Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

* * *

The next morning she stood on deck in the icy February wind to punish herself. The ocean was endless in all directions, nearly the same color and texture as the sky, mirrors set against each other toward infinity. Her coat was buttoned to her neck, her scarf around her ears, her arms clamped tight. She was in the middle of nothing, nowhere, countryless, familyless, husbandless, homeless. These two lives she had been living, the one inside and the one out, how much longer could she pretend they mattered when nothing out here held its borders?

She turned from the deck rail to find a young man watching her from inside the lounge, sipping his coffee. She felt her guts shift delicately against her spine with the movement of the ship, an action both effortless and sick at once. He raised his cup in her direction. She needed, first, a drink.

* * *

Tim answered her knock, and she passed through the door, already opening her clothes. His smile was gentlemanly, and she shut her eyes to it, the buttons of her blouse beneath her hands, the next and then the next and then the next. He cupped her face, his kiss the one she’d gotten after every dance in boarding school, soft and warm and pleasant and over all too quickly.

“I’m very glad you’re here,” he said.

“Oh, for chrissake. You should be. Turn out the lights.”

She sounded brassy, and she could feel the work of the whiskey she’d taken in the bar at the back of her throat. She stepped out of her skirt, yanked her slip over her head. None of it seemed delicate now, and none of it seemed right, but only pushing through to the next thing, and then the next. She felt frayed to tears, and then Tim clicked out the lamp beside the bed, and they went down.

It was not pretty until much later, until they’d made excuses for lunch and his mother’s invitation, until they’d pulled the damasked sheets from the mattress, strewn the pillows across the carpeting, until she’d bruised her wrist against the headboard, broken a glass, burned the skin off her tailbone, the room ripe with what they’d extracted from each other, then something turned another way than desperate.

They lay side by side, crosswise on the bare ticking, Mary Frances’s face tucked into the bend of her elbow like a bird asleep. Her dark hair spilled over the edge of the mattress. On the floor, a scatter of hairpins amongst the shards of water glass, a few flecks of down, as though a brittle animal had given up. Tim wished he had his sketchbook. He could not think of what to say, and he did not have it in him to go another time, he was exhausted and starving and empty of absolutely everything.

He opened his mouth to tell her how beautiful she was again. She rolled her face from where she tucked it and looked at him from underneath those eyebrows, at first sly and teasing, then seeming to realize what he was about to say.

Her hand shot out to cover his mouth. “Don’t you dare, Dillwyn Parrish. I didn’t come all this way to be patronized.”

He took her wrist and kissed it. The muscles in her chest bowed and arched to hold her shoulders up, to hold him quiet, so many lovely hollows. He reached beneath her armpit; she had not bathed before she came to him, a fine bristle of hair and her travel there. She had not stopped for much of anything, and his hand fit against her perfectly, his fingers cupping against her shoulder blade, and the completeness of it nearly made him sigh.

He pulled her onto her back. He wiped his hand between her legs and across her thighs, slick as paint. He took his mouth across her hipbones and down. She told him to wait, and he told her to be quiet, that she had not come all this way to be patronized.

All the delicate things undone with the mouth every day, and she had never thought of this, never asked for it before, and the sense it made was like threading a needle, pulling the end of thread to a point with her lips and then carefully, with concentration, looping it through. They were lovers now, flesh and beating blood, lovers, and there was nothing to do but dive in, headlong.

* * *

At sea, the sunrise was like a bloodletting, and to see it, Mary Frances had been up all night. She was sore. Tim, asleep beside her, her hip now pressed against the length of his back; his nakedness was strange and her alertness to it strange, and outside the small ship’s window, the sky pulsed.

She let her hand fall into his white hair, and he stirred, turning to her.

“How do you think I’ll get out of here?”

“You’re better at breaking in, aren’t you.”

“It’s morning. The stewards.”

“The well-tipped stewards?”

“They’ll be here soon, regardless. I have to go.”

Tim’s hand pushed against the sole of her foot, pushing her back against the headboard. “I don’t have to open the door.” His mouth found the inside of her knee. “You don’t have to do anything.”

But she would, of course.

* * *

She wrote to Al in the mornings from her desk in her stateroom. It took time to settle there, the far horizon outside and nothing but the ocean to watch. She felt herself dividing, everything happening twice, and she filled page after page as though to show him she was busy.

The flowers , she wrote, are everywhere, little gardens and terrariums, so much that I seem always to be broaching a wall of perfume, lilies big as fists, chrysanthemums, orchids. They never seem to wilt; secretly there has to be a team of stewards whose sole job it is to garden.

One night, Tim at her door, the bouquet he’d stolen crushed between them in a cloud of sharp green scent. Stargazers, he said. Casablanca, the largest lily in the world. Later he painted her hip with yellow pollen, the flowers never meant for the vase.

The eating goes on at all hours , she said. You would love the strange little smorgasbords in the afternoons, the pickled vegetables and corned meats, the hard sausages that smell like the floors of the barns they hung in. The chef’s consommé is clear as a bell. And one day it had been sunny, almost warm on deck, and she and Tim took their mugs to the deck chairs, wrapped in blankets side by side, her body still tender from the night before, the morning, already lit in anticipation of the night to come, and the warm consommé in the mug in her hands, in her chest, headed to her belly, Tim’s voice, half lost to the water and the breeze, calculating his own pleasure and exhaustion, the tenderness with which he planned to handle her neglected parts: What about your ankles, Mary Frances? What about your little toes?

They were alone, except when they were with Mrs. Parrish, and so at all other times free to say and be what they thought to each other. It was glorious, frightening, to care so little. Passengers stared at Tim’s head in her lap in the lounge, his hand inside the low back of her dinner dress at the bar, late at night, all the Germans drunk around them.

Mrs. Parrish thinks it’s funny, how I am always setting things aside for you, but I can tell she’s truly pleased. I think all the time of our crossings, the little Dutch ships and freighters, how odd and magical it all felt and how it still does, and will again. I wonder what you are doing now, morning here, but still night for you, and I think of what we were doing then, mid-morning, mid-ocean, on our way to France for the first time. I feel all these parallels acutely, Al. At sea, I remember other times at sea, and they overlay these times.

Tim seems better. He looks very well, strong and straight in a way that I remember, and he seems glad to be on this trip with his mother. He rarely mentions Gigi, except in the way that someone speaks about a pet that ran away when they were a child, a passing kind of wistfulness, but maybe the truest kind. I know he will always love her.