Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

“Eat, eat,” he said.

She took the bite. It was tender and sweet; it felt clean in her mouth. She made a sound, and the fishmonger echoed her.

“What you like?” he said, and she gestured at all of it.

* * *

There was no coffee in the pot when Al got out of bed, and the house seemed empty, the women gone. He cracked ice into a glass and filled it from the tap; there was nothing else for breakfast. The ice tasted rotten, and he poured the glass back down the sink.

He caught the flutter of a hem on the terrace.

He had not seen Gigi since before Christmas, before all this broke out, and he walked to the glass, expecting some kind of markable change in her. Perhaps she would seem less attractive because of what he knew now; it was not the sort of thing he knew about very many women. After Mary Frances came back to bed last night, he had lain awake, trying to imagine the tenor of their conversation in the kitchen from the sharp tones he’d overheard. It embarrassed him to be this curious, but it didn’t really matter if he was embarrassed in front of Gigi anymore. After all this was over, they would never see each other again.

He opened the French door. “Good morning?”

“Yes,” Gigi said. It was all she seemed capable of. Her frame was draped in a kimono that fell low over one small breast, she wore dark glasses, her hair wrapped back in a turban. She made no move to cover herself, and Al looked at the ground. There was an open bottle of aspirin there, a soda siphon, and a bottle of Peychaud’s bitters.

“Oh, dear,” Al said. “That sort of evening?”

Gigi sighed and turned, the kimono shifting. Actresses. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and waited to be dismissed. Sometimes, polite conversation eluded him; he settled for countdowns instead, backward in his head from ten.

“Al,” Gigi said. She pushed her dark glasses on top of her head. Tired, without her makeup, her face still looked like porcelain. “My father died shortly after Tim and I were married.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I hadn’t seen him in years, and I didn’t go east for the service. I didn’t even hear about it for two weeks after it happened. Heart condition.”

Her voice had the faintest tremble in it. He leaned closer to hear her.

“Anyway. Tim told me you were having troubles, and I just—” She tried again. “I just wanted…”

“Thank you, Gigi,” Al said.

Her hand skimmed his pant leg. Al stepped back.

“I know Mary Frances must be such a comfort now. She’s so close to her family, I’m sure she understands. But if you want to talk, or if you need anything.”

“Thank you, Gigi. Thank you.” His fingers beat time on the frame of the French door.

She studied him a long moment as if sizing him for a suit, then looked away, waved her hand. He felt, at last, dismissed.

* * *

His papers and typewriter were just as he had left them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling somebody had been touching his things. He missed his study in Eagle Rock; he had grown used to working there, and now this house would be full of distractions it would take weeks to rise above. Gigi on the terrace, half dressed, Gigi’s friends — they were all so young, and lately youth only made him feel impatient.

He needed to clear his darker thoughts, like Tim. He needed to go somewhere, but Mary Frances had taken the car.

He left on foot. The winter sky was angry and gray, and the air damp, his head bent to watch his long strides, one after the other. He enjoyed the rhythm of a long walk, and let his mind loose to it. He could walk all day.

Up into the hills, he walked to Otto Klemperer’s house, the man whose children he’d be tutoring. Without thinking about it, he knocked, and as though he were expected, the servant led him into the ballroom, where a black-coated man bent to the piano.

“I am sorry, Mr. Fisher,” Klemperer said, without raising his head from his work. “You find me on a day I am composing.”

“Please excuse me. I was in the neighborhood—”

Klemperer held up his hand. “A moment, Mr. Fisher. Feng, please show Mr. Fisher to the…” He waved his fingers. “The veranda, yes? Lunch, Mr. Fisher?”

“Well, yes. Thank you.”

Al was starving. He hadn’t really eaten since yesterday. He followed Feng through the French doors, the veranda in the shade of an enormous Morgan fig tree. Below, a rippled swimming pool; in the distance, the reservoir, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, as though he might forget where he was.

Feng brought him a cup of coffee, the door to the house like the opening of a vacuum, music rushing out to meet the air and then sealed in again. This was a familiar rhythm too; Al thought of those mornings at the Café de Paris, the way time accelerated and collapsed around his poem, his work. This is how it had felt, if not sounded: a day composing. He could have those days again. He took his notebook from his back pocket, his pencil to a blank white page.

He drank another cup of coffee before Klemperer joined him, and Al left his notebook folded open, a mark of who he was, a writer.

“Thank you, Mr. Fisher, for your help with my children.”

“Of course. I look forward to meeting them.”

“And you are living in the area now? Your letter said you were moving?”

“Yes. My wife and I are staying with friends for the next few months.”

Otto Klemperer lit a cigarette, his sharp face, his round black eyeglasses bearing down. He stared at Al in such a way that Al kept talking.

“The wife of a friend, she’s in the movie business. He is… traveling.”

Al felt the stupidity of this topic settling around them now, Klemperer’s first impression of him, the tutor to whom he would trust his children.

“Ah,” Klemperer said. “I have been married for twenty-two years. Traveling is often a part of life.”

He smiled then, a quick, well-guarded flare, and Al felt welcomed into a kind of confidence he was not prepared for. He had always valued his relationship with older men, the precision of their opinions. Tim was like that for him, a good friend but also counsel. He missed him now in a way he had not yet permitted himself to understand.

Feng came with the plates from the kitchen, slender curls of ham wrapped around white asparagus, dark bread, a soft, runny cheese, and a bottle of pinot blanc , three glasses. He opened the wine and poured it, Klemperer looking back toward the house.

“So,” he said with a clap of his hands. “We will not wait. Enjoy, Mr. Fisher.”

And carefully, with exacting care, Al watched Klemperer eat every bite on his plate, and then every bite on his wife’s. He drank her wine, he discussed Amelia Earhart and how she had just landed the first flight from Hawaii to Oakland, and did Al know Oakland, and did he know Amelia Earhart? Klemperer did, and he liked her intelligence. His daughter, Britta, who was twelve, loved to fly. Christoph, eight, loved milk shakes and the idea of being buried in a tomb with all his earthly possessions. Klemperer wanted to buy them a dog while they were here in California, a big hairy dog. What were the hairiest kinds of dogs in America?

Al looked out over the deep green swimming pool and answered Klemperer’s questions: he did not know Earhart, he’d never flown in a plane, he liked Airedales, but they were more fuzzy than hairy and they probably had those in Germany as well. The sun was warm, the food good, and Feng seemed to magically appear whenever Al’s glass was empty. This life seemed so evenhanded — vital and civilized at the same time. Al was very comfortable.

“May I ask you a personal question, Mr. Klemperer?”

Klemperer crossed his fork atop his knife and sat back in his chair. “Of course.”