The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  But in truth, this conversation never came to anything. Eventually, the silence in the kitchen grew too long to be supported. Gigi uncrossed her arms and turned back down the hall to her bedroom. Mary Frances looked toward the terrace. Al had been gone a long time for just taking out the trash.

  She pulled out her notebook but couldn’t find a pen, not in her pocket or hooked to the neckline of her blouse, not on the countertop or in the drawer full of odds and ends. But in the foyer, beside the vase of chrysanthemums, there was Tim’s marbled Parker. She’d seen him with it a thousand times, the pen he used when he marked up her work.

  It was heavy in her hand, the fine nib scratching at the page, formed to Tim’s script and now forced to hers. She tore the paper, tore it once again, and put her notebook down, finishing her thought on the palm of her hand, Tim’s blue ink across her skin now. Down the hall, she heard a door slam and her chest pounded suddenly, once, and then returned to its own tempo. What on earth was she doing here? What on earth had she done.

  Anne fought with Edith. First, the letter came from Anne, how she was not a child or a wife any longer, how she wouldn’t listen to Edith at all but for the fact she and Sean needed her allowance to make their monthly bills. And then the letter from Norah, how Edith could hardly get out of bed she was so blurry, so low and upset. Anne was being a stubborn pill, but she always listened to Mary Frances, didn’t she, wouldn’t she? And then Norah wandered off into a long ramble about the trouble with studying Latin on an empty stomach. It seemed everyone expected intervention.

  Mary Frances called out to the Ranch to try to soothe Edith’s nerves.

  “Anne is proud of herself, Mother.”

  Anne was living in a tiny apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood, leaving Sean with a nurse during the day so she could take dictation for some president so-and-so, and this was not what Edith had raised her daughters to do. What was all that with the debut at the Hacienda Club, the weddings, college? Edith started crying. She was not a young woman anymore, and she was disappointed.

  “Do you want me to come home?” Mary Frances said.

  “I know you’re busy.”

  “Not that busy. It’s all right, Mother.”

  Al walked out of the kitchen and stood in the hall watching her. He let a handful of peanuts into his mouth. He did not try to hide the fact that he was listening.

  “I could come home,” Mary Frances said. “Norah said you were a little blurry.”

  Al shook his head, shut out the kitchen light, and headed down the hall to the bedroom. Mary Frances watched his shoulders disappear into the darkness.

  * * *

  A flurry of telegrams, and Al made plans to go north to Palo Alto on the weekend. His brother Herbert would meet him at the station, home from China on some kind of medical leave, dysentery, but maybe just another ploy to get out of trouble over there. Mary Frances folded white shirts into Al’s valise, knowing his mother would unpack them and notice how neat and how worn. The evening stretched long before his train, and she tried to stuff down her anxiety at being left behind.

  “I will miss you,” she said.

  “Really?” He turned to her, mildly surprised. “I thought you might be looking forward to some time alone.”

  “An afternoon, perhaps. A trip to the Ranch. But much more than that, I start to lose my footing.”

  “My dear,” Al said, squeezing her hand once. He turned back to his shaving kit, counting out enough spare blades for the time he’d be away.

  In the living room, Gigi dealt a hand of solitaire.

  “Gin?” Mary Frances asked.

  “I’ll get it,” Al said, going to the bar.

  The women looked at each other, and Mary Frances laughed. “I’ll deal,” she said, and held her hand out for the deck of cards.

  She held a run and a set, but couldn’t remember which they were playing for. Some sort of violin whined from the radio; it had been too early for dinner, and now she just wanted to keep drinking. Even as their glasses were not empty, she asked if Gigi would like another.

  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.

  Tim would have known every curve of it, of course. In a strange translation of time and space, Mary Frances knew that the time Tim had taken with her body the night they’d spent together was his habit, was what he gave Gigi as a matter of course, and she stuttered there at the door. To have that all the time. To walk away from it for something else. Or maybe every person met another on their own fresh terms, and what happened between her and Tim had never happened before. She couldn’t say, and she was surprised by how little she cared.

  In the studio, Al’s manuscript was still stacked beside the typewriter, his clean paper, a fine film of dust collected there, and the paintings stacked against the walls, like children made to face the corner. She trailed her fingers along the top edge of the canvases smeared with red and ochre, tipping one back against her leg: a flurry of shapes and colors. Another, and another: they were all bright, dodgy, difficult to understand upside down and backward.

  Tim had never showed her this work. There were paintings he’d made all over the house, landscapes and portraits and studies of small objects, paintings his cousin had made of Tim and his sister when they were children that you could now buy on greeting cards, and none of them were like this. She pulled out a canvas and hung it on a tenpenny nail across from the worktable.

  It seemed to be a view through a scrim, the wavery aspect of water. She had the feeling her eyes were adjusting to the light in the room; which room exactly she could not say, the studio or the space in the painting, but after a while, a man’s face appeared, angular and strong, a bright stain of rouge or red on his cheek, as though he’d been kissed there and rubbed it away, as though he’d been slapped.

  She pulled out a stool and sat down, cranked a clean page into the typewriter, and opened her notebook.

  Lucullus placed a live fish in a glass jar in front of every diner at his table. The better the death, the better the meal would taste.

  Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France.

  Everything started somewhere else. She thought of Tim’s note: write to me. He didn’t want to hear about Lucullus and Catherine de Medici; but she loved her old tomes and the things unearthed there, the ballast they lent, the safety of information. She spread her notebooks open across the table. There was a recipe for roasted locusts from ancient Egypt, and on the facing page, her own memory of the first thing she ever cooked, the curry sauce and Anne’s chocolate. A conversation rising between the two, her own voice at the center of it all.

  It was hours later when Gigi knocked on the studio door.

  “I’m late,” she said. “Did Al get off all right?”

  Mary Frances turned on her stool. Gigi wore an ivory coat that gathered and buttoned at the waist, a pert hat pushed forward over her sleek curls, and Mary Frances wanted to excuse her same white blouse, her same blue skirt and oxfords. But Gigi was staring at Tim’s painting.

  “I didn’t know he kept that,” she said, her expression skipping like a record.

  “There are stacks of them.”

  Gigi tried to make a sentence several times, her pretty mouth discarding the words before they’d begun. Finally, she turned to Mary Frances.

  “You know that’s a picture of him.”

  Mary Frances looked at the painting again.

  “He had a collection of mirrors—old mercury glass ones, cracked ones, some that were ruined with age. He used the mirrors. Sometimes we’d have to stop—”

  “It’s just nice to have something to look at.”

  Gigi let her gaze settle on Mary Frances.

  “He used to let me hel
p, give me little chores around his studio,” she said finally. “He was always very good at making you feel important.”

  “He’s probably still good at those things.”

  She laughed. “Of course. That’s not what I was saying. Only that I’m familiar with his methods.” She gestured at the typewriter.

  Mary Frances turned back to the page she’d written. She felt exposed the way she had playing cards, Gigi passing her Tim’s letter like contraband. She thought of the pale fish twisting in the jar, and she listened to Gigi walk away.

  * * *

  Without Al, Mary Frances discovered what she did alone. She liked to cook for herself, to assemble a meal of things he would never consider worth a mealtime—shad roe and toast, soft-set eggs, hearts of celery and palm with a quick yellow mayonnaise, a glass of wine, an open book in her lap, and the radio on. The elements that mattered most were the simple ones: butter, salt, a thick plate of white china and a delicate glass, the music faint, the feel of paper in her hand, and the knowledge that there was more, always more book to read, more wine if she liked it, some cold fruit in the refrigerator when she was hungry again, and the hours upon hours to satisfy herself.

  She wrote. She wrote when she got up in the morning, straight on the typewriter or with her notebook in her lap, a cigarette lit but unsmoked, coffee poured but turning cold. She wrote while she did the breakfast dishes, while she swept the kitchen floor or hung the laundry, while she unpacked the refrigerator, wrapping everything in wet newspaper to keep it cold while the freezer box dripped into a mop bucket inside the open door. She wrote mostly when she was not writing; she wrote mostly when she looked as if she were doing something else, and then she typed late into the night in Tim’s studio to have another manuscript to send to him, another way to keep their conversation going.