Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Mrs. Parrish could not have cared less about the evening amongst Claire’s friends.

“Honestly, we sail tomorrow! There will be so many polite conversations to make at the pensions, the dinner tables. Those friends of Claire’s will draw all the clever thoughts right out of me, like blood from a stone. And then what will I have left to talk about over the crossing?”

“I’ve never known you to flag, Mother.”

“I am so much older than I’ve ever been. Mary Frances, how will you manage?”

“Manage? Oh, I try never to speak until people have finished with the weather reports.”

Mrs. Parrish laughed. “She’s such a lovely girl, Timmy. Where are you always finding such lovely girls?”

Mary Frances was aware of how carefully they folded into the car, and the passing, flashing lights outside the taxi making a blur of Tim’s face. Mrs. Parrish was still talking and seemed as if she would never quit. Claire’s husband Charles was in the hospital, and yet here they were anyway for dinner, and Mrs. Parrish outlined the other possible guests: writers like Claire, bankers like Charles, and behind it all was a kind of aristocratic code Mary Frances could not track. This was New York, far more channeled and ornate than California, no matter what Rex did for a living. She watched Tim’s cool silhouette. How had she ever found the nerve to touch him?

Inside Claire’s building, the elevator was a birdcage, the foyer a chessboard with walls of a sour bottomless blue. A man took their coats, and there was Claire behind him. Mary Frances recognized her from the portraits in the house in Laurel Canyon.

Time shimmered uncomfortably, and Mary Frances thought of the bungalow now empty, she and Al gone, Gigi gone, and everything that had started there still rolling forward.

“Are you all right, dear?” Claire asked, her hand at Mary Frances’s back. “You haven’t got a chill, have you? Timmy, you will never learn how to care for women travelers.”

She bussed his cheek roughly, beaming, and thumbed the smear of lipstick she left behind. She was as willowy and beaked as Tim, with wild hair she wore bobbed to her chin and a long silk caftan that parted in dramatic grooves of unexpected skin.

“They always turn up here nearly shattered with all the walking and riding and talking and talking. And then he’s gone and fed her something wild, like oriental radishes and sea scallops. Gigi used to spin with it.”

Her long fingers, still alight on Mary Frances’s shoulder, flexed and softened.

“Well,” she said, collecting herself around her glass of champagne. “You are probably far more used to that sort of thing, aren’t you? Mother is so excited about the trip.”

And they were off in that direction, as fast as possible away from the mention of Gigi’s name. Mary Frances was unsure if it was Tim’s feelings Claire was trying to protect, or her own. So many lovely girls, his mother said, and Gigi was the loveliest. She wondered suddenly what these Parrish women thought she was doing here, if Gigi was the only one Tim had told.

Claire turned to greet another guest, and Mary Frances dropped her voice to speak to Tim.

“What did you explain to Claire?” She couldn’t look at him. “About my coming with you.”

“She knows I could never handle Mother by myself.”

“She seems to know a great deal.”

“She’s my sister. She thinks she knows everything.” He took her by the elbow and steered them toward privacy. “What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Why are you upset?”

“I’m not.”

Tim took two glasses from a passing tray and handed one to Mary Frances, martinis clearly meant for someone else, but the waiter turned and headed back into the bar. Tim drank deeply and looked off over the party.

“My dear,” he said. “I have hedged and suggested and connived. I have lied when asked directly of my intentions. I have followed my best instinct to get us this far with fairly spotless reputations. In other words, I have done my part. What’s your plan?”

“My plan? I don’t know—”

“You knew in Hollywood.”

She laughed. Claire was ringing the bell for dinner. “I was terrified, Tim. And that was months ago.”

“You came to me,” he said. “What are you going to do next?”

For the first time, she got the idea the answer could be anything she wanted.

* * *

The dining room was wallpapered with giant melon-colored camellias, almost as tall as Mary Frances herself, their brassy stamens furred and reaching. The service glistened in the candlelight. She trailed her fingers along the backs of chairs, scanning the place cards. In the scripted, careful names, she found herself as MFK FISHER.

She felt a flush of gratitude toward Claire, now arriving in the dining room on the arm of one of her guests. It was a small gesture, but she must have known what this would mean, must have remembered such a feeling herself. Perhaps she was not like Gigi to these people, not small and delicate and pretty, not Tim’s wife. But she was understood.

“Claire says you are headed across the pond.”

She turned to the man seated to her right, swarthy and round, a plug of a man with a beautiful battered face. He was pouring the inch left in his highball down his throat.

“Yes,” she said. “Paris, and Switzerland.”

Claire leaned across the table. “Davis, be nice.”

“I’ve hardly said a word.”

“I knew this was a mistake, Mary Frances. You have my dispensation to ignore him altogether.” Claire offered Davis a glittering smile. “E. Pearson Davis, correspondent for the Herald and insufferably right about everything.”

“And I love you,” Davis said.

“Rounder.”

“Tease.”

Davis turned his attention to Mary Frances. “Just got back from Spain myself.”

She felt Tim watching her from down the table. There had not been a second since she stepped off the train that morning that she hadn’t known where he was, felt his attention or lack. What would she do next? She closed her eyes, took a sip from her water glass.

“It’s all going to hell,” Davis said.

“Spain?” she said.

“Davis.” Claire touched Mary Frances’s hand, but the warning was in her voice. “You promised.”

“A bedtime story then, darling. I’ll tell my bedtime stories.”

“Mother and Tim and Mary Frances are touring. Mother is elderly. They will not bring aid to the insurgency, nor will they have to fight them off. They’re going to Switzerland, for god’s sake.”

“The Swiss,” Davis said, “are in hell.”

Claire ignored him. “Timmy wants you to see Le Paquis, the land we’ve bought above Lac Léman. He thinks we should start a retreat there for artists. The countryside is beautiful. Inspiring. Writers, painters. Mary Frances is a writer.”

Davis smiled at her as if he’d just discovered a flask in her handbag. “What do you write about?” he said. “Novels, like Pretty Princess here?”

“No. I—”

“You’re such a pig, Davis.”

Davis sucked his teeth and looked away.

What difference did it make? Here was a man predisposed to think she was silly. Over his shoulder, Tim’s carved cheek, his snowy head, turning again. He had not told her about Le Paquis, and she was sure he had his reasons, one of which was the idea that someday he would go to Switzerland and not come back. She felt the edges of what they knew about each other acutely; what rights she had seemed slim. What would she do next?

“Hunger,” she said. “I write about hunger for all kinds of things.”

Davis laughed and raised his glass.

Dinner was laid in front of them, tiny shrimps in cream over Holland rusk, and then thin slices of roast beef, potatoes, beets that bled across the plate. The wine was older than she was, and French.