The Arrangement Read online

  “Do you remember that commercial for Dunkin’ Donuts? With that old guy who woke up early every morning and said, ‘Time to make the doughnuts’? He was dragging himself around, saying, ‘Time to make the doughnuts, time to make the doughnuts’?” Susan asked Dr. Weinberg at their first joint therapy session. “Seriously, do you remember?”

  “I do remember that commercial,” the doctor said finally.

  “Okay, well, that’s how Rowan makes me feel about wanting to have sex. Any time the idea of sex comes up, it’s like there’s a thought bubble over his head that says, ‘Time to make the doughnuts.’”

  “Because you’re putting a lot of pressure on me,” said Rowan. “You don’t see it, Susan, but you are.”

  “What pressure?”

  “All of it! The new lingerie. Every time I get into bed I feel like I’m disappointing you.”

  “You are disappointing me! This is a really messed-up situation, Rowan. I don’t see why you don’t see it!”

  “I do see it. I’m here, right? I’m willing to work on it. I want to fix it.”

  “Are you gay, Rowan? If you’re gay, just tell me.”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Do you think he’s gay, Dr. Weinberg?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  It seemed rather unusual for a shrink to say something that definitively, but Susan liked it. He must be pretty sure, she thought, to put it that plainly. Dr. Weinberg had had three sessions with Rowan on his own. Who knows what he might have teased out in those hundred and fifty minutes? Perhaps Rowan had revealed a very deep, very symbolic, profoundly heterosexual dream.

  “Okay,” Susan said. She scooched a bit on the couch, turned her body toward her husband, and looked him directly in the eyes. “Are you having an affair?”

  “No! Jesus, Susan. No.”

  “Just tell me if you are,” she said. “It’s okay to tell me. Honestly, at this point I’d rather know.”

  “I’m not! I swear,” said Rowan. “Are you having an affair?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I love you. I love our family. I want us to work.”

  “I do too,” said Susan.

  Rowan took Susan’s hand in his. He turned to Dr. Weinberg and said, “What are we supposed to do?”

  First, Dr. Weinberg insisted they move Charlotte out of their room and install a lock on their bedroom door to keep the twins at bay. This was almost more than Susan could handle, losing Charlotte, locking the boys out; it felt cruel and dangerous. (“What if there’s a fire? What if there’s a fire and we’re asleep and they can’t get in?”) But Dr. Weinberg wouldn’t bend—getting the eighteen-month-old out of the marital bed and making sure the door would lock was nonnegotiable. “It might be enough,” Dr. Weinberg said at the end of that first session. “Quite often, that’s enough.”

  It wasn’t, though. It wasn’t enough.

  And thus was ushered in a particularly grim phase of their marriage, the Working on Sex phase. They saw Dr. Weinberg every Thursday night, and at the end of each session he sent them off with homework to complete by the following week. They bought scented massage oils, they slept naked, they forced themselves to cuddle and kiss and give each other long-drawn-out nonsexual massages. Susan was encouraged to masturbate. Rowan was told in no uncertain terms not to. They wrote down their fantasies and then read them to each other while Dr. Weinberg looked on from the comfort of his Eames chair. They held hands when they didn’t want to, they made out in a movie theater, groping each other like teenagers. Only that was the thing—the groping didn’t feel teenager-ish, the groping felt forced, staged, awkward, and distinctly unsexy. Working on sex, it turned out, was worse than not having sex.

  Through it all, Susan could feel how difficult, how truly unpleasant, this was for Rowan. It always came down to one thing: The pressure! He couldn’t take it! And the more Rowan couldn’t take the pressure, the angrier Susan got. He’s really fucked up, Susan thought. That’s all there was to it. And if Susan had been a different woman, a woman with a baseline of instinctual health, she probably would have cut her losses right then. But—the kids. The life. The friends. Beekman.

  It started as an innocent experiment in reverse psychology. Susan sat Rowan down after the kids were in bed one night and told him that she wanted to stop Working on Sex. She wanted to stop seeing Dr. Weinberg and maybe use the money they saved for a date night every few weeks if that sounded good to him, but no pressure. She’d decided that she was okay, she was happy, and things were good the way things were. They were both tired, the twins were still a handful, Charlotte was still in diapers, and his job put him under a lot of pressure. They loved each other, they had a life together, and the sex would eventually sort itself out.

  Two more years passed.

  * * *

  Ten days after the meeting in the school auditorium, Colleen Lowell was relieved of her position as the kindergarten teacher of the Beekman elementary school and placed on paid leave.

  The administration pulled Mrs. Gibson away from one of the first-grade classes and placed her in the kindergarten spot and then blended half of the first-graders with the second-graders, going from four classrooms down to three. Of course, this had the effect of angering even more parents, the parents of the first- and second-graders who were now in classes with higher pupil counts, the second-graders sitting side by side with the first-graders, with all the parents comparing notes, trying to figure out if they’d put the smartest first-graders in with the second-graders or if it was truly random, as Mrs. G. insisted over and over again.

  The school board had finally settled on the excuse of gross insubordination, based on the fact that Mrs. Lowell hadn’t informed the principal or the superintendent of her plans before commencing her transition. She was tenured, though, and continued to receive full pay while on leave, and since there was only one elementary school in the Beekman Unified School District, there was no other school in which to place her.

  The local Catholic school was oversubscribed by ten o’clock the morning after the initial public hearing as a small but significant group of Beekman parents rushed to pull their kids out of the public school. The Archdiocese of New York trucked in mobile classrooms and placed them in rows on the big, flat lawn in front of Beekman’s beautiful two-hundred-year-old Catholic church, creating an eyesore and sparking a new round of contentious municipal-zoning hearings. Before long, parents who had never set foot in a church were listening to their children saying Hail Marys at the dinner table and then again while they knelt beside their beds each night. A little religion never hurt anybody, these parents would say to themselves and then try not to think about whether or not that statement was actually technically true.

  It was Susan Howard who came up with the idea for Colleen Lowell’s silent protest. She didn’t want Colleen, in particular, and the subject of transgenderism, in general, to disappear from the “Beekman dialogue,” and so she persuaded Colleen to take up residence during school hours on the bench in front of the Country Crock, so no one in town would be able to ignore this colossal injustice! Colleen was dressed to the nines every day, looking like she was either on her way to a cocktail party (all black, wearing statement necklaces) or doing duty as mother of the bride (pastels, with the pearls she’d bought herself as a present for coming out). Her wife, Arlen, joined her whenever she wasn’t working at the shelter or visiting her mother at the retirement home, and the two would hold hands, scratch dog bellies, and chat with friendly passersby.

  * * *

  For the first time in my life, I’m glad my parents are dead, Lucy thought.

  Lucy was on Metro-North, heading south, heading toward Ben, and for some reason she found herself thinking about her parents.

  Her mother had died when Lucy was three years old. She’d pulled over to help a stranded motorist along the small stretch of highway she used as a shortcut to and from Lucy’s ballet class, from exit 18 to exit 19. Lucy was in the back of the car and her m
other had gotten out to talk to the stranger, who had run out of gas, when she was clipped by a drunk driver and then flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. Lucy had overheard one of the EMTs use those exact words, clipped and flattened, and they were not words her three-year-old mind could forget.

  Her mother, driving her home from ballet. Her mother, stopping to help a stranger.

  Her father was a famous scholar, tenured young at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and everything about that suited him. He never remarried, and Lucy and her older sister, Anna, grew up like feral cats. Every year, he hired graduate students to help with household tasks like shopping and organizing, cleaning and cooking, always women, always B-plus students who were thrilled to get to spend so much time in his orbit even if it meant scrubbing his toilets and changing his sheets. Not the superstars, never the superstars, and never, not once, a man. That was the lowest thing you could be in the world Lucy’s father had made for himself: a woman who was not a superstar. A woman who changed the sheets.

  He was warm, though. He was kind and he was loving and mostly, well, he was around. He was there, literally, spending nearly all of his time inside the house—a stately Victorian with a wraparound porch and a widow’s walk even though it was fifteen hundred miles to the nearest ocean. He held office hours in the parlor and did his reading in his study, and twice a week he walked the three blocks to campus and gave a lecture to two hundred and fifty students who treated him like a god. Other than that, he brought the college to him, hosting potluck dinners several nights a week with his grad students, and Thursday sherry hours, a tip of the hat to the four years he’d spent at Oxford in the sixties.

  Lucy’s father wasn’t good with things like remembering to sign permission slips and buying hair bows and putting on tights, but he had a lap he would let her sit on for hours, both of them reading, in front of the fire. That’s what Lucy thought of when she thought of life after her mother died, reading on her father’s lap and, later, curled up next to him on his ancient Chesterfield couch, the one with the silver duct tape slapped over the cracking parts.

  He died quickly, of pancreatic cancer, when Lucy was four months pregnant with Wyatt. His life’s great work was a European history textbook that was still popular, one that had been in use for three decades and was now digitized and enhanced and changed around a bit every few years by the publisher to ensure continuing sales. Inheriting her share of its copyright was like being gifted with a very small and yet extremely reliable money machine. It generated enough revenue that Lucy didn’t have to feel guilty about not working. It paid for Wyatt’s extra therapies, the special horseback riding and the vision therapy, the ones that weren’t covered by the generosity of the taxpayers of New York State. Not riches, not by a long shot, but breathing room.

  Lucy’s therapist, back when she had one, during the worst six months of her infertility treatments, had commended her on her resilience. There she was, saddled with a dead mother and an extremely traditional, intellectual father, and yet: A good marriage, a satisfying career. No addictions or phobias or neuroses to speak of. A desire for children so strong that she was willing to go through a great deal of pain and disappointment and expense in order to have one of her own.

  But Lucy was unmothered, as unmothered as it was possible to be, and the thing that therapist never told her, the six-months you’re-so-very-resilient therapist, was that it was hard to be a mother when you had never been mothered yourself. Your children’s needs remind you of your needs. Their pain reminds you of your pain. All of it reminds you of how bad it felt, how hard it was, how much you wanted and needed and didn’t get.

  It’s very hard.

  The elevator opened and Lucy stepped into the hall. Ben was standing in his doorway, smiling a small yet undeniable smile. Lucy walked toward him, knowing what was next, knowing exactly why she was there, again, ready this time, ready to lose herself in whatever was to come.

  Ben put her purse on the table and locked the door behind her. Then he took her by the shoulders and turned her away from him. He pressed her against the wall, pulled her hair up with one hand, and kissed the nape of her neck.

  This.

  The kisses did not stop. She felt his body, solid, behind her. She closed her eyes.

  This.

  He pulled her skirt up. He slipped his hand between her legs, and she gasped.

  This. This. This.

  Nine

  If your wife, approaching midlife, found herself vivified by a passing infidelity, if after years of quiet desperation she woke up one morning and felt glad to be on this planet, if she once again felt the wind on her cheek, on what rational basis would you object?

  —Constance Waverly

  The Man Summit, New York City

  Gordon Allen was pretending to be sick.

  He’d chosen this day carefully, with the strategic help of a flotilla of attorneys. He needed a day when Rocco would be home from school. He needed his wife, Kelly, and Judith Ann, their weekday daytime nanny, both in the same room at the same time. He could have done it on a weekend, but the weekend nannies were Jamaican and Hispanic. Maybe one was Guatemalan. Hell, he didn’t know; he didn’t even know their names. But Judith Ann was British, middle-aged and dignified, and she would do well during a deposition if it ever came to that. So he’d been hanging around the house all day, feigning illness, waiting for an opportunity.

  Kelly doesn’t spend a goddamn second with our son, Gordon thought, and not for the first time. All day long he had been lurking around the house in his forest-green bathrobe, peeking around corners, trying to catch Kelly and Rocco together and, by extension, Judith Ann, because Judith Ann never let Rocco out of her sight.

  Finally, around three thirty in the afternoon, Kelly wandered into the kitchen wearing her yoga pants and happened upon Judith Ann giving Rocco his afternoon snack. Gordon watched from the hallway as Kelly poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down at the kitchen counter.

  Gordon tightened the sash on his bathrobe and ambled into the kitchen, coughing for effect. He had a thick stack of papers tucked under his arm. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of orange juice.

  “Hi, Rocco.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “I can’t get too close to you because I’m sick.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hi, Gordon,” said Kelly.

  “Oh. Kelly. Glad you’re here. I need a signature,” Gordon said oh so casually. He slid the stack of papers along the smooth, cold marble and handed her a pen.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s something the lawyers drew up. It’s about our estate. Sign right here.”

  It’s about our estate. That’s what the lawyers said he should say. That, and nothing more. And all within earshot of Judith Ann.

  “I’ll do it later.”

  “It’ll take two seconds. I told Hugh I’d get these back to him by tomorrow.”

  “I want to read it first,” said Kelly. “I don’t believe in just signing things.”

  “There’s nothing to believe in. Part of our life is signing a lot of documents. You’ve seen me do it a million times,” Gordon said. He chuckled. “If I read everything I signed, I’d never have a second to do anything else.”

  “Just put them on my desk,” Kelly said. “I’m trying to spend some time with our son.”

  Foiled!

  Gordon walked upstairs to Kelly’s “office”—it was decorated like Marie Antoinette’s sitting room, all mirrors and gilt and washed-out pastels, completely out of keeping with the rustic Adirondack style Gordon had insisted on for the rest of the house—and did his best to gather his thoughts.

  His plan had been this: Have Kelly sign the papers, and then, seemingly as an afterthought, ask Judith Ann to sign as a witness. And then messenger the papers to his lawyers so they could be filed with the court. Simple!

  Gordon sat down on a tufted silk chaise longue and fanned through the pages of the document. It was, techni
cally, a postnuptial agreement. It provided a huge trust for Rocco, the interest on which, should his parents’ marriage end, his mother would be entitled to for her lifetime, unless and until she elected to remarry. Gordon didn’t want to give Kelly money—certainly not the amount of money he would have to give her if they were to divorce—but more important, he didn’t want another man married to Kelly and raising his son.

  The agreement wouldn’t stand up in court, of course, not if things got that far, but at least it would be something. That’s what his lawyers told him. They wanted to get Kelly’s signature on something, anything, some sort of agreement, no matter how legally suspect, just so they’d have something to fight with if it ever came to that.

  And, Gordon thought, it was increasingly looking like it might come to that. Kelly had started sleeping in what she was now referring to as her room, a majestic guest suite that was equidistant from the master suite and Rocco’s bedroom. She claimed Gordon’s snoring and his peeing and his phone pinging kept her up all night. It was true Gordon snored loudly and he peed about eight times every night and his phone pinged if something major was happening in the markets overseas, but all of his other wives had been able to tolerate it! They hadn’t complained! They’d all slept next to him!

  Well, they had until the end, really. Until the very end.

  * * *

  Lucy had started to worry about how she was going to keep seeing Ben regularly. There were only so many excuses she could make for her new trips into the city. Even with the Arrangement it wasn’t going to be simple—the trip to Brooklyn was a trek, and not a simple one, and she had responsibilities. She had a spectrum-y five-year-old, for God’s sake! Perhaps she’d made a mistake not finding someone closer to home, like the married dentist in Rye she’d stumbled upon online who was looking for discreet, no-strings lunchtime fun.