by Sarah Dunn
But lately, things had changed. She was walking around with a goofy smile on her face all the time, not because of the sex, but because of Ben. She thought about him constantly. She dreamed about him, happy dreams, dreams where the rest of her life didn’t exist. They’d started texting each other, not a lot, just a bit, but they’d gotten into the habit of saying good night every night. Good night. Kiss. Sleep tight. Kisses back. And her heart jumped every time.
This is why people have affairs, Lucy thought. This feeling, this one right here.
No wonder. No fucking wonder.
Fourteen
Lust is energetically expensive. It consumes time and resources. It impairs judgment. From an evolutionary point of view, once the desired number of children are born, there is no advantage in feeling lust for your spouse.
—Constance Waverly
Choke me.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want you to choke me,” said Izzy.
Owen was, at that moment, in his favorite sexual position, the one that most closely resembled taking a nap. He was on his back, with Izzy straddling him and doing the lion’s share of the work. Izzy occasionally used Owen almost like a prop, just like one of the countless dusty sex toys she pulled out from under her bed (“One sec, gotta go wash this bad boy off”).
“Put your hands around my neck and sorta strangle me.”
“Izzy—”
“Please?”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Just enough to cut the air off for a little bit. It’ll make me come hard.”
“Are you serious?” Owen had stopped moving altogether, but Izzy continued to move her hips in a tantalizing way, like an ocean swell slapping against the hull of a boat.
“You’ve never heard of this?”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Owen. “I just don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me,” said Izzy. “I’ve done it a thousand times.”
A thousand times? Owen thought. That can’t be true. That simply cannot be true.
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this, Izzy.”
“Just do it.”
Izzy was in a weird mood this afternoon, that was for sure. She’d greeted him at the door already semi-drunk, although it was not even one o’clock. Apparently, she’d just received an unexpected property-tax bill from five years back. Apparently, it was Christopher’s fault, but getting him to pay it was going to involve lawyers, and Izzy didn’t know if she could go through that again. Apparently, this was never going to end. She wasn’t a poster child for divorce, Izzy wasn’t, that’s for sure.
When else am I going to get the chance to choke a woman while I fuck her? Owen thought. Probably never. And, on some level—he knew this sounded weird but it felt, at the time, nonetheless true—it seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.
Owen put his hands around Izzy’s neck and squeezed a little and then paused.
“Shouldn’t we have a signal or a safe word or something so I know when to stop?”
“Be quiet. You’re making this not sexy.”
“Okay.”
He tightened his hands around her neck again and squeezed.
“Harder.”
Owen squeezed harder.
“Better. Now do it even harder, and fuck me hard at the same time,” said Izzy.
Owen obeyed. He felt a surge of energy at the base of his back, like a ball of molten lava, and it seemed to radiate up his spine and out through all of his limbs. Izzy’s neck was small, birdlike even, and he enjoyed the feeling of having his hands encircling it. I’m choking her, he thought. I’m cutting off her air supply. This is weird. Weird, but cool.
Izzy started to come—he could feel it, he could always feel it, but he could tell this was a big one, not one of her run-of-the-mill, six-times-a-session orgasms—and so he kept going, choking her and fucking her and feeling her body shiver and shake and throb. Finally, he took his hands from her throat. She flopped down on his chest with a thwack, her face in the pillow next to his head.
She was completely still. She did not appear to be breathing. It felt like she weighed two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds of deadweight. Oh my God, Owen thought. I’ve killed her. Bits of his life flashed past his eyes—Lucy, Wyatt, happiness, this stupid experiment—as he carefully rolled her off of him. He slapped her cheek. Nothing. He slapped her harder and yelled her name. How soon do I dial 911? Do I give her mouth-to-mouth? Should I stabilize her neck?
Finally he remembered the sternum rub, an old fraternity trick they used to do when someone passed out in college. He knelt on the bed next to her and rubbed his knuckles up and down Izzy’s sternum, hard and fast.
“Ow!” Izzy yelled. She sat up and shook her head, pissed off and a bit stunned. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“That was amazing,” Izzy said. “Amazing, amazing. I’m still shaking. Look, my knees are shaking. I can barely walk.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Owen. “But I can promise you one thing. I’m never, ever doing that again.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I thought I killed you!” said Owen. “I thought you were dead! I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison!”
“I passed out. That’s what happens when you do that the right way. I thought you knew that.”
“You didn’t pass out, Izzy. You flatlined. You stopped breathing.”
“I did not stop breathing.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I passed out. You still breathe when you pass out.”
“You. Stopped. Breathing.”
“You’re being a hysteric.”
“I don’t care what I’m being,” said Owen. “That was a first and last time for that particular stunt. Deal with it.”
“You’re such a pussy.”
“And please stop calling me that,” said Owen. He was standing at the foot of the bed, pulling on his jeans.
“It’s a real boner-killer, right?” said Izzy. “That’s what Christopher always said.”
For the first time since the relationship began, Owen found himself thinking about breaking things off early with Izzy. Early, meaning before the Arrangement officially ran its course. Between her attempt to burn her ex-husband’s great-grandfather’s desk and that afternoon’s choking episode, Owen couldn’t fight the thought: Maybe I’ve ridden this particular train as far as I want to ride it.
But could he just sit Izzy down and tell her that he and Lucy were ending the Arrangement early and therefore he would not be having sex with her anymore? Or bringing her fresh eggs? Or performing any of the small duties around her house that she had queued up for him the moment he rolled off her, it was starting to seem, every time he stopped by, even for the quickest of quickies? That day it had been: Open the jar of roasted red peppers on the kitchen counter, change the lightbulb in the stairwell, and see if he could figure out what was up with the powder-room toilet, and did he think she really needed to call a plumber or could she maybe fix it herself. Oh, and drop off her plastic shopping bags filled with plastic shopping bags at GroceryLand, since he was headed there anyway and they had that big recycling box out front.
His girlfriend was choring him! It hit him when he was walking across the GroceryLand parking lot carrying Izzy’s three enormous bags full of bags under his arm. The air-conditioner installation, the bathtub-caulking fiasco, all that time he spent inspecting her drains and creeping around in her dank basement, flipping switches on her fuse box while she yelled down at him, “No, not that one! Try the next one!”
“Owen!”
Susan Howard was standing behind a portable table covered with baked goods. Three fourth-grade boys were off to the side, wearing soccer uniforms, taking turns punching each other as hard as they could.
“Soccer bake sale? Yum,” Owen called to her. “Put something good aside for me, I’ll hit you on my way out.”
Susan vacated her post and made a b
eeline for Owen.
“Please don’t tell me you and Lucy use plastic grocery bags,” said Susan.
“We don’t.”
“Owen.”
Owen was, in fact, at that very moment shoving Izzy’s enormous collection of plastic grocery bags into the recycling box in front of GroceryLand. The box in question had a very small opening, and Izzy’s bags of plastic bags had each been knotted tightly shut and were the size and shape of large human heads. Owen had ripped the first one open and was squishing handful after handful of ancient, balled-up plastic into the recycling bin as fast as he could.
“We just…sometimes I guess a few end up in our house and we save them until we have enough to recycle. This is, like, two years’ worth.”
“I have to lecture you.”
“Please don’t, Susan. I can’t handle it today.”
“They are so bad. Not a little bit bad. So bad. And I know you think by putting them in that recycling bin, you’re doing a good thing and helping the planet, but you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“When people like you and Lucy—smart, educated consumers—choose to use plastic, it just perpetuates the entire system. It makes the checkout people feel less bad just shoving plastic down the planet’s throat.”
“I don’t think you can blame the checkout ladies at GroceryLand for plastic bags—”
“Of course I can! They shouldn’t even offer plastic. Plastic should be kept in a locked room in the back of the store, and if you ask for plastic, you should have to wait for them to find the key.”
“I think they’d lose their jobs pretty quickly if they did that.”
“I’m going to send you a link to a video.”
“Please don’t, Susan.”
“It’s that huge floating island of garbage that’s out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This young woman gets in the middle of it in her kayak and it’s nothing but plastic water bottles and plastic shopping bags and dead fish as far as the eye can see. She just floats there and weeps.”
“I look forward to it,” said Owen.
“Don’t be sarcastic. Watch it,” said Susan. She grasped him by both shoulders and looked into his eyes. “It will change you. Hey, Rowan, lecture Owen about plastic grocery bags. He won’t listen to me.”
Susan’s husband, Rowan, walked over from the ATM vestibule. Their youngest kid, Charlotte, was climbing on Rowan’s head and shoulders like a monkey, and Rowan was wearing a long red skirt.
“Dude,” Owen said.
“What do you think?” Rowan said, doing a twirl.
“Great, right?” said Susan. “We’re raising awareness.”
“Susan won’t let me put on a pair of pants until Colleen Lowell gets her job back.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m kinda diggin’ it,” said Rowan. “You’ve got all this room down there, things can breathe, move around—”
Susan cut Rowan off. “Tell Owen how bad plastic bags are.”
“They’re really bad,” Rowan said.
“Sometimes we forget to bring our canvas bags, I guess,” said Owen. The plastic bags were balled up like snowballs and several of them were, for some reason, damp. It was hard to push more than two or three through the slot at one time no matter how hard he tried. “We’ve got a bunch in the house, but it’s easy to walk out the door and forget them.”
“Keep them in your trunk!” Susan said. “When you unload the car, bring them right back. That way you’ll always have them.”
“Good tip,” said Owen.
Charlotte rappelled down Rowan’s left arm and disappeared under his skirt.
“Seriously, Owen, it’s pretty important,” said Rowan.
“Yeah, you know, when you have a kid like Wyatt, sometimes things fall through the cracks.”
Owen didn’t like playing the Wyatt card, but he found himself doing it more and more these days. His mother wondered why he’d been so out of touch? Oh, you know, things with Wyatt have been a little rough lately. His boss needed his expense report? Wyatt’s not sleeping again, Lucy and I are taking turns with him at night, I guess I’ve gotten a little backed up on things. Wyatt had become his get-out-of-jail-free card, his all-purpose excuse, his reason why.
But really, it wasn’t Wyatt. Not lately, not the way it used to be. Wyatt was doing better. It was hard to put a finger on just what exactly was going on with his son. It wasn’t simply compliance, although that was part of it. He put up less of a fight doing the ordinary tasks of life. Getting dressed, putting his shoes on, climbing in and out of the car, brushing his teeth, going to bed. They had reinstituted the visual schedule at home, and that was probably part of it. Wyatt liked to know what was next, so Owen and Lucy Velcroed small laminated PECS cards with simple pictures and phrases—Get dressed, Eat snack, Play game, Ride in car—down a long grid, with the day carved into manageable half-hour units.
But then, the other day, Wyatt stole Blake’s canned peaches. Blake had gone to the bathroom during snack time, and Wyatt grabbed them and ate them! This from a kid who’d consumed nothing but bananas, banana yogurt, crunchy peanut butter on saltine crackers, applesauce, and Cheerios for his entire life. And suddenly, out of the blue, he’s stealing peaches! Canned peaches were now in the mix! And it was starting to feel like, well, a succession of things like that, things like canned peaches and animal crackers, eye contact and actually playing with other kids, actually playing, like kids do, letting the game change and going with it instead of rigidly sticking to a Wyatt-made plan.
“Can I make a skirt for you?” Susan asked Owen. “I got a bunch from the Salvation Army store and I’m altering them so they’ll fit.”
“A skirt? For me?” said Owen. “That would be a no.”
“Owen.”
“I love you, Susan, but no.”
The pain started on his drive home, a low throbbing at the base of his spine, and by the time he pulled into the driveway, Owen could barely get out of the car.
“I have to lie down,” he said to Lucy. “My back went out.”
He dropped the car keys in the basket filled with shoes and crumpled to the floor in front of the staircase, still in his jacket and ancient beat-up wingtips.
“Can you make it to the couch?” she asked. “I’m trying to clean up in here.”
“I can’t move, Lucy. I’m in incredible pain. Can you bring me three Advil?”
“If I can find some.”
The stress of almost killing Izzy was somatizing at a rapid rate. It had shot past his lower back and was starting to radiate out through his limbs. He couldn’t turn his head without just about screaming.
“How long do you think this is going to last?” Lucy asked after she brought him the pills. She was standing up by his right shoulder, looking down at him, while he sipped water out of the side of his mouth and tried to swallow the Advil.
“I have no idea. It’s never been this bad before. Never, ever, not even in this ballpark.”
“Did you do something to yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
Lucy folded her arms across her chest and asked, “Did you physically exert yourself in some unusual way?”
“It started when I was in the car,” said Owen. “My lower back seized up, and then pain started shooting down my legs. I’m lucky I made it home without driving into a ditch.”
“I have French tonight,” said Lucy.
Owen groaned.
“Do you think that’s going to be a problem?”
“I don’t know, Lucy. I can’t move my body.”
“I really don’t want to miss class tonight,” said Lucy. “We have a big test.”
“I can’t lift my arms, Lucy. I don’t know what to tell you,” said Owen.
“Should I call a sitter?”
“If I still feel like this, I’d really appreciate it if you’d stay home.”
* * *
Lucy was not happy. She didn’t want to stay home with Owen and his bad bac
k. She wanted to see Ben. She needed to see Ben. She’d been looking forward to it all week.
She took Wyatt outside and zipped him up in the trampoline and left Owen alone and moaning on the kitchen floor.
“The African black mamba can sink its fangs into a grown man’s face!” Wyatt yelled as he bounced around on the trampoline. He careened hard into the net and lost his footing.
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
“Yes,” said Wyatt. He got back on his feet and started bouncing again. “The African black mamba can sink its fangs into a grown man’s face!”
I can’t come today, Lucy texted.
How come? Ben texted back.
Owen did something to his back. He doesn’t want me to leave. I’m really sorry.
Could we talk, do you think?
On the phone?
Yes. If you can.
Lucy looked down at her phone. Why shouldn’t she and Ben talk on the phone? That wasn’t against the rules. They hadn’t done it before, but there was no reason not to, at least none that Lucy could come up with at the moment.
I’ll call you when I get Wyatt to bed. It’ll be a while, Lucy texted.
I’ll be here.
“Mama! Mama! I have something to tell you!”
Lucy looked up. Wyatt was jumping with stiff legs in the center of the trampoline.
“The African black mamba can sink its fangs into a grown man’s face!” Wyatt said again.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Siri showed me,” said Wyatt.
“What? Why?”
“Siri showed me videos of snakes attacking humans!”
“I don’t think those are good videos to watch, sweetie. They might be too scary.”
“They’re super-scary,” said Wyatt.
He started to bounce-walk in a big circle, landing on the balls of his feet. The autism walk, Lucy thought for the millionth time.
“Heels down, Wyatt.”
“They’re super-duper scary!”
* * *
Owen found himself watching Lucy out of the side of his right eye, from his spot on the kitchen floor, while she started making dinner for Wyatt. She was clearly angry about missing French. She banged a few pots and pans around to make her point, but Owen didn’t see how he had any choice. I can’t lift my arms, he wanted to say to her yet again. It’s not my fault I have a bad back.