The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  “Give my best to Al,” Gigi said.

  Mary Frances nodded. “I will.”

  Driving away, she watched Gigi in the rearview mirror watching after her, just as electric in her shape as ever. Mary Frances wondered if she missed her life in Hollywood and the talent she had spent there, or if she’d even know what to do with herself if she went back.

  There was no score to settle here, nothing to be lost or won. Their lives had changed hands fluidly, and if there was anyone who would understand how Mary Frances was feeling, it was Gigi. But she had been unable to set her straight when she mentioned Al. She had not told her about Tim. She was not going to have lunch in Hollywood. She had no idea what she’d come out here looking for, or what she was afraid would happen if she told the truth, but she needed to start saying something.

  She lost her footing after that. She told Edith that Al had left her, and she wept hysterically as Edith stroked her hair.

  “I’m sure it’s just a passing phase, Dote.”

  “He’s found a job in Massachusetts.”

  Edith began again. “You’ll move home then,” she said. “You will always have your home here with us, darling.”

  This only made Mary Frances cry harder.

  Later, in Rex’s office, she explained it another way. “Al and I have separated. Unless something drastic changes—”

  “Your mother told me.”

  “I’m afraid that got rather muddled.”

  Rex sighed. “Well. We’ve been through this before.”

  “Daddy, it’s not like that. I thought—and I guess Al thought—returning to Europe would be good for us, that he might write again, and other things would fall into place. But he only became more distant, and then my book was published . . .”

  The more she talked, the clearer this version of events became. She had wanted to be a good wife, to have a baby with Al. He had come to not like her, to even despise her. She had tried. She had failed. Wasn’t that confession enough?

  “So you are home to stay,” Rex said.

  “I’m working on another book now,” she said. “A novel set in the hotel in the mountains at the end of the funicular—you remember it.”

  “A novel.” Rex said. “How much longer to finish that?”

  He sounded as if he were asking for corrections to the sports pages, or maybe how much it was going to cost, her staying on in Vevey.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think you can know.”

  He leaned back in his chair, pulling his ankle across his knee. He was her father, and she owed him an explanation; they had always been close, and she wanted to give him one. But there was only so far she was willing to go.

  Finally, “You’re a smart girl, Dote. You’ll figure it out.”

  It seemed like the only kind of blessing she was going to get.

  * * *

  The next afternoon a letter arrived from Tim. Her mother handed it to her with a heavy sigh, as though Tim had presumed too much welcome to think he could write her here, now. Mary Frances made a point of opening it in front of her, the leaf of paper perfectly transparent. Tim missed her and felt compelled to count the ways.

  “He needs some supplies when I return,” she said. “Some paints. I’ll have to go into the city.” She folded the letter and tucked it back into its envelope, her face flushing hot. “Shall we make a day of it?”

  Her mother waved her hand vaguely, and Mary Frances walked away.

  In her room, she read Tim’s words again and again, her fingers finding the parts of her he made rise and swell. Each day there was less of herself she would share with her family, these people she loved and now lied to freely, had even come to dread. Anne would be arriving by the weekend, all her righteous pride in tow.

  And Sean, with neatly trimmed hair and short pants and knee socks, saddle shoes, and teeth, a mouth full of them when he grinned. He didn’t remember Mary Frances and whimpered when she came too close. She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. She’d hardly seen him in the last year and a half, but for some reason, his distance weighed against her heavily.

  She and Anne sat underneath the lemon tree while Sean collected fruit, still green and hard as baseballs. He placed one at a time in Anne’s lap.

  “I guess Mother told you, too,” Mary Frances said.

  “Mother? Oh, Dote, come on. Your letters have been so dodgy. You hardly mention Al anymore. I just assumed.”

  Mary Frances sighed.

  “I know the signs,” Anne said.

  “Well. You were right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Little comfort in that now.”

  “You shouldn’t count on comfort for a while, Dote.”

  Mary Frances agreed with everything Anne said but still refused to ask for her advice, to relinquish her position as the eldest. Sean kept with his back and forth. David stepped onto the porch, his hands hanging at his sides as he’d been taught. It was hard to remember him as a boy, like Sean now, doing anything so pointless. It felt as though they’d all assumed these places long ago.

  There were only a handful of days left before her train.

  But then Norah, who loved boys, who loved romance and intrigue and secrets, Norah came home! They stretched across her bed on their bellies, Norah still in her slip and stockings. Her date would be here any minute, but he was the sort of date you kept waiting. She and Mary Frances had been talking all afternoon.

  “When did you know?” she asked.

  “Oh, I was far too young to get married. That’s where you’ve been so smart, darling. You’re in college now, you’ve focused on your writing, your life.”

  “Not really. Not enough yet, or like you.”

  Mary Frances ran a palm down Norah’s glistening head. “But you will. And you’ll see how that changes you. And you’ll see which of these boys likes the way that changes you.”

  “But with you and Tim?”

  Mary Frances ducked her chin. “I loved him the moment I met him. I knew it was hopeless—his wife was beautiful, and he adored her. And I was married, and I thought I would stay married forever. But one night when he and Gigi were coming apart, we were there for a party, and I sat next to him on the piano bench where she had been practicing a song for a part in a film, and I was plinking along a bit, and I just said it. I turned to him and confessed I was deeply in love.”

  Most of all this felt like the truth, voluptuous and flush with the sort of undercurrents that carried a good story. She could almost hear Tim asking what MFK Fisher longed for, that night at the piano. This version was as clear as any of the others she had conjured up the past few weeks: the stubborn sister, the dutiful wife, the abandoned woman. And what if she had confessed she was in love with Tim on that piano bench, all those years ago? Could they have saved themselves the trouble and just run away together then?

  Were they running away now?

  Norah laughed. “Oh, god, you are so fearless.”

  “I was terrified! But I did make the direct approach.”

  “And that was years ago.”

  “Lifetimes,” she said.

  Norah stood to slip her dress over her head, and Mary Frances felt a wash of something permanent and sad, something like mourning. She would never be so young and beautiful as Norah again, getting ready for a date. She could imagine suddenly the distance their conversations would acquire as Norah chose her way, and she returned to France.

  What really happened, how it happened, that belonged to her and Tim.

  * * *

  At Le Paquis, he was waiting on the patio. She pressed herself against him, kissing the spot where her mouth fell against his neck. A warm wind stirred the meadow, beginning to green at the edge.

  “It feels like a Santa Ana,” she said.

  “The foehn. You brought it with you.”

&nb
sp; She closed her eyes against it. “At home they said the Santa Anas drove people insane. I remember one winter our cook slit her mother’s throat then killed herself.” She turned to Tim. “She had the most beautiful long-handled French knife.”

  Tim burst out laughing. He reached for her, his fingers playing at her neck, and she folded herself once again into the tight wrap of his arms, the rising, licking need to get inside. He pulled her down against him on the chaise, her hands already inside his clothes; the newspaper he had been reading fell away in leaves.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  Something stirred in him to hear this, starving. Why would she neglect to feed herself? He put his hand on her knee and guided her back in the chaise as though she were a lithe craft under his sail.

  * * *

  Spring was coming. They started seeds in the perfect cups of eggshells and lined their sunny windowsills. They drove to the casino at Chillon for a dinner dance, for blackjack, took the funicular and hiked the mountain ridge. They strolled the market in Vevey, these last moments of leisure stretching out on the cusp of the season to come.

  They listened to the news when Hitler walked into Vienna, the ringing of church bells, the cheers and singing, to the royal suite at the Hotel Imperial and the throngs in the plaza, their palms raised to greet him. Men climbed trees to see him on the balcony, people raised their children overhead. Mary Frances clicked off the radio. It was all so close. Tim stared out the window, his cigarette burning to his fingers.

  Late that night, his arms wrapped around her: “What if we have to go?” he said

  “Go where?”

  “That’s my point. What if we can’t stay here anymore?”

  Mary Frances pushed herself up to look him in the face. He loved to see the edges of her suntan; he traced them with his fingertip.

  “Poland, Austria. France has left the doors open. What’s left but here?”

  “But there’s nothing here to want.”

  “There are the banks.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Tim let his hand drop. He looked at her a long time.

  “I won’t stay here through another war, darling. Not again, and not with you. I couldn’t.”

  They would wait and see. There was time, and outside their window, the garden was coming all to life again. Soon the radishes and peas. Soon the tomatoes, the peppers, the corn, the berries and apples, the plums. The grapes, their skins hollowed out by bees; she stepped close in the vines to hear them rattle in the husks. Soon Norah and David were coming, the chance to show all this again to people she loved, to show herself, finally, for the first time, happy. Herself. There was too much here to leave behind.

  They would, of course. It was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  But before they left, the children would come to visit from California, one last great Kennedy gathering, and they would tour the Swiss countryside, they would have a grand night in Berne.

  When she thought back on the evening, she swore she could tell the moment it happened, the moment their lives changed forever. The table was loud. They were all drunk, the wine light and full in everyone’s glass, dinner long ago eaten, and some other kind of hungers rising. There was a band swinging, clarinets and brass. Norah danced a tight little circle on the seat of her chair, and the boys at the next table looked up at her with wonder on their faces; Mary Frances had been thinking about the wonder of boys, about David across the table, laughing for the first time since his horrible girlfriend slunk off to Austria and god knows whatever might happen to her there, and she turned to Tim, his hip pressed against hers in the banquette, and she was about to tell him what all she would do just to see such wonder on his face, but something else beat her to the punch.

  She saw everything in him shudder to a stop, and start again.

  The sound he made was awful. The band stopped playing. The solid parts of Tim sheared away, in exchange for pain that seemed to dim the lights in the room. He wouldn’t let her touch his leg. Someone called an ambulance; she heard it roaring toward them in the dark.

  In the Viktoria Hospital, a surgeon opened a vein in Tim’s thigh and removed an embolism the size of her thumb, then went back the next morning and removed another. Somehow, and at tremendous cost, his blood kept making more.

  The surgeon’s name was Dr. Nigst: he was square and Swiss. He explained what they had found, explained the process of the surgery, and then explained it again another way. Mary Frances was quiet, looking at Tim’s leg. A blood clot. A blockage. The wound seeped through its white bandage.

  “Why?” Mary Frances said. “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you these things, Madame. I can only tell you what I’ve done.”

  “But why again? And why his leg?”

  “I do not know.”

  She was grateful somehow, for this small honesty. “Then when will it be over?” she said.

  Dr. Nigst lifted his heavy shoulders and explained the surgery again. They didn’t know what was wrong with him, what was making this happen, only that if one of those clots stopped the blood to his leg, he would lose his leg. To his heart, a cardiac arrest. To his brain, he’d have a stroke. It was the worst story Mary Frances had ever heard. In her head, she began to write another.

  * * *

  In the morning, Tim’s foot was blue, then white. He thrashed and moaned but never seemed to rise above the morphine; he sweated through his sheets. The children came and went. David brought newspapers. Norah brought her notebook, some chocolates and clean clothes, but Mary Frances’s silk party dress was like a wilted corsage; to take it off would be to give up in some way. She left the clothes folded in their bag.

  David asked Dr. Nigst if he thought there would be another war.

  Again, his shoulders rose and fell. “They say it is a pact in Munich, but yes. Yes, it feels like war again to me.”

  “Yes,” David said, as though he could feel it, too.

  “But who knows?” Dr. Nigst said. “Who knows.”

  Rex and Edith knew. A cable came from California; the children’s passage home had been arranged. Norah’s German lessons, the accordion she hoped to learn to play, David’s last pining thoughts of his horrible girlfriend, they would have to leave it all behind.

  “But Dote,” Norah said, “we can’t leave you alone with this. We can’t.”

  Mary Frances looked at Tim, still and white under the wash of drugs.

  “It’s already done,” she said.

  Norah wept. David stood tall between the women, his hands clasped behind him, and Mary Frances could imagine him in the uniform he’d worn in school, perhaps another uniform, if things took the turn they seemed to be taking. Before all this, she would have cried with Norah, she would have begged David not to do anything rash. She would have gathered their thoughts into a neat package to take with them, all sorted and saved for later. Now it was all she could do to get them to their train.

  * * *

  In the morphine, Tim lay perfectly still. He sighed and hummed and slept, he ground his teeth until his jaw clicked against itself, but he did not move. When the morphine wore off, he prayed. He wept. He writhed as though someone had set the sheets on fire. When she touched his hand, he yelped as if she had struck him, and she had to learn not to touch him anymore. It was a whole new kind of horrible conversation they could not stop having.

  She hovered near the bed, waiting. They could not tell her why he was still in pain. Sometimes she held his water glass while he slept, waiting until the same thing started up again.

  * * *

  When Tim’s foot turned yellow, Dr. Nigst said they would have to take his leg.

  “How much?” Mary Frances said. Even just a little was too much, but she would give anything now, anything they asked to have Tim back.
r />   “Please, just a moment, Madame, and I will tell Mr. Parrish about the surgery. If you would step outside—”

  “Outside?”

  “He is in tremendous pain. I’m sure you do not want to see—”

  She didn’t even have to think about it; this new sure thing rose in her now and pushed her forward. She leaned over Tim, her lips to his ear. His hands were already twisting at the sheets.

  She said, “Darling, that leg is going to kill you. They are going to cut it off.”

  “Oh Christ please,” he said. “Cut it off, cut it off.”

  She looked at Dr. Nigst as if she had won something. That would be the last of it: Tim would heal, he would come to walk again, and they would return to Le Paquis. It was just his leg. She had never been the sort of woman who allowed for the worst.

  “Cut it off,” she said.

  But somehow the pain got left behind.

  * * *

  Tim reclined in the hospital bed he had not left in weeks and held a book open in his lap. He turned pages he did not read. He looked at the book without seeing it, looked out the window, looked at her. She thought how hard it was not to hate the thing that pulled your lover into himself, no matter what it was. She wrote that down.

  She wrote everything down now, what Dr. Nigst said or the nurses, what Tim said when he was lucid, what he screamed when he was not. She wrote to keep a stitch running through her thoughts, to have something to do with her thoughts, because what was happening was important and someday she would need to remember. Someday she would need to remember everything, even this.

  And the words across the page, page after page, meant time moved forward. The light falling across the room, the nurse that came at noon, at four, the meals that came, uneaten now, she wrote to move from one to the next to the next. It was the darkness that was uncountable. In the dark, when all Tim could manage was a whimper, he begged her to drag him to the window, break a mirror, lift a pillow, please—would she help him? Of course she would. In the dark, she would do anything.

  But in the morning, the shots would come, he seemed better, and they bore on.

  “Do you know,” he said, “from where they cut it on down, I can’t remember one goddamn thing about my leg.”