by Sarah Dunn
“Sorry,” said Owen. “I, uh, I thought since we’re just going to be here for a few hours it didn’t make sense to drive all the way to—”
The first two times he’d slept with Madison, Owen had picked a considerably nicer hotel, a Doubletree Inn near White Plains. They’d given him a warm chocolate chip cookie when he checked in and charged him two hundred and forty dollars for his three hours of midday extramarital bliss. It was unsustainable, spending that much on a hotel room, and Owen, after the second meeting with Madison, didn’t think she’d notice the absence of soft sheets and wireless access, the fact that there wasn’t a business center off the lobby or a complimentary breakfast buffet complete with a make-your-own waffle station. (She did like the warm cookie, however.) At the Doubletree, Owen had had her on the floor the first time, and then up against a window that looked out over a Bed Bath & Beyond, and finally they’d taken a shower together and washed each other all over with little tiny bars of extremely smelly soap.
“Turn the lights off,” Madison said to him now. “I don’t want to see any black and curlies.”
Owen flipped off the lights and started to unbuckle his belt.
“Take your top off,” he instructed.
Madison slouched out of her hoodie and then reached down and pulled her T-shirt over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were magnificent. They defied all known laws of breast gravity.
“Now your jeans,” he said.
Madison ran her hands over her breasts rather theatrically and then slowly down her stomach to her jeans. She slipped a hand inside and looked Owen directly in the eyes. Like so many of Madison’s moves, it had a rehearsed quality, like she had practiced it in front of a mirror after watching a lot of porn. Kids these days! Stop it, stop it, he told himself, this is not your problem!
“Do you want me to do anything special for you?” she asked.
“Um, let me think about that,” Owen said. “What kind of special?”
Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door. A real pounding.
“Is that your wife?”
“I would be truly surprised,” said Owen. “Let me check.”
Before he could look through the peephole he heard a familiar voice. “I know you’re in there, Owen.”
It was Izzy.
Of course, thought Owen.
“Let me in, Owen, or I’m gonna make a real stink.”
“Just go home, Izzy,” Owen said through the door. “I’ll call you later.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Well, you’re not coming in here.”
“Let me in or I’ll do something bad to your car.”
“Jesus, Izzy.”
“I’ll put rocks in your gas tank, Owen. I will fuck your shit up.”
“Calm down, Izzy.”
“I just want to talk to you. I swear.”
Owen was pretty sure she wasn’t joking. He didn’t want anything done to his car. He slid the chain off the door and opened it.
Izzy forced her way inside.
“Oh, nice, Owen. Real nice. I wonder how Lucy’s gonna feel about this.”
“Who’s Lucy?” Madison asked.
“Oh, shut up, you little skank,” said Izzy.
“Who’s Lucy?” Madison asked again. Being called a skank to her face didn’t seem to faze her in the least.
“My wife.”
Madison turned to Izzy and appeared genuinely perplexed. “Then who are you?”
“I’m his girlfriend,” said Izzy. “And you must be the preteen with the freshly waxed undercarriage.”
“Excuse me?” Madison said.
“You heard me,” said Izzy.
“Where are you getting this stuff, Izzy?” asked Owen.
“Oh, you idiot,” Izzy said. “I know everything. I’ve got you wired.”
Madison pulled on her T-shirt and sweatshirt and then headed out the door.
“I’ll call you,” Owen said.
“Oh no, he won’t,” said Izzy. “Say your good-byes, sweetheart.”
“Whatever, lady,” Madison said. “Enjoy the rest of your life.”
“You ginormous shit.”
“You told me two days ago that this was temporary,” said Owen. “Forget two days ago. We both always knew what this was, Izzy. You’re not allowed to act like this.”
“I never said that you could humiliate me,” she said. “I don’t remember signing off on that.”
“How is this humiliating you?”
“Oh, come on, Owen. Come on.”
“Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Izzy. You’re not making any sense. I’m going out to my car now. We can talk about this later after you calm down.”
“I’m not gonna calm down!”
“Well, I’m not going to talk to you until you do.”
Owen grabbed his belt and his jacket and sort of skipped-slash-ran out to his car while Izzy chased him, hitting him on his back with both of her fists.
“Goddamn it, Owen! Do not run away from me! I can’t believe you think this is okay! You owe me more than this, you prick! This is not okay!”
Somehow he managed to get into his car and lock the door.
He couldn’t find his keys. Please don’t tell me I left them in the hotel room. He dug around deep in his jeans pockets but they weren’t there. His old barn jacket was draped over his arm, and it had a million different pockets. He started searching through them as fast as he—
Crash!
Izzy was standing by the door of her pickup truck, holding an empty wine bottle up in the air. “Get out of the car, asshole! Get out of the car or I will fuck your car up! I will fuck your life up, Owen! I’m not kidding, I will fuck your whole shitty little fake life up!”
Owen could feel the car key, but it was inside one of those strange pockets-behind-a-pocket that you had to figure out exactly how to get into—
Crash!
Izzy, it turned out, had a lot of empty wine bottles in her truck. Like a conscientious drunk, whenever her recycling bin started to fill up too fast, she tucked a few in the tiny backseat under a black contractor’s bag filled with giveaways and then offloaded them at faraway places, shopping-center dumpsters and gas-station garbage cans.
“I’m not discussing this until you are calm,” yelled Owen through a cracked window.
Izzy threw the bottle straight at his face. It bounced off the window and exploded on the asphalt.
Keys!
The crazier Izzy got, the calmer Owen got. It happened when he fought with Lucy too, although he and Lucy rarely fought. (They rarely fought! They had a home and a child together! Why were they doing this? Why am I doing this?) A rare, completely apoplectic Lucy once told him that having a real fight with him was impossible, because the madder she got, the more he started to sound like a psychiatrist addressing a woman in a straitjacket. It was impossible to get a reaction out of him. And a reaction was clearly what Izzy wanted.
Fortunately, Owen had backed his car into the parking spot, subconsciously setting himself up for a quick getaway. By the time he got the engine started, Izzy was standing directly in front of his car wielding two jumbo bottles of Chilean chardonnay like martial arts weapons. He couldn’t move the car without running her over.
He began to slowly ease the car forward, all the while saying soothing things through the crack in the window. Izzy wasn’t having any of it. She started banging on the hood with the wine bottles. They were thick, though, and didn’t break.
As he finally managed to pull away, Owen yelled out the window, “I’m just letting you calm down! We’ll talk about this later, I promise.”
She launched one of the wine bottles, and it bounced off the hood of his car, denting it pretty bad.
Owen drove around the back roads of Beekman for a while, collecting his thoughts. He wasn’t going to go home or to work, because he was afraid Izzy would track him down and go at him with the wine bottles again. Lucy was in the city seeing Dr.
Hubble, their dentist, and Wyatt was with the afternoon sitter, so Owen was free and clear. He’d blocked out the afternoon for Madison, anyway.
He finally parked his car on a small private dirt road that bisected a bigger dirt road, the main dirt road, the historic one that the local dirt-road wingnuts were always going on and on about preserving. Beekman was overrun with dirt roads, and every last one of them was a money pit. Every year, potholes the size of kiddie pools materialized, and tax dollars were siphoned off to fill them in, smooth things down, regrade, and sprinkle them with nonpotable water in order to keep the dust down in the summer. It was a huge waste of money, Owen thought, but that was a position he did not mention in polite company. It was impossible to figure out who was on what side of the big dirt-road fight, and Owen found it was wisest to keep his mouth shut. It was one of those local battles with no end in sight, like the war over the occupancy permit for the Zalinskys’ garden shed–turned–home office, which, depending on whom you believed, either did or did not extend two feet over the original footprint.
He stared out his window at some rolling farmland dotted with white houses with screened porches. The leaves had all turned, but he’d been so preoccupied lately he’d barely noticed. It was clear to him he had made a fundamental mistake along the way, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He really didn’t believe Izzy was in love with him. Up until today’s wine-bottle-chucking fiasco, she certainly hadn’t acted like a woman in love. It’s possible he had underestimated his importance to her, but it was just as likely that what her ex-husband Christopher had said to him outside Izzy’s house that evening not long ago was true: she was five kinds of crazy. Maybe it was as simple as that.
Should he tell Lucy about it? Did he have a responsibility to let her know what was going on, the turn things had recently taken? He didn’t think he did, but he didn’t want Lucy to be blindsided by some nutjob either.
Contain it, he thought. Talk to Izzy, calm her down, figure it out.
* * *
“God, I miss takeout,” said Lucy.
She was sitting up in bed with Ben, sharing green chicken curry and pad see ew. It was Monday, and she and Ben were having a late lunch. When Ben texted that he had the afternoon free, Lucy arranged for an after-school babysitter and told Owen she was going to the dentist.
“They don’t have takeout in Beekman?” Ben asked.
“They don’t deliver. Owen and I fight over who has to go pick it up, and by the time we start to eat, it’s cold and we’re mad at each other.”
“Why do you live there?”
“I forget. The air smells good?”
“You’ve got too much nature up there. It’s not healthy.”
“I saw a rat on the subway tracks in Grand Central on my way here,” said Lucy. “It was as big as a rabbit.”
“Yeah, see, that’s just the right amount of nature,” said Ben.
“I miss eating takeout in bed,” said Lucy. “I miss having sex, ordering food, and eating it naked in bed. And drinking out of real wineglasses.”
“I’ll buy you some wineglasses,” said Ben. “That much we can fix.”
“We don’t use any glass in our house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when my son was about two, he would pick up a glass and ask, ‘That’s glass?’ and if you said yes, he would hurl it to the floor and watch it shatter. He found it unbelievably exciting. Finally I got rid of all of our glasses and replaced them with plastic.”
“Would he still do that?”
“Who knows? Probably not. I guess I just haven’t been in the mood to find out,” said Lucy. “Now he does this thing where whenever he spots a knife on the kitchen counter he picks it up and yells, ‘It’s knife time!’”
“Oh my God.”
“Then, if you make the mistake of showing any reaction whatsoever, he runs away from you, brandishing the knife. I almost had a heart attack the first time it happened. He had a twelve-inch chef’s knife in his hand and wouldn’t stop running around the dining-room table.”
“So what do you do?”
“I act like it’s no big deal. I get completely relaxed and move super-slowly and say things like ‘Wyatt, give Mommy the knife’ until I can disarm him. I’d say I’m about two weeks away from throwing away all of our knives,” said Lucy. “I’ll just stick to soft foods for the next ten years. Plastic wineglasses and soft foods.”
After they ate, they made love again, and then Lucy got up and started to get dressed.
“I don’t want you to leave.”
Lucy was buttoning her blouse, and Ben was in bed, looking at her. “I don’t want to leave either. I’m not even supposed to be here today. I told Owen I was going to the dentist.”
“I mean I don’t want you to leave ever,” Ben said. And then he smiled a smile Lucy felt like she would remember for the rest of her life.
The next morning it was raining, and the wind was blowing very hard. The tree branches were whipping around frantically, dropping their leaves the way they did some years, more or less all in a single day. Lucy was packing Wyatt’s lunch, daydreaming about Ben, and wondering if the storm meant they would lose power.
“Any cavities?” Owen asked. He was at the table drinking coffee, scrolling through things on his phone.
“What?”
“At the dentist. Yesterday in the city. I thought you went to see Dr. Hubble.”
“Yes, actually,” said Lucy. She thought fast. “Three. I have to go in next week to get the top two filled, and then the week after for the bottom one.”
More Ben, Lucy thought. I just figured out how to get more Ben.
“You never get cavities.”
“I know. Hubble wanted to know if our water out here has fluoride in it,” said Lucy. “Does it?”
“I don’t see how it could,” said Owen. “It’s from the well.”
“He said we should get fluoride drops for Wyatt,” said Lucy. My goodness, I’ve become a good liar. “Otherwise he’s going to end up with a million cavities.”
“Isn’t fluoride supposed to be bad for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean bad for you. Like microwave ovens and high-voltage power lines.”
Lucy looked at her husband and said, “Are you channeling Susan Howard now?”
“Is Susan into that?” asked Owen.
“Yeah. Susan goes nuts about microwaves. She once saw Claire put Tupperware into a microwave and she lectured us about breast cancer for two hours,” said Lucy. “And that’s when Susan stopped being invited to ladies’ night.”
The Beekman Café was across from the elementary school and right next to St. Andrews, an old Episcopal church with a picturesque graveyard. The little square—made up of the school, the church, the café, and a run-down, two-pump gas station—was about two miles from downtown Beekman in an area otherwise occupied by graceful old houses with mature gardens tucked behind stone fences. Every few years, a shiny-eyed newcomer would come up with plans to turn the humble café into a swank wine bar or tapas restaurant, only to be harrumphed into silence at local planning-board meetings. And Lucy had to admit, part of what made Beekman appealing was that it was unlikely to appeal to the sort of people who couldn’t imagine living more than a five-minute walk from an overpriced glass of pinot noir.
Wyatt had missed the bus that morning—it was a sock-related meltdown, the specifics of which Lucy never did figure out, but the fifth pair he tried on were apparently okay—so Lucy had to drop him off at school. It was still raining hard but the air was strangely warm, and it made Lucy feel like she might have a fever. She’d decided to put off her plan to get the winter clothes down from the attic and grab a cup of coffee instead. She pulled her car into the gravel parking lot in front of the Beekman Café, soaked her left Merrell in a puddle, and hurried inside.
Susan, Claire, and Sunny Bang were sitting together at a small round table, and they waved her over the minute she walked thro
ugh the door.
“Lucy! We’re doing a big thing at St. Andrews. The Blessing of the Animals. You guys have to come,” said Claire, a mug of cappuccino curdling in front of her.
“We don’t go to church,” said Lucy. “We’re not religious.”
“This is not going to be religious,” said Susan.
“It’s gonna be a little bit religious,” Claire corrected Susan. “It’s at a church, and they’re going to be blessed.”
“It’s an ecumenical blessing,” said Susan. “It’s like me saying, ‘Claire, I bless you.’ Is that religious?”
“If we were standing in front of the altar inside a church and you were a priest? Yes, that would be religious. I don’t care. I want Louisa and Blake to start going to church anyway. I just can’t get Edmund out of bed on Sundays to go.”
“We’re trying to raise awareness about the unresolved employment situation of Colleen Lowell,” Susan said. “The men are all going to wear skirts as a show of solidarity.”
“Let me grab a cup of coffee,” Lucy said. “Then you can tell me all about it.”
“The kids are going to walk down the aisle in a big procession, with their pets, and then Reverend Elsbith is going to bless them. The animals, and the kids too. Oh, and they’re all going to be wearing only white,” said Susan.
“The animals?” asked Lucy.
“The kids. We’re not dressing up the animals,” said Susan. “Although maybe we could put garlands around their necks or something.”
“I’m not making any fucking garlands,” said Sunny Bang.
“I’ll make them,” said Claire. “I like doing that sort of thing.”
“Jesus,” Sunny Bang said under her breath.
“Sunny, I’m not a moron because I like making garlands,” said Claire.
“I did not say you were a moron, Claire.”
“I think garlands would be nice,” said Susan. “I’m going to write that down. Claire, garlands.”
“Wyatt doesn’t have white clothes,” said Lucy. “At least, not any white pants. That much I know.”