Either way, it was plenty long enough for Jessica to know exactly what was about to come out of Mitch’s mouth at any given moment. So when she slid into the chair across from him and he asked, “What’s the name of that drink I like here?” she had an answer locked and loaded.
“The negroni, you dummy,” she said.
“That’s not the really sweet one, is it?”
“No. Not really. It’s gin mostly. Some other stuff.”
He tilted his menu toward the candle. “Ah, right. How do you remember this stuff? We haven’t been here in months.”
“You could just get a beer,” she said. “You know, simplify.”
He made his good-natured face. “It’s date night. I order expensive drinks on date night, and you find me charming. I texted you.”
“I know. I just got it. I love when you call me ‘woman,’ by the way.”
They kissed quickly over the middle of the table—corner of his mouth to opposite corner of her mouth—the matrimonial equivalent of a knuckle bump. She picked up her water glass. “To the last couple standing,” she said.
They clinked and sipped.
“Are you supposed to toast with water?” he asked. “Isn’t that bad luck?”
“At this point, I think we can toast with whatever we want.”
“True that, girlfriend,” he said, and then he lowered his voice—serious, like a funeral. “It’s official, then? Officially official? Alan and Amber?”
There was a long, empty table across from them where a big group would sit. She imagined the Core Four gathered around it, laughing, sharing apps, which was something that would now never happen again. “Yep,” she said. “They signed the papers this morning.”
“Well, shit,” he said. “That’s that, then.”
She drained her water. “Amber emailed Megan, Sarah, and me from the lawyer’s office. She wants to get drinks on Friday. Girls’ night.”
“That’s so Sex and the City,” he said.
He was right. It was a total Sex and the City move. But they’d reached a point in their marriage where you don’t have to acknowledge each other’s rightness all the time. Instead, she surveyed the people around them. “Young crowd tonight.”
“I know,” he said. “We’re like the chaperones. I’ve been eavesdropping. Believe it or not, most of them are complete morons.”
“Don’t be cynical. They’re young. We were morons once, too.”
“You’re all morons!” Mitch said, just loud enough, but no one noticed or cared.
A Black Keys song came on, and Mitch tapped the table. “So, your day. Good? Bad? Somewhere in between?”
She thought about the day’s patients: an overeater, a college kid with bipolar disorder, and a woman who admitted to recently googling the phrase How to secretly poison someone. “It came and went,” she said. “Mostly good.”
“Same. Teenagers still don’t care about great works of literature. Other than that, nothing to report.”
This was how they talked about their days, a sort of shorthand. Since The Divorces, though, Jessica wondered if they should be saying more to each other, like with details and complete sentences.
“Oh,” Mitch said. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, be cool,” he said. “Don’t look right away. But you see that girl over there in the yellow?”
She glanced, faux casual. It was the hot girl she’d caught him checking out five minutes earlier. She was a few tables over now, her long legs crossed. “Got it.”
“All right. Is that a really short dress, or is it a slightly long shirt and she forgot to wear pants?”
Jessica looked again. “Well, aside from basically being able to see her crotch,” she said, “I think it’s rather elegant.”
He pushed his menu to the center of the table and rested his chin on his palm. “Emily’s never gonna dress like that, right?” he asked.
“She probably will. The other day she asked me what thigh gap is.”
“Wonderful,” he said. “How is that even in a seven-year-old girl’s brain?”
“Well, she’s highly verbal for seven,” said Jessica. “And she watches all those Ariana Grande videos on YouTube.”
Mitch took a sip of his water. “Thanks a lot, Internet.”
She smiled, and so did he, because this part of marriage had always been easy for them. The breezy part. The part that didn’t involve their friends’ marriages imploding and them being left to quietly wonder, Are we next?
“Where the hell’d our waiter go?” said Mitch.
She scanned the place, and her eyes fell on the restroom doors next to the kitchen. She remembered a night years ago, back when this place was called Pazo instead of Bar Vasquez, when they tried to have sex in the men’s room. They’d failed, of course, because the sheer logistics of having sex in a public restroom are simply insurmountable. But there was joy in that failure.
“Oh, good,” said Mitch. “Here he comes.”
Jessica barely heard this, though. She was thinking about how she’d giggled all those years ago, when the Pazo manager knocked on the bathroom door while Mitch held one of her breasts. “Maybe if we stay really quiet, he’ll think we died,” Mitch had whispered.
“Hey, guys. Sorry about the wait. Can I start you off with some drinks?”
“Absolutely,” said Mitch.
“For the lady?”
Jessica meant to say shiraz, which was a word she’d said many times before without difficulty. But when she looked up, the waiter was so startlingly good-looking that the word got caught in her throat.
“Sorry?” he said. “Shirrrr…”
“Shiraz,” she said. “A glass.”
“Right. Cool. You, sir?”
“I’ll take a…negroni.” Mitch pronounced it slowly, like a determined tourist in an exotic country.
When the waiter was gone, they looked at their menus. The Black Keys song was over, replaced by something clubby that Jessica didn’t know. Mitch took a breath, and, of course, she knew exactly what he was going to say.
“What’s the name of that thing I like here? Chicken something, right?”
3
The third negroni had been a mistake.
Mitch knew it would be, too, even as he was ordering it, which is how it always goes with fancy drinks: like making a down payment on nausea.
He took a deep breath and rallied as he opened the front door, because you never know exactly what you’re in for when you leave a nine-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl with a sitter. Injuries, emotional breakdowns, night terrors, art-supply disasters, plumbing fiascos. You have to be ready for all of it. But on that night there was only silence.
He hung his keys on the hook. “Hello, hello,” he said.
“Hey, guys. In here.”
It was Luke, the next-door neighbor kid. He was their go-to sitter, and one of Mitch’s students. They found him hunched over his laptop at the kitchen island. Three strong drinks had left Mitch feeling silly, so he went in for a high five. “Luke, my man. Bring it.”
They touched palms, and then Mitch improvised some sideways hand slaps and finger grabs.
Jessica gave him a look that asked, Are you drunk? And then she told him to leave the kid alone. “Come on, he’s studying.”
“It’s my new thing,” Mitch said. “I’m developing personalized handshakes with all my students. We’ll work on that one, Luke. It was just a first draft.”
Luke laughed. “Okay, Mr. B.”
He felt a hit of boozy goodwill. He couldn’t help it. He loved it when his students called him Mr. B.
Jessica grabbed two fizzy waters from the fridge and gave Mitch one.
“What’re you working on?” he asked Luke. “You look very serious.”
&n
bsp; “Trig,” Luke said.
“Oh God,” said Mitch.
“I know. It’s a nightmare.”
“Well, the good news is, you’ll probably never have to use it a day in your life.”
“You think?”
“Are you kidding? I’m forty. I don’t even know what trig is. Is it the one with shapes?”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Jessica.
Luke piled some things into his backpack—papers, notebooks, an awful-looking calculator—and Mitch whispered, “Trig is lame, Luke.”
“I’ll mention that to Mr. Howard tomorrow.”
“Damn right. And tell him Mr. Butler told you to.”
There was leftover oven pizza sitting on the table. Mitch grabbed some crust and took a bite. It tasted pretty much like you’d expect cold oven-pizza crust to taste.
“How were the kids?” Jessica asked.
“Good,” said Luke. “We went all in on Legos.”
Next to the microwave, Lego Bart Simpson and Lego Chewbacca sat together in the Lego Batmobile.
“Any trouble getting them down?” she asked.
Mitch caught Luke glancing at Jessica’s breasts, and he had to stop himself from ruffling the kid’s hair.
“Well, they went to bed with flashlights,” Luke said. “Is that normal?”
Mitch avoided looking at Jessica. “It’s just a phase,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna retire to the bedroom to drink LaCroix in my underwear. Jessica, pay the man.”
Jessica rolled her eyes, and Luke laughed again.
“See you fourth period,” said Mitch. “And wear your big-boy pants. We’re starting Romeo and Juliet. Oh, and spoiler alert”—for dramatic effect, Mitch turned and looked back over his shoulder—“it doesn’t end well.”
* * *
—
Date night had been his idea.
Not just that date night—the entire date-night enterprise.
It came to him in a burst of optimism a few months back, after The Divorces started, while he and Jessica tag-teamed the dishes. “We should start going out more,” he said. “Like we used to, before the kids sucked the life out of us like little vampires.”
In theory, it was a grand gesture of early-middle-age romance. Now, though, pre-hangover on a Wednesday night and looking at his own blotchy face in his wife’s full-length mirror, it felt like so many other things in their lives. It felt like one more thing.
He set his khakis on a pile of similar-looking khakis and turned on SportsCenter.
Then, at exactly 10:20 P.M., he heard the sound of a car door outside. He went to the window to look. It was James, his next-door neighbor, Luke’s dad. For the fifth night in a row, James—not Jim, James—was loading his things into his black BMW SUV in the driveway.
Luke’s parents, James and Ellen, were splitting, too, because divorce was a virus at that point, and it was closing in on them at zombie-movie speed. Mitch hid behind the blinds and watched.
James wore a Yale sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. He smiled down at his iPhone. The light from the screen caught his teeth, making them glow in the dark. Ellen was out there, too, arms crossed, glaring at him.
A throat cleared. It was Jessica, standing at the bedroom door, there to startle him. “You’re creeping again, weirdo,” she said.
“I’m not creeping. I’m observing.”
“Well, you’re observing creepily.”
She came into the room and set a laundry basket next to the dresser.
“Do you think that dickhead whitens his teeth?” Mitch asked.
“Of course he whitens his teeth,” she said. “He tans, too.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“It’s April in Baltimore, Mitch. He’s a white guy with skin like a Latin R & B singer.”
“Man,” he said. “That’s so nineties.”
Out in the driveway, James checked his phone again. Another smile. Mitch wondered who he was texting with.
Jessica stepped out of her heels, one after the other. After all these years, he still had to recalibrate whenever she did this. She was shorter barefoot, obviously, but it was more than that. She was somehow smaller, too, like an actress removing an elaborate costume. She reached back and unzipped her dress, exposing one bare shoulder, and Mitch felt that familiar stir. The topographical map of their sex life featured the typical peaks and valleys, but his body still reacted to hers at nearly every turn, which, he knew, counted for something.
“I like that dress on you, by the way,” he said.
She flexed her feet, cracking her toes. “Thanks.”
“Luke liked it, too,” he said.
She tossed her heels into her closet with a clunk. “Teenage boys are an easy audience,” she said.
Outside, James Tetrised more crap into his car. A long reading lamp. A set of golf woods. A duffel bag.
In the bathroom, she let the dress fall to the floor and started brushing her teeth in her bra and underwear, and Mitch fell into bed to watch her. About ten seconds in, she wandered to the window with her electric toothbrush and looked down on James and Ellen.
“You get to creep, but I don’t?” he said.
“I’m subtler than you.”
“Why do you think Ellen watches him like that?” he asked. “Every night. She just stands out there.”
She turned off her brush. There was toothpaste foam at the corners of her mouth. “That woman represents one of the great internal conflicts of my feminist life.”
He turned down the TV. “Yeah?”
“On one level, James is a pulsating asshole. Through and through.”
“I support that. Particularly in light of the tanning revelation.”
“But then there’s this mean voice in my head. It keeps saying, ‘Maybe the mom jeans and androgynous haircut weren’t such a good idea after all, Ellen.’ ”
“Ouch,” he said. “That is mean.”
“I’m not proud of it.”
Back at the sink, she rubbed moisturizer on her face and legs—a nightly ritual. “I watched you tonight, you know,” she said.
“You what?”
“I watched you.”
“You did? When?”
“At the restaurant. Before I went in. I watched you through the front window for a few minutes.”
“How’d I look?” he said. “Do you think my blazer’s getting too ratty?”
She met his eyes in the mirror. “I saw you check out that girl.”
“What girl?”
“The one who forgot her pants. Remember?”
Obliviousness was a card Mitch played as much as any other husband, but for a moment he legitimately had no idea what she was talking about. And then…the girl in yellow. “Ah,” he said. “Right.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He felt his face flush. “In my defense, it was a lot of skin, Jess. Your eyes sort of go right to it.”
She climbed into their bed smelling like nighttime. Instead of curling into her spot beside him, she settled somewhere in the middle, legs tucked beneath her. She was in shorts and a tank top now. So much of marriage is spent only half paying attention to each other. Talking while driving. Talking while watching Netflix. Talking while staring at a toddler, or while scanning utility bills or catalogs from the mail or Evites for some distant weekend. But she faced him now, fully engaged, her eyes square on his, and it made their bedroom feel smaller.
“You seemed pretty interested in her,” she said.
“It was just a girl in a restaurant. There are millions of them.”
“Stop it. Of course you were interested. She was hot.”
He sat up and settled against the headboard. “Hardwiring,” he said. “Right, doctor?”
She nodded. “If this was ten th
ousand years ago, you’d’ve grabbed her by the hair and done whatever you wanted to her.”
“Which would’ve totally ruined date night,” he said.
Outside, another car door shut, and Ellen shouted something that sounded very much like “There’s no way in hell you’re taking the espresso machine, you son of a bitch!”
“Mitch,” she said. “I want to continue our conversation. The conversation.” She put her hand on his leg over the comforter.
But before either of them could say more, there was a noise. Through their closed bedroom door, from the other side of the house, over the sounds of their neighbors’ marriage ending, came a shout. That shout was followed by the sound of a little boy running down the hallway.
“Shit,” Mitch whispered.
Jessica wrapped herself in a blanket, and three seconds later their son, Jude, stood in the doorway clutching his flashlight.
“Hey, buddy,” said Mitch.
“Hey, honey,” said Jessica.
“E.T. is in my closet again,” said Jude.
“Jude,” said Mitch. “Come on.”
“I’m serious, Dad.”
“Buddy, I promise. He’s not.”
“I saw him, though.”
“You didn’t.”
“I heard him.”
“Jude.”
It was a parent-child standoff. Jude clicked his flashlight on and off, on and off. “Can one of you come lay with me?” he said.
Mitch looked at Jessica. She was already reaching for her Kindle.
“Jude. We’ve been over this. A lot.”
“I could hear him breathing. In the closet.”
Jessica sighed. It was a weaponized sound, aimed at Mitch.
“Just for a minute?” said Jude. “Till I fall asleep again?”
There was no use in fighting. He’d lost. There are so many losses in parenting, strung together over many years. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there in a second.”
When their son was gone, Mitch reminded Jessica that, technically, according to the rotation, it was her turn.
“Mm-hmm,” she said.
Outside there was beeping as the rear hatch of James’s SUV closed.
“Goddamn E.T.,” Mitch said. “I hate that little fucker.”
Last Couple Standing Page 2