Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Across from the workspace, she’d hung a painting of Tim’s that Al could not make heads or tails of. The color seemed off, sour, garish. What had Mary Frances liked about it?

He spooled a clean page into the machine, turned the last page open to see what he’d been doing, turned another and another. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried to write. Gently, he put his head down on the keys and closed his eyes, exhausted. He’d forgotten to tell her about the tickets Klemperer had given them for the show.

* * *

Al put his hand to the small of Mary Frances’s back and guided her to their seats. The night and the canyon rose up around them, the bowl of sky full of stars. The crowd pressed in, its hum enough to take the place of conversation, and Mary Frances was relieved not to have to try. His hand slipped away, she smiled at him, and they turned their attention to the band shell below, lit from inside, a hive.

A woman stepped forward on the stage in a long black gown, her eyes fast upon her conductor. Her white skin and red curls, the delicate way she arched to the music drawing up in her — even at this distance, she was beautiful. Klemperer raised his baton, and the orchestra let loose its opening plumes of sound. The redheaded woman opened her mouth and sang.

Mary Frances had loved opera since she was a child, and tonight the music unfurled its full way up the sides of the canyon, notes rose and fell, stumbled, rolled and then spun off under their own sail into something unexpected and fast. Her own breath came fast in her chest with it. She listened often to recordings, but she’d never heard sound like this before.

Al leaned down and whispered in her ear; it was all she could do to keep from snatching herself away.

“Yes,” she said, and she smiled tightly. “Beautiful.”

The first aria ended, she glanced up, and he was gone.

Perhaps he hadn’t whispered about the music, perhaps he’d said something else altogether — she hadn’t paid attention. She gathered her sweater and purse and slipped out of their row, back up the rough-hewn stairs to the parking lot. She would retrace their steps and find him. He wouldn’t just leave her.

In the parking lot, Al leaned against the Chrysler, smoking a cigarette. The soprano’s voice vaulted all around them, the bright lights from the band shell pinking the sky. Mary Frances felt suddenly less sure of herself.

“Al?”

“I said I’d be right back.”

“Are you all right?”

He didn’t say anything, jetting a stream of smoke from his nose.

“Do you want to go home?”

“Home?” He laughed. “We told Gigi we’d be out until late. God knows what we’d walk back in on. That’s the interesting thing about this life we’re leading, darling wife — we can’t just change our plans. We can’t quit holding up our corner of the sheet.”

She leaned against the car fender. Al was frayed and brittle, and she knew some of the things that weighed on him, but she could not bring herself to say the words father, job, poem , or even to think of the rest of it. She leaned next to him, and waited for him to go on.

“I feel so trapped,” he said.

The orchestra began a new song, but Mary Frances knew they would not be returning to their seats. And too, this was a kind of call and response; Al needed her to say the next thing.

“Come on. If you’re ready to go, we go.”

She let herself into the car, and Al turned to watch her, stubbing out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe. He needed her bluster in these moments; he needed her not to care about propriety and rules and manners as much as he did. He needed her to act, and yes, it felt good to do something right.

They found the driveway empty, the house lit up. At the dining room table, dinner had been served. The candlesticks placed, napkins still tented neatly, a bowl of lemon-colored roses in the center, and dear god, Gigi had cooked. But the plates were hardly touched, as if the meal were still waiting for grace. One bite taken from a lamb chop, squarely cut away with knife and fork, the slender frenched bones, the pink skin of new potatoes, thickly waxed with butter. Mary Frances plucked one and ate it in two bites. Good food, wasted on new lovers.

She gathered the plates into the kitchen, wiping the melt from the fridge and setting things to rights, just for something to do with her hands.

“Don’t worry about that,” Al said. “Gigi will get it. She’ll be home soon.”

They both knew that wasn’t true.

“Do you remember,” Mary Frances said, “how we used to celebrate the tiniest thing with dinner out? Our one-month anniversaries at Aux Trois Faisons, the gifts you brought me every Thursday.”

Al looked at her, a strained kind of melancholy on his face. “Of course.”

Aux Trois Faisons had been the first truly French restaurant they loved, the place they learned to order, and eat, together, all those years ago in Dijon. Mary Frances found her notebook in her purse and a pen.

“What are you doing?” Al said.

Mary Frances looked up from her notebook. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re writing that down?”

“Yes.”

Al shook his head. “Honestly,” he said. “How can you use such things.”

Mary Frances finished her thought. Use was an interesting word, the word for tools, talents, whores. She wanted to say, At least I’m using something , but she looked at his face, and she couldn’t.

“It’s just my notebook, Al. I don’t want to forget.”

“Ah,” he said. “I doubt you’re at risk for that.”

In bed, they read their novels, Al with a pencil in his hand and his own notebook open on his lap. She couldn’t concentrate and studied the side of his face: his sandy, ruffled hair, the true lines of his features still so boyish.

“I’m sorry you’re unhappy,” she said.

He made a dismissive sound, not lifting his eyes from his page. It was a frustrating book he was reading, and somehow he’d managed to read the last stanza three times. He snapped the book closed. Maybe he would quit reading, too.

He hadn’t read Mary Frances’s essays; he had no idea what they were about really, beyond food, eating, dinner parties. But he knew she’d been sending her manuscript to Tim. He watched her checking for the mail, her eyes always flicking to the door, the quick way she jumped from her chair. He knew she was waiting for some kind of verdict. And he knew he’d made it impossible for it to come from him.

“Al,” she said, “are you awake? I was thinking we could go to the reservoir tomorrow for a swim. It might be a nice day. Al?”

“Yes, dear?”

“How about a swim tomorrow?”

It was as though she’d handed him a teaspoon and a coffee can, asked him to dig the reservoir himself. He settled farther into the bed, making the same grunt of adjustment he’d heard from his father all his life.

“Whatever you’d like,” he said.

* * *

The Santa Anas came whipping through the canyon from the high desert like something on horseback, dragging the smell of fire, dust, leaden heat behind, bearing down upon the three of them, sometimes four, in the little white house in the hills. Al left for the Klemperers in a pair of mirrored sunglasses he’d found in one of Tim’s drawers, returning hours later chapped to the bone, a fern of sweat blooming on the back of his shirt. Lunch was soup and crackers, ham and cheese, sometimes just Al standing over the sink with an orange, Mary Frances at the table with a cup of tea. She fit sentence to sentence, paragraph to the next while she mopped the floor, made the beds. She would not use the typewriter in front of him again if she could help it, christ.

The newspaper said the winds made people do crazy things, made them violent and nervous and sleepless and sad. Al read the articles aloud from the front page: this woman in Racine strangled her cat, this father disappeared, this girl was beaten and pushed from a moving car, that girl threw herself into the sea. The canyon on the other side of the reservoir was on fire. After he left for the afternoon, Mary Frances typed her headful of paragraphs, as surely as if she were taking dictation.