Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

She did. Tim had asked her first. At the lunch counter, neatly devouring a stack of ham sandwiches to the crusts, as though he had not eaten in days. He drank glass after glass of milk, put his head down on the counter, and spoke in the direction of the floor.

“I’m sorry to put you in this position.”

“You don’t have to be so polite. Please.”

“But I do.” Tim cleared his throat. “I need your help.”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“I’ve telegraphed the lawyer in Delaware, and I’ll file papers when I get there, but the process is not quick. Things like this, time is of the essence. If word gets out—”

“I’d never say anything, Tim. Of course not.”

“But the other girls at the studio, they’ll go tattle-telling as soon as they even imagine something is fishy. They’ve all signed morality clauses, very cut and dry. Her contract might survive the divorce, handled quietly enough, but an affair…” He laughed here almost, a sound that cut. “Gigi would be one less girl in the next picture.”

He looked at her, and Mary Frances sighed.

“It’s all she’s ever wanted,” he said.

“Not all, evidently.”

“I owe her this much,” he said.

The afternoon grew long outside the window. Mary Frances had to be home soon. She took another sip of her coffee, thick and bitter. He might never return to California. Why would he ever return?

“I’d like your help, too,” she said. “With my book, when the time comes.”

He looked back at the floor, saying of course he would, of course, it would be his pleasure, and she hated herself for asking. It sounded as if she were taking advantage of him, and maybe all of it would come to sound like that. She had seduced a man who was in love with his wife, and everything that happened afterward bore the echo of that fact.

Now in her living room, her conversation with Tim seemed discrete. She could be here and there, knowing what Al was about to say and at the same time having no idea. She closed her eyes against Al’s shoulder, breathing the damp coal smell of his coat, and long ago in France. Part of her had lived through this already; she was just looping back again.

“Poor Tim,” she said. “Of course.”

They would move into Tim’s house after the holidays, to live with Gigi while Tim sought a divorce quietly back east. They would just say they were keeping her company while Tim was out of town, and no one would suspect otherwise.

“Too,” Al said, “there are some complications.”

“Like?”

“The kind with proper names, I suppose. It’s not my business.”

“None of this is our business, Al.”

“Tim wanted me to ask you. It was important to him that this was amongst friends.”

She wrapped her arms again around his neck. The less space she had to cover, the less hollow she felt.

“The family has a lawyer Tim’s talking to back east, and when the time comes, he and Gigi will just go to Sam Goldwyn and say what’s done is done. Once it’s all over, Goldwyn won’t care anyway.”

“Why would anybody care? It’s not like that’s the worst that happens over there.”

“Mary Frances. It’s still Gigi.”

“But it’s not.” And she realized then how completely she felt this. “It’s not Gigi any longer. It’s just not.”

She sounded as though she were about to cry, and maybe she was. Regardless of what Gigi needed the studio to think, she was now the person most likely to tell Al everything, if she was bitter, if she wanted revenge. The thought of living with her seemed at once a disaster, and the only way to keep her quiet.

Al patted her back, offering that good people made mistakes, that it was not our place to judge, and Mary Frances let him go on thinking she was upset by yet another of her friends splitting up.

“Come on now,” he said. “Look at the bright side.”

He would be tutoring after the first of the year, the children of the conductor of the Philharmonic, who lived above Laurel Canyon in the hills. Living amongst all those rich neighbors, they might pretend they could afford their lives for once.

“That’s what you like, isn’t it?” He was smiling, but Mary Frances could feel his meaning, the hard feelings underneath.

“I like our little house. I like our privacy.”

“Of course you do.” He unclasped her wrists from his neck, straightened the lapel of his coat as though she’d mussed it. “Aren’t we off to the Ranch for family lunch?”

“I mean it, Al.”

“I know. I know.”

He was finished talking, already walking away, and she knew this would burn through the afternoon with him, especially in front of her parents. Al often found it easier to put distance between them before afternoons at the Ranch, when it became so clear how tightly she still fit to her family. Today she was relieved as well. Now she had something tangible to be responsible for, which was a whole lot easier than pretending things were fine.

* * *

In the long, low-lit kitchen at the Ranch, her sister Anne looked thin and frayed. She and the baby had driven down from San Francisco, and Sean was still squirmy and drooling, a tight bundle of new energy. Anne held him in her lap and tried to spoon him oatmeal, most of it clotting on his cheeks, his waving hands. His hands were everywhere.

“Oh, Sis,” Mary Frances said. “Go take a nap. You’re exhausted.”

Anne made a sacrificing smile. “I’m fine.”

“I can watch him. Mother’s upstairs.”

Mary Frances took the spoon and rested her chin on the block next to Sean’s bowl of oatmeal. He was laughing, round and white, a baby like dough. She dipped the spoon toward his mouth once, twice, the whole thing like trying to daub honey from a pot, and Anne began to cry.

It was almost embarrassing, how fragile Anne seemed since the divorce. She dithered and sighed; she rarely had anything nice to say. Mary Frances could not imagine surviving a life where she spent so much time with her face in her hands. Perhaps it was better not to live with your mistakes, or at least not to let them out into the open for everyone else to live with.

Mary Frances snatched Sean onto her hip, oatmeal now on her blouse, in her hair, which she’d just washed and set the night before. She plugged the sink and put him in it, clothes and all. He squealed.

“Let’s give him something he might really like, Sis. What do you say? Let’s give him applesauce.”

Mary Frances handed Sean a jar and watched him feed himself, the first bite strange and tart, everything he thought about it happening right there on his face. She tried to remember the last time she’d tasted something for the first time, but that comparison failed quickly, as Sean was new, and new to everything.

“I don’t miss him,” Anne said now, and they were back to talking about her husband. Maybe they were always talking about her husband. “I don’t. I’m just so tired all the time, Dote. It’s too much.”

Mary Frances took back the jar of applesauce and watched as Sean fisted the soap toward his mouth. She didn’t miss Anne’s husband either, a brute and a boor, and thank god Anne left him, but she wasn’t sure that was what she was supposed to say now. She lifted a palmful of warm water over Sean’s head, and he sputtered, Mary Frances twitching back to keep from getting wet.

“I’ll do it,” Anne said sharply.

“It’s all right. It’s just water.”

Mary Frances tugged at the buttons on Sean’s shoulder, his wet jacket and undersuit, unpinned his diaper, the clothing slapping to a pile on the floor by her feet. She held his wrist to keep him from slipping away.

Out the kitchen window, Al sat beneath a lemon tree with an open book he was not reading in his lap. Mary Frances wanted him to look up, to see her wrestling with Sean and for it to make him laugh, but he kept looking at the book, and the moment passed.