The Arrangement (13 page)

They heard the car in the drive that Gigi had been waiting for, the engine at an idle. They heard Mary Frances cut the water in the bath. Still Gigi stood there with her skirts around her waist and Al, paralyzed. Seconds beat past. From the driveway, a tap on the horn, and she smiled, and let them fall.

*   *   *

It was a flat card, not a letter; he said he’d been reading an article in a magazine the other day that made him think of her, a little piece about the sand and the sea, an artist’s colony of sorts. He had found
Westways
at the library near his
mother’s house. The piece was very good. He hoped she was proud. She turned the card over. A single line:

Write to me.

It was more haiku than conversation; he offered her nothing more in these few words than what she could make herself. But still, he’d gone to the library. He’d looked up her essay and taken the time to tell her as much.

She took off her clothes and climbed into the tub. She could hear Gigi leaving, the front door slamming as she rushed to meet whoever waited in the driveway. She sank back into the water, Tim’s card still clutched in her hand.
Write to me.
She had been. She did, all the time she wrote to him in her head, of what had happened and might still happen again, of what she saw that made her think of him, his razor left in the bathroom cabinet, and pulling the open blade across the soft hairs at the back of her hand, seeing his white shirt, crisp and hanging from the laundry, and burying her face in the empty chest of it, hoping for his smell, his chlorine and wet pavement and grass. The ink bloomed across the cardstock, and what rose in her gave way to that thing that tried to figure out how long, how much she would give him, now that he was asking. Now that she was here, and Al was going away.

*   *   *

His departure was early, and they dressed in darkness; Al whispered they could share a coffee at the station.

They did not notice the blue Hudson blocking the drive until they’d already started backing out.

Al checked his watch. He cranked around in his seat,
gauging his options, and then turned back to the steering wheel. Mary Frances didn’t know what to say. She folded her hands in her lap as if she were waiting for the light to change.

“I can’t leave like this,” Al said. “I can’t leave you here alone.”

She looked back at the Hudson, as if for confirmation she was not alone.

“Your train, Al.”

“I can’t.”

“They’re in love, aren’t they?” she said. “People in love are completely full of themselves. You’re not going to stop any of this, obviously. Nothing will.”

He was still looking at the wheel. She suddenly had the feeling they could sit here for days and not get past this moment. She patted Al’s shoulder as you would the flank of a good horse.

“Cut over the lawn,” she said. “You don’t want to miss your train.”

*   *   *

When she got home, the Hudson was gone. Gigi’s door was ajar: on the nightstand, a cup of coffee and the newspaper collected from the front porch. The sheet was low on Gigi’s back, so slight Mary Frances could trace the basket of her ribs, a long scar, thin and red as a whip of candy, disappearing over the arch of her hip. Mary Frances had seen Gigi in bathing suits and harem costumes and had never seen this scar. She wondered how hard she had to work to keep it covered.

Tim would have known every curve of it, of course. In a strange translation of time and space, Mary Frances knew
that the time Tim had taken with her body the night they’d spent together was his habit, was what he gave Gigi as a matter of course, and she stuttered there at the door. To have that all the time. To walk away from it for something else. Or maybe every person met another on their own fresh terms, and what happened between her and Tim had never happened before. She couldn’t say, and she was surprised by how little she cared.

In the studio, Al’s manuscript was still stacked beside the typewriter, his clean paper, a fine film of dust collected there, and the paintings stacked against the walls, like children made to face the corner. She trailed her fingers along the top edge of the canvases smeared with red and ochre, tipping one back against her leg: a flurry of shapes and colors. Another, and another: they were all bright, dodgy, difficult to understand upside down and backward.

Tim had never showed her this work. There were paintings he’d made all over the house, landscapes and portraits and studies of small objects, paintings his cousin had made of Tim and his sister when they were children that you could now buy on greeting cards, and none of them were like this. She pulled out a canvas and hung it on a tenpenny nail across from the worktable.

It seemed to be a view through a scrim, the wavery aspect of water. She had the feeling her eyes were adjusting to the light in the room; which room exactly she could not say, the studio or the space in the painting, but after a while, a man’s face appeared, angular and strong, a bright stain of rouge or red on his cheek, as though he’d been kissed there and rubbed it away, as though he’d been slapped.

She pulled out a stool and sat down, cranked a clean page into the typewriter, and opened her notebook.

Lucullus placed a live fish in a glass jar in front of every diner at his table. The better the death, the better the meal would taste.

Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France.

Everything started somewhere else. She thought of Tim’s note:
write to me
. He didn’t want to hear about Lucullus and Catherine de Medici; but she loved her old tomes and the things unearthed there, the ballast they lent, the safety of information. She spread her notebooks open across the table. There was a recipe for roasted locusts from ancient Egypt, and on the facing page, her own memory of the first thing she ever cooked, the curry sauce and Anne’s chocolate. A conversation rising between the two, her own voice at the center of it all.

It was hours later when Gigi knocked on the studio door.

“I’m late,” she said. “Did Al get off all right?”

Mary Frances turned on her stool. Gigi wore an ivory coat that gathered and buttoned at the waist, a pert hat pushed forward over her sleek curls, and Mary Frances wanted to excuse her same white blouse, her same blue skirt and oxfords. But Gigi was staring at Tim’s painting.

“I didn’t know he kept that,” she said, her expression skipping like a record.

“There are stacks of them.”

Gigi tried to make a sentence several times, her pretty mouth discarding the words before they’d begun. Finally, she turned to Mary Frances.

“You know that’s a picture of him.”

Mary Frances looked at the painting again.

“He had a collection of mirrors—old mercury glass ones, cracked ones, some that were ruined with age. He used the mirrors. Sometimes we’d have to stop—”

“It’s just nice to have something to look at.”

Gigi let her gaze settle on Mary Frances.

“He used to let me help, give me little chores around his studio,” she said finally. “He was always very good at making you feel important.”

“He’s probably still good at those things.”

She laughed. “Of course. That’s not what I was saying. Only that I’m familiar with his methods.” She gestured at the typewriter.

Mary Frances turned back to the page she’d written. She felt exposed the way she had playing cards, Gigi passing her Tim’s letter like contraband. She thought of the pale fish twisting in the jar, and she listened to Gigi walk away.

*   *   *

Without Al, Mary Frances discovered what she did alone. She liked to cook for herself, to assemble a meal of things he would never consider worth a mealtime—shad roe and toast, soft-set eggs, hearts of celery and palm with a quick yellow
mayonnaise, a glass of wine, an open book in her lap, and the radio on. The elements that mattered most were the simple ones: butter, salt, a thick plate of white china and a delicate glass, the music faint, the feel of paper in her hand, and the knowledge that there was more, always more book to read, more wine if she liked it, some cold fruit in the refrigerator when she was hungry again, and the hours upon hours to satisfy herself.

She wrote. She wrote when she got up in the morning, straight on the typewriter or with her notebook in her lap, a cigarette lit but unsmoked, coffee poured but turning cold. She wrote while she did the breakfast dishes, while she swept the kitchen floor or hung the laundry, while she unpacked the refrigerator, wrapping everything in wet newspaper to keep it cold while the freezer box dripped into a mop bucket inside the open door. She wrote mostly when she was not writing; she wrote mostly when she looked as if she were doing something else, and then she typed late into the night in Tim’s studio to have another manuscript to send to him, another way to keep their conversation going.

She stayed out of Gigi’s way. Her friends came to the house, other chorus girls and actresses, all of them as young as she was, slender as switches, their hair every shade of blond imaginable. They passed around eyelash curlers and lipstick, cinched and beaded dresses, draped their clothes around the living room as though it were a costume closet: somebody had a date and needed a sweater, a skirt, a pair of stockings without runs, it came off another girl’s body, as if one were as good as another. Mary Frances lingered in the kitchen just to listen to them talk.

The talk was constant, wrapped in nudge and insinuation.
This director was easy, this one hard, the production code would be the death of all of them. Roles were being cut because of it: embraces that lasted too long, hips that shimmied too long, the moll to the devil who didn’t get his due, and suddenly movies they thought they were playing in belonged to someone who’d kept their sunnier side up. One girl, Nan, was sad there would be no more kissing.

“Not the way there used to be kissing, at least. You know, like kissing so that maybe you got a date later.”

“No more bad girls.” Doris’s voice was whiskey-burned, and she liked to take the dim view. “No revenge in modern times. I mean, just think about that. What kind of stories are you going to tell without revenge?”

“I think that’s the modern times part, Doris,” Gigi said. “I think revenge is just old-fashioned.”

“But it’s human nature.”

“What isn’t?” And they laughed.

Tim had been right; they loved their scandals: who was too fat, too thin, and what that might mean about their habits, and what would happen if the studio found out. Once a subject was open, it always seemed open. Nan was having an affair with someone famous; they referred to him only as the King, and with a great deal of whispering and giggle. They all thought Tim was out of town.

It wasn’t long before Gloria heard that the Fishers had moved to Laurel Canyon.

She appeared late one afternoon, still wearing her backless lace gown from whatever scenes she’d shot that day, its fishtail hem dragging on the slate. She was stunning. One of the
girls in the living room gasped when Mary Frances opened the door.

Gloria took Mary Frances’s hands and kissed her cheeks. Her stage makeup was frighteningly dark, as if her features had all been underlined.

“I want you to move in with me,” Gloria whined. “What do I have to do to get that? Al?”

“Al’s gone to see his father in Palo Alto.” Mary Frances slipped her arm into Gloria’s and turned her toward the living room.

“So it’s just us girls?” She shot a gleaming smile over her shoulder, and Gigi seemed to wilt.

The actresses fell away for her entrance. She swept into the love seat, her skirt flung wide, perching forward for a cigarette from the box on the table. She waited for someone to light a match, and Nan fumbled through her purse.

“Would you like some coffee?” Mary Frances said. “I was just going to make some. Coffee?”

Gloria was suspicious already; her imagination followed only one direction, down a path she’d taken herself many times and so was familiar with the scenery. When Mary Frances returned from the kitchen, she was still digging at Gigi, Doris and Nan hanging on every word.

“He went home to Delaware without you?” she said. “Are you working? I mean, that’s a long time for you to be working.”

“And Al did the same thing to me,” Mary Frances said. “Just last week, he took the train north by himself and said I could keep Gigi company.”

“Well. It’s an epidemic!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned it together. I haven’t heard from Al once, but Tim and Gigi talk every day. I’ve never seen a man more in love.”

“They are
adorable
,” said Gloria.

“Oh, more than that, I’d say.” Mary Frances looked at Gigi, her face coloring over her cup. “I’m jealous.”

“Who isn’t,” said Gloria, and then, “I heard the fixers had to drag somebody’s wife out of the House of Francis yesterday.”

Nan looked nervous. “Whose wife?”

And they rolled on to other matters, finger waves, and how to lose five pounds in three days, and a woman downtown who fit corsets as if she were giving you a whole new rib cage. Gigi smiled and laughed and flattered Gloria, but when Mary Frances returned to the kitchen with the coffeepot, she’d followed her inside.

“That Gloria,” she said. “I never—”

Mary Frances said, “Gloria has been my friend for as long as I can remember.”

Gigi looked small and suddenly tired, dark circles beneath her eyes beneath her makeup. Everyone had lives they lived outside themselves, and altogether separate ones within.

“I’m sorry,” Gigi said quietly.

Mary Frances understood then that maybe their fight was over, debts paid. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

“Show me what you’re doing here. Even I can learn how to make coffee.”

Mary Frances measured beans into the grinder and turned the handle. Gigi filled the pot. In the other room, Gloria’s
spangled laughter led the others, and neither woman found herself particularly eager to return.