The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  Out the window on the street below, Tim sat at one of the café tables on the sidewalk that had appeared with the spring weather. His white hair blew forward across his face, an open sketchbook, a short glass of wine at his elbow. Al felt a nauseous flipping in his gut: this had all happened, and would keep happening. The window was open. He leaned out.

  “Al?” Mary Frances said.

  “We’re ready to go, then?” Al said. He sloshed some of his martini, streaking his shirtfront as he took it down. He pointed to the window. “Tim’s waiting.”

  * * *

  Tim raised his hand for the check. Mary Frances would be gathering herself for dinner now, coming down the stairs. He had marked this day in his head when she left for Paris, and he’d thought about it constantly since she’d been gone. He’d known when her train made the station, the route she would take home; he had known she was in the apartment when he took his seat at the café. It was all a tremendous scale of increments and numbers: how close, how soon. With enough patience, he decided, anything was possible.

  His head felt too large on his shoulders. The night at the theater had begun to dog him, the way the ground had dropped away. He could still feel it, maybe because of her, how she filled his thoughts. She was coming down the stairs. He closed his eyes, opened them. Here she comes.

  She stepped onto the sidewalk across the street, and it was as though someone had dialed in a radio, the frequency tight and every register clear. She touched her throat with the flat of her thumb, and he could feel the pulse there, the thin skin, her nail.

  She looked for him. He stood to meet her gaze.

  Mary Frances.

  He crossed the street and greeted her parents, Al. He took her hand too, pressed her fingers to his cheek; she wore a new perfume. He had not heard a word from her since she’d left for Paris, and it didn’t matter what they said now. He wanted to crush her in his arms.

  He was not sure how they made it to the restaurant.

  Her parents filled the silence; they could not stop asking questions about the future. They asked what Al was working on, and wouldn’t her book be published soon? Edith even started to tell stories of Sean and how wonderful he’d been as a baby, the sort of baby you might have taken anywhere, perhaps overseas. Mary Frances and Al sat blanched and paralyzed at opposite ends of the table. Even what they were going to do tomorrow proved a question to fumble between them.

  The waiter stepped away, and Mary Frances turned as if to follow him, straining toward something unreachable.

  Tim felt responsible. This had all been his idea, the three of them together at Le Paquis. As much as it had once seemed the way into this life, it would have to be the way out now.

  “Tomorrow we should see the house,” he said. “We could pack up the car and take a picnic.”

  “Oh, lovely,” said Edith.

  He thought of that early spring a year ago, taking Mary Frances to see Le Paquis for the first time, and now he told the Kennedys about it, none of it a lie but rather a last, late abstraction. Everything was lush and green, the meadow blooming, the house rising up from the foundations. The peas were almost ready in the garden, and there was nothing as good as fresh spring peas. They could make a picnic, push the carpenter’s tables together, and spread a cloth beneath the sun, the stars. They could cool their wine in the spring-fed fountain. They could see Mary Frances’s new home.

  “That sounds fine,” Rex said. He turned to Al. “So different from last time around.”

  “Sir?”

  “I remember when you and Mary Frances were in Dijon, it seemed like you were off somewhere new every weekend. This apartment, then another. I must have wired once a week for a while.”

  “Daddy,” Mary Frances said.

  “You were so young.” Rex reached to touch the back of her hand, almost shyly.

  Al cleared his throat. “It’s different this time, sir. Tim has provided us with everything, the house, the garden.” He met Tim’s gaze evenly across the table. “I’m afraid he’s gotten very little in return.”

  Tim inclined his head and smiled, opening his fist against his thigh.

  “The experience, though,” Rex said. “Invaluable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The waiter delivered their nut-brown roast chickens, more cold bottles of Dezaley. Across the low-lit table, Mary Frances excused herself. Minutes later, Tim realized he’d left his cigarettes back at the café. He would be right back.

  He found her leaning against the wall outside the restaurant, rolling her head back and forth against the brick. He did not say anything, what was left to say, but went to her and put his hand to the nape of her neck, drawing her mouth to his, her cheek, her earlobe, his thumb on the pulse at her throat he had begun to feel hours before.

  She had not yet allowed herself to imagine what this life would be like when they were gone, but she could see it now. It was almost here.

  * * *

  The quail, when she pulls them from the oven, are golden and crisp, and she wishes for some fresh spring peas to go with them, for a long table on a stone terrace and a warm season coming on, her family gathered around. And always Tim.

  She remembers now their afternoon in the trellises, Tim and Al snapping off the new pea pods, each one a bell in the bowls they were filling for Edith, who slit them open with a sharp thumbnail, Rex draped against a chair, looking out over the lake, still and silver in the lengthening light. Then everyone gathered at the table with steamy platefuls, the color of brand-new anything, perfectly green and bathed in butter and salt, bursting with themselves—the first spring peas. All around, only the sound of knife and spoon and china, the bent heads of the people she had loved most in the world, the place she had loved most, the time. For better or worse, the last time they were all together.

  She feels dizzy and rocks back in her joints to rest her head on her forearms. She has spent too long on her feet. Perhaps she is tired. Perhaps what she needs is to lie down.

  A fire stammers warmly in the grate, and the marmalade cat is curled in front of it: down the hall, her own personal librarian taking his bath. She thinks she can hear him humming some old show tune, but her hearing has become a creative sense these days, filling the gaps as they occur. Maybe that’s what time is doing to her now, filling in.

  She finds herself drawn down the hallway toward the line of light at the bottom of the bathroom door, the song becoming the sluice of water from his limbs as she imagines them, her imagination still sharp. She decides he must be strong to have loaded that van, dexterous to have plucked those quail. A flush seeps through her: this too, still strong enough to follow.

  Her fingertips trail the shelves of books that line the hall, their slick jackets and spines. This is her last house; she knows every inch of it by heart. She slips her shoes from her feet, letting them fall, one by one, to the floor. At last she reaches for the knob. And turns.

  Idyll

  1937

  They were deeply in love. There were other things in their lives that were not so effortless, but those things were far away from Le Paquis and their garden and their books; those things were in other countries, across oceans. News arrived by mail and could be opened at their leisure, on the radio they could turn on or off. There were whole weeks they did not drive to town, they did not see another soul. What pressed them were their appetites and what they grew themselves.

  The house was finished as they had planned, space that opened one room into the next, where they sat to where they ate to where they cooked, the large stone staircase winding to the second floor and Tim’s room, filled with summer light. Mary Frances had the only quarters left over from the old house, a tight warren beneath the stairs, and her refuge near the stove.

  She cracked blue-shelled eggs from the vigneron’s chickens across the road, beating them for omelets, a nub of butter skating the pan. Out the
window, boys were reaping in the pasture, the tall purple thistle and chamomile coming down with the hay, but this was the second reaping of the summer; she knew the flowers would return and be more for it.

  She called to Tim, breakfast.

  He kissed her; his mouth tasted of cigarettes and honey. She could see his relief after all those months on tenterhooks. It was hard to understand now what had taken so long, what they had thought they were doing, what they had been trying to protect. She promised herself she would not waste another moment not sure of what she wanted, not with him.

  They sat next to each other at the long Valaisanne table, a streak of cadmium in Tim’s white hair, the fletching on an arrow. They talked of the novel they would write together, a woman’s story, maybe a woman trapped in a desperate life. They were still imagining it. The omelets were lacy and fine, a few crisp lettuces from their garden dressed with mustard, a bottle of cold ale from the fountain. Mary Frances stood to get her notebook, and Tim to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of strawberries, a pitcher of thick cream. The woman would be a widow perhaps. What would a widow long for? They had a pseudonym: Victoria Berne.

  Her book Serve It Forth arrived from New York, as well as a clutch of the first reviews. Some of them were very good, and there was also a small check. But when she read the clippings, she could hardly remember the motion of the essays referenced there, as though she’d written them in a trance, in another life. She was flattered, of course, but after the first few, they stopped making her feel flattered, stopped making her feel any way at all. That had been so long ago.

  Shards of hay spun in the shaft of light from the open window. It was already late in the morning; they had work to do outside. Tim looked at her wistfully. He reached out and ran one square finger down her collarbone, her chin tipping back to receive the length of his touch.

  “Happiness becomes you,” he said. “You are happy, yes? You’re not coming down with a fever.”

  She laughed. “I knew there was something.”

  “Yes, something.” He pressed his hand flat against her chest, what beat there, and time passed the way it seemed to now that they were together: right by them.

  * * *

  The garden was a tyrant, and they lived off it. Tomatoes, the reddest she had ever seen, their stalks twined up the cages Tim had built from galvanized wire. The peas were gone now, but Tim had planted radishes beneath the lettuces so that they might be shaded longer into the summer; each plant provided something for the other. Eggplants and peppers and squash, tents of beans, they were good for the soil. Basil and chives, a few melons, potatoes for the fall and keeping. And down the terrace, espaliered apples and pears that had fruited for decades, farther down the grapes, all this lushness, and then the wide blue stretch of the lake, a plate of glass.

  Mary Frances stepped into the rows with her basket, pulling down what was ripe, Tim behind her, tying stalks back, turning the crumbs of their eggshells into the soil. The sun was hot on their necks, their shoulders brown, fingernails ragged and stained.

  Tim said, “A child. A widow would long for a child.”

  And Mary Frances’s hand stilled in the vines for just a moment, her head already nodding but a kind of alchemy taking place inside her. A child.

  “She could marry again,” she said. “Someone with children.”

  “Someone who already had them.”

  She couldn’t see Tim in the mass of green behind her, but she could hear the rasp of his fork in the ground. He was thinking now about how that would work, about the novel, the man their widow might meet and how they would meet and why. And in that silence, her mind flashed across the baby Al had wanted and how even that had gotten smeared between the three of them: Al wanting the baby but not the thing they had to do to get one, Mary Frances wanting Tim. She could examine it now; she could talk about it with him. They talked about everything, sometimes folded inside other things, but still. Light reached all corners, now that it was just the two of them.

  Her basket was full of tomatoes and beans; she would need to can some for the winter. Their last trip up the mountain to the orphanage in Fribourg, the car was overflowing with zucchini, leafy bundles of chard, carrots. They could not eat enough to keep up.

  “What about the orphanage?” she said. “Perhaps she goes to an orphanage for a child?”

  She stood and pressed her hands to the small of her back, arching; she looked around for Tim, but he had gone inside.

  * * *

  The bed in Tim’s room was wide and white. From there, she could look out the window toward the lake, and afternoons when he was painting, sometimes she would come to his door and drop her muddy pants, stretching out full on her stomach, her round white behind an invitation. She counted in French the seconds it took for him to cross the room. He pushed the back of her shirt up, over her head, away. He pressed against her. He did anything he liked, his canvases stacked against the walls again: his home, their home, together.

  “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I regret not being able to father a child.”

  Her forehead pressed into the sheets. The talk about their widow had brought this on, another thing they’d made together. She felt a vibrant new potential open inside her, not for some tangible baby, but the desire they carried for each other, their constant want taking shape.

  “Say it again,” she said.

  “I would have liked to have a child with you.”

  Not everything was possible, but they had learned how want was a powerful thing.

  The first hints of fall came in the night, the chill they closed the windows against, the extra blanket they drew across Tim’s bed. In the pasture, the asters bloomed, the grapes ripened, the tart apples and pears, the last vegetables pressed for their seed. Then it was time to rake things clean, to turn the soil so that in spring they might start again.

  Mary Frances needed a divorce.

  “You can send for it,” Tim said. “It’s a piece of paper and travels quite easily. Much more easily than you, in fact.”

  She pulled the quilt around their shoulders and studied his face in the firelight. “I want to see the children. I want to arrange for Norah and David to visit us here.”

  “And Anne?”

  “Oh, Anne.” Mary Frances felt a stab of something in her guts. “Anne will have plenty to say to me, I’m sure. And Rex, and Edith. I want to get it all over with, face to face and then be done.”

  Tim pushed her back against the pillows, his hand skating along the flat of her belly. She breathed out.

  “And back here to you,” she said.

  He dropped his mouth to her skin. “Ah, Mary Frances. What could I do to make you stay?”

  And all night long, he tried.

  But after Christmas she took a train to Cherbourg, and a ship out. As soon as she lost sight of land, she knew she’d made a mistake. Out in the world, time passed in the usual way; she felt her guilts and regrets, the things she wished had happened differently, as though she’d left the shell of herself back there with Tim and now she was only jelly. She would be gone for the short, dark days of winter at Le Paquis: their rest, the rhythm of their work together, their long nights. What had she been thinking?

  * * *

  In New York, it was a matter of signing her name where the notary indicated.

  “Is it still mine?” she asked. “The Fisher. Or does it go back?”

  He shrugged; this was just his job. “You bought and paid for it, I guess.”

  His bright blue necktie lolled against the desk as he leaned over her. He pointed to another line, and she signed “MFK Fisher,” again and again.

  * * *

  It took three days to get to California, but still it felt as though the Kennedys were not quite ready when she arrived. Rex was busy at the paper with another change in editorial staff, and Edith was fluttery, di
thering, older than their last visit in Paris. The children were not yet home from school. Mary Frances told herself she’d wait to tell everyone at once about the divorce, get it over with and be done.

  But whatever she once would have busied herself with seemed lost to her now. She didn’t want to bake or can or listen to Edith’s gossip about town; she remembered trips from their house in Eagle Rock to the Ranch when she had first been married to Al—it had always been a whirlwind of activity. Perhaps she had made it so, not wanting to sit too long and think about her life away from home. Now her comforts were shifting.

  She took long drives in Rex’s coupe, into the city, out to the ocean. She’d heard that Gigi and John Weld were living back in Laguna, that they had married and bought the newspaper there. Gigi had changed her name: she was Katy now. Mary Frances asked at the post office where she might find their house.

  It was a big, sprawling house covered in weathered cedar shake, the yard filled with juniper and purple sage, maybe other things like bicycles or toys; Mary Frances hadn’t even considered the possibility that Gigi might have a family now. When she appeared on the porch, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, she was still beautiful, still young.

  “Mary Frances?” Gigi’s face opened. “Hello! What a surprise.”

  “I’m sorry to just show up.” Mary Frances smiled but did not get out of the car. She looked up the lane to where it met the coast highway, as though she were still driving. “I’m not in town for long.”

  “Come have a drink. John’s at the paper. It’s just me. Come inside.”

  “Oh, I can’t. Edith is expecting me for dinner.”

  Gigi leaned to the passenger window, resting her elbows on the frame. “We’ll have lunch in Hollywood, then. Next week—you pick the day.”

  “That would be lovely.” Mary Frances put the car into gear. She needed to get away.