Lucy remembered it like it was yesterday. Juicy? Who thinks things like that? Who has the luxury of juicy?
What Lucy had wanted while she was standing in line at the Gourmet Garage was this: A baby. A child of her own. Her egg, Owen’s sperm, her womb, period. Or, rather, no period—every time her period arrived, it felt like a knife to her heart. They had done three rounds of IVF—three was all they could responsibly afford—and Lucy had found out that morning that the third one hadn’t worked. And she’d burst into tears again, right there in line. She hated that woman, the juicy woman, because she was standing in line with her two adorable kids climbing up her legs, complaining into her cell phone about wanting something juicy in her life.
But now it was many years later, and Lucy had gotten what she wanted: a child. They’d left the city so they could afford a decent house. She and Owen had a happy marriage. She had close friends, a nice community.
But she did not have juicy. She was a lifetime away from juicy, she was miles, light-years, eons away from juicy, and now it seemed that juicy was what she wanted.
Lucy remembered her lowest point in what felt like years full of low points, infertility-wise. She’d just gotten her period, two weeks after yet another costly and painful medical procedure—although by no means the costliest and most painful she would endure—and she’d been sobbing off and on for forty-eight hours.
She was in bed, watching a segment on Sixty Minutes about the genocide in the Ivory Coast. Apparently, the rebels would come into a village and go from home to home forcing fathers to have sex with their daughters in full view of the rest of the family, on threat of death. Once rumors of this spread, village men wisely decided to switch huts with each other at night, so they wouldn’t be made to have sex with their own daughters in front of their own wives and sons. Still, the whole thing was incredibly horrific and grim and as the segment unfolded, Lucy felt for a moment that it put her situation in perspective. Face it, she said to herself, things could be worse. You have food and clean water, a loving husband and air-conditioning—air-conditioning was one of Lucy’s all-time-favorite things—and no one is breaking into your hut, raping you, and killing your family.
Then the story homed in on a thirteen-year-old girl who had been forced to have sex with a neighbor who was pretending to be her father and then made to watch as both of her brothers were killed. Next, she was abducted and taken to the rebels’ camp deep in the jungle and held as a sex slave, being forced to have sex with up to thirty men in one day. After about six months, she managed to escape and make her way to a refugee camp. It was at the refugee camp, in front of the rolling cameras, that she discovered she was four months pregnant, carrying a rebel-rapist’s child.
And Lucy thought: How come everybody can get pregnant except for me?
That’s infertility. It takes over.
Every woman Lucy saw on the street back then was pregnant or pushing a stroller; every old friend who called out of the blue was announcing a new baby. Facebook was impossible. The holidays were impossible. Everything hurt, time was running out, what were they going to do, how much would they be willing to spend, would they consider adoption—they would, of course they would, they’d agreed at the beginning, back when it first looked like there might be a problem, but both of them secretly believed that there wasn’t, wouldn’t be, a big problem—but as each try failed, even talking about it had become dangerous emotional ground for them to tread.
IVF was all numbers. She and Owen finally scraped together enough money for a fourth round. Only five eggs were retrieved. Four were good on day three, two were good on day five, both were implanted. Two weeks later, a ten p.m. phone call from Dr. Hamilton.
“Congratulations,” he’d said. “You’re pregnant.”
*
Owen parked his car on a short residential street near the river and walked the seven blocks to the address Izzy had sent him. He was not entirely sure what was going on.
After their chance meeting at GroceryLand, Izzy had e-mailed him and suggested he stop by so they could talk about Izzy and Owen, their children’s book about the unlikely friendship between a mouse and a hippo. She said she already had a few preliminary thoughts she wanted to run by him. She ended with a ;*, which he looked up online and found meant a wink and a kiss. Early afternoon, flirty woman’s house, e-mail winks and kisses—was it possible she actually intended to write a children’s book with him? That made no sense! No sense whatsoever.
Had he implied he was a writer of some sort? Had he suggested he fancied himself an illustrator? Or said he worked in publishing? Or proclaimed a love of children’s literature? No! None of those things. Owen’s mind circled back through his two encounters with Izzy to see if there was anything to hang this children’s-book idea on, any logical reason why she would have invited him, alone, to her house at two o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. There wasn’t. But this didn’t make much sense either. And before the Arrangement, he would have ignored it altogether. But now, well, he was curious, if nothing else.
He rang the doorbell. He forced himself not to look up and down the street like a prospective adulterer and instead tried to stand up straight, like an aspiring children’s-book author, like a man who had absolutely nothing to hide.
Izzy opened the door and smiled at him. It was a wicked, sexy half smile that reminded him of the Ellen Barkin of fifteen years ago.
“Well, hello there,” she said.
“Just so you know, my wife and I have an open marriage,” said Owen.
Izzy started to laugh.
“What?” said Owen.
“You’re in my bed. You already slept with me. You don’t need to lie to me now.”
“I’m not lying, I swear—”
“Don’t talk,” said Izzy. “Just lie there and be all quiet and pretty.”
Owen suddenly felt self-conscious. He pulled the sheet up to his chest and stared at the chandelier hanging over the bed. Lucy would kill for a chandelier like that.
“Okay, you can talk,” said Izzy. “Explain yourself.”
“My wife and I have a good marriage, we’re happy, and we love each other, but we’ve decided to sort of give each other a free pass for a couple of months to bypass any midlife crises or things like that. Like the way the Amish kids get a rumspringa when they turn eighteen.”
Izzy nodded her head slowly, like she was taking it all in, like she was thoughtfully processing what he had just said, and then she burst out laughing.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m just thinking of all the things my idiot husband must have said to the women he fucked while he was married to me,” she said. “I can’t imagine it. He probably told people I was okay with it.”
“No, we do, we have an open arrangement.”
“Will she sign a note to that effect? ‘Dear Izzy: You hereby have my permission to fuck my husband, signed’—what is her name?”