by Sarah Dunn
“Your wife is a very happy woman.”
“Listen to me, Lucy,” Andrew said. He put his arm on the back of the seat and leaned in and lowered his otherwise booming voice. “You gotta help me with this one thing that’s been bothering me.”
“What?”
“Okay. The other day I came home, and Margaret was trying to open this box, this, like, big huge cardboard box her mother had sent her. And she had a box cutter in one hand, and there were packing peanuts flying out all over the place, and she was saying, ‘Fuck this shit! Fuck this fucking shit! I can’t take this goddamn fucking shit anymore!’”
“What did you do?” asked Lucy.
“I pretended I didn’t see it. I just tiptoed back into the garage and hid in there for ten minutes,” said Andrew. “Do you think she should be on a pill for that kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucy. “Sometimes being a mom of little kids is hard.”
“Yeah, I can see that, I guess,” he said.
“Is she like that all the time?”
“No! That’s what was so weird about it. Otherwise she’s pretty normal. It was like a weird window into her that made me think, um, my wife might be batshit crazy.”
“Margaret is not crazy,” said Lucy. “She probably just had a bad day.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Andrew said. “What are you doing on this late train?”
“I had French class. I take French. On Thursday nights.”
“Ah,” Andrew said, nodding his head knowingly.
“Ah what?”
“That’s why you look so happy,” said Andrew. “Owen’s finally letting you out of the house.”
Twelve
All paradises fail.
—Constance Waverly
Owen and Lucy had gotten married inside the basilica on the college campus where Lucy’s father taught. It was a huge wedding, and not at all what Lucy would have wanted if she had stopped for even a minute to ask herself what she actually wanted. But she was working for the Today show at that point, up at four a.m. just about every day, and she and Owen lived half a continent away from where they were having their wedding. Lots of women get married before they really know themselves, but Lucy didn’t have a mother to impose her own taste on the affair, and her father had no taste to speak of. If it had been up to him, he would have walked Lucy down the aisle wearing green wool pants that bagged at the knees and his lucky houndstooth jacket.
Instead of a mother, Lucy had Olive Steppenfeld. Olive was earning her PhD in medieval studies, and she was toiling away on a dissertation entitled “These Boots Are Made for Walking: The Unencumbered Wench Takes Flight—Medieval Woman on Foot to Canterbury.” She’d been working for Lucy’s father for years, running his household, balancing his checkbook, coordinating his calendar, and he’d handed her his youngest daughter’s wedding-planning responsibilities as a reward for her overall competence and attention to detail. Olive had a blank check, a disengaged bride hundreds of miles away, and the gut sense of a thirty-eight-year-old Midwestern spinster that she would never get the chance to plan the wedding she’d been dreaming of all her life. It stands as a credit to Olive’s formidable life force that she went ahead and ran with it.
To this day, all Lucy could remember was the initial phone call, when Olive had said to her, “The chapel is so brooding and dark, and it’s going to be October, I’m thinking red roses.”
“Red roses would be good,” Lucy said.
“Red roses, excellent,” Olive said, the way you say something when you’re writing it down.
“What color are your bridesmaids going to be wearing?” Olive asked. “I was thinking maybe jewel tones.”
“I’m not having bridesmaids. I’m keeping this simple. My sister is going to be my maid of honor. You can talk to her about the color of her dress.”
“Okay, I’ll get in touch with her,” Olive said, and then she made a sound like she was writing something down on a list. “A few of the faculty members who work with your father have little girls. They are dying to be flower girls. Can I say yes on your behalf?”
“Of course,” Lucy said, and then she had to hang up because they were two minutes to live, and there was a gray-haired man walking slowly back and forth behind the news correspondent holding a big sign that said STOP THE FLUORIDE CONSPIRACY.
The first, and only, clue to what lay ahead was the invitation. Lucy didn’t see it until her friend Aly called her.
“Are you serious with this thing?”
“What thing?” Lucy had asked.
“The invitation to your wedding.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“You haven’t seen it?” And with this Aly started laughing—cackling, really—through the phone.
The honour of thy presence is hereby
requested at the marriage of
Lady Lucy Miranda Ringwald
and
Sir Owen Jeffrey McIntire
on the eleventh of October in the year
of Our Lord two thousand and nine
at half past the sixth hour in the eventide
in the Basilica of Our Most Benevolent Lord
Feasting and revelry to be held at the great hall until dawn
In Lucy’s defense, by the time she laid eyes on the invitation, the wedding was five weeks away and she still hadn’t settled on a dress. She’d been promoted again at work, she was about four months away from developing a duodenal ulcer, and she was in no position to begin to micromanage her wedding. Besides, she and her father had agreed: It was to be a typical understated, ecumenical university wedding. Olive was simply handling the details.
Lucy got dressed in her old bedroom and rode over to the church in a limo with her father. When they arrived, Lucy looked out the windshield and saw this: Two straight lines of male undergrads, armed with what appeared to be real swords, dressed in silky purple pantaloons. They were on bended knee, heads bowed, with their swords before them. When Lucy stepped out of the limo, a bugler, standing on the steps of the church, began to play reveille, and the swordsmen stood in unison and clanged the tips of their weapons overhead, making a tunnel for Lucy and her father to walk through.
Once inside the vestibule, Lucy watched through the small square window as an altar boy, dressed like he was on his way to a Renaissance fair, swung a smoking thurible down the aisle, arching it over the heads of any of the seated guests that he could reach. The church itself was filled to capacity with all of her father’s grad students, both current and former, every last faculty member, as well as the college’s groundskeepers, the food-service personnel, and the janitorial staff. It was true Lucy had known most of these people all of her life. She just hadn’t expected to see them all at her wedding.
The flower girls, all eight of them, were wearing floor-length dresses and those pointy princess hats. Two were in ruby red, two in emerald green, two in amethyst purple, and two in sapphire blue—jewel tones; to be fair to Olive, they were all in jewel tones!—and they each had yards of tulle and shiny satin trailing along behind them. Lucy’s sister, Anna, was waiting for her at the end of the aisle wearing a tasteful knee-length dress of deep blue and looking deeply apologetic. (Later, at the reception, Anna told Lucy, “By the time I saw the whole setup, it was too late. I tried to make the flower girls take off those crazy hats but they all started crying.”)
“I’m going to kill Olive,” Lucy whispered to Owen when she finally made it to the altar, where he was standing.
“Just breathe,” said Owen. “I’m in love with you, and we’re getting married.”
The bagpipes kicked in when they stepped out of the church. Olive had always wanted bagpipes at her wedding, and doggone it, she had made it happen. She’d found a bagpipers’ club a few counties over and promised them dinner at the reception and as much alcohol as they could drink. The sound filled the campus and made it all the way to Main Street. The locals thought the police commissioner had died, and more than one called the polic
e station to inquire about it.
The flower girls were jubilant. The flower girls had never had a better day in their entire lives.
Now it was nine years later, and it was their anniversary. Owen had made reservations at an expensive Italian restaurant, he had lined up the sitter, and he had brought home a dozen red roses. Red roses were their anniversary joke, but Lucy still loved them. She couldn’t hold Olive Steppenfeld’s lunacy against red roses forever.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Owen said to her once they sat down.
“Thank you.”
“I like your new hair,” said Owen.
“I did this two weeks ago, you know.”
“Did I forget to say something about it?”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “But that’s okay.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“Is it weird that when I think of our wedding day, all I can remember are bagpipes?”
Owen’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it and then flipped it over.
“I wonder how Olive is doing?” he said.
“Last I heard, she was co-chairperson of Dad’s old department.”
“Good for her.”
“I still want to kill her,” said Lucy. “I would kill her if I thought I could get away with it.”
“She meant well,” said Owen.
“No, she didn’t.”
“You’re right. She didn’t mean well,” Owen admitted. “But I do believe she couldn’t help herself.”
Owen’s phone buzzed again. He glanced at it, and then flipped it over again.
“Tell her to stop texting you,” said Lucy. “For the next two hours. So we can have a nice dinner together.”
“If I do that,” Owen said, “it might not have the intended effect.”
Lucy looked across the table at Owen.
“Give me your phone,” said Lucy.
“Lucy—”
“Trust me on this.”
Owen handed Lucy his phone. She hunched over it and hammered out a text with her thumbs.
“What did you say?” asked Owen when she gave him back his phone.
“I said, ‘This is Owen’s wife, Lucy. If you call or text or e-mail my husband in the next four hours, I’m going to flush his phone down the toilet.’”
“Nice,” said Owen.
“I just want her to know that I know,” said Lucy.
“I’ve told her all about it,” said Owen. “She knows you know.”
“Yeah, but I want her to know that I know.”
“I’m feeling happier,” said Lucy.
“I am too,” said Owen.
“It’s weird, right?”
“Yes, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“I know,” said Lucy. “But we could talk in general terms. Just for tonight.”
“Okay.”
“But only very general.”
“I’ll go first,” Owen said. “I feel like I’m choosing you. Like when we were first dating. Like, ‘I pick…you.’”
“I feel not trapped. Not that you were trapping me. I don’t mean that—”
“Like life was trapping you—”
“Exactly.”
“It’s like I’m not in a submarine anymore,” said Owen. “Like I’m walking around on the deck of a sailboat with the wind in my hair.”
“I think I’m less depressed,” said Lucy.
“You seem less depressed. You seem better.”
“I feel better,” said Lucy. “I feel more like me. It’s hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” said Owen. “I get it. I do.”
Earlier that evening, before the babysitter arrived, Owen found himself standing alone in the mudroom, chatting with Wyatt through the closed bathroom door.
“You know, buddy, you’re old enough to poop alone,” he’d pointed out.
“I don’t like to poop alone!”
“Fine,” said Owen. “Tell me something that happened today at school, then.”
Lucy’s handbag was dangling from one of the hooks by the back door. It was a brown canvas messenger bag, aggressively unstylish, with a big flap that snapped closed on the front. Lucy had never been one for fancy purses, which was just as well, Owen thought, because they couldn’t afford them.
It wasn’t that he was suspicious. Not exactly. And, to be fair, Lucy was allowed to do what she wanted to do. That was their deal, that was the Arrangement, and Owen intended to honor it.
But still, a small part of him had started to wonder.
He unsnapped the flap and peeked inside.
He saw a teal-colored book, a paperback, with Allons-y! printed on the broken spine. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find, but the sight of a beat-up French textbook was enough to make his entire body suddenly relax.
“Look, Dada!”
The bathroom door swung open. Wyatt was standing in front of the toilet with his pants around his ankles, staring into the toilet bowl.
“It’s a big one,” said Wyatt proudly. “It’s a very big poop.”
“Is it possible we’ve cracked the code of married life?” said Lucy.
“It feels kind of like we did.”
“What if this is the secret? What if it’s like The Secret, but for marriage.”
“We’ll have to write a book about it.”
“We’ll be rich and happy,” said Lucy. “We can start giving seminars to help people we don’t know.”
“People will want to do yoga and eat clean foods and come to us for marital wisdom,” said Owen.
“You’ll have to learn yoga,” said Lucy.
“I want a gong. A big gong.”
“I’ll grow my hair long and wear big turquoise rings.”
“I’ll wear nothing but floppy cream-colored drawstring pants made from hemp,” said Owen. “Those pants that make people think, Does he have anything on under those things? Because he seems really free and easy.”
“We’re gonna be friends with Deepak Chopra.”
“Is Deepak into this?” asked Owen.
“I think once he sees what we’re doing and how well it works and how evolved we’ve become, he’ll be on board,” Lucy said. “I think Deepak is pretty flexible. He’s ushering in the new global consciousness and maybe this is part of it.”
“Nonattachment.”
“Nonduality.”
“This is total nonattachment and nonduality.”
“I’m not sure I understand what nonduality is.”
“Nobody does,” said Owen. “That’s part of it. It can’t be understood with the mind.”
“Maybe we should go the other direction, be normal,” Owen said. They were deep into their second bottle of wine, finishing up the main course.
“What do you mean?”
“That could be our hook. Like, be super-ordinary and straight and clean-cut. Like Mormons, but with the Arrangement.”
“I think Mormons invented the Arrangement.”
“You know what I mean. We should look like we work for the CIA. It would seem less threatening that way.”
“So I don’t get to wear big rings?”
“No. And I have to wear underwear and no floppy pants.”
“Can we still go to Costa Rica?”
“No,” said Owen. “It’ll have to be places like St. Louis.”
“That doesn’t sound fun. If I’m going to be a life guru, I don’t want to do it in St. Louis.”
“Right. Screw St. Louis!”
“Screw St. Louis!”
“I love you,” said Lucy.
“I love you too.”
“I think I even love you more these days,” said Lucy.
“That’s how I feel too.”
“And the stuff with Wyatt doesn’t upset me as much,” said Lucy. “He is who he is.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Owen.
“He had a two-hour playdate with Blake on Friday and they actually played togethe
r,” said Lucy. “They even took turns at Candy Land. They’ve been working on it at school.”
“At Candy Land?”
“Taking turns. It went really well until Blake got the gingerbread man and flipped the board and Wyatt punched him in the side of the head.”
“What’s wrong with the gingerbread man?” asked Owen.
“You have to go back pretty close to the beginning.”
“Why is Wyatt friends with that kid?”
“Because we’re friends with Claire and Edmund.”
“I don’t like them all that much,” said Owen.
“Me neither.”
“I say we can do without them.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I have this overwhelming urge to have sex with you right now,” said Lucy.
“Check, please.”
Lucy frequently found herself thinking back to that night. She and Owen had come home, paid the babysitter, and fallen straight into bed. Nobody checked e-mail, neither of them flossed. They still had passion; it hadn’t gone anywhere, just maybe underground for a bit, but here it was, evidence of who they were together, what they had with each other.
She thought about Ben in the middle of it, that was true, but only for a fleeting moment. She didn’t think about what Owen was doing or who he was doing it with, only that she hoped he was happy. She hoped he was getting what he needed.
They were three months in. Three months down, three to go. Everything was working out just the way they’d planned. Better, even. It was like this haze that had covered them for years now had not only started to lift but had actually burned off, and the day ahead promised nothing but blue sky and sunlight glittering off an open sea. It’s not that Lucy woke up each morning with a huge smile on her face, but she no longer woke up consumed with dread. And from what Lucy could tell, Air-Conditioner Cat-Hair Lady didn’t seem like much of a threat to their marriage.
Later, of course, Lucy wondered what would have happened if they had just stopped. If, in the middle of the night, she had reached over and touched Owen’s shoulder. If she had shaken him, gently, until he woke up. If she had softly said, Honey?