Arranged

by Catherine McKenzie

  “This and a lot more.”

  “I sound like a brat.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “I am.”

  “Why don’t you turn in?”

  “I’m going to. But first I need something to eat. I’m starving.”

  “I’ll let you go, then.” He sounds disappointed.

  “Sorry, I’m just really hungry.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. And see you in two days.”

  “Right. ’Night, Jack.”

  “ ’Night, Anne. Sleep well.”

  I hang up the phone, collect my room key, and go down to the hotel bar to shake off the day. It’s one of those English-hunting-scene places, with a mahogany bar and forest-green walls. There’s a fire in the fireplace, and the burning-wood smell almost covers up the years of spilled beer and malt whiskey. The room is empty except for a female bartender in a white shirt and black apron. She’s wiping down the top of the bar, looking bored, while she listens to the radio. Top-forty, by the sound of it. I decide to sit at the bar rather than at one of the small tables scattered about. They look lonely in a way a seat at the bar doesn’t.

  I order a pint of Harp and a pastrami sandwich with a dill pickle and open the newspaper I brought with me to pass the time.

  “Mind if I sit here?” says a man with a British accent.

  “Suit yourself,” I reply, glancing sideways at him. He has short black hair and an ordinary profile.

  He turns toward me. “Thanks. You eating or just drinking?”

  I look into his blue, blue eyes. He might look ordinary in profile, but straight on, he looks like a man who belongs with me. “I’m waiting for a sandwich.”

  He smiles. His teeth are straight, dazzling. “That sounds just right.”

  He waves the bartender over and orders a Guinness and a roast beef sandwich. While his attention is diverted, I check out the rest of him. He’s wearing a very well-tailored black suit and a still-crisp powder-blue shirt. He’s loosened his navy tie at the throat and undone the first two buttons on his shirt, showing just the right amount of dark chest hair.

  He turns back to me. “So, what brings—”

  “A nice girl like me to a place like this?” I laugh. “You can do better than that!”

  “You’d think so, but no, I can’t.” He laughs along with me, a deep, infectious laugh.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  “I’m on a book tour.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Not the answer I was expecting.”

  “What, you thought maybe I was a lady of the evening?” I’m wearing old, loose jeans and a simple black V-neck sweater.

  He shakes his head. “My name’s Perry.”

  “I’m Anne.”

  The bartender brings our sandwiches. As we eat, Perry tells me about his business trip (client development) and his business (corporate investigations), and I tell him about my book (not his cup of tea, but he listens politely) and the book tour (more interest here), and we spend an easy hour together. Between the bites of pickle and pastrami and the next two beers, I decide he looks most like John, but I can’t tell whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that the noise in my head has quieted down for the first time all week.

  “So,” he says as I finish the last dregs of my third pint. Our stools are close enough that his thigh is brushing against mine. We’ve had this much contact for several minutes, ever since we both moved toward each other at the same moment. “Time for one more drink?”

  “I should be getting to bed. I’ve got another round of signings in the morning.” I stand up. My feet feel uneven.

  “Steady there.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. I feel the heat of his hands through the fabric of my sweater, and I understand the look in his eyes. I might have the same look in mine. Everything seems to slow down in this moment, and I feel hyper-aware. I smell old beer and dust. Christina Aguilera is singing on the radio.

  Then something shifts, and I’m hit by a wave of déjà vu. My book-deal party. The way everything—even my skin—was attracted to Aaron. I check Perry’s left hand to see if he’s wearing a wedding band. His ring finger is bare, but mine isn’t.

  “Can I walk you to your room?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  What the hell am I doing?

  “Shall we go?”

  I turn to leave, and two steps in, I feel dizzy. “Let me go splash some water on my face first. I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll be right here.” He sits back down on his stool, a smile playing on his perfect face.

  I walk toward the bathrooms at the back of the bar and push through the swinging door. The music from the radio is piped in through a tinny speaker, and it bounces off the tiles. I turn on the water to wash my hands as Christina holds her last note and the music switches to a mellow guitar. A song about mockingbirds flying away.

  I recognize it right away. It’s the song Jack and I danced to on our wedding night. The song he sang to me.

  I look at myself in the mirror as I let the words wash over me. My face looks strange, like a word you say over and over until you’re not sure it’s a real word anymore.

  My God, my God, what am I doing? Why can’t I move past the ridiculous, infantile attraction I have to this particular type of man? I’m not like this. I don’t cheat. I don’t pick up men in bars. Then again, I don’t marry strangers either. Goddammit! What do I want from my life? What do I want from Jack? From my marriage? From this day?

  I realize I’m crying, and I wipe the tears away. My hands smell like the soap I just washed them with, and it makes me think of Jack. My hands smell like he smells. His soapy, woodsy smell.

  I look at myself in the mirror and face the truth. I know what I’ve been trying to ignore. What I’ve been pushing away. What I’ve been afraid of. Why I’ve been distracting myself with Perry, being an earlier version of myself.

  I love Jack.

  I slip past Perry, who’s flirting with the bartender in my absence (a backup plan?) and return to my room for a hard hour of self-reflection.

  At the end of it, I’m stuck with two things: I love Jack, and that scares the shit out of me.

  The love part is easier to understand. I’ve been in love before. Too many times. And Jack and I fit together in a way I haven’t with anyone else. But the fear—where does that come from? Am I worried Jack doesn’t love me? No. I know with a quiet certainty that he does. Despite his silence the other night, we think too much alike for us not to feel the same. He was probably even trying to tell me he loved me at the airport, and I was too freaked out to let him. And since then, whenever we’ve spoken, I’ve kept him at arm’s length.

  So what is it? Why am I terrified?

  God, I wish I could talk to Sarah. But what could I say? I just realized I’m in love with my husband, and that’s freaking me out? It wouldn’t take more than five minutes for her to strip away my Blythe & Company facade. And as much as I need to talk this out, I have no desire to expose the way Jack and I met.

  Speaking of Blythe & Company, emergency phone sessions with Dr. Szwick should really be included in the ten-thousand-dollar cover charge.

  What would Dr. Szwick say if I could call him? He wouldn’t let me get away with telling myself I don’t know why I’m terrified. And shouldn’t I be able to do this on my own? Shouldn’t I know my own mind by now?

  I do. I know why I’m scared of love. It’s because that’s when it always starts to go wrong. When it starts to deviate from the fairy tale. After the happy ending comes . . . disappointment. I don’t think I can stand another disappointment. I did this crazy thing, married a stranger, so I could avoid it, so I could get my happy ending.

  So save yourself, Anne. One more time.

  In the morning, I call the airline and change my flight so I can leave right after my last signing.

  I decide not to tell Jack I’m coming home a day early. I want to surprise him. Surprise him and tell him that I don’t
take it back, that I love him, that I hope he feels the same way.

  After ten anxious/happy hours, I push open our front door and call out his name. “Jack?”

  My stomach churns with nerves and longing, but there’s no answer. I try to suppress my disappointment as I walk into the empty living room. Jack has set up a sawhorse in the middle of it, but he’s made minimal progress on the shelves. I smile as I look around at the mess, because right now I love even his messiness.

  I wheel my suitcase into the bedroom and find more chaos. The bed is unmade, there are clothes all over the floor, and Neil Young is whining through the clock radio. I turn off the radio and look around for some sign of when he’ll be back. There isn’t anything, because he doesn’t know I’m coming home today. I think briefly of calling him until I notice his cell phone sitting on the night table. Damn. I can’t even let him know I’m here.

  Frustrated, I go back into the living room and sit down at the desk he’s set up in the corner to write. His appointment book is sitting there, open to today. He’s meeting his editor, Ted, for drinks at five-thirty.

  I check my watch. It’s six o’clock. He probably won’t be home for a while. Maybe I should go meet him at the bar. No, no, that’s crazy. Relax, Anne, relax.

  I sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and flip through the channels. I can’t rest on a channel for longer than ten seconds, and after a few minutes, I realize I’m sitting on something uncomfortable and bulky. I reach under me and find a large stack of paper held together with a clip. I turn it over. It’s Jack’s work in progress, the one he never lets me read.

  Its title makes me feel queasy. With shaking hands, I start reading.

  Married Like Me

  Prologue

  I was kicking around my editor’s office about six months ago, waiting for the inevitable “So, what’s your next project going to be, Jackie, my boy?” It was the only reason he’d ever call me in for a meeting.

  Great guy, Ted, but in the years we’ve worked together, he’s assumed a role of parental concern about my career, my general lack of drive, and my revolving door of six-month girlfriends. He also has this unnerving ability to call me at the exact moment when I most need a kick in the ass. And since the final proofs for my book were approved two weeks after Jessica, my last six-monther, demanded her key back with a shrill “Never call me again,” I knew it was only a matter of time before Ted started talking about the future.

  “Jackson, your presence is required in my office tomorrow at two sharp.”

  “Yessir, Master Ted.”

  “Knock it off, Jackass. Be here.” He clicked off, on to his next problem child.

  He has a stable of about twenty of us. All men. All writers of middling success. All in need of his tough love, without which, according to him, we would never get off our “keisters” and produce anything salable. “And then where would you be?”

  “So, Jackson, what’s the plan?” Ted said, now that he had me in front of him.

  “I’ve been toying with the idea of doing one of those survivalist adventures where they drop you off in the woods for two weeks sans everything.”

  “Jesus, Jack. Have you been reading women’s magazines for inspiration?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to keep my temper.

  “Gwyneth Paltrow just did that for Vogue.”

  Ted’s an insomniac, and he reads—and remembers—everything under the sun. He’s also a hub of information: celebrities, quasi-celebrities, people who might be celebrities and even average Joes—chances are Ted knows them or knows something about them.

  “What about sending me up McKinley? People keep dying there.”

  “Isn’t it called Denali now?”

  “So?”

  “Why not Everest, Krakauer wannabe?” He knew he was hitting a nerve, and he was enjoying it. I looked at him sitting smugly at his desk, his feet propped up and his head resting on the back of his chair. I realized I was missing the obvious.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what my next project’s going to be?”

  “Finally got there, did you?”

  “Looks like.”

  He brought his feet to the floor and leaned forward with an excited look in his eyes. He asked me if I’d ever heard of Blythe & Company. When I told him no, he asked me to close the door. He had a book idea for me that was going to “knock my fucking socks off.” All I had to do was one little thing.

  “What’s that?” I asked with a hint of trepidation.

  He paused dramatically. “Get married.”

  Chapter 21

  An Unfinished Project

  I read Jack’s book all the way through, frozen on the couch, barely breathing, barely thinking.

  There are so many shocking things in this book, it’s hard to know where to start.

  But the highlights:

  He uncovered a lot of details about Blythe & Company, details I failed to find in my limited search on the Internet. Details that show me to be either a terrible journalist or a stupid girl looking for a fairy tale. Maybe both. But now, thanks to Jack, I know all about the aging guru couple behind it and their enormous house and Swiss bank accounts. Whether Blythe & Company works or not, is real or not, someone’s making a lot of money off it.

  Jack also tracked down some of Blythe & Company’s former clients. Some were deliriously happy and spoke about the company the way people used to speak about the Peoples Temple. Others ended up poorer, divorced, and bitter. They spoke about the “process” like kids talk about their grades in high school: how it was all random, how there was no method to any of it. I can’t tell if their relationships failed because it was all random or because they’d never given it a real chance. Were they part of the 5 percent? Was there a 5 percent?

  And then, and then, he writes about me, about seeing me for the first time. Oh, he gives me a different name: Diana Barry (c’mon, Jack, couldn’t you make up a name instead of using one from the same book I was named from?), but it’s recognizably me.

  Jack knew all kinds of things about me before we ever met. When he received his slip of paper from Ms. Cooper, he got a friend to hack in to their computer system and learned my full name. Then he Googled me to death and read everything he could find.

  The first time he saw me wasn’t in Mexico. He followed me around for a day, watched me buy some of the clothes I got for the trip. In the book, he speculates on what a person like me (good-looking, successful, educated) would want from a service like this. Was it my fault all of my relationships had failed, or did I just have bad luck?

  He has that freaky ability the best journalists have of remembering conversations verbatim, or nearly so, without taking notes. So every time he quotes me in the book, it’s something I said, or it sounds like something I could’ve said, even if I don’t remember saying it. And Jack’s accuracy doesn’t make it any easier to see it written down on the page, or to be editorialized by him.

  By the time I read about our first night together, I’m nearly hyperventilating. And while this is the most restrained chapter, it makes me sick to my stomach to see these moments I thought were so private captured starkly on the page.

  Ten pages from the end, I throw the manuscript down and run to the bathroom, throwing up what’s left of the lunch I ate hours ago. When I finish, I sit down on the cold porcelain floor and rest my head against the wall. The act of throwing up makes me furious. I hate throwing up. I hate the tangy metallic taste in my mouth and the lack of control and—

  I hate Jack. I hate him.

  I start to cry.

  The cold, hard floor makes my butt ache. And my heart aches, it aches, so I cry and cry until there are no tears left in me.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. What am I going to do? What am I going to say to Jack? How will I be able to speak to him, see him, share any space with him for longer than one second? I don’t think I can manage even that. One second is too much. I need to leave before he gets back. Write a note for him and tell him to ge
t out, that I never want to see him again. Don’t contact me, don’t call. And don’t bloody publish that book, or I’ll get Sarah to sue your ass to kingdom come. You think you’ve been unsuccessful before? You have no idea. I will own you and everything you produce until you die, you asshole motherfucker!

  God. What time is it? Jack’s going to be home soon. I need to get up. I need to pull myself together.

  Get up, Anne, get up.

  I hear a key in the lock.

  “Hold on a sec, Ted. I think I left it on the couch,” Jack says, crystal-clear though he’s rooms away. Even his voice is too close.

  I hear a murmur of a deeper voice but not the words. Through a supreme act of will, I stand up, run some water in the sink, and wash the grief off my face. Feeling unsteady, I dry myself on a towel. I don’t want to see Jack, but mostly, I don’t want him to find me in here like this.

  “Anne? Anne? Are you here?”

  “I’ll be out in a second,” I croak. “Give me a minute.” A little louder, a little stronger.

  “I want you to meet Ted,” Jack calls from outside the bathroom door.

  Are you fucking kidding me? He wants me to meet Ted, the mastermind behind this whole shit show? Just the idea of it makes me so mad, I’m filled with a burst of energy.

  “In a minute,” I say as firmly as I can.

  As his footsteps recede, I start formulating a plan, a way I can deal with this and retain (maybe) a small measure of dignity. I look at myself in the mirror. I’m a disaster, but I can fix it. I brush my hair, apply some mascara, and tuck in my blouse. I check my reflection again. I look presentable. I look normal except to myself.

  I square my shoulders and leave the bathroom.

  Jack is in the living room with a man in his late fifties who’s about the same height as Jack, with a large beer belly that protrudes vertically from his body. He has short graying hair and wears glasses that are too big for his face. He’s holding Jack’s manuscript under his arm.