The Arrangement Read online

  The meeting had begun with a welcome from Mrs. G., sunburned from her recent truncated vacation in Tulum and sitting behind a long table flanked by Emma, the school psychologist, and a pale, balding man in a three-piece suit. Mrs. G. droned on for a good twenty minutes about courage and respectfulness and dignity and honesty, pointing to the words painted on banners that hung over the bleachers and addressing the roomful of agitated parents as if they were half-witted seven-year-olds.

  Next, the man in the three-piece suit, who turned out to be the school district’s lawyer, reeled off statements about employee discrimination and hostile work environments. He said that Mrs. Lowell was now a member of a protected class and that parents and the school staff had to honor her right to change genders. Parents were asked to instruct their children to refrain from making jokes, comments, slurs, or aspersions of any kind about Mrs. Lowell, in person or on social media. When he was done, he slid the microphone across the table to Emma, who perkily announced plans for biweekly discussion groups for parents and interested students and encouraged anyone who needed additional resources to e-mail her night or day. By the time the floor was open for public discussion and a microphone on a stand positioned down front by a heavyset middle-schooler, the grinding wheels of public school bureaucracy had just about sucked the life out of the one thing every last person in town had been talking about for days.

  A rangy brunette wearing dark brown cords and a fluttery white top came up to the microphone. She adjusted the mic so she wouldn’t have to slouch, tossed her lank brown hair to one side, and slowly surveyed the crowd.

  “Wow. Wow. Okay. Hi! For those who don’t know me…my name is Susan Howard.” Was it just Lucy, or had Susan paused for a murmur of acknowledgment that hadn’t come? “First, let me just say, it is an honor to be addressing you tonight. My husband, Rowan, and I feel so, so grateful for the hard work you, the people of Beekman, have done to build this community.

  “A tiny bit about me. I’m a poet, a deacon at St. Andrews right across the street, and a stay-at-home mother to three utterly amazing kids. And I’m afraid I plead guilty to being one of the progressive parents Karl was just talking about. Hi, Karl!” Susan waved at Karl, a jowly fourth-generation Beekmanite who had opened the public-comments portion of the meeting by reading a stinging indictment of the newcomers who were trying to impose socialist values on this all-American town.

  Lucy nudged Claire and whispered, “Since when is Susan a poet?” Claire just rolled her eyes.

  “I completely understand why Mrs. Lowell’s brave personal journey has been so controversial. I get it. I do. But the truth is, some people are born inside the wrong bodies and they know it from a very young age. And when their cries aren’t heard, when society makes it impossible for them to be who they really are, the result is depression, anxiety, and suicide. Statistically, ten percent of the children of the people in this room are transgender but are too frightened to say anything about it.”

  Ten percent? Lucy thought. That’s not possible.

  “Every child in this school has had a wonderful kindergarten experience in Mrs. Lowell’s class. And now they have an opportunity to watch her as she becomes who she truly is. Which is, really, all we want for our children anyway, isn’t it? To become who they really are, whether straight or gay or bisexual or transgender or gender-neutral.”

  Lucy heard someone in the back of the auditorium say, “What the hell is gender-neutral?”

  “And who better than Mrs. Lowell to normalize something that is completely normal? Next it might be your child. It might be my child. But this is not going away. And I think that the bravery Mrs. Lowell has shown should be applauded and recognized. She is our Rosa Parks, and kudos to her for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Howard,” said Mrs. G.

  There was a smattering of applause—Lucy noticed that Susan was in no hurry to return to her seat—and then whispers as a tall, thin man in a cashmere sweater, pressed blue jeans, and Gucci loafers approached the microphone.

  “Who is that?” Lucy asked Claire.

  “Gordon Allen. The billionaire. He’s got a kid in Mr. Lowell’s class.”

  “Are you serious? Which kid?”

  “Rocco.”

  “Rocco’s father is Gordon Allen?”

  “I can’t believe you’re just finding this out now,” Claire whispered.

  “I’ve been a little distracted lately.”

  “I’ll say,” said Claire.

  “This is not acceptable,” said Gordon. “He needs to go.”

  The school district’s lawyer leaned forward and spoke. “I respectfully remind you that in the context of this public forum, we are using Mrs. Lowell’s preferred form of address. The pronoun should be she.”

  “Forgive me.” Gordon folded his arms across his chest and said, “It needs to go.”

  The room erupted. It wasn’t altogether clear to Lucy who was on what side of things at this point. Most, she hoped, objected to Gordon’s use of the word it. Some were clearly thrilled.

  Mrs. G. pounded her gavel and shouted, “Order! Order!”

  “You can’t control what I say. I know you’d like to. But I can use the pronoun of my choice, the pronoun that members of this community have been using to address Mr. Lowell for fifteen years.”

  The lawyer leaned into the microphone. “I would like it on the record that the Beekman school district does not support this position, but according to our bylaws, the gentleman is entitled to have his voice heard. You may continue.”

  “This is not San Francisco,” Gordon said. “It’s not New York City. It isn’t Brooklyn, no matter how many of you hippies wish it were. Beekman is a small town. We came here for a reason. And part of it was not to force our children to witness men changing into women before their very eyes.”

  A few Woo-hoos, along with scattered hisses. Lucy craned her neck to see who was doing what and her eyes fell on Sunny Bang, who was standing in the back of the room with her hands on her hips, hissing for all she was worth.

  “This is a civil rights issue,” the school psychologist said. “We’re here to help the members of the community adjust to this new reality.”

  “I want to know when traumatizing a roomful of kindergarteners became a civil right.”

  “Transgenderism may be difficult for some people to understand,” Emma said, “but it is a fact of life.”

  “It’s not a fact of my life,” said Gordon. “It’s not a fact of anyone I know’s life.”

  A voice called out, “Well, you know one now, Gordon. And so does your son.”

  “I want it out of the classroom.”

  The room went crazy. The lines were becoming plain. Most of the old-time Beekmanites whooped whenever Gordon said it, while the former city folk either hissed or shouted “Shame!” at him. Gordon didn’t appear to care.

  “The law is clear on this point,” the school district’s lawyer said. “This is not a reason for termination.”

  “You’re wrong. The law is not at all clear on this point. And do you know how I know that? This is my lawyer. His name is Hugh Willix. You might want to get to know him because you’re going to be spending a lot of time with him, time I’ll be paying him six hundred dollars an hour for. Hugh likes to rack up those six-hundred-dollar hours, don’t you, Hugh?”

  Hugh nodded, but to Lucy he didn’t seem overly happy to be a prop in Gordon’s little show.

  “Hugh has got three kids in private school,” Gordon said. “Turns out, he’s smarter than I am.”

  Hugh looked down and shook his head.

  “I moved my family to Beekman because I wanted to believe in public education again,” said Gordon. “I wanted to believe in America again, frankly, if that isn’t too patriotic. Well, one thing I know about America is that the public has a voice. And you, all of you, sitting up there on the stage, are here at the pleasure of the people. We pay your salaries and we can hire and fire you. The school board i
s elected and can be recalled. The administration can be replaced.

  “Either the drag queen goes, or you’ll be seeing me in court.”

  Gordon Allen didn’t typically take an interest in local affairs. He viewed Beekman as his own personal Brigadoon, completely removed from reality, which for Gordon meant from global finance, George Soros versus the Koch brothers, the nonstop flickering of his Bloomberg terminal, the price of gold, the boneheaded mistakes the Republicans in Congress kept making, the browning of America, the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, and his own creeping mortality. If you’d asked him a month earlier, he would have said he’d be more likely to go to the moon than show up at a local school-board meeting.

  But an incident earlier that week had changed everything.

  He had been in the kitchen making himself a protein shake when Kelly and Rocco and one of the nannies came home from soccer.

  “Hey, champ. How was the game?”

  “I didn’t score any goals.”

  “You gotta score goals, buddy! That’s the whole point of soccer. Otherwise you’re just a schmuck running up and down a field,” said Gordon. He ruffled his son’s hair and was struck by how silky and perfect his blond curls were, like he had spent the afternoon at the salon. “Did your team win?”

  “Everybody won,” said Rocco.

  “It was a tie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were the scores the same?”

  “We’re not allowed to keep score.”

  Gordon turned to Kelly. “They’re not allowed to keep score?”

  “It’s like this everywhere,” said Kelly. “You can’t get away from this stuff, Gordy. You know that.”

  Gordon turned to Rocco, who had begun to suck on a yogurt stick like it was a clarinet. “How are your grades?”

  “He’s in kindergarten,” said Kelly. “They don’t give them grades.”

  “Tell his teacher we want grades,” Gordon said to Kelly. “I want to know where he is in the class, because if he’s not at the top of it in this place, something’s really wrong.”

  “They color things and sit on alphabet mats. How can anyone be at the top of that?”

  “Trust me, there’s a kid at the top of that class, and the teacher sure as hell knows who it is. I want to hear that it’s Rocco.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes.

  “My teacher wears dresses to school,” Rocco volunteered.

  “Good for her,” said Gordon. “That’s nice. I like it when women wear dresses.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Rocco. He slurped down the last of his snack, and his yogurt clarinet went limp in his hand. “But he’s a boy.”

  “What the fuck!”

  Gordon was in the great room, pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, which was blazing even though it was unseasonably warm outside. Gordon kept the temperature in the house low so he could enjoy a fire twelve months out of the year. He loved his fireplace. It was an exact replica of the fireplace in the lobby of the Ahwahnee lodge at Yosemite, and it could burn logs that were twelve feet long. It could, and it did.

  “Calm down, Gordon. You’re going to have a heart attack and we’re an hour from a halfway-decent hospital.”

  “Goddamn it, Kelly, why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “Because I knew you’d have this reaction,” Kelly said. “And I didn’t want to deal with it. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s not that big of a deal.”

  “It sure as fuck is a big deal! If the goddamn kindergarten teacher is going to chop his dick off? I’d call that a big fucking deal!”

  “He’s not gonna do it in the classroom, Gordon. The surgery isn’t until the summer.”

  “Oh, well, that makes it better,” Gordon said. He was stalking around like a madman. “He’s gonna have a dick under his dress all year and then chop it off in July. That’ll make for an interesting what-I-did-last-summer essay, don’t you think?”

  “Teachers don’t write those essays, Gordon.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this, Kelly. This is unacceptable. I would have pulled Rocco straight out of that school and you know it.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. He’s already been exposed. I think making too big of a deal about it around Rocco would be counterproductive at this point, but what do I know?” Kelly said. “Good night. I’m going to my room.”

  * * *

  Lucy would love this, Owen thought as he trudged up the narrow staircase of Izzy’s basement. He was carrying a rusty old air-conditioning unit, the kind he hadn’t owned since college, and it had to weigh seventy pounds. He could already tell that this little task of Izzy’s was going to be more difficult than she had let on. If Lucy saw me doing this, Owen thought as he took another shaky step, she’d never stop cracking up.

  Owen had dropped by Izzy’s for a quickie, twenty minutes of what turned out to be exceptionally hot and sweaty sex. He was sitting on the foot of the bed, pulling on his khakis, trying to think of what he needed to pick up at GroceryLand and whether there was enough wine in the house, when he heard Izzy sigh loudly.

  “That was amazing,” he said.

  “Um-hmm,” said Izzy.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You’re dripping with sweat.”

  “This isn’t from the sex,” Izzy pointed out. “It’s a million degrees in here. My window unit is shot.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’ve got a spare one down in the basement,” said Izzy.

  Could I ever tell Lucy about this? Owen thought as he braced his lower back against the handrail and tried to catch his breath. Was this the kind of story he could tell his wife: that the woman he was sleeping with had him hauling an old air-conditioning unit up two flights of stairs and installing it in a window?

  Owen didn’t even do this sort of thing in his own house. He paid a guy named Larry to do it. Lucy made a list of things that in a perfect world her husband would do, and then Owen called Larry and paid him to do it. And if Owen could have figured out how to get Larry over to Izzy’s, he would have. But unfortunately, in the course of the past few years, Larry had become something of a family friend. He also was not an idiot. The penis is an interesting organ, Owen thought as he shuffled along the landing and then paused for a moment before starting up the second flight of stairs. The penis truly has a mind of its own.

  “Lift with your knees, not with your back,” Izzy called from the kitchen. She was standing naked in front of the open refrigerator, drinking white wine from a half-empty bottle.

  Helpful, Owen thought. Very helpful.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Owen yelled.

  “What the hell is going on up there, Owen?”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Owen yelled again.

  Owen could hear Izzy’s footsteps hurrying up the staircase.

  “Holy shit,” said Owen.

  “What happened?”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Where’s my air conditioner?”

  “It fell out the window.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I almost lost a finger,” said Owen. “This finger right here was almost ripped off of my hand.”

  “If you didn’t know how to install an air conditioner, you should just have told me.”

  “I did tell you. I said exactly that. And then you said it was easy and that your idiot husband Christopher did it every year.”

  “You’re right. You did tell me that,” said Izzy. “My bad.”

  “Do you have a first-aid kit?” Owen asked. He looked down at the gash in his finger. It was bleeding profusely. He tried not to think of all the rust that encrusted the old AC, the one that was now outside in pieces on the lawn. Rust caused tetanus, right? Jesus. Jesus! “I need some Neosporin.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up,” Izzy said. She looked out the window at the air conditioner, which had flattened one of her boxwoods. “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “Can we take a moment and be g
rateful it didn’t hit anybody?”

  “No. No, we can’t.”

  “It could have killed somebody. Or a dog or a cat or something. It fell two stories down.”

  “I’m not grateful for this. I can’t afford to be doing things like buying new air conditioners, Owen. I live on a fixed income. It’s called alimony, and it’s shit.”

  “I can’t turn back time, Izzy. I apologize for not making my inability to install an air conditioner clearer to you at the onset.”

  “I’m perimenopausal, Owen.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Izzy said, “I get hot.”

  Six

  It is true that in the natural world, there is one foolproof way to revive a flagging libido—find a new partner.

  —Constance Waverly

  The Indigo Initiative

  The Waldmans’ outdoor wood-fired Japanese soaking tub had achieved almost mythical status in Beekman, even though the Waldmans had moved away long ago, the tub itself had fallen into disrepair, and the house was now owned by wealthy retirees who spent their winters in Palm Springs. Still, the tub lived on in the communal mommy-memory of the town, passed down from woman to woman on park benches at the tot park, over bottles of wine at the Cutting Room, alternately chilling and thrilling, scandalous and intriguing.

  What had happened was this. Some number of years earlier, a local attorney named Elliot Waldman had installed a handmade wood-fired Japanese soaking tub in the woods behind his home. Elliot had built it himself—he was that kind of guy, very handy, always finding plans for things on the Internet and then building them for less than seventy-five bucks. The sprawling Waldman property also boasted a saggy, stained yurt and a lethal-looking tree house that Elliot’s wife forbade their three children to use.

  The soaking tub sat six people comfortably and eight or even nine if everyone was willing to be ever so slightly pressed up against one another. And sitting in the middle of the woods in a tub of hot water drinking wine while snowflakes floated down all around you, or looking up at the stars while passing around a glass pipe, turned out to be just about as much fun as anyone had managed to have in Beekman in a very, very long time.