by Sarah Dunn
By the time he met Susan, Rowan was like one of those soldiers back from the trenches in World War I, unable to reenter normal life and incapable of communicating what he’d lived through. Their first date was a setup, orchestrated by one of the nosy yentas who worked alongside him at the firm, and he went along with it more or less against his will. He sat across the table from her, and it was like he was trapped inside a glass jar. He was numb, aloof, barely reachable.
Susan hadn’t noticed. Here she had the advantage of her narcissism—which was in the subclinical range, but just barely—and her laserlike focus on her life plan, which was clicking along nicely but now required a suitable man. And Rowan—tall, not bad-looking, with a decent job and all of his hair—was suitable. He was more than suitable. And she was thirty-eight.
Susan had been the engine driving their courtship, with her optimism and determination and purposefulness, and for the most part Rowan didn’t mind. He didn’t believe love could conquer all anymore. He had convinced himself that there were more important things than whatever Marissa LeFevre had to offer, things like stability, sanity, warmth. He didn’t exactly long for hearth and home, but it seemed preferable to a life of midnight bodega runs and biannual suicide attempts. He wanted a woman who would make a good mother. A woman who wouldn’t threaten to slit her wrists to get out of going to a dinner party. He found his new role as passive participant in the unfolding of Susan’s life plan refreshing. He’d been Marissa’s caretaker, her mother and father and shrink and best friend, and he was tired. He had nothing left to give, and he’d stumbled upon a woman who required very little of the deepest parts of him. He didn’t have to do anything, really. As long as he didn’t put up a fight, Susan took care of everything.
Six months into his marriage to Susan, Rowan realized he’d made a terrible mistake. He couldn’t stop thinking about Marissa. When he couldn’t reach her on her cell phone, he broke down and called her mother in Iowa.
“Marissa’s dead.”
“Oh my God,” said Rowan.
“She hung herself in the garage,” Marissa’s mother said. “People always want to know how she did it, so I figure I might as well tell them.”
* * *
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
Wyatt was flicking his beads on the kitchen table while Lucy, exhausted and exhilarated from the night before, was staring into her coffee cup.
Don’t think. Stop thinking about it. This is an unsolvable problem, it is a riddle with no answer, it is an inverse Zen koan, one that sends the mind spinning in a million different directions instead of stilling it.
When you’re with Ben, you can think about Ben. When you’re with Owen or with Wyatt, think about them. It started to feel bad only when she thought more than a few months into the future, when the impossibilities started lining up like Wyatt’s Matchbox cars in impossibly long, perfectly straight rows.
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
“What’s that, Wyatt?”
“Captain Edward Smith, wireless operator John Phillips, and Mary Smith’s husband, Lucian, who would never see his unborn child alive.”
“Who are those people?”
“People who perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Oh yeah?”
“They perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Do you know what perished means, Wyatt?”
“They perished in the ice-cold water of the North Atlantic Ocean.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“Not exactly.”
“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, bu
t 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.
Yesterday, however, had been Friday, and yet there’d been no sign of Simka. Gordon spent most of the night worried, first only a bit, but by four a.m. his mind would not stop racing. Where was Simka? What happened to Simka? What if Simka was gone forever?
Then, at 7:26 a.m., his phone woke him up and told him a new video had finally landed on Simka’s channel.
She looked beautiful, as usual. She was wearing her hair the way he most liked it, falling forward over both shoulders, as thick and shiny as any head of hair he’d ever seen. She had her little mischievous smile on, too, and Gordon could tell she was in a good mood. Simka was always in a good mood, but the glow around her suggested today’s was a particularly good one, particularly, particularly good.
“Before I start today, I just want to take a moment to say thank you to a few of my super-special friends, I really love you and appreciate you and your comments and I love knowing you’re out there, it makes me feel so happy. You are so special to me, I know you might not believe that but I really treasure my special friends, and I want to say a super-special hi to chiefogomo, exactomac, wallabiefifteen, Gordonseven-twenty-six, fariephantom—”
Gordon726!
That was him! He was Gordon726! Simka was talking to him!
Gordon clicked on the screen and listened to the beginning again, waiting to hear his name. It was like a crack in the time-space continuum, Simka whispering his name, her tongue doing unimaginable things to the d in the middle and to the seven and the twenty and the six. She had over two hundred thousand followers, and yet, and yet! She’d singled him out! Gordon726! Simka knew him. He was special to Simka. She loved him and appreciated him.
To be fair, Gordon knew Simka didn’t really know him, and she didn’t really love him, but he had the sense that she did appreciate him! She must have seen something in his comments that stood out to her, stood out enough for her to single him out from among her over two hundred thousand followers.
He started again, from the beginning.
* * *
“My mother said you’re having a midlife crisis,” Madison said to him the second time they met.
Her name was Madison and she was twenty-six! She’d texted him back that first night saying that she was twenty-nine, but then after they slept together she admitted she was twenty-six, in her sexy kitten voice. He never would have slept with her if he knew she was only twenty-six, but, well, at this point, he figured the damage had already been done.
“You told your mother about me?”
“I tell my mother everything.”
“Did you tell her you’re sleeping with me?”
Madison rolled her eyes at him.
“I don’t understand that eye roll,” said Owen. “Does that mean yes, you told her, or no, you didn’t?”
“I tell my mom everything. She’s my best friend. We text a thousand times a day.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” said Madison. “She said you probably don’t really have an open marriage.”
“Your mom said that?”
“Yeah. And she said I should just be aware of that if I’m going to spend time with you.”
“Well, first of all, I do have an open marriage. That is in fact the truth.”
“She said that’s what you’d say,” said Madison.
“I’m saying it because it’s true. I have a six-month free pass.”
“What happens after six months?”
“We both stop. End of the experiment. Life goes back to normal.”
“I went out with this fireman who told me he and his wife were separated, and then it turned out they were still living in the same house, but he said he slept on the couch. And then his wife found his burner phone in the glove compartment and tracked me down and went batshit on me. It was awful. I was totally in love with him. I had to move back home for, like, eight months. My mom doesn’t want to see me go through all that again.”
“You told your mom all that?”
“My mom’s not uptight about sex,” said Madison.
Her mom’s not uptight about sex.
“She raised me to believe that there’s no such thing as a slut.”
This was the problem with the millennials, in a nutshell. There still was such a thing as a slut. You could say there wasn’t, but there was. For example: Madison. Madison was a slut.
“All of my friends are like me with this stuff,” she said.
“How is that possible? I’ve never met anyone like you, ever.”
“That’s because you’re super-old,” said Madison with a smile. “So, next time, you want to do some molly?”
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, Owen thought on the drive home. It was funny, really, how doing the most transgressive thing of his entire adult life was making him feel like a real fuddy-duddy. That’s how he felt, like a fuddy-duddy. And proud to be one! Proud to be a fuddy-duddy if the alternative was this, having sex with the Madisons of this world, becoming the kind of person who did this. No, he didn’t want to “do some molly.” He didn’t even know what molly was. Something like ecstasy, only better or much, much worse, depending on how your Internet search went. Owen wanted to stand on his front porch and yell at the neighborhood kids. He wanted to watch Fox News and boycott things and get really scared about the direction the country was headed in.
/> He had a plan. He was going to fuck Madison again. No doubt. Maybe even a few more times. And he was going to keep freezing Izzy out until she got the message and left him alone or sold her house and moved away, whichever came first. Then, in a couple of weeks, he was going to sit Lucy down, tell her how much he loved her and their life and their family and the way they knew each other inside and out, the way they made love and the way they raised Wyatt, and call the whole arrangement off early. Oh, and take her to Bermuda for five days. She’d like that.
Sixteen
Change is the only constant.
—Constance Waverly, quoting Heraclitus
The Wayside was a sleazy motel, and Owen planned on doing something sleazy inside of it. It had a parking area hidden from view, and it was a place where nobody from Beekman would ever go and where out-of-towners routinely died. Well, not routinely, but twice in the time Owen had lived in Beekman, a dead body was found at the Wayside; once, a soccer mom from Westchester who’d driven north and OD’d, the other time, a gangbanger from Newburgh who’d done something unwise on the other side of the Hudson and hid out at the Wayside for three weeks. He was shot, finally, two times in the head, on a trip back from the vending machine. He never even got a chance to enjoy his orange soda and peanut M&M’s, according to the local paper, which had an above-the-fold photo of the Wayside’s parking lot filled with cop cars and volunteer firefighters.
“Nice,” Madison said when she walked in.
