“It’s good for him to talk about it,” said Lucy. “He’s going to have to process it somehow. I wish I could live inside his brain for a while and feel how it works.”
“You’re as close to the inside of his brain as anyone could be,” said Owen.
“But you’re better with him than I am,” said Lucy. “Getting into the tub with him with your clothes on. I never think of things like that. I’m too busy being the bad guy.”
It was one of those things that get said in a marriage, something that starts out as a genuine compliment but then turns into a criticism without either party noticing or caring all that much. It was true, though; among the various parts of her life that she was tired of, Lucy was tired of always being the bad guy. The one who got spit at and bitten and scratched till she bled, the one Wyatt said that he hated because she said no to the second bowl of ice cream, the seventh trip on the escalator, the iPad in bed.
One chicken, not three.
One chicken would have fit into the old plastic cat carrier, the one with the swinging mesh door. Lucy had woken up at two in the morning with that thought rattling around in her head. It took a lot for Lucy not to wake up Owen and point it out to him right then, point out how this entire situation could have been avoided if he had just listened to her in the first place. It took a lot for her not to say it to him now, but she didn’t. Instead, she stared down wordlessly at their American Express bill, which was, as usual, surprisingly big. For people who didn’t buy expensive things or go on fancy trips or eat at nice restaurants, they sure managed to spend a lot of money.
“Yes, it was pretty gross!” said Wyatt into the phone now. “Yes, it was super-gross and very bloody!
“Okay, I’ll get him for you.”
Wyatt bouncy-tiptoed over to the kitchen table and handed Owen the phone. “Izzy wants to talk to you,” Wyatt said to his dad. “She says it’s very important. Very, very important.”
Owen took the phone from Wyatt and immediately powered it down. Lucy stared at her husband, completely enraged.
“Have you been spending time with this person with our son?”
“Of course not!”
“Then how does he know who she is?”
Owen took a deep breath. “He met her in the grocery store once. A long time ago. Before anything even happened between us. You know how good his memory is. And Izzy is an unusual name.”
“So you knew Izzy before we started everything?”
“No! Absolutely not. I happened to meet her early on, but after we started this. I swear. And then I met her again in the grocery store, and Wyatt was with me. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
“And then you just started having sex with her? No, stop, don’t tell me.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” said Owen.
“I don’t want to know anything.”
“Well, if you change your mind, the offer stands. And I think it would be best to stop it all right now.”
“You’re free to do what you want, Owen.”
“I’d like us both to stop it.”
“You want me to stop it, you mean.”
“I want it to be over. The Arrangement. Fight Club. All of it.”
“What do you think I’m doing, exactly?” Lucy asked. “I’m curious.”
“I have no idea. Probably nothing. I just want to end this whole thing now before things get any more out of hand.”
“I see,” said Lucy. “So I should stop doing ‘probably nothing’ because you picked a girlfriend who is unstable and erratic and more trouble than she’s worth.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. She never was my girlfriend.”
“Is this all the same person? Is Izzy the air-conditioner cat-hair lady? Or is she somebody new?”
“She’s the air-conditioner cat-hair lady.”
“You two have been at this for quite a while, wouldn’t you say?”
“This, this thing, is not anything. And it’s over,” said Owen.
“She doesn’t seem to think so.”
“It’s because I’ve stopped responding to her texts. She knows it’s over, I’ve told her it’s over, but she won’t get the message and I don’t know what to do.”
“I really don’t feel like giving you dating advice, Owen.”
“I’m not asking for—I’m just telling you that this is the situation.”
“We both realized a lot of things could happen. Maybe there’s a reason I don’t want to quit early.”
“What?”
“Maybe something happened,” Lucy said.
“Wait, what?” Owen asked. He looked genuinely confused. Like the conversation had taken a left turn somewhere back when he wasn’t paying close attention, and now he was heading down a road he didn’t want to be on.
“I don’t know, Owen,” Lucy said, her voice filled with disgust. She climbed up the stairs and said, “Maybe. Something. Happened.”
What the hell happened?
Of course something happened. What had he thought? That Lucy wouldn’t do anything? That was insane! She was a very attractive woman! And she had come up with the idea, now that he thought about it. Maybe she had tricked him! Maybe she’d had someone waiting in the wings!
The truth was, Owen had sort of thought that she wouldn’t do anything. And now he was sure something had happened between Lucy and somebody.
But who?
An old boyfriend? Some guy in her French class? One of the husbands up here? Larry the handyman? Some dude she met online? The whole thing was harder for him to imagine than it should have been. He wished she hadn’t said anything. There was a part of him that had thought the Arrangement should follow the script of the wives who say, “If you cheat on me, don’t tell me. Don’t try to clear your conscience by confessing. I don’t want to know. Ever.” Weren’t there women like that? Women who said things like that, casually, dropped into a conversation on a car ride while the kids had their headphones on in the back?
He didn’t like it. That was for sure. But he would let Lucy have her little bit of whatever it was with whoever he was and run out the clock. Never ask about it and never acknowledge it.
That was his plan.
*
Two days after her surgery, as Kelly drifted in a narcotic daze, Gordon clutched a glass of Laphroaig eighteen-year-old scotch—delivered without a whisper—and watched a freighter loaded with cargo cut through the chop of the East River. Shipping, he thought. High risk, but still…
Gordon’s reverie was interrupted by a doctor poking his head into the room, followed by the rest of him. To Gordon, he looked about twenty. And Indian, which Gordon liked. He’d heard they sent their smartest students over here to become doctors, and the best and brightest of them never went back.
“How are we feeling!” the doctor chirped to the very obviously zonked-out Kelly, half her face wrapped in bandages, the other half bruised beyond recognition, as he flipped open her chart.
“She’s a little out of it,” said Gordon.
“Yes, well, that’s to be expected.”
“How does it look?” Gordon asked, setting aside his glass of scotch out of a sense of decorum.
“We got some tests back,” the doctor said. He flipped through the chart with an inscrutable look on his small brown face. “Well, um, this is not what I was hoping to see.”
“Say more,” said Gordon.