The Arrangement (27 page)

They were sitting in the mezzanine of the
Théâtre de Vevey,
the lights just coming up for intermission, and Tim went to stand and found he couldn’t, went to speak and couldn’t, only a last spasm, then blackness.

“Tim.”

Al turned, and Mary Frances was crouched over him as he sprawled, collapsed, his limbs flung out and stiff.

“Is he all right? Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know, yes.” She gathered his head into her lap, her voice low and even. “Tim,” she said again, “Tim.”

Al reached a hand to his cool cheek.

Panic filled him, Mary Frances’s calm voice, repeating and repeating. He wanted to shake Tim awake, alive, and then that’s what it became in his head, Tim dying in the red aisle of the Théâtre de Vevey after a half-baked performance of
Cocteau, a hundred people milling past them and not stopping, not even looking long at the man collapsed and Mary Frances. This couldn’t be how it ended for the three of them. What would he do with her now?

And in that moment, Al realized how that would never be his problem. He was watching Tim and Mary Frances drift out of reach, sink beneath the surface, a slow but inexorable slipping away. They grew smaller there in the aisle, Mary Frances clinging, her voice a plea; she wanted Tim back, yes, but too, she would follow him anywhere, anywhere he went.

And then Tim rolled away from her, pushing himself back and away, very pale now and beads of sweat bursting across his forehead, his mouth slack, his whole body. Al stepped to put his hands beneath his arm. He folded over himself in the theater seat, clutching now at Al’s hand, clammy with whatever had overcome him.

The panic still roared in Al’s ears, uncontained.

*   *   *

Back at the apartment, Mary Frances bustled at the stove, heating broth, toasting yesterday’s end of bread, her silk dress creased and rumpled, her hair loosed from its pins. Al poured everyone a brandy, shot his back, and poured another.

“I feel so embarrassed about all this,” Tim said. He propped his hand against the side of his head as if to hold himself up, studying nothing on the far edge of the table.

“I’m sure you’re fine,” Al said. “A bit of bad potato.”

“We’re past the season for that.” But he smiled. He was grateful and confused, very much alive.

Al left the kitchen for the fire, and he could hear Mary
Frances still bustling with the pots and pans, the low sound of their talk together, but he didn’t need to weigh and measure it anymore. He understood now that whatever they were saying was so much more private than he might have imagined.

He threw his empty glass into the corner, the way you’d toss a coat or a newspaper. It splintered into a hundred shards.

“Would you look at that,” he said. “It slipped.”

He got no answer back, and he doubted they had even heard him. He left the pieces where they fell and went to bed.

In the kitchen, Mary Frances turned from the sink. She was crying.

“Oh, darling,” Tim whispered.

She shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to go to sleep now.”

“Please.” But he couldn’t finish that thought. What more could he ask of her than he already had?

But she could not sleep. The sheets were musky and suddenly too long unwashed; the radiator heat so dry it seemed difficult to breathe. Again and again she thought of Tim lying on that carpet at the theater, all the blood drained from his face and the white of his hair, the whiteness of him monstrous now, her mind unable to shake loose of it. Tim, at her feet, and only this tenuous arrangement they’d forged left for her to navigate without him.

Escape was not peace, she realized, not ever.

*   *   *

Al left the apartment before dawn.

Tim watched the knob on their bedroom door for long
minutes. He needed to go for his walk through town in the cold, to do whatever it was that made him not think about her so constantly, but he lit another cigarette instead, and watched the bedroom door, and remembered the pale skin of her hip beneath his hand their last night aboard the ship back to New York, the last night he’d truly touched her, and he felt something bleakly rocket through him, the last thin restraints breaking free.

And then it all seemed so easy.

He crossed the room, knocked. She opened the door for him, still in her white cotton nightgown, the strong winter light from the windows behind her outlining the arcs of her body in the fabric. He didn’t say anything, and didn’t touch her, but crossed the room to the bed and lay down. She lay beside him, but it wasn’t like the times before, where he wanted to eat her alive, where he could not bear his need for her any longer. It was deeper and darker; he loved her, he was certain of it. Why else would he do this thing to be near her?

When he told her so, she wept.

He took her hand, and they whispered, staring at the stamped tin ceiling of the apartment. This was their life, their second life, their shadow life, and they were living it inside their heads and on the promise that things would someday be different. That someday needed to be now.

“How?” she said, and she was still crying, her mouth swollen and red.

He did not know. In fact, it was a question he could barely understand, and he felt dumb and childlike looking at her, filled with a child’s sense of relief, as though someone had only turned on the lights and everything was better.

“Stop crying,” he said. “We’ll think of something.”

“What?”

“We thought of this.”

“This is horrible.”

“Then the next thing will be better, no? Mary.”

He took the hand that held hers and brushed her hair from her eyes, again and then again, he couldn’t stop his hand now, tracing her cheek and jawline, the fine bow of her clavicle where her pulse hammered, he could see it against her skin, another thing that seemed impossible, and yet here it was, her blood, throbbing. He brought his mouth down, wanting to feel it, his lips opening, he could not stop himself, his hands beneath her nightgown now and pushing up, her blood against his mouth and pushing, Mary Frances.

*   *   *

“He knows.”

“Are you sure?”

“He knows something.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing, a better thing. Maybe that’s just the next step.”

They were quiet a long time.

“I don’t think so.”

*   *   *

On the funicular to Mont Pèlerin, they were the only people in the car. The calliope played, and the cables tightened and drew overhead, the winter-dead meadows giving way to alpine shale and pines, sharp and true against the ever-blue sky. They stood at either end of the car, their backs to the rails,
Mary Frances looking down at Tim. She seemed, to him, to be flying, only the sky behind her as they went up. Her grip on the rail to her back was tight, her body moving with the groan and shift, the music like something plucked on a saw.

“I love this thing,” he said.

“Let’s buy it. Let’s live here.”

“You say that of everyplace we go, dear.”

“Well, I mean it.” She shrugged prettily, or perhaps it was just the rocking of the car. He loved to watch the way she absorbed motion, the way she landed in the world.

“You are magnificent,” he said. “I mean that too.”

At the top, they passed the Hotel Mirador, its elaborate balconies and patios, and took the trail along the mountain’s ridge at a pace that left them just enough breath. The air was thin and still cold; they walked fast to keep their blood moving, and they did not talk. Tim listened to the solid grind of her boots on the trail, the wick of her pant legs. In her satchel, she carried a thermos of warmed red wine, a bar of chocolate, and a loaf of bread. Her breath heaved white ahead of her, her lips parted. She licked them, and smiled.

*   *   *

There was more money in the kitty than Al had put in it; he emptied the can onto the table and counted it twice, almost three hundred dollars. Tim had been adding to it rather than taking away. The yellow light buttered everything in the kitchen. He was suddenly ashamed to have trusted one man with so much without thinking, ashamed to have trusted anyone at all.

There, on the table, was Mary Frances’s notebook.

The thing was, it was nothing to open a book, to read it. It left no marks, no broken seals or waste. He had never thought about it so brutally, but really—all this fuss over who was writing, not writing seemed suddenly ridiculous. There was no way Mary Frances would ever know if he read her notebook or not. It was the thinnest line, requiring the slightest effort. How many of these lines had been crossed in his marriage? What was one more now?

He poured himself a drink, pulled out a chair, and sat. He opened the book, and he was still reading when Tim returned to the apartment.

He pushed the notebook away, pushed back from the table, but it was the quick move at the hot stove; he’d been caught. He grinned stupidly. His reflexes were failing him.

“Any good?” Tim asked. His face was neutral, passive.

Al tried to see him for the first time as the man who had stolen his wife, but it was almost impossible to forget what he already knew and loved.

“Drink?” he said.

Tim looked at his wrist; Al didn’t see a watch. “I can’t. I’ve got another meeting with the dealer from Geneva at four.”

“Geneva.” Al rolled the short glass between his palms. “Are you headed to Geneva soon?”

“Hopefully, some paintings will be.”

“But you won’t need to go.”

“No. I’ll stay.”

Suddenly Al was standing, his chair pitching back behind him, and he grabbed Tim by the shoulders in a rough embrace. His body felt enervated, terrified, and he clasped Tim closer, unable to form words that might make sense. He could
feel Tim’s breath push against the bones in his chest, breakable. Al was sweating now. Tim’s hands came up to free himself.

“I have to go, Al,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you at supper. Perhaps a night on the town, say. We haven’t done that in a while.”

Al shook his head. He could not fathom the kind of arrangements Tim must be managing within himself to suggest such a thing. What, exactly, had they all been doing?

“The other night—”

“It’s okay, Al.” Tim reached across the table and took the notebook, slipping it back into the cupboard where Mary Frances kept it. “I’m fine, now.”

“Fine?” This was insane. “Fine?”

Tim nodded, rapped the tabletop twice with his knuckles, and left the kitchen empty-handed.

This couldn’t go on any longer. Al took the bottle to his room, dragged the armchair across the floor to wait for Mary Frances.

*   *   *

She knew what he was going to say as soon as she walked into the bedroom, as soon as she saw Al’s face. She sat on the edge of the bed with her skirt smoothed over her knees and stared at her lap like a scolded child. The conversation ahead lay in blackness. If she took a deep breath, it would be over soon, she’d learn her punishment and take it. They just had to get through it.

“Al—”

“I’m leaving.”

“What?”

“I’m going to Salzburg for the summer. George will be there, and we’ve talked of writing a paper together.”

“All summer?”

He laughed. “Yes, my dear, all summer. You and Tim will have to find some way to make it without me.”

“Well. I’ll come visit for a few weeks. We can—” She met his eyes and the sentence evaporated, the anger and hurt and drink dangerously plain on his face.

“Visit,” he said. “Visiting your husband while you live here. That’s very bohemian of you, MFK Fisher.”

“I only meant—”

“Of course.” He reached blindly for the bottle beneath his chair, knocking it over. There was no glass. He must have been drinking for hours. He pushed himself upright and came to stand too close in front of her, all gray flannel and loom.

“You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re doing,” he said.

She didn’t answer, but lifted her eyes finally to his and was surprised to feel the measure of sadness there. She had been so insulated for so long, had felt so little; this sharp pain made her flinch.

“Do you?” he said again.

“No.”

He made a dismissive sound, bending to where his sport coat had slipped from the back of the chair. He dove his arm into the sleeve once, twice without shooting it; the sleeve was inside out. He wadded the lapel in his fist and seemed, almost, to tremble.

“Here, let me,” she said.

“Let you what? What now?”

But she took the jacket anyway and reached into the sleeve, drawing it right. She held it for him while he slipped into the shoulders. He focused on a spot on the wall above her head to hold his balance.

“I’m going to get a job teaching, back in the States,” he said. “I don’t care if it bores me to tears. I haven’t written in months, years, and
The Ghost
is dead now. A great poem, squandered on . . . this.”

He was winding up now. The next thing he said would be truly devastating, and she tried to scan the possibilities, to prepare herself: Would he disparage her writing, her parents, her fidelity, her pride? Would he call out children they’d never had? Would he say he’d seen this coming? The room was close and airless. If she could just stand still enough, she could think of what came next.

Instead: “You’re not even going to try to convince me to stay, are you.”

She looked at him evenly and said nothing.

“Ah, Mary Frances. I would have thought you’d learned some potent new persuasions. To get where you are now.”

He took his hat from the rack and slowly, carefully, pushed it forward on his head. The door did not slam behind him, and at the window she watched him cross the street below, ducking into the tavern on the corner.

She opened the armoire and considered her suitcase, her neat stack of shoes and the clothes hanging there. Al had taken the keys to the car in his pocket, but she had money tucked away. She could take blankets, she could wash in the
fountain at Le Paquis. She could stay with Jules across the road; she could pay him. She could pay anyone. She did not have to wait for Al to come back and go at her again.

She thought of her parents, somewhere in the midst of the Atlantic, on their way to visit her; she could not go home now.