France reminds me of you every day, and everywhere we go there is a fourth seat for you, my dear, as though you might meet us any moment.
* * *
They took a carriage through the Bois de Boulogne, the women bundled in lap robes and furs, Tim on the buckboard with the driver, the wide allée stretching ahead. The wind whipped across the lake, ice still clinging to its edges, but Mrs. Parrish spoke of a sunny lunch fifty years before on the topmost balcony of the Chalet des Iles. Her companion had rowed them across in a tiny wooden boat, her father one boat behind.
“I’m sure Paris was a father’s nightmare,” said Mary Frances. “My father was a fan of boarding schools when I was young.”
Mrs. Parrish nodded. “I wanted desperately to see Paris before taking my place at home. Paris at the end of the century! Of course, now I understand that was something special. Then, Paris was enough.”
Mary Frances took out her notebook.
“Are you writing that down, my dear? So unnerving, these habits of writers.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary Frances said. “It’s just that your story reminded me of something else.”
She could feel Mrs. Parrish looking over her shoulder as she wrote. She marked her place in the book with her thumb.
“I look forward to reading your book, Mary Frances. Tim speaks so highly of your talent.”
“His help has been a godsend.”
“He has no doubt you will be published to wide acclaim. I think, when you find yourself in the public eye, careful comportment makes all the difference.”
Mary Frances laughed. “It’s a very little book. I don’t imagine we need to worry about the public eye.”
“You must always be careful how you present yourself. For instance, I know you to be the devoted wife of Tim’s best friend. I like knowing that about you, and I imagine I would find that reflected in the things you’ve chosen to write about. There might be other things about you I wouldn’t like to know, and they would change my feelings about your book.”
She spoke evenly, with the same instructive ease she’d spoken about chaperones and escorts, dinner table conversation and correspondence. “I don’t want to read about what I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what I don’t want to know, for that matter.”
“I appreciate that,” Mary Frances said, matching her tone. “I will remember that.”
Tim turned on the buckboard. “Are you warm enough, my dears? Another fur? A little nip of brandy? Mother?”
But Mrs. Parrish was looking out over the lake and didn’t seem to hear him. She reached forward and placed a gloved hand on the back of the driver.
“Once around again, please.” She said it in English, but the driver understood.
* * *
That night Mrs. Parrish suggested Mary Frances would go ahead to Dijon, and she and Tim follow a few days later.
“You and Al must have friends there, people you’d like to see,” Mrs. Parrish said. “And I’m sure Timmy can manage our train.”
“I have done it before,” Tim said. “No one’s gotten hurt.”
“It’s not necessary, Mrs. Parrish. I’m happy to stay with you.”
“I insist.”
“Well.” She looked at Tim. “Thank you.”
“Yes, Mother.” Tim sighed. “That’s very kind.”
Mary Frances bent to her coffee. Her conversation with Mrs. Parrish in the carriage suddenly seemed far more consequential than she’d thought, yet the woman remained personable, chatty, herself. She was a mother, after all. She was capable of many different tacks at once.
“I’m hoping you and Al will come to visit when we return,” she said. “I think I should meet him at last.”
“You should. He’s very curious about you. And grateful.”
Mrs. Parrish touched her hand, and that seemed to settle it. “It has been my pleasure.”
After his mother said good night and Tim walked Mary Frances to her rooms, unlocked her door, and pushed her up against the papered wall, his hand drawing up beneath her corselette, the thick resistant fabric and belts, her legs opening for him, after they’d made love on the carpet, finally reaching the bed, she told him what his mother had said in the park.
He laughed. “It’s nothing compared to what she said to me.”
“Oh god, Tim. Really?”
“Something about what happens on a ship is one thing, everybody packed in like sardines together, but she expects a return to my senses, post haste.”
Tim rolled away from her, found his pants on the floor, and extracted his cigarette case from the pocket. Their time together would be over soon, and she could not imagine what would come next, how anything could come next. They would certainly never get another chance like this.
“Shouldn’t you be getting back to your own room?” she said, looking at Tim, the smoke from his cigarette rising lazily.
He traced a slow line along her collarbone. “Post haste.”
* * *
She checked into the Hôtel de la Cloche and left her bags, the day bright and cold, the rooftops sending their wood smoke into the blue sky. She went first and stood in the street at Crespin’s, the oysterman still there with his craggy fingers, the gnarled shells. She tipped back a half-dozen oysters with a short cold beer for lunch, the rattle of Dijonnaise around her like the beat of wings in a coop. This was not Paris or Provence but dark gray France, musty and cobbled and muddy and rich. Behind her, she could hear the clock chiming at the Nôtre-Dame.
This was the place she’d first learned to pay attention to the particular way she noticed things, her perspective, to pay attention as a writer. If these were their last days together, she wanted Tim to know this city as she did, so that something between them might be complete.
She took the narrow stairs to the second floor at Aux Trois Faisons, the narrow hallway to Ribaudot’s office, still the short balding man, brusque and pacing, a lit cigarette between his teeth as he yelled into the telephone.
He pretended to remember her. “Yes, of course. Madame Fisher. You look well.”
“Thank you. I would like a table for Thursday night. A special table, please, a very special meal. Shall I order it now?”
“Of course, Madame.”
Perhaps he did remember. But the lingering feeling of unease followed her to the street, in and out of shops, through the empty rooms in the house on Petit Potet, where she and Al had first lived, and Madame, now poor and alone. Everything was changed. She’d pressed money into Madame’s hand as she left, then wandered the quarter, embarrassed, sad, the scent of gingerbread adrift.
When Tim and his mother arrived in Dijon, Mrs. Parrish seemed to need him constantly. She had letters to write and gifts to buy, she was too cold, too hot, too tired—would Tim read to her in their rooms? Mary Frances had other things to do, she was sure.
The one night she shared with Tim was their dinner at Aux Trois Faisons.
There was her table, the menu she’d ordered typewritten on a nice white card. There was the old man who ate with his dog, the four widows in their weeds, the young tourists much like herself and Al. There was her waiter, Charles, with his delicate waxed mustache. Old now, shrunken, his hands fumbled and shook, chasing his tools across the buffet. The Dubonnet ran a purple stain on the white cloth. He was obviously drunk. Mary Frances glanced at Tim, feeling somehow responsible, but he was looking at the swirl in his glass, the lovely deep color there, then at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “And somehow ashamed.”
Tim laughed. “Ashamed?”
“I’ve talked and talked about this restaurant.” She gestured at the purple stain, the pool of soup in his saucer.
“My dear,” he said. “What does it matter, where we are?”
And with that, the evening took up its slack. Course by course, the meal be
came the thing she’d hoped it would be: intricate and subtle and lovely and long, and none of that had to do with the place, which was ancient, or the food, which was perfectly prepared to her specifications, or the service, which somehow improved the more they asked of Charles, his skill finally rising to the surface. It was Tim. He made her laugh, he made her think, they lingered in the restaurant long past hours; the boy with the mop on the edge of their light, sweeping the long hall to the stairs.
A last sip of marc, they settled the bill, and Charles was gone.
They ducked past the boy sweeping up. Mary Frances knew where the coats were hung, but passing Ribaudot’s office, he called out to them, “Madame, how was your meal?”
“It was wonderful, wonderful. Thank you.”
“I am so happy you remembered us.”
“But everyone remembers Ribaudot’s. And Charles. Charles was wonderful.”
He shook his head. “These days it is hard to say who remembers what. And Charles, I am glad he was able to be here. Yours was his last service.”
“Last?”
“He is probably already headed south by now.”
“But why?”
It was a horrible question, none of her business, but she couldn’t help herself.
Ribaudot drew a small polite smile. “Why, Madame, his family is from the south. And the weather there . . .” He stopped. “Charles is old, intemperate, and now he is gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ribaudot shrugged. “So am I.”
Tim took her hand and led her down the narrow stairs, and once they were in the courtyard, the full starlight above, Ribaudot threw the switch, and Aux Trois Faisons went dark. Mary Frances was crying.
Tim gathered her in his arms, pressing her cheek to his. “My dear. It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
“It was a lovely dinner, a perfect dinner. I am so happy to be with you here.”
“But, Tim. I wanted this so much. And now there’s nothing.”
“Everything passes,” he said. “Everything changes.”
She put her forehead to his shoulder, but she turned her face up, out, away.
“Look,” he said. “All those beautiful tiled roofs. The moonlight, Dijon . . .”
But all that was what she was crying for now, big hopeless tears that come effortlessly, that she did not try to wipe away.
This dinner would become the centerpiece of her book, the story the reviews all focused on, Tim as Chexbres, as he would always be called in her books to come. In her telling, they spark and flirt, they indulge themselves at the table, and at the end of “The Standing and the Waiting,” they weep for what they will never have. But most important, Chexbres is not Al, who appears in stories before and stories after, Al who is clearly her husband. Dijon had belonged to them. That she would have this dinner, write about this dinner, and then show it to the world is the most complete betrayal of her marriage she could make.
* * *
“I don’t think people realize how significant a meal can be,” says the librarian, and she has to laugh.
This is one of the things she likes to talk about these days, how people eat in their cars and don’t enjoy actual plates or food or company as they much as they should. He’s been a good librarian, read her latest interviews. Or maybe he shares her thinking too: she can tell by the way he uses his thumbs against the breastplate, the way he plucks only a few quills at a time, that he knows his way around a game bird. She looks hard at him: a hunter or a cook? She wishes she could blame her glasses.
“God no,” she says. “Which is why there’s much to be said for dining alone.”
He pauses and looks out at the vineyard, the coming darkness. “I guess there is,” but he looks unconvinced.
She’s not certain she believes it herself anymore. But she’s written about the pleasures of traveling alone, dining alone, cooking for one, and she feels beholden to the time he’s taken and the distance he’s come to hear her say what she always says. She has been alone for quite some time now, and the solitary meals, the big bed, the day that insists on being filled lend an intensity to her smallest conversations. Of course, Norah is here, but that is not the type of companion she means.
She offers the librarian a bag for the feathers and takes the still downy necks of the quail he’s finished back to her kitchen. She fills their cavities with lemons, the bay and sage from the pots on the balcony. She trusses the birds, butters their skins. All of it makes for a familiar ceremony, the hundreds of times she’s trussed birds, pleased guests, held forth on the significance of daily things.
Then suddenly, he’s there behind her with two more birds, his hand to her shoulder, a man accustomed to communicating silently. Suddenly, she wonders about his life back east in Boston, the last woman he touched, the last time he could not keep silent.
“Thank you,” she says, and the evening seems new again.
* * *
By the time they got to Switzerland, Mrs. Parrish had caught a cold. She wanted Mary Frances to stay with her in Vevey while Tim went to check his property above Lac Léman.
“I’m sure you’ll be fine, Mother. We’ll only be gone for the day.”
Mrs. Parrish blew her nose into her handkerchief and looked at Mary Frances.
“I can stay,” she said. “I can go to the pharmacy. It’s not a problem.”
“I hate for you to change your plans, dear. It’s just that I feel rather out of sorts here, and it’s not like Paris. I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”
“Of course. It’s not a problem.”
Tim turned from the window. He pushed his white cuff up his forearm to check his watch, and Mary Frances realized she had not worn her own in weeks. She rubbed the empty spot on her wrist, wondering if she’d even brought it.
“The weather is just too spectacular, Mother. I’ll be back in a half hour with the car. You can come with us, or you can stay here and we’ll return this evening.”
“Oh, Timmy,” she said. “I just can’t.”
“That’s fine, then. And you’ll be fine. But Mary Frances and I will be going.”
Mrs. Parrish redistributed the blankets over her legs. She studied her son, his face even and calm. This was not a standoff, but merely Tim’s patience in waiting for her to understand. Finally, she put her head back to the stack of pillows and coughed.
“Perhaps if I can just have a bit of tea sent up,” she said, but Tim was already out the door.
Mary Frances picked up the phone to order the tea, lemon, and honey, a plate of sandwiches. She asked if there was anything else, and Mrs. Parrish pretended not to hear her.
“Some brandy, perhaps?”
Mrs. Parrish only shook her head. She looked fragile, her eyes mouse-pink and wet, and Mary Frances felt a stab of guilt. What would Edith do to see her behave this way, Rex, any of them? She sank into the bedside chair.
“You truly are sick, aren’t you,” she said.
“Well, yes.”
She reached a hand to feel her forehead, and Mrs. Parrish pulled away, startled.
“This is beyond my understanding,” Mrs. Parrish said. “Really.”
Mary Frances let her hand fall to her lap. She was embarrassed to be so obvious, but not so embarrassed that she could stop herself. And what would it matter, to stop herself now? Suddenly the room felt hot, her own face feverish, but Mary Frances kept her seat until the bellman’s knock at the door with the tea tray, and then she slipped away.
* * *
They drove along the lake, the winding Haute Corniche between Lausanne and Vevey, the Alps still capped with snow. Tim was talking even faster than he drove, his white hair downy in the wind.
“I’ve wanted you to see this place from the moment we found it. Really. I thought of you immediately.”
“Y
ou did?”
“I think this place saved my life. Buying this place with Claire, thinking of you, here, this moment we are about to arrive at—” He began laughing. “I think that was it.”
They had not really talked about the winter before last, how bad he seemed when he left Los Angeles and what had taken place since then, not in any kind of solid terms. What would be the point in tracing back, what he had done, what she had done to get here? The vineyards terraced up from the lakeshore, and in the meadows between she could see small stone houses built into the hillsides, wending paths, sheep and their herder, a boy and a dog. Tim was talking about the cheeses, the brandy and eau de vie, the summers, the meadows filled with flowers, and Mary Frances rolled the window down to feel the breeze on her face and hear the bells from the sheep as they tripped along. And to be alone with Tim, moving. This was as solid a thing as she could ever ask for.
“We’re here,” he said. “This is it.”
A stone house like the others they had passed, but this one in an open meadow, a fountain bubbling in front, spring-fed, ice cold on her fingertips. He motioned her forward, inside. It was dark and cold and smelled of old hay. The house would need more rooms, a kitchen, but the chimney was sound, and the hearth magnificent. Could they cook on the hearth? Could they chill things in the spring?
She stared at him.
“I have this idea,” he said, and he began to laugh again. “What if we all lived here together?”
* * *
And then they boarded the ship home, and it was over. Mrs. Parrish, still under the weather, hardly left her stateroom. The salon, exactly like the salon they’d enjoyed on the trip over, was full of German brewers headed to Milwaukee, the first drink of every evening in toast to the portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging at the end of the bar. They had found a woman, lean and giggling, the silvery drape of her dress like a wing. They were loudly pressing her with glass after glass of champagne.
The Arrangement Page 18