The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  “A diaphragm? You want me to get a diaphragm?” The word diaphragm struck Owen like a Ziploc bag full of cold pudding. It felt strange and truly surprising. How is it that I’m talking to this woman who’s not my wife about getting a diaphragm? When did this become my reality?

  “I want you to get something, to go to the doctor and get something, yes. If we’re going to keep doing this.”

  “I haven’t been to the gynecologist in ages,” said Izzy. “I don’t think I can even get pregnant. Although I’m so bloated these days I look pregnant.” She paused and stared at Owen. “This is where you’re supposed to say I don’t look the least bit pregnant.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Izzy. I’m serious about this. I want you to go to the doctor.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said. She wiggled her shoulders a bit theatrically. “I’ll make an appointment.”

  * * *

  “Tell me something about your life upstate,” said Ben.

  Lucy had come to Brooklyn early that day, and they’d already had sex twice, and now they were both lying on their sides, looking at each other’s faces.

  “It’s too boring to talk about,” said Lucy.

  “Just one thing. Anything.”

  “Let me think,” said Lucy. Finally she said, “I have chickens.”

  “You have chickens?”

  “I do.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Last winter I was drinking perhaps a little too much wine in front of the fireplace and I ended up ordering fifteen baby chicks online.”

  “Fifteen?”

  “That was the smallest amount they’d sell you,” said Lucy. “I went to the wrong website. I went to one meant for chicken farmers, not housewives looking for a new hobby. And then when the box came, there were nineteen in there,” said Lucy. “They give you extra. They call them packing peanuts. And I did not know that at the time.”

  “You have nineteen chickens?”

  “I started out with nineteen chickens,” said Lucy. “I currently have eleven.”

  “You eat your chickens?”

  “Nope,” Lucy said. “Just the eggs.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What happened to the missing eight chickens?”

  Lucy sucked her teeth and said, “They died while under my care.”

  “How did they die?”

  “This is not a good conversation to have with anyone who’s never had chickens.”

  “No, no,” said Ben. “Keep going. I’m fascinated.”

  “First of all, chickens look for ways to die,” said Lucy. “You know how people always get upset about chickens being kept in those little cages on factory farms? Well, those are the lucky chickens. You take those chickens out of their cages and put them anywhere near the natural world and they will die horrible, gruesome, violent deaths.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Okay, so one morning I go out to the chicken coop, and there’s a dead chicken inside. It’s missing its head. Its head has just disappeared.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I had to go online to find out,” said Lucy. “Apparently, a raccoon ripped it off and ate it. Raccoons do that. If a chicken gets too close to a spot with chicken wire, a raccoon will reach his hand in and rip off its head.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “I know. So what you do is, you make the coop more secure, you figure out what happened, and things go well for a while and then one night, a chicken vanishes.”

  “Just—disappears,” said Ben.

  “Exactly. And then the next night, another one goes. And the next night, another. And every day you try to figure out what is happening, you look for holes and you take pictures of the carcasses and post them online for chicken people to make sense of. If you can find them. The carcasses, I mean. It’s easy to find the online chicken people.”

  “If you can find them?”

  “Sometimes they’re dragged off into the woods. Sometimes they’re eaten in the coop or in the run.”

  “This whole thing sounds horrible,” Ben said, laughing. “You should be in jail.”

  “I know!”

  “Really. I should report you to the authorities.”

  “And sometimes, it remains a mystery,” Lucy went on. “You plug some little hole someplace and the carnage stops, but you never really know what caused it.”

  “My sister would love you,” Ben said. “You’re living her dream life.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “I have a sister and two brothers. What about you?”

  “Just a sister. She’s a lawyer. She lives in San Francisco.”

  “Are you youngest or oldest?”

  “Youngest. You?”

  “Oldest.”

  “Look at us,” said Lucy. “First-date talk.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben. “So, tell me, Miss Lucy. Where did you grow up?”

  * * *

  For the first stretch of their life together, Owen and Lucy visited Owen’s family once a year, at Thanksgiving. They flew to Colorado and slept on a pull-out couch in a room that doubled as the TV room and they carried their toiletries in and out of the bathroom because there was no counter space or drawer space or even so much as a bit of an unclaimed shelf on which they could place them. The house was overrun by Owen’s extended family, his two brothers and their wives and kids, who’d arrived early and claimed all the spare bedrooms, a pattern that started when Owen and Lucy were not yet married and then perpetuated itself year after year with no apparent option for renegotiation. Still, they came every year, and they tried not to talk about politics, or guns, or religion, and if you’d asked either of them, they would have agreed that it would continue like that more or less forever.

  But things changed when Wyatt was two. The visit had been four days of misery, with Wyatt completely off the chain, overstimulated by his seven loud, hyperactive, proudly unvaccinated cousins (the entire Colorado clan was opposed to vaccinations, in some weird strain of Republicanism they linked with their love of the Second Amendment and desire for freedom from the federal government). Lucy had pleaded with Owen to go home early, or at least check them into a hotel, but Owen had refused, worried that either option would damage his mother’s feelings beyond repair. Wyatt became more and more unglued—he would not sleep, he did not eat, and Owen’s mother insisted on taking pictures of him without switching off the flash, even though every time it went off, it sent him into another round of hysterics. On the flight back, Wyatt had gotten so completely out of control that the plane had to land. Owen and Lucy rented a car and drove the rest of the way home.

  A week later, Owen got a long, handwritten letter from his mother stating in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with Wyatt, he was just in his terrible twos, and the real problem was that Lucy refused to discipline him. And then she suggested that he and Lucy might have made a mistake when they opted to have Wyatt vaccinated, because, well, there had been links. And she had warned Lucy about them, remember?

  Lucy found the letter a few months later, tucked into the nest of junk inside Owen’s nightstand, and she exploded. (Why didn’t I throw away the letter? Owen thought a million times. I should have burned the letter.) But what was done was done. And their yearly trip to Colorado to see his family was no longer in the cards.

  “They can come here,” Lucy suggested coolly whenever the topic came up. “We have a spare room. Your father is retired, and fortunately for them, your parents don’t have an autistic child. They’re welcome to visit us whenever they want.” But as she aged, Owen’s mother was beset by neuroses and maladies that served her most basic desires—she wanted to sleep in her own bed, be matriarch in her own house, cook her own holiday meals. Earlier that year, when Owen pressed her to come visit, she’d claimed her doctor told her it was no longer safe for her to fly.

  It was weird, the thought of facing life without any real connection to extended family. And Beekman felt like roots, in a weird way. It
was probably why both he and Lucy were not just drawn to Beekman, but committed to staying there. Beekman felt like a place your kids could come back to. Or, in the case of Wyatt, a place your kid would be okay if he never actually left.

  What was going to happen to Wyatt? It was a thought that struck Owen a lot, most often late at night. What happens to these kids? Once, when Wyatt was in preschool, all the kids and their parents went on a field trip to a farm that was a boarding school for autistic teenagers and, it turned out, a permanent residence for autistic adults. They trained dogs there, the bomb-sniffing and seeing-eye kind, and they ran an organic farm, which required a lot of labor. (“When you don’t use pesticides, somebody has to pick the slugs off the lettuce,” Owen overheard one parent say.)

  The day of the field trip was almost impossibly beautiful, blue skies with puffy white clouds, the grass springtime green, baby sheep scampering in the fields, and Owen tried to be optimistic. There were two-story dormitories scattered across the property, connected with winding paths painted different colors. This wouldn’t be so bad, Owen tried to make himself believe. A life filled with well-behaved dogs and frolicking sheep and puffy clouds and organic tomatoes? Harvard might be out of the question—okay, Harvard was out of the question—but was this kind of life really so bad?

  On the ride home, Wyatt fell asleep in his car seat.

  “That was kind of nice,” said Owen.

  Lucy didn’t respond.

  “I mean, it was a nice place,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, I mean, if things ever came to that.”

  “That’s not going to happen to Wyatt,” Lucy said.

  “I’m just saying,” said Owen. “It’s nice to know places like that exist.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Lucy. “But that place has nothing to do with our son.”

  * * *

  The weekend nanny whose name Gordon could never remember was standing by the front door, helping Rocco put on his coat. They were heading out for a walk.

  “Tell the nanny not to let Rocco go near Fang,” Gordon said to Kelly.

  “Maria. No Fang! No Fang por Rocco! Not safe. Muy dangeroso.”

  “Okay, Miss Kelly,” Maria said. “Okay, no Fang.”

  Fang, the Allens’ new Doberman puppy, was outside, tied to a hundred-yard zip line that zigzagged through the trees. The dog practically lost his mind each time an acorn fell or a squirrel scurried by or a bird flew overhead. Fang was not yet trained, not by any stretch of the imagination, although he was getting better at waiting to attack the dog guy until the dog guy was wearing the protective suit. Other than that, they hadn’t seen much progress. The next step was to send Fang away to Texas for six months to be trained in a controlled setting. The promise was, when he came back, he’d be the world’s best guard dog and yet gentle as a dove.

  “Enjoy your walk, sweetie,” Kelly said to Rocco, and she tightened his scarf. Once the front door closed, she walked over to the couch and dramatically flopped down on it, groaning a big groan.

  “God, I’m so bored.”

  This was Kelly’s latest refrain. She’d just come back from Vegas, loaded down with shopping bags—that’s why Kelly went to Vegas, she went there to shop, whereas Gordon’s other wives had disappeared for weeks to Paris or Milan. It took him a while to realize Kelly’s shopping trips to Vegas weren’t signs of her thriftiness, or even of what Gordon thought of as her fundamental Americanness, but were in fact disturbing reminders that deep down, she was tacky and cheap. She’d put on a silver lamé minidress to go out to dinner with Jamie the yoga instructor and when Gordon told her, “You can’t wear that kind of dress around here,” she’d said, “Okay, Grandpa.”

  Grandpa! The disrespect! The disrespect was mounting!

  “This place is so boring. There are no movie theaters. There’s nowhere to shop.”

  “Go to the city if you want to shop. And we have a movie theater in the house.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Kelly. “I’m talking about Beekman.”

  “Why don’t you volunteer at the school,” said Gordon. “I read in the paper that a bunch of the mothers get together to cook hot lunches twice a week. That would be fun.”

  Gordon loved stuff like that. The women cooking the hot lunches. Volunteering their time, banding together, driving to the local big-box club to buy massive blocks of cheese and bags of baby carrots that were as big as actual babies. It was also a PTA fund-raiser—they charged five bucks for each lunch, and each lunch couldn’t have cost more than twenty-five cents. Hot lunch, cooked by an army of mommy volunteers raising money to do things like buy books for the school library and new equipment for the gym. And zero tax dollars involved! That was the America Gordon wanted to live in.

  “With those busybody nobodies? No, thank you.”

  “This is a community,” said Gordon. “That’s part of what we do. We give back.”

  “You want me to be the lunch lady? And wear a hairnet? That’s what you want me to do for fun?”

  “Okay, maybe not the hot lunches. But you could join a club or something.”

  “Join a club? Am I in junior high? I don’t want to join a club. I want some kind of a life. I want to move back to the city.”

  “Only animals raise their kids in New York City,” said Gordon without even looking up from his computer screen.

  “Someplace else, then,” Kelly said, giving up easily.

  “Like where.”

  “South Beach.”

  “South Beach? Are you kidding me?”

  “There’s lots of art there. Culture. Good food.”

  “I’m not raising my son in South Beach,” said Gordon. “Besides, I have to be near the city for my work. You know that.”

  “Okay, the Hamptons, then. We could live there year-round. They have excellent schools.”

  The last time Gordon had been in the Hamptons, Alec Baldwin had walked up to him at a farm stand and yelled at him about climate change. He accused him of being a climate-change denier, spitting it out like it was worse than being a Holocaust denier, and Gordon had said, “I am a climate-change denier. I deny climate change. I don’t think it’s happening. I don’t think the planet is getting hotter because of what man does or does not do. I am pro-fracking, pro–fossil fuels, pro-pipelines, pro-jobs, pro-America, pro-freedom. Drill, baby, drill, Alec! Drill, baby, drill!”

  Gordon loved it, of course, and he dined out on that story for years, but he didn’t want to live in a place where there were people richer than him, more famous than him, who hated him and weren’t afraid to show it. Maybe twenty years ago, he would have been up for a dustup with a celebrity or a liberal billionaire every time he walked out the front door, but now he was getting tired. Gordon liked being the biggest fish.

  “I’m not gonna live in the Hamptons, Kelly. We’ve been over this a million times.”

  “Well, I’m going crazy, Gordon,” Kelly said, sitting up. “I’m thirty-one years old. I don’t want to count bald eagles and watch YouTube videos of a woman folding towels for the rest of my life.”

  Enough with the mocking of Simka! Simka was one of the last legitimate pleasures in his life! Plus she didn’t just fold towels! She collected greeting cards and fancy journals and old library books and tapped her fingers on them while she talked quietly about them! And wrapping paper!

  “You have a six-year-old son,” Gordon reminded her. “You could try spending some time with him. Why didn’t you go on his walk with him if you have nothing else to do? Lots of mothers find their children fascinating.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes at him. His wife rolled her eyes at him! What was next? Giving him the finger? Gordon had to get things back under control. He had to. He could feel his control slipping away. The postnup! The missing fucking postnup! How was it that a man of his age and experience, a three-time loser in the marriage game, a goddamn billionaire, had married a woman less than half his age and hadn’t insisted on a prenup? It was one of the gr
eat mysteries of Gordon’s life, really.

  “You can go to the city whenever you want. You have a car and driver at your disposal. You want a different car? I’ll buy you a different car. You don’t like Bo? I’ll get you a different driver.”

  “Bo’s fine,” said Kelly.

  “You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Don’t talk to me about bored. Look at this place. You live like the goddamn queen of England.”

  Kelly flopped back down.

  “I bet she’s bored too.”

  * * *

  Lucy was putting Wyatt to bed. He had a pretty elaborate bedtime ritual at this point, stuffed animals in a long row down the side of the bed, each in its proper place, various sound machines plugged in and humming at just the right frequencies, and a special weighted blanket that provided proprioceptive input to help him calm down.

  “Remembering people’s birthdays is an excellent way to make friends,” said Wyatt.

  “That’s true,” Lucy said.

  “You can give them a phone call,” said Wyatt. “You can give people a phone call on their birthdays and it’s an excellent way to make friends.”

  “Do you want to call someone on their birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who do you want to call?”

  Wyatt’s face went completely blank. He looked up at the ceiling, like he was stumped by the question.

  “Remembering people’s birthdays is an excellent way to make friends,” he finally said. “And you can say something nice about their clothes. Saying something nice about people’s clothes is an excellent way to make new friends.”

  “Do you want back scratches tonight?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Wyatt rolled over, and Lucy started to scratch his back.

  I have a crush on Ben, Lucy thought for the first time.

  It was weird, how the Arrangement had made all of this happen backwards. For the first few times, the sex with Ben was just what it was supposed to be: Meaningless sex. Surprising, satisfying, a bit educational, delicious—all of those things too—but essentially meaningless.