3. They’d shaken hands on it.
He had six months! Six whole months! The only time he’d even allowed himself to imagine being in a situation like this was when he occasionally daydreamed about Lucy’s death. In his defense, it was always a quick and painless one. It was like, dead Lucy, sadness, poor Wyatt, must be strong for Wyatt, a dismal six to twelve months, the worst six to twelve months of his life, and then sex with new women. Owen never even entertained the idea of a divorce. It just never struck him that he and Lucy would end their marriage. Her death, that he could imagine. Aneurysm, plane crash, blood clot from a long plane trip that slowly worked its way up to her brain, spinal meningitis diagnosed two days too late—those things he could picture. Divorce, no way.
But this? This he never would have imagined in, as Wyatt would say, a million gazillion years.
*
I could fuck any of the men in this place, Lucy thought as she sipped her latte.
Correction: I’m allowed to fuck any of the men in this place. Whether or not she could was a different question. Whether she could figure out a way to make it happen—that was yet to be determined. Even when she was single, Lucy had never thought things like that. In fact, she’d always been a little surprised when someone wanted to have sex with her. She’d slept around, yes, but most of it took place during a five-year period when she was working through the most painful issues of her childhood; at least, that’s how she thought about it now. Even when she was going home with just about whoever asked, she was always on the lookout for a boyfriend, a partner, a husband, a father-to-be of her children-to-come. But now she had that. She had found the perfect husband, the perfect father, and he loved her.
Back then, she would never have given a second glance to what she saw before her now. She was in a coffee shop three towns away from Beekman. It seemed like a safe distance; she was unlikely to run into anyone she knew.
Exhibit A: Salt-and-pepper hair, bushy eyebrows, glasses. Intelligent-looking, but that could be the glasses talking. But—he was tiny. Lucy was not planning to be picky, but she did not want to have sex with a tiny little teeny-tiny man.
Exhibit B: Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, scruffy beard, a white Wilco T-shirt, paint-splattered brown pants, broad chest, looked like he might smell like turpentine or furniture oil.
Exhibit C: Salt-and-pepper hair. (Why were all the men here so old? Lucy needed to find a different coffee shop! Somehow she’d stumbled onto a place filled with unemployed middle-aged white men, all of them nursing two-dollar cups of coffee while they pretended to do important things on their laptops. They were like ants. First you noticed one or two, but then when you really looked, you realized the place was crawling with them.) There was a thing, she found. Once her antennae were back up (and they’d been down now for years, for years), Lucy started noticing men who had their antennae up. It was like a whole world of signs and signals had been floating right past her—lingering looks, secret smiles, eyes moving up and down, wineglasses lifted in solidarity, charged conversations in bookstores. It was like an energy field, and some people were aware of it and some people weren’t. Lucy had been walking around with fifteen extra pounds on her, wearing bulky sweaters with things like foxes on them, obsessed with her son and his challenges, completely oblivious to the thick ever-present sexual haze that was in the air. Lucy had turned herself off—in defense of love and marriage and family and community—and now that she had finally turned herself back on, she had no idea what would happen.
Exhibit C smiled at her. She smiled back.
*
Gordon Allen, Beekman’s only billionaire, was in his backyard, hitting golf balls into the Hudson River. The sky was turning pink and the wispy clouds were both purple and gold, and Gordon was thinking that his swing was looking better than it had been in years. It helped, having a driving range just a few steps off his lower back deck. It made it easier to hit golf balls than to not hit golf balls. Gordon had had his landscape architect construct him a little hideaway so boaters couldn’t see him and report him to whomever you would report someone who was driving silicone golf balls into Robert Kennedy Jr.’s precious protected Hudson River. Surely it was less than legal. Surely Bobby would have something sanctimonious to say about this, Gordon thought as he watched another one of his golf balls sail through the sky and plop into the river.
One of his idiot grown sons had bought him some biodegradable fish-friendly golf balls as a somewhat pointed gift the previous Christmas, but Gordon didn’t like them. The thwack didn’t feel as satisfying and they didn’t fly nearly as far. So he kept them on hand, in a bucket inside the hideaway, but the balls Gordon drove into the river were brand-new Titleist Pro V1xs he bought by the pallet.
“Goddamn it, Gordon!”
He shanked it.
“What now?”
“One of your bees stung me again!”
He looked over and saw Kelly, his wife, sitting up on her pool chaise, pressing an icy pink drink to the inside of her perfect thigh. She was topless, but he barely noticed.
“How do you know it was one of mine?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Maybe because you decided to put half a million bees in our backyard. I’m guessing it was one of yours.”
“I don’t have that many bees, Kelly.”
Gordon did have that many bees. He had ten hives, and each hive hosted between sixty thousand and eighty thousand bees, at least during the summer, according to his bee guy. His bee guy was named Dirk and he looked like some kind of prophet. He was bald with an almost comically huge red beard, and he always wore sandals, some kind of fair-trade eyesores made from old tires pulled out of an open-air landfill by AIDS orphans or one-legged land-mine victims—Dirk had told Gordon the sob story of his footwear once but Gordon had forgotten the particulars.
“Do you know how much those bees save us in real estate taxes every year?”
“I don’t care! I don’t care, Gordon! We’re rich! I’m sick of being stung by a bee every time I walk out my front door.”
“You always want me to be more concerned about the environment. I’m single-handedly battling colony collapse! Dirk says I’m doing God’s work with those bees. He’s going to nominate me for an environmental award.”
“You hit sixty brand-new golf balls into the Hudson River every day, Gordon. No one’s giving you an environmental award.”