The Jazz Agreement

The letter was in a desk drawer, behind a row of folded handkerchiefs, wrapped in a rubber band the way someone wraps a secret they do not want anyone to find but also cannot bring themselves to throw away.

Stitches found it while tailoring Lieutenant Chenault's uniform—he had gained weight, or perhaps he had simply stopped caring about the fit, and the jacket needed taking in at the waist. She was not looking for anything. She was doing what she always did when she was bored: making small, precise alterations to the clothes of the men in her life, tightening seams, replacing buttons, adjusting hems. It was her way of saying I care without saying the words.

But the letter was not for tailoring. It was for reading.

There were seven of them, dated over six months. Six months of engagement. Six months of Harold telling Stitches and Clara and everyone in their circle that he was the luckiest man in the world, that Clara Delaney was the woman who had stayed alive when the world had tried very hard to kill her, that he was going to spend the rest of his life making it up to her for the time they had lost in the war.

The letters said none of that. They said: u up? miss u. can't wait til friday. she doesn't know.

Stitches sat on the edge of Clara's bed and read them three times. Then she walked to the mirror, took out her lipstick—a deep red, the color of something you would not name out loud—and wrote on the mirror in a clean, precise line: He is cheating on you. Do not marry him.

Clara read it on her return from rehearsal. She did not argue. She did not cry. She erased the message with the heel of her hand and went to the kitchen to make tea.

"Stitches," she said, "do you have any idea how boring it is to be the war nurse who comes home and gets married and lives happily ever after?"

"I have no idea," Stitches said. "Tell me."

So Clara told her. About the hospital in France, the shrapnel that had caught her collarbone, the way the nurses had taught her to dance when she could not sleep. About the way the war had ended and she had come home to a world that wanted her to be grateful and quiet and that she had wanted, instead, to be loud and alive and absolutely certain of nothing.

"That is why I need to get out of this city," Clara said, finishing her tea. "I need to go somewhere where nobody knows what I look like with shrapnel in my collarbone. Somewhere I can be someone else for a while."

The Gilded Cage was not anywhere. It was a speakeasy on the Lower East Side, and it was the loudest, brightest, most alive place Clara had ever seen. The band was playing something that sounded like joy being invented in real time. The room was packed with people drinking liquor that was probably poison and dancing in a way that would have scandalized their grandmothers and would, in fact, have scandalized their grandmothers' grandmothers.

Stitches had gotten them in through a back door with a password that involved a number and a promise to buy the next round. Clara was immediately uncomfortable and immediately intoxicated. She liked it.

"Clara Delaney," a voice said beside her. "You are the war nurse. The one with the shrapnel."

She turned. The man was sitting at a corner booth, wearing a tuxedo that looked like it had been chosen by a committee rather than a person. He was alone. He was watching the dance floor with an expression that was not boredom but something close to it—discomfort, perhaps, or the quiet bewilderment of someone who has been told this is where he is supposed to be and is not entirely sure why.

"I'm not a nurse anymore," Clara said. "I'm a chorus girl now. It's much less dangerous."

"I heard the band," he said. "They're very good."

"They're excellent. My brother played trumpet in France. He died in '18. This is what he would have wanted—to play until nobody could think about the war for five minutes."

The man looked at her for a long time. Then he did something that surprised her: he nodded, once, slowly, the way a person nods when something has been said that is true in a way that cannot be argued with.

"I need to talk to you," he said. "About something completely unrelated to the band."

They sat in his booth. He introduced himself as Wells Whitmore III. He was twenty-eight, from a family that had been rich longer than the United States had been a country, and he was currently the target of his grandmother's most aggressive matchmaking campaign to date.

"My grandmother," he said, "has hired a woman named Mrs. Pemberton. She is a professional matchmaker. She has a file on every eligible woman in Manhattan. She is coming to my office tomorrow at nine in the morning. If I am not with a woman by Christmas, she will come to my office at nine and bring a portfolio."

Clara stared at him. "A portfolio?"

"Of candidates. With photographs. And personality assessments. I cannot let this happen."

"Get married," Clara said.

"I am trying. The problem is that I need a wife who will look at my grandmother with enough affection to believe that I am happy, who will not ask too many questions about my personal life, and who will, ideally, not have any connections to my family's social circle so that there is no risk of gossip. Do you know how difficult that is to find?"

Clara looked at him across the table. He was not handsome in the way that men at speakeasies are handsome—he was not lean or sharp-featured or the kind of face that appears in magazine advertisements. He was handsome in a different way: his face had a quality of honest exhaustion, the kind of face that belongs to someone who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and is too polite to complain about it.

"What happens after Christmas?" she asked.

"We part ways. The contract expires. Nobody is the worse for wear."

"You're proposing a marriage as a business arrangement."

"I am proposing a marriage as a survival strategy. There is a difference."

Clara thought about the letters in the desk drawer. She thought about Harold's voice when he said she deserved better than a man who could not see what was precious. She thought about the war and the shrapnel and the way her body felt different now, in ways that would never be the same.

"How long?" she asked.

"Three months. A trial period. If either of us is unhappy, we end it."

"And if neither of us is unhappy?"

Wells considered this. Then he said, with the same careful honesty he had brought to everything else: "I do not know. I have never tried anything that was not a transaction before."

"Then it's a good thing I'm very good at transactions," Clara said. "I've been performing for tips my entire life."

She said yes.

Author Note & Copyright: