The Arrangement Page 8

  There was still a debate about whether swimsuits were worn in the tub. Some said yes, others whispered no. Some claimed suits were wriggled out of, or people forgot them altogether, quite possibly on purpose. But swimsuits or no, the tub was filled with drunk and/or high, slippery-wet mommies and daddies pressed up against one another in the pitch-dark, deep in the woods.

  Late the following summer, the divorces started. Only two of the original hot-tub buddies still lived in town, now married to each other, and they were looked upon with suspicion by the Long-Memory Mommies, the ones who knew which young mothers of current pre-Ks used to be nannies in the employ of their now-husbands, who knew which man used to live with his ex-wife in a house presently owned by a new couple running in their set, who knew where all of the bodies were buried.

  The lasting impact of the Waldmans’ soaking tub was this: the young mothers of Beekman were fundamentally conservative, not in their politics, but in their behavior. They did not flirt with one another’s husbands. Cleavage was suspect. Bikinis worn to the club pool were analyzed and then texted about. Sometimes even photographed if it was possible to do it discreetly (and it was). Lingering hugs, drunken conversations that took place in corners of rooms at Beekman parties and lasted ten minutes too long—all of that was frowned upon.

  And the wives—well, they looked out for each other. So when Claire Chase and her son Blake were driving through the parking lot at Home Depot, and she spotted Owen, she made a mental note of it.

  Something about it struck her as off. It was the middle of the workday, for one thing, and Owen had a large window-unit air conditioner wedged into the top of a shopping cart and was walking rapidly toward his Subaru. Once there, he popped the back open and began an awkward dance of trying to get the air conditioner from cart to car. For reasons she was unable to fathom, Claire did not stop her car, roll down her window, and say hello.

  A few minutes later, it hit her: Owen and Lucy have central air.

  * * *

  Saturday-morning soccer was an exercise in futility, but Lucy and Owen kept signing Wyatt up for it every year. They wanted him to have the experience of playing a team sport.

  That Saturday, Lucy and Wyatt showed up to the game twenty minutes late because Wyatt had refused to get into the car. Finally, Lucy bribed him with five—yes, five—Hershey’s kisses. He’ll burn the sugar off on the soccer field, Lucy thought when she gave them to him. Wyatt could be a tough negotiator when he sensed he had the upper hand.

  “Go on,” Lucy said to him when they got to the field. “Your team is in the yellow. Go and have fun. Remember, no hands on the ball!”

  Wyatt wandered off slowly in the direction of the scrum of kids chasing the ball just as Sunny Bang sidled up to Lucy and said quietly, “Yo.”

  “Hey, Sunny.”

  “I’ve found someone for you.”

  “A babysitter?” Lucy was always looking for new babysitters. Wyatt chewed through them. They’d babysit once, and then become mysteriously, perpetually unavailable.

  “No, you idiot,” said Sunny Bang. “A guy for you to have sex with.”

  “Sunny—”

  “GO, TOBIAS!” Sunny shouted. “GO, TOBITO-BAMBITO! GO! KICK IT! KICK IT! GOOD TRY! GOOD TRY, BABY!

  “Well, you’re not making any progress on your own,” said Sunny. She turned away from the soccer field and stared intently at Lucy’s face. “Unless you are and just aren’t telling me about it, in which case I will be extremely mad at you. But also proud of you. I’ll be equal parts mad and proud.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “But you’re pretty sure Owen has. Is.”

  “I’m pretty sure. Basically, I’m sure.”

  “But you haven’t asked.”

  “We don’t talk about it. Asking is against the rules.”

  “The rules! I love it,” said Sunny. “You do realize this whole thing is completely insane, right?”

  “Nothing bad has happened.”

  “Yet,” added Sunny Bang. “Nothing bad has happened yet.”

  Lucy couldn’t help herself. She was curious. “So, is he, like, a guy from that affair website you told me about?”

  “No. He’s just a guy I know. I went to college with his sister. He lives in the city.”

  “How do you know he’ll have sex with me?”

  “Trust me, he’ll sleep with anyone,” said Sunny. “Plus, you’re gorgeous. Anyone would sleep with you.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “What’s wrong with him, besides the fact that he’ll apparently sleep with anyone?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sunny…”

  “Okay,” said Sunny Bang. “He’s not what you’d consider classically good-looking.”

  “Here we go,” said Lucy.

  “But you know how those not-super-great-looking guys can hit their early forties and develop some character in their faces and become sort of appealing? That’s him. And he works out. He goes to the gym. His body is pretty decent from what I could tell.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “At his sister’s second wedding last Saturday. It was at some rent-a-loft in Tribeca,” Sunny said. “GO, TOBIAS! YOU GOT IT! YOU GOT THIS ONE, BABY! GOOD EFFORT!”

  “And you talked to him? About me?”

  “I didn’t use your name. But I told him about you. I explained your situation.”

  “You just said you had a married friend who was looking to have meaningless sex with someone and he was like, Sign me up?”

  “What part of this don’t you understand?”

  “Just, who would say yes to that sort of thing?”

  “Um, a man?”

  Lucy looked over at Wyatt. He was dressed in his soccer uniform, everything except the long yellow socks, which were a truly vile wool-polyester blend that he refused to wear because they itched. He was alone, far away from the action, flicking the flag that marked a corner of the field while he flapped his hands and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. At least he’s on the field, Lucy thought. At least he’s having fun.

  “Is he repulsive or something?”

  “No. Not even a little bit. I promise you. He’s got a weird sexy thing going. He once slept with Helena Bonham Carter.”

  “Really?”

  “It was a while ago. But yes. It happened. It is verifiable. I have it from multiple sources. ETHAN, I SEE YOU! STOP PICKING YOUR NOSE!”

  “Sunny, that’s not even your kid!”

  “So?”

  “You can’t yell at other people’s kids!”

  “Of course I can. People don’t yell at other people’s kids enough as far as I’m concerned. ETHAN, COME OVER HERE FOR A WET WIPE RIGHT THIS SECOND.”

  Sunny started to fish around in her enormous purse for a wipe for the nose-picker. “He’s not looking for anything serious. He just got a divorce. I think his ex did a number on him. They have two preteenish girls together, and they share custody.”

  “Why’d they get a divorce?”

  “Unclear,” said Sunny. “But I can make a few calls if you want.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m just saying, he seems perfect for this scenario,” said Sunny.

  “Perfect how, exactly?”

  “Well, he’s not going to slit your throat in a motel room somewhere. Call me crazy, but I consider that a major plus,” said Sunny. “And he’s smart and he’s funny and he’s a good guy. He lives in the city, so no one in town will find out. And he won’t screw up your entire life.”

  “It just feels, I don’t know, not like me,” said Lucy. “But thanks for thinking about me. Thanks for trying to be my pimp.”

  “The clock is ticking,” Sunny said, and then she lowered her voice. “And you need to get your dick wet.”

  “Jesus, Sunny.”

  “I expressed my opposition to this entire experiment, but now that it’s actually happening, it’s not fair that Owen is running around having sex with strangers and you a
ren’t,” Sunny Bang said. Parents of the opposing team cheered poor-sportsmanship-ly when the ball rolled slowly past Beekman’s goalie and made its way into the side of the net.

  “You know me,” Sunny Bang said. “I’m all about fair.”

  * * *

  Claire watched Sunny Bang and Lucy’s little confab from about twenty yards down the sideline while she pretended to be paying attention to the soccer game and typing important things into her phone. Normally, Sunny and Lucy would have waved her over and had her join their conversation, but there was almost a bubble around the two of them, the way they were talking to each other so quietly and intently. Something’s going on, Claire thought. I wonder what it is?

  It wasn’t until the game was finally over, and Lucy was loading up her car, that Claire found an opening. “I saw Owen on the other side of the river yesterday afternoon,” Claire said.

  “Oh yeah? He didn’t mention it.”

  “I don’t think he saw me,” said Claire. “He was at Home Depot.”

  Lucy looked like she was barely listening. She was wrestling with Wyatt, trying to get him into his car seat.

  “You have to be strapped in, honey,” Lucy said to Wyatt. “It’s not safe.”

  “I don’t want to be safe!”

  Wyatt was arching his back as hard as he could and Lucy was pushing him into the car seat, trying to get the straps buckled across his chest.

  “He was buying an air conditioner,” Claire continued. “Owen was. One of those window units. Like we all had in college!”

  “Sorry, Claire, I can’t talk, I’ve gotta handle my kid.”

  “Of course,” Claire said. “Blake used to hate his car seat too. It’s very normal.”

  Just then, Wyatt yelled, “I hate you, Mama!” and spit in Lucy’s face.

  Lucy calmly wiped the saliva off her face and went back to wrestling her son. Claire hurried across the parking lot and slipped behind the wheel of her black BMW X5, completely speechless.

  * * *

  There existed a general consensus among the married women of Beekman that husbands were useless. Not that any of the ladies wanted to be husbandless—not quite, not yet, probably never—but if you gathered two or more around a bottle of wine, the complaints would begin pouring out, first a trickle and then a flood.

  Andrew showed up forty-five minutes late to his daughter’s third birthday party. Jake gave Sunny premium cable for her thirty-sixth birthday present and then canceled it eight months later. Rowan had been promising to set up the wireless printer/copier/scanner for six months, and the box was still unopened on the floor in the corner of the kitchen because Susan wanted to see how many times he could walk past it without either putting it away, returning it, or setting it up. So far, he’d done it at least ten times a day for a hundred and fifty days, which meant, conservatively, fifteen hundred times and counting. Edmund had so completely worn down Claire with his chronic forgetfulness and ineptitude that he had been given only one—one!—domestic responsibility, scooping out the cat box, and yet he failed to do it! Unless Claire nagged him! Which her therapist told her not to do under any circumstances! Just wait and watch, her therapist had said. You’re overfunctioning, her therapist pointed out. It makes him underfunction. Which meant the cat pissed all over the house, and Claire suspected her husband was trying to drive her slowly insane.

  And in a life of niggling mommy minutiae—of finding the Batman sippy cup and the other pair of purple tights, of pulling out splinters and searching for ticks, of signing up for the book fair and then remembering that you’d already signed up for the book fair, of putting quarters in lunch boxes and scheduling trips to the dentist—the fact that their husbands had morphed into endless open loops, like three-fer federal employees you could never fire, like bathroom doors that had swelled while you weren’t paying attention, bathroom doors that you couldn’t shut but you couldn’t fix and you couldn’t replace, bathroom doors you were stuck with until you physically moved out of the house, well—

  “Hey, honey, can you make sure you take the recycling down tonight? The guy comes tomorrow and if it’s not there, he knocks on the door and complains.”

  “Gotta go,” Owen said into the phone. “Gettin’ chored by the wife.”

  Owen hung up. Lucy just looked at him.

  “What?” Owen asked.

  “Do you have any idea how much I hate that word?”

  “What word?”

  “Choring. Getting chored. You and Scott’s shorthand for when your wives ask you to do something.”

  “It’s just a word. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But it does. It does mean something,” said Lucy. “First of all, it is contemptuous of me. Me asking you nicely to do something you’ve promised to do, promised over and over and over to do and still haven’t done, is not me assigning you a chore. And somehow now, every last thing I ask you to do is me choring you. Like you’re a kid and I’m the mom. These are not chores, Owen. These are things adults do to keep a household running.”

  “It’s just a word,” said Owen. “Don’t overreact.”

  “Well, since I’m choring you anyway, can I ask when you plan to deal with the situation in the garage?”

  “I’m gonna take care of it.”

  “When?”

  “When I have the time.”

  “It’s going to start to snow in a few months, and we’re not going to be able to fit our cars into the garage unless you clear it out.”

  “I’m aware that the garage needs to be cleared out before it snows. But it’s September.”

  “Can I put a date on the calendar when it will be done, so I won’t have to think about it anymore?”

  “You can put anything on the calendar you want.”

  Lucy just looked at him.

  “And I can’t control what you choose to think about,” said Owen. “I don’t have that particular magical power.”

  “If I put a date on the calendar, will you promise to do it by that day so I can stop thinking about it and I won’t have to nag you about it anymore?”

  “All I can promise is what I’ve already said,” said Owen. “I intend to do it when I have the time.”

  “Are we really going to fight about this?”

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  “I need to understand why you are doing this to me!”

  “Because I don’t want to do it right now! I will do it, eventually, but it falls under the category of ‘things I’d really rather not do.’ And like many things you don’t want to do, you don’t just wake up on a beautiful Sunday like today and decide to ruin it by doing something you don’t want to do.”

  “I don’t want to be a nag. That’s not who I want to be. This isn’t fun for me, Owen.”

  “Then stop nagging me! I said I’ll do it.”

  Lucy just looked at him. She took a deep breath.

  “We could not park our cars in the garage last winter, Owen. Because you didn’t make the space for us to. You promised me you would, and yet you didn’t. You promised me again and again. I had to scrape snow and ice off the car over and over and over again, all winter long. So I’m not being crazy worrying that you will not complete this task.”

  “Enough!” shouted Owen. “Enough!”

  Why did my husband buy an air conditioner at Home Depot? Lucy thought for the thousandth time since Claire had oh so carefully let her know. Obviously, he bought it for some person he was seeing. There was no other logical conclusion. But still—an air conditioner? The Arrangement had only been going for six weeks and Owen was involved with someone to the degree that he was buying them an air conditioner and transporting it to their home? Who on earth was this person? And what the hell was going on between them?

  Lucy slowly walked up the stairs and lay down on the bed, on top of the comforter. Her shoes were still on, and she looked down at her feet, at her sad Merrells, black potato shoes, the shoes of resignation and defeat. She reached over to her nightstand and pic
ked up her phone.

  “Sunny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m in,” said Lucy.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I am,” said Lucy. “Set it up.”

  Seven

  Constance Waverly: Someone needs to admit that this is almost impossible.

  Charlie Rose: And when you say “this,” I take it you mean, um, you mean—

  Waverly: Lifelong, sexually satisfying, non-deadening, non-soul-killing marriage—

  Rose: Right, yes, but this is not new, people have been talking about this since the seventies.

  Waverly: The seventies might as well be ancient history, Charlie. We’re talking almost fifty years ago.

  Rose: And the French, uh, the French have been making accommodations in their marriages, the Europeans—

  Waverly: I’d like to talk about here and now, Charlie. I think someone needs to start the conversation again.

  Rose: And you think that that person is you.

  Waverly: Well, I think it should be someone who’s not a pervy, out-there, free-love weirdo.

  —Constance Waverly

  Charlie Rose

  It’s so romantic,” said Sunny Bang.

  Lucy, Sunny Bang, and Claire were having ladies’ night cocktails at the Cutting Room. Lucy thought it was hilarious that Beekman had a bar named the Cutting Room—like they were filmmakers grabbing a drink after a long day in the editing suite instead of three stay-at-home moms who’d miraculously been allowed out of the house at seven thirty on a Tuesday night.

  “It’s completely insane,” said Claire.

  “It’s somewhere between romantic and insane,” said Lucy. “It’s somewhere in there.”

  The news had just broken that Arlen Lowell was going to stay with her husband. Her now-wife. They were to be the two Mrs. Lowells.