Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Davis hadn’t touched his plate but was well into his fourth highball when he leaned close again. “Was this what you were hungry for?”

She looked at him squarely. He seemed to read her disdain but not care to acknowledge it.

“Claire’s not listening anymore,” he said. “It’s a known tactic — be quiet, and she’ll find someone else who isn’t. She’s talking opera with the gentleman across from you. She knows a little bit about everything.”

Mary Frances blotted her mouth with her napkin, a neat red print of her lips left behind. “You say you work for the Herald ?”

“The Herald Tribune . I have a key to their offices. Would you like to, I don’t know, see how they run the big press?”

“Mr. Davis. My father has run the newspaper in our little town of Whittier, California, since I was six years old. I doubt you could show me something that I haven’t seen before.”

“I dunno, doll.”

“Doll?”

He leaned close. “I look at you, I look at this.” His gesture indicated the fine room, the fine people in it. “And I doubt you’ve ever been hungry in your life.”

It seemed a ridiculous thing to have to prove.

She leaned closer, reached across his untouched plate, and plucked the small white carnation from his boutonniere. She bit the petals from the stem and chewed.

* * *

Tim found her on the balcony, a February Manhattan lit below. She had wanted him to come for her; she was so pleased.

“I was thinking,” she said, “The first time I ever ate an oyster, I was in love with a girl.”

“I imagine most of us would say the same.”

“I was in boarding school. Her name was Eda Lord. We used to have these dances at Christmas, and the school would serve special things — one year, oysters.”

Tim offered his navy jacket around her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he said.

“That Davis is a boor.”

“He is. I’ll go back inside and challenge him to a fistfight.”

“What should I have told him? That I’m married?”

“He can see that. And he outweighs me by double, I’d guess.”

“Tim.”

“And there’s all that nasty business he’s been into with boxing or bullfighting, parachuting behind enemy lines. I think he shot a tiger once, and he’s so drunk he probably does think he’s Hemingway, but if it would make you feel better, my dear, I am your man.”

“For now.”

He inclined his head, turning back to the city, the two of them shoulder to shoulder now, the party a distant background. “Tell me something,” Tim said.

“What?”

“Something I don’t know about you, like the oysters. Like how you were in love. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a letter from you, and I have come to depend on them.”

From far below, the sounds of the city quickened in the cold. Mary Frances buried her face in the shoulder of Tim’s coat.

“I won’t push you,” he said. “This can be all your idea, exactly how much or how little you want.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “As much as I want?”

Tim didn’t look away, and they didn’t talk anymore. She gave him back his coat, and they went back into the party, Davis gone and Tim taking his seat beside her. Claire reached across the table for his hand and squeezed it, turning from her conversation about how to bridle a difficult horse and beaming again at her brother.

“All right?” she said.

“All right.”

* * *

That night Mrs. Parrish insisted they escort Mary Frances to her room. “It’s just appropriate, dear. This is New York.”

“I’m sure I’m perfectly safe,” Mary Frances said, tracing the carved mahogany of the elevator wall. There was a term for this paneling she could not remember, a French term. Boiserie . Her thoughts felt as if they were dripping out a faucet.

“And now we’re sure, too,” Mrs. Parrish said. She kissed Mary Frances’s cheeks at her door and took Tim’s arm.

“Good night, my dear,” Tim said, and she watched him and his mother down the hall.

The gates of the elevator closed, and Tim said, “You’re not chaperoning me, are you, Mother?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Should I?”

“I am a grown man. I assume you expect me to act like one, whether you’re watching or not.”

“Whatever that means.”

Tim laughed. “Whatever that means, yes.”

If he could have explained his true feelings for Mary Frances in that moment, he believed he would have, regardless of the embarrassment it would cause. He did not want to sneak around. He wanted to take her clothes off, to put her body underneath his, he wanted to help her with her work, and it made him want to take her clothes off all again, more slowly, more. When she said something, when she laughed, watching her in the low light of the dining room tonight, he half-thought to tip a porter for her key after his mother went to bed and appear in her room this time.

But he’d left it in her hands. Even more than he wanted her now, he wanted to see what she’d do with that permission, their time at sea. What he would do, with the wait.

“I feel like a twelve-year-old boy,” he said.

His mother laughed. “That’s none of my doing.”

“No, it’s not.”

The fire had been laid in their rooms, and Tim put a match to it. His mother opened a book in her lap. Tim asked her if she’d care for a brandy, but she said she’d had quite enough already.

“Claire seems well, considering,” she said.

Tim settled himself across from her, a brandy not enough to ease the high vibrating ache in his fingertips, between his hipbones. “Did she mention Charles to you?”

“I didn’t know Charles was in the hospital until this morning.”

“It’s like he was out of town.”

“Charles has been ill for quite some time, Timmy. And there’s his age. I’m sure she’s made certain arrangements in her mind, perhaps from the start.”

He was constantly impressed with the pragmatic ease of women. He wondered what arrangements Mary Frances had made in her mind for these months away, if that was what she was doing now.

“Are you certain you won’t have that brandy, Mother? It might help you sleep.”

“No, no. I’m practically asleep already.”

She stood unsteadily, offering her good nights, and Tim waited by the fire. He heard his mother in the toilet, watched the light snap off beneath her closed door. He counted the minutes on the clock since they’d left Mary Frances, wondering if it was too late to wake her, if the point was to wake her, and what he would find if he did. God, he hadn’t felt this good in years; he could not remember when.

* * *

The next morning, Tim collected mail from the front desk, and there was a letter for Mary Frances. He took it with him to breakfast and found her already waiting at a table, a blush-colored silk blouse tucked primly into her belted skirt. He set the letter next to her plate.

“Thank you.”

“I would love to hear some news from Al,” he said.

She slit the envelope, folding her hand across her mouth as she read. Al’s script was small and tight; her eyes scanned it quickly for something she could share. She sighed.

“It’s okay,” Tim said.

“He just sounds so dissatisfied. A mountain of papers to grade, the students and their inane questions.” She folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “He’s not writing.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not since his father, maybe before. We don’t talk about it.” She looked at her plate.

He remembered that she used to grade his papers. Was Al intending to make her feel guilty for not grading papers now? It sounded so petty, Tim felt ashamed of himself for thinking it. “Perhaps the time alone will help,” he said. “Perhaps we can think of something else.”