The Arrangement Read online

  If not for Gigi, there’s no way he’d still be living here.

  But he’d promised her California, that she could be a movie star, and for god’s sake if she wasn’t about to play Barrymore’s secretary in his next picture. And if her star continued to rise, she would get better roles, where she would play another man’s wife, girlfriend, mother someone else’s children. He walked up the driveway of their house, squat and white, and he felt as if he were walking onto a set, that behind and beneath this place that looked so solid, people were working hard to make it seem real.

  He left his keys on the table in the foyer next to the bowl of florist tulips, now ragged and sad in the time since Gigi left. He left his jacket on the table too, his tie and pants, skinned his white shirt over his head. He’d pick up in the morning, or the maid would on Friday; it didn’t make much difference as long as he was here alone.

  * * *

  He woke to the double beat at his bedroom door, a woman’s shoes falling from her hand into the parquet, one and then the other.

  “You would not hear a person breaking into your own house,” she said.

  He turned on the light. “Mary Frances? Are you all right?”

  “The door was unlocked. I walked right in.”

  His body sank against the pillows, all ribs and sockets, lean and not relaxed. She remembered he had fought in wars, that he was trained to be prepared for anything, and still he was surprised to see her. She had surprised herself.

  She placed her clutch on the bureau, thought ridiculously of the folded typescript she still carried. There was nothing left to pretend that might make sense: her house in the hills was the other direction, her husband the other direction, and yet the evening seemed finally sharpened to its point. If she was going to be here, it could be for only one thing.

  She unfastened her watch from her wrist and set that on the bureau too.

  Tim stared at her. “You’re right,” he said. “You never blush.”

  “I told you.”

  “Dear, what time is it? You’re like the little girl, stayed up too late.”

  It seemed like a dare.

  “Mary,” he whispered. “Don’t.”

  But she turned from him, her fingers at the catch of her dress, the untoothing of a zipper. She was hoping that this wasn’t as foolish as it felt, but it seemed the thing she had to do. If he didn’t want her, she needed to know it, and if this was bound to happen, it needed to be now, and if she was about to ruin everything, then goddamnit, so it was.

  Behind her, she felt the bed shift beneath Tim’s weight, and then there came the barest tip of his touch between her legs.

  She could not get her mouth around fast enough to take him in.

  * * *

  They will never, really, tell anyone about this. In the morning, at the beginning of next week, Tim will meet Gigi’s train at Union Station, and he’ll bring her a corsage. He’ll load his arms with her cases, cutting the flock of other girls, their bottled hair waved, each of them like orchids, petals thick and flashy, with their men, and their arms full too. He’ll take Gigi home. She’ll sit at the piano, her ankles crossed and tucked aside, and she’ll ask him what he’s been playing since she’s been gone.

  He’ll see the moment before him: he has missed her, he has always loved her, and people do the most surprising things by accident. He’ll tell her a funny thing happened while she was away, and think of her washed in lights on that picture with Eddie Cantor, the heavy blond wig that concealed her body for the camera, a slave girl, a harem girl, her face lifted for her single moment in the shot, so like a racehorse, his Gigi, since she was thirteen. He’ll tell her a funny thing happened while she was away, that their friend Mary Frances appeared in his bed in the middle of the night, and when he says it, he’ll feel something new break over them, hot and bright and from above.

  She’ll place her small white hand atop his and say it doesn’t matter. He’ll notice then how she hasn’t even removed her hat, that her small white hand is cool and ringless, the corsage heavy with lilies and their scent of powder, and he will not know what else to say.

  In some small way, it is Mary Frances now who ate his words. She ate everything tonight, lush and drunk and wet, now she has her mouth at his ear, and she’s saying things to him about what she wants and how, and she is strong against him, he can feel her strength in her legs and her grip and in her mouth still at his ear, but he can’t make out words anymore, just something straining at its seams. Her slip drifts against him, and then she takes that, too, away, and they are naked.

  There is nothing Mary Frances understands so much as nakedness, and looking down between them, she can’t bear to look into his face, so she looks where things make sense on him, the way each part fits into the next, how compact and practical, and she thinks of the waiter with his knife over the fish, what a marvel it is to see the works inside. She wants to keep seeing that in Tim. She is afraid of what she’ll think of if she stops.

  Her fear must show for just a moment, because he says what, and stumbles on the rest of it, unable to finish the question what’s wrong, what is it, because all of it is wrong, but he asks anyway and stumbles, and nothing comes to her, nothing even to fill the space, which is growing now, pushing up between them. Oh, goddamnit, she thinks. Goddamn. Before she realizes it, she’s talking, and she nearly tells him she loves him before his mouth comes down again to cover hers, thank god, because it wasn’t love that made her want Tim, that turned her car around on the dark highway and brought her back to this moment, it wasn’t love, but rather an appetite’s demand: direct, imperative, true as love perhaps, but far more dangerous.

  All she’s thinking now is don’t stop, don’t stop. Don’t stop.

  * * *

  She left while he was still asleep, the folded typescript from her purse next to his jacket in the hall. She rolled the car downhill before she started it, flicked the headlights before she hit the main road, headed fast along the canyon to her family’s summerhouse in Laguna, where she’d told Al she’d be all night. Funny, the things that just came naturally. When she unlocked the door and threw open the windows, the scent of eucalyptus and last year’s ashes struck her like a fist.

  In a book on the shelf under the eaves upstairs was a packet of sonnets, nearly fifty, papers creased and brittle from the number of times she had unfolded them, from the way she’d carried them the winter before they got engaged, when Al was away teaching English in a boarding school in Wyoming. He’d written to her, he said, on a single long cold night, until his candles burned out and the ink froze in the well. The sonnets weren’t about her; they were for her. She could sense all he’d poured into them, even when she wasn’t entirely sure what all of it was. It made her want all that poured into herself.

  She had been a lazy student, enrolled in summer school at UCLA when they first met, but she was ardent in her letters. By the time Al came home for Christmas break, he wanted to marry her and take her away from California, to France, to Dijon, where he’d been awarded a three-year fellowship. The first time they kissed, she’d fallen against him, the ground beneath her swaying like a ship. She was twenty-one.

  France had been a fairy tale, an adventure, an extended honeymoon. Al was a student, and so there was no money but what they accepted from her parents, Rex and Edith. There was no time to be what Al was studying to be, a writer. Perhaps that was why one shouldn’t spend one’s time studying to be something rather than being it; there was only so much time.

  It was to the summerhouse in Laguna that she and Al returned after Dijon, and where they’d first met Tim and Gigi.

  There had been a minor earthquake. When it passed, they’d tumbled out to the pebbled lane to find Gigi, the ties of her madras sundress flapping against her bare neck. A downed power line snapped and flared behind her, and when she started toward them, it was as though she’d been cracked i
nto motion with the whip of it. Mary Frances felt Al stand up straight beside her; she stood up straighter herself.

  “Dear god, California,” Gigi said. In her hands, she held the pieces of a china dog she let chunk into the dirt. “Dillwyn and Gigi Parrish.”

  But there was no Dillwyn. The three of them looked behind her to the latticed porch she’d come from. “Timmy!” she called.

  The Parrishes had been their constants ever since. They were renting the house next door while Tim worked on several others they owned, one in Laguna and one back in Laurel Canyon. He was older, an artist, he’d run a restaurant, he’d published a novel years before, and illustrated a handful of his famous sister’s children’s books. He knew people in New York and Hollywood; he’d hire Al to paint a fence, and they’d end up plotting a screenplay. Mary Frances remembered the evenings they talked over a bottle of wine or two, with the fire in the hearth and the wind whisking outside and Gigi like some kind of crystal chandelier, suspended overhead. She often felt she started writing just so they wouldn’t forget about her altogether.

  But after a stretch of painting fences, she knew Al was relieved to be part of college life again when he got a job at Occidental starting in the fall. It had been months since they’d seen the Parrishes, since the end of summer, when they’d moved to Eagle Rock.

  Mary Frances had missed this house. She had been raised, truly, at this long table by the sea; all the parlors and cooks, the teas and socials back in town, all that balanced by a summer spent scrabbling along the rocks with her sisters, Norah and Anne, their feet black with tar, their bellies full of fish their brother David pulled from his nets. The Kennedys’ Laguna. She had come here hoping for some sense of what this place might do to fix her now.

  She took the path from the weathered porch through the sage and down the cliffs to the ocean. It was not warm, and the beach was curved around itself and empty, the broad neon sign for the hotel winking on and off up the coast. She sat on the bottom step nearly in the sand and watched the sea beat itself against the shore.

  Behind her, she heard footsteps and turned to see another couple she knew from the summer. Every afternoon they’d sit on their blanket, the man in a short, tight bathing suit, the woman dressed like his nurse, rubbing his thick brown back with oil. Now passing her on the bottom stair, they let their conversation drop, to be picked up again once they were alone.

  In summer, the man had watched her as she came from the ocean, his forearms draped over his bent knees, squinting after her into the sun. Every day he watched her pass their blanket for the stairs, her wet bathing suit somehow making her more than naked, and his eyes so constant. One day she looked back, met his stare, held it. Then, from behind, the woman rose and nipped the fat part of his hand with her teeth the way a bitch directs a pup, and he laughed, turned to the woman, smiled, spoke. Like a distant light, Mary Frances had snapped out.

  Now the man walked along the water’s edge, just outside the spray, and the woman followed a half step behind, her arms folded against her gray buttoned coat. After a while, she reached out and brushed some fleck from the shoulders of his sweater. Mary Frances no longer walking past their blanket, the winter, this chill, this season had not really changed them.

  Soon Mary Frances would take the steps back up the cliffs to her narrow bed beneath the eaves and sleep, and then tomorrow she would return to Al, her face windburned from this morning on the beach and fresh enough to hide behind. She would make supper, the simple kind of meal they used to eat in France, then the last of the good cognac by the fire. Al would pick up the book they were reading, Moby-Dick, and the great white whale would take them back to the sea.

  It was just a night she had insisted on, with her willfulness, with her shoes in her hands. It was just a night, and back in Eagle Rock, she would feel her life nip her into place again, blurring at the edges so that she could not say if she had meant for such a night to happen or just to come close enough to watch it pass by.

  * * *

  Back in Eagle Rock, Al was writing the same he’d been writing for almost their entire married life together. He went to class in the morning and came home for lunch, a bottle of milk, a fried egg on rye, a kiss on her cheek before he went to his office, and that was what she saw of him until dinnertime.

  She followed the rhythm of his typewriter around the house. She washed the dishes, hung the laundry, took a bath, the tap of his keys coming over the transom from his desk next door, a vibrant whickering, so loud and bright. She was afraid of what would fill her head if not this brightness, if not the clip of his typing, the crank of a fresh page.

  In Dijon, Al had seemed to be thinking all the time, and even when they were first married, she never knew what he was thinking about. He could be perfectly still for minutes, his lanky legs folded under his chair, looking out the same window she sat in front of. His black coffee, his pipe, the still keys of his typewriter, and his long stare right through her over the mossy rooftops of the city. It was worse when he worked in their rooms. It was worse to see how far away he was, right next to her, than to imagine him at the café in the place, not seeing strangers around him, not even the pretty girls.

  She’d slip off her velvet house shoes, cross her legs high, and wait for him to notice. She’d tap the tip of her pen against her teeth, the wet pop of her lips in the silence. She’d turn her face to the sun, arch back against her chair, and close her eyes, but she was nearly screaming in her own head, innervated, willing him to turn her way. Finally she’d snap out of her chair, the novel open in her lap clattering to the floor.

  Finally, then, Al looked at her.

  “Darling,” he said, reaching into the breast pocket of his coat. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it.”

  And he’d press into her hand some tiny gift he’d picked for her in the market, a pair of ivory buttons, a lavender sachet, a tortoiseshell comb for her hair. He gave her something every Thursday to mark the day they first met, and turning the bauble in her palm, she would feel as if she’d forged it herself, with all her want pressing up against his lofty far-awayness.

  He’d smile at her, brush his fingers across her cheek, and everything was fine again.

  Now she jumped at the ringing telephone, the mailman’s knock. She lingered in the hall outside his study—Al’s chair, Al’s black typewriter, Al’s poem, the last thin light faint across the desktop—waiting to be invited in.

  “Darling,” he said. “Is it so late already?”

  He extended his arm for her to step inside. They looked at the scattering of work across the desk: the slips of ciphered paper, the full ashtray, the growing stack of manuscript that she would not ask again to read. She could throw a dust cloth over all of it, pack their bags, and go south to Mexico, back to France, return maybe in the spring. They had once spent a chilly holiday planning a trip to Algiers they both knew they would never take. She needed a plan like that now, a string of plans, the sort Al had always made with her before.

  “Dinner?” she said.

  He sighed, his blond curls sweetly ruffled. “Of course.”

  He took his place at the kitchen table, and she reached across him to strike a match for the candles, her body brisk and distant, a kite too far away to chase. It was difficult to leave his desk sometimes, to remember what she’d want from him, how to be a husband.

  She pulled a small glass from the cabinet and a bottle of sherry, placed them at his elbow.

  “What would I do without you?” he said, but she did not turn around.

  Al pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes. He liked to listen to Mary Frances in the kitchen, the rasp of the knife against the board and whatever thunking vegetable she was taking down. It was a habit they’d begun those last few weeks in France, their apartment so small and cold that Mary Frances had prepared supper in her overcoat. They didn’t talk—later, huddled together in front of the coal stove, they wo
uld read to each other, they would talk then—but when Al had spent the day at his desk, to be in the same room with her was often overwhelming.

  He’d never seen such company between his mother and father. His mother boiled potatoes and slabs of meat, and he’d never seen his father sit and watch her, never seen him sit without doing something else: reading the paper, listening to the radio, eating, and then moving on. His mother had her hands full with himself and Herbert, brothers for whom food was fuel. And then there was his father’s church, the parishioners, the handfuls of people in and out on any given day. The community. The community had always been important to his parents.

  Al felt without one now, only himself, Mary Frances, and her family.

  “You know,” he said. “Larry says Fay’s boy is less a terror since he’s been talking more. More words, less screaming. Perhaps we can have them back around.”

  Mary Frances laughed. Larry was their oldest friend. “But what about Fay?”

  “You love Fay.”

  “I love Larry. I like Fay.”

  Mary Frances sectioned an orange from its membrane over a bowl to catch the juice; the quick feathering motion of her wrist. The kitchen filled with oranges.

  “I doubt they’ll have more children,” Al said.

  The rhythms of her knife broke, began again. “Oh, doesn’t the world have children enough? Clearly, Fay has her hands full.”

  Al didn’t say anything.

  She turned.