Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Do it, Al thought, please just do it, kiss her, something. But instead he watched the two of them for full minutes, staring at each other.

If everybody saw, could he and Mary Frances just go home?

He walked back to the patio. Mary Frances was still kneeling by the flower bed. She could kneel for the longest time.

“Gigi’s back,” he said, and she looked up, startled. She brushed her hands on her skirt, faint green streaks left behind.

“I’ll make supper,” Mary Frances said. “Did she bring a friend?”

And because Al was not himself, because Al was looking for a fight or a distraction from one, he took long strides back around the side of the house and called across the yard. “Gigi, dear. Bring your friend for dinner.”

* * *

John Weld was a nice man. He was tall and tan, had won swimming contests when he lived in Kansas City. His teeth were straight and white. He came from a newspaper family, had worked in Paris after the war, and wrote screenplays and novels. There was plenty for Mary Frances and Al to talk with him about.

And yet they didn’t. John Weld folded his long legs over themselves, and Al jingled the change in his pockets, and Gigi smiled, drinking her vermouth too fast. John Weld was not the one responsible for all of them being in these circumstances; they were adults and had made their own decisions, yet there he was, in all his bright and shining strength. And he looked half Tim’s age.

“It’s a lovely home you have, Gigi,” he said finally.

Al stopped his pacing. “Oh, you haven’t had the tour?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Let me tell you about this house, then. Are you a fan of architecture?”

The house had been built in the last five years and wasn’t architecturally significant from its neighbors, really, but Al started in with a history of Laurel Canyon as a development, Wonderland Park and the trackless trolley, which didn’t even run anymore. He was lecturing. He had John Weld standing at the patio doors and looking out into the garden as if the view were a mappable one. Gigi stared at the Parrish painting of Tim and his sister that hung above the piano, looking bored or desperate, it was hard to tell.

“I don’t think he plans to buy the place, Al,” Mary Frances said.

“Everything’s for sale, for the right price. Isn’t it, John?”

Mary Frances excused herself to the kitchen.

Supper for two was now supper for four. She pulled the rabbit from its brine, heated a lump of salt pork in Tim’s copper pan. She plugged the sink to fill with water. Al followed moments later.

“I was being funny,” she said. She kept her voice light and even, but she did not look at him, and she did not laugh. “What possessed you?”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his face, stared at a spot on the linoleum. “I was angry. I felt like embarrassing her.”

“She’s not embarrassed, Al. What are you talking about?”

He didn’t answer.

Mary Frances turned back to the stove. He could no sooner embarrass Gigi than drown a fish. She could hear her laughter in the other room, the rattle of ice in a glass, and low talk, and Mary Frances thought of how long it had been since she’d been to a dinner party. She missed the sounds of people gathering for an evening.

She turned the flame up under the rabbit and gave it a good shot of brandy, poured a quick glass for herself. Some stock, more herbs; she put a lid on her casserole to simmer and went back to the living room.

Gigi and John sat close on the barkcloth love seat, the record skipping on the player.

Mary Frances picked up her cocktail, her resolve slumping.

“What happened to Al?” she said.

* * *

Al had gone to bed. He had meant only to rest his eyes, but the thin afternoon light was leaching away, and he began to think of his father, their last conversation, which had happened in his dim bedroom at the back of the parsonage in Palo Alto. He had wanted his father to tell him something profound. But the drugs he took for pain made his mind glassy, his mouth dry. Speaking was a challenge, and he had trouble holding his head still, the room stale and airless, the edge of the bed sagging beneath Al’s weight. Finally, it was just his father’s hand lifting from the sheets in his direction, a kind of benediction, and the request for a glass of water before he left.

In the other room, Mary Frances was flirting, telling one of her stories — he could hear the race in her voice if not the words. His father had wanted him to marry one of the Lassiter girls from his congregation, Alice or Annie, a girl with milkmaid skin and round shoulders, a girl who’d never finished high school and never left California and never had a boyfriend before she was introduced to Al.

He didn’t regret marrying Mary Frances. But he was filled with regret now nonetheless, a great current of it pulling him, and there was nothing to do but let it have its way.

“What are you doing?” Mary Frances stood at the end of the bed. “Al?”

“I’m tired, Mary Frances.”

“But you can’t leave. Dinner’s almost ready, and then we’ll sit down, and what will I tell them?”

He didn’t open his eyes but turned onto his side, wrapping his arms around a pillow. She was still talking to him, still shrill, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t getting up. He wasn’t going out there, and she couldn’t browbeat him into it. His conscience was clear. Sleep rolled him like a thief.

* * *

Mary Frances sat at the piano bench in the living room and stacked her pages on the music rest as though she might begin to play, and in a low voice, she read aloud. If there was a way to trim a line from a paragraph, a word from a line, a simpler tense, a clearer example, she drew her marks and began the piece again. Soon her pages were covered with notations, and she could recite them with her eyes closed. They began to feel like rhythms more than words; they began to feel smooth.

She opened Tim’s studio. It didn’t look as though Al had been there since he’d come back, and he would be tutoring all afternoon. She turned fresh paper into the typewriter and began to type. She wasn’t hiding what she was doing, but neither did she want to have this conversation again, about what belonged to whom.

The front door opened and shut. She had three more pages to type, and she beat the keys to go as quickly as she could, as if that would make a difference.

“What are you doing?” Al said.

She stood from the typewriter and gathered her pages. She was acting as if she’d been caught, but she couldn’t make herself stop. He crossed the room to his manuscript, still stacked beside the typewriter, where it had been since they moved in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I needed the typewriter.”

“This isn’t for you to read, Mary Frances.”

“I didn’t read it. I wouldn’t.”

He seemed to be talking to the room, to himself. “Of course not, dear. I should never have left it out. It’s not for reading. It’s not for anyone else.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He didn’t answer her, looking around the room for a place to tuck his manuscript away. For the thousandth time since Al returned from Palo Alto, Mary Frances thought how weary he looked, as though something in his person were dimming. She should be more careful with him. She slipped her pages into a manila envelope and left the studio, closing the door behind her.

Al sat in the chair before the typewriter, still clutching the stack of manuscript. He could not account for how uncomfortable it made him to find Mary Frances sitting at his typewriter, or when he’d come to think of it as his typewriter, but he felt the violation in his bones. This was serious work, the kind you did alone, not some glorified travelogue or recipe card. He would have to make Mary Frances understand.