Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

“Did you two have a fight?” Gigi asked.

Mary Frances was knitting, a long tube of lace and counting. “We didn’t fight,” she said.

“Okay. It’s just that—”

“Yes, I know. It will pass.”

“Maybe you need to do something to make him jealous.”

“That has always seemed to me the most ridiculous idea. Don’t men get jealous well enough on their own?”

“I like a little nudge once in a while.”

Gigi’s hair was slicked back tight against her scalp and fringed at the nape of her neck. She’d been wearing a wig; Mary Frances could see the scrim of glue along her forehead, the dark gloss of stage paint still beneath her eyes.

“You look like Clara Bow,” she said

Gigi sighed and folded herself into a seat at the table. “Everybody looks like somebody else these days.

“You sound so jaded.”

“It’s just not fun anymore, all the rules and regulations, and everybody’s nervous. Somebody follows the girls around the set with a bathrobe, like what happens on the set might get us canned. I think I’m done with being an actress anyway.”

“You’re joking.”

“I think it’s time for a change. Don’t you?”

No, she didn’t. It had always been a comfort for her, to think about the things that couldn’t be undone, that only moved forward. And here they’d spent the summer, she thought, salvaging the one thing Gigi wanted from her old life, her good standing with the studio. The whole awkward press of the summer, for nothing. Mary Frances felt dizzy.

“What will you do?” she said.

“We’ll marry. We’ll move away. I’ll take another name.”

“Your given name, it’s Katherine?”

“John calls me Katy. Katy Weld.”

Mary Frances rolled the name in her mouth, but could not bring herself to say it. She remembered Tim and their night together again, how he’d brought her a spool of thread to fix her slip, and a pink satin pincushion embroidered with initials not Gigi’s. “Her name is really Katherine,” he’d said. “Her brother called her Gigi. Not really her brother, even. She was adopted.”

He’d watched Mary Frances make her fast, looping stitches, one ankle tucked beneath her hips and the wet spot of what they’d done darkening the sheets between her legs. The sun was not yet up; it was the longest night she could remember, and she was grateful for that and anxious at the same time.

“What will you say?” he asked.

“I’m a decent seamstress.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

She didn’t answer him, breaking the thread against her white teeth. “I’m driving out to Laguna for the weekend. It’s been months since I’ve seen the ocean. Would you like to come?”

He told her no, he was sorry, he couldn’t get away, even as he took the pincushion from her hands and eased her back again.

And even now, all these months later, the air drew tight around her like a robe to think about it. She had to physically shake herself free, and only to arrive back here, across the table from Gigi. She could not believe she’d allowed herself to do the things she’d done — that night, this summer, any of it.

“Christ,” Gigi said. “I need a shower.”

And when she stood, there was that drawing tall of her limbs, the pull and lift of her shoulders, her chin, the crown of her head as though she were a deck of cards stacked into place. She knew Mary Frances was watching her. Could she stop being an actress? Could Mary Frances stop being a writer? Was it like stopping being somebody’s wife? If there was one thing she doubted she was capable of, it was knowing when, and how, to stop.

* * *

Tim had read her story about the fifty million snails: I remembered a summer in the south of France, the whole coast beset with heat, a kind of dust and burn. There was nothing for it but to lie in the darkened room, or brave it. One afternoon, walking outside Hyère just to feel the air move, I saw peasants harvesting grapes in baskets on their backs. They had set a stand of grass on fire, or maybe it had combusted in the heat, but as I came across these bent, brown people, they were gathering the roasted snails from the ashes for their lunch.

He would be leaving soon for England with his sister. Perhaps they would go to France too; he had been thinking a lot about France lately, because of her. He would give the full count of her pieces to Claire so she might read them while they traveled. It will be harder to tell you so while I am gone, but you know my thoughts never seem to stop circling the things you write. If only we could talk without our skulls and fingers in the way.

She took his note to the patio and stretched out in the chaise to read it again. She wanted to have seen that roadside with him, to have tasted the ashy snails. Her imagination was without distraction; she wondered if she could keep this temperature if she saw him face to face.

We might have spent the day together in Hyère, in the shuttered afternoon of your rooms, she wrote. She untied her blouse from where she’d hitched it around her rib cage, and in her mind, he watched as she loosened herself further from her clothes, the room green with heat now, a jungle, the slatted light cast across the floor. It was only the bed and the room; she conjured them slowly, not yet that sunbaked field, that roadside set on fire. I can imagine it , she wrote, from what you tell me here. I find of late I can imagine almost anything you say, and everything you don’t.

She could imagine them meeting again, and their days together that would follow, their lives together full of writing and talk and skin against skin, their lives full and yet fitting neatly into her head now, complete in miniature. She could live their lives in an afternoon’s time, in an hour or two, in her dreams, in private, and she had no expectations beyond that. This little bit was enough. Or perhaps it was that more seemed terrifying.

* * *

A telegram came, first thing in the morning, the dew still painting the slate of the front walk. Mary Frances answered the door, and there was the boy and his bike and cap, so much shiny red. He looked at Mary Frances’s shoes as he held out the ink-blue envelope, so intently that Mary Frances looked at her shoes as well. The lace on her oxfords was frayed. Her fingers trembled. A telegram. She scanned the window for her name, and her hopes fell, once for herself and again for Al.

She called back into the house and went to fetch a nickel for a tip.

When Al saw her with the telegram, he turned around, back down the hall to their bedroom. Mary Frances followed. He was packing a suitcase.

“Al,” she said, but he didn’t stop what he was doing. “I’m so sorry.”

She laid the telegram on the bed beside his case, but he did not open it or even pick it up. His face was brittle, and she felt a wave of shame.

“Shall I call the station?”

“No.”

“I’ll make you something to eat, then.”

“Jesus, Mary Frances.”

“All right,” she said.

She left him for the kitchen. She sliced rye bread and split links of sausages for frying, cracked an egg and let it bubble against the meat. She toasted the bread and spread it thickly with mustard Gloria had brought them, good Dijon mustard, and Mary Frances knew she must have paid a fortune for it, and what a strange thought that was to occupy her now.

Al’s chair scraped out from the table behind her; she could sense him there, wanting and not wanting her. He stood buttoning his collar, brushing at his shirtfront, his fingers moving over himself of their own accord. She split a grapefruit and juiced it into a ruby-footed glass, poured coffee, and set it all in front of him.

“Okay,” she said.