The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  “I’d call a guy,” said Owen. “I’d pick up the phone and call someone who knew how to caulk a tub.”

  “The Home Depot guy said that would be very expensive and it was super-easy to do this kind of repair by yourself.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Owen. He was out of the bed now and pulling on his boxers. “Why don’t you try fucking the Home Depot guy. Why don’t you get him over here. He seems to know an awful lot about DIY home repair.”

  “All right,” said Izzy. “Forget I said anything.”

  “This is not what I signed up for, Izzy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I have a wife for this. Her name is Lucy and she nags me about things like caulking the bathtub.”

  “Maybe she nags you because you’re over here fucking me instead of doing the stuff you’ve told her you’ll do.”

  “Are you serious right now?”

  “I’m just saying, as an outside observer of your marriage, you seem to have it pretty good.”

  “Yeah, well, trust me,” said Owen. He buckled his belt and noticed it was in yet another notch. His belly had just about disappeared. “You don’t know everything.”

  How had this happened? How had he ended up with a girlfriend who was worse than his wife? Izzy was beginning to make Lucy look like a paragon of sweetness and sanity, and if it weren’t for the—Owen was going to be honest with himself, he prided himself on unwavering honesty to himself—if it weren’t for the ease and simplicity of their encounters, the fact that he could send Izzy a text and she would tape a handwritten Back in fifteen minutes sign to the window of her store and zip around the corner to her house and somehow be in a different slutty lingerie getup every time, that she was kinky and wild and most of all game, Owen would consider calling the whole thing off.

  But, alas, he was not stupid. Izzy was a rare find for a man in his situation, and he was wise enough to realize it. But he didn’t need to pretend that it was more than it actually was.

  When Owen got back to the office, he found himself staring at the calendar hanging over his desk. It was already October. He and Lucy were three months into the Arrangement. Three months in, three months left. The halfway point, almost exactly. Thus far, he had confined himself to just Izzy. To be fair, Izzy had been about all that he could take—but he had, he believed, shown admirable restraint.

  Still, it didn’t seem smart to limit himself to just Izzy. The whole point of this thing, he told himself, was to explore his options, to partake of life’s sexual buffet. He scrolled through his contacts on his phone, looking for inspiration.

  Cassie Lambert.

  She was an old colleague who’d known him back when he was still a rising star, during the heyday of his Madison Avenue career. They’d once had…an encounter.

  He fired off a quick, friendly e-mail. Cassie e-mailed back two minutes later. By the end of the day, they’d arranged to meet for a drink at the Campbell Apartment the following week to catch up.

  * * *

  Gordon was lying on the couch in front of the fire with his laptop balanced on his chest, his eyes at half-mast, and his enormous Bose headphones covering his ears and a good portion of his skull.

  He was watching Simka.

  She was Polish, she spoke very softly, and the first time he saw her, she folded towels. She was completely clothed. You couldn’t even see her face, not even much of her body—although she did have an impressive bust, quite impressive, quite, quite impressive—but she whispered and folded towels and licked her lips and sometimes tapped her manicured fingernails on the table. And for some unknown reason, listening to it gave him goose bumps. Mostly on his head, sometimes down his spine, occasionally all over. And it wasn’t just him, it was clearly a whole thing, these ASMR videos, and while he knew he could Google ASMR and find out in about five seconds what exactly was happening to him when his beautiful blond Polish girlfriend folded towels and crinkled paper and tapped her nails and licked her lips, Gordon didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to risk breaking the spell.

  It was so relaxing. It was so relaxing. And it was Gordon’s secret place.

  Kelly grabbed his feet and shook them hard.

  “If you want to watch a woman fold towels, Manuela’s in the laundry room,” said Kelly. “I’m sure she’d whisper things to you if you paid her extra.”

  Gordon snapped his laptop shut and swung his legs off the couch and sat up. Kelly and her yoga instructor/only friend in Beekman, Jamie, were standing there, wearing bright stretchy clothes, both covered in a sheen of sweat.

  “I’d understand it more if she was at least naked while she did it,” Kelly said to Jamie. “At least that would be normal. Kind of normal. Weird, but normal.”

  Spending time watching Simka online was one of Gordon’s last remaining pleasures in life, and Kelly treated it like it was some sort of perversion. Well, it wasn’t a perversion. It was just odd. He didn’t know why he liked it but he did, and by the looks of the number of views on YouTube, so did millions of other people. Perfectly normal people, probably. Some of them had to be normal.

  Still, Gordon could appreciate the fact that people might think it was weird, and so he liked to keep it private, which was why he didn’t like Kelly yapping about it in front of Jamie. He was a public person! The last thing he needed was some dippy yoga twit telling one of the lefty journalists who was always sniffing around that Gordon Allen was into some bizarre towel-folding fetish.

  “You really should throw away that sweater,” Kelly said to him on her way to the kitchen. “People your age can’t really pull off yellow.”

  This is what he was up against. Kelly had no tenderness for him anymore. Had she ever? Gordon wondered. It was not something Gordon liked to think about. He’d been in such a froth during their courtship he could barely remember who he’d thought Kelly actually was. That’s not true. He did remember. Gordon had thought Kelly was a sweet, genuine, Catholic virgin who fell deeply in love with him against her will and did not want to break up his marriage to Elaine. Was it possible he’d been that wrong?

  All he wanted now was tenderness. Not even sex, not that much, not the way he used to. He wanted a woman who would lie next to him in bed and stroke his head gently until he drifted off to sleep and be there when he woke up in the middle of the night terrified because his heart had skipped too many beats or his next breath didn’t want to come. He wanted softness, compassion, a cool silky hand to reach out and touch his forehead in the middle of the day to check if he was running a fever, to see if he felt flushed.

  Instead, he had Kelly. And her contempt for him, and for their life together, and even for Beekman did nothing but grow. At this point, Gordon had settled on one objective, and that was to keep his son Rocco in his home, with him, raised under his own roof, for as long as humanly possible. And if that meant putting up with Kelly, and a life without tenderness, so be it.

  Gordon had other kids, of course. His two grown sons were completely awful, a pair of rich, entitled assholes devoid of drive and character in equal measure, and his daughter, well, she was a lost soul who’d built her entire life around rejecting everything Gordon stood for.

  Gordon had been busy building his empire while the three of them were growing up; he’d been traveling constantly, having affairs, divorcing or being divorced by their respective mothers—but still. They’d had every opportunity. They’d gone to the best schools. They’d seen and done and tasted and experienced more things by the age of eighteen than most people had in five lifetimes, everything from the Super Bowl to the aurora borealis, sleeping at the White House and being backstage with the Rolling Stones. What’s more, they’d been surrounded by kids who had every opportunity, and the truth was, their friends were awful too, hateful entitled little rich pricks. “Every opportunity” was not all it was cracked up to be.

  Gordon and his daughter, Violet, were estranged. That was the word, estranged. She refused to talk to him or see him or answer h
is e-mails or come to visit. Even when he’d had his heart scare all those years ago, back when he was still married to Elaine, Violet refused to come see him in the hospital. He’d written her out of his will and then written her back in two weeks later, and then out again and then in. And then out. And then in.

  Violet owned and ran a trendy dry-goods store up in Woodstock, Vermont, and drank, according to his private investigator, two and a half bottles of red wine every night. (“What the hell is a trendy dry good?” Gordon had asked his private investigator when he phoned in his report. Even though they weren’t on speaking terms, he liked to keep up with her goings-on. His investigator sent him a large box of items purchased from Violet’s store: a tea towel with a quote attributed to somebody named Margot Tenenbaum, a pair of hand-felted bedroom slippers priced at a hundred and sixty-five dollars, some wooden whirligigs and yoyos and slingshots, Bazooka gum and Charleston Chews, a flannel bathrobe, seed packets sporting sketches of lumpy purple tomatoes and warty hook-necked gourds, and a sack of pinto beans.)

  His two sons lived in Hollywood. They’d started a production company called Two Rich Guys Productions.

  “Help me out with this, you two,” Gordon said to them every Thanksgiving. “What exactly have you done in your life to earn the label rich?”

  “It’s supposed to be ironic,” one of them always said.

  “It’s moronic,” said Gordon. “It’s not ironic, it’s moronic,” he said, laughing at this joke.

  Gordon stayed fit just to spite them. Whenever they came to visit, Gordon would stride into the living room to greet them wearing his sweat suit, with a damp towel around his neck, slurping a repulsive-looking green juice out of a tall clear glass. I’m not going anywhere, he all but shouted.

  But whether he was alive or dead, this was the truth: You got to a certain point, wealth-wise, and it was impossible to keep your kids from being rich too. You made decisions when they were young for certain sentimental and tax avoidance reasons, you moved money in your children’s direction during your various acrimonious divorces in order to keep it from your hateful ex-wives, and then when they were forty and hadn’t worked an honest day in their lives, you had only yourself to blame.

  Rocco was born early in the morning of March 21, the first day of spring, and while Gordon was not generally one to think in either symbolic or poetic terms, with this he couldn’t help himself. Rocco was a fresh start, a new beginning, a fierce purple crocus pushing up against the winter’s dirty snow.

  Gordon just wanted one of his kids not to be a total shit. Was that too much to ask?

  The papers. God knew what she’d done with them.

  * * *

  “I’ve figured out what you are,” Lucy said to Ben.

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re the great evener-outer,” said Lucy. “No matter what Owen gets up to during our six months, I’ll have had you, even if we stop this today, even if this is all it is, this will even it out. In my head at least. In our marriage, in my head, I’ll be fine.”

  “That is quite a compliment.”

  “It is. You should take it as one.”

  “What do you think your husband is doing?”

  “He’s having sex with a woman who has an orange cat,” said Lucy. “And he may or may not have bought her an air conditioner at Home Depot.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Well, it’s possible that the cat lady and the air-conditioner recipient are two different people. I don’t know.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “I do my best not to think about it,” said Lucy. “And that, by the way, is one of the strangest things about this whole arrangement. When you stop and think about what your spouse would actually do. For example, I’m doing exactly what I would do, but not what Owen would think I would do.”

  “What do you mean, you’re doing what you would do?”

  “I mean this,” Lucy said, gesturing big, somehow taking in Ben and the bed and the sex they’d been having with one swoop. “Falling into something that’s delicious and life-affirming and, most important, temporary. You’re like…” Lucy thought for a second, and then it came to her. “You’re like the junior year abroad of marriage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When I went to Barcelona for my junior year, I remember worrying that all of my friends were going to have an amazing time at school and I would be left out when I got back. Instead I had this once-in-a-lifetime experience, truly the time of my life, and when I went back to campus, nothing had changed. Not one thing. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

  “What does your husband think you’re doing?”

  “Owen?” said Lucy. “He thinks I’m taking French lessons.”

  As she walked down the hallway to the elevator, Lucy called over her shoulder, “Don’t let me fall in love with you.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Ben. “That will not happen.”

  Lucy pushed the elevator button and looked back at him. He was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, wearing a button-down shirt and boxer briefs. “Because that would be the fly in the ointment,” she called.

  “There is no fly here,” Ben said, “only ointment.”

  Lucy stepped into the elevator, smiling. The doors started to close, and she heard Ben calling after her.

  “Only ointment!”

  Lucy had been trying to avoid having any big, private conversations with Sunny Bang for what seemed like forever. It was hard, but so far she’d managed it by canceling on two ladies’ nights at the last minute and pretending to be in a big rush whenever they bumped into each other at the school. Still, Sunny Bang was pretty much everywhere any kids were, and Lucy finally found herself standing next to her at a child’s birthday party, out of earshot of the other mothers, at the indoor bouncy-house place with the MRSA and the bad pizza.

  “So,” Sunny said.

  “So.”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Good. Busy. Things have been crazy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever get in touch with Ben?”

  Lucy took a breath and then nodded.

  “And?”

  “I think maybe it’s best if we don’t talk about it,” said Lucy.

  “Okay,” said Sunny Bang.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re not mad at me,” said Sunny.

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “I just mean, I didn’t steer you wrong or anything.”

  “You did not,” Lucy said—and then a smile came over her face, one of those smiles that is lit from within—“steer me wrong.”

  “Oh my God, you did it! What the hell? Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I think we shouldn’t talk about it, Sunny.”

  “You’re right,” said Sunny Bang.

  “Let’s pretend it never happened.”

  “Okay, but stop smiling. You’re freaking me out.”

  “I’m not smiling.”

  “You’re smiling with your eyes,” said Sunny Bang. “Stop eye-smiling!”

  Lucy didn’t say anything.

  “I can’t believe I made this happen,” said Sunny Bang. “Please don’t ruin your perfect life, Lucy. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “No one,” said Lucy, “is ruining anything.”

  * * *

  The Campbell Apartment was tucked away upstairs in Grand Central Station, and you had to know where it was to find it. Owen always thought that it struck the perfect note between business and sex. If you walked in at six o’clock on a weeknight, you’d swear that half the people there were going to close a deal and the other half were about to get laid.

  “You’re married,” Cassie said.

  “I know,” Owen said. “But do you remember that party? That was twelve years ago. And I still think about it.”

  “I was drunk. Sometimes I do things like that when I’m drunk. It doesn’t mean I’m go
ing to go fuck somebody else’s husband.”

  Owen tiptoed onto delicate ground.

  “I don’t usually tell people this, but Lucy and I have sort of an arrangement,” said Owen.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We have an arrangement. And not sort of. It’s real. It’s confidential, though. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat it.”

  “Are you serious?” said Cassie.

  “I am serious. We’re happy, and we love each other, but we’re giving each other a free pass for a few months. Like Amish kids. It’s a rumspringa, but for marriage.”

  “Ugh,” said Cassie. “I thought you were one of the good guys.”

  “I am one of the good guys,” said Owen. “It was my wife’s idea.”

  “There’s no way that’s true.”

  “It’s a hundred percent true.”

  “So you’re saying you’re allowed to hook up with me. And you want to hook up with me. That’s what this drink is all about.”

  “I wanted to see you,” said Owen. “I’ve always liked you. But yes to the other parts too.”

  “Interesting,” said Cassie. “Very interesting.”

  “It is interesting,” said Owen.

  “I’m going to go to the restroom,” said Cassie.

  “Okay,” said Owen. “Do you want me to…” Owen gestured toward the restroom.

  “Follow me into the bathroom?” Cassie laughed at him, a little meanly. “No. I’ve gotta pee.”

  Owen had been thinking about Cassie Lambert for years and years, idly, not obsessing really but occasionally brightening his day by remembering the way she managed to press her boobs up against him any chance she got. Any time he saw her someplace socially—at a party, or a lecture, or out for drinks—she always gave him a kiss on the lips and a double-boob hug. A real two-boober, as Owen and his friend Scott liked to call it. Those hugs that make married men think about their friends’ boobs. And their friends’ wives’ boobs. And then there was that night at a Christmas party that Lucy had been too tired to attend, long before they were even engaged, when Owen had gotten so hopelessly drunk he had to sleep it off on a couch in the host’s study. He had a vague, fuzzy memory of following Cassie down a long narrow hallway and into the laundry room and kissing her. He’d snapped out of it before things progressed too far, his muddled head filled with thoughts of Lucy. “God, I’d kill my own mother for this laundry room,” Owen remembered Cassie saying at one point during the proceedings, so it’s possible she hadn’t been as enraptured as he’d thought.