Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Tim wiped his chin with the back of his hand, glanced through the parlor to the bedroom door where Mary Frances slept. She might stay in bed through the next morning, pulling what she needed to her, her pens and paper, her notebooks and tomes.

“Al—” he said.

“And I’m trying to figure it out. I go to the house. I work all day there. I chopped wood today and stacked it higher than the roof beams. It felt good to do it.”

“Give yourself time, Al.”

“There’s been only time. I thought coming here would change things. I mean, Dijon was the last best place for me in this regard, and here we are, in the middle of… it’s the same kind of place, Tim. It feels the same, but I’ve lost something.”

His voice was quiet. His eggs ran on his plate. He prodded them with his fork, not raising his eyes to meet Tim’s.

“And I haven’t told her. I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t told her that.”

“Mary Frances is very understanding. Resourceful. She could help you. I could help you, too.”

“Because,” Al said, “if I’m not working, what am I doing here?”

Tim leaned back and lit a cigarette. And as though he had been released, Al picked up his fork and ate.

* * *

But with that, whatever means Tim had used to rise above these days of tension evaporated. He wasn’t sure what he’d thought might happen, but they’d all entered this arrangement far too passively, with basic understandings they did not hold in common, and though he’d kept away from Mary Frances, he didn’t want her any less for it. And she had withdrawn into whatever private world she tended in her head, and Al was suffering. He had been suffering long before he came to Le Paquis, Tim knew that, but still. He was hurting his friend and could bring himself to do nothing but continue to carefully hurt him further.

He began to have horrible dreams, to stay awake to avoid them. He smoked more, smoked all the time, and Mary Frances watched him with worry in her face, but she didn’t ask any questions. First he tried leaving the apartment more often, giving the two of them space and time to be together — he didn’t care what they did, he wanted them to be happy — but he would return to find Mary Frances napping in her room and Al gone, gone all day to watch the work at Le Paquis. She would flutter awake to see him, her eyes round with something desperate, and then she’d go down again, sometimes for hours, for the rest of the night.

He started making plans for the three of them together. A trip to the casino at Chillon, where Byron had written; Al loved Byron. A blustery night walking the old quarter for fondue, dinner, drinks, tickets to a play. He kept pushing, thinking they could push past this to something else, but each outing was less successful than the last, and finally he broke.

They were sitting in the mezzanine of the Théâtre de Vevey, the lights just coming up for intermission, and Tim went to stand and found he couldn’t, went to speak and couldn’t, only a last spasm, then blackness.

“Tim.”

Al turned, and Mary Frances was crouched over him as he sprawled, collapsed, his limbs flung out and stiff.

“Is he all right? Is he breathing?”

“I don’t know, yes.” She gathered his head into her lap, her voice low and even. “Tim,” she said again, “Tim.”

Al reached a hand to his cool cheek.

Panic filled him, Mary Frances’s calm voice, repeating and repeating. He wanted to shake Tim awake, alive, and then that’s what it became in his head, Tim dying in the red aisle of the Théâtre de Vevey after a half-baked performance of Cocteau, a hundred people milling past them and not stopping, not even looking long at the man collapsed and Mary Frances. This couldn’t be how it ended for the three of them. What would he do with her now?

And in that moment, Al realized how that would never be his problem. He was watching Tim and Mary Frances drift out of reach, sink beneath the surface, a slow but inexorable slipping away. They grew smaller there in the aisle, Mary Frances clinging, her voice a plea; she wanted Tim back, yes, but too, she would follow him anywhere, anywhere he went.

And then Tim rolled away from her, pushing himself back and away, very pale now and beads of sweat bursting across his forehead, his mouth slack, his whole body. Al stepped to put his hands beneath his arm. He folded over himself in the theater seat, clutching now at Al’s hand, clammy with whatever had overcome him.

The panic still roared in Al’s ears, uncontained.

* * *

Back at the apartment, Mary Frances bustled at the stove, heating broth, toasting yesterday’s end of bread, her silk dress creased and rumpled, her hair loosed from its pins. Al poured everyone a brandy, shot his back, and poured another.

“I feel so embarrassed about all this,” Tim said. He propped his hand against the side of his head as if to hold himself up, studying nothing on the far edge of the table.

“I’m sure you’re fine,” Al said. “A bit of bad potato.”

“We’re past the season for that.” But he smiled. He was grateful and confused, very much alive.

Al left the kitchen for the fire, and he could hear Mary Frances still bustling with the pots and pans, the low sound of their talk together, but he didn’t need to weigh and measure it anymore. He understood now that whatever they were saying was so much more private than he might have imagined.

He threw his empty glass into the corner, the way you’d toss a coat or a newspaper. It splintered into a hundred shards.

“Would you look at that,” he said. “It slipped.”

He got no answer back, and he doubted they had even heard him. He left the pieces where they fell and went to bed.

In the kitchen, Mary Frances turned from the sink. She was crying.

“Oh, darling,” Tim whispered.

She shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to go to sleep now.”

“Please.” But he couldn’t finish that thought. What more could he ask of her than he already had?

But she could not sleep. The sheets were musky and suddenly too long unwashed; the radiator heat so dry it seemed difficult to breathe. Again and again she thought of Tim lying on that carpet at the theater, all the blood drained from his face and the white of his hair, the whiteness of him monstrous now, her mind unable to shake loose of it. Tim, at her feet, and only this tenuous arrangement they’d forged left for her to navigate without him.

Escape was not peace, she realized, not ever.

* * *

Al left the apartment before dawn.

Tim watched the knob on their bedroom door for long minutes. He needed to go for his walk through town in the cold, to do whatever it was that made him not think about her so constantly, but he lit another cigarette instead, and watched the bedroom door, and remembered the pale skin of her hip beneath his hand their last night aboard the ship back to New York, the last night he’d truly touched her, and he felt something bleakly rocket through him, the last thin restraints breaking free.

And then it all seemed so easy.

He crossed the room, knocked. She opened the door for him, still in her white cotton nightgown, the strong winter light from the windows behind her outlining the arcs of her body in the fabric. He didn’t say anything, and didn’t touch her, but crossed the room to the bed and lay down. She lay beside him, but it wasn’t like the times before, where he wanted to eat her alive, where he could not bear his need for her any longer. It was deeper and darker; he loved her, he was certain of it. Why else would he do this thing to be near her?

When he told her so, she wept.

He took her hand, and they whispered, staring at the stamped tin ceiling of the apartment. This was their life, their second life, their shadow life, and they were living it inside their heads and on the promise that things would someday be different. That someday needed to be now.