insinuation. This director was easy, this one hard, the production code would be the death of all of them. Roles were being cut because of it: embraces that lasted too long, hips that shimmied too long, the moll to the devil who didn’t get his due, and suddenly movies they thought they were playing in belonged to someone who’d kept their sunnier side up. One girl, Nan, was sad there would be no more kissing.

  “Not the way there used to be kissing, at least. You know, like kissing so that maybe you got a date later.”

  “No more bad girls.” Doris’s voice was whiskey-burned, and she liked to take the dim view. “No revenge in modern times. I mean, just think about that. What kind of stories are you going to tell without revenge?”

  “I think that’s the modern times part, Doris,” Gigi said. “I think revenge is just old-fashioned.”

  “But it’s human nature.”

  “What isn’t?” And they laughed.

  Tim had been right; they loved their scandals: who was too fat, too thin, and what that might mean about their habits, and what would happen if the studio found out. Once a subject was open, it always seemed open. Nan was having an affair with someone famous; they referred to him only as the King, and with a great deal of whispering and giggle. They all thought Tim was out of town.

  It wasn’t long before Gloria heard that the Fishers had moved to Laurel Canyon.

  She appeared late one afternoon, still wearing her backless lace gown from whatever scenes she’d shot that day, its fishtail hem dragging on the slate. She was stunning. One of the girls in the living room gasped when Mary Frances opened the door.

  Gloria took Mary Frances’s hands and kissed her cheeks. Her stage makeup was frighteningly dark, as if her features had all been underlined.

  “I want you to move in with me,” Gloria whined. “What do I have to do to get that? Al?”

  “Al’s gone to see his father in Palo Alto.” Mary Frances slipped her arm into Gloria’s and turned her toward the living room.

  “So it’s just us girls?” She shot a gleaming smile over her shoulder, and Gigi seemed to wilt.

  The actresses fell away for her entrance. She swept into the love seat, her skirt flung wide, perching forward for a cigarette from the box on the table. She waited for someone to light a match, and Nan fumbled through her purse.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Mary Frances said. “I was just going to make some. Coffee?”

  Gloria was suspicious already; her imagination followed only one direction, down a path she’d taken herself many times and so was familiar with the scenery. When Mary Frances returned from the kitchen, she was still digging at Gigi, Doris and Nan hanging on every word.

  “He went home to Delaware without you?” she said. “Are you working? I mean, that’s a long time for you to be working.”

  “And Al did the same thing to me,” Mary Frances said. “Just last week, he took the train north by himself and said I could keep Gigi company.”

  “Well. It’s an epidemic!”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned it together. I haven’t heard from Al once, but Tim and Gigi talk every day. I’ve never seen a man more in love.”

  “They are adorable,” said Gloria.

  “Oh, more than that, I’d say.” Mary Frances looked at Gigi, her face coloring over her cup. “I’m jealous.”

  “Who isn’t,” said Gloria, and then, “I heard the fixers had to drag somebody’s wife out of the House of Francis yesterday.”

  Nan looked nervous. “Whose wife?”

  And they rolled on to other matters, finger waves, and how to lose five pounds in three days, and a woman downtown who fit corsets as if she were giving you a whole new rib cage. Gigi smiled and laughed and flattered Gloria, but when Mary Frances returned to the kitchen with the coffeepot, she’d followed her inside.

  “That Gloria,” she said. “I never—”

  Mary Frances said, “Gloria has been my friend for as long as I can remember.”

  Gigi looked small and suddenly tired, dark circles beneath her eyes beneath her makeup. Everyone had lives they lived outside themselves, and altogether separate ones within.

  “I’m sorry,” Gigi said quietly.

  Mary Frances understood then that maybe their fight was over, debts paid. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

  “Show me what you’re doing here. Even I can learn how to make coffee.”

  Mary Frances measured beans into the grinder and turned the handle. Gigi filled the pot. In the other room, Gloria’s spangled laughter led the others, and neither woman found herself particularly eager to return.

  * * *

  Mary Frances sent Tim the piece about Catherine de Medici and waited. She no longer pretended she knew what she was doing; her sense of reason seemed to have evaporated in favor of another letter, and then the next. The postman arrived in the morning and returned most afternoons; she knew his schedule by heart, shuffling through the envelopes before she’d even closed the door. She wanted her exchange with Tim to be as immediate as what she carried in her head, but a week went by, ten days, the time it took a letter to travel all the way across the country and another one to travel back, and there was little for her to do but imagine what he might have written, and then imagine it another way again.

  Your writing is beautiful, Mary Frances, and it lingers with me long after I have put your pages away. I planted a small garden in the cold frame here and went this morning to work in it. The seedlings are still tender, but by late spring, I should have lettuces and peas, a radish or two. Your essay was on my mind, and I thought of how in France there was a time a woman might have been as flattered by a bouquet of lettuces as she would have been with roses. I read the piece a second time, and I think you might—

  Enclosed was her essay and Tim’s blue notes across it, careful and precise, a record of his time, his interest in her. A second reading, she thought. At the end of his letter, he thanked her for sending her work and asked for more, dear god, more.

  * * *

  She found Gigi on the terrace, basking. She wore a bird’s-egg blue hostess dress, the organza tie at the waist flailing against the flagstones like something that had lost its wings. She had slices of cucumber over both eyes. Mary Frances asked her if she wanted the bitters.

  “Just tired,” she said. “But aren’t you sweet. I was out late with Nan. It seems she’s making a surprise move to San Francisco.”

  “She has a picture there?”

  “A nine-month engagement, so to speak.”

  “Oh.”

  Gigi rolled her head along the back of the chaise, letting the cucumber fall into her open palm. She looked at Mary Frances from underneath her long, long lashes.

  “She’s Catholic. And he’s married, maybe to two women, it’s hard to say. Nan’s lucky, really. The fixers only come into the picture if you’re worth something to the studio. Otherwise you have to work these things out for yourself.”

  They were resourceful girls on the whole, the studio girls—they knew how and where to get things done, and when the fixers wouldn’t help, they helped each other, getting money together or a place to stay, the name of a doctor in another town. Circles were small. A dozen pretty girls with long legs and good voices, and one became Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, and everyone
else was like Nan. So when someone did pick you, took you aside and told you that you were more than pretty and long-legged and good, it was hard not to get carried away.

  Mary Frances thought of Tim’s letter, what a beautiful writer he said she was. It was easy to say those things from the other side of the country. It was easy to send them, to send anything on paper.

  Gigi said, “I don’t think Tim can father children. It’s the kind of thing we used to talk about on the train, late at night with the other girls, when we talked about troubles. I didn’t think Tim and I would ever have a family. But I’m certainly thankful not to have one now.”

  “Is that why you left him? Do you want to have children?”

  Gigi faltered, then pretended otherwise. Mary Frances could see her draw a sense of gravity over herself, her posture in the chair shifting, her face veiled with something new.

  “It was hard for me to make the decision to leave Dillwyn,” she said.

  She never called him Dillwyn. Mary Frances pressed her hand against her temple, and Gigi went on.

  “I think John was even surprised I did it. We wanted to be together, of course, but it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible until it was.”

  Gloria was like this too, a billboard of interior thoughts, without a shred of self-protection. It must be what the camera so loved about these women. Too, she knew her lines, and how to deliver them.

  “I doubt you can understand it,” Gigi said, “unless it happens to you.”

  * * *

  Still, Tim said, still, I love those moments where you reveal yourself. I love to hear what you want in a dinner partner, in a kitchen, your wooden spoons and copper pots. (There is a beautiful set I left at the house, undoubtedly going green. Please use them, take them. They’re yours.) You are the center in these stories. And everything about you, your wit and passion, your sensualism, your fine arched brow, is clear and true on these pages. I can close my eyes and see you now.

  In the cupboards, she found the pots, French ones with heavy bottoms and a thick patina of disuse. She scrubbed them with a lemon dipped in salt, buffed them with mineral oil, arranged them on the stove: a stockpot, a large sauté, and a saucepan. She would keep them for the rest of her life.

  In Last House, they are really all she needs. The newspaper people come, the magazine reporters, soon someone from the library at Harvard to take away her cartons of paper, which seems strange to do while she is still alive, but there is so much she’s glad to be rid of. They come, expecting a meal with her, the pleasures of her table such as she’s described them for some fifty years and counting. In the past year, she has made nearly three hundred meals for visitors of some professional stripe or another; she keeps a tally for the tax man at Norah’s insistence. Everyone wants their piece.

  Norah has gone back home for the weekend, another grandchild soon to be born, her family still growing and expanding, still lush in a way that needs to be tended. And Mary Frances can entertain her guests alone. It’s how she prefers to meet new people these days; the labor of bringing her old life to their expectations too great. Instead, she lets them do all the heavy lifting for her. All that seems to be required is an arch of her brow, some cursing in French, and a good, honest meal.

  In the deep sauté, she has made a stew: eggplant and tomatoes, onions and summer squash, a sort of ratatouille, tiella, samfina, pisto, there are as many names for it as countries, and she has stopped caring for all the names of things. She has made stew, and there are ripe peaches and cream for dessert, a few bottles of wine to choose from. She does not know when the librarians will arrive. Her marmalade cat rubs at her ankles, hungry too.

  She pours him a small saucer of the cream, takes her cold vermouth to the fan-back wicker chair on the balcony that looks toward the mountains. Night will come soon enough, and her skin is so thin, she won’t be able to keep herself warm out here. But for now, she looks out across the vineyards, the thick smell of her stew wafting behind her, and she feels content to wait.

  * * *

  When Mary Frances saw Al get off the train, she hardly recognized him. Travel could do that to a person, and grief, but it was still shocking, the gray sag to his features, the smell of his mother’s house that clung to his clothes.

  He pressed a dry kiss to her cheek. “Have you been waiting long?”

  She shook her head. They made their way to the car, through the cluster and press of people coming and going, people standing around with their hands out. He let her drive, resting his head on the back of the car seat. He seemed to be balancing something that required all his concentration; he had nothing left for questions or talk or an easy expression on his face. Mary Frances could hardly bear it. These days apart made his silence feel like an accusation.

  “How is your mother?” she asked, and she thought Al had not heard her, so she asked again.

  “Last night I found her at the laundry sink. She’d been scrubbing my father’s sheets. Her head was stopped against the canning shelf above the faucets, sound asleep.”

  “Oh, Al.”

  Mary Frances reached for his hand. She thought of Rex, his ink-stained fingers prying back the flesh of an orange, his graveled laugh filling his office. He was steadfast in her thoughts, a fortress of security, but Edith could fall to pieces any minute. She felt her palm begin to sweat in Al’s and pulled away.

  She drove him to the house in Laurel Canyon; he went to their bedroom and lay down atop the coverlet, his coat, his shoes still on. She stood at his elbow, her hands twisting at her skirt.

  “Can I get you anything?” she said.

  “I’m tired. It was a long trip.”

  “A glass of juice? A cup of tea.”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She lingered at the bedside, and he could not think of what she wanted now.

  Al’s father was the kind of sick that looked like death would be a blessing. His mouth hung open vacantly when he slept, and he slept all the time. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was frightened, and that was worse—all the years he’d comforted others, all the years he’d preached about milk and honey, but the fear was there, beneath his pallor and his dull eyes fluttering closed. He was afraid he didn’t know what came next. If Al’s father didn’t know, who would?

  The whole house smelled of rot and fear and probably would forever. His mother moved constantly from room to room. She slept standing up. Herbert had hopped a boat the afternoon Al left, back to China for another tour. There seemed nothing left to do but to wait for the inevitable.

  When Al woke, Mary Frances was perched on the edge of the bed, her shadow looming over him. It was nearly dark outside.

  “Oh.” Al sat up. “The time.”

  She looked out the window as though it had just occurred to her as well. “It’s not so late,” she said. “We could have dinner.”

  Al thought of the two of them across from each other at the big table in the dining room, some carefully simple plate and full glasses of wine, maybe some music: the very antithesis of his father’s house. She would want to hear more. He remembered the feeling he used to have leaving his office at the end of the day, working his way back to her, and the weight he felt now was tenfold.

  “Let’s take in a movie, shall we? Eat some candy bars and laugh.”

  Relief flickered on her face, too. “Marx Brothers?”

  But Night at the Opera was not playing close by, and they ended up in a movie neither one of them knew anything about. A young woman from some pastoral, daisied homeland was whisked away to the big city by a handsome, wealthy benefactor. Over time they fell in love, a fact signaled with the clasping of her hands to his heart and singing. There was lots of singing, a few jokes with a terrier named Milo, and a very happy ending. Mary Frances looked over at Al, his head lolled back against the seat and the light from the picture catching the sharp parts of his profile. He laug
hed when he was meant to, and the darkness took care of the rest.

  * * *

  Sunday afternoon, and Gigi had been out all weekend. Mary Frances worked in the garden, Al on the patio behind her, turning the pages of the paper. They had been outside for the front page and half the city section, a sheaf of iris blades gathered at her knee. He was not really reading; the sound of the newspaper clapping back against his body from the breeze marked the time.

  “Al,” Mary Frances said, “can you take these for me?” Her basket was full of clippings from the garden.

  “Another way to earn our keep?”

  “I enjoy it,” she said.

  She enjoyed everything. Around the corner of the house, he dumped the basket of Mary Frances’s clippings by the rubbish pile and caught the flash of that long blue Hudson. He edged closer to see Gigi and her stuntman. Gigi lingered at his car door, her pale hand to her throat, and suddenly it seemed pornographic, that she had to linger here, in her old life, house, with himself and Mary Frances looking on, linger at the car door, so desperately.

  Do it, Al thought, please just do it, kiss her, something. But instead he watched the two of them for full minutes, staring at each other.

  If everybody saw, could he and Mary Frances just go home?

  He walked back to the patio. Mary Frances was still kneeling by the flower bed. She could kneel for the longest time.

  “Gigi’s back,” he said, and she looked up, startled. She brushed her hands on her skirt, faint green streaks left behind.

  “I’ll make supper,” Mary Frances said. “Did she bring a friend?”

  And because Al was not himself, because Al was looking for a fight or a distraction from one, he took long strides back around the side of the house and called across the yard. “Gigi, dear. Bring your friend for dinner.”

  * * *

  John Weld was a nice man. He was tall and tan, had won swimming contests when he lived in Kansas City. His teeth were straight and white. He came from a newspaper family, had worked in Paris after the war, and wrote screenplays and novels. There was plenty for Mary Frances and Al to talk with him about.