The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  “You’ve really developed a philosophy about all this,” said Lucy.

  “Keep in mind, today is a good day. Not every day is a good one in my head, not by a long shot. And I do realize that after all of our high-minded plans, our ‘new paradigm’ and my feminist ideals, I’ve been reduced to a stereotype.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m economically dependent on a man and I’m too old to start over.”

  “You’re not too old to start over,” said Lucy. “Plenty of women do.”

  “I want to have Christmas with my son and my grandkids and not have to share them with Thom and his new wife. And I know this sounds bad, but I’m not interested in reducing my standard of living by sixty-five percent at this point in my life. I don’t want to move into a condo next to a shopping center in Weehawken and go on Internet dates with seventy-year-old men. I just don’t.”

  “Did you, um, did you ever…” Lucy made a hand gesture to indicate sex.

  “Yes. A couple of times. All disasters. Not worth talking about.”

  “Where’d you find them?”

  “The Internet. Plus one old boyfriend I tracked down on Facebook. None of it really worked for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s just say, the earth did not shake,” said Victoria. She took a big sip of wine. “Who knows, maybe I’m just not that into sex. That’s another thing I’ve had to deal with in all this. I don’t think I’m really that sexual of a person. It just doesn’t matter that much to me. And those years of fighting with Thom over what he called my low sex drive—well, turns out he was right.”

  “Maybe you’re a lesbian,” Lucy said.

  “I’ve thought about it. I just don’t think I am. And if I am, what difference does it make? Even in nature, any females, let’s say female dogs—dogs my age, dogs who can barely still reproduce—are those dogs having sex all the time? Are they spending their energy trying to get laid, feeling bad about not getting laid, feeling jealous of the younger dogs who are getting laid instead of them? I don’t think so. I think that would be considered extremely abnormal in the animal world.”

  “Couldn’t he still leave you for her?”

  “Sure he could. He almost did, twice, but both times he came back in less than a week.”

  “How come?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m not sure. She’s married and has three kids, and I get the sense she doesn’t want to blow up her life any more than I do. But who knows? There’s nothing I can do about it if that’s what they want.”

  “But if he really, truly loves her—”

  “It’s not love, Lucy,” said Victoria, cutting her off. “He’s in a fog. He’s temporarily lost his mind, and I refuse to sit back and let him ruin six innocent people’s lives because of it. The fact that my life happens to be one of them is almost beside the point.”

  This is not a fog, thought Lucy. What I’m feeling is not a fog. It’s the opposite of a fog. It’s the clearest I’ve been in a long, long time. Ben is with his girls. And I am in love with Ben.

  “Men and their pricks,” Victoria said, signaling the bartender for another round. “Honestly, I don’t think we can begin to understand them. I think if we really knew what went on with them, the strongest emotion we’d feel is pity.”

  It was getting dark by the time Lucy walked back to Ben’s building. Her mind was spinning, and she was a little drunk. She and Victoria had spent the afternoon drinking, and through it all, the voice in Lucy’s head wouldn’t stop. I am in love with Ben. Ben is with his girls, and I am in love with Ben.

  I’m here. Downstairs. Can you come down for one minute?

  I’ve got my girls up here.

  I know. I’m sorry. But please. I need to see you.

  Be down in five.

  When Ben came out, they stepped around the corner. He kissed her, and for a moment she forgot her plan, she forgot why she was there other than to kiss and be kissed, other than to spend five minutes with Ben.

  “I just need to know if this is real,” Lucy finally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Us. This,” said Lucy. “I need to know if there is an us.”

  “There is an us,” said Ben.

  “Okay,” said Lucy. “Tell me more.”

  “I want us to be together.”

  “You’re going to have to be more specific,” said Lucy. “I need specifics.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Specifics aren’t going to freak you out?”

  “I need to know what your intentions are. What you want, I mean. With me.”

  Ben looked her in the eyes and said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Lucy stopped breathing.

  The world stopped turning.

  “I want to wake up with you every morning and go to bed with you every night,” he said. “I want to figure out a way to blend our families. I want to get to know Wyatt and be the best stepdad any kid has ever had. And, yes, that means I want to marry you, Lucy, but I am not going to propose to a woman who is married to somebody else. That’s just not something I’m prepared to do.”

  “Okay,” said Lucy. “Go back up to your girls,” she said. “I’ll text you later.”

  Twenty-Two

  There is such a thing as human limitation, whether by nature or by fate.

  —Constance Waverly

  The Eros Manifesto

  Kelly was sitting at the midpoint of a long cherrywood conference table, flanked by her lawyers. She looked good, Gordon thought as he walked into the room and took his seat at the table, directly across from her. She was wearing huge Gucci sunglasses and a tight dress with a plunging neckline. She still looked pretty goddamn succulent, he thought, like the cocktail waitress he’d gone berserk for nearly seven years earlier. This was a first for Gordon, divorcing a wife who still looked young, and he remembered his other divorces, and how it had always seemed to him that he was still in the season of the rising sap while across from him sat some angry, bony old shrew who thought it was his moral duty to have sex with nobody but her for the rest of his time on this planet. Back when Gordon was forty-two, his thirty-seven-year-old wife looked old, and when he was fifty, his forty-year-old wife looked old, and when he was sixty-three, Elaine looked like a stringy plastic handbag, but now he was seventy. He finally felt old, and Kelly, well, Kelly was still young.

  The eye, though. The missing-eye thing was unfortunate.

  The sunglasses did a good job of hiding it, but Gordon knew that behind the left lens there was nothing but a flesh-colored patch. Of course, Kelly would get a prosthetic eye, the best prosthetic eye money could buy, but still—the woman was missing an eyeball. You don’t bounce back from that, Gordon figured. There was no known cure for No Eyeball.

  His lawyers did their best to put up a fight on his behalf but Gordon overruled them again and again. Kelly wanted the triplex on Park Avenue and planned to gut it. Done. She wanted the ranch they never went to in Sun Valley. Done. She asked for the place on St. John, and she undoubtedly expected Gordon to argue, since he’d managed to hold on to it through his three previous divorces. With a small, almost imperceptible gesture, Gordon indicated his wishes to his attorneys. The last time Gordon had been on St. John, he’d opened a drawer in the master suite and smelled a smell he hadn’t encountered in years, a smell he could only think of as the Smell of Elaine. It wafted up from the drawer paper and nearly floored him. So, St. John, Kelly could have it. Done.

  The dollar amount they began to circle around was truly astronomical, so high that Gordon’s lawyers called for a short break and retired to a distant conference room to slow things down and to attempt to talk some sense into their overly accommodating client.

  * * *

  Lucy was out in the backyard, near the edge of the woods, watching Wyatt. It was snowing, and Wyatt was trying to build a shelter out of sticks. He was very excited about the snow, and he had it in his head
that if he moved quickly enough, he could build a house that would keep out the snow.

  “I’m going to sleep in the shelter,” said Wyatt.

  “You better get lots of sticks, then,” said Lucy.

  “You and me and Dada are going to sleep in the shelter.”

  “Then you really need lots and lots and lots of sticks.”

  Lucy pulled out her phone, but she couldn’t get cell service. She wasn’t sure if it was related to the snowstorm or something about the distance she was from the house, but she found it frustrating. She wanted to text Ben. Pretty much all Lucy wanted to do was see Ben, call Ben, text Ben, and think about Ben.

  Susan Howard had filed for divorce. Lucy didn’t know the whole story, but Claire told her Susan had found some letters, love letters apparently, hidden in the back of Rowan’s Jeep. Secret love letters. It was a very old-fashioned way to break up. And according to that morning’s New York Post, Gordon and Kelly Allen were getting a divorce. That one was less of a surprise, but still.

  These things always come in waves, Lucy thought. And then: They also come in threes.

  There had been a tarot card reader at one of the Beekman PTA fund-raisers the year before. It was a ladies-only event, with Moscow mules and mojitos and finger foods and a handful of “super-fun things” the ladies on the committee had dreamed up, like an old-fashioned photo booth and a decorate-your-own-gigantic-wineglass station (You had me at merlot), and three tables dedicated to bunco.

  There was a tremendous amount of planning that went into these fund-raisers, committee meetings and e-mail chains and food-prepping parties and team trips to the discount wine emporium, which is why the tarot card reader showing up unannounced struck everyone as such a surprise. Susan Howard was the chairwoman of the committee, though, and the tarot card reader was one of her middle-of-the-night brainstorms and she hadn’t bothered to run it past anyone else involved. The woman Susan found worked out of a storefront in New Paltz and she weighed about three hundred pounds and she either was or was not a genuine psychic.

  The Good Christian Women of the town huddled in the corner of the room and whispered among themselves, oozing disapproval. There were only about twelve Good Christian Women in Beekman, but a lot more came out of the woodwork once you introduced the element of sorcery to a PTA fund-raiser. There was talk about how inappropriate it was, how the PTA should not be involved with this, how it was a community event, and maybe they should go ahead and get the karaoke started early.

  Susan got more and more frantic as the charges of witchcraft and the dark arts began circling the local golf club’s dilapidated ballroom. “It’s just for fun! It doesn’t mean anything! I’m a Sunday-school teacher, you guys, I mean, give me some credit!

  “Are you hearing this?” Susan had said to Lucy. “Have these women all lost their minds?” Even Claire, relatively reasonable Claire, was overheard saying, “Well, I would have put a stop to it if I’d had the chance, but this is the first I heard of it.”

  “Please, just do it, Lucy,” Susan said. “For me.”

  And of all the things Susan Howard was always pestering Lucy to do—judge the class scarecrow competition, make chili for the chili cook-off, man the Milk-a-Goat booth at the spring festival—this one seemed like the most painless. So Lucy paid her thirty-dollar donation and sat down across from the woman who either was or was not a psychic and watched as she shuffled cards and laid them out in the shape of a large cross and said a bunch of things Lucy could no longer recall. She remembered only one part of the reading, but it had stuck with her, and Lucy found herself thinking about it at the strangest times.

  “You have a son,” the woman had asked Lucy. Stated, really.

  “I do.”

  “Just the one, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman turned over three more cards, all in a row.

  “Your son has very strong karma.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy remembered asking. “Is that good or bad?”

  “It’s neither,” the woman had said. “It’s just very, very strong.”

  * * *

  After Gordon and his team left the conference room, Kelly turned to one of her lawyers and said, “I want to hurt him.”

  “So far he’s giving you everything you’ve asked for,” said Lawyer Number One.

  “I realize that,” said Kelly. “What I’m asking you is, how can I hurt him?”

  “He wants the child,” said Lawyer Number Two.

  “Yes, according to the postnup you brought us, all he really wants is physical custody of your son, with you being granted essentially unrestricted visitation rights,” said Lawyer Number One. He flipped through the document and found the appropriate sections, running his finger down the text while he summarized it for her. “Not even essentially. You would have unrestricted visitation rights. He proposes purchasing an estate near the Eagle’s Perch so that you can be with Rocco whenever you want. The assumption, it seems, is that you could reside wherever you chose and be able to spend time in Beekman with your son, as much as you want, and at your convenience.”

  “And I could fight that?”

  “You never signed the postnup,” said Lawyer Number Two. “You can fight for whatever you want.”

  Kelly took off her dark glasses and looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. It was strange, still, to see the patch where her left eye used to be. When she was fourteen, her creepy science teacher Mr. Skinner used to massage her shoulders during class and say, “You don’t have to worry about science, sweetie. Your face is your fortune.”

  Well, now her fortune was her fortune.

  Fuck you, Mr. Skinner.

  Kelly knew her happiness wasn’t to be found living full-time in Beekman, but she also knew this: Beekman was the best place for her son. It might be filled with boring old housewives who volunteered to be lunch ladies, but for a kid who stood to inherit billions, the chance to be a stone’s throw from a normal childhood was priceless. Rocco’s best friend, some kid named Theo, lived in a house that was smaller, square-footage-wise, than Rocco’s playroom. Kelly knew this only because Gordon had found the school directory and looked up the kid’s address on some real estate website and then told her about it. And just last week, Rocco had asked her if they could go to Hershey Park. A kid on his soccer team named Brannon—the same Brannon who had taught Rocco the word titty—told him it was the best place ever. Not Aspen, not Nantucket, not Gstaad. Not even Disneyland. Hershey Park.

  And it was good for him, Kelly knew. All those things Gordon had wanted, the rock collections and the sledding and the little American flags, all of that was real. She might have been raised in a trailer park by a single mom with a weakness for bad boys and a taste for methamphetamine, but Kelly knew what childhood was supposed to be like. And Rocco had it.

  But all of that didn’t take away from the fact that Kelly wanted to cause Gordon some pain. She wanted the loss of her eye to cost him something, something more than just houses and stock portfolios and cold hard cash.

  And so she sat alone in her lawyers’ bathroom for a while and had herself a good long think.

  * * *

  Izzy had gone radio silent on Owen, so completely silent that he began to worry about her. No calls, no texts, no menacing emoticons—nothing. When he saw Sunny Bang at soccer practice that week, he pulled her aside and asked her if she’d talked to Izzy.

  “She’s gone,” said Sunny Bang.

  “What do you mean, gone?” Owen asked. “She’s dead?”

  “No, you idiot,” said Sunny Bang. “She’s gone. She disappeared. Nobody knows where she went.”

  “Someone has to know. She can’t have just vanished.”

  “She did.”

  “What about her house? What about her store?”

  “She hired a lawyer from Poughkeepsie to handle everything. He’s selling her house, liquidating the inventory of her store, getting rid of all of her stuff. He won’t say where she went or where she wan
ts the money sent.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Owen.

  “It’s really unhealthy,” said Sunny Bang. “She needs support. She needs the Sunny Bang meal-delivery treatment, at least. I would drive her to her chemo appointments. We weren’t best friends or anything, but that’s what I do.”

  “She told me she didn’t want any treatment,” said Owen. “She said she was too far gone. I figured she was upset and she’d change her mind.”

  “You’re never too far gone. My uncle had stage-five colon cancer and the doctors said he had three months left. It’s four years later and he’s still alive.”

  “There’s no such thing as stage-five cancer.”

  “There is in Korea,” said Sunny Bang.

  “Your uncle still lives in Korea?”

  “No, he lives in Jersey. ‘Every day is a gift,’ he says. He has to crap in a bag but he seems pretty happy.”

  Conversations with Sunny Bang sometimes went like this, Owen thought. Half of you felt like you were talking to a wise woman from an esteemed and ancient culture, the other half left each conversation genuinely confused.

  “Well, where do you think she’d go?” said Owen.

  “I don’t know. We weren’t friends like that. I don’t know her people. She’s not even on Facebook under her real name.”

  “What about her ex-husband?”

  “Christopher? He doesn’t know anything,” said Sunny Bang. “Not about the cancer, not about where she might be.”

  “Did he say anything? Anything at all?”

  “Not really,” Sunny said. “Just that he thought something was up when a delivery guy showed up at his front door and gave him his great-grandfather’s desk.”

  * * *

  When Kelly returned to the conference room, even her lawyers had no idea what she was planning to propose. They had been hanging out around the conference table, leaning way back in their chairs, billing their hours while they texted each other about how their client was the luckiest goddamn floozy on the planet. They joked about trying to seduce her and then marrying her and how they’d refuse to sign a prenup. They speculated about what she looked like without her dark glasses on and whether or not she’d be willing to wear them during sex and/or blow jobs.