The Arrangement (14 page)

*   *   *

Mary Frances sent Tim the piece about Catherine de Medici and waited. She no longer pretended she knew what she was doing; her sense of reason seemed to have evaporated in favor of another letter, and then the next. The postman arrived in the morning and returned most afternoons; she knew his schedule by heart, shuffling through the envelopes before she’d even closed the door. She wanted her exchange with Tim to be as immediate as what she carried in her head, but a week went by, ten days, the time it took a letter to travel all the way across the country and another one to travel back, and there was little for her to do but imagine what he might have written, and then imagine it another way again.

Your writing is beautiful, Mary Frances, and it lingers with me long after I have put your pages away. I planted a small garden in the cold frame here and went this morning to work in it. The seedlings are still tender, but by late spring, I should have lettuces and peas, a radish or two. Your essay was on my mind, and I thought of how in France there was a time a woman might have been as flattered by a bouquet of lettuces as she would have been with roses. I read the piece a second time, and I think you might—

Enclosed was her essay and Tim’s blue notes across it, careful and precise, a record of his time, his interest in her. A second reading, she thought. At the end of his letter, he thanked her for sending her work and asked for more, dear god, more.

*   *   *

She found Gigi on the terrace, basking. She wore a bird’s-egg blue hostess dress, the organza tie at the waist flailing against the flagstones like something that had lost its wings. She had slices of cucumber over both eyes. Mary Frances asked her if she wanted the bitters.

“Just tired,” she said. “But aren’t you sweet. I was out late with Nan. It seems she’s making a surprise move to San Francisco.”

“She has a picture there?”

“A nine-month engagement, so to speak.”

“Oh.”

Gigi rolled her head along the back of the chaise, letting the cucumber fall into her open palm. She looked at Mary Frances from underneath her long, long lashes.

“She’s Catholic. And he’s married, maybe to two women, it’s hard to say. Nan’s lucky, really. The fixers only come into the picture if you’re worth something to the studio. Otherwise you have to work these things out for yourself.”

They were resourceful girls on the whole, the studio girls—they knew how and where to get things done, and when the fixers wouldn’t help, they helped each other, getting money together or a place to stay, the name of a doctor in another town. Circles were small. A dozen pretty girls with long legs and good voices, and one became Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, and everyone else was like Nan. So when someone did pick you, took you aside and told you that you were more than pretty and long-legged and good, it was hard not to get carried away.

Mary Frances thought of Tim’s letter, what a beautiful writer he said she was. It was easy to say those things from the
other side of the country. It was easy to send them, to send anything on paper.

Gigi said, “I don’t think Tim can father children. It’s the kind of thing we used to talk about on the train, late at night with the other girls, when we talked about troubles. I didn’t think Tim and I would ever have a family. But I’m certainly thankful not to have one now.”

“Is that why you left him? Do you want to have children?”

Gigi faltered, then pretended otherwise. Mary Frances could see her draw a sense of gravity over herself, her posture in the chair shifting, her face veiled with something new.

“It was hard for me to make the decision to leave Dillwyn,” she said.

She never called him Dillwyn. Mary Frances pressed her hand against her temple, and Gigi went on.

“I think John was even surprised I did it. We wanted to be together, of course, but it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible until it was.”

Gloria was like this too, a billboard of interior thoughts, without a shred of self-protection. It must be what the camera so loved about these women. Too, she knew her lines, and how to deliver them.

“I doubt you can understand it,” Gigi said, “unless it happens to you.”

*   *   *

Still,
Tim said,
still, I love those moments where you reveal yourself. I love to hear what you want in a dinner partner, in a kitchen, your wooden spoons and copper pots. (There is a beautiful set I left at the house, undoubtedly going green. Please use them, take them. They’re yours.) You are the center in these stories. And everything about you, your wit and passion, your sensualism, your fine arched brow, is clear and true on these pages. I can close my eyes and see you now.

In the cupboards, she found the pots, French ones with heavy bottoms and a thick patina of disuse. She scrubbed them with a lemon dipped in salt, buffed them with mineral oil, arranged them on the stove: a stockpot, a large sauté, and a saucepan. She would keep them for the rest of her life.

In Last House, they are really all she needs. The newspaper people come, the magazine reporters, soon someone from the library at Harvard to take away her cartons of paper, which seems strange to do while she is still alive, but there is so much she’s glad to be rid of. They come, expecting a meal with her, the pleasures of her table such as she’s described them for some fifty years and counting. In the past year, she has made nearly three hundred meals for visitors of some professional stripe or another; she keeps a tally for the tax man at Norah’s insistence. Everyone wants their piece.

Norah has gone back home for the weekend, another grandchild soon to be born, her family still growing and expanding, still lush in a way that needs to be tended. And Mary Frances can entertain her guests alone. It’s how she prefers to meet new people these days; the labor of bringing her old life to their expectations too great. Instead, she lets them do all the heavy lifting for her. All that seems to be required is an arch of her brow, some cursing in French, and a good, honest meal.

In the deep sauté, she has made a stew: eggplant and
tomatoes, onions and summer squash, a sort of
ratatouille, tiella, samfina, pisto
, there are as many names for it as countries, and she has stopped caring for all the names of things. She has made stew, and there are ripe peaches and cream for dessert, a few bottles of wine to choose from. She does not know when the librarians will arrive. Her marmalade cat rubs at her ankles, hungry too.

She pours him a small saucer of the cream, takes her cold vermouth to the fan-back wicker chair on the balcony that looks toward the mountains. Night will come soon enough, and her skin is so thin, she won’t be able to keep herself warm out here. But for now, she looks out across the vineyards, the thick smell of her stew wafting behind her, and she feels content to wait.

*   *   *

When Mary Frances saw Al get off the train, she hardly recognized him. Travel could do that to a person, and grief, but it was still shocking, the gray sag to his features, the smell of his mother’s house that clung to his clothes.

He pressed a dry kiss to her cheek. “Have you been waiting long?”

She shook her head. They made their way to the car, through the cluster and press of people coming and going, people standing around with their hands out. He let her drive, resting his head on the back of the car seat. He seemed to be balancing something that required all his concentration; he had nothing left for questions or talk or an easy expression on his face. Mary Frances could hardly bear it. These days apart made his silence feel like an accusation.

“How is your mother?” she asked, and she thought Al had not heard her, so she asked again.

“Last night I found her at the laundry sink. She’d been scrubbing my father’s sheets. Her head was stopped against the canning shelf above the faucets, sound asleep.”

“Oh, Al.”

Mary Frances reached for his hand. She thought of Rex, his ink-stained fingers prying back the flesh of an orange, his graveled laugh filling his office. He was steadfast in her thoughts, a fortress of security, but Edith could fall to pieces any minute. She felt her palm begin to sweat in Al’s and pulled away.

She drove him to the house in Laurel Canyon; he went to their bedroom and lay down atop the coverlet, his coat, his shoes still on. She stood at his elbow, her hands twisting at her skirt.

“Can I get you anything?” she said.

“I’m tired. It was a long trip.”

“A glass of juice? A cup of tea.”

“No. Thank you.”

She lingered at the bedside, and he could not think of what she wanted now.

Al’s father was the kind of sick that looked like death would be a blessing. His mouth hung open vacantly when he slept, and he slept all the time. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was frightened, and that was worse—all the years he’d comforted others, all the years he’d preached about milk and honey, but the fear was there, beneath his pallor and his dull eyes fluttering closed. He was afraid he didn’t know what came next. If Al’s father didn’t know, who would?

The whole house smelled of rot and fear and probably would forever. His mother moved constantly from room to room. She slept standing up. Herbert had hopped a boat the afternoon Al left, back to China for another tour. There seemed nothing left to do but to wait for the inevitable.

When Al woke, Mary Frances was perched on the edge of the bed, her shadow looming over him. It was nearly dark outside.

“Oh.” Al sat up. “The time.”

She looked out the window as though it had just occurred to her as well. “It’s not so late,” she said. “We could have dinner.”

Al thought of the two of them across from each other at the big table in the dining room, some carefully simple plate and full glasses of wine, maybe some music: the very antithesis of his father’s house. She would want to hear more. He remembered the feeling he used to have leaving his office at the end of the day, working his way back to her, and the weight he felt now was tenfold.

“Let’s take in a movie, shall we? Eat some candy bars and laugh.”

Relief flickered on her face, too. “Marx Brothers?”

But
Night at the Opera
was not playing close by, and they ended up in a movie neither one of them knew anything about. A young woman from some pastoral, daisied homeland was whisked away to the big city by a handsome, wealthy benefactor. Over time they fell in love, a fact signaled with the clasping of her hands to his heart and singing. There was lots of singing, a few jokes with a terrier named Milo, and a very happy ending. Mary Frances looked over at Al, his head
lolled back against the seat and the light from the picture catching the sharp parts of his profile. He laughed when he was meant to, and the darkness took care of the rest.

*   *   *

Sunday afternoon, and Gigi had been out all weekend. Mary Frances worked in the garden, Al on the patio behind her, turning the pages of the paper. They had been outside for the front page and half the city section, a sheaf of iris blades gathered at her knee. He was not really reading; the sound of the newspaper clapping back against his body from the breeze marked the time.

“Al,” Mary Frances said, “can you take these for me?” Her basket was full of clippings from the garden.

“Another way to earn our keep?”

“I enjoy it,” she said.

She enjoyed everything. Around the corner of the house, he dumped the basket of Mary Frances’s clippings by the rubbish pile and caught the flash of that long blue Hudson. He edged closer to see Gigi and her stuntman. Gigi lingered at his car door, her pale hand to her throat, and suddenly it seemed pornographic, that she had to linger here, in her old life, house, with himself and Mary Frances looking on, linger at the car door, so desperately.

Do it, Al thought, please just do it, kiss her, something. But instead he watched the two of them for full minutes, staring at each other.

If everybody saw, could he and Mary Frances just go home?

He walked back to the patio. Mary Frances was still kneeling by the flower bed. She could kneel for the longest time.

“Gigi’s back,” he said, and she looked up, startled. She brushed her hands on her skirt, faint green streaks left behind.

“I’ll make supper,” Mary Frances said. “Did she bring a friend?”

And because Al was not himself, because Al was looking for a fight or a distraction from one, he took long strides back around the side of the house and called across the yard. “Gigi, dear. Bring your friend for dinner.”

*   *   *

John Weld was a nice man. He was tall and tan, had won swimming contests when he lived in Kansas City. His teeth were straight and white. He came from a newspaper family, had worked in Paris after the war, and wrote screenplays and novels. There was plenty for Mary Frances and Al to talk with him about.

And yet they didn’t. John Weld folded his long legs over themselves, and Al jingled the change in his pockets, and Gigi smiled, drinking her vermouth too fast. John Weld was not the one responsible for all of them being in these circumstances; they were adults and had made their own decisions, yet there he was, in all his bright and shining strength. And he looked half Tim’s age.

“It’s a lovely home you have, Gigi,” he said finally.

Al stopped his pacing. “Oh, you haven’t had the tour?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Let me tell you about this house, then. Are you a fan of architecture?”

The house had been built in the last five years and wasn’t architecturally significant from its neighbors, really, but Al started in with a history of Laurel Canyon as a development, Wonderland Park and the trackless trolley, which didn’t even run anymore. He was lecturing. He had John Weld standing at the patio doors and looking out into the garden as if the view were a mappable one. Gigi stared at the Parrish painting of Tim and his sister that hung above the piano, looking bored or desperate, it was hard to tell.

“I don’t think he plans to buy the place, Al,” Mary Frances said.

“Everything’s for sale, for the right price. Isn’t it, John?”