The Arrangement (23 page)

A last sip of marc, they settled the bill, and Charles was gone.

They ducked past the boy sweeping up. Mary Frances knew where the coats were hung, but passing Ribaudot’s office, he called out to them, “Madame, how was your meal?”

“It was wonderful, wonderful. Thank you.”

“I am so happy you remembered us.”

“But everyone remembers Ribaudot’s. And Charles. Charles was wonderful.”

He shook his head. “These days it is hard to say who remembers what. And Charles, I am glad he was able to be here. Yours was his last service.”

“Last?”

“He is probably already headed south by now.”

“But why?”

It was a horrible question, none of her business, but she couldn’t help herself.

Ribaudot drew a small polite smile. “Why, Madame, his family is from the south. And the weather there . . .” He stopped. “Charles is old, intemperate, and now he is gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ribaudot shrugged. “So am I.”

Tim took her hand and led her down the narrow stairs, and once they were in the courtyard, the full starlight above, Ribaudot threw the switch, and Aux Trois Faisons went dark. Mary Frances was crying.

Tim gathered her in his arms, pressing her cheek to his. “My dear. It’s okay.”

“It’s not.”

“It was a lovely dinner, a perfect dinner. I am so happy to be with you here.”

“But, Tim. I wanted this so much. And now there’s nothing.”

“Everything passes,” he said. “Everything changes.”

She put her forehead to his shoulder, but she turned her face up, out, away.

“Look,” he said. “All those beautiful tiled roofs. The moonlight, Dijon . . .”

But all that was what she was crying for now, big hopeless tears that come effortlessly, that she did not try to wipe away.

This dinner would become the centerpiece of her book, the story the reviews all focused on, Tim as Chexbres, as he would always be called in her books to come. In her telling, they spark and flirt, they indulge themselves at the table, and at the end of “The Standing and the Waiting,” they weep for
what they will never have. But most important, Chexbres is not Al, who appears in stories before and stories after, Al who is clearly her husband. Dijon had belonged to them. That she would have this dinner, write about this dinner, and then show it to the world is the most complete betrayal of her marriage she could make.

*   *   *

“I don’t think people realize how significant a meal can be,” says the librarian, and she has to laugh.

This is one of the things she likes to talk about these days, how people eat in their cars and don’t enjoy actual plates or food or company as they much as they should. He’s been a good librarian, read her latest interviews. Or maybe he shares her thinking too: she can tell by the way he uses his thumbs against the breastplate, the way he plucks only a few quills at a time, that he knows his way around a game bird. She looks hard at him: a hunter or a cook? She wishes she could blame her glasses.

“God no,” she says. “Which is why there’s much to be said for dining alone.”

He pauses and looks out at the vineyard, the coming darkness. “I guess there is,” but he looks unconvinced.

She’s not certain she believes it herself anymore. But she’s written about the pleasures of traveling alone, dining alone, cooking for one, and she feels beholden to the time he’s taken and the distance he’s come to hear her say what she always says. She has been alone for quite some time now, and the solitary meals, the big bed, the day that insists on being filled lend an intensity to her smallest conversations. Of course,
Norah is here, but that is not the type of companion she means.

She offers the librarian a bag for the feathers and takes the still downy necks of the quail he’s finished back to her kitchen. She fills their cavities with lemons, the bay and sage from the pots on the balcony. She trusses the birds, butters their skins. All of it makes for a familiar ceremony, the hundreds of times she’s trussed birds, pleased guests, held forth on the significance of daily things.

Then suddenly, he’s there behind her with two more birds, his hand to her shoulder, a man accustomed to communicating silently. Suddenly, she wonders about his life back east in Boston, the last woman he touched, the last time he could not keep silent.

“Thank you,” she says, and the evening seems new again.

*   *   *

By the time they got to Switzerland, Mrs. Parrish had caught a cold. She wanted Mary Frances to stay with her in Vevey while Tim went to check his property above Lac Léman.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine, Mother. We’ll only be gone for the day.”

Mrs. Parrish blew her nose into her handkerchief and looked at Mary Frances.

“I can stay,” she said. “I can go to the pharmacy. It’s not a problem.”

“I hate for you to change your plans, dear. It’s just that I feel rather out of sorts here, and it’s not like Paris. I can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

“Of course. It’s not a problem.”

Tim turned from the window. He pushed his white cuff up his forearm to check his watch, and Mary Frances realized she had not worn her own in weeks. She rubbed the empty spot on her wrist, wondering if she’d even brought it.

“The weather is just too spectacular, Mother. I’ll be back in a half hour with the car. You can come with us, or you can stay here and we’ll return this evening.”

“Oh, Timmy,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“That’s fine, then. And you’ll be fine. But Mary Frances and I will be going.”

Mrs. Parrish redistributed the blankets over her legs. She studied her son, his face even and calm. This was not a standoff, but merely Tim’s patience in waiting for her to understand. Finally, she put her head back to the stack of pillows and coughed.

“Perhaps if I can just have a bit of tea sent up,” she said, but Tim was already out the door.

Mary Frances picked up the phone to order the tea, lemon, and honey, a plate of sandwiches. She asked if there was anything else, and Mrs. Parrish pretended not to hear her.

“Some brandy, perhaps?”

Mrs. Parrish only shook her head. She looked fragile, her eyes mouse-pink and wet, and Mary Frances felt a stab of guilt. What would Edith do to see her behave this way, Rex, any of them? She sank into the bedside chair.

“You truly are sick, aren’t you,” she said.

“Well, yes.”

She reached a hand to feel her forehead, and Mrs. Parrish pulled away, startled.

“This is beyond my understanding,” Mrs. Parrish said. “Really.”

Mary Frances let her hand fall to her lap. She was embarrassed to be so obvious, but not so embarrassed that she could stop herself. And what would it matter, to stop herself now? Suddenly the room felt hot, her own face feverish, but Mary Frances kept her seat until the bellman’s knock at the door with the tea tray, and then she slipped away.

*   *   *

They drove along the lake, the winding Haute Corniche between Lausanne and Vevey, the Alps still capped with snow. Tim was talking even faster than he drove, his white hair downy in the wind.

“I’ve wanted you to see this place from the moment we found it. Really. I thought of you immediately.”

“You did?”

“I think this place saved my life. Buying this place with Claire, thinking of you, here, this moment we are about to arrive at—” He began laughing. “I think that was it.”

They had not really talked about the winter before last, how bad he seemed when he left Los Angeles and what had taken place since then, not in any kind of solid terms. What would be the point in tracing back, what he had done, what she had done to get here? The vineyards terraced up from the lakeshore, and in the meadows between she could see small stone houses built into the hillsides, wending paths, sheep and their herder, a boy and a dog. Tim was talking about the cheeses, the brandy and eau de vie, the summers, the
meadows filled with flowers, and Mary Frances rolled the window down to feel the breeze on her face and hear the bells from the sheep as they tripped along. And to be alone with Tim, moving. This was as solid a thing as she could ever ask for.

“We’re here,” he said. “This is it.”

A stone house like the others they had passed, but this one in an open meadow, a fountain bubbling in front, spring-fed, ice cold on her fingertips. He motioned her forward, inside. It was dark and cold and smelled of old hay. The house would need more rooms, a kitchen, but the chimney was sound, and the hearth magnificent. Could they cook on the hearth? Could they chill things in the spring?

She stared at him.

“I have this idea,” he said, and he began to laugh again. “What if we all lived here together?”

*   *   *

And then they boarded the ship home, and it was over. Mrs. Parrish, still under the weather, hardly left her stateroom. The salon, exactly like the salon they’d enjoyed on the trip over, was full of German brewers headed to Milwaukee, the first drink of every evening in toast to the portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging at the end of the bar. They had found a woman, lean and giggling, the silvery drape of her dress like a wing. They were loudly pressing her with glass after glass of champagne.

Mary Frances held her chin in her hand, drawing a small map in the condensation on the tabletop. Tim watched the Germans with a kind of simmering concern; she could feel what he was feeling, as if they had exchanged skins.

“Tim,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“We’re going to help that woman get out of here, for chrissake.”

“Tim.”

He looked at her then, and she saw how tired he was, the dark circles beneath his eyes. He couldn’t tell her what they were going to do. He didn’t know how they would do it.

He stood and extended his hand for hers, tucking it against his heart, and they left the salon, the pink piano, the girl in the silver dress still laughing with panic, her wrist in the grip of a monocled man. In the dining room, the cabin boys were decking the walls with pine boughs, preparing for the woodland feast. It was as if they were living it all in reverse.

In her room, Tim pulled the red satin coverlet from the bed, and they lay down on the white sheets in their evening clothes. She had begun to cry, and he turned to her so he could see her face, reaching out and lifting her chin.

“You don’t need to hide from me,” he said. “And you don’t need to stop.”

She covered her face, and he took her hands in his, pressed them to his own hot cheeks, his neck and ears. She tried to apologize, and he told her to stop. This is what they were doing now.

“And then we will think of something else.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“You will.”

“I can’t leave Al. He is so very sad. We can’t.”

“No.”

“And you can’t come back to California.”

“So we have no choice, darling. Imagine that. We have no other choice.”

His own eyes were filling now, and she felt something in her head snap and heave forth blackly. The sound she made seemed to come from somewhere else in the room and he put his mouth down on hers to take it from her and that’s all they suddenly seemed capable of, throwing their bodies over each other like shields. He pushed the top of her dress down her shoulders to get to her skin.

In the middle of the night, he told her he would write to Al of Vevey, of the orchard and the lake below, the stone fountain and the little house they could make bigger, how they could all go there together and make it something new, for the three of them. Al was her husband, and Al was his friend, and this was a human thing they’d made together, all three of them. She listened to his voice in the darkened room, the spotlight moon shining from the porthole, the ship’s rolling beneath her, his breath on the back of her neck, and she knew she’d do anything he asked of her, anything he could think of.

“But this,” she said, and she reached over, closing her hand around him, his body already rising to the same thought. She turned and pushed him onto his back, her feet flat beside his hips, her sex settling down. “But this.”

He reached between them, and his touch shot through her.

“We can’t have this anymore.”

Vevey, Switzerland

Fall 1936

A
l sat in the café overlooking Lac Léman and knew the decision to come here had been the right one. There were no pages in front of him, no whores chattering past, this was not Dijon or Paris, this was a Swiss town, and the Swiss did not go in for whores the way the French did. And there was no cassis. He drank a strong black coffee and felt the autumn afternoon on his face, the sinking, chilly light off the water, and he knew this would be the place where everything changed.

Upstairs, in the pension, his wife unpacked their trunks, making their home the way she had when they’d first married, and there was comfort in that. They had money; he’d sold the car, whatever furniture Mary Frances had not wanted to store at the Ranch, they had stripped their lives down to the wires—typewriters, wool overcoats, sturdy shoes, a small collection of records and books. Each other, perhaps—it was hard to say.

He had not written in over a year. He had come to blame California.

When Mary Frances returned in the spring, it had already been in his mind to move away from there—to leave the
Kennedys, the college, his own mother, still lost in the uncharted territory of her widowhood; it made him guilty to read her letters, made him feel as though he should take the train north immediately, but when he got there, he felt like he should shoot himself. And the Ranch was worse, the Kennedy press and need of each other, all of it suffocating. He had been looking for a way to begin again, and then Tim’s letter arrived with this idea that they all return to Vevey. They could make a place to work, and live a life free from the past, and Al knew he was talking about Hollywood and Gigi and the little white bungalow in Laurel Canyon, but also that Tim saw his predicament. Tim had always understood him.

Now he was anxious for Tim to arrive—they had expected him to meet their train at the station, and they had waited with their trunks on the platform, Mary Frances blanching with nerves or travel. She had been so quiet since they left California. Al knew part of her was reluctant to make this leap, and as he watched her knot and unknot the handkerchief in her lap at the station, he realized it hadn’t mattered to him. She never talked about her book, and he would have given his eyeteeth for such a contract. She had been reluctant to have children, and he felt as if they’d lost their chance now. They were doing this instead. Sometimes when he looked at Mary Frances, she seemed like a stranger to him; he watched her bring a cigarette to her red mouth and thought how this was not the girl he’d married.