The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  If they had just stopped.

  Thirteen

  Thirty-five years ago, I attended a talk on marriage by M. Scott Peck, the author of the blockbuster The Road Less Traveled. He said the only reason to get married was for the friction. Everyone in the packed lecture hall laughed. Nothing I’ve seen or experienced since has proven him wrong.

  —Constance Waverly

  WaverlyRadio podcast #63

  Gordon Allen’s lap pool was enclosed inside a large outbuilding that Gordon had had built for just that purpose. The pool was forty meters long, fresh water, and chlorine-free, and it was maintained at such a careful pH balance that it was home to three turtles (Reagan, Nixon, and Goldwater) and a couple of large, slow-moving fish.

  About six months after construction was completed, Gordon lost interest in swimming in the pool, although he still liked to give tours of it to guests. He liked to wow them with the turtles. Kelly hated the pool, and Rocco was uninterested in it, so Gordon had more or less given Dirk the bee guy the run of the place. It would help, come winter, simply to have somewhere warm to shower. And Dirk loved it. When he did his laps each day, the Republican turtles swam right alongside him like old friends. This is what a few billion dollars feels like, Dirk always found himself thinking. And I’m the one enjoying it.

  Dirk let himself in through the side door that opened onto the changing room. He put on his bathing suit and took a quick shower. The guy who took care of the pool, Gordon’s turtle guy, had told him to shower before he got in, and there was a special kind of soap and shampoo there just for that purpose.

  When he opened the door to the pool area, he realized something was off. The lights were on, and Gordon Allen’s wife—Kimmy? Carrie?—was in the pool, naked, floating on her back.

  “Oh, sorry—” Dirk turned away from her. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”

  “No worries,” she said.

  “I’ll just grab my stuff and take off,” said Dirk.

  “No, don’t go, I was just getting out.”

  “Still, I’ll wait outside till you’re done,” said Dirk.

  “Don’t be crazy,” she said. She climbed slowly out of the pool and picked up a flimsy robe and tied the sash around her waist.

  “Gordon told me you never use the pool.”

  “I don’t, usually,” she said. “But I thought today I’d give it a try.”

  “How was it?”

  “Not great,” she said. “The fish and the turtles creep me out.”

  “They’re the best part.”

  “Now you sound just like Gordon,” she said.

  She walked over to the little sitting area off to the side of the pool and opened the refrigerator.

  “Have a quick drink with me,” she said. “You must get bored out there in the woods all the time.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess I can do that.”

  She handed him a beer and took one for herself too.

  “Can I ask you something? Do you get stung by your bees?”

  “It happens,” said Dirk. “Not often. And it doesn’t bother me very much.”

  “I get stung all the time,” she said. “I keep begging Gordon to get rid of the bees, but he won’t listen to me. Maybe you could talk to him.”

  “Well, I can’t argue in favor of getting rid of the bees, because then I would be out of a job,” said Dirk. “And a place to live. So you’ll have to handle that one on your own.”

  “He doesn’t listen to me. He doesn’t care if I get stung.”

  “I use tea tree oil,” said Dirk. “I’m pretty sure that’s what keeps the bees off me. I can bring you some if you want.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I gotta warn you, it doesn’t smell great.”

  “Honestly, I don’t care at this point,” she said. “Gordon told me you live inside a school bus.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it yellow?”

  “It is. I might paint it, I just haven’t gotten a chance to do it yet.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Do you drive it around town?”

  Dirk laughed.

  “Right now, it’s technically broken down. I’m trying to see if I can make it through the winter in it. I’m weatherizing it, and I just put in a rocket stove. Your husband’s finding me a snowmobile so I can get in and out when the weather’s bad.”

  “I’d like to see it sometime,” she said.

  “I’ll have you and Gordon out soon,” said Dirk.

  She looked him in the eye. “I’d like to see it by myself.”

  Dirk nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’ll have you and Gordon out sometime,” he said. “I think Rocco would get a kick out of it too.”

  Dirk was that rare type of person who could pinpoint the moment everything, everything, in his life changed.

  It all began with a blind date.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” his date said when he arrived at her apartment, “I’m almost ready.”

  Dirk sat down heavily on her couch and leaned back and put his feet on the Lucite coffee table. He pulled out his phone and checked his e-mail.

  “I’ll be just a minute,” she called from the other room.

  Her name was Melody and she was his boss’s wife’s niece. He could tell by the look on her face when she opened the door that she had been prepped for the sight of him. Dirk was not the blind date you wanted to see through the peephole of your apartment door. He was, at that time in his life, over three hundred pounds, covered in freckles, and going bald in a weird way. But Dirk was a banker—a big banker—and it didn’t take much imagination to piece together the conversations that went on between the married women who fixed him up and the single women who agreed to go out with him. They knew what big banker meant. It meant managing director. It meant hedge fund. It meant all the things in life that these kinds of women wanted, and if Dirk was three hundred–plus pounds of lumpy, pale freckled flesh, at least he wasn’t seventy. At least he didn’t have ex-wives and grown children, a bum prostate and a nine o’clock bedtime. And the right woman could put him on a diet and encourage him to shave his head.

  Melody was taking a long time to get ready. Dirk swiped right on twenty pieces of Tinder Trash for later in the evening and then slipped his phone in his pocket. He stood up and went over to the bookshelf and examined the titles. A mix of college paperbacks, cookbooks written by television personalities, and hardcover bestsellers. He’d seen worse. He turned back to the couch and that’s when he saw it.

  A dog.

  A tiny one. White as a snowball.

  Motionless, with its neck at a weird angle.

  Oh, shit.

  Dirk poked it with his index finger.

  Still warm.

  But dead. Dead in that way dead things are—clearly, undeniably dead.

  Dirk panicked. He’d killed the dog. He’d thought it was, well, not a pillow, but maybe a part of a pillow; there were a lot of freaking pillows on that couch, and some fluffy ones, fluffy with scraggly Mongolian fur, and anyone could have made a mistake like this, and it wasn’t his fault, he was a big guy, and weren’t little dogs supposed to yap when strangers came by, maybe the dog was dead before he got there—Unlikely, Dirk, unlikely!—and Melody was his boss’s wife’s niece! And Dirk had just sat on her dog!

  Almost without thinking, Dirk picked up the dog and slipped it into the silver umbrella stand by the front door, then quietly let himself out.

  He hailed a cab and headed straight to JFK. He looked at the departures board, starting with the As, and settled on Aruba. It wasn’t until he reached the ticket counter that he realized he didn’t have his passport. His passport, along with everything else he owned, was inside his loft in Tribeca. He knew if he went home to get it, he’d stay there.

  He went back to the departures board.

  Bozeman. Bozeman sounded good.

  He was done with New York City, done with dating women who had small dogs and umbrella stands. He’d been that guy, t
he fat banker whose expensive tie slithered over his belly all day because it couldn’t find a good resting spot. The guy who looked fifty at thirty and would probably die of heart failure before his sixtieth birthday. He’d never quit his job, not officially; he just disappeared. He knew that accidentally killing a teacup poodle was not a fireable offense, not when he brought in over four million dollars a year for the firm, but what the whole thing had given him was clarity. Clarity was a commodity that had been in short supply for Dirk for pretty much all of his life, and when it came, it came big.

  He stumbled upon a worn copy of Helen and Scott Nearing’s old homesteading bible The Good Life at a used bookstore and fell in love with it. There were newer books, of course, and the Internet—people all over the Internet were talking about this stuff, permaculture and tiny houses, leaving the rat race and living the simple life—but it was the Nearings’ book he kept on his nightstand at whatever motel he happened to be staying at, it was the Nearings’ book he read cover to cover.

  After playing pool with a guy in a bar in Butte who’d been living inside a refurbished school bus for three years, Dirk began to develop his plan. He liked the idea of starting with a school bus. Dirk could afford to do things differently—he had money in the bank, he could buy himself whatever he needed, really, within reason—but he was, fundamentally, a man who liked a challenge. So he bought an old bus at an auction for six thousand dollars, listed the seats on Craigslist, and sold them to the owner of a drive-in movie theater for the labor it took to pull them out. Then he hit the road.

  His plan was to head to Maine and try to replicate the Nearings’ homesteading experiment as closely as possible. He’d live in the bus, teach himself to farm, eventually build himself a little cabin off the grid. He wanted to do as much with his hands as possible, with his hands and with his brains, mostly to see if it could still be done.

  He was driving through the Hudson Valley when his bus broke down for the third time. He happened to pick up the local paper and noticed a small ad in the back.

  Beekeeper Wanted. No experience necessary.

  * * *

  Kelly stalked back to the house from the pool in a pissy mood.

  It was like she was in prison! Even that idiot beekeeper wouldn’t lay a finger on her. And she’d all but offered herself up to him. And not even “all but.” It was like…it was like she was Gordon Allen’s property, and no one would dare to get near her. Certainly nobody on his payroll, and everyone Kelly encountered was on Gordon’s payroll in one way or another.

  A week earlier, Kelly had looked up Renaldo. Good old Renaldo. It had been over six years, and he had never been an e-mail type of guy, but she finally tracked him down through a bartender/coke addict she was friends with on Facebook. Renaldo was still living in the Keys, still unmarried, still casually dealing drugs and napping in hammocks, living the life of a man who’d figured the whole thing out. But for some reason, he seemed less than interested in flying in to visit her, living it up in a five-star hotel in Manhattan for a week or so, all paid for by her.

  When she pressed him, he admitted he was involved with someone. He said, in that formal way of his, the way of a lothario for whom English is a second language, “The truth is, Kelly, I have met someone.”

  “I don’t mind, Renaldo. You know that.”

  “Yes, but I must tell you, Kelly, I am in love.”

  “You’re in love?”

  “She is my perfect woman. I wish you could meet—”

  Kelly hung up the phone.

  * * *

  It was well past two o’clock in the morning when Owen’s cell phone started vibrating on top of his nightstand. Lucy finally jabbed him in the kidney with a pointy knee, waking him from a dead sleep.

  “Hello,” he mumbled into the phone.

  “I’m sorry for calling so late.”

  It was Izzy.

  “You can’t do this,” Owen whispered. “You can’t call me like this.”

  “I know,” said Izzy. “I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency.”

  “What kind of emergency?”

  “I can’t tell you over the phone. I just need you to come here right now. You know I wouldn’t call you like this if it wasn’t important.”

  “It’s the middle of the goddamn night.”

  “This is really serious. Just come, please.”

  Owen hung up the phone. Lucy had rolled over and watched the back of his head throughout the entire conversation.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He got up and pulled on yesterday’s jeans, which he’d left in a heap on the floor by the bed. “I’ve got to, uh. It’s um, it’s sort of an emergency.”

  Owen had the look on his face that he had a lot these days, half apology and half nonapology. Half this-is-what-we-get. Half this-is-what-we-agreed-upon. Half you-had-to-know-things-like-this-could-happen, things like your husband being called away in the middle of the night to deal with something, and someone, you know nothing about. “I can’t say much more about it.”

  “Go,” said Lucy. “Just go.”

  Beekman was incredibly dark at night. There were no streetlights, and people kept their houses dark. Owen parked his car halfway down the block from Izzy’s and walked to her front door, tripping twice on the uneven sidewalk. Before he had a chance to knock, the door swung open.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Izzy said.

  “What happened? What’s the matter?”

  “Come in.”

  Owen went in and looked around. He didn’t see any emergency.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “I’m gonna burn the desk.”

  “The what?”

  “The desk. Christopher’s great-grandfather’s desk. And I need your help.”

  “You got me out of bed for this?”

  “Yes, I apologize for that, but I need your help.”

  “You can’t call me up in the middle of the night and tell me it’s an emergency, Izzy. I have a—”

  “A wife and a kid and a home and a life, I know all that. You and your happily married wife named Lucy with her stupid chickens.”

  “How much have you had to drink?”

  “Not much. One bottle.”

  “A regular bottle or a big bottle?”

  “A regular bottle,” said Izzy.

  “Izzy…”

  “Okay, it was a big bottle! I was upset! Stop judging me!”

  Owen knew Izzy well enough by now to understand that she kept her daytime-drinking tally separate from her nighttime drinking. Not that she tallied anything, not really. She just considered the daytime to be a different day than the nighttime. So one big bottle meant, at a minimum, a daytime regular bottle plus a nighttime big bottle. Which explained a few things, Owen thought, as he watched Izzy lurching around her living room. It was the first time he’d seen her lurch.

  “I’m not judging you,” said Owen. “I just like to know what I’m dealing with.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Christopher coming by the other day was very upsetting to me. I thought you’d understand. I’m sorry if I was wrong.”

  “I do understand,” said Owen. “I just don’t think this is the way to handle it.”

  “Well, then, go home to your wife. I’ll do it by myself.”

  “If you burn it, it’s done,” said Owen. “Why don’t you just enjoy having something he wants for a while.”

  “He’ll just steal it like he tried to do the other day. He’ll come by when I’m not home and take it.”

  “Change the locks. I’ll find someone to do it for you. I’ll get it done tomorrow.”

  Izzy just stood there.

  “You’re going to set your house on fire, Izzy. You are in no condition to handle matches and lighter fluid. Come on upstairs, I’ll put you into bed.”

  Izzy stood there and appeared to think about it. She swayed a little to the left and grabbed the back o
f a tattered wingback chair, steadying herself, although just barely.

  “Give me the lighter fluid,” said Owen. “I’ll help you up the stairs.”

  “I need you to hold me.”

  “I can’t carry you up the stairs, Izzy,” said Owen. “I’ll kill us both.”

  “No, I mean tonight. I need you to stay. I don’t ever ask for anything like this, but tonight I need it.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” said Owen.

  Owen jolted awake deep into the night. He was in Izzy’s bed. He was tangled up in a linen sheet, drenched in a clammy sweat, possessed by a single terrifying thought.

  What if Izzy got pregnant?

  They were using condoms, yes, but using condoms the way Owen suspected most people did, meaning less than perfectly and not all the time. Owen and Lucy had had such a difficult time conceiving children, they had spent so many thousands of dollars they didn’t have in order to create Wyatt in a petri dish and have him implanted in Lucy’s belly, that there was a small part of Owen that didn’t actually believe that sex caused babies, and that small part occasionally overruled his more rational side when it came time to put on a condom when he was naked with Izzy and she was doing something crazy. He wasn’t proud of it. He had promised Lucy condoms, promised them as part of their agreement, and here he was, in this most primal and fundamental way, failing her. In the way that could cause her the most harm, the most pain, that could put her most in jeopardy.

  “I’m not going on the pill,” Izzy said to him when he brought it up the next morning.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Owen,” she said. “Maybe because I don’t want to put pig hormones into my body?”

  “Is that what the pill is made out of?” Owen asked. “That doesn’t sound right, Izzy.”

  “They have to get the hormones somewhere, right? And whatever kind of strange hormones they are, I don’t want them in my body.”

  “Okay, but what about the other thing. A whatchamacallit. We can put two men on goal.”