“It means they died.”
“Perished means they died. Perished means you die.”
“That’s right, Wyatt. Perished is a long word that means die.”
“Dead as a doornail in the middle of the ice-cold North Atlantic Ocean.”
It’s called dissociating, a part of her said later.
It was three o’clock in the morning, and Lucy was wide awake, keyed up from the sugar in one too many glasses of white wine. She remembered the word from a psychology class she took at Oberlin.
That’s what this is. You’ve split yourself in two.
*
Owen’s back did not get better overnight. He had to call in sick every day for a week, and Lucy’s patience, which wasn’t that thick to begin with, grew infinitesimally thin. He couldn’t help with Wyatt, he couldn’t take out the garbage, he couldn’t do anything, really. All he did every day for a week was lie flat on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, and then somehow manage to drive himself to the local acupuncturist and stare down through her therapy table’s doughnut hole and think about his life.
He decided he would gently ease Izzy out of the picture. He instituted Delayed Text-Response Time. He forced himself to wait three hours to respond to one of Izzy’s texts. Three hours, to Izzy, was an eternity. Hey, baby, I miss you, how is your day so far? Smiley face, winky face, sexy bear emoticon. Twenty minutes would pass. Sexy bear, glass of wine, winky face. Twenty more minutes. Dancing poop, dancing poop. How’s it going? You okay? I’m getting worried. Angry poop! Super-hot and angry poop! Gun aimed at head! Flames coming from a house!
One thing was clear: Izzy did not want this to stop. Whatever the two of them had together—which, at this point, was Owen canceling two out of every three meetings, and on the one he showed up for, they had a quick half hour of angry sex followed by the requisite jar-opening and dry-rot examining, laying of mousetraps and opening and then closing and then opening again of fireplace flues—she intended to keep it going as long as she possibly could.
Owen found it a little perplexing. It was not as if they had fallen in love. If anything, Izzy seemed mad at him most of the time. He wasn’t sure she even liked him. She was lonely and she liked to talk, that’s for sure, and he didn’t think she had many friends. She didn’t seem to like women very much. In fact, she enjoyed telling Owen about the women in town, the women who came into her shop, and how much she loathed them all. She was, he realized, what Lucy would call a very negative person. He couldn’t figure out why it had taken him so long to see it.
*
“This is a hypocritical little town,” Izzy said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Everybody is secretly happy that the weird man in a dress isn’t teaching their kids the days of the week, but when he sits on a bench on Main Street holding hands with his wife, they all treat him like he’s Rosa Parks. I watch them out my window all day long. It’s like they have to kiss the ring. And he’s wearing a lot of rings.”
“That’s a little harsh, Izz.”
“There’s all this sweet stuff going on on the surface around here and all sorts of dark shit brewing beneath. That’s why I’m putting my house on the market. I’m getting out. I’m moving back to the city, where the dark stuff is out in the open.”
Owen fought hard not to show any reaction. “You’re moving to the city?” he asked. “When did you decide this?”
“Well, I had an epiphany. The last time I was in the city. I was going to the dentist.”
“What kind of epiphany?” said Owen.
“I was walking up Sixth Avenue and this man came up to me and said, ‘I want to take a shit on your forehead.’”
“What?”
“Yep,” said Izzy. “I was just walking down the street, minding my own business.”
“Someone really said that to you? That’s insane.”
“I didn’t make it up. He seemed normal too. He was wearing a suit.”
“A guy in a suit walked up to you and said he wanted to take a shit on your forehead?”
“I don’t know how to be any clearer, Owen. But you’re missing my point. My point is, everyone in Beekman wants to shit on your forehead, but nobody actually says it out loud.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“Oh, it’s true. Trust me. Nothing could be truer.”
“So you’re really gonna move?”
“I already talked to a real estate agent,” she said. She rolled over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but you always knew that this was temporary.”
Owen went into Izzy’s bathroom to take a quick shower. Izzy kept her coffeemaker on the bathroom counter, along with a sixty-four-ounce jug of powdered creamer and a filthy spoon. (“Because I don’t want to walk all the way downstairs to make my coffee in the morning.”) Approximately twenty different hair-care products lined the edge of the tub, and half a dozen cardboard flats of canned cat food were stacked next to the toilet. The smell was a potent cat-food-litter-box-French-roast blend. If Owen had seen this bathroom before they’d slept together the first time, he liked to think a few alarm bells would have gone off. Whether or not he would have heeded them—that was a different question.
But none of that mattered anymore. It was like the message on the steam-crinkled Post-it note stuck to Izzy’s bathroom mirror. Everything always works out perfectly for me!
Deus ex machina. Izzy moving away.
Everything always works out perfectly for me!
*
That night, after Lucy went to bed, Owen locked himself in the spare room and went online.
He had had a lot to drink. That might have been part of it, who knows. He didn’t know what he was looking for exactly. He didn’t have a plan. He just knew he had a window, and he owed it to himself, to his life, and, yes, to his marriage to make the most of it.
He clicked around for a while, not seeing much of anything, and he was just about to give up and go to sleep when he found just the sort of thing he realized he wanted.
It was a picture, cropped artfully, so you couldn’t possibly recognize the person’s face. The woman in the photo was sitting back on her ankles with her knees spread, her hands mostly covering herself with what Owen felt was an endearing display of modesty. She had no top on. It was one of those pictures that was grainy enough to feel authentic, and he was reasonably sure she wasn’t a prostitute or a man. There was a cell number.
He sent the woman a text.
*
Simka put out a brand-new ASMR video once a week. She usually put them online on Friday evening, and Gordon had begun to count on it, to count on spending his Friday night listening to the new Simka offering three or four or even five times, thumbs-upping it and making a handful of appreciative comments below, using his secret Gmail handle, Gordon726.