The Arrangement Read online

  There was no coffee served that night. Nobody asked for it, and Lucy didn’t offer any. Caffeine seemed altogether beside the point. Instead, Owen brought out a bottle of locally made bourbon after the last bite of steak was eaten and the marinade was commented upon one final time, and even though the bourbon tasted like tree bark, everybody just kept on drinking.

  “Suppose I found out that Thom cheated on me on a business trip,” Victoria said. “He had a one-night stand, met someone at his hotel bar and slept with her. Everyone would understand if I kicked him out of the house or even filed for divorce, but if I told people I let him have sex with women on his business trips, that we had an arrangement, I’d be a social pariah.”

  “How is it that as a culture we’ve decided that it’s completely rational to break up a nuclear family because one of the parents has sex with somebody else, even if it’s only one time, or a minor fling, or whatever,” Thom said, “but it’s shameful and perverted to make some temporary accommodations inside a marriage so all parties can get their needs met while doing their primary job, which is staying together and raising their kids as an intact family unit?”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” said Owen.

  “Marriage is about kids,” said Thom. “It’s about having kids and raising them together and not leaving them no matter what.” He gestured toward his wife. “Both of our parents got divorced while we were young and it was the single biggest force that shaped our lives.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure marriage should be like dating,” said Lucy. “Where you’re always looking for someone to hook up with.”

  “Not looking for it, necessarily. Just, not having to shut it down if it happens,” said Victoria. “Being able to feel like a sexual person walking through the world again.”

  “I barely feel like a sexual person when I’m actually having sex,” Lucy said, and then she laughed at her own joke.

  “It’s almost over for us, Lucy,” Victoria said. “I have a friend, she’s ten years older than I am, and she says it’s like one day, everything changes. It’s like someone flips a switch.”

  “That’s really depressing,” said Lucy.

  “The other day, I was dropping Flannery off at Life Drawing, and a kid in his class asked me if I was his grandmother.”

  “No way.”

  “It’s true,” said Victoria. “And let me tell you, you don’t bounce back from that one overnight. You stop thinking you’ve got all the time in the world pretty quick.”

  “Are those crickets?” Thom asked.

  “They’re frogs,” said Lucy.

  “They’re really loud.”

  “They croak until they find a mate for the night, and then they shut up,” explained Owen. “If you wake up in the middle of the night, there are four sad horny frogs still out there croaking.”

  “I can’t believe you live someplace that has frogs,” said Victoria.

  “We also have chickens,” said Lucy.

  “I saw your chickens on Facebook,” Victoria said. “I refuse to discuss them. You have gone full-on Green Acres on me and I’m not sure how much longer we can be friends.”

  “I’ll send you home with some eggs,” said Lucy.

  “I won’t take them. That would only encourage you.”

  “I need something. And Thom needs something. We’re both tired of this persistent, I don’t know…low-grade dissatisfaction with life, I guess,” Victoria said. “Do you know how often we have sex?”

  “Never,” said Thom as he served himself a narrow slice of the fruit tart Victoria had picked up at Pain Quotidien that morning.

  “Not never never,” said Victoria. “But it might as well be never.”

  “And the weird thing is, we’re both fine with it,” said Thom. “That’s the scariest part.”

  “We can feel ourselves slipping into that kind of stale marriage where you are both fine not having sex, letting that part of you sort of wither up and die, and as we talked about it we realized we didn’t want that, but we didn’t want to split up either.”

  “This is officially the strangest conversation that has ever taken place on our deck,” said Owen.

  “I don’t get it,” said Lucy. “Do you still love each other?”

  “Yes!” said Thom.

  “Of course we do.”

  “Then why are you even talking about this?”

  “Let me try to explain,” said Victoria. She took a big, dramatic pause and then reached over and held on to Thom’s hand. “I want to grow old with this man. I love him, and he loves me. He’s my best friend and my favorite person in the world and the only person I want sleeping in my bed with me at night. I want to go on vacations together and have a life together and have Flannery come home with his kids at Christmas when we’re seventy. I just don’t, at the moment and, if I’m totally honest, for a while now, really, feel like having sex with him.”

  “Maybe it’s your hormones,” Lucy said helpfully. “Maybe you need a patch or something.”

  “Our therapist has ruled that out.”

  “You’ve talked about this with a therapist?” said Lucy.

  “He’s a bit unconventional, but he’s interested in finding ways to make long-term marriages work,” said Thom. “Marriages where you don’t have to disown a big part of yourself in order to stay in the relationship.”

  “My father cheated on my mother for their entire marriage,” said Victoria. “It completely destroyed her. I don’t want that for myself. I don’t want to give up all my power.”

  “This is the way nobody gets hurt. Not Victoria or me, not Flannery.”

  “Has it started yet?” Lucy asked. “Do you guys both have other people on the side?”

  “It hasn’t started yet,” Victoria said. “But we’re doing it.”

  “We are,” said Thom.

  “Wow,” said Lucy. “Just, wow.”

  Two

  When people ask me, “What is the best predictor of long-term success in a marriage?” I always have the same answer: “A mutual respect for suffering.” Nobody likes that answer.

  —Constance Waverly

  Huffington Post

  Why is there poop on the wall again?” Lucy yelled.

  She didn’t expect an answer. She just wanted the universe to hear her. To hear that this was her life, a life of discovering poop on the wall. Again.

  Because, really, is there any good answer to that question? Why was there poop on the wall? Because Lucy was a mommy. Because she had a five-year-old son with some challenges. Just because, really. Because, full stop.

  Actually, not full stop. This is why there was poop on the wall: Because sometimes, when Wyatt went to the bathroom, he accidentally got some poop on his hand. And then he did what he considered the most efficient thing. He wiped his hand on the wall next to the toilet. Apparently, with his sensory issues, having poop on his hand was the equivalent of a neurotypical person having, say, acid on his hand. Think about it, Wyatt’s occupational therapist had said to Lucy. If you had acid on your hand, your brain might stop working normally. You might forget what your mother had told you a million times. You’d get rid of it the quickest way possible.

  Which was all well and good, but for some reason, Wyatt never thought to tell her about it when it happened, so she was frequently surprised to find poop on the wall. She would sit down, intent on enjoying a rare moment of solitude, trying to eke out the most possible enjoyment she could get from a few minutes alone on the toilet, armed with a Real Simple or a Pottery Barn catalog or the free local newspaper, grabbing the tiniest of tiny pleasures for herself, a pleasure so tiny even calling it a pleasure was pathetic, and she would turn her head and find herself staring at a smear of drying-out shit.

  Shoes that tied were the first thing to go.

  Lucy needed shoes she could put on without using her hands, with a writhing, screaming, occasionally biting child in her arms, shoes she could tip up with her toes and slide her feet into without so much as ben
ding a knee. Flip-flops when at all possible, clogs or Merrells the rest of the time.

  Then it was earrings. Earrings were so long gone, the holes in her ears had closed up. Next it was eyeliner, then mascara, then returning phone calls, then going to the dentist, then looking in a full-length mirror before she left the house, then lip gloss, unless she found some in the bottom of her purse while she was stopped at a red light. There was more, of course. Pedicures, thank-you notes, RSVPs, Christmas cards, flossing, stretching, remembering birthdays, exfoliation. Basically, Lucy was down to nothing but deodorant, toothpaste, and a ponytail five days out of seven. She was lucky she was thin and had cheekbones and good skin.

  Lucy had planned to move to Chicago after college, because that was where her friends were all headed, but her father had pronounced in that way of his, “If you’re going to move to Chicago, you might as well move to New York.”

  It was good advice. The only time to move to New York City is when you’re fresh out of college, unless you happen to be rich. If you’re rich, you can move to New York whenever you want.

  Lucy could still remember the moment she met Owen like it was yesterday. It was one of those disgusting East Coast summer days, where everyone was sweating and midtown Manhattan was perversely heaped with piles of garbage everywhere you looked. Lucy had just turned twenty-six and she’d gotten an interview for the job of her dreams. She arrived at Rockefeller Center on time, but there was a hang-up at security and her pass wasn’t there. She waited. And she waited some more.

  By the time she finally got into the elevator, it was two minutes to one. The elevator was slow and hot and seemed to stop on every floor. Lucy was sweating—a combination of nervous sweat and residual city sweat—and she kept looking up at the elevator numbers and then down at her watch. All of a sudden, she felt a strong, cool breeze coming from her right. She turned her head and saw a tall man in a gray suit fanning her with the Metro section of his New York Times. He fanned her, wordlessly, while the elevator made its way up the next eighteen floors.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said to Lucy as she stepped out of the elevator. “Whatever you’re doing, you’re going to be great.”

  Lucy got the job.

  She started out as a junior line producer for a morning network news show. It was a great job, but it was challenging. It wasn’t just making the trains run on time, it was making the trains run on time in a world where there were no tracks, no trains, no trial runs, no do-overs, and no excuses. She remembered the time she was covering a protest against the war in Iraq and one of the lazier grips told her he couldn’t manage the setup she wanted because the power cord couldn’t reach the outlet. “Anything can reach anywhere,” Lucy pronounced, and she marched across the street and bought three extension cords. Her boss, witness to this all, immediately gave her a promotion and a raise.

  She lived in a world of concrete, solvable problems: Get a camera and the weatherman and a backup power source to a safe-but-seemingly-dangerous spot to cover the hurricane. It was difficult, it was stressful, and it was prestigious and relatively well paying, but it wasn’t particularly creative. Lucy thought about that, often, after she quit her job and moved up to Beekman. If she had been a writer or an artist, a photographer or a filmmaker or a poet, perhaps she could have found a way to wrestle some meaning out of the pockets of free time allotted to her. She could have pretended to write a screenplay in the spare room, could have joined the glassblowing collective, could have carried around a notebook and written down all of her interesting thoughts. Instead she had entered a world of problems that didn’t play to her strengths. She wasn’t the least bit tidy and she could find no satisfaction in housework. And then there was Wyatt, her lovable, impossible, unsolvable cipher.

  Owen never forgot her face. That’s what he always said, how he explained it, how it was that he spotted her two years later, sitting at a bar on the Lower East Side.

  “You were sweating in an elevator at Thirty Rock two summers ago,” Owen said to her. “I fanned you with my New York Times.”

  “That was you?” said Lucy.

  “It was me,” he said. “I’m Owen.”

  “I’m Lucy,” she said.

  “Hey, dude,” Lucy’s date, a hipster with a beard so long he looked like a lumberjack who’d gotten lost, said to Owen. “Uncool.”

  “I hear you,” Owen said to the guy. “And I get where you’re coming from. But I’ve been looking for this girl for the past two years, and unless you two are married or she’s carrying your baby, I’m giving her my phone number.”

  Owen and Lucy had been together ever since.

  * * *

  “Hey, Claire, can I stop by later and snag a few of Augie’s Ritalin?” asked Sunny Bang.

  They were at summer-school drop-off, and the kids who qualified for the program—kids who either needed extra help or could benefit from some genius-type enrichment—were already inside the school. A few of the moms always hung around at the bottom of the concrete steps to chat, and today Lucy was one of them.

  “What?” asked Claire.

  “Just five. I have to do my taxes and you know I can’t focus.”

  “It’s July.”

  “I got an extension. Please. Three, even; three would probably be enough.”

  “Are you being serious right now?”

  “Yes,” said Sunny Bang. “At least, I thought I was.”

  Claire folded her arms across her chest and said, “The answer is no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because I’m not going to let you borrow and consume my teenage son’s prescription medication.”

  “Oh.”

  “There is a cop right over there.”

  There was a Beekman cop, sitting in his police car out in the parking lot in front of the school, drinking coffee and doing paperwork. Ever since Sandy Hook, the local cops had spent their downtime near the school, parked in plain sight.

  “This is not a crime. It is one mother asking to borrow something from another mother at drop-off,” said Sunny Bang. Then she said loudly, in the direction of the police car, “I would also like to stop by your home to pick up any fall hand-me-downs you might have lying around.”

  “I’m going to pretend we never had this conversation,” said Claire.

  “She’s a little uptight today,” said Sunny Bang after Claire got into her minivan and drove off. “I should have just made an excuse to go over there and palmed a few.”

  “What do you need Ritalin for?” Lucy asked.

  “What don’t I need it for?” Sunny Bang said. “I take one, I can do two weeks’ worth of bullshit mommy tasks in a single day. I’m like a whirlwind. Totally focused and totally energized. And Augie’s got the good stuff. It’s slow release. It lasts for twelve hours, and you don’t feel like eating for two days.”

  “That sounds a lot like speed,” said Lucy.

  “It’s better than speed,” said Sunny Bang. “I can’t wait until Tobias is old enough to get a prescription that I won’t ever let him use.”

  Sunny Bang was one of only three Asian American women who lived full-time in Beekman, and it was a sad fact of their lives that they were all mistaken for one another again and again and again. They were addressed by the wrong name in the grocery store, at the club pool, at school functions, at Christmas parties, in parking lots, and at the farmers’ market. It took the average new Beekmanite sixteen months to be able to reliably tell them apart, and a few of the more disengaged husbands never did manage it. Andrew Callahan was always trying to cover for himself by saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Don’t get mad at me, Sunny, I used to only date Asian women!”

  “How was your weekend?” Sunny asked.

  “Honestly?” said Lucy. “It was weird.”

  “How so?”

  “These old friends of ours from Brooklyn came by for dinner Saturday night. They told us they have an open marriage. We spent the whole night talking about it.”

  “Wer
e they trying to get you to”—and here Sunny did a hand motion to indicate sex—“with them?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lucy. “God, I hope not. That thought never even entered my mind.”

  “I bet they were,” said Sunny Bang. “I bet they were just trying to feel you out.”

  “Well, if they were, it didn’t work.”

  “Maybe that’s what all those idiots are doing in Brooklyn. Having sex with each other’s spouses. Otherwise, why would you still live there? Why would you live in Brooklyn when you could live here?”

  This was a common refrain for the residents of Beekman. How come I never heard about this place before? How come everyone doesn’t want to live here? They hadn’t just fled the city because they couldn’t afford it anymore, although that was true for a lot of them. They hadn’t been forced to do that dreaded thing, move to the suburbs. Beekman wasn’t the suburbs. It wasn’t Dobbs Ferry, it wasn’t Mamaroneck, it wasn’t New Jersey, it wasn’t Connecticut. Every house was on at least two acres of land, you could commute into Grand Central on Metro-North, and yet there was not a Wall Street asshole in sight—how was that possible? It was twenty-five minutes to the nearest Starbucks. And nobody went to Starbucks! Starbucks had become a thing of the past, like a rotary phone or a VCR. Beekman attracted the kind of people who didn’t want shopping malls or Starbucks or a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality, and they’d found it. They had found someplace they believed, truly believed, to be inestimably better.

  * * *

  “That was weird, the other night,” Lucy said to Owen.

  They were in the living room, sitting on the couch. Lucy’s feet were tucked under Owen’s legs.

  “You mean when we woke up and Wyatt was standing at the foot of the bed staring at us?”

  “Well, yes, that was weird, but I’m talking about the conversation with Thom and Victoria.”

  “Oh. Right.”