That Monday, Mr. Lowell had come to school wearing a long, tasteful gray skirt, but for some reason nobody thought anything of it. It was so long and so gray it almost passed for a pair of trousers, that was all anyone could remember. On Tuesday, he wore a dress and a pair of low heels. Eyebrows were raised, to say the least, and the teachers began to talk among themselves, but Mrs. G., the principal, was off the grid in Tulum for a yoga retreat that week and no one knew quite what to do. Some said that on Wednesday he added makeup; others insisted he’d been wearing makeup on Tuesday as well. Thursday morning, he walked into the kindergarten classroom wearing a dress, high heels, full makeup, fake lashes, and a blond wig. He wrote his new name on the whiteboard and explained to his students that he was now a woman. The fourth-grade teacher, a strict Baptist, tracked down Mrs. G. in Tulum, and she took an early, angry flight home.
*
“Wyatt’s got enough to deal with,” said Lucy. “How’s he going to get his head around this?”
“The way he gets his head around anything,” said Owen. “He’ll think about it for a month or two, talk in circles about it, and then move on to the next thing he wants to understand, like how astronauts go poop in outer space.”
“At least he has a sense of humor,” said Lucy. “That’s very unusual, you know, for kids like Wyatt. At least he knows when something is funny.”
“You’re his mom,” said Owen. “Of course he has a sense of humor.”
“Awww,” said Lucy. “That little shit Brannon is the one who taught him the word fucker.”
“He was going to learn that one sooner or later.”
“I know.”
“I think it’s going to be good for this place,” said Owen. “We have to hope people will accept Wyatt for who he is and not expect him to be like everybody else. Maybe this whole Mrs. Lowell thing will be a blessing in disguise.”
“Well, the ladies of Beekman are going nuts about it,” said Lucy. “My phone blew up from all the texts flying this afternoon. Is it okay if I go to the school-board meeting next week?”
“Of course. Go ahead,” said Owen. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
*
“You realize your wife is an idiot,” Izzy said to Owen after they’d had sex the next day.
Owen had come back for seconds. He hadn’t planned on it, not exactly, not right away, but Izzy had sent him a text around noon, nearly all emoticons. He had to hunt for his reading glasses in order to see the text clearly. Rumpled bed, fireworks, hands folded in prayer, winky eye, winky eye, dancing bear, and then two o’clock with a long row of question marks after it.
“Actually, Lucy’s a lot smarter than I am,” said Owen.
“Well, you’re an idiot too,” said Izzy. “You’re both morons if you think this is going to work. This is a divorce you guys are looking at. This is a divorce in slow motion.”
“We’re trying to avoid getting a divorce.”
“Well, you’re going about it the wrong way.”
“What would be the right way?”
“You really want to know?” Izzy said.
“Sure.”
Izzy climbed back on top of him and started grinding herself against him, trying to see if he was good for another go.
“Only. Have sex. With each other,” she said, and then she started to laugh like a mental patient.
Izzy was like that. She was a different world. Not a better world, not a kinder or gentler one, but a different one. Owen had read somewhere that the brain needs novelty. Novelty is what keeps the neurons from dying. Novelty makes new connections; it rewires things, it repairs, it renews. Drive a different route to work, the article suggested. Order something new from your favorite restaurant. Have sex with someone who’s the polar opposite of your wife.
The best word to describe how Izzy fucked was angrily. She was explosive and hungry and passionate and crazy and would allow more or less anything to penetrate her anywhere. Owen had gone out and gotten himself some strange—but it turned out to be pretty strange strange. Izzy asked to be tied up, she liked to bite, she begged to be spanked, and she had a sex-toy collection that was truly astonishing. One time, Owen opened up her dishwasher, and there were two gigantic rubber penises in the silverware compartment. What the hell is going on around here? he wondered, but then he chose to put it out of his mind.
Another thing: Izzy was highly orgasmic. She came, a lot. Many, many, many times. Izzy came so much and so often that it was, paradoxically, difficult to satisfy her, to completely satisfy her—it was like trying to fill a bucket that had a hole on the bottom. No matter what Owen gave her, it was never enough.
Owen had gotten so used to his hands being guided away by Lucy, with her “Not tonight” and “Please no, not there,” her distinctly unsexy desire to keep her T-shirt on during sex (he’d put his foot down on that one, thankfully), that for a while the sheer pleasure of being able to do anything he wanted to do was enough. Like a kid in a candy store, really, that’s how he felt. I can do this! And I can do this! I can put this in here! I can touch that! I can look at this with the lights on!
And the pictures. Good God, the pictures. After his second time with Izzy, a seemingly unending stream of pornographic selfies popped up on his screen, to the point where Owen’s once rather cozy relationship with his cell phone was forever changed. He’d type in his password and see he had four new texts and then be like, Whah? She really didn’t have a good eye, Izzy. She didn’t seem to know the difference between a sexy picture and an alarming one. It didn’t help that she held her iPhone at strange angles, and always a little too close, so that he often had to spend a good fifteen seconds figuring out which way was up and, occasionally, what exactly he was looking at. Once, while he was giving Wyatt a bath, he glanced at his phone and saw what he thought was an extreme close-up of Izzy’s vagina. It turned out to be a picture she’d found online of one of those wrinkly hairless cats.
Owen tried to get her to stop with the pictures.
“You mean because of your wife who knows we’re sleeping together and is fine with it? You’re worried she’s going to see something on your phone?”
“Yeah. It doesn’t mean she needs to see any of that. Plus, my kid plays with my phone.”
“So password-block your texts.”
“I don’t know how to do that. And even if I did, I don’t want to have to type in a password every time I get a text. It’s not efficient. Just, do you mind stopping?”
“I thought you liked my pictures.”
“I do like them. It’s just—you send a lot of them. And maybe it would be better if we just toned that part of things down for a while.”
“Whatever.”
Four
The only virtue of a marriage based purely on love is the expediency of a divorce based on hate.
—Constance Waverly
The Waverly Report