by Sarah Dunn
She was searching for a packet of taco seasoning in the pantry when an idea hit her.
“I think I know what I want to do,” she called out.
“What?” asked Owen. “I can’t hear you.”
“I mean about the thing,” Lucy said. She walked out of the pantry carrying a bunch of spice jars, chili powder and onion flakes and cumin. She’d make her own taco seasoning. “I’ve decided what I want to do about our arrangement.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
“Well, this part we can talk about,” said Lucy.
“Okay,” said Owen. “Shoot.”
“I want to start taking French lessons in the city one night a week, like I used to do before we met. So I can feel like myself again. More like myself.”
“And?”
“That’s it,” said Lucy. “Sometimes I might have dinner with a friend or do a little shopping too. But you’ll have to take care of Wyatt and get him fed and to bed and everything. I want to be off duty.”
“I think that sounds good,” said Owen. “You love French.”
“I miss it,” said Lucy. “I miss having something going on in my brain.”
“I think we still have a box of your old French stuff in the attic. Those flash cards you used to make and some other things. I’ll get it down for you.”
“That would be great.”
Lucy walked back into the pantry, looking for nothing, but her heart was beating fast and loud and she needed a second to regroup. She was not going to take French lessons. But the imaginary French lessons would make it possible for her to see Ben once a week, and it would save her from having to come up with a new lie every time. And lies were okay, according to the rules, if they were used to spare the other person’s feelings. Her husband didn’t need to know that French lessons meant Ben.
Owen called to her, “I have two questions.”
“Shoot.”
“Does your class have to be at night,” he asked, “and does it have to be in the city?”
Lucy walked over to the sink with a can of black beans and a bag of yellow rice.
“If I take a class during the day, there’ll be sick days and parent-teacher conference days and fall break, and I won’t be able to count on it. And I want to go to the Alliance Française like I used to, not some dopey place up here with a bunch of retired old ladies planning a week in Provence. All I’m asking is that you be in charge of Wyatt, on your own, one night a week.”
“Okay,” said Owen. “Sounds fair enough.”
Lucy turned on the faucet and measured out the water for the rice.
“I looked online this afternoon,” she said casually. “New classes start up in a few days.”
Owen and Lucy had bought their house in Beekman before they had Wyatt, back when they both had well-paying jobs, during what would turn out to be a blink-and-you-missed-it substantial dip in the price of real estate in Beekman. They couldn’t afford to buy what they wanted in the city and suspected that might remain true no matter what imaginary unending upward trajectory their careers took, so they did that odd Manhattanite thing of continuing to pay rent on an apartment that would serve as their primary residence while purchasing a house they would make use of only on the weekends and holidays.
For a long time, Owen and Lucy were weekenders—a different species, it turned out, than full-timers, but at that point they had no idea of the extent of the difference. They didn’t know a soul in town for the first few years, and that’s the way they liked it. They didn’t even like to have houseguests. In the summer, they fell asleep in the hammock and grilled expensive cuts of meat; they watched the fireflies and made love on floors in partially furnished rooms. In the winter they read book after book after book in front of the fireplace; they watched more snow fall than seemed possible, and they let the soup simmer all afternoon. Lucy planted peonies and daffodils in the fall, and she ran fishing line through the leaves of the tiny Japanese maple to startle any deer who tried to eat it. Owen bought a chain saw, snowshoes, a used kayak, and a telescope.
Even cleaning the gutters was romantic, with Lucy holding the ladder up to the second floor, and Owen, terrified, bravely aiming the leaf blower. Think of the money they’d just saved! There was a bumper crop of acorns their first fall, and Lucy collected them and put them in a big basket. She wanted to have a home filled with interesting rocks, pinecones and pussy willows and artfully twisted driftwood. She built a small cairn out of river rocks on the kitchen windowsill, and just looking at it made her calm, just looking at it made her workday life in the city feel a million miles away.
A few weeks after Wyatt was born, Owen was unexpectedly laid off from his marketing job. Some back-of-the-envelope math made it clear that with their new baby plus two residences and minus one paycheck, the money they had was not going to cut it. The logic was simple: Move to Beekman. Owen could find a job outside the city, in Westchester perhaps, or figure out a way to work from home. If necessary, he could do the hour-long commute into Grand Central. They would move into their sweet little house and begin the next part of their life, the easy, slow-paced, family-friendly part. Lucy could put in a vegetable garden. They could get a dog.
People often asked her if she was sad she’d left New York City, and when they did, she always told them the same story. In the story, which was true, she was riding in a cab, headed up Madison Avenue, on the way to have lunch with a friend. She saw a bunch of private-school kids playing on a side street that had been closed off to traffic for their recess. They were just running in circles on the asphalt, these kids! Not even with a ball! They weren’t allowed to use a ball because it might break somebody’s window. And those were the rich kids! Those were the kids whose parents were paying forty grand a year for elementary school!
And I realized I didn’t want that, she would always say. I didn’t want that life at all. I didn’t want my tombstone to read, “She somehow managed to scrape together enough money to raise her family in New York City.” I wanted trees and air and rocks and hammocks. Fireflies and thick books and snow days.
The truth was, Lucy could barely remember those early years in Beekman, because they were also the early years with Wyatt. A few things stood out, mainly a six-month or so period where it seemed likely that Wyatt might in fact be a genius. When he was sixteen months old, he could stack his wooden alphabet blocks eighteen blocks high. He would reach up and carefully, carefully balance them, with a look of total focus on his little round face. It was like a party trick—it was a party trick, actually; Lucy would put a pile of blocks in front of Wyatt whenever people came to the house just so she could witness their stunned reactions. And he taught himself the letters of the alphabet in two weeks, using a toy keyboard that made sounds when he pressed the buttons. When she told her sister, Anna, about it during one of their phone calls, Anna said, “Do yourself a favor. Don’t repeat that to any of the mothers in town if you want to have any friends.”
But he was also banging his head against the wall. And he wanted to do nothing except watch the washing machine—he would watch the soap and the water sloshing around inside the front-loading washing machine for hours if they’d let him, and sometimes they let him. At some point, he stopped sleeping more or less entirely. And Lucy’s head, what was left of it, was filled with the escalating beat of Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.
The artful stacks of river rocks and the bowls of acorns and the ornamental deer antlers were long gone, tossed in the garbage once Wyatt discovered just how easily they could be weaponized. Lucy didn’t have time to put fishing wire on the tiny maple anymore, the optimism to keep planting things, or the energy to weed. She was left with a house with black Sharpie on the walls, Cheerios and red-wine stains on the couch, and a huge brown splotch on the kitchen ceiling just below the upstairs bathroom because Wyatt had left a faucet running while they went to OT. And the last book Lucy had read she couldn’t remember, and hadn’t finis
hed.
Lucy was alone in Ben’s bed, looking around the room, trying to take everything in. She’d been to his place three times now, and up until this exact moment she wouldn’t have been able to tell you what color the walls were painted, or if he had rugs, or lamps, or art, or books. But now: beige walls, oriental rugs, groovy lamps, and lots of books. Not much in the way of art, however. Some framed…things. He wasn’t arty. That was okay.
The main thing Lucy noticed was that his apartment was very neat and tidy. That’s something you paid attention to after you’d been married for a while, how neat people were, because it was the kind of characteristic that never changed, no matter how much you wanted it to. Owen wasn’t neat, but neither, to be fair, was Lucy. They were both basically slobs. Slobs who fought their slobbiness and didn’t always win.
“I still don’t understand why you said yes to this,” Lucy said when Ben came back from the bathroom.
“Aren’t you happy I did?”
“That’s not the point,” said Lucy. “Who are you? What kind of person would say yes to this?”
“Pretty much all heterosexual men.”
“Men,” said Lucy. “What is wrong with you?”
“There’s a lot wrong with us,” he said. “Honestly, I thought it was a little strange when Sunny brought it up. I wasn’t completely sure I was going to go through with it. But then, when you walked in, you were so nervous and fragile and beautiful, I just thought, I’ll do this lady a solid and fuck her brains out.”
“You didn’t fuck my brains out,” said Lucy.
“I didn’t?”
“Last I checked, I still had my brains.”
Ben grabbed one of Lucy’s ankles with each hand.
“And she throws down the gauntlet.”
Lucy was still breathing heavily when she asked Ben, “Did you really have sex with Helena Bonham Carter?”
“That’s what you say? That’s all you have to say to me after all that?”
“I can’t help it. I’m a curious person.”
“Who told you I slept with her?”
“Who do you think?”
“How does Sunny Bang know I had sex with Helena Bonham Carter?” said Ben. “Look at me. I’m calling her Sunny Bang now too.”
“She said you met her at an Italian villa where you were staying with some mutual friends and you had sex with her one night in a swimming pool.”
“That is true.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“Was it amazing?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t really say. It was a lot of my head going, I’m having sex with Helena Bonham Carter. I am. I actually am. Right now. I’m having sex with Helena Bonham Carter.”
“So then what happened?”
“It was her last night,” said Ben. “She was flying back to London to shoot a movie the next day.”
“That is so cool,” said Lucy.
“It was pretty cool,” said Ben. “It’s safe to say it was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I also had sex with a bank teller once, but that was considerably less cool.”
Lucy got out of bed and looked around on the floor for her underwear. “So, this might sound kind of weird, but is there a day of the week that would work better for you than other days, for this, if we’re going to keep doing this?”
“Thursdays,” Ben said, after thinking for a second. “Thursdays would be good.”
It was after nine o’clock before Lucy was on the train, heading back to her real life, staring out at the bright lights reflecting off the black of the Hudson River. She’d told Owen she was having dinner with Aly again, that Aly was going through a bad breakup, so he was home with Wyatt.
She couldn’t stop smiling.
When did I stop feeling like this? Lucy wondered. It had been a very, very long time since she felt like this.
It really wasn’t the sex. Or it wasn’t just the sex. It was, well, feeling like the best version of herself, the version she used to be a long time ago. Only back when she was that version of herself, she hadn’t appreciated it. She didn’t know it was something that would go away, that would disappear so slowly and yet so quickly she wouldn’t even notice it was gone until it was too late. Maybe it was just youth, but it seemed like more than that. This is how Ben made her feel: completely adorable. That was the word. Lucy felt adorable. When did she stop feeling like this? What happened to her? Where did it all go?
One of the results of turning yourself invisible was that the moment somebody actually paid attention to you, the minute somebody actually looked into your eyes for three seconds too long or touched your arm a few too many times or sent you a mildly flirty e-mail, you thought you were in love with him. It didn’t take much.
And, to be fair, Ben was doing more to her than that. A lot more.
It was like she had turned her dimmer switch way, way down, and now it was up, and she was herself again for the first time in a very long time.
Anyhow, whatever it was, Lucy couldn’t stop smiling.
And her pretend French class started up next week. On Thursday.
Ten
As the Lord Buddha famously said, “Life is suffering.” Part of the problem, okay, a big huge part of the problem, is when you expect that it is the job of your life partner to rid your life of suffering.
—Constance Waverly
The Waverly Report
Izzy’s fat, neurotic, semi-invalid cat was asleep on Owen’s blazer. Owen could hear Izzy walking around upstairs, singing the opening bars of a song he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was trying to nudge the cat onto the floor when Izzy slinked down the stairs in a flimsy silk robe, belting out the refrain of “Blue Bayou.”
“You have a great voice,” Owen said when she finished.
“I know,” said Izzy. “You don’t have to tell me that. I used to be a singer.”
“Really?”
“Yep,” she said. “I used to sing at Eighty-Eights in the city.”
Owen was surprised. “You used to sing at Eighty-Eights? Are you serious? That place was amazing.”
“Yeah, well,” said Izzy. She sighed theatrically and leaned against the door frame, her right thigh peeking through the slit in her robe. “What can I say? It was another life.”
Owen knew there were a million questions he should ask her, out of basic human courtesy more than anything else, but really what he wanted to do was retrieve his blazer from under her fat orange cat and get back to the office before anyone noticed he was missing.
“Can you help me with…” He motioned to the cat and his jacket.
“Buttons!” Izzy yelled. “Buttons, down! Off the chair!”
Buttons swiveled his neck and stared at Owen, pissed off. Izzy finally scooped him up with both hands and held him like a baby. He seemed to like that.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you before,” said Izzy. “I bumped into your wife this morning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t get crazy,” said Izzy. “It was nothing. She was at GroceryLand.”
“You told me you and Lucy had never met.”
“I don’t know her. I saw a woman buying fourteen banana yogurts.”
“That doesn’t mean it was Lucy.”
“Owen, come on. Nobody buys fourteen banana yogurts at GroceryLand,” said Izzy. “Besides, I’ve seen her picture on your Facebook page.”
“Oh.”
“She seemed nice.”
“How do you mean?”
“She was nice to the checkout lady. They talked about chickens. Apparently Lucy is having a big problem with a rooster. And the checkout lady knows a guy who takes roosters.”
“You were behind her in line?” said Owen.
“It just worked out that way, I swear,” said Izzy. “I didn’t know you had chickens.”
“We have chickens.”
“How many?”
“A lot,” said Owen. “Too many. I think about fourteen.”
“Can you bring me some eggs next time you come over?”
Owen tried to sweep the cat hair off his blazer. “Can you do me a favor and stay away from Lucy?”
“What are you talking about? I am staying away from her. I saw her at GroceryLand. It’s a public place.”
“One of the things we’re trying to do with this is not humiliate each other. And I think, if she knew that you and I were doing this and she didn’t know you, but you knew and knew her, it would—”
“You guys and your rules.” Izzy laughed. “You still think you can get out of this thing with no consequences.”
“Not no consequences necessarily,” said Owen. “I’m just trying to be respectful, okay?”
“Yes, that was very respectful of your wife,” Izzy said, gesturing up the stairs to her bedroom. “What you just did to me.”
Owen worked two towns away from Beekman, inside an old industrial loft that had been turned into an open-plan office space and housed several unrelated small companies.
For a long time, Owen was a respected and well-compensated executive at a large marketing firm on Madison Avenue. He’d liked his job and had climbed the ladder both quickly and graciously. By the time he was thirty, he had a few small, prestigious luxury brands and three major book publishers in his portfolio, and he would have been content to keep it more or less like that until he retired. People liked him. They liked working with him, they liked talking to him, they liked going out to lunch with him.
He should have known change was a-brewing when people started to refer to his department as Old Marketing, as opposed to New Marketing, but he hadn’t really paid much attention to it. And then, out of the blue, the asteroid hit the U.S. economy in 2008, and by the time the dust settled, Owen’s whole world had changed. The prestigious, high-profile books Owen knew how to market were being tossed like greased watermelons into that spring-break swimming pool known as social media. Marketing efforts for the luxury goods he knew how to position were scaled back, and executives soon decided they could handle their needs in-house. When things finally started to normalize, the consensus seemed to be that Owen was too old to market, or to understand the market, or to change with the times. His social media presence consisted of Facebook posts of his kid saying funny things. Somebody had moved his cheese. His cheese was gone, and he couldn’t find it.