Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

They leaned into each other across the table, threading their hands together; they touched whenever they were near enough now, Tim’s foot resting on the seat next to her, his crutches by the wall. The train chuffed and runneled through the Alps, still distantly cragged with snow. Their Asti arrived, popped and poured for them to toast their future or their pasts, but they just drank it down.

Soon the tunnel would appear ahead of the tracks, and always before they had dreaded it: the echo of their own travel, where they had been and where they were going disappearing in the blackness. Their waiters dreaded it, too, and the chef in his high white hat. But today they sat across from each other, and the dread never came. Whatever was happening to them had already been cast, was here, now. As they slipped into the darkness, Tim whispered something to Mary Frances, and she laughed the kind of low, throaty laugh not heard in public places anymore. The young waiter watched them and sighed.

When the train stopped at Domodossola, they made their way back to their compartment to wait for the border guards. In the corridor, they passed two Blackshirts, a man between them, his hands cuffed to each. You saw that sort of thing all the time now, their three faces sharing the same empty look, and Tim met it squarely, stopping to let them pass.

Their compartment was full of German tourists, their backpacks and girth, their ruddy faces and long legs a tangle in the aisle. They stood politely, to make room.

Tim was hurting now, she could see it in how his hands seemed to shimmer in his lap. She looked at her watch; it was too soon for another shot. She went into her bag for the pills to hold him, but she would give him a shot if he needed it, she didn’t care anymore. She had come to hate this as much as he did. The border guard appeared at the compartment door, but Mary Frances kept her eyes on Tim, his beautiful birdlike face so taut, his eyes so fragile. She swore she heard something shatter and bent to her purse again. The pills were in here somewhere.

Finally she pressed a tablet into his palm. The compartment door slammed; the guards were running in the corridors. The Germans smelled of hay and sweat, their words chinking low in their throats, but Mary Frances watched Tim. Slowly his face released; he might have been asleep.

* * *

The train had been stopped for too long by the time the young waiter came to fetch them for lunch. He was anxious, his French rushing from him all at once, how wonderful, wonderful to see them both again. He had thought — but then he couldn’t finish that sentence. He hoped — but that one fell short too, finally asking them only to be careful, monsieur, be careful. There was a spot on the passageway that was slick.

The border guards stood by the spreading puddle, and a woman with a broom swept the shards from a broken window into a pile at their feet. Inside, the train had been hosed down. Water still dripped from the glass caught in the frame

“What happened?” Tim asked the waiter.

“It was nothing, nothing. An accident.”

But the waiter’s voice hitched as he rushed ahead, leaving them to their table, little dishes of pickles, salami and sweet butter, a basket of warm bread. He brought a bowl of peeled fava beans, Mary Frances’s favorite, as though that were answer enough.

The old waiter was yelling in the kitchen; he’d torn the sleeve of his black jacket. He waved his hands; the chef continued to smoke passionlessly.

As the old waiter passed, Tim reached out for his arm. “What happened?” he asked again.

The old waiter jerked away. “The bastards,” he said. “It is not my business. I was not there. I didn’t do anything, but look what the bastards did to my coat.”

He turned his head; he might have spat. His face, always given to coldness and crease, seemed fully hateful now. Mary Frances looked out her window, the small station, the black toe of a guard’s boot. Tim leaned back against his seat. He was on the downhill slide of his shot; he’d need another soon, and she’d left the works in the compartment.

Finally, slowly, the train began to move.

The young waiter appeared with a bottle of Chianti. He was sorry; the old man was upset, he was crazy.

“What happened back there?” Tim said.

The young waiter leaned close. “There was a prisoner on the train since Paris, with the Blackshirts. They were bringing him back to Italy. In Domodossola he broke the window, leaned his head out, and pressed his throat—”

The old waiter had seen it happen. It was why the train had stopped so long at the border. Mary Frances looked at Tim, his eyes fluttering closed. She noticed for the first time that the restaurant car was not empty; other passengers seemed poised and listening, the clatter of their plates quiet, their forks in midair. Outside the window, the blue blur of spring rushed past as the train picked up speed. The young waiter touched their arms, and left.

Tim was exhausted now.

“Eat,” she said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Tim?”

“But you should,” he said. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

She looked away. They never talked about too little or too much anymore; they just ate and drank. The accounting would come later.

Their plates arrived, little nests of pasta, and the first mouthful tasted like ashes; she could barely swallow it. Long ago they had been different people who had seemed as complete and solid as the ones they were now. Mary Frances put a hand to her chest, the knot there. She no longer thought of home and the Ranch and the Kennedys, of Al and his new wife and the baby they would finally have, she never thought of Le Paquis, now full of boxes, their cellar full of stores they would never use, and she didn’t think of Tim, standing tall in the rows of their garden, his face tipped back to last summer’s sun. What she had was right in front of her, and she thought, only and always, of that.

But now, bite by bite, the train shattered and heading south, their past lives leaked in. What was there left to do but go along?

It was basically done. She pushed away from the desk, her hands coming to rest atop the full basket of her pregnant belly. It pressed before her everywhere now, insistent, ponderous, entirely her own.

She had been writing all day in the tiny rooms at the boardinghouse, rooms that reminded her of so many other places she had written in her life. Her emotions seemed so close to the surface now, and the heat, the last throes of July made her melancholy anyway, but this book was finished, and it was good, she knew it. She’d written it in ten weeks flat.

She’d written to Edith and Rex, the rest of them, that she was taking a leave of absence, that she’d been hired to do some government publicity work, secret, for the war effort, that she’d be incommunicado for some time; she threw in as many official words as she could think of. She’d also said she was thinking of adopting a child.

Instead she had come to Pasadena and rented these rooms through August. She’d spoken to no one but Dr. Bieler and the chambermaid, and because she was weighted with consequence, and because she had nothing better to do, she pounded at her typewriter day and night. To begin at the beginning, to take the measure of her powers, to taste the first thing she remembered tasting and wanted to taste again: from there, she’d written the book she was meant to write, about how she came to be herself, The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher. She had written about her grandmother’s boiled dressing and dour face, about Aunt Gwen and the hills above Laguna, about making curried eggs with Anne when they were children, so hot her face flamed for days after. She wrote about crossing the ocean, about Al and Dijon and Tim. Tim was everywhere; she owed this book to him, and in her mind, would owe every book after, would owe everything that happened to her for the rest of her days.