Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

The officers returned to their papers; Tim’s orders for home would materialize within days. The Sikh passed a cup beside the pyre (the smell, terrifyingly, made Tim hungry), and in the bottom of the cup, there was a gold coin. Drinking the water released them from the Gurkha’s soul, and he from theirs.

He drained the last of the marc and dropped the bottle in the street.

Where was he going? He turned the corner to see a wash of light ahead, and after the next corner, a building still at work at this hour, looming above the houses around it, a man spraddle-legged on the steps in the cold, his white apron spattered with blood. An abattoir? A hospital. The smoke from the man’s cigarette mimicked the smoke rising from the chimney behind him.

He spoke in French, and Tim shook his head. He did not want a cigarette, or have one, or need to understand whatever the man was asking him. He walked up the steps beside the man and pushed inside the hospital doors. He was not sick, but he needed to lie down, and it really didn’t make any difference to him what it looked like he was doing anymore.

He laughed. It didn’t make any difference at all.

* * *

The next morning Tim and Otto appeared back at the pension with a hired car, and the four of them drove up to Le Paquis.

It had never seemed more beautiful to her, the golden rush on the ash trees, the meadow rolling endlessly gold alongside the minty brook, speckled here and there with a last snapdragon, the fresh hope she felt now watching Tim stretch his hand toward the clouds, drawing some thought on the air for Al.

She collected a skirtful of small green pears, knobby and hard, dumping them into the trunk of the car, where they rolled like stones. She would make preserves for winter: a knife in her hands, a pot on the stove, something to occupy her senses for long enough to settle here, this meadow that would be their home, these men, gesticulating, energized, who would be with her always.

She followed them into the house, the thick walls that held the cold, the two rooms that would become the many. The strong bones of a granite staircase led to an imagined second story; a terrace off the back would overlook the gardens, the vineyards, the lake beyond. She ducked into the bathroom, still a privy, with one commode for grown people and a small, squat one for children.

She studied the miniature toilet; in a house that seemed to offer such plain charms, near-monastic simplicity, to make such a concession seemed to hint at priorities she had not imagined. She felt a sharp bright pang of something regretful and ashamed, Tim and Al talking just outside the door, their voices echoing and blending. There would be no children here, no chance. Not with either of them, not anymore.

* * *

Al stood in the meadow and thought of his father, dead almost a year. He could hear the questions now: But what will you do, Alfred? How will you support yourself and your family? How might you ever find work? His father, who believed in callings, who had read his poems once and spoken of the poetry in King James, a capable man, an intelligent man, now even more so to Al since his thoughts had become so fixed and weighted by his death. His father would have thought he was as crazy as Herbert in China, doing God knows what with whom.

Then Tim was at his elbow, sampling the warming air in deep breaths through his magnificent nose. Al had the clear sensation of leaping or falling, and he threw his arm around Tim’s shoulders; he could not help himself.

“You’re like a whole new man,” he said. “It’s wonderful, Tim, to see you so happy.”

Tim tipped his face back for a moment, the autumn sun on his cheeks. “This has been the thing I’ve looked forward to — Le Paquis, your company, to have a place to work again and people I love to share it with.”

Al felt equal pride and discomfort. He’d never even told his father that he loved him, certainly not Herbert, and not Tim.

“And the vineyards?” he said. “Whose are those?”

Tim shrugged. “Ours.”

The rows of vines laced the terraces all the way to the main road, their fruit gone, their leaves already gold and falling. But Al could see the job they would become, next spring, summer. He said, “We’ll need to speak to the vigneron across the Corniche, see what he says. I don’t know balls about growing grapes.”

Otto arranged it all. The vigneron ’s name was Jules; his shoulders filled the doorjamb. He made wine all over the valley and kept his cellar in the catacombs of an old convent behind his home; he would be happy to show them. His face was ruddy and serious, the face of reliable people everywhere, but there was something in his girth, the quick way he moved his weight, that made Mary Frances feel that he would be quick to anger and difficult to stop once he got there.

Jules said they had to drink, that was the only way to learn anything: the thin whites made from these hillsides, a heavier, headier Côte de Beaune, champagne after champagne, too many cigarettes, and more champagne. Before long a young woman descended the cellar stairs, a tray full of sandwiches, pâté and ham, balanced on her shoulder. She was tall and pink like Jules, but slender, beautiful. Her name was Anna; she was sixteen, his only child.

It was a study to watch these men enjoy themselves; Mary Frances could see how happy Jules was to share his wines, the cases Al and Tim were buying stacking up against the far cellar walls were tabulations in his head, and Al bent on his every word, how the canton of Vaud was the lake and the mountains, how Le Paquis was caught between and so would catch the weather, for better and worse. The lovely Anna, in her long skirts and pink cheeks, reaching to collect a glass. And Tim.

He appeared to be listening to Jules as well, slouched languidly against the cellar wall, tilting his glass to the candlelight when conversation turned to color or body. But Mary Frances could feel the charge of his attention in her skin even from the shadows. When Jules struck a match, she was not prepared for the full blow of their eyes meeting, the sounding that took place in her. Jules blew a mouthful of his uncut rum across the match flame, flaring high then out, and leaving them in darkness.

They were all balanced here at the tip of time’s arrow, speeding fast: Al’s hand on her shoulder, Tim’s gaze across the cellar, the lights out in her bedroom back at the pension in her narrow little bed where she slept alone. She thought of birds that could fly continents without resting, she thought of fish that must swim to survive. They’d keep moving forward, they had to, because there was no going back to any other way it had ever been.

* * *

Late that night she and Tim sat in the parlor on the pert fan-back sofa, Al already upstairs sleeping, exhausted by all the shift and change, the possibilities. He had left them to their nightcaps.

Mary Frances smoothed the velveteen. She felt keyed too high, on the verge of tears or laughter, she could not tell which one.

Tim dropped his head back against the sofa and turned to her.

Finally, “I am happy to be near you again. I am trying to let that be enough.”

“Oh, Tim.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” he said. “If we talk about it, if it becomes a conversation, then it’s fixed somehow. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just think our thoughts.”

“You think of me?”

He made a low sound in his throat, the skin of his neck and cheeks flushing hot. Mary Frances watched; he was doing this for her and whatever was inside him was for her and she thrilled to it, felt her own skin heat with it, and this was what they had now, instead of what they’d had last winter on the ship, in Paris. This thrill was all they had.