Because this was what he came home to every night: A woman wearing saggy old workout clothes that she never worked out in, that had somehow become her pajamas and the clothes she went to the grocery store in and the clothes she wore around the house all day, with her dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail and who looked like she’d just been run over by a sedan.
“Put on lipstick” meant Stop that. Stop looking like that. It’s not fair to me. I married a beautiful woman.
And Lucy had gone ballistic. It was one of the biggest fights of their marriage. Probably the biggest. This was before they knew Wyatt was any different from any other typical-yet-difficult little boy. He was banging his head against walls, he was not sleeping, he was darting off into the woods behind the house and hiding silently behind trees. The terrible twos, people kept saying to Lucy. Every parent goes through it.
“Lipstick? Are you serious right now? Do you have any idea what my life is like? And you want me to put on lipstick before you come home?”
She’d stalked up the stairs and slammed the bathroom door. Owen sat at the table, drinking his wine, realizing he had said the wrong thing.
When Lucy came back down, she had bright red lipstick smeared all around her mouth, like a little girl who’d raided her mother’s purse.
“Can I do anything else for you?” she said. “Would you like a foot massage? Shall I bake you a pie?”
And then she collapsed on the floor, sobbing, and she didn’t stop for hours.
Owen took the next day off to look after Wyatt while Lucy stayed in bed with tears slowly, continuously leaking out of the corners of her eyes. He wished she had a mother he could call, a mother who would get on a plane and move in for a few months and get everything sorted out. Her mother was dead, though, and his own mother was such a distant, uninterested presence that the thought of asking her for help was essentially unimaginable. When the crying started to look like it might never stop, Owen decided to call Lucy’s older sister, Anna, who had a big job and three kids of her own but who still hopped on the first flight out.
Anna stayed with them for two weeks. She looked after Wyatt, organized the house, cleaned out the pantry, opened stacks of mail, and coaxed Lucy into her first shower in weeks. Anna and Owen interviewed sitters together and eventually found a nice middle-aged woman to watch Wyatt for three hours every afternoon so Lucy could rest. Her name was Paulette and she had raised three kids. Paulette lasted a little over four months, four months before Wyatt became too much for her, which was just long enough for Lucy to get her sea legs again. When both Owen and Anna insisted they hire someone else, Lucy refused. (“I don’t work,” she’d said. “I’m not going to pay someone to raise my child.”) So Lucy went back into the trenches full-time, and Wyatt got harder and more inscrutable. No lipstick was worn. And then when Wyatt was three, their pediatrician suggested they get him evaluated.
But it’s back again, Owen thought. The lipstick is back.
*
Wyatt finally fell asleep at ten, and his entire dinner-calm-down-bath-time-bedtime routine had fallen on Lucy’s shoulders. Owen had managed to make it up the stairs and into bed, but he’d asserted that anything more was too much for him. He texted a few people he knew in town asking if anyone had any old pain pills lying around, but nobody in Beekman wanted to give up their spare pain pills for actual physical pain, so he suffered through the evening with bourbon and Netflix.
Like he’s on a goddamn vacation, Lucy thought when she walked past their bedroom on her way downstairs. I was supposed to be with Ben, and he’s drunk and watching Game of Thrones.
Ben picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“It’s really you,” said Ben.
“It’s me.”
“It’s weird to hear your voice without seeing your face.”
“You have a very low voice,” said Lucy. “I never noticed how low it was until now.”
“I can’t believe we’ve never talked on the phone before.”
“Neither can I.”
“I like it.”
“I do too.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting outside, on an Adirondack chair, wrapped in a blanket.”
“Nice.”
“It’s cold and dark and all the stars are out. I see the Big Dipper and something that may or may not be Mars,” said Lucy. “What about you?”
“I’m in bed.”
“What are you wearing?”
“Me? Nothing. You?”
“Sweats and an old ski cap.”
“Nice,” he said, mock-sexily.
“I told you, it’s freezing out here,” Lucy said.
“I’m really glad you called.”
“You are? I was worried it was too late.”
“It could never be too late,” said Ben. “We don’t get to talk enough, I think.”
“We don’t,” she said. “Sometimes I think I barely even know you.”
“Well, what do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything you want. I’m serious, Lucy. I’ve got all night.”
Lucy ran into the house for some wine, and then once about an hour later to pee, but other than that, they just kept talking.
“Tell me about your marriage,” Lucy finally said.
“What do you want to know?”
“What happened to it,” said Lucy.
“That’s a tough question,” said Ben.
“Take a swing at it.”
“I think life happened to my marriage,” said Ben. “Or maybe marriage happened to my marriage. Something about not knowing how hard it was going to be, or not being able to accept it. Taking it for granted.”
“Too vague, my friend, too vague,” said Lucy.
“We met in college. I wanted to be a history professor, and she wanted to be a doctor. Mostly what we did was study together. I know that sounds weird, but it was a lot of sitting on the couch reading and taking notes with our feet in each other’s laps and then having sex and then studying some more. I think if we could have gone on like that forever, things would have been different.”
“Well, that’s stupid,” said Lucy. “Life isn’t like that.”
“I agree, but you don’t necessarily realize that in college.”
“College seems like five lifetimes ago.”
“Yeah,” said Ben. “Which is only one of many reasons why you shouldn’t marry your college sweetheart.”
“So that was the problem? You got married too early?”
“No,” said Ben. “That’s too easy.”
“Did you fight a lot?”
“Neither of us are fighters,” said Ben. “We only really disagreed about one thing.”
“What?”
“She didn’t want to have kids.”
“And you did.”
“Yep.”
“That’s a pretty big problem,” said Lucy. “That’s what most people would consider a deal-breaker.”
“She told me she didn’t want kids when we first met. On our first date, actually. I was nineteen. Kids were the furthest thing from my mind. And the truth is, I didn’t believe her.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I’d never thought that women who say they don’t want kids really don’t want kids. I realize now that’s stupid, but at the time, it just seemed like a thing a certain kind of ambitious girl would say. For effect, I guess, or to show that she wasn’t trying to trap you. I figured either it was a lie, or it would change.”
“And you guys had kids.”
“We did.”
“So she changed her mind?”