The Arrangement (18 page)

Back in her compartment, the porter had yet to make up her berth, and so she crawled back inside, folded her hands beneath her head, and stared at the glossy capsule of the ceiling. She thought about how many lives it contained, just this single car, and how fast it was going, away from home.

*   *   *

At Penn Station, Tim was waiting on the platform.

He was lithe and elegant, dressed all in navy blue, a fine cashmere topcoat and herringbone muffler, his white hair waved back close against his head. He looked like a knife, like a hawk, a piece of dark blue open sky. Mary Frances took his gloved hand and tried to make her mouth work to speak. She could think of only the plainest things,
hello, how nice to see you, how nice.

He broke her wrist back and brought it to his lips, a light, true kiss where her blood was pounding, and that was all.

He directed a porter to her trunks, her trunks to a cab, his hand steering her forward at the small of her back. They were nearly the same height. She could feel his breath on her temple, and with his hand, he was all through her, and there was nothing to say, nothing that could be heard over this.

The cab took them uptown, to the Warwick Hotel where he had reserved her a room. Watching his profile, the city racing past them, she realized he belonged here, amongst all
this business and metal, noise and speed, or at least the man he was now belonged here. The thought plummeted through her. What else might she have to learn about him? What else might she have made up to suit herself in all this time they’d spent apart?

“Where is your mother?” she asked.

“She naps in the afternoons. Are you tired?”

It sounded like one thing made him think the other, and she shook her head, turning to the window. What if she was making a horrible mistake?

The taxi pulled to the curb, and Tim paid it, a fleet of doormen descending upon the car, her steamer and satchels full of books. She stood where she’d been escorted and watched her things stack up; why had she brought so much stuff? She needed the help of so many people.

Inside the hotel: the bellmen and the elevator operator, the examination of the room, tips passing hand to hand. Tim ordered tea to be sent up, and then finally they were alone. Mary Frances stood by the windows, her purse in her hand. Tim studied her, and she tried to meet his eye but lost her nerve. She had thought about this moment for months on end, a thousand different ways. Maybe the moment itself was tired now. She laughed.

“What?” he said.

“Oh. I suppose I am tired. Completely.”

“It’s all right. Really.” He did not cross the room. “My sister has a party planned tonight, for you and Mother. She’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

She was still looking, distractedly, anywhere but at Tim.

“Mary Frances?” he said.

“Of course.”

She felt as if she were waiting for something to crest between them, but Tim seemed so mild, so easy. It was never going to happen. She took a deep breath.

“Of course,” she said again. “I’ll meet you in the lobby, and your mother. We can all have a drink before we go, several drinks perhaps. Oh, Tim.”

She tossed her purse well shy of the desk, and Tim laughed. He was so much stronger than she’d remembered. He placed her key on the dresser.

“It’s all right. Get some rest,” he said, and he left.

She drew a bath. The tea came, and she took a cup, a pretty pastry with her to the tub, resting it on the lid of the commode. She poured yellow oils into the running water, the scent of violets. In a few weeks, she would have a few weeks behind her, and she would be in France.

*   *   *

On another floor of the hotel, Tim took the box from his pocket and set it on the secretary in his room. He lit a cigarette and sat before the window, the afternoon sky lost in the shadows of the buildings around the hotel, the trolleys clattering in the streets below. He had all this energy and nothing to do with it, energy enough to run laps in the street, to run flights in the stairwell. He just wanted to spend it, for chrissake, spend everything: his money, his time, his hard cock chafing in his pants. It had been a year since he’d seen her, and he had not accounted for the composure that year had made necessary.

The door to his mother’s room opened.

“Well?” she said.

“She’s resting. A long trip.”

“I’m just glad she’s arrived. All that way from California. I don’t know what you people could have been thinking.”

“She’s traveled a great deal, Mother. I’m sure you’ll find she’s able to handle the toughest situation.”

“Still,” his mother said.

She saw the box on the table, obviously a jewelry box; her eyes settled on it, but she didn’t ask. Tim felt as though he’d swallowed a lit match. His mother had always been a hoarder of details, an amateur detective. Everything was suspect until proven otherwise.

“Mother.” Tim stubbed out his cigarette and took her hand, pressing it between his cheek and shoulder. “Would you like to go for a walk, or is it too cold? A carriage? Tea?”

Mrs. Parrish patted his shoulder. “I’m fine,” she said. “I thought I might write a few letters before we sail.”

And she began ticking off the things and people she needed to write, the process of a letter decidedly unsilent for Mrs. Parrish, rather a one-sided conversation that had to meet the air before she could commit it to a piece of paper. Tim stood to give his mother the secretary, slipping the box back into the breast pocket of his jacket before she got up the words to ask about it.

He’d wanted to give her something.

In the time it took to loose himself from Gigi, he’d remembered all kinds of things he used to like about pursuing women: elaborate dates, veiled letters, the slow unpinning of a twist of hair, endless buttons, whatever clasped at the back of the neck. So much depended on preparation and rate of
speed. He could fill an afternoon with a search for a pair of silk stockings. He’d followed a woman two blocks through the theater district the other day, watching the spindle of darker fabric extending from the heel of her shoe to the seam that arched her calf. Cuban-heeled stockings; not the sort of thing you could buy for another man’s wife. He’d chosen a bracelet instead, a wide swath of gaspipe chain with a pavé clasp, but Mary Frances had seemed at such loose ends, he hadn’t given it to her. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so easy.

“Would you write a letter for me?” he asked. “For Alfred Fisher.”

The sound of his mother’s pen started across the page.

“‘Dear Al. Can’t say how glad we are that Mary Frances is here. I have missed her and you both, and know Mother will be all the more comfortable for her presence abroad. Bought her a gift today, your wife, walking to meet her train. Couldn’t help myself, a little bauble to mark our time together here. Very excited, and grateful to you, old man.’ And that’s all. I’ll sign it.”

His mother passed the stationery over her shoulder, and Tim beat it dry in the air. She looked up at him, her face soft with years. There was no cause to worry her if he could help it. There was no cause to worry anyone.

*   *   *

In the lobby, Mary Frances telephoned Al.

“You’ve arrived.”

“In body, I guess. Such a trip! What time is it at home? I feel made of taffy.”

“It’s two.” He cleared his throat. “I’m having a sandwich.”

“You’ll be living like a bachelor by Sunday, won’t you.”

There was a long silence, static, maybe something else.

“Al?”

“I’m here.”

“I posted letters from the train, five already. I hate to spoil them by telling you everything now. I just wanted to say hello. I wish you were coming with us. It won’t be near the same without you.”

“I’m sure you’ll have a good time.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, though, about how it’s time to put away our distractions and live our lives. I think we would make good parents, Al. I always have.”

“Do you mean that?”

She did, for how it squared them up for this time apart, and the enthusiasm in his voice was some kind of permission, reassurance, absolution all in one. She thought of the boy and his nurse on the train, the way he patted her cheek when she dipped the fork in his direction, the soothe of her whisper through the compartment walls.

“What kind should we ask for, Al, a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, do. Please do. I think we should.”

He told her he loved her, and
bon voyage
, and he hung up the phone before she did, the dead line buzzing in her ear. If she’d promised him the moon, it would seem more possible, and yet she’d have promised him anything. She looked down at her lap, the swath of russet silk, the dress Edith had bought her the previous Christmas. It somehow had become part of all this, her costume.

Across the lobby, Mrs. Parrish stepped out of the elevator
on Tim’s arm, hunched and delicate in a ruffled velvet cape, a bee working at a flower. Mary Frances stepped out of the telephone booth and into their oncoming path.

“So lovely you could come, dear.” Mrs. Parrish brushed her cheeks with her own.

“I was just calling Al. He is sorry he can’t be here too. I’ve promised him an absolute account of everything we do and see, a letter every day.”

“Oh, goodness!” Mrs. Parrish beamed at Tim. “When Dillwyn was a boy, I used to take the children all summer to the seashore with my sister. If my husband never got a word from me, he was a happy man.”

But Mary Frances could tell she’d pleased her, perhaps even put her at ease. It was important that her feelings toward Al always be clear. She repeated that to herself as they walked to the bar, three abreast, and repeated it again as Tim ordered the drinks, vermouth for his mother, a Gibson for her, and again in the taxi, on the way to Claire’s apartment uptown.

Mrs. Parrish could not have cared less about the evening amongst Claire’s friends.

“Honestly, we sail tomorrow! There will be so many polite conversations to make at the pensions, the dinner tables. Those friends of Claire’s will draw all the clever thoughts right out of me, like blood from a stone. And then what will I have left to talk about over the crossing?”

“I’ve never known you to flag, Mother.”

“I am so much older than I’ve ever been. Mary Frances, how will you manage?”

“Manage? Oh, I try never to speak until people have finished with the weather reports.”

Mrs. Parrish laughed. “She’s such a lovely girl, Timmy. Where are you always finding such lovely girls?”

Mary Frances was aware of how carefully they folded into the car, and the passing, flashing lights outside the taxi making a blur of Tim’s face. Mrs. Parrish was still talking and seemed as if she would never quit. Claire’s husband Charles was in the hospital, and yet here they were anyway for dinner, and Mrs. Parrish outlined the other possible guests: writers like Claire, bankers like Charles, and behind it all was a kind of aristocratic code Mary Frances could not track. This was New York, far more channeled and ornate than California, no matter what Rex did for a living. She watched Tim’s cool silhouette. How had she ever found the nerve to touch him?

Inside Claire’s building, the elevator was a birdcage, the foyer a chessboard with walls of a sour bottomless blue. A man took their coats, and there was Claire behind him. Mary Frances recognized her from the portraits in the house in Laurel Canyon.

Time shimmered uncomfortably, and Mary Frances thought of the bungalow now empty, she and Al gone, Gigi gone, and everything that had started there still rolling forward.

“Are you all right, dear?” Claire asked, her hand at Mary Frances’s back. “You haven’t got a chill, have you? Timmy, you will never learn how to care for women travelers.”

She bussed his cheek roughly, beaming, and thumbed the smear of lipstick she left behind. She was as willowy and beaked as Tim, with wild hair she wore bobbed to her chin and a long silk caftan that parted in dramatic grooves of unexpected skin.

“They always turn up here nearly shattered with all the walking and riding and talking and talking. And then he’s gone and fed her something wild, like oriental radishes and sea scallops. Gigi used to
spin
with it.”

Her long fingers, still alight on Mary Frances’s shoulder, flexed and softened.

“Well,” she said, collecting herself around her glass of champagne. “You are probably far more used to that sort of thing, aren’t you? Mother is so excited about the trip.”

And they were off in that direction, as fast as possible away from the mention of Gigi’s name. Mary Frances was unsure if it was Tim’s feelings Claire was trying to protect, or her own. So many lovely girls, his mother said, and Gigi was the loveliest. She wondered suddenly what these Parrish women thought she was doing here, if Gigi was the only one Tim had told.

Claire turned to greet another guest, and Mary Frances dropped her voice to speak to Tim.

“What did you explain to Claire?” She couldn’t look at him. “About my coming with you.”

“She knows I could never handle Mother by myself.”

“She seems to know a great deal.”

“She’s my sister. She thinks she knows everything.” He took her by the elbow and steered them toward privacy. “What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Why are you upset?”

“I’m not.”

Tim took two glasses from a passing tray and handed one to Mary Frances, martinis clearly meant for someone else,
but the waiter turned and headed back into the bar. Tim drank deeply and looked off over the party.

“My dear,” he said. “I have hedged and suggested and connived. I have lied when asked directly of my intentions. I have followed my best instinct to get us this far with fairly spotless reputations. In other words, I have done my part. What’s your plan?”

“My plan? I don’t know—”

“You knew in Hollywood.”

She laughed. Claire was ringing the bell for dinner. “I was terrified, Tim. And that was months ago.”

“You came to me,” he said. “What are you going to do next?”

For the first time, she got the idea the answer could be anything she wanted.