The Arrangement (22 page)

Cathedral after cathedral, she stared hard at the guide and the French that rolled out of him. She had to concentrate to understand, Dijon two years gone, but worse and harder, Tim at her elbow in his beautiful blue suit, his overcoat open. He stood so close, she could feel the difference in the air inside his coat and out.

He leaned to her. “The church is what?”

“Old,” she said. “Old and . . . important.”

He told his mother this was a church built during the Dark Ages, with marble quarried from the Hebrides, that every king of France had been interred there, and that the monks now made beautiful cheese. There were no monks or marble in the Hebrides, but he was right about the kings. The guide kept speaking and Tim leaning close to her; everything kept happening.

The guide spoke of an abbey made famous for the marriage of Louis XIV and something to do with lace. There was Tim’s hand, and she let her hand fall beside it, this part of France the province of apples, of honey, of sheep, of iron, and like it was an accident of proximity, the back of his knuckles brushed hers and her body leaped and rushed to remember the night before.

Mrs. Parrish asked, “What are they talking about sheep for?”

Mary Frances couldn’t say. Her blood thrummed in her ears.

“My dear, are you sure you’re listening?”

*   *   *

Tim stood in the gallery at the
Musée de l’Orangerie
and realized how long it had been since he’d painted. Gauguin’s
Tahiti before him now, violently affixed to canvas, green and gold and red and cerulean blue in the light that seemed to come from everywhere, an explosion, ecstasy; he loved it. It had been too long since he’d spent time in museums, too long between shows; he’d forgotten what this test felt like, to measure your fire against another.

Of course, he thought of Al. Tim had never been unable to do what he wanted, whether it be to write or paint; he’d opened restaurants and tea shops, torn houses to the ground to rebuild them. He felt a stab of sympathy, another unexpected feeling in this situation. But he could not understand where Al’s congratulations for his wife had gone. How could you not be happy for the woman you loved?

Mary Frances stopped behind his shoulder, and Tim turned to look at her.

Her eyes worked fast across the canvas. She would say something, soon, she would say something he’d never thought about, and that made him want to paint all the more, just to hear whatever it was she said next. God, he loved women: young women, smart women with talent, Mary Frances. He was forty-two. There was still time to be a genius in her eyes.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

“It doesn’t seem to care,” she said, “does it?”

He laughed out loud; heads turned. They drew such attention wherever they went, a triumvirate of statuesque travelers, insulated by their English, their apparent wealth. Tim saw no point in pretending to hide, but Mary Frances brought a finger to her lips and moved away. She sat beside his mother on a green velvet bench in the next gallery, removed her notebook from her purse, and bent to it.

He followed. “Lunch?”

“Timmy,” his mother said. “Who can think about lunch at this hour?”

“Most of the Western world. It’s two o’clock.”

Mary Frances put a hand on his mother’s arm. “We could send Tim ahead, Mrs. Parrish. There’s no rush. You and I could take a taxi when we feel ready to leave.”

His mother looked pleased. “Would you be able to get yourself a drink?”

“I’m capable of the hand signals.”

“Here, then.” Mrs. Parrish reached into her purse for a fistful of francs.

“I’ve got money, Mother. I’m fine.”

They agreed on the bar at the Ritz, and Tim set out through Monet’s water lilies to the sparkling cold Tuileries. He’d been to Paris last winter, after Gigi left him, and winters before they were married, winters during the war. It was a city he was quite familiar with. But today with Mary Frances, with the stir of work and watching her, the attenuated hours of want ahead, this Paris seemed like the culmination of all those others, the whole point.

Perhaps he would just get drunk at lunch, tell his mother everything she well suspected already, and persuade Mary Frances to really run away with him. Perhaps he would just get drunk.

Sometime over the weekend, when it seemed nothing could be done about it, Hitler marched into the Rhineland, knocking on the door of France.

*   *   *

We go everywhere, Al, and we see everything, eat everything, and the Parrish pocketbook never seems to flag. Soufflé! Omelets with burnt sugar, like we used to get at Aux Trois Faisons, with our initials burned into the crust. The Tuileries! the wind biting at our coats. We walk and walk and walk
(so as to wear out Mrs. Parrish so that when they did return, she was exhausted. She begged off dinner. She began to lose weight, they all did, even though they ate the lunches of duck, creamed Brussels sprouts with lardons, terrine, confit,
fromage blanc
, steak tartare with shimmering soft-set eggs, brioche. And they passed cathedral and train station and park and square. They passed women with their prams, old women, tired women—they all made Mary Frances want Tim more, as though he could keep her from the ages to come).

I was so cold this afternoon, I thought about that February in Strasbourg, how the wind was so bitter and we moved into the rooms at the Elisa, where the heat came blaring off the radiators. I would sit at the window and watch you leave for the university in the mornings—how cold you looked, your collar turned up, while I basked like a lizard inside. I welcomed you home warmly, as I recall. I wish for that same welcome now.

Your last letter sounded so melancholy. And I know it’s wrong of me to be oceans away and having a high time in all our old haunts, telling you to keep your chin up. But I do worry.
His grief seemed like a thick blanket that wrapped him away from her now, as if he too were carrying on a separate life back in California, as if they both had somehow moved on. She knew this wasn’t true, but every thought she had of them together seemed sepia-toned and distant, their youth in Dijon, the ghosts of who they had become.

France reminds me of you every day, and everywhere we go there is a fourth seat for you, my dear, as though you might meet us any moment.

*   *   *

They took a carriage through the Bois de Boulogne, the women bundled in lap robes and furs, Tim on the buckboard with the driver, the wide allée stretching ahead. The wind whipped across the lake, ice still clinging to its edges, but Mrs. Parrish spoke of a sunny lunch fifty years before on the topmost balcony of the
Chalet des Iles.
Her companion had rowed them across in a tiny wooden boat, her father one boat behind
.

“I’m sure Paris was a father’s nightmare,” said Mary Frances. “My father was a fan of boarding schools when I was young.”

Mrs. Parrish nodded. “I wanted desperately to see Paris before taking my place at home. Paris at the end of the century! Of course, now I understand that was something special. Then, Paris was enough.”

Mary Frances took out her notebook.

“Are you writing that down, my dear? So unnerving, these habits of writers.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary Frances said. “It’s just that your story reminded me of something else.”

She could feel Mrs. Parrish looking over her shoulder as she wrote. She marked her place in the book with her thumb.

“I look forward to reading your book, Mary Frances. Tim speaks so highly of your talent.”

“His help has been a godsend.”

“He has no doubt you will be published to wide acclaim.
I think, when you find yourself in the public eye, careful comportment makes all the difference.”

Mary Frances laughed. “It’s a very little book. I don’t imagine we need to worry about the public eye.”

“You must always be careful how you present yourself. For instance, I know you to be the devoted wife of Tim’s best friend. I like knowing that about you, and I imagine I would find that reflected in the things you’ve chosen to write about. There might be other things about you I wouldn’t like to know, and they would change my feelings about your book.”

She spoke evenly, with the same instructive ease she’d spoken about chaperones and escorts, dinner table conversation and correspondence. “I don’t want to read about what I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what I don’t want to know, for that matter.”

“I appreciate that,” Mary Frances said, matching her tone. “I will remember that.”

Tim turned on the buckboard. “Are you warm enough, my dears? Another fur? A little nip of brandy? Mother?”

But Mrs. Parrish was looking out over the lake and didn’t seem to hear him. She reached forward and placed a gloved hand on the back of the driver.

“Once around again, please.” She said it in English, but the driver understood.

*   *   *

That night Mrs. Parrish suggested Mary Frances would go ahead to Dijon, and she and Tim follow a few days later.

“You and Al must have friends there, people you’d like to
see,” Mrs. Parrish said. “And I’m sure Timmy can manage our train.”

“I have done it before,” Tim said. “No one’s gotten hurt.”

“It’s not necessary, Mrs. Parrish. I’m happy to stay with you.”

“I insist.”

“Well.” She looked at Tim. “Thank you.”

“Yes, Mother.” Tim sighed. “That’s very kind.”

Mary Frances bent to her coffee. Her conversation with Mrs. Parrish in the carriage suddenly seemed far more consequential than she’d thought, yet the woman remained personable, chatty, herself. She was a mother, after all. She was capable of many different tacks at once.

“I’m hoping you and Al will come to visit when we return,” she said. “I think I should meet him at last.”

“You should. He’s very curious about you. And grateful.”

Mrs. Parrish touched her hand, and that seemed to settle it. “It has been my pleasure.”

After his mother said good night and Tim walked Mary Frances to her rooms, unlocked her door, and pushed her up against the papered wall, his hand drawing up beneath her corselette, the thick resistant fabric and belts, her legs opening for him, after they’d made love on the carpet, finally reaching the bed, she told him what his mother had said in the park.

He laughed. “It’s nothing compared to what she said to me.”

“Oh god, Tim. Really?”

“Something about what happens on a ship is one thing, everybody packed in like sardines together, but she expects a return to my senses, post haste.”

Tim rolled away from her, found his pants on the floor, and extracted his cigarette case from the pocket. Their time together would be over soon, and she could not imagine what would come next, how anything could come next. They would certainly never get another chance like this.

“Shouldn’t you be getting back to your own room?” she said, looking at Tim, the smoke from his cigarette rising lazily.

He traced a slow line along her collarbone. “Post haste.”

*   *   *

She checked into the
H
ô
tel de la Cloche
and left her bags, the day bright and cold, the rooftops sending their wood smoke into the blue sky. She went first and stood in the street at Crespin’s, the oysterman still there with his craggy fingers, the gnarled shells. She tipped back a half-dozen oysters with a short cold beer for lunch, the rattle of Dijonnaise around her like the beat of wings in a coop. This was not Paris or Provence but dark gray France, musty and cobbled and muddy and rich. Behind her, she could hear the clock chiming at the Nôtre-Dame.

This was the place she’d first learned to pay attention to the particular way she noticed things, her perspective, to pay attention as a writer. If these were their last days together, she wanted Tim to know this city as she did, so that something between them might be complete.

She took the narrow stairs to the second floor at
Aux Trois Faisons,
the narrow hallway to Ribaudot’s office, still the short balding man, brusque and pacing, a lit cigarette between his teeth as he yelled into the telephone.

He pretended to remember her. “Yes, of course. Madame Fisher. You look well.”

“Thank you. I would like a table for Thursday night. A special table, please, a very special meal. Shall I order it now?”

“Of course, Madame.”

Perhaps he did remember. But the lingering feeling of unease followed her to the street, in and out of shops, through the empty rooms in the house on Petit Potet, where she and Al had first lived, and Madame, now poor and alone. Everything was changed. She’d pressed money into Madame’s hand as she left, then wandered the quarter, embarrassed, sad, the scent of gingerbread adrift.

When Tim and his mother arrived in Dijon, Mrs. Parrish seemed to need him constantly. She had letters to write and gifts to buy, she was too cold, too hot, too tired—would Tim read to her in their rooms? Mary Frances had other things to do, she was sure.

The one night she shared with Tim was their dinner at
Aux Trois Faisons.

There was her table, the menu she’d ordered typewritten on a nice white card. There was the old man who ate with his dog, the four widows in their weeds, the young tourists much like herself and Al. There was her waiter, Charles, with his delicate waxed mustache. Old now, shrunken, his hands fumbled and shook, chasing his tools across the buffet. The Dubonnet ran a purple stain on the white cloth. He was obviously drunk. Mary Frances glanced at Tim, feeling somehow responsible, but he was looking at the swirl in his glass, the lovely deep color there, then at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And somehow ashamed.”

Tim laughed. “Ashamed?”

“I’ve talked and talked about this restaurant.” She gestured at the purple stain, the pool of soup in his saucer.

“My dear,” he said. “What does it matter, where we are?”

And with that, the evening took up its slack. Course by course, the meal became the thing she’d hoped it would be: intricate and subtle and lovely and long, and none of that had to do with the place, which was ancient, or the food, which was perfectly prepared to her specifications, or the service, which somehow improved the more they asked of Charles, his skill finally rising to the surface. It was Tim. He made her laugh, he made her think, they lingered in the restaurant long past hours; the boy with the mop on the edge of their light, sweeping the long hall to the stairs.