Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

“Can’t we talk?” he said.

She was already gathering the music, gathering herself away from him. They had talked so much these past few days, but Tim still thought there was something else he could offer her. Just one last thing.

She didn’t look at him. “I’ve got early rehearsals tomorrow. I need to get to bed.”

She leaned from the waist and kissed his brow. If he’d worn a tie, she’d have straightened it. He remembered her suddenly as just a girl with her braids in her mouth, bent over her primer, painfully reading to him in Latin, her foot beneath the table atop his own. She was always touching him, petting him, but he suspected now it was something she did without meaning to.

But she was sure, of course she was sure. Of course.

“We can work this out,” he said. “If you—”

“But I won’t. We can’t.” She put a hand to his cheek; there was a kind of pleasure in her voice to tell him no. “And anyways, I was thinking how you won’t be alone for very long. The men you know are not alone. They all have wives.”

“Gigi—”

“You’ll find another one.”

She backed away, butting against the piano bench, jangling his empty glass. She passed it to him, wiping the ring of sweat with her hand. “You should call the ice man in the morning,” she said. Her exit then: a swirl of skirt and green perfume.

John Weld was a screenwriter or a stuntman, maybe both. He and Gigi had known each other since the spring before, and she was not ashamed of herself in the least. It couldn’t be helped who you fell in love with, she said. Which was the excuse of a child, he said, and when would she ever grow up. But he’d made it all the easier for her, what with Mary Frances.

He took the last of his drink to the French doors, the night garden visible through his reflection in the panes, the woolly arm of a juniper, the floss silk tree and its bulbous trunk, near-monsters from where he stood. A stuntman, for chrissake — a man who did dangerous things other people took credit for.

He let the night grow late, and kept his glass full.

* * *

He woke in daylight, late morning, Gigi standing in front of his chair like a woman on the edge of a diving board.

“Everyone is still coming for drinks,” she said.

“Yes?” Tim sighed, looked out at the terrace, the short shadows of the neighbor’s palms. He felt as if time shimmered out there somewhere, had failed to pass the way it usually did. Goddamn Laurel Canyon. “Everyone?”

“The Fishers, the Sheekmans. Nan and whoever.”

Gigi wore an apron over her blouse, printed with apples. She held a wooden spoon by the bowl instead of the handle and looked at him expectantly. When had she become this person who wanted him to break? She turned back to the kitchen, her house shoes clapping loosely on her small feet.

“I’ll go for ice,” he said, and left by the terrace door.

* * *

He was just coming home hours later when the Fishers’ Chrysler pulled beside him in the drive.

“Old man,” Al said, and Tim turned around, a bag of ice dripping on the dark canvas of his loafers. “What the devil are you doing?”

Al leaned across Mary Frances’s lap to speak through her open window, and she put a hand to his shoulder, her left hand, her wedding ring suddenly so plain. They were friends, for god’s sake. They’d all been friends for years.

Tim smiled at them. “Hello.”

He looked different to her now, his face handsome in its angles and shadows, his face above her in the half-light of his bedroom, as she would always see him now. He leaned against the window talking to Al, his mouth making sounds she could not seem to collect into words, his hands cupping the doorframe, his long fingers. Her insides reeled.

“Are you all right?” she said finally.

Tim looked at her and spoke, and she supposed he answered her question. He smiled, and she laughed, and Al did the same. Tim slapped the door of the car and stood, walking away, waving over his shoulder as he disappeared behind the house.

Mary Frances felt the breath she was holding give out.

“Good lord,” Al said. “What happened to him?”

“What do you mean?”

“He looks awful. He looks run through. I mean, really. Do you think he’s ill?”

“Ill?”

Al glanced at her, and Mary Frances closed her eyes, her mouth, the parts of her not to be trusted. “You didn’t notice?” he asked. And then, “Darling. You must learn to pay attention.”

She shook her head. The next few hours seemed impossible, literally impossible, like boulders to be thrown uphill. But then Al opened her door, she took his arm, yanking on the thumb of her short black glove as he raised his hand to knock, and she was headlong into it.

Gloria answered, Gloria Sheekman now. She was squealing glad to see them both.

“You know,” she said. She braced Al’s back with the flat of her hand, exceptionally strong for her size, her hair the color of snow today. “Timmy’s disappeared.”

“Ah. Not really,” Al said.

“Really. Gigi said he went for ice, but his car’s still in the drive.”

“Let me get you a drink, Gloria,” Al said. “Introduce me to your latest husband.”

“You’re such a grouch, Al.” She leaned to kiss Mary Frances. She smelled of roses and gin. “Get yourself a drink.”

She made like they were taking coats and butted Mary Frances down the hall, talking, talking. The lights were on in the master bedroom. “And Gigi is a flutterby, in and out. She’s wearing an apron , for god’s sake.”

“Gloria. I wear an apron sometimes.”

“Not when you’ve spent the last two weeks in a tin can with twenty other girls, you don’t. Something’s fishy.” She looked off absently. “Maybe she’s pregnant.”

Mary Frances swallowed. “You just want somebody else in dutch with the studio.”

“Studio, schmudio. I’ve got a new daddy now.”

The Love Captive had been in the theaters for weeks; Gloria played a hypnotized ingenue, wandering around the screen for an hour until her fiancé broke the spell. The papers had slayed the movie and made Gloria sound as if she were well accustomed to mindless wanderings herself. It didn’t matter; it was her last picture with Universal. Hollywood was changing. There were rules now, laws even, and reputations like Gloria’s had become problematic; starlets didn’t divorce. Still, she seemed to have landed on her feet. She couldn’t quit talking about this Busby Berkeley showstopper, mostly because Gigi had a part too, a smaller one, a chorus girl.

“She’s had the longest girlhood in the history of girls,” Gloria said. “Does she think she’ll be a girl forever?”

Mary Frances lifted her shoulders to say she didn’t know, and then there she was, Gigi, around the corner from the foyer, the hem of her apron balled up in her hand. Underneath the apron, she wore a slender dress of blue crepe that rustled as she stopped and started again toward them.

“Gloria, you stop making fun of me,” Gigi said. She leaned close to press Mary Frances’s cheek. “How nice to see you.”

“Oh, Gigi,” Mary Frances said. And then, “You know I don’t believe a word.”

Gloria sighed. “I’m just jealous, darling. I was never so young as you.”

Gigi patted her hair back from her face, her smile a flashbulb at close range, and Mary Frances felt dizzy, caught in their stutter-step. She remembered Tim saying how he told Gigi everything, everything. Then Gloria called them all her little birds and butterflies, and wasn’t it time for a drink.

“I’ll be right along,” Gigi said, and passed through toward the bedroom.

“Oh, damn,” Gloria whispered. “How much of that should I take back?”