“Well, that’s a given. It’s our defining feature. But what do you mean specifically?”
“Table nineteen, right?” he said. “I was watching you guys earlier, over there in your dresses, all done up. Any one of you could’ve taken home any guy in here. Snap of the finger.”
“Oh? Just like that, huh?”
“Yeah. Just like that. It’s like a superpower, and you guys don’t even know you’ve got it. Total waste. With great hotness comes great responsibility.”
“This is good to know,” said Jessica.
He took a sip, swished it around a little. “Wait,” he said. “Which one was Amber again?”
“The tall one. Really tall. Like a baby giraffe.”
“Oh shit, yeah,” he said. “I totally would’ve hit that.”
She laughed, louder than she’d intended. “Well, if you’re interested, I can give you her number. She’d be thrilled.”
He finally took the twentysomethings’ drink order. A beer for the guy, something fizzy with vodka for the girl. When he came back, he told Jessica that he had a confession to make.
“Yeah?” she said.
“I’m lying,” he said.
“About what?”
“I can’t remember what any of your friends look like.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hmm,” he said. “I was too busy looking at you.”
12
Mitch was dreaming about Alan’s date.
Before, she’d been just a picture on an iPhone screen—a smile, shoulders, freckles. In his dream, though, she was fully three-dimensional, and sitting in his classroom.
Even asleep, Mitch acknowledged how cliché this setup was.
He was a teacher, and his subconscious had made her a student. If this were an essay instead of a dream, he’d write something constructive across the top of the first page in red. Maybe start with a less familiar premise and go from there.
Dream Mitch was at his desk at the front of the classroom, which looked mostly like his real-life classroom, except there were no windows, and all the desks were empty save for hers, which was right in the middle of the room. She wore one of the school’s cross-country uniforms—those little singlet things. He had no idea why. He was lecturing about…well, something. He couldn’t tell what. Words were coming out of his mouth in a steady, cohesive, academic-sounding stream, and she listened, nodding along, nibbling at a pen cap.
And then she was walking toward him. Her cross-country spikes click-clacked on the hard floor. Then, in a senseless dream jump cut, her shoes were gone, and she was sitting on his desk in those little ankle socks that runners wear. She handed him her iPhone and licked her lips, and he found himself swiping through naked picture after naked picture. On a beach. In a bed. On a yoga mat. Lying on a couch. Sitting in a leather recliner reading a magazine.
Do you like them?
I…
Keep going. There are so many. Millions.
And then she was straddling him, and it was so vivid that he could feel the weight of her body pressing down on him. And just as quickly, she was naked, and he was inside of her, and he could feel that, too, as utterly real as sex had ever been.
She was a stranger, this girl. He didn’t even know her name. But she was so completely familiar to him. Her skin. Her lips. The flutter of her tongue against his.
Shhhhhh. You don’t even have to wake up.
She didn’t smell like Starbursts, as Alan had said. She smelled like alcohol, which burned his eyes, and her lips tasted like something he knew. Like vanilla.
“My God, Mitch. You’re so hard.”
This wasn’t dream dialogue—it was actually happening—and when he opened his eyes Jessica was rocking gently on top of him. The room was dark, he could barely see her, but he didn’t need to see her, because, of course, it was her.
“Jess?”
“Kiss me,” she said. The slightest lisp, the ghost of her childhood speech impediment lingering in the dark.
He kissed her, and she grinded herself harder against him. He put his palms on her hips to slow her down, because it was too fast, but it made no difference. She grabbed the headboard and anchored her legs to the mattress. “Oh fuck,” she whispered. “Oh fuck.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Hon, slow down.”
She ignored him, so he closed his eyes and tried to gather himself, which he was able to do for about nine seconds. But then she bit his shoulder. Softly at first—gently, even—then a lightning strike of pain as her teeth sank into his flesh, and it was too much to bear. Jessica and Mitch came together for the first time in as long as he could remember. It was so intense that he didn’t even notice their bed breaking until Jessica shouted. The headboard snapped away from the base with a crack and crashed into the wall, and the frame buckled. The box spring hit the floor, and she collapsed on top of him.
For a while, they just breathed. And then Mitch said, “Holy shit.”
She rolled off of him and onto her back, and they watched the ceiling fan spin above them. He touched the bite mark on his shoulder, which was tacky with blood, and he said “Holy shit” again.
Jessica sighed, and it turned into a sleepy little laugh. Such a lovely sound.
“You ate Golden Oreos, didn’t you?” he said.
“I may have.”
He reached over and rested his hand on her bare stomach, tracing his fingertips gently from hipbone to hipbone, and they lay quietly together, wrapped in their sheets, atop the wreckage of their bed.
CONVERSATION NUMBER FIVE
“Okay,” he said.
She lolled her head to the side, her breath and heart rate slowing now. “Okay what?”
“Let’s do it.”
He could’ve said more, but he didn’t. Fifteen years. He didn’t have to. She knew what he meant.
13
It took Jessica and Mitch about twenty minutes to come up with the Rules for their relaxed marriage.
You’d think it’d take two middle-aged neurotics longer to work through something like that. But, by the time they sat down on their back deck on that Sunday evening, they were tired and, as it turned out, a little stoned. Jessica would note to herself later that it had taken them longer to decide on the lamp in their entryway than it did to determine the logistics of their infidelity.
It was fully dark, aside from some purple tiger stripes over the horizon, and Jude and Emily were in bed, finally.
Jessica and Mitch could count on one hand the number of times they’d smoked pot since college, but Alan had given each of the Core Four a joint a while back, long before The Divorces, and if any occasion called for casual drug abuse, this was it.
“How old do you think it is?” Jessica asked of the joint.
“Couple years?” he said. “Right?”
“It’s gotta be longer than that. Emily wasn’t even born yet.”
“Time is a very mysterious thing,” he said. Which was true. Half an hour ago they were on their honeymoon; now they were forty.
Jessica held the shriveled thing to her nose and handed it back to him.
“It looks like petrified wood,” he said.
“Do you think it’ll even work?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s been in my sock drawer.”
“Does pot go bad, do you think, or is it like Twinkies?”
“They didn’t cover that in season one of Narcos,” he said.
They were two people asking each other questions that neither could answer. It was a microcosm of marriage. Not just their marriage—all marriage. Fidelity. Parenting. Money. Interest rates. Real estate. The stock market. Jumbo mortgages. The differences between LED and plasma. Nobody knows. Everyone’s just making it up as they go and hoping to avoid catastrophe.
“There’s only one way
to find out,” he said.
They didn’t own a lighter, so Mitch lit the joint with an extra-long grill match from the garage and inhaled deeply, like he remembered doing. After a few coughs that burned straight down to his soul, he felt his brain shake loose, and he smiled. “Damn,” he said.
“Really? It works?”
He nodded and gave her the joint. The end had smoldered out, so he fired up another foot-long match. Jessica held the smoke in her lungs for a beat, then blew it out in a long, shaky plume.
“Look at you, Snoop,” he said.
A few seconds passed, and she blinked. “You’re right,” she said. “Damn.”
They put their feet up on a big flowerpot and looked out at their yard. The tree stump that Luke had claimed for his sit-in was empty, which was a relief. Unseen wildlife called out in the woods, and they both agreed that their faces felt weird.
“This is fun,” she said. “We should do this more.”
Was she referring to smoking pot or to just sitting together on the deck? Mitch had no idea which. Maybe both. “Let’s move to Fenwick,” he said. “Quit our jobs. Sell stuff to tourists.”
“We could buy a convertible,” she said. “The kids look cute when they’re tan. It’d be good for them.”
This was a mantra of sorts for Jessica and Mitch, one they returned to from time to time. The first half was always the same—the “Let’s move to Fenwick” part. The second half changed every time.
We could paint houses like college kids on summer break.
We could start a vegan bicycling club and wear lots of bracelets, like Johnny Depp.
We could open a bookstore that also sells boxes of wine and gives away rescue puppies.
“So, the Rules,” she finally said.
Their faces really did feel weird, like masks made of friendly, slow-moving bees.
“The Rules,” said Mitch.
“How should we…proceed?”
“Proceed?” He giggled, like a stoner. “That sounds pretty formal. Like there should be an official ledger. Should we find a notary?”
“Shut up,” she said. “Rules are important. Guard rails.”
“Well, for starters, no lying,” he said. “Total honesty.”
“Right,” she said. “But do we really need to state that? Isn’t it assumed?”
Mitch considered this.
“Should we also say no murder?” she said. “Like, hard-and-fast, no killing people.”
“Okay,” he said. “I get your point.”
RULE NUMBER ONE: NO SOCIAL MEDIA FRIENDS
They’d never taken a good look at each other’s social follows and friend lists before—they’d never even talked about them, specifically—but Jessica and Mitch knew enough about social media to know that danger lurked there.
There were high school crushes and exes online. There were old hookups, now married and fat, and also old hookups now divorced and hotter than ever. There were co-workers with emotional vulnerabilities and albums full of vacation pics of themselves in swimsuits. There were the ones who got away. The ones who almost were. The ones who maybe could’ve been if things had all worked out differently.
The past is always present on social media—inescapably so. It helped take Sarah and Doug’s marriage down, and they knew it had the power to take theirs down, too.
RULE NUMBER TWO: NO REPEATS
This just made sense.
As a matter of fact, it was the whole point.
What they were agreeing to were dalliances: little breaks from their daily reality. Anything more than once with the same person would be an affair, and affairs were the hideous clichés of middle age. Affairs were ugly and required lies and guilt, and they ruined lives.
“I don’t think I could do it anyway,” he said. “The carrying-on part. The sneaking around. I’m so terrible at lying.”
“You really are,” she agreed.
Mitch looked at the joint. He considered lighting it again but didn’t. One hit was clearly plenty. Any more and he’d wake up in the middle of the night with his head stuck in a bag of Doritos.
“It’ll be like getting a massage on vacation,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You go once, right?” she said. “You enjoy it. It feels good. It relaxes you. And then you never see the massage therapist again.”
Mitch sat up in his chair. “Wait,” he said. “What kind of massages are you getting?”
RULE NUMBER THREE: NOBODY THAT YOU KNOW KNOW
This started as “strangers only.” It was Mitch’s idea, and it was, according to him, the same principle as the social media rule, just rearticulated for real life instead of digital life.
His point was that they had their celebrity hookup lists, of course, like everyone else in the world, chock-full of Uptons and Clooneys. “But there’s another list, too, right?” he said. “A list that’s more, you know, obtainable.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Real people. People we actually know.”
“Ah,” she said. She understood what he was getting at. Secret crushes. Daily, recurring desires, harmlessly categorized as off-limits under normal circumstances.
“Right?” he said. “We all know people we’d have sex with, all things equal, if there were no consequences.”
“True,” she said.
“Those seem like land mines to me,” he said. “Probably even worse than our Facebook friends.”
“But what constitutes a stranger, exactly?” she asked.
Jessica was thinking, of course, of the bartender, and while she was thinking of the bartender, Mitch was briefly trying to imagine his parents having this exact conversation. It was so utterly far-fetched that he couldn’t even conjure the imagery necessary to set the scene. It was like picturing them as marines or MMA fighters.
“Good question,” he said. “Okay, well, who’s someone from your list?”
“My real-people list?” she said.
“Yeah. Noncelebs. Everyday people.”
Jessica paused to think, which made sense to Mitch. It was a dangerous thing to be talking about, but exciting, too. “Okay. Remember the contractor who fixed the roof last fall?”
Mitch squinted out into the darkness. “The guy with the…the jean jacket? Really?”
She looked the way she looked when she was pretending not to be embarrassed.
“Don’t be a jerk. We’re being honest with each other.”
“Okay, yeah,” he said. “Jean jacket aside, I can see it. He was a good-looking guy.”
“I know him,” she said. “His name and what he does for a living. But I don’t know know him. He’s not a part of my life in any way. He’s not a land mine.”
“Yeah,” said Mitch. “That makes sense, actually. Okay, he’s eligible. In theory. But maybe not him specifically, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Agreed.”
And so, on the fly, “strangers only” was rewritten to the far more cumbersome “nobody that you know know.”
“What about you?” said Jessica. “Who’s someone from your list?”
He squeezed the top of her hand. She was right. This was twisted. Strange, for sure. But it really was fun. “That’s easy,” he said. “The spin instructor at the gym.”
“Which one?” she said.
“What do you mean, which one? Are you kidding? The redhead. Tara. She’s a goddess.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “Yeah, Tara’s pretty hot.”
RULE NUMBER FOUR: THREE QUESTIONS ONLY
They could thank the film industry for this one.
In every movie ever made in which a man and a woman discuss one of them having had sex with someone else, there’s that scene. The woman is usually sitting tensely, and
the guy is pacing, and there’s the unending flurry of questions, each somehow more difficult to answer than the last. They wanted to avoid that.
Three questions each. That was that.
RULE NUMBER FIVE: THIS WAS THEIR SECRET
This was between them, and they would tell no one—not even the Core Four. Especially not the Core Four.
The Core Four had once known everything about Jessica and Mitch’s life. The good and the bad. The pretty and the ugly. But times had changed, and the group was all but disbanded now. It was powerless and mostly symbolic, like some Eastern Bloc country during the Cold War.
Jessica and Mitch were on their own. And this was their secret.
RULE NUMBER SIX: NO NAMING NAMES
Five Rules would’ve been better; cleaner, somehow. But out on the deck, as they both became drowsy, eyes reddening, a sixth and final rule came up, and it seemed, somehow, to be the most important of them all.
Since they’d only be sleeping with people they didn’t know know, and since they’d be confined to one-off events, they would share only the most general details with each other. No names. No identifiable features. No identities.
“Again,” said Jessica. “Massage therapists.”
“Right,” said Mitch.
“For all intents and purposes,” she said, “their names mean nothing.”
14
Two days later, Jessica sat in her office across from an eighteen-year-old girl named Scarlett Powers.
Scarlett wasn’t the star of a comic book–turned–action movie, as her name might have suggested. Instead, she was a private school–educated drug abuser, possibly a low-level sex addict, a petty criminal, and far and away Jessica’s most infuriating patient.
Jessica and Scarlett were in the midst of one of their spontaneous timeouts, in which Scarlett picks at her nail polish and says nothing for an extended stretch of time. The girl had drawn a tattoo on her ankle with a Magic Marker—something tribal and intricate—because, along with being infuriating, Scarlett was a talented young artist.
Last Couple Standing Page 7