The Arrangement (25 page)

It was a study to watch these men enjoy themselves; Mary Frances could see how happy Jules was to share his wines, the cases Al and Tim were buying stacking up against the far cellar walls were tabulations in his head, and Al bent on his every word, how the canton of Vaud was the lake and the mountains, how Le Paquis was caught between and so would catch the weather, for better and worse. The lovely Anna, in her long skirts and pink cheeks, reaching to collect a glass. And Tim.

He appeared to be listening to Jules as well, slouched languidly against the cellar wall, tilting his glass to the candlelight when conversation turned to color or body. But Mary Frances could feel the charge of his attention in her skin even from the shadows. When Jules struck a match, she was not prepared for the full blow of their eyes meeting, the sounding that took place in her. Jules blew a mouthful of his uncut rum across the match flame, flaring high then out, and leaving them in darkness.

They were all balanced here at the tip of time’s arrow, speeding fast: Al’s hand on her shoulder, Tim’s gaze across the cellar, the lights out in her bedroom back at the pension in her narrow little bed where she slept alone. She thought of birds that could fly continents without resting, she thought of fish that must swim to survive. They’d keep moving
forward, they had to, because there was no going back to any other way it had ever been.

*   *   *

Late that night she and Tim sat in the parlor on the pert fan-back sofa, Al already upstairs sleeping, exhausted by all the shift and change, the possibilities. He had left them to their nightcaps.

Mary Frances smoothed the velveteen. She felt keyed too high, on the verge of tears or laughter, she could not tell which one.

Tim dropped his head back against the sofa and turned to her.

Finally, “I am happy to be near you again. I am trying to let that be enough.”

“Oh, Tim.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” he said. “If we talk about it, if it becomes a conversation, then it’s fixed somehow. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just think our thoughts.”

“You think of me?”

He made a low sound in his throat, the skin of his neck and cheeks flushing hot. Mary Frances watched; he was doing this for her and whatever was inside him was for her and she thrilled to it, felt her own skin heat with it, and this was what they had now, instead of what they’d had last winter on the ship, in Paris. This thrill was all they had.

“Tell me how,” she whispered.

*   *   *

They found an apartment the three of them could rent in Vevey while they waited for the work to be done on Le
Paquis. On All Saints’ Day, she watched the old women bundle past her kitchen window, their arms laden with rusty chrysanthemums for the cemeteries, the first snows whitening the deeper folds of the Alps beyond the lake. On the stove, she turned thick brown slabs of wild mushrooms in butter, a salad already tossed of bitter chicory and wine vinegar, roasted walnuts Tim had brought back from Le Paquis, where he’d met with the architects, where he’d hired the workmen, where things were beginning to begin.

He’d never asked her to leave Al, never acknowledged that they were married, only that her relationship with Al was her own, the three of them another thing altogether. He never hid his affection for her: he squeezed her hand, stood close, whether Al was in the room or not. He took walks alone. He stayed out many nights after they had gone to bed. He made space and closed it, every day.

“Al,” she called. They were by the fire, playing cards. “Would you open the wine?”

Music and candles and another bottle of wine. Pastries bought from the shop on the corner, filled with quince or fig, some kind of sweet conserve, and then tiny glasses of marc,
La Vie en Rose
. Tim’s hand, still clutching his napkin, extended to her, a dance.

And she didn’t think about it, rising into his arms, fitting herself to him, the ease immediate. And perhaps she’d had a glass of wine too many, because she looked into his face, the thing that leaped to her from there.

“Your wife is a better dancer than I am,” Tim said.

“Or me. She’s had more practice.”

“Ah. Finishing school.”

“I did not go to finishing school.”

“Miss Porter’s blah-blah-blah?” Tim raised an eyebrow.

“I think, actually, it was Miss Something-or-other, not Porter’s,” Al said.

“And you?” She pushed at Tim’s shoulder. “You?” She looked at Al.

His face was shadowed in the last glow from the street-side windows, laughing. Of course Al had worked his way through college, while she had been a student at Miss Harker’s. And Tim, when he had been that age, was away in France at war, which he never spoke about. But both of them were laughing now, and she was so grateful for that lightness. The song ended; Tim’s hands left her. Her heart raced; how lucky she was, for however long it could last.

They bought a car to get to and from Le Paquis. They hired a charwoman, so Mary Frances could focus herself at the table and the desk, without worry for the laundry and the floor-washing, the rhythms of cleaning in this country that were so different from their own. Tim seemed to come by these arrangements with a minimum of fuss and consult, and finally Al just put what money they had into a kitty in the pantry and told Tim to take what he thought was fair.

The charwoman came to clean the apartment on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a slight and dark-browed girl whose father was a tailor. She changed sheets and scrubbed floors, she made bleachy potions and sang in French. She’d grown up around men and men’s things, pinstripes and flannel, sweeping scraps of cloth from the floor of her father’s shop in the haze of cigar smoke and talk. She seemed to think that was how it was done, by talking.

“Madame,” she said, “you would like fresh sheets? For you and the gentlemen, or only for yourself?”

“For whomever needs them, Chantal.”

“But you must tell me that, Madame. What do your gentlemen require?”

Mary Frances lifted her head from her notebook and looked at Chantal, her back humped over a laundry basket. The woman looked prickly and teasing, not at all the way the maids in Whittier might have looked at Edith in her day.

“Change the sheets,” she said, and Chantal dipped her knees in a little curtsy and left the kitchen for the bedrooms. Mary Frances could hear her talking to Al.

“I’m off, then,” Tim said, pulling his overcoat from the hook by the kitchen door.

“Oh, you can’t.”

“I can, and I am, and there’s no need for you to stay here either, you know.”

“But, Tim.”

“We’re paying her to clean.”

Al reached around Tim to take his coat as well.

“Not you, too.”

Al looked annoyed. “My head hurts. I need a brandy and a café.”

“It’s noisy enough here, isn’t it?”

“She just asked me the size of my shoe and conjectured as to the rise in my pants, based on her father’s theories. Her own observation.”

“You know, the study of proportion is more exact than you would think—”

“At the café, Timmy. Tell me all about it.”

Mary Frances knew how one brandy would turn to two, a stroll along the esplanade to another café, or if it was windy, a tavern with a fireplace, perhaps some fondue. She wondered what they talked about when they were alone; the thought sent a ripple of panic through her, gone as quickly as it had come. She should have gone with them, but god, she couldn’t be with them always.

“Madame.” Chantal was standing in the doorway again. “Madame.”

“What is it?”

“I have been waiting to speak to you,” she said. “Alone.”

“And so we are alone.”

“I am seeking a divorce from my husband.”

Mary Frances stared at her.

“He is unfaithful. He keeps a house with another woman, right here in Vevey. He has given me a catarrh—”

“Chantal.”

“I must go to the hospital in Montreaux three times next week to be cauterized. I have decided. I will get a divorce, even if God hates me for it. But if you hate me for it, if you will not have me in your home—”

“Chantal, really.”

“Please, Madame—”

“Chantal, it’s nobody’s business, you and your husband, least of all mine.”

She put a hand to her forehead; she felt clammy and nauseous. She had drunk too much coffee. Chantal stood before her, still waiting for something.

“Please,” she said. “The laundry. The day.”

“Of course, Madame.”

It was the last they spoke, but Mary Frances pressed at the gape it opened in her thoughts all afternoon. Another divorce. It seemed anyone could do it, even maids, even dark Catholic Swiss women could do it and felt right to do it. What had she agreed to instead? And if you went to hell for your divorce, what would her penance be for what she was doing now?

*   *   *

Al loved the old quarter of Vevey. He loved the purr and bustle of an old city, the cafés on every corner, the winding tempo of it all. And you took up that tempo when you walked these streets, you couldn’t help yourself. He knew that was his problem with work.
The Ghost
had ambitions of its own, and he needed to give himself over to them as freely as he gave himself over to his walks.

It had been so long since Al had talked like this to someone, and it felt good, even as what they were saying was how hard it all was, how overwhelming. He ordered them another round.

“So you feel naked and confused, you feel intimidated—goddamnit, you should.” Tim pulled on his cigarette. “Or what’s the point.”

The point was, Al couldn’t stand nakedness and confusion, messiness, mistakes. But he could never admit as much to Tim. He nodded, staring over the bar to the mirror beyond. With his white hair, Tim looked old enough to be his father.

“You’ve read Mary Frances’s work,” Tim said. “What do you think?”

“Well,” he said. “It’s lovely. Clearly.”

“Lovely?”

Tim went on talking, but Al stopped understanding him, like a radio that had slipped out of frequency. All this time, all the size and strength and passion Tim was urging, Al thought they had been talking about
The Ghost
. About him. But really it had been Mary Frances all along.

When they returned to the apartment, she was still pacing the kitchen, still trapped, though there was no sign of Chantal anywhere.

“What is it?” Al said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Mary Frances?”

“Nothing. Did you boys have fun?” she said, banging a pot down to start supper.

*   *   *

Tim and Al sat by the fireplace, the last of the evening’s wine in their glasses. Mary Frances was in the bath. The walls of these rooms were old, the carpets thick, but Tim was in the chair closest to the bathroom door and he could hear the water moving against her body, the lift of her limbs from it and the clinging rush back into itself, a kind of suck and kiss of something slick drawn away, the sound of mouths. He wanted to be in the room with her; he didn’t have to touch her, he remembered fully. He wanted to see her face, to hear her talk. He closed his eyes: they never stopped fucking, somewhere in his brain, they never stopped. They were inexhaustible in this regard.

“That bad?” Al said.

Tim opened his eyes, his book fallen flat across his chest.

“This? No.” He looked toward the bathroom door. “Just listening. Like swans on a lake.”

“Ah,” Al said. He studied Tim, not saying anything more.

“It’s a beautiful sound. How many paintings of a woman at her toilette? I’m thinking of Degas here, the series.”

“I don’t know them.”

Tim rose to the occasion. “I’m so grateful you are here, that we will live and work together. I’m so long out of practice at companionship, and so eager. Forgive me.”

Al smiled. “Nothing to forgive.”

Tim stood and smoothed his shirt into his trousers. It was time for him to take a walk.

When Mary Frances returned from the bath, Al sat reading by the fireplace, his lanky form folded on itself, and the glasses he had taken to wearing perched on the end of his nose. He looked older with them, brittle. A draft whistled in the bedroom window.

“What are you reading?” she said.

“Oh. This.”

“Al.”

He looked at her. “Just reading.”

She draped her forearms over the back of his chair and looked over his shoulder, the newspaper, the names of generals and cities not in French. She wanted to tell him something suddenly, something it would make him happy to hear.

“I could sit with you,” she said. “You could read to me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, Al.”

He looked at her long over the tops of his glasses, then snapped the paper out roughly. “They bombed the Plaza de Colón last week, six or seven different bombs in a single square. Sixty people dead, most of them women, most of them waiting in line for milk. And so I keep thinking about milk. Milk, mother’s milk, my mother, you. Madrid is the exact center of Spain, and it’s Spaniards in the airplanes, dropping the bombs. On their own honest-to-god mothers, see.”

She backed away from him. His head lolled against the chair, his eyes closed now.

“Where’s Tim?” he asked. “We were just talking about this, I think.” He looked at her now, lazily. His voice was even and calm. “Go find Tim for me, would you?”

She felt like such a coward, unwilling or unable to meet what Al was saying with the truth, her own truth, their truth. What was wrong with her? She went into their room, closed the door, and went to sleep.

Sleep came often and easily for Mary Frances now, a nap after lunch and perhaps another before supper, but also five or ten minutes drifting off before the fireplace, her book open in her lap and her eyes floating closed, a measure of escape. Al and Tim played cards in the kitchen, long hands of rummy and pinochle. She canned beets and ground mustards, made late apples into sauce. Al and Tim pored over the plans for the house. She knit endless cabled scarves, watch caps with brims that could be doubled, tripled around the ears. She walked the esplanade along the lake when the sun was high, basking in the thin winter light that seemed to shatter on the water.