Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

In fact, Tim never mentioned her. It was Mary Frances who brought her up, and only the once, asking if he’d gotten news from her. Saying Gigi’s name aloud was different from writing it in a letter. She watched it skitter across Tim’s expression, a rock on a still pond.

“No,” he said. “No, I have not. I’m sure she’s married now. She was planning to marry him as soon as she could.”

She wanted to ask if it still upset him, but she didn’t want to hear him say it. Have you heard from her, Al? Have you seen her around town? Perhaps she and John have already gone to Laguna.

You should use the house when it gets warmer. Or drive out now and lay a fire, look out the window, and watch the sea. It is so peaceful there, and it reminds me of the days when we were first married.

I am still thinking of our plans. Perhaps I was never meant to carry a child, and that will be our lot. There are plenty of children in the world already. Surely there is one who would want us.

Against the flat of Tim’s inner thigh, she traced the curl of him with the tip of her finger. Something was unbalanced.

“I had tuberculosis.”

“Here?”

“Well. Here is where it left me. They had to cut it out.”

She cupped her hand around him, and he breathed out languidly. His body seemed to move against his breath: what was slow becoming fast, what was soft, hard.

“Everything seems to work all right,” she said.

“Not quite everything.”

It seemed somehow another sign. Still, like athletes, winded, they would roll away from each other and eat from the trays the stewards left them, rare roast beef sandwiches and champagne in her room, stout in his, sometimes bracing themselves against the walls, draping themselves like rags. She would tell him not to touch her for a minute, stretching her long white back over a chair, and he would watch the lift in her hips and take it as a dare. They would start again, acrobatically, dynamically, never so much for the coming as for the act itself. There were times she was not sure if Tim came at all, his shoulders curving off the bed to meet hers, the small hot sphere they made together, kept making, kept working at, the thing between them, their own.

It’s all right, Al, she wrote. And I know we have the spring and summer before us to figure it out when I return, and that there is no rush. We are young still, even when we do not feel it, and this life is longer, larger than we think. I feel we are on the cusp of something. Who knows what lies ahead? Who knows.

She did not mention the meeting at Harper. She was waiting for him to do it first.

When she was finished with her letter, she would stand from the desk and run a bath, the bottle of violet-scented oil from the Warwick rationed out, and she would scrub to her toes with the thick white washcloth. She would dress, and Tim would come to the door and ask her if she’d finished her correspondence, and she would point to the letter on the desk and feel a kind of allowance about it all. She’d follow him down for a beer before lunch, the bar already packed with Germans, Tim with his sketch pad, she with her notebook, and they would sit quietly and wait for Mrs. Parrish.

She loved to write with Tim beside her, to write smart things they would pass back and forth more than they talked, a line, a thought drawn out. He sketched her, sometimes as she sat, and sometimes from memory, from the night, the afternoon before, the arc of her spine over the chair back, only her mouth, her lips open.

They ate with Mrs. Parrish in the little restaurant with the caged birds — Italian, Swedish, Mexican-German food, always heavy and rich, good and strange. Afterward they found conversations and card games and concerts for her, swapped novels with other passengers for her, and invented excuses to be alone. Mary Frances often forgot her wrap. Tim was often curious about the weather. If the elevator was empty, he kissed her. If the stairwell was empty, he ran his hand beneath her dress. Two, three steps away; there was no one here who knew them. He offered his arm, and she fit her side against him, her head sinking back on its stem, how delicious, how well they fit together, what a satisfying lock.

They didn’t talk; it was as though they had nothing to talk about, or that the talking would come later, but the current between them was live and thrumming.

The ship felt like their own, something private now, where no real scale applied. They would go to lunch, and then to stroll the deck in the blistering sea wind, and then to play cribbage in Mrs. Parrish’s stateroom. Mary Frances had no patience for cribbage and would bring her notebook and write. She marveled at how hard it was for people to find something pleasant to talk about, and how hard they tried even after it seemed unlikely they would find it. It seemed a lesson to her, that we try, even when we ought to know better, to connect with where we are, whom we are with. But whom was she with? She felt Tim’s presence in an empty room, she sparked and lifted to it, and when he touched her, her mind went everywhere and nowhere at once. But here, to be here, to feel like she could be here, she rose every morning to write a letter to Al.

* * *

The night before they landed in Cherbourg, the little dining room was transformed into a forest. Pine boughs arched the doorways, waxy with scent, and behind them hid the cabin boys with birdcall whistles, trilling at each other from all corners. It was meant to be a woodland feast, some sort of Bavarian tradition, and from the kitchen came huge platters of roasted boar and pheasant and trout, sheets of potatoes, sausages, schnitzels.

Mrs. Parrish clapped her hands like a girl at a play. “Isn’t this amazing,” she said. “Look at all the evergreens! Where have they been keeping them all this time?”

Mary Frances had no idea.

Tim had fallen quiet, watching. From the bar came the drunken Germans with their champagne flutes full of cherries, their tall buxom women on their arms, and their songs. The cabin boys peeped and twittered, the German women squealed with laughter, and platter after platter poured out of the kitchen on the upturned palms of white-jacketed stewards. There were people in California lining up for bread; a forest of game in the middle of the Atlantic seemed no more impossible than that.

There were songs, of course, salutes and toasts, all in German. The noise rose around them, and Mary Frances found herself intent upon her food, as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. The buxom women pointed and laughed. Some of them wore little felt hats with plumage. Some of them wore dirndl skirts and pinafores. A steward came around with a tray of wooden popguns and a basket of cotton balls.

“For the birds,” he said. “For shooting.”

Mary Frances leaned forward. “The cabin boys or each other?”

Tim shook his head. He didn’t know. The stewards went around, and the first cotton ball took flight, another and then another. Soon the air seemed filled with cotton balls.

Tim fiddled with the hammer on the popgun, trying to figure out the load. The room was getting louder now, the laughter turning coarse, and Tim was frustrated with the gun, prying open the mechanism with a butter knife and muttering something under his breath when all of a sudden, Mrs. Parrish let out a chirp of her own.

“Oh dear, oh dear, I shot him!”

Mary Frances looked up to see one of the Germans stiffly bending in his tuxedo to look behind him, hand at the back of his neck. He pulled from the floor, not a cotton ball, but a round red grape, the same kind spilling from the centerpiece in front of Mrs. Parrish.

“Mother,” Tim said, “if you’d given me a second, I was trying to figure it out.”