Owen’s phone buzzed again. He glanced at it, and then flipped it over again.
“Tell her to stop texting you,” said Lucy. “For the next two hours. So we can have a nice dinner together.”
“If I do that,” Owen said, “it might not have the intended effect.”
Lucy looked across the table at Owen.
“Give me your phone,” said Lucy.
“Lucy—”
“Trust me on this.”
Owen handed Lucy his phone. She hunched over it and hammered out a text with her thumbs.
“What did you say?” asked Owen when she gave him back his phone.
“I said, ‘This is Owen’s wife, Lucy. If you call or text or e-mail my husband in the next four hours, I’m going to flush his phone down the toilet.’”
“Nice,” said Owen.
“I just want her to know that I know,” said Lucy.
“I’ve told her all about it,” said Owen. “She knows you know.”
“Yeah, but I want her to know that I know.”
“I’m feeling happier,” said Lucy.
“I am too,” said Owen.
“It’s weird, right?”
“Yes, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“I know,” said Lucy. “But we could talk in general terms. Just for tonight.”
“Okay.”
“But only very general.”
“I’ll go first,” Owen said. “I feel like I’m choosing you. Like when we were first dating. Like, ‘I pick…you.’”
“I feel not trapped. Not that you were trapping me. I don’t mean that—”
“Like life was trapping you—”
“Exactly.”
“It’s like I’m not in a submarine anymore,” said Owen. “Like I’m walking around on the deck of a sailboat with the wind in my hair.”
“I think I’m less depressed,” said Lucy.
“You seem less depressed. You seem better.”
“I feel better,” said Lucy. “I feel more like me. It’s hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” said Owen. “I get it. I do.”
Earlier that evening, before the babysitter arrived, Owen found himself standing alone in the mudroom, chatting with Wyatt through the closed bathroom door.
“You know, buddy, you’re old enough to poop alone,” he’d pointed out.
“I don’t like to poop alone!”
“Fine,” said Owen. “Tell me something that happened today at school, then.”
Lucy’s handbag was dangling from one of the hooks by the back door. It was a brown canvas messenger bag, aggressively unstylish, with a big flap that snapped closed on the front. Lucy had never been one for fancy purses, which was just as well, Owen thought, because they couldn’t afford them.
It wasn’t that he was suspicious. Not exactly. And, to be fair, Lucy was allowed to do what she wanted to do. That was their deal, that was the Arrangement, and Owen intended to honor it.
But still, a small part of him had started to wonder.
He unsnapped the flap and peeked inside.
He saw a teal-colored book, a paperback, with Allons-y! printed on the broken spine. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find, but the sight of a beat-up French textbook was enough to make his entire body suddenly relax.
“Look, Dada!”
The bathroom door swung open. Wyatt was standing in front of the toilet with his pants around his ankles, staring into the toilet bowl.
“It’s a big one,” said Wyatt proudly. “It’s a very big poop.”
“Is it possible we’ve cracked the code of married life?” said Lucy.
“It feels kind of like we did.”
“What if this is the secret? What if it’s like The Secret, but for marriage.”
“We’ll have to write a book about it.”
“We’ll be rich and happy,” said Lucy. “We can start giving seminars to help people we don’t know.”
“People will want to do yoga and eat clean foods and come to us for marital wisdom,” said Owen.
“You’ll have to learn yoga,” said Lucy.
“I want a gong. A big gong.”
“I’ll grow my hair long and wear big turquoise rings.”
“I’ll wear nothing but floppy cream-colored drawstring pants made from hemp,” said Owen. “Those pants that make people think, Does he have anything on under those things? Because he seems really free and easy.”
“We’re gonna be friends with Deepak Chopra.”
“Is Deepak into this?” asked Owen.
“I think once he sees what we’re doing and how well it works and how evolved we’ve become, he’ll be on board,” Lucy said. “I think Deepak is pretty flexible. He’s ushering in the new global consciousness and maybe this is part of it.”
“Nonattachment.”
“Nonduality.”
“This is total nonattachment and nonduality.”
“I’m not sure I understand what nonduality is.”
“Nobody does,” said Owen. “That’s part of it. It can’t be understood with the mind.”
“Maybe we should go the other direction, be normal,” Owen said. They were deep into their second bottle of wine, finishing up the main course.
“What do you mean?”
“That could be our hook. Like, be super-ordinary and straight and clean-cut. Like Mormons, but with the Arrangement.”
“I think Mormons invented the Arrangement.”
“You know what I mean. We should look like we work for the CIA. It would seem less threatening that way.”
“So I don’t get to wear big rings?”
“No. And I have to wear underwear and no floppy pants.”
“Can we still go to Costa Rica?”
“No,” said Owen. “It’ll have to be places like St. Louis.”
“That doesn’t sound fun. If I’m going to be a life guru, I don’t want to do it in St. Louis.”
“Right. Screw St. Louis!”
“Screw St. Louis!”
“I love you,” said Lucy.
“I love you too.”
“I think I even love you more these days,” said Lucy.
“That’s how I feel too.”
“And the stuff with Wyatt doesn’t upset me as much,” said Lucy. “He is who he is.”
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Owen.
“He had a two-hour playdate with Blake on Friday and they actually played together,” said Lucy. “They even took turns at Candy Land. They’ve been working on it at school.”
“At Candy Land?”
“Taking turns. It went really well until Blake got the gingerbread man and flipped the board and Wyatt punched him in the side of the head.”
“What’s wrong with the gingerbread man?” asked Owen.
“You have to go back pretty close to the beginning.”
“Why is Wyatt friends with that kid?”
“Because we’re friends with Claire and Edmund.”
“I don’t like them all that much,” said Owen.
“Me neither.”
“I say we can do without them.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I have this overwhelming urge to have sex with you right now,” said Lucy.
“Check, please.”
Lucy frequently found herself thinking back to that night. She and Owen had come home, paid the babysitter, and fallen straight into bed. Nobody checked e-mail, neither of them flossed. They still had passion; it hadn’t gone anywhere, just maybe underground for a bit, but here it was, evidence of who they were together, what they had with each other.