4
Back to the conversation.
That conversation. The one Jessica and Mitch were about to continue having.
It was ongoing: one big conversation in five parts, like a British detective series.
When frightened Jude showed up in his pajamas with his flashlight, he interrupted what would’ve been conversation number four about how Jessica and Mitch Butler planned to save their marriage.
CONVERSATION NUMBER ONE
The first time they talked about it, they barely even talked about it. Mitch actually thought Jessica was joking.
They were at the Towson mall.
Luke was watching the kids one Saturday afternoon so they could do some shopping. They milled around a couple of stores together, looking at this and that. Jessica asked for, then promptly disregarded, his advice on a sweater. Mitch let her pick out a new pair of jeans for him. Eventually, though, as couples in malls do, they drifted apart.
Mitch sat in a massaging recliner at Brookstone, and looked at a display of Air Jordans at Foot Locker that he was way too old to pull off. A girl at a kiosk gave him a sample of a new moisturizer for his face. Eventually, he grabbed a drink at Starbucks and just started wandering. A half hour later, when Jessica found him, he was drinking an iced green tea and looking up at an enormous image of a nearly naked Kate Upton in an ad for pajamas.
There are thousands of beautiful, famous women in the world. For Mitch, though, there’s just always been something about Kate Upton, which was why she was at the top of a short list that Mitch kept in his head, like an all-star team. This list was no secret. Quite the opposite. Jessica had a list of her own, in fact, of male celebrities, which included Mark Ruffalo, George Clooney from 1998, and, for some reason, Salman Rushdie.
She shouldered up to him and nudged his arm. “Busted,” she said.
Mitch sipped his tea and played it off. “We should probably get you a pair of those jammies,” he said.
A young mother passed, pushing a stroller with twins in it. A Journey song was coming out of a nearby store. A mall janitor mopped up a spilled soda next to a nearby garbage can. And then Jessica said, “Do you ever think about sleeping with other people?”
Mitch laughed, because what else can you do when your wife asks you something like that?
CONVERSATION NUMBER TWO
The following weekend, they were on their hands and knees picking up strewn Lego pieces in the living room.
Mitch was about to ask her if she thought it was weird that Jude kept putting Darth Vader heads on girl Lego bodies when she said, “That Kate Upton thing. I wasn’t entirely joking.”
“What?”
“I’m genuinely curious.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?” he said. “Do I think about sleeping with Kate Upton? Doesn’t everyone think about sleeping with Kate Upton? Isn’t that, like, part of the human condition?”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s not?”
She shook some Lego pieces in her hand, like dice. “People,” she said. “Do you ever think about sleeping with other people?”
Historically, Jessica wasn’t a layer of traps, but a series of warning alarms went off in his head anyway. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Of course you know. Either you do or you don’t.”
“Well, yeah. I guess. Sometimes.”
She nodded.
“Why? Do you?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s hardwiring, Mitch. We’re human beings.”
For Mitch, being married to a therapist had some advantages and some disadvantages. She was unfailingly reasonable. She was incredibly smart. But sometimes it felt like he was talking to a robot that had been programmed to read WebMD pages aloud to him.
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“I do,” he said.
“And I love you. You’re a human male. Wanting to have sex with one of the hottest women on the planet doesn’t make me love you less.”
He thought about it. And he thought about Kate Upton. Lego Luke Skywalker looked up at him from the floor. True to form, he was missing one hand. “You’re not trying to tell me you had sex with Salman Rushdie, are you?”
CONVERSATION NUMBER THREE
And then there was just last week.
They were writing the kids’ weekly activities on a dry-erase board in their kitchen, because that’s what marriage is with children: scheduling.
“All of our friends are divorced,” she said.
He looked at her. “I know. I’ve been keeping up.”
She jotted down some kid’s birthday on the board. “Sex was a big part of all of their downfalls.”
“You think?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Terry had sex with someone else. Sarah and Doug virtually had sex with other people, which is a symptom of wanting to really have sex with other people. Amber and Alan didn’t want to have sex with each other.”
“Okay,” he said. “But how does that apply to us?”
“How could it not apply to us?”
“We’re not them, Jessica. You do know that, right?”
“You think we’re that different?”
“Of course I do. Just because we like them doesn’t mean we’re all the same people. For starters, they’re assholes. We’re better than them.”
Jessica capped the dry-erase pen.
“Plus, we’re happy,” he said. “That’s the big difference. You and me. All of this.” He made a grand, sweeping gesture with his arms, meant to indicate the house and the children and the yard and the kitchen and the activity board and their lives. All of it. “We’re happy. Right?”
Emily and Jude were on the back deck messing with the birdfeeder. Just before the kids burst back into the house to tell them about a blue jay that was fighting a cardinal, Jessica replied, “But, Mitchell, are we?”
5
“Okay, bud, first off, it’s pretend. E.T.’s a puppet. Or maybe a robot. I can’t remember which. Either way, he’s one hundred percent not real.”
His son looked at him with grave suspicion. They were lying in Jude’s room. With the night-light and hallway light on, it was just dark enough for the sticker stars on the ceiling to glow.
“Secondly. And this is more important, narrativewise. Even if he was real, why would E.T. want to murder you?”
“He’s bad,” said Jude. “And his neck is gross. It’s like a giant worm.”
“Yeah. The neck. CGI wasn’t as good in the eighties. But he’s not bad. That’s the whole point of the movie. We’re the bad ones, not him. Society. He’s a metaphor for…I don’t know, innocence or something.”
Silence followed, and it occurred to Mitch that maybe this wasn’t the best time to introduce the concept of metaphor.
“The end was nice, though, right?” he said. “E.T. gives little Drew Barrymore the flowerpot and the ship flies off into the sky? All’s well.”
Jude shook his head. “I don’t like how he sounds when he screams.”
Mitch slow-blinked his way into a sigh, and for a while they looked at the sticker stars together.
Jessica had totally called this, of course. The whole thing.
He’d showed her the ad in the City Paper a few weeks ago. The Senator, this cool old theater downtown, ran classics on Saturday mornings for families. “Check it out,” he said. “Let’s take them.”
She looked at him like he’d suggested a family outing to test chain saws. “Are you crazy?” she said. “It’ll scare the shit out of them.”
“What? There used to be E.T. lunch boxes. I had an action figure!”
But then there they were, Jude and
Emily, scared shitless, watching what Mitch quickly remembered was a terrifying movie. A child alien is left on Earth and then slowly chased for two hours by deep-breathing men in masks. At one point, during the scene in which Elliott’s big brother finds E.T. pale and dying in the woods, Mitch looked over at his children, and they appeared not just scared but scarred—for life. They hadn’t slept through the night since.
Mitch tugged the blanket up over himself and his son, and told Jude to close his eyes. “Don’t worry. I won’t leave till you’re asleep, okay?”
Jude slid closer. “Promise?”
“Yeah.”
One of the big stickers above them—a moon or something—was starting to peel away from the ceiling, and Mitch fixated on it as they lay in silence. A few of the other stickers were starting to peel away, too. After a few minutes, Jude’s breathing slowed, and Mitch thought about conversation number three with Jessica.
We’re happy.
Long, dramatic pause.
But, Mitchell, are we?
The fact that she questioned this should’ve stung, but it didn’t. Because, he had to admit, it was a perfectly valid thing to ask. For years, the concept of happiness simply hadn’t come up in Mitch’s head. Nor had the concept of unhappiness. This was his life. This was their life. She was his wife, and he was her husband, and that was the way it’d always be.
Then The fucking Divorces.
Everything was open to scrutiny now. Everything needed to be parceled and quantified.
He thought of the last time they’d had sex—a fifteen-minute-or-so operation last week, after The Daily Show. He’d picked up an issue of Cosmo that morning in his dentist’s waiting room and skimmed an article about the many hidden erogenous zones scattered across the female anatomy. As Jessica wiggled beneath him, he stretched her arm out and kissed the humid spot inside her elbow. She laughed and asked him what he was doing.
“Does that feel good?” he asked.
She took her arm back and told him to hurry up and fuck her. “The kids could show up any second.”
Jude was passed out now, his eyeballs jittery beneath their lids, and Mitch started to untangle himself from the sheets. But then there was a knock. It was a tap, really. Barely loud enough to hear. His daughter, Emily, stood at the door in comically mismatched pajamas with her hair hanging over one eye.
“ ’Sup, lady?” he said.
“Daddy?”
“Hmm?”
“Can I tell you something?”
It was a tic, a sign of learning to articulate herself. She’d ask permission to say something before saying it. As perfectly normal as it was for a seven-year-old, it made everything sound very grave, like she was about to report the death toll after an earthquake.
“What is it, babe?”
“I think E.T.’s in my closet.”
Good Lord, Mitch was tired.
It was a level of exhaustion you don’t experience in your twenties or even your thirties—something exclusive to forty and up, like colonoscopies and pleated khakis. So he held his arms out to his daughter, because it was all he could muster the energy to do. “Okay,” he said. “Hop in.”
And as she did, as she crawled over him and into bed—as she’d done so, so many times before—she kneed him right in the balls.
6
And that was how Jessica found them.
It was exactly how she knew she’d find them—a sleeping mass of humanity tangled in Transformers sheets. Jude was on his side, back pressed to Mitch. Emily was sprawled out over both of them like a human blanket. She must’ve racked Mitch again, Jessica thought, because he’s holding himself in his sleep.
Two of her three best friends in the world had recently negotiated for custody of their kids, and Jessica played a ridiculous scene out in her head. A judge—an older lady, African American, kind of an Oprah vibe—asks Jude and Emily who they’d rather live with, their mom or their dad. They pick Mitch, of course. They don’t even extend Jessica the courtesy of pretending to think about it.
He lets us put gummy bears on our Froyo!
Yeah!
She touched his shoulder, gave him a shake. “Mitch. Hey. Mitch.”
He opened his eyes. “Hi,” he said.
“Come downstairs.”
“Okay,” he said. “Be down in a sec. I’m just gonna shoot Steven Spielberg a quick email first and tell him to go fuck himself.”
* * *
—
Downstairs, in the kitchen, Jessica ate two Golden Oreos over the sink.
She did it quickly—single-biters—because they were amazing. She ate two more, slowly this time. Outside, through the kitchen window, the backyard was as black as deep space. Five years into suburban living and she still wasn’t used to the darkness. When her eyes adjusted, she saw her own reflection in the glass.
She straightened herself and arched her back, assessing things. And then she ate another Oreo, because…fuck it.
The hot waiter from earlier must’ve looked at her breasts no fewer than ten times over the course of their meal. He wasn’t egregious about it, like some gawking teenager, like Luke, their babysitter. He just did that quick eyeball dip—the thing men have been doing for millennia and women have learned to live with. She ran through a list of similar looks she’d gotten that day. And then the day before that. And every day since she was twelve and a half. She imagined a relentless wave of male eyeballs, like in a horror movie. Classmates and patients and coaches and teachers and colleagues and neighbor kids and random men she’d never meet or speak to.
As she looked at her reflection in the window, she caught a familiar light out behind the house. It flickered, then held steady. She cupped her eyes with her hands and pressed them to the glass. Luke was sitting on a tree stump in the strip of side yard between their properties, reading a book by the light of his cellphone.
Squeaks and thuds came from above as Mitch made his way down the stairs. “Oh no,” he said. “You opened them. You monster.”
“Couldn’t help it.”
He grabbed a handful of Oreos, devouring two in an instant, like a creature from the woods.
“Check it out.” She pointed to the window. “He’s out there again.”
Mitch smiled a sad half smile for his student.
The past few nights, when James was at the house packing, Luke had been there, stationed on his stump. Jessica thought of go-kart rides with her own dad. Go-kart rides and batting cages and mini golf and Saturday matinees and waterslides. Her father was like an every-other-week day camp that concluded with her being dropped off in front of her mom’s house. Till next time, Jessie.
Mitch ate another Golden Oreo. “Remember when we used to eat regular Oreos, like assholes?” he said. “Then some product-development guy at Nabisco says, ‘Let’s make vanilla Oreos and call them Golden Oreos,’ and our lives are changed forever.”
She’d found them at Giant a few weeks ago, under a sign that said NEW FLAVOR. Since then, Golden Oreos had become their mutual obsession. Jessica and Mitch kept them in the highest kitchen cabinet, away from the kids, like cigarettes or porn.
She twisted one in half, licked the frosting. “Maybe they’re not really better than the originals,” she said. “Maybe they just taste so good because they’re different.”
CONVERSATION NUMBER FOUR
He leaned against one counter; she leaned against the other.
“Jessica,” he said, “did you just turn Golden Oreos into a justification for infidelity?”
She tilted her head. “I may have.”
“I knew there was a reason I married you,” he said.
“I don’t love that word, by the way.”
“Infidelity?”
“Yeah. It’s judgy. Steeped in negativity and accusation.”
“You’re right, i
t is. Open marriage?”
She felt an actual chill. “That’s even worse.”
“I know, right?” he said. “It’s like a key party. Like I should be wearing a bathrobe.”
She briefly imagined Mitch having sex with Kate Upton. Since The Divorces, along with directing Lifetime-quality courtroom dramas in her head, stalking her husband through restaurant windows, and questioning everything about her own happiness, Jessica got to picture the love of her life screwing a world-famous swimsuit model.
Mitch and Kate Upton in a hot tub.
Mitch and Kate Upton in the back of a limousine.
Mitch and Kate Upton at the Plaza in New York City, the skyline lit up through the window.
He’d be all sensual about it, too, Jessica knew. Gentle and attentive, which was totally his thing when it came to sex. He’d kiss Kate Upton’s neck and ears while he moved inside of her, and her big, gorgeous eyes would roll back in her head.
Holy shit, Jessica. He’s really good at this.
“Maybe relaxed is a better word,” she said. “Conceptually speaking.”
Mitch nodded. “ ‘The Relaxed Marriage.’ It’s got a ring to it. Like a Cheever story.”
“Only you could turn a conversation about sex into something nerdy.”
He tipped an Oreo her way. “Touché.”
“Love is a feeling,” she said. “Monogamy is a rule. One we came up with twelve thousand years ago when we started worrying about property rights.”
“That’s romantic.”
“Nobody ever said reality is romantic,” she said. “As a society, we’ve watched monogamy fail over and over again, but we still put ourselves through it, generation after generation.”
Mitch chewed and thought. “How about ‘The Evolved Marriage’? The world’s changing. The environment’s different. We’re…evolving.”
Jessica had lost interest in finding a label. “You know, in therapy, when someone chea—” She stopped herself. “When someone evolves in their marriage. When you ask them why, they almost always say the exact same thing.”
Last Couple Standing Page 3