The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  “Christ,” Gigi said. “I need a shower.”

  And when she stood, there was that drawing tall of her limbs, the pull and lift of her shoulders, her chin, the crown of her head as though she were a deck of cards stacked into place. She knew Mary Frances was watching her. Could she stop being an actress? Could Mary Frances stop being a writer? Was it like stopping being somebody’s wife? If there was one thing she doubted she was capable of, it was knowing when, and how, to stop.

  * * *

  Tim had read her story about the fifty million snails: I remembered a summer in the south of France, the whole coast beset with heat, a kind of dust and burn. There was nothing for it but to lie in the darkened room, or brave it. One afternoon, walking outside Hyère just to feel the air move, I saw peasants harvesting grapes in baskets on their backs. They had set a stand of grass on fire, or maybe it had combusted in the heat, but as I came across these bent, brown people, they were gathering the roasted snails from the ashes for their lunch.

  He would be leaving soon for England with his sister. Perhaps they would go to France too; he had been thinking a lot about France lately, because of her. He would give the full count of her pieces to Claire so she might read them while they traveled. It will be harder to tell you so while I am gone, but you know my thoughts never seem to stop circling the things you write. If only we could talk without our skulls and fingers in the way.

  She took his note to the patio and stretched out in the chaise to read it again. She wanted to have seen that roadside with him, to have tasted the ashy snails. Her imagination was without distraction; she wondered if she could keep this temperature if she saw him face to face.

  We might have spent the day together in Hyère, in the shuttered afternoon of your rooms, she wrote. She untied her blouse from where she’d hitched it around her rib cage, and in her mind, he watched as she loosened herself further from her clothes, the room green with heat now, a jungle, the slatted light cast across the floor. It was only the bed and the room; she conjured them slowly, not yet that sunbaked field, that roadside set on fire. I can imagine it, she wrote, from what you tell me here. I find of late I can imagine almost anything you say, and everything you don’t.

  She could imagine them meeting again, and their days together that would follow, their lives together full of writing and talk and skin against skin, their lives full and yet fitting neatly into her head now, complete in miniature. She could live their lives in an afternoon’s time, in an hour or two, in her dreams, in private, and she had no expectations beyond that. This little bit was enough. Or perhaps it was that more seemed terrifying.

  * * *

  A telegram came, first thing in the morning, the dew still painting the slate of the front walk. Mary Frances answered the door, and there was the boy and his bike and cap, so much shiny red. He looked at Mary Frances’s shoes as he held out the ink-blue envelope, so intently that Mary Frances looked at her shoes as well. The lace on her oxfords was frayed. Her fingers trembled. A telegram. She scanned the window for her name, and her hopes fell, once for herself and again for Al.

  She called back into the house and went to fetch a nickel for a tip.

  When Al saw her with the telegram, he turned around, back down the hall to their bedroom. Mary Frances followed. He was packing a suitcase.

  “Al,” she said, but he didn’t stop what he was doing. “I’m so sorry.”

  She laid the telegram on the bed beside his case, but he did not open it or even pick it up. His face was brittle, and she felt a wave of shame.

  “Shall I call the station?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll make you something to eat, then.”

  “Jesus, Mary Frances.”

  “All right,” she said.

  She left him for the kitchen. She sliced rye bread and split links of sausages for frying, cracked an egg and let it bubble against the meat. She toasted the bread and spread it thickly with mustard Gloria had brought them, good Dijon mustard, and Mary Frances knew she must have paid a fortune for it, and what a strange thought that was to occupy her now.

  Al’s chair scraped out from the table behind her; she could sense him there, wanting and not wanting her. He stood buttoning his collar, brushing at his shirtfront, his fingers moving over himself of their own accord. She split a grapefruit and juiced it into a ruby-footed glass, poured coffee, and set it all in front of him.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He bent over his plate. His collar had been badly pressed, and she reached to smooth the crease. A crease like that, anyway, there would be no fixing it without water and an iron, without starting all over again. She was crying now.

  “I’ll check the train,” she said.

  “We’ll take the car,” he said.

  “Of course.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She had not been particularly close to Al’s father, and she studied her tears now for some sense of what they were for: Al’s pain, of course, and his distance from her, which had everything and nothing to do with what he was going through now. The room was hot and airless; Mary Frances turned to shut off the broiler before it caught fire. There was nothing to do but pack their things, and go.

  * * *

  The driveway of the Fishers’ house was full of cars, and women in solemn gray and navy flanked the porch, older women practiced at this kind of ministering, and Mary Frances felt for just a moment jealous at their ease, their graceful presence. Clara’s roses lined the drive, and one woman held a basket and shears, carefully clipping rose upon rose for an arrangement. Al nodded to her, to the other people waiting outside, and Mary Frances understood him to be home. He had been the right reverend’s son here, and now he was the right reverend’s son come to pay his respects.

  He opened her door for her, and Mary Frances could hear his mother at the piano inside. She had played all her life, and beautifully, even now.

  Suddenly, Mary Frances thought of her courtship, how she’d told Al she’d live in a piano box with a man if she’d loved him enough. He must have thought then of his mother’s piano, of Brahms and Mozart, and not the blithe, blustery girl before him. A piano box, she remembered saying it.

  Al took her arm again and introduced her to the women, the endless ropes of them, by the names of their husbands. She wondered how he did it; the Fishers had moved to Palo Alto only after she and Al were married. These were not women he’d grown up with, but maybe versions of the same, from another town.

  In the parlor, Al’s mother rose from the piano and kissed Mary Frances’s cheeks, her own cool and chapped, as though she’d been running in the wind.

  “I am so grateful you came, dear,” she said. “Al needs you by his side.”

  She looked then at her son with a kind of pain Mary Frances had never seen before. Al’s head bent, his body slackened, and for the first time since she arrived, Mary Frances felt as if he were actually present, and it was horrible to stand there next to him and not know what to do.

  She began to cry.

  Clara patted her back and cooed to her, some of the women flocking close now and patting too, and Mary Frances felt so foolish, so greedy.

  “The room in the back,” Clara whispered. “Al will take your things, and you can freshen up. There are so many people here.”

  She said it as if they would need to be organized, arranged, but all around her the women bustled with their own discrete jobs, filling, fluffing, sweeping away. She was being kind, trying to make Mary Frances feel needed even at a time like this.

  Mary Frances followed Al through the parlor down the hallway, his long frame seeming to fill all the space in front of her. At every doorway, a cluster of the mourning women, and somewhere in the house Mary Frances did not want to look, the body rested.

  Al closed the door and sat on the edge of the tall iron-frame bed, one of Clara’s coiled rag rugs at his feet. Mar
y Frances stood before him. He reached for her wrist, but did not direct her closer or away. She wished for something to say, but nothing came.

  Al sighed. “You smell like smoke.”

  “I smoke.”

  “Not here.”

  His face tipped back then, and he appraised her, cool, remote. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and brought it to her mouth, blotted the red of her lipstick, turning the same careful attention to the print it made on the cloth. He folded a clean, white square over it and returned the handkerchief to his pocket.

  “Not today,” he said.

  What might have seemed funny at any other time now resounded between them, as sharp and sure as a slap to her cheek, and Mary Frances reeled backward in her heels.

  “Al,” she said.

  His thin smile fought to turn it, and she let it go. This dying, this end, was like a klieg light. It made everything clear.

  * * *

  Driving back to Los Angeles, Al announced he no longer wanted to teach at Occidental. They had no choice, of course, they needed the money to live on, but he was through with that, as soon as he could be.

  “I understand,” she said. “You need some time now.”

  “It’s not about time.”

  “Then grief, Al. I understand.”

  “What do you do,” Al said, “that you would rather not?”

  The silence hung between them bitterly. She seemed so oblivious to her good fortune, her entire life of relative ease. It was more than he could stand right now.

  She said, “Gigi told me she would be leaving the studio anyway. She says she and John Weld are going to get married, and that she’s done with acting.”

  Gigi was another thing he could not deal with anymore, the way she required an audience. There was something wrong with her that Tim was lucky to have slipped; he was only now realizing that. Perhaps these things happened for a good reason sometimes. Perhaps all this was happening for a good reason.

  “You could have your study back, in Eagle Rock,” she said.

  “Yes,” Al said. “The study.”

  “We’ll go back to how it always was,” she said. “Couldn’t we?”

  He glanced over at her and reached across the seat for her hand.

  “Oh, let’s stop in town for dinner,” she said. “Let’s go to Don’s. I’ve got some extra money tucked away in here.”

  She began digging through her purse. She wanted a drink. She wanted to be in a crowd, not to be alone with her husband, not to have to talk so much. She wanted to stop the car and call another couple to meet them, but days like this before, the number to call would have been Tim and Gigi’s.

  “We’ll find something else,” she said. “We’ll go away again. We’re good at that.”

  “I think we should adopt a child.”

  Mary Frances stopped digging in her purse and looked at him. It was the closest he had ever come to admitting they might not be able to have one naturally.

  “I think we should find something else, and I think it should be a family of our own. It’s time, Mary Frances. It’s time to put away our distractions and live our lives.”

  His voice was even and firm, his eyes fixed ahead as he said it. It was insane, of course. He’d just finished saying he didn’t want to work the only steady job he’d had in the course of their marriage, but he was ready for a child. He was in so much pain, he wasn’t making sense. She would have said anything to change the subject.

  “I’ll think about it, Al. Perhaps you’re right.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  He put his hands back on the wheel, and they rode into Los Angeles with the words still vibrating between them, too charged to continue or touch again.

  At Don’s, Al ordered a dozen oysters, and they talked about the grizzled men at Crespin’s in Dijon, their blood-flecked hands, the green shells prized open in their palms and pearly pale inside. Mary Frances had to work to keep her face clear; she felt like a wall that had rotted through, plaster turned to slurry inside.

  She would pack their things this afternoon.

  * * *

  The house at Eagle Rock had not rented that summer or fall, and they took it back. It looked as they had left it, the bedsteads draped in muslin, the kitchen coated with a fine film of sticky grime. Mary Frances pulled out the rags and brooms and did some satisfying work, but Al wandered the rooms for days, an engine sputtering to catch.

  She left an atlas open on the coffee table in front of the fire, but the pages never turned. She suggested books and movies, a drive down to the coast, and he would nod his head, tell her to go get ready, but she’d find him napping in his armchair half an hour later. She asked him if he’d talked to Larry, to Gordon, anybody at the college, but his answer was always no. She spent a lot of time watching him when he was lost in thought, and she stayed up late to write when she was alone.

  For the holidays, they went to the Ranch. Anne was secretive and snippy. She took at least one private phone call in Rex’s office and came back as flushed as if she’d been sprinting up and down the stairs. Mary Frances knew she must be seeing someone, but she wouldn’t say, which meant she had a reason not to. She thought of Gigi’s friend Nan and the nine-month engagement she was bearing somewhere in San Francisco. It looked exhausting to be single, let alone a single mother.

  Baby Sean was toddling to and from any reachable surface, babbling his sounds, and Edith kept asking when the next new baby might be on the way. Mary Frances and Al looked at each other politely and smiled, asked Edith for another slice of cake, or Rex for his thoughts on the governor’s race. Deflection seemed everyone’s default position, but when Mary Frances had Rex alone in his office, she explained more of what was going on.

  “Al says he wants to adopt a baby.”

  “Adopt?”

  She could not look at him when she nodded, but she had always shared everything with Rex, the privileges of being oldest.

  “Your mother didn’t have you the minute we were married. You shouldn’t be so hasty.”

  “I’m not being hasty.” She sat on the edge of Rex’s desk, looking at her shoes.

  “But someone is, if I catch your meaning.”

  Mary Frances shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re supposed to know, what he’s supposed to know.”

  Rex laughed. “You people spend too much time in school.”

  “Daddy.”

  “If you want a baby, Mary Frances, I have no doubt you’ll get one.”

  “But Al has no job, no . . . drive.”

  “Now, now. It’s the season for miracles, Dote.”

  She let herself be led into another conversation, but it marked the first time a talk with her father had failed her, and she knew the fault was her own. She hadn’t been able to be honest with him. He’d see her differently in light of her correspondence with Tim, and whatever else she was carrying on there, and so she’d streamlined. She made a different story, one that was just as true as the real story. Her feelings for Tim were not so different from dreaming of being a writer, or an actress, a fantasy based on slender experience, slight encouragement, and the vast space inside her head to fill.

  She hadn’t heard from him in weeks now. He was traveling Europe. She had no way to tell him they’d left Laurel Canyon, no good address in this country or another. The one thing Tim’s attention required was paper and ink, and while filling notebook after notebook, journal after journal, she realized what a flimsy requisite that really was.

  Something drastic would have to happen now if they were to continue, something equally drastic as her starting a family to continue with Al. From where she stood, either prospect seemed both unlikely and necessary, vital. A rebirth.

&
nbsp; * * *

  After the new year, a letter from Tim arrived. He was grateful for their friendship, for the time they’d spent with Gigi. He understood from her that all was well and they had moved back to Eagle Rock. But he would like to repay their generosity, or perhaps ask another favor, it was hard for him to tell—but they were such good friends, he felt he didn’t need to stand on ceremony. Would Mary Frances be able to escort himself and his mother on a tour of France? They needed someone with her skills in companionship and conversation, both in English and in French. Mrs. Parrish wanted to revisit the places she had loved in her youth, and it seemed like the timing would be right in February . . .

  “What do you think?” Mary Frances said.

  Al let the letter fall to the tabletop. “What do you think?” he said.

  * * *

  Al did not sit on the edge of the bed and watch her pack. Into her trunks went clothes for the ship, silks and satins, the brocade pumps of Anne’s she’d admired at Christmas, Edith’s fox collar coat. She packed her French dictionary, needles, and yarn; it would be cold enough for mittens and scarves, and in Paris she would buy perfume. What was she packing for, really? She knew the sort of ladies companionship Tim suggested in his letter, the long stretches of tea and cards, museums and churches, but she would have his audience as well, unbroken, for weeks. She could not seem to push her imagination past that; perhaps she was not meant to.

  From the other room, she could hear the drawers in Al’s desk open and close, the typewriter silent. She told herself this time would be good for him too, time to take up the poem again, but she’d tell herself anything that made it easier to leave.

  He was standing in the doorway, his gaze now fastened on the spillage of slick color from the lip of the trunk.

  “Your feathers,” he said, his smile tightly drawn.

  Her hands felt thick and clumsy. She bundled empty hangers back into the closet, like a shuffling of bones.

  “Do you remember,” Al said, “the summer I sent you to London with Edith? You didn’t want to go, but I thought it would be good for you.”