The Arrangement (5 page)

He was grateful for Tim’s attentions to her writing, her anecdotes and sketches. Al had seen Mary Frances through the art classes and the tutoring, the days when she carved table legs; this would run its course as well, and he wanted her to be happy. Tim could make you feel brilliant when nobody else seemed to care what you were doing.

But Al didn’t think they were talking about writing tonight. If he had to guess, he’d say it was Gigi.

Truth was, Gigi was too young for Tim. Around the living room, her friends were easy to spot: glossy hair, glossy dresses, so much skin. He thought of his students, nearly Gigi’s age, the young glossy-lipped whores in Dijon. Al had liked to talk to them, to watch their pretty painted mouths at work.

Mary Frances was standing now, draining the last from her cocktail glass. Soon someone else would draw her into conversation. She was always in the midst of something: stories, admirers, audience. Those afternoons in Dijon, he remembered her waiting for him at the apartment, before she made friends or started her art classes. The cold walk from the university, he would think of her powdered and dressed, perched on the edge of the bed, then pacing to the window and back, waiting just for him, looking just like she did now.

He wanted to take her home.

He checked his watch; they couldn’t leave, not with the awkward way the evening had started. But she was still
looking across the room, her mouth wet from the last of her drink, and he thought of what he could do if he took her home now. He wanted to take her home now.

Where the hell was Tim? And Gordon, long gone from Gloria’s clutches, still drinking his way out of a paper bag. The rate things were going, soon there would be nothing for him at these parties but to watch.

He crossed the room to Mary Frances. “Ready?” he said.

“Now?” But she was already backing down the hall to Tim’s studio for her coat, and then they were on the road to Eagle Rock.

Al pulled her close on the seat, feeling the warm stretch of her thigh against his, and the darkness. They could ride like this for miles, he thought, east into the desert. They had never lived in the desert. Another country.

She looked up at him, her face waxed in moonlight, in nerves, tender with concern and maybe something else. Al wanted to cover her eyes with his hand, cover her mouth. He could see her pulse hammering in her throat, and he wanted to press it still. He pulled the car off the highway and dragged her leg across his lap.

She made a gasp and settled down once, twice, the stir in his cock already gone, yet somehow here was where the sex began: Mary Frances curled around him, her knees on the seat, her skirt around her waist, and her hand working between them. She pantomimed her part so well, her fluttered breath, her voice trapped in her throat, a small cry against their rocking. Al held her tight. There was no way, he knew there was no way, but he couldn’t let her pretend this by herself.

When it was over, Mary Frances slid off his lap. Al fastened his pants. The quiet was shatteringly complete, as though someone had just stopped screaming.

Al started the engine and pulled back onto the road.

They had once been timid with each other and full of love, the prospect of sex. They had not waited for their wedding night.

The invitations had been engraved, addressed, and all her mother could talk about was which punch bowl, how much standing rib. It seemed to have nothing to do with them; they easily slipped away. They borrowed her father’s Auburn roadster and drove to Laguna, stopping along the roadside where a Mexican was selling iced-down beer and watermelons. They scooped the cold flesh with their fingers, licked their mouths, then each other’s. They took a blanket back into the trees, opening their clothes just enough to fit themselves together.

In the end, it was so fast and blunted, she felt as if she had not paid close enough attention. But then Al sank his face into her neck and wept, or something close to weeping, and she was moved by his tenderness. He kissed her jaw, her ear, whispered how he loved her and asked again and again if she was all right, watching the side of her face as they drove on.

“Of course, I’m all right. I’m happy, and soon this whole mess will be over.”

“This mess?”

“I mean the wedding, the party, whatever it is Edith’s making. It doesn’t matter. Soon we’ll be married. And French.”

“Oh.” Al put his eyes back on the highway, and fell quiet.

It had been wrong to be so casual, to leave that place where
he’d wept for her so quickly, and she’d stung him. Al was sentimental at his core. She would do well to remember that lesson, the dark ride home.

Al took a long time in the bathroom. She listened to the pound of his shower, steam curling into the hallway from beneath the door. She thought of the burlap sacks full of snails they’d gathered in the woods above Dijon, their meat extracted and boiled, their shells scrubbed clean; the kitchen could be such a brutal place. They had been the finest snails she’d ever tasted, and the first. So much of what she’d done for the first time she’d done with Al.

When he finished his shower and came into the bedroom, she pretended to be asleep. He stood over her a long time, her breath even, eyes closed. He reached down to smooth her hair back from her cheek, his touch light and lovely, and even then she did not stir.

“Darling,” he said finally. “You’ve inspired me. I think I’ll get a little work done now.”

She sighed and whispered all right, and he snapped out the light as he left the room. She could hear him strike a match in the study, imagined the soft pant of his pipe, and soon the clip of keys, whatever Al was thinking stretching out across the page, then facedown atop the last and all again. That, he could do for hours.

She rolled over to the nightstand, her pen and notebook. She wrote down
snails, Papazi, their little bodies starving in the night,
not even turning the light back on to do it.

In Dijon, they’d eaten snails, tripe, livers, brains, meats rotted and roasted, pâtés ten years old and better under clouds of fat, sliced and spread on toast. The air smelled of
pain d’épice
, honey, cow shit, and the wine was red, the winters cold. Mary Frances wore woolen stockings, bloomers made of challis with elastics at the knee that Al liked to snap; they would pile the blankets onto the bed and crawl beneath. She wished, sometimes, they’d never come back to California, and other times that they’d not gone to France. They might have been happier to never know the difference.

She could not stop thinking about Tim.

It seemed impossible that Gigi would leave Tim for another man, even more impossible that Tim would talk to her about it, without pride or temper, without anything to shield himself. She hadn’t known what to say, and she’d done a bad job pretending she did. She was ashamed of that.

But the truth was, Gigi leaving changed everything. It would continue changing once Tim told Al about it, which he would want to. The Parrishes were their closest friends, and Tim and Al confided in each other, or at least they had once upon a time. Gigi leaving would change everything for all of them.

She had begun to see how her own life might divide. Her closet became things she would take and things she would leave. She imagined what she would tell her mother, what Al would tell her mother, their friends. She thought about it so much, it was as though it had actually happened; she would pass Al in the hallway and be surprised to feel him squeeze her hand and smile. She went to the market, did the laundry, read her books and exhausted herself with her thoughts, both invented and recalled, until all she wanted was to rest for a while against the mindless tasks before her in the course of a regular day. She didn’t always have to do it to know how it could be done. There was a comfort in that, she thought.

*   *   *

She set the table, poured what was left of the wine, and Al wandered from his study, a man in from a storm.

“What’s that I smell for dinner?”

“Oxtails,” she said. “For tomorrow.”

“Not tonight?”

“They’ll taste better tomorrow.”

Al lifted the lid and breathed deeply over the pot, licked the spoon. “Where on earth did you find them?”

“It might have been cheaper if I raised the cow myself.”

The market had been empty, eerie, the shelves furry with dust and not a single shopper other than herself. She needed something to make for dinner, and she’d borrowed from the larder at her parents’ house the week before. She couldn’t ask again; Edith would start to worry. She’d rounded the corner to find a crateful of carrots, their long fingers reaching from their stacks, cheerful against the lumps of potatoes and squash. She filled her basket, as many as she could carry home, their green tops sticky in her hand. One thing she had decided, she would not ever waste a chance again.

Now Mary Frances lifted the lid on a pot of carrot soup.

Al sighed. “When I was first married—”

“All those years ago?” This was a game they played. Her part was to egg him on.

“Yes, yes, to a
wonderful
girl, we lived abroad in France. We lived in a boardinghouse with a strange and very French family, and we ate at their table every night. Meals made from air and sawdust and whatever Madame found at the bottom of her shopping cart.”

He went on, rhapsodizing: the
blanquette de veau
and legs of mutton marinated for days in wine and juniper, Madame’s oxtails, the first oxtails he ever ate, and how the smell of them would wake him from his afternoon nap, hours to wait until supper.

“And I would turn to my sweet wife, sitting by the window in her chair, a novel open in her lap, and I would think . . .” He turned to her now, his face soft and suddenly young.

“You would think?” she said.

“Someday she might make oxtails for me. Someday we might have oxtails of our own.”

She turned back to her pots.

“I never thought you’d make me wait like this,” he said.

They weren’t playing anymore, and they weren’t talking about dinner. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“But you won’t change your mind.”

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. This would be the story now, that Mary Frances didn’t want to have a child, not that Al couldn’t perform long enough to make one, that Mary Frances wasn’t ready, that she was distracted, immature, or worse—that she didn’t want a child because she wanted to spend all her time writing, as though that would ever amount to anything as fulfilling as motherhood.

Where did he think babies came from? What would happen now if she grabbed the collar of his shirt, if she swept the dishes from the table and pulled him on top of her? Her mind flashed to Tim, his full weight bearing down, and the pot she was holding slipped from her grasp.

They both watched the bright orange fantail cross the floor, splashing her apron and skirt, her stockings, everything
hot and clinging. It felt, first, as if she’d been slapped. Then her hands began to shake over all the mess and burn; she couldn’t tell where to wipe them first.

Al scooped her up beneath her knees and shoulders and carried her to the bath, flipping on the cold water, filling the tub. He said things—he was scared—things she could not hold in her head, and there was this awful panting sound. Was she making that sound? The water rose, muddy with what leached off her clothes.

“Darling, darling.” Al cupped the water in his hands to pour over her legs. His face was so tight, it hurt to look at him. What on earth were they going to do?

“I’m okay,” she said.

They peeled off her clothes, the stockings first, then her apron, her skirt. Her shoes were ruined.

“I just feel so very dumb.” Her arms went around Al’s neck, and he held her. It was just an accident. He was sorry, she was sorry. He loved her, he was a good man. What difference did it make, what she said about children. It was easy to want something. She wanted things all the time. She could say she wanted a child if it made him happy; it did not mean they were going to have one.

Later, they ate. Her legs were still tender, the splash of burn marks livid on her shins, but the oxtails, delicious.

*   *   *

Fridays, Mary Frances took the electric train into Los Angeles and spent the morning at the public library. She loved the great hall, its Spanish arches scrolled across the ceiling like rosy bones. She loved flipping through the card catalog, then
wandering the stacks, plucking this old history and that translation and the next, and they smelled so good, and they weighed so much in her arms, the weight of what had come before.

But today she chose a table and reached into her satchel for a sheaf of compositions from Al’s class to grade, a simple way to start her pen to paper. Later she would get around to working on her own book. Once she had cleared her head.

Her book, too, had changed, or maybe it had never really been her book to start with, just a handful of essays about the history of food, the Greeks, the Romans, the French, slipping in bits and pieces of things she remembered, things she knew. She’d always written to show Tim. She wanted him to see her as wise and experienced, the woman she wrote about like some kind of veil she let over herself, or maybe something she peeled away. But too, the work was something they could talk about, just the two of them. When he’d asked for more, she’d written more, and when he said she should write a book, she said she already was. She had no idea how to begin that conversation again now. Maybe it was just another thing that didn’t really matter anymore.

Then Tim pulled out the chair across from her.

His pallor was startling, even as he was clean-shaven, his hair neatly waved and white, a bright pink handkerchief folded in a four-point crown tucked into the pocket of his blazer. The library was nearly empty, and no one was watching them, but she felt nervous just the same.

“How did you know where to find me?” she said.

“You spend every Friday with Lucullus.”

“You look awful.”

“I am awful.”

“And maudlin, I see.”

“So that’s it, then. Sympathy is dead. Where are the dusty books, the tomes you’re so concerned with?” he said. “Those look like first-year compositions.”