“Yeah?”
“You’re covered in cat hair,” said Lucy.
“What? I am? I don’t think this is from a cat—”
“Honey.” Lucy picked a piece of orange cat hair off his blazer and held it up. “This is a cat hair. And we don’t have a cat.”
Owen just sat there, half guilty, half caught, a little confused. Lucy stared him straight in the eye for a moment that felt like it went on forever.
“Do us both a favor,” she finally said, “and put a lint roller in the glove compartment. Hey, Wyatt, bath time. Upstairs.”
*
Well, it’s official. She knows.
Owen was wrapping the leftover pizza in foil. My wife knows I’m sleeping with a woman who has a cat. In a way, it was good. In a way, it was proof that the Arrangement was working, that it wasn’t just a weird dream he’d had, and that Lucy wasn’t going to snap at some point and act like the whole thing hadn’t been essentially her idea. He had fought the urge to check in with Lucy on more than one occasion. He had forced himself not to ask, Are we really doing this? Is the deal still on? Or maybe just two words, followed by a question mark dangling up in the air: Fight Club?
Because Owen was pretty sure Lucy wasn’t doing anything. Not 100 percent sure, but, say, 95 percent sure. From what he could determine, she was as busy as ever with her usual mom stuff, taking Wyatt to soccer practice and horseback riding and birthday parties, and whenever he glanced over her shoulder at her computer screen she was on Etsy or Instagram or Pinterest, just the way she always had been. And she still lost her phone at least once a day. Completely lost it. It would show up several hours later under the front seat of the car, or in a laundry basket, or on a shelf in the pantry, or in the back pocket of a pair of jeans she’d slipped out of and then kicked under the bed. If she had something going on, she’d be much more attached to her phone, Owen thought.
But mostly, well, it was a feeling. Owen felt like he would know, he felt like he would be able to sense it if Lucy was sleeping with somebody else. He was okay with it if it happened. That was the deal, and he was fine with their agreement, he was cool with her taking advantage of it. On some level, he liked to think, he even wanted her to take advantage of it, so she didn’t end up feeling like she’d missed out—but he didn’t think she had done anything yet.
Yet.
Eleven
How many times have you heard a woman say that her idea of foreplay is watching her husband do the dishes? How about changing diapers, scrubbing the toilets, vacuuming the floor? Are you getting excited, ladies? Feeling a little tingle down there? Today’s marrieds have been told so often that a man folding the laundry constitutes foreplay that both parties are shocked when it doesn’t actually work.
—Constance Waverly Women and Power, New York City
I’m not going to caulk your tub, Izzy.”
Owen and Izzy were in bed, watching the ceiling fan as it made slow, lazy, a bit wobbly rotations.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how to caulk a bathtub. I am not a handyman. Nor am I a plumber. I’m not even handy around my own house.”
“The guy at Home Depot said it was easy,” said Izzy.
“Then you do it.”
“You know I’m very sensitive around chemicals,” said Izzy. “It’s a small space. I’ll pass out.”
“Then it sounds like you have a problem,” said Owen. “You should probably figure it out. But I am not going to caulk your bathtub, I don’t care how easy the Home Depot guy said it was.”
“Well, how would you get your tub caulked if you needed it done? The one at your house.”
“I’d call a guy,” said Owen. “I’d pick up the phone and call someone who knew how to caulk a tub.”
“The Home Depot guy said that would be very expensive and it was super-easy to do this kind of repair by yourself.”
“I’ve got an idea,” said Owen. He was out of the bed now and pulling on his boxers. “Why don’t you try fucking the Home Depot guy. Why don’t you get him over here. He seems to know an awful lot about DIY home repair.”
“All right,” said Izzy. “Forget I said anything.”
“This is not what I signed up for, Izzy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I have a wife for this. Her name is Lucy and she nags me about things like caulking the bathtub.”
“Maybe she nags you because you’re over here fucking me instead of doing the stuff you’ve told her you’ll do.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m just saying, as an outside observer of your marriage, you seem to have it pretty good.”
“Yeah, well, trust me,” said Owen. He buckled his belt and noticed it was in yet another notch. His belly had just about disappeared. “You don’t know everything.”
How had this happened? How had he ended up with a girlfriend who was worse than his wife? Izzy was beginning to make Lucy look like a paragon of sweetness and sanity, and if it weren’t for the—Owen was going to be honest with himself, he prided himself on unwavering honesty to himself—if it weren’t for the ease and simplicity of their encounters, the fact that he could send Izzy a text and she would tape a handwritten Back in fifteen minutes sign to the window of her store and zip around the corner to her house and somehow be in a different slutty lingerie getup every time, that she was kinky and wild and most of all game, Owen would consider calling the whole thing off.
But, alas, he was not stupid. Izzy was a rare find for a man in his situation, and he was wise enough to realize it. But he didn’t need to pretend that it was more than it actually was.
When Owen got back to the office, he found himself staring at the calendar hanging over his desk. It was already October. He and Lucy were three months into the Arrangement. Three months in, three months left. The halfway point, almost exactly. Thus far, he had confined himself to just Izzy. To be fair, Izzy had been about all that he could take—but he had, he believed, shown admirable restraint.
Still, it didn’t seem smart to limit himself to just Izzy. The whole point of this thing, he told himself, was to explore his options, to partake of life’s sexual buffet. He scrolled through his contacts on his phone, looking for inspiration.
Cassie Lambert.
She was an old colleague who’d known him back when he was still a rising star, during the heyday of his Madison Avenue career. They’d once had…an encounter.
He fired off a quick, friendly e-mail. Cassie e-mailed back two minutes later. By the end of the day, they’d arranged to meet for a drink at the Campbell Apartment the following week to catch up.
*
Gordon was lying on the couch in front of the fire with his laptop balanced on his chest, his eyes at half-mast, and his enormous Bose headphones covering his ears and a good portion of his skull.