The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  They installed sliding locks up high on the insides of the doors the next day, and Wyatt went back to not sleeping.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Lucy.

  It was dark, and Owen and Lucy were in bed. Lucy was wide awake and staring up at the ceiling.

  “About what?”

  “The list. The open-marriage thing. I think I want to do it.”

  “What? Are you being serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s crazy, Lucy.”

  “I’m not so sure it is.”

  “You said it was crazy, remember?” said Owen. “That was your word.”

  “Well, I think I’ve changed my mind.”

  “You think you’ve changed your mind, or you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I’ve changed it. I want to do it.”

  “No, Lucy,” said Owen.

  “Is that a real no?”

  “Yes,” said Owen.

  “Your voice went up at the end of that yes,” Lucy pointed out. “That means you’re not sure it’s a real no.”

  “Well, it’s a real no until we discuss it,” said Owen. “And I mean, really discuss it. Like, a paid professional should probably be involved in the discussion. A marriage counselor or something.”

  “No.” Lucy sat up. She pulled her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. “That’s just it. I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to spend two years talking about whether or not this is a good idea. I think that would be profoundly destabilizing, actually.”

  “And you don’t think both of us fucking strangers for six months would be a bit destabilizing?”

  “It might be,” said Lucy. “But honestly, Owen? I don’t think it will be. And I don’t think you think it will be either.”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  “We made the list of rules. That was the discussion. It’s either a yes or a no. It’s like we’re on a nuclear submarine, and it only happens if we both turn our keys.”

  “And you’re turning your key.”

  “But only if you will. This is not me announcing that I’m going to go run around and cheat on you. I’m saying let’s both do it, and let’s swear to keep our mouths shut about it for the rest of our lives. Let’s decide right now, and then not another single word about it, ever,” said Lucy.

  “How much wine did you have tonight?”

  “One glass. Maybe two, but that was hours ago. In no way am I drunk.”

  Owen sat up and leaned against the headboard and looked at his wife. “I’m just trying to process this.”

  “We stick to rules,” said Lucy. “Especially the end date. Six months from tomorrow.”

  “I need to know you’re one hundred percent serious, Lucy.”

  “I am,” said Lucy.

  Owen would never know why he said yes, beyond the stupid reasons, beyond the “my wife is going to let me sleep with other women” reasons—but he did. She leaned over and kissed him, a kiss filled with meaning and love and a little bit of danger, but still it was the kiss of the person he’d been kissing now for years and years and years. Maybe that’s why I said yes, he’d think to himself later. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

  “I know this is weird, but I think we should shake on it,” he said.

  “This is it,” Lucy said while they were shaking hands and looking into each other’s eyes. “This is done. We’ve made the deal. Now, not another word about it.”

  Three

  Schopenhauer rather famously said, we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

  —Constance Waverly

  Esalen Institute, spring 2015

  The Titanic was unsinkable!” said Wyatt.

  “Yes, that’s what they called it,” Owen said.

  It was the next morning. Owen was shaving, and Wyatt had followed him into the bathroom so he could flick his fingers under the faucet while the water was running.

  “The Titanic was unsinkable! It was the unsinkable ship!” Wyatt said again.

  “But what happened to it?”

  “It sank! The Titanic sank in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean!”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “Over two hundred thousand people died in the freezing water.”

  “I think that’s not the right number, Wyatt.”

  “Over two hundred thousand people died in the freezing, freezing water,” said Wyatt. He had both of his hands under the running water now, flicking them with excitement. Owen filled the toothbrush holder with water so he could clean his blade.

  “We might have to ask Siri about that number, Wyatt.”

  “The Titanic was unsinkable!”

  “We’re unsinkable,” said Owen, wiping his face dry with a towel.

  “If our house got a hole in the side, and water poured in, our habitat would be destroyed!”

  “But that’s not going to happen, Wyatt.”

  “Our habitat would be completely, completely destroyed!”

  Did last night really happen? Owen thought as he was driving to work. Was that whole thing my imagination, or did that really just happen?

  1. They were both sober.

  2. Everything was written down, first in orange Sharpie and then with an ordinary black pen.

  3. They’d shaken hands on it.

  He had six months! Six whole months! The only time he’d even allowed himself to imagine being in a situation like this was when he occasionally daydreamed about Lucy’s death. In his defense, it was always a quick and painless one. It was like, dead Lucy, sadness, poor Wyatt, must be strong for Wyatt, a dismal six to twelve months, the worst six to twelve months of his life, and then sex with new women. Owen never even entertained the idea of a divorce. It just never struck him that he and Lucy would end their marriage. Her death, that he could imagine. Aneurysm, plane crash, blood clot from a long plane trip that slowly worked its way up to her brain, spinal meningitis diagnosed two days too late—those things he could picture. Divorce, no way.

  But this? This he never would have imagined in, as Wyatt would say, a million gazillion years.

  * * *

  I could fuck any of the men in this place, Lucy thought as she sipped her latte.

  Correction: I’m allowed to fuck any of the men in this place. Whether or not she could was a different question. Whether she could figure out a way to make it happen—that was yet to be determined. Even when she was single, Lucy had never thought things like that. In fact, she’d always been a little surprised when someone wanted to have sex with her. She’d slept around, yes, but most of it took place during a five-year period when she was working through the most painful issues of her childhood; at least, that’s how she thought about it now. Even when she was going home with just about whoever asked, she was always on the lookout for a boyfriend, a partner, a husband, a father-to-be of her children-to-come. But now she had that. She had found the perfect husband, the perfect father, and he loved her.

  Back then, she would never have given a second glance to what she saw before her now. She was in a coffee shop three towns away from Beekman. It seemed like a safe distance; she was unlikely to run into anyone she knew.

  Exhibit A: Salt-and-pepper hair, bushy eyebrows, glasses. Intelligent-looking, but that could be the glasses talking. But—he was tiny. Lucy was not planning to be picky, but she did not want to have sex with a tiny little teeny-tiny man.

  Exhibit B: Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, scruffy beard, a white Wilco T-shirt, paint-splattered brown pants, broad chest, looked like he might smell like turpentine or furniture oil.

  Exhibit C: Salt-and-pepper hair. (Why were all the men here so old? Lucy needed to find a different coffee shop! Somehow she’d stumbled onto a place filled with unemployed middle-aged white men, all of them nursing two-dollar cups of coffee while they pretended to do important things on their laptops. They were like ants. First you noticed one or two, but then when you really looked, you realized the place wa
s crawling with them.)

  There was a thing, she found. Once her antennae were back up (and they’d been down now for years, for years), Lucy started noticing men who had their antennae up. It was like a whole world of signs and signals had been floating right past her—lingering looks, secret smiles, eyes moving up and down, wineglasses lifted in solidarity, charged conversations in bookstores. It was like an energy field, and some people were aware of it and some people weren’t. Lucy had been walking around with fifteen extra pounds on her, wearing bulky sweaters with things like foxes on them, obsessed with her son and his challenges, completely oblivious to the thick ever-present sexual haze that was in the air. Lucy had turned herself off—in defense of love and marriage and family and community—and now that she had finally turned herself back on, she had no idea what would happen.

  Exhibit C smiled at her. She smiled back.

  * * *

  Gordon Allen, Beekman’s only billionaire, was in his backyard, hitting golf balls into the Hudson River. The sky was turning pink and the wispy clouds were both purple and gold, and Gordon was thinking that his swing was looking better than it had been in years. It helped, having a driving range just a few steps off his lower back deck. It made it easier to hit golf balls than to not hit golf balls. Gordon had had his landscape architect construct him a little hideaway so boaters couldn’t see him and report him to whomever you would report someone who was driving silicone golf balls into Robert Kennedy Jr.’s precious protected Hudson River. Surely it was less than legal. Surely Bobby would have something sanctimonious to say about this, Gordon thought as he watched another one of his golf balls sail through the sky and plop into the river.

  One of his idiot grown sons had bought him some biodegradable fish-friendly golf balls as a somewhat pointed gift the previous Christmas, but Gordon didn’t like them. The thwack didn’t feel as satisfying and they didn’t fly nearly as far. So he kept them on hand, in a bucket inside the hideaway, but the balls Gordon drove into the river were brand-new Titleist Pro V1xs he bought by the pallet.

  “Goddamn it, Gordon!”

  He shanked it.

  “What now?”

  “One of your bees stung me again!”

  He looked over and saw Kelly, his wife, sitting up on her pool chaise, pressing an icy pink drink to the inside of her perfect thigh. She was topless, but he barely noticed.

  “How do you know it was one of mine?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Maybe because you decided to put half a million bees in our backyard. I’m guessing it was one of yours.”

  “I don’t have that many bees, Kelly.”

  Gordon did have that many bees. He had ten hives, and each hive hosted between sixty thousand and eighty thousand bees, at least during the summer, according to his bee guy. His bee guy was named Dirk and he looked like some kind of prophet. He was bald with an almost comically huge red beard, and he always wore sandals, some kind of fair-trade eyesores made from old tires pulled out of an open-air landfill by AIDS orphans or one-legged land-mine victims—Dirk had told Gordon the sob story of his footwear once but Gordon had forgotten the particulars.

  “Do you know how much those bees save us in real estate taxes every year?”

  “I don’t care! I don’t care, Gordon! We’re rich! I’m sick of being stung by a bee every time I walk out my front door.”

  “You always want me to be more concerned about the environment. I’m single-handedly battling colony collapse! Dirk says I’m doing God’s work with those bees. He’s going to nominate me for an environmental award.”

  “You hit sixty brand-new golf balls into the Hudson River every day, Gordon. No one’s giving you an environmental award.”

  Gordon lined up his shoulders, straightened his left arm, and swung. The ball floated like it had wings and then dropped into the river about ten yards shy of the tugboat he was aiming for. “Touché,” he said to Kelly.

  Every time Gordon looked at Kelly these days he was struck by the same thought. What in God’s name was I thinking? A man of his age, a three-time loser, a goddamn billionaire (twelve billion is where Forbes had pegged him last March, and they weren’t far off, no siree!), marrying a cocktail waitress less than half his age and not insisting on a prenup? It boggled the mind! It was one of the great mysteries of Gordon’s life. He peed a good five or six times each night these days, and every time he woke up thinking the same thought: Fuck, I have to goddamn pee again and why didn’t I make Kelly sign a goddamn prenup?

  She wasn’t even pregnant when he married her! That at least would have made some sense. A tearful, knocked-up young girlfriend, a sentimental rush to do the right thing. But Kelly got pregnant on their honeymoon. Gordon had had a paternity test done, secretly, all men in his position did that, it was practically included in the price when you sprung for the presidential birthing suite at Lenox Hill—but there was only a 1 in 11,200,247 chance that Rocco had been sired by someone other than him.

  Rocco was the only reason Gordon lived in Beekman. After Rocco arrived, Gordon had become obsessed with solving the problem of where to raise him. He didn’t like his options. It was live with either the rich assholes in Connecticut, the rich assholes in the Hamptons, or the slightly less rich assholes up in northern Westchester.

  Finally he sat down with the Best Real Estate Agent on the East Coast and said exactly that. He needed to live near the city and he didn’t like his options. There had to be another choice.

  The agent had had him sit back in his chair and close his eyes and told him to describe exactly what he was looking for. To imagine he could have every last thing he wanted. He told Gordon to dream out loud. It sounded a little airy-fairy to Gordon, but he decided what the heck and went with it.

  He started by saying he wanted to live someplace where there were ordinary people.

  (“How ordinary?” the Best Real Estate Agent prompted.)

  People who lived contentedly in houses with four bedrooms. People who paid strangers to mow their lawns but looked at the lawn-mowing bills and thoughtfully considered both the economics and family-time trade-offs of buying mowers and doing it themselves the next summer. Some millionaires, that was fine, and impossible to avoid these days, really. But: Churches. Bake sales. Soccer games. A place where kids built forts out of sticks they found in their backyards. Rock collections. Snowball fights. Sledding! Cheerful, chubby stay-at-home moms who believed in raising their own kids and giving back to the community. A picturesque main street with no chain stores or homeless people. And not New Jersey. He wasn’t going to live in New Jersey.

  (“That’s it?”)

  A Fourth of July parade with people waving those little American flags. Trick-or-treating. Kids who believed in Santa longer than you thought humanly possible. A scenic, manageable, non-Hamptons-like commute to the city. Mostly Caucasian. Mostly Protestant. Some solid, salt-of-the-earth Catholics, that was fine. A public school he could feel good about putting his son in, at least until fourth or fifth grade. A view of the ocean, or anyway a view of some water. But not a lake. Lakes creeped Gordon out.

  (“Is that it?” the Best Real Estate Agent asked him one last time.)

  Gordon thought for a moment.

  “I like trees.”

  * * *

  Owen had taken Wyatt shopping at GroceryLand. It was one of the things Owen and Lucy tried to do with Wyatt at least once a week, to pique his interest in different types of food. So far, it hadn’t worked.

  “Hey! You’re Owen.”

  “Yeah,” said Owen. “Hi, uh—”

  “Izzy. Izzy of ‘Izzy and Owen.’ Remember? The mouse and the hippo!”

  “Of course.”

  “And who is this young man?”

  “This is Wyatt.”

  Izzy crouched low and met Wyatt’s eyes. “Hi, Wyatt,” she said. “I’m Izzy.”

  Wyatt didn’t say anything and looked down at his shoes.

  “You are a handsome little boy. Are you helping y
our daddy do his grocery shopping?”

  “We’re buying banana yogurt,” said Wyatt.

  “I love banana yogurt!” said Izzy. “Banana yogurt is my absolute favorite!”

  “We’re buying it all,” said Wyatt matter-of-factly. “We’re buying all the banana yogurt in the store.”

  It was true. There were twenty-three banana yogurts in their grocery cart. La Yogurt brand banana yogurt was one of the five foods Wyatt would eat. And it was hard to find. So when they found it, they bought them all.

  “Oh no. So none for me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even one?”

  “Sorry, Charlie.”

  “But I love banana yogurt,” she said.

  “We’re buying it all,” said Wyatt. “Sorry, Charlie.”

  Izzy stood back up and turned to Owen. “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!”

  “Thank you.”

  “He looks just like you.”

  “No one ever says that.”

  “It’s true! He has your eyes. And I’m serious about the children’s book,” said Izzy. “Give me your e-mail. We’ll just send a document back and forth while we work on it. It’ll be fun.”

  She pulled a crinkly receipt out of her purse and Owen found himself writing his e-mail address on it while Wyatt looked at him out of the side of his eye.

  In the parking lot, Owen was loading groceries into the back of the car when Izzy drove by in a black pickup truck. She rolled down her window.

  “Izzy and Owen!” she shouted, and then she drove off.

  “Izzy and Owen!” Wyatt said as Owen strapped him into his seat. “Izzy and Owen! Izzy and Owen!”

  That was one of the things Wyatt did: he repeated what he heard. It was called scripting. His brain was filled with scripts, scripts from months ago, scripts from videos he’d seen on YouTube, from cartoons he’d stopped watching years ago.

  So when Wyatt repeated “Izzy and Owen!” on the drive home, Owen had no idea how long he would keep it up.