Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

He bent over his plate. His collar had been badly pressed, and she reached to smooth the crease. A crease like that, anyway, there would be no fixing it without water and an iron, without starting all over again. She was crying now.

“I’ll check the train,” she said.

“We’ll take the car,” he said.

“Of course.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She had not been particularly close to Al’s father, and she studied her tears now for some sense of what they were for: Al’s pain, of course, and his distance from her, which had everything and nothing to do with what he was going through now. The room was hot and airless; Mary Frances turned to shut off the broiler before it caught fire. There was nothing to do but pack their things, and go.

* * *

The driveway of the Fishers’ house was full of cars, and women in solemn gray and navy flanked the porch, older women practiced at this kind of ministering, and Mary Frances felt for just a moment jealous at their ease, their graceful presence. Clara’s roses lined the drive, and one woman held a basket and shears, carefully clipping rose upon rose for an arrangement. Al nodded to her, to the other people waiting outside, and Mary Frances understood him to be home. He had been the right reverend’s son here, and now he was the right reverend’s son come to pay his respects.

He opened her door for her, and Mary Frances could hear his mother at the piano inside. She had played all her life, and beautifully, even now.

Suddenly, Mary Frances thought of her courtship, how she’d told Al she’d live in a piano box with a man if she’d loved him enough. He must have thought then of his mother’s piano, of Brahms and Mozart, and not the blithe, blustery girl before him. A piano box, she remembered saying it.

Al took her arm again and introduced her to the women, the endless ropes of them, by the names of their husbands. She wondered how he did it; the Fishers had moved to Palo Alto only after she and Al were married. These were not women he’d grown up with, but maybe versions of the same, from another town.

In the parlor, Al’s mother rose from the piano and kissed Mary Frances’s cheeks, her own cool and chapped, as though she’d been running in the wind.

“I am so grateful you came, dear,” she said. “Al needs you by his side.”

She looked then at her son with a kind of pain Mary Frances had never seen before. Al’s head bent, his body slackened, and for the first time since she arrived, Mary Frances felt as if he were actually present, and it was horrible to stand there next to him and not know what to do.

She began to cry.

Clara patted her back and cooed to her, some of the women flocking close now and patting too, and Mary Frances felt so foolish, so greedy.

“The room in the back,” Clara whispered. “Al will take your things, and you can freshen up. There are so many people here.”

She said it as if they would need to be organized, arranged, but all around her the women bustled with their own discrete jobs, filling, fluffing, sweeping away. She was being kind, trying to make Mary Frances feel needed even at a time like this.

Mary Frances followed Al through the parlor down the hallway, his long frame seeming to fill all the space in front of her. At every doorway, a cluster of the mourning women, and somewhere in the house Mary Frances did not want to look, the body rested.

Al closed the door and sat on the edge of the tall iron-frame bed, one of Clara’s coiled rag rugs at his feet. Mary Frances stood before him. He reached for her wrist, but did not direct her closer or away. She wished for something to say, but nothing came.

Al sighed. “You smell like smoke.”

“I smoke.”

“Not here.”

His face tipped back then, and he appraised her, cool, remote. He took his handkerchief from his pocket and brought it to her mouth, blotted the red of her lipstick, turning the same careful attention to the print it made on the cloth. He folded a clean, white square over it and returned the handkerchief to his pocket.

“Not today,” he said.

What might have seemed funny at any other time now resounded between them, as sharp and sure as a slap to her cheek, and Mary Frances reeled backward in her heels.

“Al,” she said.

His thin smile fought to turn it, and she let it go. This dying, this end, was like a klieg light. It made everything clear.

* * *

Driving back to Los Angeles, Al announced he no longer wanted to teach at Occidental. They had no choice, of course, they needed the money to live on, but he was through with that, as soon as he could be.

“I understand,” she said. “You need some time now.”

“It’s not about time.”

“Then grief, Al. I understand.”

“What do you do,” Al said, “that you would rather not?”

The silence hung between them bitterly. She seemed so oblivious to her good fortune, her entire life of relative ease. It was more than he could stand right now.

She said, “Gigi told me she would be leaving the studio anyway. She says she and John Weld are going to get married, and that she’s done with acting.”

Gigi was another thing he could not deal with anymore, the way she required an audience. There was something wrong with her that Tim was lucky to have slipped; he was only now realizing that. Perhaps these things happened for a good reason sometimes. Perhaps all this was happening for a good reason.

“You could have your study back, in Eagle Rock,” she said.

“Yes,” Al said. “The study.”

“We’ll go back to how it always was,” she said. “Couldn’t we?”

He glanced over at her and reached across the seat for her hand.

“Oh, let’s stop in town for dinner,” she said. “Let’s go to Don’s. I’ve got some extra money tucked away in here.”

She began digging through her purse. She wanted a drink. She wanted to be in a crowd, not to be alone with her husband, not to have to talk so much. She wanted to stop the car and call another couple to meet them, but days like this before, the number to call would have been Tim and Gigi’s.

“We’ll find something else,” she said. “We’ll go away again. We’re good at that.”

“I think we should adopt a child.”

Mary Frances stopped digging in her purse and looked at him. It was the closest he had ever come to admitting they might not be able to have one naturally.

“I think we should find something else, and I think it should be a family of our own. It’s time, Mary Frances. It’s time to put away our distractions and live our lives.”

His voice was even and firm, his eyes fixed ahead as he said it. It was insane, of course. He’d just finished saying he didn’t want to work the only steady job he’d had in the course of their marriage, but he was ready for a child. He was in so much pain, he wasn’t making sense. She would have said anything to change the subject.

“I’ll think about it, Al. Perhaps you’re right.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m relieved to hear it.”

He put his hands back on the wheel, and they rode into Los Angeles with the words still vibrating between them, too charged to continue or touch again.

At Don’s, Al ordered a dozen oysters, and they talked about the grizzled men at Crespin’s in Dijon, their blood-flecked hands, the green shells prized open in their palms and pearly pale inside. Mary Frances had to work to keep her face clear; she felt like a wall that had rotted through, plaster turned to slurry inside.

She would pack their things this afternoon.

* * *

The house at Eagle Rock had not rented that summer or fall, and they took it back. It looked as they had left it, the bedsteads draped in muslin, the kitchen coated with a fine film of sticky grime. Mary Frances pulled out the rags and brooms and did some satisfying work, but Al wandered the rooms for days, an engine sputtering to catch.