Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

They collected themselves in a café around the corner. There was no conversation; not even Edith tried. When the waiter came, Rex did not look up, and she ordered champagne and rillettes for the table in French, though the waiters here served thousands of tourists. They would have understood Rex, and the way he silently handed the job to her made her somehow mournful.

Across the street, he watched tall blond German girls stirring in and out of an open doorway, a clutter of Nazi officers drinking beer and playing cards.

“Austria,” he said, “is very close to here.”

Mary Frances made a sound in her throat, but he didn’t say anything more, his high, clear brow drawn tight. It was her brow, too; she got it from him. She wanted to think about that, not Austria or Germany, not any of the things that seemed to be looming so clearly in the future now.

“Let’s take the train tomorrow,” Rex said. “I’m anxious to see your home.”

In spite of herself, Mary Frances said she was as well. Back in Vevey, she was surrounded — by the news, the Alps, by what was on the other side.

* * *

Mary Frances’s suitcase arrived with a porter from the train station sometime late in the afternoon. It was very heavy, probably filled with books and things her parents had bought for her that could only be bought in Paris. Al tipped the porter and put the suitcase in her bedroom at the foot of her bed. He looked at it for a long moment, then closed the door.

The porter had given him a note: the Kennedys would be arriving for a drink at five, Mary Frances had made reservations for dinner later at Doellenbach’s. She asked that Al be in the apartment to greet everyone and signed her initials, nothing more.

He wondered what kind of notes she had been sending Tim.

It was an honest wondering; the fury he’d felt, the hurt and stupidity, the shame had all burned out, to leave a shell of removed curiosity. He wondered about chronology and timelines, which one of them had lied to him first — his guess was Mary Frances; he’d come to feel she was always lying to him, while Tim had been honest in all but one respect. He wondered why it was so much easier to hate Mary Frances than Tim. Perhaps it was simply that she had been gone, and once Al was gone, they would both seem equally, monstrously, to blame.

All of Le Paquis had been a lie; that he could chart for certain.

It was a matter of days now, a matter of survival. There was an envelope in his packed suitcase with five hundred dollars, a ticket for a ship that would depart England in August for New York. Just this last act of his marriage to get through, and then blackness, nothing, not even grief. He just saw nothing.

When he heard the Kennedys coming up the stairs, they sounded loud and happy, Mary Frances’s laughter loudest and brightest of all. Al suddenly remembered, lifetimes ago, arriving at Tim and Gigi’s house for that cocktail party right before Tim went back to Delaware. Tim had been broken. He certainly seemed fine now, and Mary Frances coming in the door of the apartment with her parents in tow, she was fine too. Al stood and extended his hand to greet Rex, bent to kiss Edith’s cheek; he could feel the muscles in his face grinding to work, and with a kind of grim kinetic force, the evening slid into place.

He offered martinis, the Kennedys accepted. He asked Rex about Paris, and he heard about their walks in the Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées, the dogs, the bread, the art. He asked Edith about the children, and he heard about Norah’s French tutor whom Norah had to correct half the time, and David’s company exercises, his handsome uniform, his skill, it seemed, with a gun.

Then Mary Frances laughed, low and private like a curse slipped out by accident, and Al wanted to slap her. He couldn’t look at her. He focused on what Edith was telling him about the children.

God, if they’d had children.

Edith was blinking, making a small open gesture with her hand toward the silent room. For a moment, Al worried he might have said his thoughts out loud, but there were a thousand possible reasons for discomfort: Rex and Edith had traveled all day, did not know this place, or what their daughter was doing here. And Tim was nowhere to be found.

“Tim will be meeting us at the restaurant,” he said, because it felt like the thing everyone had been waiting for. Maybe Tim would be meeting them; the man had an uncanny ability to know what he needed to know and to be in the right place at the right time. Mary Frances laughed again, and Al stood up to mix himself another drink.

Out the window on the street below, Tim sat at one of the café tables on the sidewalk that had appeared with the spring weather. His white hair blew forward across his face, an open sketchbook, a short glass of wine at his elbow. Al felt a nauseous flipping in his gut: this had all happened, and would keep happening. The window was open. He leaned out.

“Al?” Mary Frances said.

“We’re ready to go, then?” Al said. He sloshed some of his martini, streaking his shirtfront as he took it down. He pointed to the window. “Tim’s waiting.”

* * *

Tim raised his hand for the check. Mary Frances would be gathering herself for dinner now, coming down the stairs. He had marked this day in his head when she left for Paris, and he’d thought about it constantly since she’d been gone. He’d known when her train made the station, the route she would take home; he had known she was in the apartment when he took his seat at the café. It was all a tremendous scale of increments and numbers: how close, how soon. With enough patience, he decided, anything was possible.

His head felt too large on his shoulders. The night at the theater had begun to dog him, the way the ground had dropped away. He could still feel it, maybe because of her, how she filled his thoughts. She was coming down the stairs. He closed his eyes, opened them. Here she comes.

She stepped onto the sidewalk across the street, and it was as though someone had dialed in a radio, the frequency tight and every register clear. She touched her throat with the flat of her thumb, and he could feel the pulse there, the thin skin, her nail.

She looked for him. He stood to meet her gaze.

Mary Frances.

He crossed the street and greeted her parents, Al. He took her hand too, pressed her fingers to his cheek; she wore a new perfume. He had not heard a word from her since she’d left for Paris, and it didn’t matter what they said now. He wanted to crush her in his arms.

He was not sure how they made it to the restaurant.

Her parents filled the silence; they could not stop asking questions about the future. They asked what Al was working on, and wouldn’t her book be published soon? Edith even started to tell stories of Sean and how wonderful he’d been as a baby, the sort of baby you might have taken anywhere, perhaps overseas. Mary Frances and Al sat blanched and paralyzed at opposite ends of the table. Even what they were going to do tomorrow proved a question to fumble between them.

The waiter stepped away, and Mary Frances turned as if to follow him, straining toward something unreachable.

Tim felt responsible. This had all been his idea, the three of them together at Le Paquis. As much as it had once seemed the way into this life, it would have to be the way out now.

“Tomorrow we should see the house,” he said. “We could pack up the car and take a picnic.”

“Oh, lovely,” said Edith.

He thought of that early spring a year ago, taking Mary Frances to see Le Paquis for the first time, and now he told the Kennedys about it, none of it a lie but rather a last, late abstraction. Everything was lush and green, the meadow blooming, the house rising up from the foundations. The peas were almost ready in the garden, and there was nothing as good as fresh spring peas. They could make a picnic, push the carpenter’s tables together, and spread a cloth beneath the sun, the stars. They could cool their wine in the spring-fed fountain. They could see Mary Frances’s new home.