For a long time, Owen and Lucy were weekenders—a different species, it turned out, than full-timers, but at that point they had no idea of the extent of the difference. They didn’t know a soul in town for the first few years, and that’s the way they liked it. They didn’t even like to have houseguests. In the summer, they fell asleep in the hammock and grilled expensive cuts of meat; they watched the fireflies and made love on floors in partially furnished rooms. In the winter they read book after book after book in front of the fireplace; they watched more snow fall than seemed possible, and they let the soup simmer all afternoon. Lucy planted peonies and daffodils in the fall, and she ran fishing line through the leaves of the tiny Japanese maple to startle any deer who tried to eat it. Owen bought a chain saw, snowshoes, a used kayak, and a telescope.
Even cleaning the gutters was romantic, with Lucy holding the ladder up to the second floor, and Owen, terrified, bravely aiming the leaf blower. Think of the money they’d just saved! There was a bumper crop of acorns their first fall, and Lucy collected them and put them in a big basket. She wanted to have a home filled with interesting rocks, pinecones and pussy willows and artfully twisted driftwood. She built a small cairn out of river rocks on the kitchen windowsill, and just looking at it made her calm, just looking at it made her workday life in the city feel a million miles away.
A few weeks after Wyatt was born, Owen was unexpectedly laid off from his marketing job. Some back-of-the-envelope math made it clear that with their new baby plus two residences and minus one paycheck, the money they had was not going to cut it. The logic was simple: Move to Beekman. Owen could find a job outside the city, in Westchester perhaps, or figure out a way to work from home. If necessary, he could do the hour-long commute into Grand Central. They would move into their sweet little house and begin the next part of their life, the easy, slow-paced, family-friendly part. Lucy could put in a vegetable garden. They could get a dog.
People often asked her if she was sad she’d left New York City, and when they did, she always told them the same story. In the story, which was true, she was riding in a cab, headed up Madison Avenue, on the way to have lunch with a friend. She saw a bunch of private-school kids playing on a side street that had been closed off to traffic for their recess. They were just running in circles on the asphalt, these kids! Not even with a ball! They weren’t allowed to use a ball because it might break somebody’s window. And those were the rich kids! Those were the kids whose parents were paying forty grand a year for elementary school!
And I realized I didn’t want that, she would always say. I didn’t want that life at all. I didn’t want my tombstone to read, “She somehow managed to scrape together enough money to raise her family in New York City.” I wanted trees and air and rocks and hammocks. Fireflies and thick books and snow days.
The truth was, Lucy could barely remember those early years in Beekman, because they were also the early years with Wyatt. A few things stood out, mainly a six-month or so period where it seemed likely that Wyatt might in fact be a genius. When he was sixteen months old, he could stack his wooden alphabet blocks eighteen blocks high. He would reach up and carefully, carefully balance them, with a look of total focus on his little round face. It was like a party trick—it was a party trick, actually; Lucy would put a pile of blocks in front of Wyatt whenever people came to the house just so she could witness their stunned reactions. And he taught himself the letters of the alphabet in two weeks, using a toy keyboard that made sounds when he pressed the buttons. When she told her sister, Anna, about it during one of their phone calls, Anna said, “Do yourself a favor. Don’t repeat that to any of the mothers in town if you want to have any friends.”
But he was also banging his head against the wall. And he wanted to do nothing except watch the washing machine—he would watch the soap and the water sloshing around inside the front-loading washing machine for hours if they’d let him, and sometimes they let him. At some point, he stopped sleeping more or less entirely. And Lucy’s head, what was left of it, was filled with the escalating beat of Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong.
The artful stacks of river rocks and the bowls of acorns and the ornamental deer antlers were long gone, tossed in the garbage once Wyatt discovered just how easily they could be weaponized. Lucy didn’t have time to put fishing wire on the tiny maple anymore, the optimism to keep planting things, or the energy to weed. She was left with a house with black Sharpie on the walls, Cheerios and red-wine stains on the couch, and a huge brown splotch on the kitchen ceiling just below the upstairs bathroom because Wyatt had left a faucet running while they went to OT. And the last book Lucy had read she couldn’t remember, and hadn’t finished.
Lucy was alone in Ben’s bed, looking around the room, trying to take everything in. She’d been to his place three times now, and up until this exact moment she wouldn’t have been able to tell you what color the walls were painted, or if he had rugs, or lamps, or art, or books. But now: beige walls, oriental rugs, groovy lamps, and lots of books. Not much in the way of art, however. Some framed…things. He wasn’t arty. That was okay.
The main thing Lucy noticed was that his apartment was very neat and tidy. That’s something you paid attention to after you’d been married for a while, how neat people were, because it was the kind of characteristic that never changed, no matter how much you wanted it to. Owen wasn’t neat, but neither, to be fair, was Lucy. They were both basically slobs. Slobs who fought their slobbiness and didn’t always win.
“I still don’t understand why you said yes to this,” Lucy said when Ben came back from the bathroom.
“Aren’t you happy I did?”
“That’s not the point,” said Lucy. “Who are you? What kind of person would say yes to this?”
“Pretty much all heterosexual men.”
“Men,” said Lucy. “What is wrong with you?”
“There’s a lot wrong with us,” he said. “Honestly, I thought it was a little strange when Sunny brought it up. I wasn’t completely sure I was going to go through with it. But then, when you walked in, you were so nervous and fragile and beautiful, I just thought, I’ll do this lady a solid and fuck her brains out.”
“You didn’t fuck my brains out,” said Lucy.
“I didn’t?”
“Last I checked, I still had my brains.”
Ben grabbed one of Lucy’s ankles with each hand.
“And she throws down the gauntlet.”
Lucy was still breathing heavily when she asked Ben, “Did you really have sex with Helena Bonham Carter?”
“That’s what you say? That’s all you have to say to me after all that?”
“I can’t help it. I’m a curious person.”
“Who told you I slept with her?”
“Who do you think?”
“How does Sunny Bang know I had sex with Helena Bonham Carter?” said Ben. “Look at me. I’m calling her Sunny Bang now too.”
“She said you met her at an Italian villa where you were staying with some mutual friends and you had sex with her one night in a swimming pool.”
“That is true.”
“Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“Was it amazing?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t really say. It was a lot of my head going, I’m having sex with Helena Bonham Carter. I am. I actually am. Right now. I’m having sex with Helena Bonham Carter.”
“So then what happened?”
“It was her last night,” said Ben. “She was flying back to London to shoot a movie the next day.”