The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  Mary Frances held her chin in her hand, drawing a small map in the condensation on the tabletop. Tim watched the Germans with a kind of simmering concern; she could feel what he was feeling, as if they had exchanged skins.

  “Tim,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to help that woman get out of here, for chrissake.”

  “Tim.”

  He looked at her then, and she saw how tired he was, the dark circles beneath his eyes. He couldn’t tell her what they were going to do. He didn’t know how they would do it.

  He stood and extended his hand for hers, tucking it against his heart, and they left the salon, the pink piano, the girl in the silver dress still laughing with panic, her wrist in the grip of a monocled man. In the dining room, the cabin boys were decking the walls with pine boughs, preparing for the woodland feast. It was as if they were living it all in reverse.

  In her room, Tim pulled the red satin coverlet from the bed, and they lay down on the white sheets in their evening clothes. She had begun to cry, and he turned to her so he could see her face, reaching out and lifting her chin.

  “You don’t need to hide from me,” he said. “And you don’t need to stop.”

  She covered her face, and he took her hands in his, pressed them to his own hot cheeks, his neck and ears. She tried to apologize, and he told her to stop. This is what they were doing now.

  “And then we will think of something else.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You will.”

  “I can’t leave Al. He is so very sad. We can’t.”

  “No.”

  “And you can’t come back to California.”

  “So we have no choice, darling. Imagine that. We have no other choice.”

  His own eyes were filling now, and she felt something in her head snap and heave forth blackly. The sound she made seemed to come from somewhere else in the room and he put his mouth down on hers to take it from her and that’s all they suddenly seemed capable of, throwing their bodies over each other like shields. He pushed the top of her dress down her shoulders to get to her skin.

  In the middle of the night, he told her he would write to Al of Vevey, of the orchard and the lake below, the stone fountain and the little house they could make bigger, how they could all go there together and make it something new, for the three of them. Al was her husband, and Al was his friend, and this was a human thing they’d made together, all three of them. She listened to his voice in the darkened room, the spotlight moon shining from the porthole, the ship’s rolling beneath her, his breath on the back of her neck, and she knew she’d do anything he asked of her, anything he could think of.

  “But this,” she said, and she reached over, closing her hand around him, his body already rising to the same thought. She turned and pushed him onto his back, her feet flat beside his hips, her sex settling down. “But this.”

  He reached between them, and his touch shot through her.

  “We can’t have this anymore.”

  Vevey, Switzerland

  Fall 1936

  Al sat in the café overlooking Lac Léman and knew the decision to come here had been the right one. There were no pages in front of him, no whores chattering past, this was not Dijon or Paris, this was a Swiss town, and the Swiss did not go in for whores the way the French did. And there was no cassis. He drank a strong black coffee and felt the autumn afternoon on his face, the sinking, chilly light off the water, and he knew this would be the place where everything changed.

  Upstairs, in the pension, his wife unpacked their trunks, making their home the way she had when they’d first married, and there was comfort in that. They had money; he’d sold the car, whatever furniture Mary Frances had not wanted to store at the Ranch, they had stripped their lives down to the wires—typewriters, wool overcoats, sturdy shoes, a small collection of records and books. Each other, perhaps—it was hard to say.

  He had not written in over a year. He had come to blame California.

  When Mary Frances returned in the spring, it had already been in his mind to move away from there—to leave the Kennedys, the college, his own mother, still lost in the uncharted territory of her widowhood; it made him guilty to read her letters, made him feel as though he should take the train north immediately, but when he got there, he felt like he should shoot himself. And the Ranch was worse, the Kennedy press and need of each other, all of it suffocating. He had been looking for a way to begin again, and then Tim’s letter arrived with this idea that they all return to Vevey. They could make a place to work, and live a life free from the past, and Al knew he was talking about Hollywood and Gigi and the little white bungalow in Laurel Canyon, but also that Tim saw his predicament. Tim had always understood him.

  Now he was anxious for Tim to arrive—they had expected him to meet their train at the station, and they had waited with their trunks on the platform, Mary Frances blanching with nerves or travel. She had been so quiet since they left California. Al knew part of her was reluctant to make this leap, and as he watched her knot and unknot the handkerchief in her lap at the station, he realized it hadn’t mattered to him. She never talked about her book, and he would have given his eyeteeth for such a contract. She had been reluctant to have children, and he felt as if they’d lost their chance now. They were doing this instead. Sometimes when he looked at Mary Frances, she seemed like a stranger to him; he watched her bring a cigarette to her red mouth and thought how this was not the girl he’d married.

  Tim had sent the caretaker Otto to meet them, a barrel of a man, barely topping Al’s shoulder with the crown of his hat, which he immediately wadded in his big square hands. Mary Frances kissed both his cheeks. He appeared to be weeping, perhaps with joy at seeing her, perhaps with allergies. The accent here was frighteningly thick; it seemed as if he said Tim would be in on the six-fifteen, that they should all have dinner together and begin their grand plans.

  Mary Frances had laughed and closed her eyes. “Grand plans,” she said.

  Al didn’t understand. “What other kind should we make?”

  And so what had been quiet between them turned cold, and Mary Frances did not want to leave the rooms at the pension for a café. She needed a nap, she said, but she seemed skittish. She needed, he suspected, to be away from him.

  Al sighed, sipped the last gritty dregs from his cup. It was understandable, of course. They had been married seven years this month, spent the last several weeks crammed against each other in various forward-moving, earth-chewing hunks of metal, and he could not remember their last deliberate contact, their last touch or whispered conversation. It had been weeks of shucking their old lives for this new one, and the fit was still awkward.

  Al paid the check and shoved his hands in his pockets. He took the walk along the lake, the Alps hoving up, closing in, already and perhaps always white with snow—he had never been here. He rolled the thought in his head; he had never been here before.

  * * *

  When Tim stepped onto the platform, her pulse thrummed as if she were lined with brass. She called his name, and she felt his eyes catch hers, everything inside her surging forward. Then Al called him, and she turned to see everything she felt in Al’s face too, the nerves and joy, the thrill to see the man they’d come to see. Al did want to be here. Maybe this would not be so confusing after all.

  “Old man,” Tim said.

  He and Al made a long handshake, and then he took her by the elbows, their cheeks brushing, and she laughed something tittery, and they all stumbled their words over each other like teenagers.

  “A momentous occasion,” Al said.

  “I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you how glad I am.”

  “You look well, Tim. Mary Frances had said, but I’m relieved to see it for myself.”

  “Mary Frances is a lifesaver.”

 
She couldn’t look at Tim for more than a second. “Don’t be silly.”

  And then everything seemed to run suddenly too long, their smiles clinging to their faces, Mary Frances looking at her shoes. It was all so surreal; she felt like a costumed actor waiting in the wings. If they did not move forward, she was going to lose her nerve.

  “Well,” Tim said. “Let me direct the porter with the bags, and the thing we need, of course—”

  They went to Doellenbach’s and ordered plate after plate of frogs’ legs crusted with garlic and mustard, bottle after bottle of vin du Vevey, the thin dry wine Tim said they would soon make from their own grapes. Al put his elbows on the table, and Tim took a pen from inside his jacket and drew a map for Al on the back of a menu card, and Mary Frances kept laughing for no reason and then going quiet, pouring another glass of wine.

  She could not look directly at Tim. She studied Al’s face instead, unburdened in a way she remembered from before they were married, when he used to seek her out in the library to rattle on about Stevenson or Yeats. She reached for his hand. She wanted Al to be happy again; it had been so long. Maybe Tim could get him talking and planning and writing as he had done when they first met, and she would just be the weather between them: with both, in her way, but with herself most of all. She tried to relax into that thought: with herself, most of all.

  They walked back to the pension three abreast, unsteady in the early chill. Al felt like singing, but they couldn’t settle on a song. Tim felt like another drink, but it was late, the town already closed. Back at the pension, he bartered a bottle of marc from the madame’s oldest, son and they went up to the Fishers’ rooms for a nightcap.

  “Nightcap, my foot.” Al stretched out on the bed in his suit coat. “I couldn’t find a place to put a cap if I grew an extra head for it.”

  “Al?” Mary Frances perched on the edge of the nightstand and poked him.

  “I’m fine. Timmy, tell her I’m fine.”

  Tim handed Mary Frances a drink. “He’s fine. A quick toast, and then I’m off.”

  “A toast.”

  “Al?”

  “My heart is as full as my glass. My heart is as full as . . .”

  “Your heart. Sit up, Al. For goodness sake.” Al made a sound like a groan, his eyes already closed.

  “Ah, dear,” Tim said, and then his hand slipped to the nape of her neck and he pulled her to him, holding her tightly. He smelled of the cold and the brandy, and underneath that, he smelled like always, and she pitched into him as he pulled away, unable to keep her balance.

  “Good night, old man,” he called to Al, now almost out the door, and Mary Frances swallowed the rest of the marc in her glass, setting it down again on the nightstand with a joggle.

  If this was the way it was going to be, she didn’t think she’d last the week.

  * * *

  There was nothing like an empty city at night, and nothing Tim wanted so much—a black lakeshore, a blank canvas, this. It felt as if he’d left Mary Frances and turned off all the lights on the world. He still felt the soft nape of her neck beneath his fingers, bringing his hand to his face, breathing in. Then suddenly there was the morning she’d come to his cabin on the Hansa, the scent of her hair, the hollows and folds of her, her salt. He drank from the bottle of marc and watched the stars and ached.

  He had not fucked another woman in six months, had not been with anyone but Mary Frances since that morning, and now all that was over for them, which meant, all that was over. Forever? How could he never have sex again?

  He laughed. There were a thousand ways to think about it: they would live like family, like monks, like roommates, like freaks. He loved them both, and this was the only way to do it. He shuffled on the cobblestones; he was drunk. He doubted he could stay drunk forever, but in his slurriness he could see a dumb kind of chance for this to all work out. The three of them would make art, maybe great art. There was a theory about it from the Far East, he was certain, about saving your energy for creation. Maybe Claire had mentioned it. She spent a lot of time not having sex. Claire would know.

  He put the lake to his back and cut into the city, the narrow streets and slate-roofed houses in their tight, twisting rows.

  In the war, he’d admired the men from the east, the Sikhs and Hindus, a Gurkha soldier in the Bearer Corps who’d learned his English from an idiot who’d wanted to climb the highest mountain in the world. The Gurkha lost two fingers pulling an unexploded shell out of a man’s chest. He had been a palm healer, or so everyone said, until the incident with the unexploded shell.

  The streets Tim wandered were pitch black, not a streetlamp or a candle in the windows. He could still feel the vast flatness of the lake behind him, its unmeasured depth, the on and on of it. The dark streets were safer, but he had no idea where to go.

  The Gurkha had died under strange circumstances. Or rather, the Gurkha had gone on to distinguish himself as wildly fearless and skilled with the eight fingers he had left, and when he died, the whole lot of them kind of fell apart strangely. It was 1918, the third or fourth or fifth Somme. They were moving daily. Tim was supposed to be shipped back home (he had not been able to eat in almost two weeks, something rotted inside him, pulling his bones through his skin), but the orders didn’t come or couldn’t find him, and he’d left the field hospital where he had collapsed and went back to ferrying the bodies from the front lines. No one seemed to notice, until the Gurkha.

  Tim needed to go home, go to bed, stop this thinking. But every house suddenly looked like the one beside it, and his way back to the pension seemed to have closed over itself with stone. He drank again from the marc, and kept walking.

  The Sikh instructed them on how to make a funeral pyre. According to the custom of his faith, the Gurkha’s body had to be burned next to a river, and owning no nearby river, Tim and five other men dug a trench, hauled buckets from a spring-fed pond behind a nearby farmhouse. On the Sikh’s count, they poured the water down the trench so he could bathe what was left of the Gurkha’s body in what stood in for the Ganges, and the Indian soldier next to Tim began to howl.

  The others lunged at him, covering his mouth with their dirty hands, but the howls drew the attention of the nearest officers. But before they could sort the problem from the scuffle, Tim had lit the fire.

  It was stupid, of course, to send a flare like that so close to the enemy line. But it was the end of the war, and even the Gurkha had not been able to heal himself, and this was the best that could be done given the circumstances. It was a magnificent failure, and in that, almost more magnificent. Almost right.

  The officers returned to their papers; Tim’s orders for home would materialize within days. The Sikh passed a cup beside the pyre (the smell, terrifyingly, made Tim hungry), and in the bottom of the cup, there was a gold coin. Drinking the water released them from the Gurkha’s soul, and he from theirs.

  He drained the last of the marc and dropped the bottle in the street.

  Where was he going? He turned the corner to see a wash of light ahead, and after the next corner, a building still at work at this hour, looming above the houses around it, a man spraddle-legged on the steps in the cold, his white apron spattered with blood. An abattoir? A hospital. The smoke from the man’s cigarette mimicked the smoke rising from the chimney behind him.

  He spoke in French, and Tim shook his head. He did not want a cigarette, or have one, or need to understand whatever the man was asking him. He walked up the steps beside the man and pushed inside the hospital doors. He was not sick, but he needed to lie down, and it really didn’t make any difference to him what it looked like he was doing anymore.

  He laughed. It didn’t make any difference at all.

  * * *

  The next morning Tim and Otto appeared back at the pension with a hired car, and the four of them drove up to Le Paquis.

  It had never s
eemed more beautiful to her, the golden rush on the ash trees, the meadow rolling endlessly gold alongside the minty brook, speckled here and there with a last snapdragon, the fresh hope she felt now watching Tim stretch his hand toward the clouds, drawing some thought on the air for Al.

  She collected a skirtful of small green pears, knobby and hard, dumping them into the trunk of the car, where they rolled like stones. She would make preserves for winter: a knife in her hands, a pot on the stove, something to occupy her senses for long enough to settle here, this meadow that would be their home, these men, gesticulating, energized, who would be with her always.

  She followed them into the house, the thick walls that held the cold, the two rooms that would become the many. The strong bones of a granite staircase led to an imagined second story; a terrace off the back would overlook the gardens, the vineyards, the lake beyond. She ducked into the bathroom, still a privy, with one commode for grown people and a small, squat one for children.

  She studied the miniature toilet; in a house that seemed to offer such plain charms, near-monastic simplicity, to make such a concession seemed to hint at priorities she had not imagined. She felt a sharp bright pang of something regretful and ashamed, Tim and Al talking just outside the door, their voices echoing and blending. There would be no children here, no chance. Not with either of them, not anymore.

  * * *

  Al stood in the meadow and thought of his father, dead almost a year. He could hear the questions now: But what will you do, Alfred? How will you support yourself and your family? How might you ever find work? His father, who believed in callings, who had read his poems once and spoken of the poetry in King James, a capable man, an intelligent man, now even more so to Al since his thoughts had become so fixed and weighted by his death. His father would have thought he was as crazy as Herbert in China, doing God knows what with whom.