The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  “Would you like a bath?” she says. “The bathroom is the most wonderful room I have.”

  He seems startled at her question, but she doesn’t let that stop her.

  “We have all the time in the world,” she says.

  “I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  He plucks his shirt away from his chest. She can see him weigh what he thinks he should do against what he wants; she has watched so many faces. She’s always been easy to flatter, quick to flirt. It feels like a limb that needs stretching now.

  She flips the switch, and the red bathroom comes to light, the drawing by Picasso, the small Miró. The portrait Tim painted of her turning away, the long white swath of her back, a thin strap across her shoulder. She pulls two clean towels from the cabinet and sets them on the chair next to the tub.

  “Is there anything else you need?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so.” He raises his glass and touches the rim of hers.

  “Oh. What are we toasting?”

  He takes off his hat finally, his thick white forelock long enough to graze his eyebrows. Her breath catches, and she tries to hide it.

  “Just right now,” he says. “Just, I don’t know. A toast.”

  * * *

  In January the stonemasons broke ground on one of the three cellars planned for Le Paquis. They took the roof and the back wall from the kitchen, the body of the house open to the cold, as it hadn’t been for a hundred years. Mary Frances and Tim and Al drank their good champagne and watched the men in their matching black hats and woolen pants, their breath smoky in the winter air.

  “How do they know what to do?” Mary Frances said. “To just rip into a building like that and expect it to stay standing.”

  “For the parts you want to stay standing,” Tim said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Practice,” Al said. “And of course, one of them is in charge.”

  Mary Frances studied the tangle of men, all dressed alike, moving easily together. “I can’t tell them apart.”

  “Well, it’s like war, I guess,” Al said. “If you knew whom to blame, it’d be too easy to shoot him.”

  Mary Frances lifted her face to his. “A lot of things have come to seem like war to you.”

  “Nature of the age, I suppose.”

  He drained his glass and rested it on the rock wall, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Al could still look quite casual when he wanted to, quite at ease when she knew he was not. There was a kind of dare in his posture, and she took it. She threaded her arm through his and pulled him down the wall to the work site, telling him to show her what he knew, tell her how he knew it.

  Tim watched them: the beautiful dark knot of her hair, her cheeks pink against the cold, and lanky professorial Al, a professor anyplace you put him, in farm clothes, in a bathrobe, eminently wise and awkward at once. He felt love for Al, and pity, and brotherliness. He had never had a brother; he assumed this was the same kind of love and envy, pride and fear.

  * * *

  Tim had a sense for growing things, and he’d read a great deal about the French way of gardening, about cover crops and planting pairs, making your own fertilizer from kitchen scraps and saving seeds from one harvest to the next. He made sketches, watched the weather, watched the things they threw away.

  Mary Frances, cracking eggs over the sink.

  “Wait,” he said.

  He bent and picked the eggshell from the trash, holding it by its jagged white lip under the tap. She lifted her eyes to his face; he was watching her, not what he was doing. He was always watching her. He shook the water from the shell, rinsed another, reaching across her to stack them neatly on the windowsill.

  “For the garden,” he said.

  She beat the eggs into a glass of port and downed it at the sink, the winter day beyond.

  “The middle sags.” She turned from the window. She could pick up their conversation, from days or minutes ago with equal ease. “I need to write another piece for it, and all I can think about is now. I was thinking about our dinner in Dijon.”

  She went to the table and opened her notebook. She pushed the page before him, just an opening, a few lines of dialogue, a sketch of little Charles as he had been, and what he had become, but it felt as if she were peeling open her skull for him to look inside. Her wispy thoughts—undigested, undisguised.

  Tim’s eyes moved fast across the page.

  “I toasted our pasts,” he said. “You laughed.”

  “I’m not afraid of time,” she said.

  “Well, that’s fine, dear. That’s all we’ve got.”

  She sat at the typewriter and made the moment again, the two of them people not quite themselves having dinner in Aux Trois Faisons, concerned mostly with the passing of time. The layers of the truth in it stacked upon themselves.

  “Oh, Tim,” she said.

  Al came from the bedroom, his boots in his hand. He had heard them talking and turned toward the kitchen to say something about soup or lunch or fireplace construction, and in the yellow light of the kitchen bulb, still on in spite of the brightness of the day, he saw Tim bent over Mary Frances, leaned into her shoulder; she put a finger to the page and said something. Tim looked into her face, and Al felt a catch in his own chest. They both went back to the typewriter.

  Al couldn’t remember the last time Mary Frances showed him what she was doing; certainly it had been before her book was sold, the book that he had yet to read, that would be published in the summer. Maybe he would never read it. He couldn’t remember the last time she had looked at him as she was looking at Tim now.

  It was a small space to share. That was the bulk of the problem, the bath on the hall, the tiny stove and three cups. The madame kept the radiator high, which never would have happened in Dijon, and the air was always close and dry. Too, at the table, Tim’s charcoals sometimes, his sketches sometimes, sometimes of Mary Frances or himself, the both of them working. Al felt idle by comparison, and uncomfortable thinking much further than that. He put on his boots; he wondered if they’d hear the door close behind him.

  Mary Frances had gotten pages from her publisher to proof, a great stack of them, and a red pencil, the markings in the margins some kind of shorthand not easily decipherable at a passing glimpse. And she talked in a way she’d never talked before, a new bold language vaguely directed at whichever man seemed to be standing nearby, and Al had nothing to say. He’d never published a book. That belonged to her and Tim.

  But out at Le Paquis, the walls were still going up. This place might still become whatever he wanted it to be. The sun had cracked the treeline now, and he looked down the pasture, the run of rock wall to the lake below. The men would arrive soon and begin, slowly, to ruin it all.

  He unlocked the trunk of the car and folded his overcoat neatly inside. He would stand in the sun; he would work to stay warm. The blade of the ax was still sharp against his thumb, and he set off down the hillside to the banks of the brook in search of the hardwood they would want next winter, when all of this was done.

  He worked for hours. He felt efficient and clean. He sweated, he tore through winter-stripped brush and drank from the cold brook. Tim had just been saying how they needed to plan ahead, prepare for winter, not this waning winter but the next. It seemed a long way off today. How much wood could Al chop?

  At the base of the property, he caught a glimpse of a pink flap of cloth from the vigneron’s house across the road, Jules’s lovely daughter hanging out the wash.

  Perhaps it was time to begin his education in wine.

  He knocked at the heavy door of the convent, knowing he should have sent Otto, that he should have made sure he was expected, but Jules had offered. They were to be neighbors, and Al would have to make his own arrangements in the months to come. Otto was not his
man, after all.

  He turned his back to the door, the vineyards bare around him.

  “Monsieur.” It was Anna, her fine blond hair caught back against her head with a ribbon, a pail of soapy water she set behind the doorframe, shyly.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Al said. “I was looking for your father.”

  “He is in the Fribourg, Monsieur. He will not be back until late in the day.”

  “Of course.”

  “He is checking on the vineyards there.”

  “Of course.”

  She had been working too, her hands red and cold looking, the dark underarms of her dress, woolen, he guessed. There was the slight animal scent to her, and a mask of soap. She was so young.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked. “Are you here alone?”

  The girl nodded. She stood there, waiting for whatever he wanted next.

  He stepped away from the door, into the strong sun. He wished he had a card to leave, something to leave with her, a message, but he just kept stepping backward. He thought of the picture he carried of Mary Frances as a girl, of Gigi, and he wanted to warn Anna now, to keep her somehow just as she was, and in an unspeakably dark instant, he realized that was how men came to do horrible things, how horrible mistakes were made.

  * * *

  It was late when he returned to the apartment. Who knows what they had done with themselves all day, but Mary Frances was already in bed, and Tim in the kitchen, making a late supper for himself. He offered and Al accepted, the thick plate draped, three eggs sunny side up, the edges gilded and crisp. There was bread run beneath the broiler, a dish of salt. The men put their elbows on the table and ate.

  “I’m not writing anymore,” Al said.

  Tim looked at him, still chewing. “What?”

  “Go look in my room. There are pages everywhere. I’ve stuck them to the walls, and I stare at them for hours, but I haven’t worked on The Ghost since last winter. Since my father, and the weeks Mary Frances traveled with you. I had another story since then, but The Ghost, I fear, is dead.”

  Tim wiped his chin with the back of his hand, glanced through the parlor to the bedroom door where Mary Frances slept. She might stay in bed through the next morning, pulling what she needed to her, her pens and paper, her notebooks and tomes.

  “Al—” he said.

  “And I’m trying to figure it out. I go to the house. I work all day there. I chopped wood today and stacked it higher than the roof beams. It felt good to do it.”

  “Give yourself time, Al.”

  “There’s been only time. I thought coming here would change things. I mean, Dijon was the last best place for me in this regard, and here we are, in the middle of . . . it’s the same kind of place, Tim. It feels the same, but I’ve lost something.”

  His voice was quiet. His eggs ran on his plate. He prodded them with his fork, not raising his eyes to meet Tim’s.

  “And I haven’t told her. I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t told her that.”

  “Mary Frances is very understanding. Resourceful. She could help you. I could help you, too.”

  “Because,” Al said, “if I’m not working, what am I doing here?”

  Tim leaned back and lit a cigarette. And as though he had been released, Al picked up his fork and ate.

  * * *

  But with that, whatever means Tim had used to rise above these days of tension evaporated. He wasn’t sure what he’d thought might happen, but they’d all entered this arrangement far too passively, with basic understandings they did not hold in common, and though he’d kept away from Mary Frances, he didn’t want her any less for it. And she had withdrawn into whatever private world she tended in her head, and Al was suffering. He had been suffering long before he came to Le Paquis, Tim knew that, but still. He was hurting his friend and could bring himself to do nothing but continue to carefully hurt him further.

  He began to have horrible dreams, to stay awake to avoid them. He smoked more, smoked all the time, and Mary Frances watched him with worry in her face, but she didn’t ask any questions. First he tried leaving the apartment more often, giving the two of them space and time to be together—he didn’t care what they did, he wanted them to be happy—but he would return to find Mary Frances napping in her room and Al gone, gone all day to watch the work at Le Paquis. She would flutter awake to see him, her eyes round with something desperate, and then she’d go down again, sometimes for hours, for the rest of the night.

  He started making plans for the three of them together. A trip to the casino at Chillon, where Byron had written; Al loved Byron. A blustery night walking the old quarter for fondue, dinner, drinks, tickets to a play. He kept pushing, thinking they could push past this to something else, but each outing was less successful than the last, and finally he broke.

  They were sitting in the mezzanine of the Théâtre de Vevey, the lights just coming up for intermission, and Tim went to stand and found he couldn’t, went to speak and couldn’t, only a last spasm, then blackness.

  “Tim.”

  Al turned, and Mary Frances was crouched over him as he sprawled, collapsed, his limbs flung out and stiff.

  “Is he all right? Is he breathing?”

  “I don’t know, yes.” She gathered his head into her lap, her voice low and even. “Tim,” she said again, “Tim.”

  Al reached a hand to his cool cheek.

  Panic filled him, Mary Frances’s calm voice, repeating and repeating. He wanted to shake Tim awake, alive, and then that’s what it became in his head, Tim dying in the red aisle of the Théâtre de Vevey after a half-baked performance of Cocteau, a hundred people milling past them and not stopping, not even looking long at the man collapsed and Mary Frances. This couldn’t be how it ended for the three of them. What would he do with her now?

  And in that moment, Al realized how that would never be his problem. He was watching Tim and Mary Frances drift out of reach, sink beneath the surface, a slow but inexorable slipping away. They grew smaller there in the aisle, Mary Frances clinging, her voice a plea; she wanted Tim back, yes, but too, she would follow him anywhere, anywhere he went.

  And then Tim rolled away from her, pushing himself back and away, very pale now and beads of sweat bursting across his forehead, his mouth slack, his whole body. Al stepped to put his hands beneath his arm. He folded over himself in the theater seat, clutching now at Al’s hand, clammy with whatever had overcome him.

  The panic still roared in Al’s ears, uncontained.

  * * *

  Back at the apartment, Mary Frances bustled at the stove, heating broth, toasting yesterday’s end of bread, her silk dress creased and rumpled, her hair loosed from its pins. Al poured everyone a brandy, shot his back, and poured another.

  “I feel so embarrassed about all this,” Tim said. He propped his hand against the side of his head as if to hold himself up, studying nothing on the far edge of the table.

  “I’m sure you’re fine,” Al said. “A bit of bad potato.”

  “We’re past the season for that.” But he smiled. He was grateful and confused, very much alive.

  Al left the kitchen for the fire, and he could hear Mary Frances still bustling with the pots and pans, the low sound of their talk together, but he didn’t need to weigh and measure it anymore. He understood now that whatever they were saying was so much more private than he might have imagined.

  He threw his empty glass into the corner, the way you’d toss a coat or a newspaper. It splintered into a hundred shards.

  “Would you look at that,” he said. “It slipped.”

  He got no answer back, and he doubted they had even heard him. He left the pieces where they fell and went to bed.

  In the kitchen, Mary Frances turned from the sink. She was crying.

  “Oh, darling,” Tim whispered.

&nbs
p; She shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to go to sleep now.”

  “Please.” But he couldn’t finish that thought. What more could he ask of her than he already had?

  But she could not sleep. The sheets were musky and suddenly too long unwashed; the radiator heat so dry it seemed difficult to breathe. Again and again she thought of Tim lying on that carpet at the theater, all the blood drained from his face and the white of his hair, the whiteness of him monstrous now, her mind unable to shake loose of it. Tim, at her feet, and only this tenuous arrangement they’d forged left for her to navigate without him.

  Escape was not peace, she realized, not ever.

  * * *

  Al left the apartment before dawn.

  Tim watched the knob on their bedroom door for long minutes. He needed to go for his walk through town in the cold, to do whatever it was that made him not think about her so constantly, but he lit another cigarette instead, and watched the bedroom door, and remembered the pale skin of her hip beneath his hand their last night aboard the ship back to New York, the last night he’d truly touched her, and he felt something bleakly rocket through him, the last thin restraints breaking free.

  And then it all seemed so easy.

  He crossed the room, knocked. She opened the door for him, still in her white cotton nightgown, the strong winter light from the windows behind her outlining the arcs of her body in the fabric. He didn’t say anything, and didn’t touch her, but crossed the room to the bed and lay down. She lay beside him, but it wasn’t like the times before, where he wanted to eat her alive, where he could not bear his need for her any longer. It was deeper and darker; he loved her, he was certain of it. Why else would he do this thing to be near her?

  When he told her so, she wept.

  He took her hand, and they whispered, staring at the stamped tin ceiling of the apartment. This was their life, their second life, their shadow life, and they were living it inside their heads and on the promise that things would someday be different. That someday needed to be now.

  “How?” she said, and she was still crying, her mouth swollen and red.