The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  Lucy was wearing workout pants, but tighter than the ones he was used to seeing her in; they looked like pants a person might actually do yoga in. From his angle on the floor, he thought her ankles were appealing, fragile and girlish. She looked good, he thought. She looked like she hadn’t looked in years, sort of shiny and new. And, was it possible…was she actually wearing lipstick?

  There was a time, a few years back, when Owen and Lucy had had what they forever would refer to as the Lipstick Fight.

  The Lipstick Fight went like this:

  Over dinner one night, when Wyatt was a toddler, Owen casually suggested it would be nice if Lucy put on some lipstick before he came home from work. He was using lipstick as sort of a signifier, but it was the thing he thought of when he thought of a woman putting some care and attention into her physical appearance.

  Because this was what he came home to every night: A woman wearing saggy old workout clothes that she never worked out in, that had somehow become her pajamas and the clothes she went to the grocery store in and the clothes she wore around the house all day, with her dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail and who looked like she’d just been run over by a sedan.

  “Put on lipstick” meant Stop that. Stop looking like that. It’s not fair to me. I married a beautiful woman.

  And Lucy had gone ballistic. It was one of the biggest fights of their marriage. Probably the biggest. This was before they knew Wyatt was any different from any other typical-yet-difficult little boy. He was banging his head against walls, he was not sleeping, he was darting off into the woods behind the house and hiding silently behind trees. The terrible twos, people kept saying to Lucy. Every parent goes through it.

  “Lipstick? Are you serious right now? Do you have any idea what my life is like? And you want me to put on lipstick before you come home?”

  She’d stalked up the stairs and slammed the bathroom door. Owen sat at the table, drinking his wine, realizing he had said the wrong thing.

  When Lucy came back down, she had bright red lipstick smeared all around her mouth, like a little girl who’d raided her mother’s purse.

  “Can I do anything else for you?” she said. “Would you like a foot massage? Shall I bake you a pie?”

  And then she collapsed on the floor, sobbing, and she didn’t stop for hours.

  Owen took the next day off to look after Wyatt while Lucy stayed in bed with tears slowly, continuously leaking out of the corners of her eyes. He wished she had a mother he could call, a mother who would get on a plane and move in for a few months and get everything sorted out. Her mother was dead, though, and his own mother was such a distant, uninterested presence that the thought of asking her for help was essentially unimaginable. When the crying started to look like it might never stop, Owen decided to call Lucy’s older sister, Anna, who had a big job and three kids of her own but who still hopped on the first flight out.

  Anna stayed with them for two weeks. She looked after Wyatt, organized the house, cleaned out the pantry, opened stacks of mail, and coaxed Lucy into her first shower in weeks. Anna and Owen interviewed sitters together and eventually found a nice middle-aged woman to watch Wyatt for three hours every afternoon so Lucy could rest. Her name was Paulette and she had raised three kids. Paulette lasted a little over four months, four months before Wyatt became too much for her, which was just long enough for Lucy to get her sea legs again. When both Owen and Anna insisted they hire someone else, Lucy refused. (“I don’t work,” she’d said. “I’m not going to pay someone to raise my child.”)

  So Lucy went back into the trenches full-time, and Wyatt got harder and more inscrutable. No lipstick was worn. And then when Wyatt was three, their pediatrician suggested they get him evaluated.

  But it’s back again, Owen thought. The lipstick is back.

  * * *

  Wyatt finally fell asleep at ten, and his entire dinner-calm-down-bath-time-bedtime routine had fallen on Lucy’s shoulders. Owen had managed to make it up the stairs and into bed, but he’d asserted that anything more was too much for him. He texted a few people he knew in town asking if anyone had any old pain pills lying around, but nobody in Beekman wanted to give up their spare pain pills for actual physical pain, so he suffered through the evening with bourbon and Netflix.

  Like he’s on a goddamn vacation, Lucy thought when she walked past their bedroom on her way downstairs. I was supposed to be with Ben, and he’s drunk and watching Game of Thrones.

  Ben picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  “It’s really you,” said Ben.

  “It’s me.”

  “It’s weird to hear your voice without seeing your face.”

  “You have a very low voice,” said Lucy. “I never noticed how low it was until now.”

  “I can’t believe we’ve never talked on the phone before.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “I like it.”

  “I do too.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m sitting outside, on an Adirondack chair, wrapped in a blanket.”

  “Nice.”

  “It’s cold and dark and all the stars are out. I see the Big Dipper and something that may or may not be Mars,” said Lucy. “What about you?”

  “I’m in bed.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Me? Nothing. You?”

  “Sweats and an old ski cap.”

  “Nice,” he said, mock-sexily.

  “I told you, it’s freezing out here,” Lucy said.

  “I’m really glad you called.”

  “You are? I was worried it was too late.”

  “It could never be too late,” said Ben. “We don’t get to talk enough, I think.”

  “We don’t,” she said. “Sometimes I think I barely even know you.”

  “Well, what do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything you want. I’m serious, Lucy. I’ve got all night.”

  Lucy ran into the house for some wine, and then once about an hour later to pee, but other than that, they just kept talking.

  “Tell me about your marriage,” Lucy finally said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What happened to it,” said Lucy.

  “That’s a tough question,” said Ben.

  “Take a swing at it.”

  “I think life happened to my marriage,” said Ben. “Or maybe marriage happened to my marriage. Something about not knowing how hard it was going to be, or not being able to accept it. Taking it for granted.”

  “Too vague, my friend, too vague,” said Lucy.

  “We met in college. I wanted to be a history professor, and she wanted to be a doctor. Mostly what we did was study together. I know that sounds weird, but it was a lot of sitting on the couch reading and taking notes with our feet in each other’s laps and then having sex and then studying some more. I think if we could have gone on like that forever, things would have been different.”

  “Well, that’s stupid,” said Lucy. “Life isn’t like that.”

  “I agree, but you don’t necessarily realize that in college.”

  “College seems like five lifetimes ago.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben. “Which is only one of many reasons why you shouldn’t marry your college sweetheart.”

  “So that was the problem? You got married too early?”

  “No,” said Ben. “That’s too easy.”

  “Did you fight a lot?”

  “Neither of us are fighters,” said Ben. “We only really disagreed about one thing.”

  “What?”

  “She didn’t want to have kids.”

  “And you did.”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a pretty big problem,” said Lucy. “That’s what most people would consider a deal-breaker.”

  “She told me she didn’t want kids when we first met. On our first date, actually. I was nineteen. Kids were the furthest thing from my mind. And th
e truth is, I didn’t believe her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess I’d never thought that women who say they don’t want kids really don’t want kids. I realize now that’s stupid, but at the time, it just seemed like a thing a certain kind of ambitious girl would say. For effect, I guess, or to show that she wasn’t trying to trap you. I figured either it was a lie, or it would change.”

  “And you guys had kids.”

  “We did.”

  “So she changed her mind?”

  “I don’t think she ever really changed her mind,” said Ben. “I won’t say she had the girls against her will, but if you got her drunk enough, she might say it.”

  “Is she sad she had the girls? What are their names?”

  “Eliza and Peggy. And no, I don’t think she’s sad she had them. That’s not quite it.”

  “Send me a picture of them. Text it to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re adorable,” Lucy said when the picture came through. “Which one is which?”

  “Eliza is the oldest, with the freckles. She’s twelve. Peggy is ten.”

  “Does your wife have freckles?”

  “Ex-wife,” said Ben. “And yes, she does.”

  “Like, freckles all over? Like Julianne Moore freckles?”

  “I guess you could say she has Julianne Moore freckles.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Why is that interesting?”

  “Actually, it’s not interesting,” said Lucy. “Sometimes I say interesting when things aren’t in fact interesting. You should know that about me.”

  “Interesting,” said Ben.

  “Ha.”

  “She has one of those jobs that is all-consuming, and she loves it. She’s one of the best heart surgeons in the country. In the world, actually. Heads of state fly in to be operated on by her.”

  “Well, now you’re just making me feel bad about myself and my lack of personal achievement.”

  “You wanted to talk about this.”

  “I know,” said Lucy. “Keep going.”

  “What else can I say? She loves her job, she’s great at it, and it eats up all she has to give. And she left her husband unattended.”

  “That means you cheated on her,” said Lucy.

  “We cheated on each other.”

  “Who first?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I guess I assume it was me. But there was no ‘catching anyone’ or anything. She finally told me she was in love with some guy she met at the hospital and she wanted a divorce. His name was Grant. I remember I kept saying, ‘Grant?’ over and over again when she finally told me.”

  “Are they still together?”

  “Who?”

  “Deborah and Grant?”

  “No,” said Ben. “Grant is long gone. I met him once, when I dropped off the girls. He had long gray hair, pulled back in a low ponytail, and I couldn’t stop thinking, She left me for that?”

  “Was he a doctor?”

  “No,” said Ben. “He’s a social worker in the cardiology unit. I picture him lurking around, offering solace to dying people’s families and hitting on my wife.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I have no idea,” said Ben. “I think he was just the fuse she needed to light to explode our life. In my experience, it’s pretty hard to end a marriage without a third party involved. Whether the third party decides to stick around is another question entirely.”

  “Is she with someone now?”

  “Nope. She’s single, which is probably the way she wants it. She dates a bit, I think. I assume so, at least.”

  “Are you guys close?”

  “We co-parent the girls without much disagreement,” said Ben. “But other than that, no.”

  “Do you do holidays together?”

  “No. Never. We trade off,” said Ben. “It makes for some lonely Christmas mornings.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I probably would have stuck it out for the girls. I really didn’t want them to go through this. I like to think I would have done that fine old-fashioned thing and waited until our youngest went off to college.”

  “I’m not sure that’s always the best plan,” said Lucy. “For the woman, at least. Deborah probably didn’t want to wait that long.”

  Deborah the freckled, brainy, child-hating cardiothoracic surgeon. Deborah, the woman who left her husband unattended, like a bomb in a backpack in a subway station.

  “The stars keep moving,” said Lucy.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been watching them this entire time,” she said. “They move faster than you’d think.”

  It was well past three in the morning by the time Lucy and Ben stopped talking and she finally slipped into bed.

  Owen was lying on his left side with pillows and bolsters arranged carefully around him, like a woman in her ninth month. He’d smeared himself from head to toe with a tube of Ben-Gay his mother had left behind years ago, back when they’d first moved into the house, during her one and only visit. The room smelled disgusting, a combination of Ben-Gay and bourbon and unbrushed teeth.

  “Who were you talking to out there for so long?” Owen asked sleepily.

  Lucy paused for a long moment and then said flatly, “My sister.”

  “How’s she doing?” Owen mumbled.

  “Fine,” said Lucy. “She’s doing fine.”

  Owen adjusted one of his pillows and winced in pain. And then he was snoring again, faster than Lucy thought humanly possible, a man completely dead to the world.

  He has no fucking clue, Lucy thought. It’s now officially weird.

  And, Lucy thought, it’s becoming insulting.

  Fifteen

  Have you ever known a middle-aged man who’s fallen head over heels in love with a woman who’s not his wife? They’re pretty goddamn happy. And a brand-new one walks into my office just about every other day.

  —Constance Waverly

  Huffington Post

  Rowan Howard was a hopeless romantic who was convinced he had married the wrong woman, which was why, periodically and yet pretty consistently throughout his marriage to Susan, he had had love affairs.

  And they were love affairs, emphasis on the love, long-drawn-out illicit courtships, emotionally intimate, all-consuming, can’t-think-about-anything-else love affairs. Most recently, Rowan had been entangled with Juliette, a married woman who’d been seated next to him at a farm-to-table fund-raising event at their local CSA. They’d both felt it immediately, an electrical current that ran between them when Rowan accidentally on purpose brushed his hand against her knee under the table, which was heaped with warty heirloom turnips and stringy grass-fed beef.

  Rowan had pursued Juliette doggedly. After a flurry of e-mails, she said she’d meet him, just once, for lunch. They’d had lunch nine times, nine exquisite times, before they broke down and had guilt-filled sex, in his old beat-up Jeep Cherokee at the end of one of Beekman’s famous dirt roads. The sex ended with Juliette crying softly while Rowan held her as tightly as any human being could—it was perfect. It went like that for a good nine months—sex, then crying—until Juliette finally put a stop to it. She agreed, however, to let Rowan write her a letter every week, as long as he mailed it to a post office box in a neighboring town.

  Those letters! Rowan was never more himself than when he crafted those letters, and after putting the first two into the mail and being sad he wasn’t able to reread them, he decided to make a copy before he mailed each one off. Rowan’s love letters were very nearly works of art, he thought, and they were effective too; every couple of months, Juliette would break down and send him a text, and then she’d agree to meet him, for the very last time, at “their” place, a bed-and-breakfast with a detached cottage, deep in the woods, that, midweek, Rowan was able to rent by the day. Then it was sex, tears, and more holding, and the whole thing would start up all over again. Rowan Howard was a family man, a loving father and an upstand
ing local citizen, a scratch golfer and a genius with a boneless pork loin—he was famous, in Beekman, for both his golf game and his pork loin in equal measure—who just so happened to be in search of the love of his life.

  Long before Juliette, and years before Susan, even, Rowan had spent his twenties in Manhattan involved in what he feared would prove to be the most passionate, intense, all-consuming love affair of his life. Her name was Marissa LeFevre, and he still woke up from a dream about her at least once a week.

  Marissa was a model and a former ballerina—technically, by the time they met, at age twenty-five, she was a former model too, but Rowan discovered that it took about a decade for a woman to admit that she was no longer a model—and she worked in an art gallery in a capacity that was largely decorative. She had an epic eating disorder, but Rowan didn’t figure it out for two years—not until he came home early to Entenmann’s boxes, the unmistakable sound of vomiting behind a closed door. The food thing didn’t alarm him. Didn’t all ballerinas-turned-models do that? It was practically in the job description. And Marissa responded to his acceptance of her binging and purging with a childlike gratitude. Here she was, being seen and known and still loved. She’d send him out at midnight with lengthy lists of foods she craved, and he would buy them, even if it involved stopping at several stores. He’d hit the Gourmet Garage for the ice cream she liked, then load up on candy bars at the twenty-four-hour Duane Reade, then pop into the bodega for an assortment of Hostess treats. He was her enabler, and she was his entire world.

  Then he went to Vegas for his brother’s bachelor-party weekend, and Marissa swallowed a bottle of Advil and then dialed 911. You can kill yourself with Advil, Rowan learned later at the hospital, but the very choice of the drug convinced him it wasn’t a serious attempt, even though Marissa spent three days in the hospital on a psychiatric hold. He loved her. He loved every last bit of her, crazy and all. And he did his best to save her. She moved back in with him, and Rowan spent the next two years treating her like a fragile, precious doll. He asked her to come home with him for Christmas, but she refused, and then she orchestrated another breakdown to prove how much she needed him not to leave. The doctors at Bellevue advised him not to have any contact with her, for her own good, and they sent her home to Iowa, to her mother and the calm of life on the plains.