He did not know. In fact, it was a question he could barely understand, and he felt dumb and childlike looking at her, filled with a child’s sense of relief, as though someone had only turned on the lights and everything was better.
“Stop crying,” he said. “We’ll think of something.”
“What?”
“We thought of this.”
“This is horrible.”
“Then the next thing will be better, no? Mary.”
He took the hand that held hers and brushed her hair from her eyes, again and then again, he couldn’t stop his hand now, tracing her cheek and jawline, the fine bow of her clavicle where her pulse hammered, he could see it against her skin, another thing that seemed impossible, and yet here it was, her blood, throbbing. He brought his mouth down, wanting to feel it, his lips opening, he could not stop himself, his hands beneath her nightgown now and pushing up, her blood against his mouth and pushing, Mary Frances.
* * *
“He knows.”
“Are you sure?”
“He knows something.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing, a better thing. Maybe that’s just the next step.”
They were quiet a long time.
“I don’t think so.”
* * *
On the funicular to Mont Pèlerin, they were the only people in the car. The calliope played, and the cables tightened and drew overhead, the winter-dead meadows giving way to alpine shale and pines, sharp and true against the ever-blue sky. They stood at either end of the car, their backs to the rails, Mary Frances looking down at Tim. She seemed, to him, to be flying, only the sky behind her as they went up. Her grip on the rail to her back was tight, her body moving with the groan and shift, the music like something plucked on a saw.
“I love this thing,” he said.
“Let’s buy it. Let’s live here.”
“You say that of everyplace we go, dear.”
“Well, I mean it.” She shrugged prettily, or perhaps it was just the rocking of the car. He loved to watch the way she absorbed motion, the way she landed in the world.
“You are magnificent,” he said. “I mean that too.”
At the top, they passed the Hotel Mirador, its elaborate balconies and patios, and took the trail along the mountain’s ridge at a pace that left them just enough breath. The air was thin and still cold; they walked fast to keep their blood moving, and they did not talk. Tim listened to the solid grind of her boots on the trail, the wick of her pant legs. In her satchel, she carried a thermos of warmed red wine, a bar of chocolate, and a loaf of bread. Her breath heaved white ahead of her, her lips parted. She licked them, and smiled.
* * *
There was more money in the kitty than Al had put in it; he emptied the can onto the table and counted it twice, almost three hundred dollars. Tim had been adding to it rather than taking away. The yellow light buttered everything in the kitchen. He was suddenly ashamed to have trusted one man with so much without thinking, ashamed to have trusted anyone at all.
There, on the table, was Mary Frances’s notebook.
The thing was, it was nothing to open a book, to read it. It left no marks, no broken seals or waste. He had never thought about it so brutally, but really—all this fuss over who was writing, not writing seemed suddenly ridiculous. There was no way Mary Frances would ever know if he read her notebook or not. It was the thinnest line, requiring the slightest effort. How many of these lines had been crossed in his marriage? What was one more now?
He poured himself a drink, pulled out a chair, and sat. He opened the book, and he was still reading when Tim returned to the apartment.
He pushed the notebook away, pushed back from the table, but it was the quick move at the hot stove; he’d been caught. He grinned stupidly. His reflexes were failing him.
“Any good?” Tim asked. His face was neutral, passive.
Al tried to see him for the first time as the man who had stolen his wife, but it was almost impossible to forget what he already knew and loved.
“Drink?” he said.
Tim looked at his wrist; Al didn’t see a watch. “I can’t. I’ve got another meeting with the dealer from Geneva at four.”
“Geneva.” Al rolled the short glass between his palms. “Are you headed to Geneva soon?”
“Hopefully, some paintings will be.”
“But you won’t need to go.”
“No. I’ll stay.”
Suddenly Al was standing, his chair pitching back behind him, and he grabbed Tim by the shoulders in a rough embrace. His body felt enervated, terrified, and he clasped Tim closer, unable to form words that might make sense. He could feel Tim’s breath push against the bones in his chest, breakable. Al was sweating now. Tim’s hands came up to free himself.
“I have to go, Al,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you at supper. Perhaps a night on the town, say. We haven’t done that in a while.”
Al shook his head. He could not fathom the kind of arrangements Tim must be managing within himself to suggest such a thing. What, exactly, had they all been doing?
“The other night—”
“It’s okay, Al.” Tim reached across the table and took the notebook, slipping it back into the cupboard where Mary Frances kept it. “I’m fine, now.”
“Fine?” This was insane. “Fine?”
Tim nodded, rapped the tabletop twice with his knuckles, and left the kitchen empty-handed.
This couldn’t go on any longer. Al took the bottle to his room, dragged the armchair across the floor to wait for Mary Frances.
* * *
She knew what he was going to say as soon as she walked into the bedroom, as soon as she saw Al’s face. She sat on the edge of the bed with her skirt smoothed over her knees and stared at her lap like a scolded child. The conversation ahead lay in blackness. If she took a deep breath, it would be over soon, she’d learn her punishment and take it. They just had to get through it.
“Al—”
“I’m leaving.”
“What?”
“I’m going to Salzburg for the summer. George will be there, and we’ve talked of writing a paper together.”
“All summer?”
He laughed. “Yes, my dear, all summer. You and Tim will have to find some way to make it without me.”
“Well. I’ll come visit for a few weeks. We can—” She met his eyes and the sentence evaporated, the anger and hurt and drink dangerously plain on his face.
“Visit,” he said. “Visiting your husband while you live here. That’s very bohemian of you, MFK Fisher.”
“I only meant—”
“Of course.” He reached blindly for the bottle beneath his chair, knocking it over. There was no glass. He must have been drinking for hours. He pushed himself upright and came to stand too close in front of her, all gray flannel and loom.
“You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re doing,” he said.
She didn’t answer, but lifted her eyes finally to his and was surprised to feel the measure of sadness there. She had been so insulated for so long, had felt so little; this sharp pain made her flinch.
“Do you?” he said again.
“No.”
He made a dismissive sound, bending to where his sport coat had slipped from the back of the chair. He dove his arm into the sleeve once, twice without shooting it; the sleeve was inside out. He wadded the lapel in his fist and seemed, almost, to tremble.
“Here, let me,” she said.
“Let you what? What now?”
But she took the jacket anyway and reached into the sleeve, drawing it right. She held it for him while he slipped into the shoulders. He focused on a spot on the wall above her head to hold his balance.
“I’m going to get a job teaching, back in the States,” he said. “I
don’t care if it bores me to tears. I haven’t written in months, years, and The Ghost is dead now. A great poem, squandered on . . . this.”
He was winding up now. The next thing he said would be truly devastating, and she tried to scan the possibilities, to prepare herself: Would he disparage her writing, her parents, her fidelity, her pride? Would he call out children they’d never had? Would he say he’d seen this coming? The room was close and airless. If she could just stand still enough, she could think of what came next.
Instead: “You’re not even going to try to convince me to stay, are you.”
She looked at him evenly and said nothing.
“Ah, Mary Frances. I would have thought you’d learned some potent new persuasions. To get where you are now.”
He took his hat from the rack and slowly, carefully, pushed it forward on his head. The door did not slam behind him, and at the window she watched him cross the street below, ducking into the tavern on the corner.
She opened the armoire and considered her suitcase, her neat stack of shoes and the clothes hanging there. Al had taken the keys to the car in his pocket, but she had money tucked away. She could take blankets, she could wash in the fountain at Le Paquis. She could stay with Jules across the road; she could pay him. She could pay anyone. She did not have to wait for Al to come back and go at her again.
She thought of her parents, somewhere in the midst of the Atlantic, on their way to visit her; she could not go home now.
She folded her face into her hands, and he was there.
“Are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “Not really.”
“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”
“Al?” And then: “Not physically.” She was crying.
“I saw him in the kitchen with your notebooks. I knew, then . . .”
There seemed no way to complete that thought. Something bad, messy, ultimately survivable, but they would none of them be without their scars. He knew that, and yet he would do anything to take what she felt now onto his shoulders. How was it Al did not feel the same? If he loved her, if he was honest, they had all done this together. What was there to gain in casting blame?
He sat beside her on the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, and wanted to kill someone for hurting her.
“Can I take you out for dinner?” he said.
She laughed and swiped at her running nose with the back of her hand. “I doubt that would be a good idea.”
“You don’t have to stay here, Mary Frances.”
She shook her head, even as she’d been packing a suitcase a few moments before. “He’s leaving,” she said.
“I heard.”
“I’m going to ask him to stay through my parents’ visit.”
Tim lay back on the bed and put the palms of his hands to his eyes. “Of course.”
“It would be so difficult on Rex and Edith, you and I without Al. There would be so many questions, so much lying.”
“As opposed to this measure of lying.”
“Tim.”
“Look. It doesn’t matter to me anymore who knows what and how they feel about it.” He wanted to throw his arms around her in this moment, but the moment itself would not allow it. Maybe she would not allow it. “I’ve done the best I can.”
“You’ve done the best you can.”
Her voice was flat and cold, and Tim found himself prickling with it. “So why is he leaving?”
“Really?” She stared at him, her eyes filling with something tender and heartbroken. “Because I’m his wife.”
The word seemed like a dropped stone they were waiting to strike bottom.
She said, “I remember when you had one of those.”
* * *
In the middle of the night, Mary Frances cut on the kitchen light and made a pot of coffee. She had begun to think it possible that Al might have hurt himself, accidentally or otherwise, and the idea set off a string of vague panics: scandal, of one sort or another, was coming. Tim joined her at the table. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes, his shirttails long and rumpled, the back of his hair on end. She poured him a cup of coffee, and they sat without anything to say.
He got up and returned with a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, copying a long address from his notebook, a formal letter. Mary Frances listened to the scrape of his pen across the page. She thought she could put her chin down in her hands and close her eyes, that then she might be able to sleep here, upright, with Tim nearby, even with all she was waiting for to happen. How was that possible?
“I could almost fall asleep,” she said, “knowing you are here.”
He slid the envelope across the table, a letter to a friend of his in Paris who was in charge of the exposition for the world’s fair.
“Is it open yet?”
“He’s a good friend. And there’s a painting they’re going to show, a huge Picasso. They’ve exiled him over it. Take Rex and Edith to see it.”
“What about you?”
“You can tell me about it. I’ll see it that way.” He looked at her then, just as helpless as she was to chart their course forward. He pressed the envelope into her hand. “Just please,” he said. “Go.”
* * *
Al stood in the street and pissed like a Frenchman, remembering only at the last moment that this was not France. For some reason, that was funny. It was dark, but he had no idea what time it was, what day it was about to be. They’d closed the tavern on him, he’d been playing the piano for hours, but there was no way in hell he was going home. He turned to the girl who’d taken him on.
“And where do you live, my sweet?”
“Ah, captain. I can make anyplace feel like home.”
Or that’s what he thought she said. There was a lag in his language skills this evening, possibly due to the vast amounts of gin he seemed to have bathed in, and she seemed to be slurring as well.
He drew some wadded bills from his pocket. “We might,” he said, “get a room.”
She took the bills in her fist and smiled at him, shaking her head. It was too late to wake anyone in town.
He noticed she was missing an incisor, and her mouth looked swollen. He drew his thumb across her upper lip and it came away bloodied. “What happened, dear? What happened here?”
She laughed. “It’s all right now.”
He stroked her lip, the red paint there. He had a faint recollection, not much more than a flash—earlier today, yesterday? He looked at the back of his hand, the livid marks on his knuckles. She’d told him it was time to go home to his wife.
He took the woman’s face in his hands now; he could not even remember her name. She was dark-skinned and sturdy, her face plump. He could see other scars there now, a cut beneath her eye that had healed badly, a rash. He was so sorry. It must have been an accident. He must have been confused. He was rattling now, maybe crying. He hardly remembered, he hardly remembered anything.
“Désolé, désolé,” she said. “Vous êtes désolé.”
So beautiful, desolate. “Just take me home with you,” he said. “I am so sorry. Just take me home.”
* * *
When Al came back to the apartment, it was already Thursday morning. He stank of cheap alcohol and cheaper perfume, his eyes shot, his shirtfront bloodied. Tim and Mary Frances still waited at the kitchen table with their empty coffee cups and their worry, he could see it as soon as he walked in the door, and he felt a sharp stab of guilt on top of everything else.
He pulled out a chair and sat between them. “I fear I might have tarried at the bar.”
Mary Frances stood and ran more water in the pot packed with fresh grounds.
Al wheeled himself around to follow her. “I fear I might have made a scene, Mary Frances. I might have had too much to drink and been an ass.”
She did no
t turn from the stove, and Al shifted his attentions to Tim.
“Did you hear what happened in New Jersey? A zeppelin burst into flames as it was trying to moor, to moor in the air, of all things, and filled with air. Just impossible. Anyone could tell it was impossible. Thirty-two seconds, and all was lost.”
“We were listening on the radio,” Tim said.
“How old are you, Tim?”
“I’m forty-two.”
“And you have no children,” Al said. “I’m thirty-two and I have no children. Time just flies, doesn’t it? You turn around, and you’re . . . I don’t know. Tetherless, and far from home.”
“You should lie down, Al,” Tim said. “Let me help you to your room.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“But I’m offering nonetheless.”
Later that night, in the shaft of light from the open door to the living room, Al snored and Mary Frances packed her bags.
* * *
In the morning, he took her to the train station in the car. They could have walked, but it was not clear he would have made it; his eyes were black in his head, his hands shook. She had not ridden in the car in weeks. The floorboards were caked with mud and crumpled lunch wrappings, a wool blanket across the backseat and what appeared to be a change of clothes. Al had been using the car for more than driving.
“When will you be back?” he said.
“My parents arrive next Tuesday. I don’t know. A week?”
“What will you say?”
Mary Frances sighed. “They’ll stay at the Trois Couronnes. We’ll show them the house, Chillon, frogs’ legs. I hope you will stay to see them.”
Al pulled the car to the station curb and kept his hands at the wheel, clutching. The people of Vevey bustled past, pushing their carriages, their market carts, everyone carrying something, the efficient flood of Swiss. The car was unbearably hot. She put her hand to the door latch.
“I’m sorry.” Al heaved himself out and came around for her door, bending to kiss her cheek, an unnecessary gesture. Of course he would stay until the Kennedys returned to the States. Really, there was no rush.
“Thank you,” she said. And she was gone.
The Arrangement Page 22