Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

She laughed. “I can’t.”

“A secretary.”

“That he would pay with gratitude? He needs the job, he doesn’t want it. He wants to write, he can’t. And meanwhile—” She gestured toward herself, dropping Tim’s gaze. “Where is your mother?”

“She doesn’t have the stomach for anything but toast in the morning. Mary Frances, if you are to worry about Al, then I will worry about him too.”

She brought her eyes back to his face, her gorgeous brow drawn up. “I’ve got my same gratitude, Dr. Parrish. Are you sure that will be enough?”

That was the girl he remembered.

* * *

They had one thing to accomplish before sailing — a visit to Claire’s publisher. She sent a car in the afternoon, and a note that she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to accompany them, but with the party, and Charles.

Mary Frances watched the city seem to form itself like crystal out the window, tried to remember to breathe. “Explain to me how this works,” she said.

“It’s nothing, my dear. It’s a roomful of old men. You’ll know exactly what to do with them when you see them.”

“But have they read it? Are they going to tell me things… I don’t know. Are they going to tell me what they think?”

“It’s an economy like any other, Mary Frances. They wouldn’t spend their time if they didn’t want something for it.”

Her casual remark at breakfast came back to her, a little more true than she had intended. She could she never repay Tim for his time spent like this. What more would she throw at him? The question seemed to be what more did she have at hand.

The car pulled to the curb, and Tim offered his arm, into the slate gray offices of Harper & Bros. The last book Mary Frances had read published by Harper & Bros. had been written by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Tim whispered something to the secretary, they sat, they rose. Doors opened on a study like Rex’s, two old men looking up from pages spread across a blotter behind a walnut desk.

“My goodness, Hamish. Look at her.”

“MFK Fisher. You might have mentioned your youth and beauty. Our hearts are not what they used to be.”

“Mr. Saxton,” Mary Frances shook his hand. “What kind of writer would I be, if I gave everything away?”

The men laughed. Tim let his hand fall from her waist. “Gentlemen,” he said, and he was gone.

* * *

They loved her. They loved how she traveled and read and pulled from all corners. They loved how she was not a homemaker, not Mrs. Something Something, and her manuscript not like anything else they’d ever seen, written by a woman or a man. A personal history of food, of eating; they wanted 45,000 words as soon as she could possibly write them. They would publish the book here and in London, through Hamish Hamilton. They would draw up the contract as soon as she said yes.

“And?” Tim was laughing. “So you said?”

“Oh, yes. Yes!”

He toasted her with champagne in the dark downstairs bar at the Warwick Hotel. He said how happy he was, and proud, and how he’d known it all along.

“I must write Claire and thank her,” she said. “I must write Al.”

“Call him. You can go upstairs.”

She didn’t though. “I want to share this with him, of course I do.”

“And yet?”

“Mr. Hamilton said they sent a letter. It must have arrived after I left, but Al didn’t mention it when I called, or when he wrote. He would have seen the return address. Everybody knows Harper.”

“Your success is not his failure, my dear.”

“No. Of course not.” And she knew it wasn’t. But would these men have looked at her work if Tim had not asked? And would Tim have asked if she were still back in Laguna, inviting him and Gigi to share a pot of stew and some California red?

“Well.” Tim pushed back from the bar. “Perhaps it can wait.”

“Perhaps.” Mary Frances drank down the last of her coupe. “Perhaps.”

* * *

If she watched carefully, as you would a bird perched on your finger, it was almost a dream. The Hansa was white against the midnight pier, the air frigid, too cold to snow, too cold to think. Mrs. Parrish prattled on, only the shrill chime of her voice in the darkness, and Tim, who seemed everywhere.

Of all the boarding passengers, their little group appeared to be the soberest, with only dinner’s drinks under their belts, and the bottle they had shared of Chambertin in honor of the crossing. They were also the only ones who did not know any beer garden songs.

“You never know with whom we’ll be lunching,” Mrs. Parrish said.

“That sounds so ominous,” Mary Frances said.

“I often find it is.”

The steward led them first to Mrs. Parrish’s rooms, red and blistered as a poached shrimp. There was a drawing room, with a games table and a writing desk that looked out to the blackness, the sea beyond. There was none of the clever compartmentalization Mary Frances had so admired on the cross-country trains. Her cabin would be smaller, she was sure, and below decks; she had hoped for privacy. Imagining this trip in California, privacy had seemed filled with much more ease than it did now; she had not been able to think past being alone. Now there was Tim, and the idea of being alone with him or without him, and then what? Her thoughts seemed bound by this mincing, obvious pace.

She could hear the singing and laughter above decks, the jangle of women letting go of themselves. The whole effect was like a very apposite, and clean, bordello.

“Al and I took a German ship home from Dijon,” she said. “But it was full of Americans.”

“Another time,” Mrs. Parrish said.

“But still, I remember there was a woman at our lunch table, a young wife who had run away with an Italian, returning with her mother who had fetched her back. There was such a peculiar light in her eyes when she told the story, she and her mother grasping at each other, as though they were at the opera.”

“Precisely what I’ve been talking about,” Mrs. Parrish said. “You can learn the strangest things about people at sea if you’re not careful.”

Tim was sitting on the edge of his mother’s puffy red coverlet, one knee crossed over the other. His mother directed the steward, and he watched Mary Frances.

“Fetched her back,” he said. “For her husband?”

Mary Frances nodded. She felt suddenly like crying. She had put herself in a difficult position and locked all the doors on it; for god’s sake, she was setting out to sea. Tim was right. What would she do next? What choice had she left for herself?

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, and then stood quickly. She would not be melodramatic, no matter what. And she would not be stupid.

“You’re tired,” Tim said. “Mother, let her go.”

Mary Frances followed the steward down the corridor to her own cabin. She looked back, and Tim stood in the hall.

“You know,” he said casually, “it’s not like there’s a switch anyone can flip.”

“I know,” she said.

“We’ll be at sea a week,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Ah, Mary Frances. Good night.”

She sent the steward away and locked the door behind him. She was an idiot, a schoolgirl, a prude, a coward. She sank down onto her own rose-colored carpeting. She thought if she could get on with it, get over, go on, she would come out the other side of this, but she felt no bottom or end to her appetites. She might just always want this way — after Tim, something else. She might just always be this hungry.

Later that night, staring at the ceiling, she heard a light rapping on her door. Perhaps her door, perhaps the one next to hers, or across the hall. She wanted it to be Tim. She wanted it to be Tim so much, Tim coming for her, that she couldn’t bear to get up and check. The rapping stopped, and the ship left the pier without her waving, without her cheering face amongst the crowd, the ribbons and streamers flying, the drinks on high.