The Arrangement (24 page)

Tim had sent the caretaker Otto to meet them, a barrel of a man, barely topping Al’s shoulder with the crown of his hat, which he immediately wadded in his big square hands. Mary Frances kissed both his cheeks. He appeared to be
weeping, perhaps with joy at seeing her, perhaps with allergies. The accent here was frighteningly thick; it seemed as if he said Tim would be in on the six-fifteen, that they should all have dinner together and begin their grand plans.

Mary Frances had laughed and closed her eyes. “Grand plans,” she said.

Al didn’t understand. “What other kind should we make?”

And so what had been quiet between them turned cold, and Mary Frances did not want to leave the rooms at the pension for a café. She needed a nap, she said, but she seemed skittish. She needed, he suspected, to be away from him.

Al sighed, sipped the last gritty dregs from his cup. It was understandable, of course. They had been married seven years this month, spent the last several weeks crammed against each other in various forward-moving, earth-chewing hunks of metal, and he could not remember their last deliberate contact, their last touch or whispered conversation. It had been weeks of shucking their old lives for this new one, and the fit was still awkward.

Al paid the check and shoved his hands in his pockets. He took the walk along the lake, the Alps hoving up, closing in, already and perhaps always white with snow—he had never been here. He rolled the thought in his head; he had never been here before.

*   *   *

When Tim stepped onto the platform, her pulse thrummed as if she were lined with brass. She called his name, and she felt his eyes catch hers, everything inside her surging forward. Then Al called him, and she turned to see everything she felt
in Al’s face too, the nerves and joy, the thrill to see the man they’d come to see. Al did want to be here. Maybe this would not be so confusing after all.

“Old man,” Tim said.

He and Al made a long handshake, and then he took her by the elbows, their cheeks brushing, and she laughed something tittery, and they all stumbled their words over each other like teenagers.

“A momentous occasion,” Al said.

“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you how glad I am.”

“You look well, Tim. Mary Frances had said, but I’m relieved to see it for myself.”

“Mary Frances is a lifesaver.”

She couldn’t look at Tim for more than a second. “Don’t be silly.”

And then everything seemed to run suddenly too long, their smiles clinging to their faces, Mary Frances looking at her shoes. It was all so surreal; she felt like a costumed actor waiting in the wings. If they did not move forward, she was going to lose her nerve.

“Well,” Tim said. “Let me direct the porter with the bags, and the thing we need, of course—”

They went to Doellenbach’s and ordered plate after plate of frogs’ legs crusted with garlic and mustard, bottle after bottle of
vin du Vevey
, the thin dry wine Tim said they would soon make from their own grapes. Al put his elbows on the table, and Tim took a pen from inside his jacket and drew a map for Al on the back of a menu card, and Mary Frances kept laughing for no reason and then going quiet, pouring another glass of wine.

She could not look directly at Tim. She studied Al’s face instead, unburdened in a way she remembered from before they were married, when he used to seek her out in the library to rattle on about Stevenson or Yeats. She reached for his hand. She wanted Al to be happy again; it had been so long. Maybe Tim could get him talking and planning and writing as he had done when they first met, and she would just be the weather between them: with both, in her way, but with herself most of all. She tried to relax into that thought:
with herself, most of all
.

They walked back to the pension three abreast, unsteady in the early chill. Al felt like singing, but they couldn’t settle on a song. Tim felt like another drink, but it was late, the town already closed. Back at the pension, he bartered a bottle of marc from the madame’s oldest, son and they went up to the Fishers’ rooms for a nightcap.

“Nightcap, my foot.” Al stretched out on the bed in his suit coat. “I couldn’t find a place to put a cap if I grew an extra head for it.”

“Al?” Mary Frances perched on the edge of the nightstand and poked him.

“I’m fine. Timmy, tell her I’m fine.”

Tim handed Mary Frances a drink. “He’s fine. A quick toast, and then I’m off.”

“A toast.”

“Al?”

“My heart is as full as my glass. My heart is as full as . . .”

“Your heart. Sit up, Al. For goodness sake.” Al made a sound like a groan, his eyes already closed.

“Ah, dear,” Tim said, and then his hand slipped to the nape
of her neck and he pulled her to him, holding her tightly. He smelled of the cold and the brandy, and underneath that, he smelled like always, and she pitched into him as he pulled away, unable to keep her balance.

“Good night, old man,” he called to Al, now almost out the door, and Mary Frances swallowed the rest of the marc in her glass, setting it down again on the nightstand with a joggle.

If this was the way it was going to be, she didn’t think she’d last the week.

*   *   *

There was nothing like an empty city at night, and nothing Tim wanted so much—a black lakeshore, a blank canvas, this. It felt as if he’d left Mary Frances and turned off all the lights on the world. He still felt the soft nape of her neck beneath his fingers, bringing his hand to his face, breathing in. Then suddenly there was the morning she’d come to his cabin on the
Hansa
, the scent of her hair, the hollows and folds of her, her salt. He drank from the bottle of marc and watched the stars and ached.

He had not fucked another woman in six months, had not been with anyone but Mary Frances since that morning, and now all that was over for them, which meant, all that was over. Forever? How could he never have sex again?

He laughed. There were a thousand ways to think about it: they would live like family, like monks, like roommates, like freaks. He loved them both, and this was the only way to do it. He shuffled on the cobblestones; he was drunk. He doubted he could stay drunk forever, but in his slurriness he
could see a dumb kind of chance for this to all work out. The three of them would make art, maybe great art. There was a theory about it from the Far East, he was certain, about saving your energy for creation. Maybe Claire had mentioned it. She spent a lot of time not having sex. Claire would know.

He put the lake to his back and cut into the city, the narrow streets and slate-roofed houses in their tight, twisting rows.

In the war, he’d admired the men from the east, the Sikhs and Hindus, a Gurkha soldier in the Bearer Corps who’d learned his English from an idiot who’d wanted to climb the highest mountain in the world. The Gurkha lost two fingers pulling an unexploded shell out of a man’s chest. He had been a palm healer, or so everyone said, until the incident with the unexploded shell.

The streets Tim wandered were pitch black, not a streetlamp or a candle in the windows. He could still feel the vast flatness of the lake behind him, its unmeasured depth, the on and on of it. The dark streets were safer, but he had no idea where to go.

The Gurkha had died under strange circumstances. Or rather, the Gurkha had gone on to distinguish himself as wildly fearless and skilled with the eight fingers he had left, and when he died, the whole lot of them kind of fell apart strangely. It was 1918, the third or fourth or fifth Somme. They were moving daily. Tim was supposed to be shipped back home (he had not been able to eat in almost two weeks, something rotted inside him, pulling his bones through his skin), but the orders didn’t come or couldn’t find him, and he’d left the field hospital where he had collapsed and went
back to ferrying the bodies from the front lines. No one seemed to notice, until the Gurkha.

Tim needed to go home, go to bed, stop this thinking. But every house suddenly looked like the one beside it, and his way back to the pension seemed to have closed over itself with stone. He drank again from the marc, and kept walking.

The Sikh instructed them on how to make a funeral pyre. According to the custom of his faith, the Gurkha’s body had to be burned next to a river, and owning no nearby river, Tim and five other men dug a trench, hauled buckets from a spring-fed pond behind a nearby farmhouse. On the Sikh’s count, they poured the water down the trench so he could bathe what was left of the Gurkha’s body in what stood in for the Ganges, and the Indian soldier next to Tim began to howl.

The others lunged at him, covering his mouth with their dirty hands, but the howls drew the attention of the nearest officers. But before they could sort the problem from the scuffle, Tim had lit the fire.

It was stupid, of course, to send a flare like that so close to the enemy line. But it was the end of the war, and even the Gurkha had not been able to heal himself, and this was the best that could be done given the circumstances. It was a magnificent failure, and in that, almost more magnificent. Almost right.

The officers returned to their papers; Tim’s orders for home would materialize within days. The Sikh passed a cup beside the pyre (the smell, terrifyingly, made Tim hungry), and in the bottom of the cup, there was a gold coin. Drinking the water released them from the Gurkha’s soul, and he from theirs.

He drained the last of the marc and dropped the bottle in the street.

Where was he going? He turned the corner to see a wash of light ahead, and after the next corner, a building still at work at this hour, looming above the houses around it, a man spraddle-legged on the steps in the cold, his white apron spattered with blood. An abattoir? A hospital. The smoke from the man’s cigarette mimicked the smoke rising from the chimney behind him.

He spoke in French, and Tim shook his head. He did not want a cigarette, or have one, or need to understand whatever the man was asking him. He walked up the steps beside the man and pushed inside the hospital doors. He was not sick, but he needed to lie down, and it really didn’t make any difference to him what it looked like he was doing anymore.

He laughed. It didn’t make any difference at all.

*   *   *

The next morning Tim and Otto appeared back at the pension with a hired car, and the four of them drove up to Le Paquis.

It had never seemed more beautiful to her, the golden rush on the ash trees, the meadow rolling endlessly gold alongside the minty brook, speckled here and there with a last snapdragon, the fresh hope she felt now watching Tim stretch his hand toward the clouds, drawing some thought on the air for Al.

She collected a skirtful of small green pears, knobby and hard, dumping them into the trunk of the car, where they rolled like stones. She would make preserves for winter: a knife in her hands, a pot on the stove, something to occupy
her senses for long enough to settle here, this meadow that would be their home, these men, gesticulating, energized, who would be with her always.

She followed them into the house, the thick walls that held the cold, the two rooms that would become the many. The strong bones of a granite staircase led to an imagined second story; a terrace off the back would overlook the gardens, the vineyards, the lake beyond. She ducked into the bathroom, still a privy, with one commode for grown people and a small, squat one for children.

She studied the miniature toilet; in a house that seemed to offer such plain charms, near-monastic simplicity, to make such a concession seemed to hint at priorities she had not imagined. She felt a sharp bright pang of something regretful and ashamed, Tim and Al talking just outside the door, their voices echoing and blending. There would be no children here, no chance. Not with either of them, not anymore.

*   *   *

Al stood in the meadow and thought of his father, dead almost a year. He could hear the questions now:
But what will you do, Alfred? How will you support yourself and your family? How might you ever find work?
His father, who believed in callings, who had read his poems once and spoken of the poetry in King James, a capable man, an intelligent man, now even more so to Al since his thoughts had become so fixed and weighted by his death. His father would have thought he was as crazy as Herbert in China, doing God knows what with whom.

Then Tim was at his elbow, sampling the warming air in deep breaths through his magnificent nose. Al had the clear
sensation of leaping or falling, and he threw his arm around Tim’s shoulders; he could not help himself.

“You’re like a whole new man,” he said. “It’s wonderful, Tim, to see you so happy.”

Tim tipped his face back for a moment, the autumn sun on his cheeks. “This has been the thing I’ve looked forward to—Le Paquis, your company, to have a place to work again and people I love to share it with.”

Al felt equal pride and discomfort. He’d never even told his father that he loved him, certainly not Herbert, and not Tim.

“And the vineyards?” he said. “Whose are those?”

Tim shrugged. “Ours.”

The rows of vines laced the terraces all the way to the main road, their fruit gone, their leaves already gold and falling. But Al could see the job they would become, next spring, summer. He said, “We’ll need to speak to the
vigneron
across the Corniche, see what he says. I don’t know balls about growing grapes.”

Otto arranged it all. The
vigneron
’s name was Jules; his shoulders filled the doorjamb. He made wine all over the valley and kept his cellar in the catacombs of an old convent behind his home; he would be happy to show them. His face was ruddy and serious, the face of reliable people everywhere, but there was something in his girth, the quick way he moved his weight, that made Mary Frances feel that he would be quick to anger and difficult to stop once he got there.

Jules said they had to drink, that was the only way to learn anything: the thin whites made from these hillsides, a heavier, headier Côte de Beaune, champagne after champagne, too
many cigarettes, and more champagne. Before long a young woman descended the cellar stairs, a tray full of sandwiches, pâté and ham, balanced on her shoulder. She was tall and pink like Jules, but slender, beautiful. Her name was Anna; she was sixteen, his only child.