The Arrangement (12 page)

She picked a shell from her bowl and tipped the mussel into her mouth.

“Everything you do is like an advertisement, Gigi. Al, look at her. It’s amazing.”

“You eat beautifully, Gigi.” Al didn’t look up from his plate.

Gigi smiled. “Tim says I am to tell you to stop being polite.”

“I’m sorry?” Mary Frances said.

“You’re supposed to send him your stories. He wants to show them to his sister, and he can’t if you won’t send them. He says he mentioned it.”

Mary Frances put down her spoon. “When?”

“In his letter?” Gigi looked at Al. “I left a letter . . .”

“Oh yes,” he said. “His letter of the other day. Yes, he did.”

Al went back to his bowl.

The phone rang, and Gigi pushed back from the table to catch it. Her voice became like music in the other room, detectable only in the higher registers. Mary Frances couldn’t look at Al any longer. She stood up and began clearing dishes, running a sink of water, anything to make noise of her own.

She wondered what Tim had said and how. The letter had been addressed to both her and Al; Tim must have assumed Al would be pleased, proud, excited. She finished the dishes and wiped down the table and counters. She swept the floor. She had not been thinking of a publisher, only of Tim, only of Tim’s attention, only of what she could keep of it now.

Al sat with his hands folded over his plate. It was not unreasonable for her to ask for the letter, but he’d gone quiet since Gigi left the room, and Mary Frances hesitated to break that. She thought about everything twice now with him: once as his wife, and once as the woman capable of what she’d done. She wondered if that would ever change.

Finally she asked, “What did Tim say?”

“I’ll find it for you. I just forgot.”

She tried to tease. “I don’t want to be rude.”

“Of course not.” But he didn’t get up for the letter either.

In the hallway, they heard Gigi hanging up the phone. Mary Frances turned back to the sink and sunk her hands into the dishwater. Behind her, Al bagged the trash and took it out to the can.

“Oh, I might have done those dishes,” Gigi said.

“It’s all right.”

“But I don’t expect you to cook
and
clean.”

Mary Frances turned. Gigi was inspecting her nails. She stopped, and met Mary Frances’s stare. There was no point in pretending that either of them did anything around the other without making calculations anymore.

“I wish you hadn’t brought that up in front of Al,” Mary Frances said.

Gigi smiled a harmless smile; she had an amazing number
of smiles at the ready, and Mary Frances had no idea how to defuse an anger so carefully played out, so costumed.

“We wouldn’t want to bother him,” Gigi said. “With our little bargains.”

“I don’t have any bargains with you. Or Tim.”

“Then I guess I have no idea what’s going on here. Because where I come from, that’s exactly how a girl gets a part.”

This moment will return to Mary Frances again and again. She’ll try to write it from distances near and years away, angles droll and poignant, but she’ll never get it to seem on paper the way it feels right now—the room filled with fuel, somebody’s fingers at the match.

Even when she sits some forty years later with her sister Norah at the round table in the kitchen of Last House, amongst the open notebooks and stapled drafts, the cartons of paper she’s made over the course of her career, she thinks to try it once again. There’s one more book here, if they can find it.

But she’s too old to start new work now; they’ll have to find it in what’s already been written. Her mind feels thinner, lacy; when her eyes get too bad to type, she reads. When they get too bad to read, she cooks. She is already thinking of the tomatoes ripening on her windowsill, how she’ll scoop them out and bake them with crumbs and anchovies and Parmesan cheese. She could eat tomatoes like that any time of day, and she would suggest lunch now, but Norah is determined to make progress. In the chair opposite, she holds her slender, knotted fingers in the spines of several books, flipping back and forth, her reading glasses low on her nose. Norah, always so steadfast.

The new book should be about places, they’ve decided:
touchstones, lodestars, sanctuaries. Norah turns again to the story of Gigi’s kitchen, the Bakelite-handled comb, the sudden, frank address.

“There’s too much to explain,” she says, “about the three of you living there together. But it’s good writing, and familiar. It feels like something you would do.”

“It is something I would do. I did it.”

“But that’s what I mean, Dote. You’d hardly have to touch it.”

Mary Frances perches her chin on her folded hand. “Which version do you mean?”

Because in the notebooks, the drafts, she’s ended this evening several ways.

In her favorite version, she tells Gigi to fuck off. Conversationally, without a pause or second thought, in an even voice, she tells her to fuck off, and she leaves the soapy water in the sink, the dishes, whatever stew is still left in the tureen, brushing past Gigi’s shoulder in the doorway as she goes. She speaks that way now, in curt four-letter words she probably said only in private then. Oh, so useful—the fuck off.

Or in another, Al returns to the kitchen, the women still circling, their tempers flared as fans. Mary Frances looks at Gigi, finding a harmless smile of her own. “Tell him whatever you want,” she says, the bluff laid out to call.

Or she says nothing. She just walks out, leaves the house and all her things in it, this life already lost to her, a fact she should have known since the moment she set foot in Tim’s bedroom. She’s become someone else—two people, a thousand. She’s become every version of herself she’ll ever write about, all capital letters and abbreviations: MFK.

But in truth, this conversation never came to anything. Eventually, the silence in the kitchen grew too long to be supported. Gigi uncrossed her arms and turned back down the hall to her bedroom. Mary Frances looked toward the terrace. Al had been gone a long time for just taking out the trash.

She pulled out her notebook but couldn’t find a pen, not in her pocket or hooked to the neckline of her blouse, not on the countertop or in the drawer full of odds and ends. But in the foyer, beside the vase of chrysanthemums, there was Tim’s marbled Parker. She’d seen him with it a thousand times, the pen he used when he marked up her work.

It was heavy in her hand, the fine nib scratching at the page, formed to Tim’s script and now forced to hers. She tore the paper, tore it once again, and put her notebook down, finishing her thought on the palm of her hand, Tim’s blue ink across her skin now. Down the hall, she heard a door slam and her chest pounded suddenly, once, and then returned to its own tempo. What on earth was she doing here? What on earth had she done.

Anne fought with Edith. First, the letter came from Anne, how she was not a child or a wife any longer, how she wouldn’t listen to Edith at all but for the fact she and Sean needed her allowance to make their monthly bills. And then the letter from Norah, how Edith could hardly get out of bed she was so blurry, so low and upset. Anne was being a stubborn pill, but she always listened to Mary Frances, didn’t she, wouldn’t she? And then Norah wandered off into a long ramble about the trouble with studying Latin on an empty stomach. It seemed everyone expected intervention.

Mary Frances called out to the Ranch to try to soothe Edith’s nerves.

“Anne is proud of herself, Mother.”

Anne was living in a tiny apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood, leaving Sean with a nurse during the day so she could take dictation for some president so-and-so, and this was not what Edith had raised her daughters to do. What was all that with the debut at the Hacienda Club, the weddings, college? Edith started crying. She was not a young woman anymore, and she was disappointed.

“Do you want me to come home?” Mary Frances said.

“I know you’re busy.”

“Not that busy. It’s all right, Mother.”

Al walked out of the kitchen and stood in the hall watching her. He let a handful of peanuts into his mouth. He did not try to hide the fact that he was listening.

“I could come home,” Mary Frances said. “Norah said you were a little blurry.”

Al shook his head, shut out the kitchen light, and headed down the hall to the bedroom. Mary Frances watched his shoulders disappear into the darkness.

*   *   *

A flurry of telegrams, and Al made plans to go north to Palo Alto on the weekend. His brother Herbert would meet him at the station, home from China on some kind of medical leave, dysentery, but maybe just another ploy to get out of trouble over there. Mary Frances folded white shirts into Al’s valise, knowing his mother would unpack them and notice how neat and how worn. The evening stretched long before
his train, and she tried to stuff down her anxiety at being left behind.

“I will miss you,” she said.

“Really?” He turned to her, mildly surprised. “I thought you might be looking forward to some time alone.”

“An afternoon, perhaps. A trip to the Ranch. But much more than that, I start to lose my footing.”

“My dear,” Al said, squeezing her hand once. He turned back to his shaving kit, counting out enough spare blades for the time he’d be away.

In the living room, Gigi dealt a hand of solitaire.

“Gin?” Mary Frances asked.

“I’ll get it,” Al said, going to the bar.

The women looked at each other, and Mary Frances laughed. “I’ll deal,” she said, and held her hand out for the deck of cards.

She held a run and a set, but couldn’t remember which they were playing for. Some sort of violin whined from the radio; it had been too early for dinner, and now she just wanted to keep drinking. Even as their glasses were not empty, she asked if Gigi would like another.

Al stood from the loveseat where he’d been reading to refresh their cocktails once again.

Gigi pressed her hand to her mouth. “Sleepy,” she said. “But I have to meet Doris and Nan soon. We’re going to see that Bette Davis picture, at the Pantages.”

She sounded seventeen, announcing her plans and asking permission at the same time. She’d left the night before around this time, and the night before that. She folded her cards and snapped them against the table edge. She’d been winning,
Mary Frances was certain; she trailed her fingers through Gigi’s hand to fan it.

“Gin,” Mary Frances said. “You won.”

Gigi smiled. From inside her skirt pocket, she pulled a letter.

“Don’t wait up for me,” she said.

The letter was from Tim, postmarked from Delaware, addressed to Mary Frances alone; it had come in the mail, but Gigi had taken it upon herself to deliver it as dramatically as possible, full of both subterfuge and flourish. The room seemed to contract in a breath, to pant. She folded the envelope in her hand.

Al bent over a book on the loveseat. She tucked the letter into the waistband of her skirt and passed behind him for the hallway. She stopped. There, in his book, her face—the portrait her father had commissioned on her sixteenth birthday.

“Oh, Al,” she said. “Not that. Where did you find it?”

He didn’t answer her. “You were so lovely. And still, of course. But you know it for yourself now.”

“I was just a child.”

“Well. Not anymore.” His gaze stayed fast into his book as though their conversation were as idle as it seemed. She let her hands rest on the back of the loveseat for a moment, her nails rasping at the barkcloth as she turned away.

He wished she had not caught him with the portrait, but it was bound to happen sometime. He’d moved it from Keats to Milton, found himself studying the fringe of bangs across her forehead, the open way she gazed at the camera. He would’ve loved to have been the object of that brand of
scrutiny, and maybe he once was. He couldn’t remember anymore.

He had lived so long in other people’s houses. As a child and then a man, a husband; in boardinghouses, at the Ranch, the summerhouse in Laguna. Now here, in what increasingly seemed like a foolish arrangement. Down the hall, the women were opening and closing doors, running water, sliding hangers on the closet bar. He could sit still and imagine what they were doing. What did it matter if he could watch over them or not?

He liked Gigi, he always had, but what she was doing to Tim was hard to stomach. She was no more going to the Pantages with somebody named Doris than Mary Frances was, and she didn’t seem to care if Al knew it. She was a woman on her way out of this house, and the motions came to her naturally. He looked back at the portrait and wondered what Gigi had looked like at sixteen. Though she was hardly older than that now.

She sashayed from the hallway, checked the sidelights by the front door, and drained the last of her martini. At the piano, she played the chords of a song, humming in the highest registers.

“What’s the part?” Al said.

Gigi let her hands fall back to her lap. “I don’t think I’ll get it.”

Al wasn’t sure how to respond. To encourage her seemed wrong, but he didn’t know anything about who got what and why. He felt suddenly, irrevocably sad. He returned to the Milton in his lap.

“Isn’t school out for you?” Gigi asked.

“I read for myself.”

“Of course. Timmy used to say that, too. If only I could act for myself, I’d get out of all these lousy auditions.”

She spoke of him so easily, as though Tim had died years ago, or been lost at sea, some disappearance she’d made peace with rather than asked for.

“Work is hard.” He sounded frosty; he heard it himself.

She sighed and looked away. Her profile was so elegant, almost defiant, the lift of her chin, the tilt of her nose in the air. He looked back down at his Milton, hoping she would just leave.

“The song is fine, anyway,” she said. “They can train you to sing.” She closed the fallboard on the piano. “What I really worry about are my legs.”

She stepped in front of him now and lifted her skirts past the tops of her stockings, the high arch of her garter belt around her shaven sex. She was looking at herself, tilting her heels so her skin would catch the lamplight. Al felt a sickening rush and lifted his gaze to meet hers.