Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Gloria was like this too, a billboard of interior thoughts, without a shred of self-protection. It must be what the camera so loved about these women. Too, she knew her lines, and how to deliver them.

“I doubt you can understand it,” Gigi said, “unless it happens to you.”

* * *

Still, Tim said, still, I love those moments where you reveal yourself. I love to hear what you want in a dinner partner, in a kitchen, your wooden spoons and copper pots. (There is a beautiful set I left at the house, undoubtedly going green. Please use them, take them. They’re yours.) You are the center in these stories. And everything about you, your wit and passion, your sensualism, your fine arched brow, is clear and true on these pages. I can close my eyes and see you now.

In the cupboards, she found the pots, French ones with heavy bottoms and a thick patina of disuse. She scrubbed them with a lemon dipped in salt, buffed them with mineral oil, arranged them on the stove: a stockpot, a large sauté, and a saucepan. She would keep them for the rest of her life.

In Last House, they are really all she needs. The newspaper people come, the magazine reporters, soon someone from the library at Harvard to take away her cartons of paper, which seems strange to do while she is still alive, but there is so much she’s glad to be rid of. They come, expecting a meal with her, the pleasures of her table such as she’s described them for some fifty years and counting. In the past year, she has made nearly three hundred meals for visitors of some professional stripe or another; she keeps a tally for the tax man at Norah’s insistence. Everyone wants their piece.

Norah has gone back home for the weekend, another grandchild soon to be born, her family still growing and expanding, still lush in a way that needs to be tended. And Mary Frances can entertain her guests alone. It’s how she prefers to meet new people these days; the labor of bringing her old life to their expectations too great. Instead, she lets them do all the heavy lifting for her. All that seems to be required is an arch of her brow, some cursing in French, and a good, honest meal.

In the deep sauté, she has made a stew: eggplant and tomatoes, onions and summer squash, a sort of ratatouille, tiella, samfina, pisto , there are as many names for it as countries, and she has stopped caring for all the names of things. She has made stew, and there are ripe peaches and cream for dessert, a few bottles of wine to choose from. She does not know when the librarians will arrive. Her marmalade cat rubs at her ankles, hungry too.

She pours him a small saucer of the cream, takes her cold vermouth to the fan-back wicker chair on the balcony that looks toward the mountains. Night will come soon enough, and her skin is so thin, she won’t be able to keep herself warm out here. But for now, she looks out across the vineyards, the thick smell of her stew wafting behind her, and she feels content to wait.

* * *

When Mary Frances saw Al get off the train, she hardly recognized him. Travel could do that to a person, and grief, but it was still shocking, the gray sag to his features, the smell of his mother’s house that clung to his clothes.

He pressed a dry kiss to her cheek. “Have you been waiting long?”

She shook her head. They made their way to the car, through the cluster and press of people coming and going, people standing around with their hands out. He let her drive, resting his head on the back of the car seat. He seemed to be balancing something that required all his concentration; he had nothing left for questions or talk or an easy expression on his face. Mary Frances could hardly bear it. These days apart made his silence feel like an accusation.

“How is your mother?” she asked, and she thought Al had not heard her, so she asked again.

“Last night I found her at the laundry sink. She’d been scrubbing my father’s sheets. Her head was stopped against the canning shelf above the faucets, sound asleep.”

“Oh, Al.”

Mary Frances reached for his hand. She thought of Rex, his ink-stained fingers prying back the flesh of an orange, his graveled laugh filling his office. He was steadfast in her thoughts, a fortress of security, but Edith could fall to pieces any minute. She felt her palm begin to sweat in Al’s and pulled away.

She drove him to the house in Laurel Canyon; he went to their bedroom and lay down atop the coverlet, his coat, his shoes still on. She stood at his elbow, her hands twisting at her skirt.

“Can I get you anything?” she said.

“I’m tired. It was a long trip.”

“A glass of juice? A cup of tea.”

“No. Thank you.”

She lingered at the bedside, and he could not think of what she wanted now.

Al’s father was the kind of sick that looked like death would be a blessing. His mouth hung open vacantly when he slept, and he slept all the time. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was frightened, and that was worse — all the years he’d comforted others, all the years he’d preached about milk and honey, but the fear was there, beneath his pallor and his dull eyes fluttering closed. He was afraid he didn’t know what came next. If Al’s father didn’t know, who would?

The whole house smelled of rot and fear and probably would forever. His mother moved constantly from room to room. She slept standing up. Herbert had hopped a boat the afternoon Al left, back to China for another tour. There seemed nothing left to do but to wait for the inevitable.

When Al woke, Mary Frances was perched on the edge of the bed, her shadow looming over him. It was nearly dark outside.

“Oh.” Al sat up. “The time.”

She looked out the window as though it had just occurred to her as well. “It’s not so late,” she said. “We could have dinner.”

Al thought of the two of them across from each other at the big table in the dining room, some carefully simple plate and full glasses of wine, maybe some music: the very antithesis of his father’s house. She would want to hear more. He remembered the feeling he used to have leaving his office at the end of the day, working his way back to her, and the weight he felt now was tenfold.

“Let’s take in a movie, shall we? Eat some candy bars and laugh.”

Relief flickered on her face, too. “Marx Brothers?”

But Night at the Opera was not playing close by, and they ended up in a movie neither one of them knew anything about. A young woman from some pastoral, daisied homeland was whisked away to the big city by a handsome, wealthy benefactor. Over time they fell in love, a fact signaled with the clasping of her hands to his heart and singing. There was lots of singing, a few jokes with a terrier named Milo, and a very happy ending. Mary Frances looked over at Al, his head lolled back against the seat and the light from the picture catching the sharp parts of his profile. He laughed when he was meant to, and the darkness took care of the rest.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, and Gigi had been out all weekend. Mary Frances worked in the garden, Al on the patio behind her, turning the pages of the paper. They had been outside for the front page and half the city section, a sheaf of iris blades gathered at her knee. He was not really reading; the sound of the newspaper clapping back against his body from the breeze marked the time.

“Al,” Mary Frances said, “can you take these for me?” Her basket was full of clippings from the garden.

“Another way to earn our keep?”

“I enjoy it,” she said.

She enjoyed everything. Around the corner of the house, he dumped the basket of Mary Frances’s clippings by the rubbish pile and caught the flash of that long blue Hudson. He edged closer to see Gigi and her stuntman. Gigi lingered at his car door, her pale hand to her throat, and suddenly it seemed pornographic, that she had to linger here, in her old life, house, with himself and Mary Frances looking on, linger at the car door, so desperately.