The Arrangement Read online

  “Izzy and Owen! Izzy and Owen! Izzy and Owen!”

  * * *

  Lucy was taking a shower, washing her hair with a cheap drugstore shampoo that smelled like strawberries. It was that chemical strawberry scent that smelled stronger than the juiciest of strawberries, and it brought to mind something Lucy hadn’t thought about in years.

  It was before she had Wyatt, long before Beekman, back when she and Owen were still living on the Upper West Side and trying desperately to have a baby. She had just come from work and she was waiting in line at the Gourmet Garage when she overheard a woman in front of her talking into her phone.

  “I don’t know, really,” the woman had said. “I just want something juicy in my life.”

  Lucy remembered it like it was yesterday. Juicy? Who thinks things like that? Who has the luxury of juicy?

  What Lucy had wanted while she was standing in line at the Gourmet Garage was this: A baby. A child of her own. Her egg, Owen’s sperm, her womb, period. Or, rather, no period—every time her period arrived, it felt like a knife to her heart. They had done three rounds of IVF—three was all they could responsibly afford—and Lucy had found out that morning that the third one hadn’t worked. And she’d burst into tears again, right there in line. She hated that woman, the juicy woman, because she was standing in line with her two adorable kids climbing up her legs, complaining into her cell phone about wanting something juicy in her life.

  But now it was many years later, and Lucy had gotten what she wanted: a child. They’d left the city so they could afford a decent house. She and Owen had a happy marriage. She had close friends, a nice community.

  But she did not have juicy. She was a lifetime away from juicy, she was miles, light-years, eons away from juicy, and now it seemed that juicy was what she wanted.

  Lucy remembered her lowest point in what felt like years full of low points, infertility-wise. She’d just gotten her period, two weeks after yet another costly and painful medical procedure—although by no means the costliest and most painful she would endure—and she’d been sobbing off and on for forty-eight hours.

  She was in bed, watching a segment on Sixty Minutes about the genocide in the Ivory Coast. Apparently, the rebels would come into a village and go from home to home forcing fathers to have sex with their daughters in full view of the rest of the family, on threat of death. Once rumors of this spread, village men wisely decided to switch huts with each other at night, so they wouldn’t be made to have sex with their own daughters in front of their own wives and sons. Still, the whole thing was incredibly horrific and grim and as the segment unfolded, Lucy felt for a moment that it put her situation in perspective. Face it, she said to herself, things could be worse. You have food and clean water, a loving husband and air-conditioning—air-conditioning was one of Lucy’s all-time-favorite things—and no one is breaking into your hut, raping you, and killing your family.

  Then the story homed in on a thirteen-year-old girl who had been forced to have sex with a neighbor who was pretending to be her father and then made to watch as both of her brothers were killed. Next, she was abducted and taken to the rebels’ camp deep in the jungle and held as a sex slave, being forced to have sex with up to thirty men in one day. After about six months, she managed to escape and make her way to a refugee camp. It was at the refugee camp, in front of the rolling cameras, that she discovered she was four months pregnant, carrying a rebel-rapist’s child.

  And Lucy thought: How come everybody can get pregnant except for me?

  That’s infertility. It takes over.

  Every woman Lucy saw on the street back then was pregnant or pushing a stroller; every old friend who called out of the blue was announcing a new baby. Facebook was impossible. The holidays were impossible. Everything hurt, time was running out, what were they going to do, how much would they be willing to spend, would they consider adoption—they would, of course they would, they’d agreed at the beginning, back when it first looked like there might be a problem, but both of them secretly believed that there wasn’t, wouldn’t be, a big problem—but as each try failed, even talking about it had become dangerous emotional ground for them to tread.

  IVF was all numbers. She and Owen finally scraped together enough money for a fourth round. Only five eggs were retrieved. Four were good on day three, two were good on day five, both were implanted. Two weeks later, a ten p.m. phone call from Dr. Hamilton.

  “Congratulations,” he’d said. “You’re pregnant.”

  * * *

  Owen parked his car on a short residential street near the river and walked the seven blocks to the address Izzy had sent him. He was not entirely sure what was going on.

  After their chance meeting at GroceryLand, Izzy had e-mailed him and suggested he stop by so they could talk about Izzy and Owen, their children’s book about the unlikely friendship between a mouse and a hippo. She said she already had a few preliminary thoughts she wanted to run by him. She ended with a ;*, which he looked up online and found meant a wink and a kiss. Early afternoon, flirty woman’s house, e-mail winks and kisses—was it possible she actually intended to write a children’s book with him? That made no sense! No sense whatsoever.

  Had he implied he was a writer of some sort? Had he suggested he fancied himself an illustrator? Or said he worked in publishing? Or proclaimed a love of children’s literature? No! None of those things. Owen’s mind circled back through his two encounters with Izzy to see if there was anything to hang this children’s-book idea on, any logical reason why she would have invited him, alone, to her house at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t. But this didn’t make much sense either. And before the Arrangement, he would have ignored it altogether. But now, well, he was curious, if nothing else.

  He rang the doorbell. He forced himself not to look up and down the street like a prospective adulterer and instead tried to stand up straight, like an aspiring children’s-book author, like a man who had absolutely nothing to hide.

  Izzy opened the door and smiled at him. It was a wicked, sexy half smile that reminded him of the Ellen Barkin of fifteen years ago.

  “Well, hello there,” she said.

  “Just so you know, my wife and I have an open marriage,” said Owen.

  Izzy started to laugh.

  “What?” said Owen.

  “You’re in my bed. You already slept with me. You don’t need to lie to me now.”

  “I’m not lying, I swear—”

  “Don’t talk,” said Izzy. “Just lie there and be all quiet and pretty.”

  Owen suddenly felt self-conscious. He pulled the sheet up to his chest and stared at the chandelier hanging over the bed. Lucy would kill for a chandelier like that.

  “Okay, you can talk,” said Izzy. “Explain yourself.”

  “My wife and I have a good marriage, we’re happy, and we love each other, but we’ve decided to sort of give each other a free pass for a couple of months to bypass any midlife crises or things like that. Like the way the Amish kids get a rumspringa when they turn eighteen.”

  Izzy nodded her head slowly, like she was taking it all in, like she was thoughtfully processing what he had just said, and then she burst out laughing.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m just thinking of all the things my idiot husband must have said to the women he fucked while he was married to me,” she said. “I can’t imagine it. He probably told people I was okay with it.”

  “No, we do, we have an open arrangement.”

  “Will she sign a note to that effect? ‘Dear Izzy: You hereby have my permission to fuck my husband, signed’—what is her name?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy.” Izzy narrowed her eyes. “She’s not the Lucy with the frizzy black hair who wears the overalls with homemade patches on them, is she?”

  “Different Lucy.”

  “Good,” said Izzy. “I couldn’t quite see you with a woman who patches her own overalls. There are so many things wrong with that Luc
y, I might actually feel bad about fucking her husband.”

  “I’m telling you, you don’t need to feel bad. This is allowed.”

  “You’re not getting it. I wouldn’t feel bad even if it wasn’t allowed. This is me, not feeling bad. I, Izzy Radford, no longer feel bad about fucking other women’s husbands. Excuse me, but I’m going to drink to that.”

  She reached over and grabbed her goblet from the nightstand and took a healthy swig of what Owen would come to think of as her house wine, a thick buttery chardonnay that came in a jumbo-size bottle.

  “I have lost my faith in the sisterhood of women.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “My best friend slept with Christopher.”

  “Christopher…”

  “My ex-husband. But we were very much married at the time. My yoga teacher Ilianna slept with him too. She spent a weekend with him in a bed-and-breakfast in Woodstock. Christopher claimed he was in Oregon at the time.”

  “How do you know about all this?”

  “Oh, I figured it out eventually,” she said. “I downloaded keystroke spy software onto his computer and tracked his car and his cell phone, I found a secret credit card he had with a bunch of motel charges, and when I had enough detail, I confronted him with it. And he spilled his guts. Told me things I didn’t even have a clue about from years ago. I filed for divorce the next day.”

  “So, uh, we good?” Owen said to Izzy. He had already grabbed his coat and was just about to let himself out. He was eager to check his phone—something he felt would be rude to do in Izzy’s presence—and see if something terrible had happened to Lucy or Wyatt while he’d been committing adultery. Even though, he told himself, it wasn’t technically adultery.

  And the truth was, he was a little bit afraid of Izzy. But he liked her spirit. She was who she was. The ultimate no-bullshit woman. She was erotically adventurous and, from what he could tell, temperamentally the opposite of his wife. She was a good choice, arrangement-wise.

  “We’re good,” said Izzy, “as long as we’re going to do this again sometime soon.”

  “We are,” said Owen. “I mean, I’d like to very much. I’ll text you.”

  “Do that.”

  When Owen walked through the front door, he was immediately accosted by Wyatt, who was bouncing up and down on his toes with excitement and twisting a string of Mardi Gras beads around his neck.

  “Dada, Dada, I gotta tell you something,” Wyatt said. “Guess what?”

  “What, Wyatt?”

  “Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell!”

  “What?” said Owen.

  “Yes,” said Wyatt. “Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell.”

  “No way,” said Owen.

  “Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell.”

  “Does that blow your mind?” Owen said.

  “Yes.” Wyatt laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “He was a boy but now he’s a girl!”

  “Let me put down my stuff and you can tell me about it,” Owen said. He slipped out of his coat and set a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter while Wyatt walked over to the table and started to play with his beads. Wyatt played with his beads when he was excited, or when he was stressed, or when he was happy.

  “Dada, Dada, I gotta tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell!”

  “You told me that already,” said Owen. “What do you think about it?”

  “Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell!” Wyatt repeated. “He started out as a boy but now he’s a girl!”

  Wyatt was shaking his Mardi Gras beads frantically on the kitchen table. His face was about six inches away from the beads, and he was staring at them with wide-open eyes while he spoke.

  “How did he do that?” said Owen.

  “I don’t know! He started out as a boy but now he’s a girl. He wears dresses!”

  “He wears dresses to school?” said Owen.

  “Yes. Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell and he wears dresses to school! And he’s going to use the ladies’ restroom!”

  “He is? How do you know that?”

  “He told the class he’s going to use the ladies’ restroom. And that it’s totally normal. Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell and he wears dresses now and even ladies’ underpants!”

  “Well, that sounds kind of silly,” said Owen. “Do you think it’s silly?”

  “It’s super-silly!”

  “Do people usually go from being a boy to being a girl?”

  “No, because it’s very hard to do.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It’s very, very hard to do but it’s totally normal.”

  “You’re right, Wyatt.”

  “You have to take special medicine to turn from a boy to a girl and it’s very, very hard to do.”

  Owen looked over at Lucy, who’d been watching the whole thing from the doorway, and shrugged his shoulders. At least the kid had his facts straight.

  “Guess what, Dada? Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell!”

  “I know, Wyatt. You told me that already. What color dress did Mrs. Lowell wear today?”

  “It was green. It was a green dress and he had on ladies’ underpants because he’s now Mrs. Lowell.”

  “Is that okay with you, Wyatt? That he’s now Mrs. Lowell?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lowell is now Mrs. Lowell.”

  “Did Mr. Lowell tell the class he was wearing ladies’ underpants?” Lucy finally asked. She couldn’t help herself. It seemed like a little more information than was called for, frankly.

  “No.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Brannon did! Brannon said that Mrs. Lowell was wearing ladies’ underpants! And probably a bra!” Wyatt started talking in circles again, this time about bras and ladies’ underpants, while he stimmed with his beads and laughed and laughed.

  Lucy had given Owen a heads-up, of course. Owen was driving home from Izzy’s when Lucy called him. He’d felt a flash of guilt and then what could only be called confusion when he saw his wife’s picture show up on his phone.

  “Wyatt has something big to tell you when you get home,” Lucy said. “I think you should be prepared.”

  “What is it?”

  “You know Mr. Lowell?”

  “Wyatt’s teacher?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s turning into a woman.”

  “What?”

  “He’s transitioning. He’s becoming a woman. He started wearing a dress to school this week. And Wyatt’s going to want to tell you the second you walk through the door, and I thought you should have a bit of a warning.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Lucy. “Act like it’s normal around Wyatt. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “Okay. Wow.”

  “Yeah. See you soon,” said Lucy. “Don’t forget the wine, please.”

  “Already got it.”

  * * *

  That Monday, Mr. Lowell had come to school wearing a long, tasteful gray skirt, but for some reason nobody thought anything of it. It was so long and so gray it almost passed for a pair of trousers, that was all anyone could remember. On Tuesday, he wore a dress and a pair of low heels. Eyebrows were raised, to say the least, and the teachers began to talk among themselves, but Mrs. G., the principal, was off the grid in Tulum for a yoga retreat that week and no one knew quite what to do. Some said that on Wednesday he added makeup; others insisted he’d been wearing makeup on Tuesday as well. Thursday morning, he walked into the kindergarten classroom wearing a dress, high heels, full makeup, fake lashes, and a blond wig. He wrote his new name on the whiteboard and explained to his students that he was now a woman. The fourth-grade teacher, a strict Baptist, tracked down Mrs. G. in Tulum, and she took an early, angry flight home.

  * * *

  “Wyatt’s got enough to
deal with,” said Lucy. “How’s he going to get his head around this?”

  “The way he gets his head around anything,” said Owen. “He’ll think about it for a month or two, talk in circles about it, and then move on to the next thing he wants to understand, like how astronauts go poop in outer space.”

  “At least he has a sense of humor,” said Lucy. “That’s very unusual, you know, for kids like Wyatt. At least he knows when something is funny.”

  “You’re his mom,” said Owen. “Of course he has a sense of humor.”

  “Awww,” said Lucy. “That little shit Brannon is the one who taught him the word fucker.”

  “He was going to learn that one sooner or later.”

  “I know.”

  “I think it’s going to be good for this place,” said Owen. “We have to hope people will accept Wyatt for who he is and not expect him to be like everybody else. Maybe this whole Mrs. Lowell thing will be a blessing in disguise.”

  “Well, the ladies of Beekman are going nuts about it,” said Lucy. “My phone blew up from all the texts flying this afternoon. Is it okay if I go to the school-board meeting next week?”

  “Of course. Go ahead,” said Owen. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  * * *

  “You realize your wife is an idiot,” Izzy said to Owen after they’d had sex the next day.

  Owen had come back for seconds. He hadn’t planned on it, not exactly, not right away, but Izzy had sent him a text around noon, nearly all emoticons. He had to hunt for his reading glasses in order to see the text clearly. Rumpled bed, fireworks, hands folded in prayer, winky eye, winky eye, dancing bear, and then two o’clock with a long row of question marks after it.

  “Actually, Lucy’s a lot smarter than I am,” said Owen.

  “Well, you’re an idiot too,” said Izzy. “You’re both morons if you think this is going to work. This is a divorce you guys are looking at. This is a divorce in slow motion.”