Ashley Warlick - The Arrangement

Now Mary Frances lifted the lid on a pot of carrot soup.

Al sighed. “When I was first married—”

“All those years ago?” This was a game they played. Her part was to egg him on.

“Yes, yes, to a wonderful girl, we lived abroad in France. We lived in a boardinghouse with a strange and very French family, and we ate at their table every night. Meals made from air and sawdust and whatever Madame found at the bottom of her shopping cart.”

He went on, rhapsodizing: the blanquette de veau and legs of mutton marinated for days in wine and juniper, Madame’s oxtails, the first oxtails he ever ate, and how the smell of them would wake him from his afternoon nap, hours to wait until supper.

“And I would turn to my sweet wife, sitting by the window in her chair, a novel open in her lap, and I would think…” He turned to her now, his face soft and suddenly young.

“You would think?” she said.

“Someday she might make oxtails for me. Someday we might have oxtails of our own.”

She turned back to her pots.

“I never thought you’d make me wait like this,” he said.

They weren’t playing anymore, and they weren’t talking about dinner. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“But you won’t change your mind.”

She could hardly believe what she was hearing. This would be the story now, that Mary Frances didn’t want to have a child, not that Al couldn’t perform long enough to make one, that Mary Frances wasn’t ready, that she was distracted, immature, or worse — that she didn’t want a child because she wanted to spend all her time writing, as though that would ever amount to anything as fulfilling as motherhood.

Where did he think babies came from? What would happen now if she grabbed the collar of his shirt, if she swept the dishes from the table and pulled him on top of her? Her mind flashed to Tim, his full weight bearing down, and the pot she was holding slipped from her grasp.

They both watched the bright orange fantail cross the floor, splashing her apron and skirt, her stockings, everything hot and clinging. It felt, first, as if she’d been slapped. Then her hands began to shake over all the mess and burn; she couldn’t tell where to wipe them first.

Al scooped her up beneath her knees and shoulders and carried her to the bath, flipping on the cold water, filling the tub. He said things — he was scared — things she could not hold in her head, and there was this awful panting sound. Was she making that sound? The water rose, muddy with what leached off her clothes.

“Darling, darling.” Al cupped the water in his hands to pour over her legs. His face was so tight, it hurt to look at him. What on earth were they going to do?

“I’m okay,” she said.

They peeled off her clothes, the stockings first, then her apron, her skirt. Her shoes were ruined.

“I just feel so very dumb.” Her arms went around Al’s neck, and he held her. It was just an accident. He was sorry, she was sorry. He loved her, he was a good man. What difference did it make, what she said about children. It was easy to want something. She wanted things all the time. She could say she wanted a child if it made him happy; it did not mean they were going to have one.

Later, they ate. Her legs were still tender, the splash of burn marks livid on her shins, but the oxtails, delicious.

* * *

Fridays, Mary Frances took the electric train into Los Angeles and spent the morning at the public library. She loved the great hall, its Spanish arches scrolled across the ceiling like rosy bones. She loved flipping through the card catalog, then wandering the stacks, plucking this old history and that translation and the next, and they smelled so good, and they weighed so much in her arms, the weight of what had come before.

But today she chose a table and reached into her satchel for a sheaf of compositions from Al’s class to grade, a simple way to start her pen to paper. Later she would get around to working on her own book. Once she had cleared her head.

Her book, too, had changed, or maybe it had never really been her book to start with, just a handful of essays about the history of food, the Greeks, the Romans, the French, slipping in bits and pieces of things she remembered, things she knew. She’d always written to show Tim. She wanted him to see her as wise and experienced, the woman she wrote about like some kind of veil she let over herself, or maybe something she peeled away. But too, the work was something they could talk about, just the two of them. When he’d asked for more, she’d written more, and when he said she should write a book, she said she already was. She had no idea how to begin that conversation again now. Maybe it was just another thing that didn’t really matter anymore.

Then Tim pulled out the chair across from her.

His pallor was startling, even as he was clean-shaven, his hair neatly waved and white, a bright pink handkerchief folded in a four-point crown tucked into the pocket of his blazer. The library was nearly empty, and no one was watching them, but she felt nervous just the same.

“How did you know where to find me?” she said.

“You spend every Friday with Lucullus.”

“You look awful.”

“I am awful.”

“And maudlin, I see.”

“So that’s it, then. Sympathy is dead. Where are the dusty books, the tomes you’re so concerned with?” he said. “Those look like first-year compositions.”

“Second.”

“You waste your time with someone else’s busywork.”

“You’d do it, if Al asked you to.”

“Ah. Yes. I would.”

And there they were again, at the heart of it. Tim leaned forward, his face unfocused, one square hand folded back against his cheek, idly rolling a marking pen across the tabletop. Her skin prickled, waiting for whatever he had come to say.

“I never told you about the tearoom, did I?” he said.

“No.”

“When Gigi and I first came to California, it had been my thinking to open a thé dansant , like she and I had loved in Paris before we married.”

He’d followed Gigi to Paris after her mother had discovered them without their lesson books, Gigi’s braids unraveled and her head in his lap, and it hadn’t mattered that he wanted to marry her. Her parents took her that night. It was a week before Tim could find a way to follow. He was a younger man then, France still fresh in his mind from his tenure in a field hospital, bearing litters, boxing coffins, moving effects from one wet pallet to the next and wasting away from hunger. Since the war, he’d written a novel, he’d taken up and put down his paints, he drank too much to measure, and then one day there was Gigi in her father’s study, her braids and red ribbons, her naughty smile. She hadn’t cared to hide it, or hadn’t known she should have, too young to conceive of consequences until they struck.

In Paris, the thé dansant had been an easy dodge; an afternoon dance sounded wholesome and cultured, even in light of the fact that Latin studies had once seemed wholesome too. Tim met her chaperone at the door with a box of chocolates and a ticket to the talkies, and found himself with two hours of Gigi’s time, whenever he pleased.

She was a beautiful dancer, tiny and lithe. He liked the attention they drew, his hair already white, Gigi barely more than a girl. Her dresses had been her sister’s and hung loose on her frame, her feelings about undergarments ambivalent, and so Tim was left with the velvety rasp of too much fabric beneath his hand, and her wide blue eyes tipped up at him.

“Marry me tomorrow,” he would say. “Marry me tonight.”

She laughed, her eyes slipping closed; everything she did seemed like she was doing it for the very first time. “What’s the hurry? And we have tickets to the opera anyway.”