The Arrangement (28 page)

She folded her face into her hands, and he was there.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?”

“Al?” And then: “Not physically.” She was crying.

“I saw him in the kitchen with your notebooks. I knew, then . . .”

There seemed no way to complete that thought. Something bad, messy, ultimately survivable, but they would none of them be without their scars. He knew that, and yet he would do anything to take what she felt now onto his shoulders. How was it Al did not feel the same? If he loved her, if he was honest, they had all done this together. What was there to gain in casting blame?

He sat beside her on the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, and wanted to kill someone for hurting her.

“Can I take you out for dinner?” he said.

She laughed and swiped at her running nose with the back of her hand. “I doubt that would be a good idea.”

“You don’t have to stay here, Mary Frances.”

She shook her head, even as she’d been packing a suitcase a few moments before. “He’s leaving,” she said.

“I heard.”

“I’m going to ask him to stay through my parents’ visit.”

Tim lay back on the bed and put the palms of his hands to his eyes. “Of course.”

“It would be so difficult on Rex and Edith, you and I without Al. There would be so many questions, so much lying.”

“As opposed to this measure of lying.”

“Tim.”

“Look. It doesn’t matter to me anymore who knows what and how they feel about it.” He wanted to throw his arms around her in this moment, but the moment itself would not allow it. Maybe she would not allow it. “I’ve done the best I can.”

“You’ve done the best you can.”

Her voice was flat and cold, and Tim found himself prickling with it. “So why is he leaving?”

“Really?” She stared at him, her eyes filling with something tender and heartbroken. “Because I’m his wife.”

The word seemed like a dropped stone they were waiting to strike bottom.

She said, “I remember when you had one of those.”

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, Mary Frances cut on the kitchen light and made a pot of coffee. She had begun to think it possible that Al might have hurt himself, accidentally or otherwise, and the idea set off a string of vague panics: scandal, of one sort or another, was coming. Tim joined her at the table. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes, his shirttails long and rumpled, the back of his hair on end. She poured him a cup of coffee, and they sat without anything to say.

He got up and returned with a sheet of writing paper and an envelope, copying a long address from his notebook, a formal letter. Mary Frances listened to the scrape of his pen across the page. She thought she could put her chin down in her hands and close her eyes, that then she might be able to sleep here, upright, with Tim nearby, even with all she was waiting for to happen. How was that possible?

“I could almost fall asleep,” she said, “knowing you are here.”

He slid the envelope across the table, a letter to a friend of his in Paris who was in charge of the exposition for the world’s fair.

“Is it open yet?”

“He’s a good friend. And there’s a painting they’re going to show, a huge Picasso. They’ve exiled him over it. Take Rex and Edith to see it.”

“What about you?”

“You can tell me about it. I’ll see it that way.” He looked at her then, just as helpless as she was to chart their course forward. He pressed the envelope into her hand. “Just please,” he said. “Go.”

*   *   *

Al stood in the street and pissed like a Frenchman, remembering only at the last moment that this was not France. For some reason, that was funny. It was dark, but he had no idea what time it was, what day it was about to be. They’d closed the tavern on him, he’d been playing the piano for hours, but there was no way in hell he was going home. He turned to the girl who’d taken him on.

“And where do you live, my sweet?”

“Ah, captain. I can make anyplace feel like home.”

Or that’s what he thought she said. There was a lag in his language skills this evening, possibly due to the vast amounts of gin he seemed to have bathed in, and she seemed to be slurring as well.

He drew some wadded bills from his pocket. “We might,” he said, “get a room.”

She took the bills in her fist and smiled at him, shaking her head. It was too late to wake anyone in town.

He noticed she was missing an incisor, and her mouth looked swollen. He drew his thumb across her upper lip and it came away bloodied. “What happened, dear? What happened here?”

She laughed. “It’s all right now.”

He stroked her lip, the red paint there. He had a faint recollection, not much more than a flash—earlier today, yesterday? He looked at the back of his hand, the livid marks on his knuckles. She’d told him it was time to go home to his wife.

He took the woman’s face in his hands now; he could not even remember her name. She was dark-skinned and sturdy, her face plump. He could see other scars there now, a cut beneath her eye that had healed badly, a rash. He was so sorry. It must have been an accident. He must have been confused. He was rattling now, maybe crying. He hardly remembered, he hardly remembered anything.

“
Désolé
,
désolé,
” she said. “
Vous êtes désolé
.”

So beautiful, desolate. “Just take me home with you,” he said. “I am so sorry. Just take me home.”

*   *   *

When Al came back to the apartment, it was already Thursday morning. He stank of cheap alcohol and cheaper perfume, his eyes shot, his shirtfront bloodied. Tim and Mary Frances still waited at the kitchen table with their empty coffee cups and their worry, he could see it as soon as he walked in the door, and he felt a sharp stab of guilt on top of everything else.

He pulled out a chair and sat between them. “I fear I might have tarried at the bar.”

Mary Frances stood and ran more water in the pot packed with fresh grounds.

Al wheeled himself around to follow her. “I fear I might have made a scene, Mary Frances. I might have had too much to drink and been an ass.”

She did not turn from the stove, and Al shifted his attentions to Tim.

“Did you hear what happened in New Jersey? A zeppelin burst into flames as it was trying to moor, to moor in the air, of all things, and filled with air. Just impossible. Anyone could tell it was impossible. Thirty-two seconds, and all was lost.”

“We were listening on the radio,” Tim said.

“How old are you, Tim?”

“I’m forty-two.”

“And you have no children,” Al said. “I’m thirty-two and I have no children. Time just flies, doesn’t it? You turn around, and you’re . . . I don’t know. Tetherless, and far from home.”

“You should lie down, Al,” Tim said. “Let me help you to your room.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“But I’m offering nonetheless.”

Later that night, in the shaft of light from the open door to the living room, Al snored and Mary Frances packed her bags.

*   *   *

In the morning, he took her to the train station in the car. They could have walked, but it was not clear he would have made it; his eyes were black in his head, his hands shook. She had not ridden in the car in weeks. The floorboards were caked with mud and crumpled lunch wrappings, a wool blanket across the backseat and what appeared to be a change of clothes. Al had been using the car for more than driving.

“When will you be back?” he said.

“My parents arrive next Tuesday. I don’t know. A week?”

“What will you say?”

Mary Frances sighed. “They’ll stay at the
Trois Couronnes.
We’ll show them the house, Chillon, frogs’ legs. I hope you will stay to see them.”

Al pulled the car to the station curb and kept his hands at the wheel, clutching. The people of Vevey bustled past, pushing their carriages, their market carts, everyone carrying something, the efficient flood of Swiss. The car was unbearably hot. She put her hand to the door latch.

“I’m sorry.” Al heaved himself out and came around for her door, bending to kiss her cheek, an unnecessary gesture.
Of course he would stay until the Kennedys returned to the States. Really, there was no rush.

“Thank you,” she said. And she was gone.

Al did not return to the apartment. He took the Haute Corniche back along the lake and into the hills to Le Paquis, this place that would never now be his, the beautiful orchard bursting into bud, the pale green break in the vines, the garden Tim had planted, the house, the three rooms there meant for the three of them, solid rooms with thick stone walls, the roof still open to the pale alpine sky.

It was how he felt now, lidless, open. He killed the engine, took the blanket from the backseat. The foreman approached, and Al nodded to whatever he said, whatever he wanted to do. He walked down the terrace to the crest of the vineyards, the foreman following after, and spread the blanket in the grass to lie down. He closed his eyes. The sun was bright in its glint off the lake; all he felt was its warmth. The foreman stood at his shoulder now, no longer asking. Soon he would go away. Al pulled the corner of the blanket tight around him and waited.

When he awoke, the sun was very high, and Tim was there beside him, looking out across the vineyards to the lake below. Al sat up, scrubbed at the back of his head with an open palm. Tim handed him a paper sack, greasy and warm with a roasted chicken. Al tore open the sack and ate. He wondered if he would ever be surprised by anything again.

“How’d you get here?” he asked.

“Chantal.” He rolled his eyes. “She saw Patrice in town. I don’t think silence is her virtue. She understood you might have collapsed.”

Al took the beer Tim offered, smiled into the neck of the bottle.

“I’m tired, Tim.”

“I understand.”

“I’d kill you if I wasn’t so tired.”

Al finished his chicken, wiped his mouth on the brown paper; Tim finished the bottle of beer. Tim had always been a generous man. But no matter what he offered, Al knew everything belonged to him; they could call it whatever they wanted, a commune, a threesome, but all of this was Tim’s.

They rested back on their elbows and took the spring sun on their faces, not talking, not thinking, should either prove too dangerous, but Al realized they would have to leave this meadow, that the next things would have to happen.

Finally he said, “I’m sure you know. I’m going to Salzburg for the summer. You’ll have to finish it without me.”

“You mean to stay longer than the summer?”

Al shook his head. “I need your help. I need to find a job.”

Back at the apartment, they typed up Al’s credentials, sent letters to people Tim knew on the East Coast; at Harvard, he’d been friends with Cummings and Aiken and Dos Passos, had gone to Paris with them during the war to drive ambulances, and now told a funny story about Aiken falling asleep with a whore and waking up to no boots, no wallet, and no cigarettes save one and the match to light it with. Al had read
The Enormous Room,
Aiken’s
Nocturnes:
he had marked their pages, returned to them again. To hear of these men as if they were men, to be writing them for favors, it felt surreal, ridiculous, even in the context of what all else was going on.

Aiken was in London and married to his third wife, Dos
Passos in New York or Baltimore, possibly Spain, everyone in flux and travel these days, but Tim would track them down. He spoke confidently, intimately about these men; they had shared a war and a decade of time Al was too young to remember; but instead of fatherly, Tim seemed supernatural, his penumbra of hair, the voluminous sleeves of his jacket, the way he seemed to always know what to do.

“I had no idea,” Al said, “the people you called friends.”

“You’re my friend, Al. I’d do anything you needed.”

“Right.”

He stood to get the coffee from the stove; he didn’t want to look at Tim but could feel the heavy blanket of his words regardless, the suggestion there, the opening, if he wanted to take it. His head pounded. On the back of the stove, there was a mustard crock from Dijon filled with the first violets of spring. Mary Frances must have saved the crock, picked the violets, all this time. He set the coffeepot down on the eye and would not have been surprised to watch it pass right through.

“I’m going to need some cash,” he said.

“How much?”

He turned from the stove. “How much is she worth to you?”

*   *   *

In Paris, Mary Frances was alone for the first time she could remember. There were hotels to arrange, and flowers; she bought novels for her parents and champagne. She made reservations all across the city, more meals than they could eat in a month of Paris, in a lifetime. But mostly she walked the springtime boulevards and felt alone.

It was the season for tourists. People from other places filled the hotels and museums and cafés, crowded the benches in the Tuileries; it was Mary Frances’s least favorite time, yet now she felt anonymous here, relieved to be unrecognized. For months in Vevey, the introductions and conversations, the raised eyebrows, had always been about the three of them, and why three? Here she was just another woman from out of town.

Paris was full of Germans, and talk of Germans, the sound of their voices in the sunshine. When she had been in Dijon, there were plenty of Germans at the university, squat, thick-legged women, dough-faced and sour. But in Paris this spring, they were girls. Lithe and beautiful, their golden hair loose around their necks, suntanned, sculptural girls calling to each other across the cafés, their accents softly German, musically German, German with smiles and light, their lean arms lifted in greeting. They wore smart suits, delicately cut shoes, a kind of easy uniform that drew your eye, as though at any moment they might all come together in a chorus, they would all break out in song.

She delivered Tim’s letter to a gallery on the Right Bank, to a secretary who would not grant her an appointment but took down her hotel information and said the monsieur would contact her, that he was very busy, and that afternoon three tickets arrived to a special preview of the exhibition, a private showing.