Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

“I think that’s the modern times part, Doris,” Gigi said. “I think revenge is just old-fashioned.”

“But it’s human nature.”

“What isn’t?” And they laughed.

Tim had been right; they loved their scandals: who was too fat, too thin, and what that might mean about their habits, and what would happen if the studio found out. Once a subject was open, it always seemed open. Nan was having an affair with someone famous; they referred to him only as the King, and with a great deal of whispering and giggle. They all thought Tim was out of town.

It wasn’t long before Gloria heard that the Fishers had moved to Laurel Canyon.

She appeared late one afternoon, still wearing her backless lace gown from whatever scenes she’d shot that day, its fishtail hem dragging on the slate. She was stunning. One of the girls in the living room gasped when Mary Frances opened the door.

Gloria took Mary Frances’s hands and kissed her cheeks. Her stage makeup was frighteningly dark, as if her features had all been underlined.

“I want you to move in with me,” Gloria whined. “What do I have to do to get that? Al?”

“Al’s gone to see his father in Palo Alto.” Mary Frances slipped her arm into Gloria’s and turned her toward the living room.

“So it’s just us girls?” She shot a gleaming smile over her shoulder, and Gigi seemed to wilt.

The actresses fell away for her entrance. She swept into the love seat, her skirt flung wide, perching forward for a cigarette from the box on the table. She waited for someone to light a match, and Nan fumbled through her purse.

“Would you like some coffee?” Mary Frances said. “I was just going to make some. Coffee?”

Gloria was suspicious already; her imagination followed only one direction, down a path she’d taken herself many times and so was familiar with the scenery. When Mary Frances returned from the kitchen, she was still digging at Gigi, Doris and Nan hanging on every word.

“He went home to Delaware without you?” she said. “Are you working? I mean, that’s a long time for you to be working.”

“And Al did the same thing to me,” Mary Frances said. “Just last week, he took the train north by himself and said I could keep Gigi company.”

“Well. It’s an epidemic!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned it together. I haven’t heard from Al once, but Tim and Gigi talk every day. I’ve never seen a man more in love.”

“They are adorable ,” said Gloria.

“Oh, more than that, I’d say.” Mary Frances looked at Gigi, her face coloring over her cup. “I’m jealous.”

“Who isn’t,” said Gloria, and then, “I heard the fixers had to drag somebody’s wife out of the House of Francis yesterday.”

Nan looked nervous. “Whose wife?”

And they rolled on to other matters, finger waves, and how to lose five pounds in three days, and a woman downtown who fit corsets as if she were giving you a whole new rib cage. Gigi smiled and laughed and flattered Gloria, but when Mary Frances returned to the kitchen with the coffeepot, she’d followed her inside.

“That Gloria,” she said. “I never—”

Mary Frances said, “Gloria has been my friend for as long as I can remember.”

Gigi looked small and suddenly tired, dark circles beneath her eyes beneath her makeup. Everyone had lives they lived outside themselves, and altogether separate ones within.

“I’m sorry,” Gigi said quietly.

Mary Frances understood then that maybe their fight was over, debts paid. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

“Show me what you’re doing here. Even I can learn how to make coffee.”

Mary Frances measured beans into the grinder and turned the handle. Gigi filled the pot. In the other room, Gloria’s spangled laughter led the others, and neither woman found herself particularly eager to return.

* * *

Mary Frances sent Tim the piece about Catherine de Medici and waited. She no longer pretended she knew what she was doing; her sense of reason seemed to have evaporated in favor of another letter, and then the next. The postman arrived in the morning and returned most afternoons; she knew his schedule by heart, shuffling through the envelopes before she’d even closed the door. She wanted her exchange with Tim to be as immediate as what she carried in her head, but a week went by, ten days, the time it took a letter to travel all the way across the country and another one to travel back, and there was little for her to do but imagine what he might have written, and then imagine it another way again.

Your writing is beautiful, Mary Frances, and it lingers with me long after I have put your pages away. I planted a small garden in the cold frame here and went this morning to work in it. The seedlings are still tender, but by late spring, I should have lettuces and peas, a radish or two. Your essay was on my mind, and I thought of how in France there was a time a woman might have been as flattered by a bouquet of lettuces as she would have been with roses. I read the piece a second time, and I think you might—

Enclosed was her essay and Tim’s blue notes across it, careful and precise, a record of his time, his interest in her. A second reading, she thought. At the end of his letter, he thanked her for sending her work and asked for more, dear god, more.

* * *

She found Gigi on the terrace, basking. She wore a bird’s-egg blue hostess dress, the organza tie at the waist flailing against the flagstones like something that had lost its wings. She had slices of cucumber over both eyes. Mary Frances asked her if she wanted the bitters.

“Just tired,” she said. “But aren’t you sweet. I was out late with Nan. It seems she’s making a surprise move to San Francisco.”

“She has a picture there?”

“A nine-month engagement, so to speak.”

“Oh.”

Gigi rolled her head along the back of the chaise, letting the cucumber fall into her open palm. She looked at Mary Frances from underneath her long, long lashes.

“She’s Catholic. And he’s married, maybe to two women, it’s hard to say. Nan’s lucky, really. The fixers only come into the picture if you’re worth something to the studio. Otherwise you have to work these things out for yourself.”

They were resourceful girls on the whole, the studio girls — they knew how and where to get things done, and when the fixers wouldn’t help, they helped each other, getting money together or a place to stay, the name of a doctor in another town. Circles were small. A dozen pretty girls with long legs and good voices, and one became Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, and everyone else was like Nan. So when someone did pick you, took you aside and told you that you were more than pretty and long-legged and good, it was hard not to get carried away.

Mary Frances thought of Tim’s letter, what a beautiful writer he said she was. It was easy to say those things from the other side of the country. It was easy to send them, to send anything on paper.

Gigi said, “I don’t think Tim can father children. It’s the kind of thing we used to talk about on the train, late at night with the other girls, when we talked about troubles. I didn’t think Tim and I would ever have a family. But I’m certainly thankful not to have one now.”

“Is that why you left him? Do you want to have children?”

Gigi faltered, then pretended otherwise. Mary Frances could see her draw a sense of gravity over herself, her posture in the chair shifting, her face veiled with something new.

“It was hard for me to make the decision to leave Dillwyn,” she said.

She never called him Dillwyn. Mary Frances pressed her hand against her temple, and Gigi went on.

“I think John was even surprised I did it. We wanted to be together, of course, but it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible until it was.”