The Arrangement (19 page)

*   *   *

The dining room was wallpapered with giant melon-colored camellias, almost as tall as Mary Frances herself, their brassy stamens furred and reaching. The service glistened in the candlelight. She trailed her fingers along the backs of chairs, scanning the place cards. In the scripted, careful names, she found herself as MFK F
ISHER
.

She felt a flush of gratitude toward Claire, now arriving in the dining room on the arm of one of her guests. It was a small gesture, but she must have known what this would mean, must have remembered such a feeling herself. Perhaps she was not like Gigi to these people, not small and delicate and pretty, not Tim’s wife. But she was understood.

“Claire says you are headed across the pond.”

She turned to the man seated to her right, swarthy and round, a plug of a man with a beautiful battered face. He was pouring the inch left in his highball down his throat.

“Yes,” she said. “Paris, and Switzerland.”

Claire leaned across the table. “Davis, be nice.”

“I’ve hardly said a word.”

“I knew this was a mistake, Mary Frances. You have my dispensation to ignore him altogether.” Claire offered Davis a glittering smile. “E. Pearson Davis, correspondent for the
Herald
and insufferably right about everything.”

“And I love you,” Davis said.

“Rounder.”

“Tease.”

Davis turned his attention to Mary Frances. “Just got back from Spain myself.”

She felt Tim watching her from down the table. There had not been a second since she stepped off the train that morning that she hadn’t known where he was, felt his attention or lack. What would she do next? She closed her eyes, took a sip from her water glass.

“It’s all going to hell,” Davis said.

“Spain?” she said.

“Davis.” Claire touched Mary Frances’s hand, but the warning was in her voice. “You promised.”

“A bedtime story then, darling. I’ll tell my bedtime stories.”

“Mother and Tim and Mary Frances are touring. Mother is elderly. They will not bring aid to the insurgency, nor will they have to fight them off. They’re going to Switzerland, for god’s sake.”

“The Swiss,” Davis said, “are in hell.”

Claire ignored him. “Timmy wants you to see Le Paquis, the land we’ve bought above Lac Léman. He thinks we should start a retreat there for artists. The countryside is beautiful. Inspiring. Writers, painters. Mary Frances is a writer.”

Davis smiled at her as if he’d just discovered a flask in her handbag. “What do you write about?” he said. “Novels, like Pretty Princess here?”

“No. I—”

“You’re such a pig, Davis.”

Davis sucked his teeth and looked away.

What difference did it make? Here was a man predisposed to think she was silly. Over his shoulder, Tim’s carved cheek, his snowy head, turning again. He had not told her about Le Paquis, and she was sure he had his reasons, one of which was the idea that someday he would go to Switzerland and not come back. She felt the edges of what they knew about each other acutely; what rights she had seemed slim. What would she do next?

“Hunger,” she said. “I write about hunger for all kinds of things.”

Davis laughed and raised his glass.

Dinner was laid in front of them, tiny shrimps in cream over Holland rusk, and then thin slices of roast beef, potatoes, beets that bled across the plate. The wine was older than she was, and French.

Davis hadn’t touched his plate but was well into his fourth highball when he leaned close again. “Was this what you were hungry for?”

She looked at him squarely. He seemed to read her disdain but not care to acknowledge it.

“Claire’s not listening anymore,” he said. “It’s a known tactic—be quiet, and she’ll find someone else who isn’t. She’s talking opera with the gentleman across from you. She knows a little bit about everything.”

Mary Frances blotted her mouth with her napkin, a neat red print of her lips left behind. “You say you work for the
Herald
?”

“The
Herald Tribune
. I have a key to their offices. Would you like to, I don’t know, see how they run the big press?”

“Mr. Davis. My father has run the newspaper in our little town of Whittier, California, since I was six years old. I doubt you could show me something that I haven’t seen before.”

“I dunno, doll.”

“Doll?”

He leaned close. “I look at you, I look at this.” His gesture indicated the fine room, the fine people in it. “And I doubt you’ve ever been hungry in your life.”

It seemed a ridiculous thing to have to prove.

She leaned closer, reached across his untouched plate, and plucked the small white carnation from his boutonniere. She bit the petals from the stem and chewed.

*   *   *

Tim found her on the balcony, a February Manhattan lit below. She had wanted him to come for her; she was so pleased.

“I was thinking,” she said, “The first time I ever ate an oyster, I was in love with a girl.”

“I imagine most of us would say the same.”

“I was in boarding school. Her name was Eda Lord. We
used to have these dances at Christmas, and the school would serve special things—one year, oysters.”

Tim offered his navy jacket around her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he said.

“That Davis is a boor.”

“He is. I’ll go back inside and challenge him to a fistfight.”

“What should I have told him? That I’m married?”

“He can see that. And he outweighs me by double, I’d guess.”

“Tim.”

“And there’s all that nasty business he’s been into with boxing or bullfighting, parachuting behind enemy lines. I think he shot a tiger once, and he’s so drunk he probably does think he’s Hemingway, but if it would make you feel better, my dear, I am your man.”

“For now.”

He inclined his head, turning back to the city, the two of them shoulder to shoulder now, the party a distant background. “Tell me something,” Tim said.

“What?”

“Something I don’t know about you, like the oysters. Like how you were in love. It’s been weeks since I’ve had a letter from you, and I have come to depend on them.”

From far below, the sounds of the city quickened in the cold. Mary Frances buried her face in the shoulder of Tim’s coat.

“I won’t push you,” he said. “This can be all your idea, exactly how much or how little you want.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “As much as I want?”

Tim didn’t look away, and they didn’t talk anymore. She
gave him back his coat, and they went back into the party, Davis gone and Tim taking his seat beside her. Claire reached across the table for his hand and squeezed it, turning from her conversation about how to bridle a difficult horse and beaming again at her brother.

“All right?” she said.

“All right.”

*   *   *

That night Mrs. Parrish insisted they escort Mary Frances to her room. “It’s just appropriate, dear. This is New York.”

“I’m sure I’m perfectly safe,” Mary Frances said, tracing the carved mahogany of the elevator wall. There was a term for this paneling she could not remember, a French term.
Boiserie
. Her thoughts felt as if they were dripping out a faucet.

“And now we’re sure, too,” Mrs. Parrish said. She kissed Mary Frances’s cheeks at her door and took Tim’s arm.

“Good night, my dear,” Tim said, and she watched him and his mother down the hall.

The gates of the elevator closed, and Tim said, “You’re not chaperoning me, are you, Mother?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Should I?”

“I am a grown man. I assume you expect me to act like one, whether you’re watching or not.”

“Whatever that means.”

Tim laughed. “Whatever that means, yes.”

If he could have explained his true feelings for Mary Frances in that moment, he believed he would have, regardless of the embarrassment it would cause. He did not want to sneak around. He wanted to take her clothes off, to put her body
underneath his, he wanted to help her with her work, and it made him want to take her clothes off all again, more slowly, more. When she said something, when she laughed, watching her in the low light of the dining room tonight, he half-thought to tip a porter for her key after his mother went to bed and appear in her room this time.

But he’d left it in her hands. Even more than he wanted her now, he wanted to see what she’d do with that permission, their time at sea. What he would do, with the wait.

“I feel like a twelve-year-old boy,” he said.

His mother laughed. “That’s none of my doing.”

“No, it’s not.”

The fire had been laid in their rooms, and Tim put a match to it. His mother opened a book in her lap. Tim asked her if she’d care for a brandy, but she said she’d had quite enough already.

“Claire seems well, considering,” she said.

Tim settled himself across from her, a brandy not enough to ease the high vibrating ache in his fingertips, between his hipbones. “Did she mention Charles to you?”

“I didn’t know Charles was in the hospital until this morning.”

“It’s like he was out of town.”

“Charles has been ill for quite some time, Timmy. And there’s his age. I’m sure she’s made certain arrangements in her mind, perhaps from the start.”

He was constantly impressed with the pragmatic ease of women. He wondered what arrangements Mary Frances had made in her mind for these months away, if that was what she was doing now.

“Are you certain you won’t have that brandy, Mother? It might help you sleep.”

“No, no. I’m practically asleep already.”

She stood unsteadily, offering her good nights, and Tim waited by the fire. He heard his mother in the toilet, watched the light snap off beneath her closed door. He counted the minutes on the clock since they’d left Mary Frances, wondering if it was too late to wake her, if the point was to wake her, and what he would find if he did. God, he hadn’t felt this good in years; he could not remember when.

*   *   *

The next morning, Tim collected mail from the front desk, and there was a letter for Mary Frances. He took it with him to breakfast and found her already waiting at a table, a blush-colored silk blouse tucked primly into her belted skirt. He set the letter next to her plate.

“Thank you.”

“I would love to hear some news from Al,” he said.

She slit the envelope, folding her hand across her mouth as she read. Al’s script was small and tight; her eyes scanned it quickly for something she could share. She sighed.

“It’s okay,” Tim said.

“He just sounds so dissatisfied. A mountain of papers to grade, the students and their inane questions.” She folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. “He’s not writing.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not since his father, maybe before. We don’t talk about it.” She looked at her plate.

He remembered that she used to grade his papers. Was Al
intending to make her feel guilty for not grading papers now? It sounded so petty, Tim felt ashamed of himself for thinking it. “Perhaps the time alone will help,” he said. “Perhaps we can think of something else.”

She laughed. “I can’t.”

“A secretary.”

“That he would pay with gratitude? He needs the job, he doesn’t want it. He wants to write, he can’t. And meanwhile—” She gestured toward herself, dropping Tim’s gaze. “Where is your mother?”

“She doesn’t have the stomach for anything but toast in the morning. Mary Frances, if you are to worry about Al, then I will worry about him too.”

She brought her eyes back to his face, her gorgeous brow drawn up. “I’ve got my same gratitude, Dr. Parrish. Are you sure that will be enough?”

That was the girl he remembered.

*   *   *

They had one thing to accomplish before sailing—a visit to Claire’s publisher. She sent a car in the afternoon, and a note that she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to accompany them, but with the party, and Charles.

Mary Frances watched the city seem to form itself like crystal out the window, tried to remember to breathe. “Explain to me how this works,” she said.

“It’s nothing, my dear. It’s a roomful of old men. You’ll know exactly what to do with them when you see them.”

“But have they read it? Are they going to tell me things . . . I don’t know. Are they going to tell me what they think?”

“It’s an economy like any other, Mary Frances. They wouldn’t spend their time if they didn’t want something for it.”

Her casual remark at breakfast came back to her, a little more true than she had intended. She could she never repay Tim for his time spent like this. What more would she throw at him? The question seemed to be what more did she have at hand.

The car pulled to the curb, and Tim offered his arm, into the slate gray offices of Harper & Bros. The last book Mary Frances had read published by Harper & Bros. had been written by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Tim whispered something to the secretary, they sat, they rose. Doors opened on a study like Rex’s, two old men looking up from pages spread across a blotter behind a walnut desk.

“My goodness, Hamish. Look at her.”

“MFK Fisher. You might have mentioned your youth and beauty. Our hearts are not what they used to be.”

“Mr. Saxton,” Mary Frances shook his hand. “What kind of writer would I be, if I gave everything away?”

The men laughed. Tim let his hand fall from her waist. “Gentlemen,” he said, and he was gone.

*   *   *

They loved her. They loved how she traveled and read and pulled from all corners. They loved how she was not a homemaker, not Mrs. Something Something, and her manuscript not like anything else they’d ever seen, written by a woman or a man. A personal history of food, of eating; they wanted 45,000 words as soon as she could possibly write them. They
would publish the book here and in London, through Hamish Hamilton. They would draw up the contract as soon as she said yes.

“And?” Tim was laughing. “So you said?”

“Oh, yes. Yes!”

He toasted her with champagne in the dark downstairs bar at the Warwick Hotel. He said how happy he was, and proud, and how he’d known it all along.