Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Al paid the check and shoved his hands in his pockets. He took the walk along the lake, the Alps hoving up, closing in, already and perhaps always white with snow — he had never been here. He rolled the thought in his head; he had never been here before.

* * *

When Tim stepped onto the platform, her pulse thrummed as if she were lined with brass. She called his name, and she felt his eyes catch hers, everything inside her surging forward. Then Al called him, and she turned to see everything she felt in Al’s face too, the nerves and joy, the thrill to see the man they’d come to see. Al did want to be here. Maybe this would not be so confusing after all.

“Old man,” Tim said.

He and Al made a long handshake, and then he took her by the elbows, their cheeks brushing, and she laughed something tittery, and they all stumbled their words over each other like teenagers.

“A momentous occasion,” Al said.

“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you how glad I am.”

“You look well, Tim. Mary Frances had said, but I’m relieved to see it for myself.”

“Mary Frances is a lifesaver.”

She couldn’t look at Tim for more than a second. “Don’t be silly.”

And then everything seemed to run suddenly too long, their smiles clinging to their faces, Mary Frances looking at her shoes. It was all so surreal; she felt like a costumed actor waiting in the wings. If they did not move forward, she was going to lose her nerve.

“Well,” Tim said. “Let me direct the porter with the bags, and the thing we need, of course—”

They went to Doellenbach’s and ordered plate after plate of frogs’ legs crusted with garlic and mustard, bottle after bottle of vin du Vevey , the thin dry wine Tim said they would soon make from their own grapes. Al put his elbows on the table, and Tim took a pen from inside his jacket and drew a map for Al on the back of a menu card, and Mary Frances kept laughing for no reason and then going quiet, pouring another glass of wine.

She could not look directly at Tim. She studied Al’s face instead, unburdened in a way she remembered from before they were married, when he used to seek her out in the library to rattle on about Stevenson or Yeats. She reached for his hand. She wanted Al to be happy again; it had been so long. Maybe Tim could get him talking and planning and writing as he had done when they first met, and she would just be the weather between them: with both, in her way, but with herself most of all. She tried to relax into that thought: with herself, most of all .

They walked back to the pension three abreast, unsteady in the early chill. Al felt like singing, but they couldn’t settle on a song. Tim felt like another drink, but it was late, the town already closed. Back at the pension, he bartered a bottle of marc from the madame’s oldest, son and they went up to the Fishers’ rooms for a nightcap.

“Nightcap, my foot.” Al stretched out on the bed in his suit coat. “I couldn’t find a place to put a cap if I grew an extra head for it.”

“Al?” Mary Frances perched on the edge of the nightstand and poked him.

“I’m fine. Timmy, tell her I’m fine.”

Tim handed Mary Frances a drink. “He’s fine. A quick toast, and then I’m off.”

“A toast.”

“Al?”

“My heart is as full as my glass. My heart is as full as…”

“Your heart. Sit up, Al. For goodness sake.” Al made a sound like a groan, his eyes already closed.

“Ah, dear,” Tim said, and then his hand slipped to the nape of her neck and he pulled her to him, holding her tightly. He smelled of the cold and the brandy, and underneath that, he smelled like always, and she pitched into him as he pulled away, unable to keep her balance.

“Good night, old man,” he called to Al, now almost out the door, and Mary Frances swallowed the rest of the marc in her glass, setting it down again on the nightstand with a joggle.

If this was the way it was going to be, she didn’t think she’d last the week.

* * *

There was nothing like an empty city at night, and nothing Tim wanted so much — a black lakeshore, a blank canvas, this. It felt as if he’d left Mary Frances and turned off all the lights on the world. He still felt the soft nape of her neck beneath his fingers, bringing his hand to his face, breathing in. Then suddenly there was the morning she’d come to his cabin on the Hansa , the scent of her hair, the hollows and folds of her, her salt. He drank from the bottle of marc and watched the stars and ached.

He had not fucked another woman in six months, had not been with anyone but Mary Frances since that morning, and now all that was over for them, which meant, all that was over. Forever? How could he never have sex again?

He laughed. There were a thousand ways to think about it: they would live like family, like monks, like roommates, like freaks. He loved them both, and this was the only way to do it. He shuffled on the cobblestones; he was drunk. He doubted he could stay drunk forever, but in his slurriness he could see a dumb kind of chance for this to all work out. The three of them would make art, maybe great art. There was a theory about it from the Far East, he was certain, about saving your energy for creation. Maybe Claire had mentioned it. She spent a lot of time not having sex. Claire would know.

He put the lake to his back and cut into the city, the narrow streets and slate-roofed houses in their tight, twisting rows.

In the war, he’d admired the men from the east, the Sikhs and Hindus, a Gurkha soldier in the Bearer Corps who’d learned his English from an idiot who’d wanted to climb the highest mountain in the world. The Gurkha lost two fingers pulling an unexploded shell out of a man’s chest. He had been a palm healer, or so everyone said, until the incident with the unexploded shell.

The streets Tim wandered were pitch black, not a streetlamp or a candle in the windows. He could still feel the vast flatness of the lake behind him, its unmeasured depth, the on and on of it. The dark streets were safer, but he had no idea where to go.

The Gurkha had died under strange circumstances. Or rather, the Gurkha had gone on to distinguish himself as wildly fearless and skilled with the eight fingers he had left, and when he died, the whole lot of them kind of fell apart strangely. It was 1918, the third or fourth or fifth Somme. They were moving daily. Tim was supposed to be shipped back home (he had not been able to eat in almost two weeks, something rotted inside him, pulling his bones through his skin), but the orders didn’t come or couldn’t find him, and he’d left the field hospital where he had collapsed and went back to ferrying the bodies from the front lines. No one seemed to notice, until the Gurkha.

Tim needed to go home, go to bed, stop this thinking. But every house suddenly looked like the one beside it, and his way back to the pension seemed to have closed over itself with stone. He drank again from the marc, and kept walking.

The Sikh instructed them on how to make a funeral pyre. According to the custom of his faith, the Gurkha’s body had to be burned next to a river, and owning no nearby river, Tim and five other men dug a trench, hauled buckets from a spring-fed pond behind a nearby farmhouse. On the Sikh’s count, they poured the water down the trench so he could bathe what was left of the Gurkha’s body in what stood in for the Ganges, and the Indian soldier next to Tim began to howl.

The others lunged at him, covering his mouth with their dirty hands, but the howls drew the attention of the nearest officers. But before they could sort the problem from the scuffle, Tim had lit the fire.

It was stupid, of course, to send a flare like that so close to the enemy line. But it was the end of the war, and even the Gurkha had not been able to heal himself, and this was the best that could be done given the circumstances. It was a magnificent failure, and in that, almost more magnificent. Almost right.