Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

He was winding up now. The next thing he said would be truly devastating, and she tried to scan the possibilities, to prepare herself: Would he disparage her writing, her parents, her fidelity, her pride? Would he call out children they’d never had? Would he say he’d seen this coming? The room was close and airless. If she could just stand still enough, she could think of what came next.

Instead: “You’re not even going to try to convince me to stay, are you.”

She looked at him evenly and said nothing.

“Ah, Mary Frances. I would have thought you’d learned some potent new persuasions. To get where you are now.”

He took his hat from the rack and slowly, carefully, pushed it forward on his head. The door did not slam behind him, and at the window she watched him cross the street below, ducking into the tavern on the corner.

She opened the armoire and considered her suitcase, her neat stack of shoes and the clothes hanging there. Al had taken the keys to the car in his pocket, but she had money tucked away. She could take blankets, she could wash in the fountain at Le Paquis. She could stay with Jules across the road; she could pay him. She could pay anyone. She did not have to wait for Al to come back and go at her again.

She thought of her parents, somewhere in the midst of the Atlantic, on their way to visit her; she could not go home now.

She folded her face into her hands, and he was there.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”

“Al?” And then: “Not physically.” She was crying.

“I saw him in the kitchen with your notebooks. I knew, then…”

There seemed no way to complete that thought. Something bad, messy, ultimately survivable, but they would none of them be without their scars. He knew that, and yet he would do anything to take what she felt now onto his shoulders. How was it Al did not feel the same? If he loved her, if he was honest, they had all done this together. What was there to gain in casting blame?

He sat beside her on the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, and wanted to kill someone for hurting her.

“Can I take you out for dinner?” he said.

She laughed and swiped at her running nose with the back of her hand. “I doubt that would be a good idea.”

“You don’t have to stay here, Mary Frances.”

She shook her head, even as she’d been packing a suitcase a few moments before. “He’s leaving,” she said.

“I heard.”

“I’m going to ask him to stay through my parents’ visit.”

Tim lay back on the bed and put the palms of his hands to his eyes. “Of course.”

“It would be so difficult on Rex and Edith, you and I without Al. There would be so many questions, so much lying.”

“As opposed to this measure of lying.”

“Tim.”

“Look. It doesn’t matter to me anymore who knows what and how they feel about it.” He wanted to throw his arms around her in this moment, but the moment itself would not allow it. Maybe she would not allow it. “I’ve done the best I can.”

“You’ve done the best you can.”

Her voice was flat and cold, and Tim found himself prickling with it. “So why is he leaving?”

“Really?” She stared at him, her eyes filling with something tender and heartbroken. “Because I’m his wife.”

The word seemed like a dropped stone they were waiting to strike bottom.

She said, “I remember when you had one of those.”

* * *

In the middle of the night, Mary Frances cut on the kitchen light and made a pot of coffee. She had begun to think it possible that Al might have hurt himself, accidentally or otherwise, and the idea set off a string of vague panics: scandal, of one sort or another, was coming. Tim joined her at the table. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes, his shirttails long and rumpled, the back of his hair on end. She poured him a cup of coffee, and they sat without anything to say.

He got up and returned with a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, copying a long address from his notebook, a formal letter. Mary Frances listened to the scrape of his pen across the page. She thought she could put her chin down in her hands and close her eyes, that then she might be able to sleep here, upright, with Tim nearby, even with all she was waiting for to happen. How was that possible?

“I could almost fall asleep,” she said, “knowing you are here.”

He slid the envelope across the table, a letter to a friend of his in Paris who was in charge of the exposition for the world’s fair.

“Is it open yet?”

“He’s a good friend. And there’s a painting they’re going to show, a huge Picasso. They’ve exiled him over it. Take Rex and Edith to see it.”

“What about you?”

“You can tell me about it. I’ll see it that way.” He looked at her then, just as helpless as she was to chart their course forward. He pressed the envelope into her hand. “Just please,” he said. “Go.”

* * *

Al stood in the street and pissed like a Frenchman, remembering only at the last moment that this was not France. For some reason, that was funny. It was dark, but he had no idea what time it was, what day it was about to be. They’d closed the tavern on him, he’d been playing the piano for hours, but there was no way in hell he was going home. He turned to the girl who’d taken him on.

“And where do you live, my sweet?”

“Ah, captain. I can make anyplace feel like home.”

Or that’s what he thought she said. There was a lag in his language skills this evening, possibly due to the vast amounts of gin he seemed to have bathed in, and she seemed to be slurring as well.

He drew some wadded bills from his pocket. “We might,” he said, “get a room.”

She took the bills in her fist and smiled at him, shaking her head. It was too late to wake anyone in town.

He noticed she was missing an incisor, and her mouth looked swollen. He drew his thumb across her upper lip and it came away bloodied. “What happened, dear? What happened here?”

She laughed. “It’s all right now.”

He stroked her lip, the red paint there. He had a faint recollection, not much more than a flash — earlier today, yesterday? He looked at the back of his hand, the livid marks on his knuckles. She’d told him it was time to go home to his wife.

He took the woman’s face in his hands now; he could not even remember her name. She was dark-skinned and sturdy, her face plump. He could see other scars there now, a cut beneath her eye that had healed badly, a rash. He was so sorry. It must have been an accident. He must have been confused. He was rattling now, maybe crying. He hardly remembered, he hardly remembered anything.

“ Désolé, désolé, ” she said. “ Vous êtes désolé .”

So beautiful, desolate. “Just take me home with you,” he said. “I am so sorry. Just take me home.”

* * *

When Al came back to the apartment, it was already Thursday morning. He stank of cheap alcohol and cheaper perfume, his eyes shot, his shirtfront bloodied. Tim and Mary Frances still waited at the kitchen table with their empty coffee cups and their worry, he could see it as soon as he walked in the door, and he felt a sharp stab of guilt on top of everything else.

He pulled out a chair and sat between them. “I fear I might have tarried at the bar.”

Mary Frances stood and ran more water in the pot packed with fresh grounds.

Al wheeled himself around to follow her. “I fear I might have made a scene, Mary Frances. I might have had too much to drink and been an ass.”

She did not turn from the stove, and Al shifted his attentions to Tim.

“Did you hear what happened in New Jersey? A zeppelin burst into flames as it was trying to moor, to moor in the air, of all things, and filled with air. Just impossible. Anyone could tell it was impossible. Thirty-two seconds, and all was lost.”