Last Couple Standing

by Matthew Norman

“Are you all right?” asked Jessica.

  Ellen looked at Amber and then Jessica, tentative. “James left today,” she said. “Like, left left. Gone.”

  “Oh,” said Jessica. “I’m sorry, Ellen.”

  “And he’s screwing a thirty-five-year-old who isn’t even that pretty. And every dress in this goddamn place makes me look like a transvestite.”

  And then, timing be damned, a saleswoman appeared with an armful of plastic hangers. “How’re you ladies coming along in here?”

  “Um, we’re gonna need a minute,” said Jessica.

  When she was gone, Amber asked Ellen how tall she was.

  “What?” asked Ellen.

  “Like, five-five? Five-six? Something like that, right?”

  “Five-five,” said Ellen. “Yeah.”

  “Perfect.” Amber pointed at herself. “You wanna try this thing on? I think it’ll look great with your coloring.”

  Ellen took in the expanse of Amber’s exposed shoulders. “You think? It might be a little aggressive for me.”

  “Oh, stop it,” said Amber. “That’s the point. These things are all just costumes anyway.”

  Amber put her regular clothes back on, and then she and Jessica waited while Ellen tried on the red strapless dress.

  “Nordstrom should really get a liquor license,” said Amber. “Can you imagine how much money they’d make?”

  Jessica agreed.

  “So, are you gonna buy that dress,” asked Amber, “or are you just gonna lounge around the dressing room in it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jessica said. “If I bought it, it’d just be one of those things I have but never wear.”

  “That’s practical,” said Amber. “And very lame.”

  When Ellen came out of the dressing room, Jessica and Amber stood up.

  She looked like a different person. Yes, her skin was pale and chalky, deprived of sunlight and moisturizer. Her toenails had been utterly ignored, and her hair was, at best, a miscalculation. But she looked good.

  “Nice,” said Amber. “Look at you.”

  “Yeah,” said Jessica. “It fits you perfectly. It’s like it was made for you.”

  Ellen clearly believed them, or at least wanted to. Her eyes brightened; she even smiled. “I think I like it,” she said.

  “Hey, there you guys are. We’ve been looking for you for twenty minutes.”

  The three women turned to find Megan and Sarah. They were holding Starbucks cups and wearing sneakers.

  “You guys came,” said Amber. “Did you bring the kids?”

  “Hell no,” said Megan.

  “God bless babysitters,” said Sarah.

  And then they both noticed Jessica’s dress at the same time.

  “Damn, Jess,” said Megan. “You trying to get knocked up again or what?”

  “That’s what I said,” said Amber. “Look at her boobs in that thing.”

  “Mitch is a lucky guy,” said Sarah.

  “Relax.” Jessica crossed her arms—aware, suddenly, of her cleavage. “I’m not buying it.”

  “The hell you aren’t,” said Megan. “Jesus, I’ll buy it for you.”

  “All right,” said Jessica. “Maybe.”

  “I can’t stop looking at your boobs,” said Sarah.

  “Okay, that’s enough.” And then Jessica noticed how uncomfortable Ellen looked standing there among them. That was the power of the Wives’ friendship. It could leave others feeling left out. “Sarah, Megan, this is my neighbor. She lives right next door. This is Ellen.”

  Sarah and Megan said hello.

  Then Amber said something that reminded Jessica just how happy she was that these three wonderful, messed-up women were in her life. “Ladies,” she said. “Ellen’s one of us.”

  26

  Jessica and Mitch rarely had sex on Sunday nights.

  They were typically worn out from the weekend—from two days in a row of nonstop parenting—and anxious about the coming week and all the logistics and hassles and responsibilities it would entail. Consequently, it was a night reserved for sweatpants and streaming episodic television and dozing off three pages into one of the countless books stacked up in their respective to-be-read piles.

  And while that particular Sunday was no different on the surface, Mitch found that there was an edge to their sexlessness. What usually felt organic—like an unspoken agreement between two tired adults to just chill the fuck out—now seemed forced. It didn’t help that they hadn’t laid a hand on each other since Jessica had told him about…well, it.

  He looked over at her.

  She was lying beside him, propped up on a pile of throw pillows, which she’d leaned against the wall behind them. The charm of their floor bed had worn off, and not having a proper headboard was really annoying.

  “Did you buy anything good yesterday?” he asked.

  “Just a dress,” she said, not looking up from her book.

  “Yeah?” he said. “What’s it look like?”

  “Like most of my other dresses, basically. It was on sale. Amber wasn’t gonna let me out of there without buying something.”

  He rolled onto his side and faced her, and then he took the book out of her hand and set it on the floor. She looked surprised, but not, he thought, in a bad way, despite its being Sunday.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  Mitch kissed her, and her lips felt like they always felt, and she kissed him back like she always did. And then their kiss deepened, and their tongues touched and he slid closer to her. When you’ve been married for fifteen years, you don’t typically make out for the sake of making out. This sort of kissing is the thing that happens before doors are secured and sweatpants come off. But when their lips parted, the energy stalled out, and they just looked at each other.

  “We didn’t think about this, did we?” he said.

  This meant a lot of things, but mostly it meant that they’d have to have sex again at some point after their evolution, and it would feel different. He didn’t have to explain that, though, because, apparently, she was thinking the same thing.

  “No,” she said. “We didn’t.”

  “I’m jealous,” he said. “We didn’t think about that part either. The jealousy part. Is that hardwiring, too? Like a caveman instinct? Like, I’d smash a rock over his head if he was here, steal his rudimentary tools.”

  “Probably,” she said. “I’d be jealous, too. I will be.”

  He looked at the television. SportsCenter flickered; he wasn’t paying any attention to it. These guys in uniforms had defeated these other guys in different uniforms. Etcetera.

  “Amber knows about Alan’s new girlfriend, by the way,” she said.

  “Oh?” he said. “Did you tell her?”

  “Didn’t have to.” She told him about Amber’s brother, the Instagram detective.

  “Well, I guess that was inevitable,” he said.

  “She feels jealous, too.”

  “Really?” This surprised him, frankly. Of all The Divorces, Amber and Alan’s seemed to be the cleanest—the poster child for modern-day uncoupling.

  “Amber wanted to be first,” she said.

  “Ah.”

  “Jealousy is a normal human emotion,” she said, “but it’s a complicated one. She’ll meet someone, and when she does, she’ll have her turn. She’ll feel better about all of it.”

  “Mm-hmm,” he said. She was being clinical again—fiercely reasonable, like always—and he understood what she was getting at. Mitch was jealous for lots of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Jessica had gone first.

  “Have you had…” She paused here, maybe because what she was about to ask was such an incredibly, debilitatingly odd thing to ask a spouse. “Have you had any luck
?”

  He gave her a brief progress report—a quick run-through of his two and a half attempts at human contact. For the sake of honesty, he spared no self-deprecating detail.

  “For the record,” she said, “when I was in college, if a handsome older man had told me I was hot enough to melt all the stuff in the frozen food section, I’d have thought he was hilarious.”

  “Really?” he asked. “That’s good to know. I’ll try to do some shopping this week.”

  The TV remote was marooned between them, half-tucked under the bed sheets. She found it and turned off the TV. “Listen,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Mitch was certain that she was going to suggest they call it off. They’d reached the end of their evolution. And in the three seconds it took her to continue talking, he vacillated between annoyance and relief. But then she got up and told him to hold on. She left the room, and he found himself alone looking at the blank television. The floor bed provided an unpleasant vantage point, and their bedroom looked cluttered and haphazard.

  When Jessica returned, she was holding her laptop. She fell into bed beside him and hit the power button. “I did some research today,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Apps,” she said. “The Internet. Apparently that’s how people have sex now.”

  The site that she went to wasn’t for dating; that much was instantly clear. It wasn’t one of those sites that advertised on TV with testimonials and success stories. The word discreet appeared three times in the opening blurb. It was a hookup site.

  “How did you find this?” Mitch asked.

  “Google doesn’t judge,” she said.

  She’d opened a profile for him already, apparently. The name at the top threw him off. “Wait,” he asked. “Who’s Will B.?”

  “That’s you,” she said. “What? You think we’re going to use your real name?”

  “Ah, right,” he said, and then he watched as she filled out his information. Long walks on the beach and a mutual love of literature weren’t the objectives here, so the space for personal details was limited to the basics. He was five-eleven, but she wrote six feet. He had brown hair and an athletic build. That part was more of a stretch than his height, but he let it go for the sake of advertising.

  She opened the photos folder on her computer. “I like this picture of you,” she said. “It’s nice. You look good.”

  He squinted at himself. It was technically him, but indistinctly so, shot from a distance on the National Mall down in D.C. the previous year. It could’ve been him. It could’ve been anyone, really.

  “My hair’s lighter now,” he said.

  She touched a tuft of it over his right ear and smiled. “Grayer, you mean?”

  When all the boxes were filled and his online profile was complete, she moved her computer from her lap to her knees and angled it toward him. “That’s it,” she said. “You’re ready.”

  “Am I?” he said.

  “Mitch,” she said.

  He’d thought about the Internet, of course. How could he not—the ease, the anonymity? It seemed somehow, though, like cheating—like cheating at cheating. And worse than that, he now realized, was the fact that it might actually work. There was safety in being rejected by women who were minding their own business in bookstores and coffee shops and frozen-food sections. A woman on a hookup site, though, would actually want to hook up. That was part of the deal, presumably, and lying there next to Jessica now, he found the prospect of actual sex less appealing than potential sex.

  “Do you remember The Dark Knight?” he asked. “The Batman movie with Heath Ledger?”

  “What?”

  “The scene in the hospital, where the Joker’s talking to Harvey Dent. The guy’s just had half his face melted off.”

  “All right.”

  “In that scene, the Joker compares himself to a dog chasing cars. But the thing is, he doesn’t know what he’d do if he actually caught one.”

  Jessica squeezed the sides of her laptop. “You wanna know why so many women think men are idiots, Mitch? This is why. Right here.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m actually making a point. I promise. What I’m saying is, what if I don’t really want to catch a car?”

  She closed her eyes and then opened them again slowly. “Mitch, it’s too late for that.”

  He didn’t say anything. Admittedly, as far as epiphanies went, this one was arriving a little late.

  “You’re just nervous,” she said. “I get it. I was nervous, too. It’s scary. But we can’t go halfway on this. We’re doing this together. We have to.”

  She was right, and Mitch knew it. If they turned back now, they’d be screwed. For the rest of their lives, it’d be something she did and he didn’t do.

  He looked at the computer screen in her lap. A beautiful blond girl in underwear and a tight tank top looked back at him from the website, biting her lip. She was a model, of course, not an actual user of the site, but he set this fact aside for a moment. “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He grabbed his grind-guard mouthpiece from his nightstand. “But can we at least acknowledge, for the record, how weird this is?”

  The computer cursor hovered over the Post button. “Relax,” she said. “You’re just a married man going online under a fake name to find sex. What could possibly go wrong?” And then she tapped her finger.

  Will B. was live.

  27

  Over that weekend, a freshman girl named Misty Crabtree tried to kill herself.

  Along with her normal daily dose of Ritalin, she swallowed an entire bottle of Advil; so, on Wednesday, Luke’s fourth-period English Lit class with Mr. Butler was replaced by an all-school assembly to “come together” and “have a heart-to-heart” about the dangers of depression.

  Principal Michaels kicked things off.

  She didn’t say Misty’s name aloud—a privacy thing, probably—but everyone knew why they were there. The news had spread instantly across text and social media, so by Monday morning everyone knew what the deal was. At least a dozen memes had already been created and circulated, one of which included some Jedi-level photoshopping of the recommended-daily-dosage language on a bottle of Advil.

  1–2 pills every four hours as needed. Or entire bottle if Daddy won’t buy you a pony.

  “Young people today,” said Principal Michaels, “are facing a legitimate health crisis. It’s a crisis that has all of us here at school—your teachers and faculty—very, very concerned.”

  She went on from there. Luke was having trouble concentrating, though, because he was sitting next to Scarlett Powers.

  This was how all-school assemblies worked. You went to your regularly scheduled class, got your attendance taken, and headed to the gym from there. You weren’t technically required to sit with kids from that specific period, but that was usually how it ended up, and now Luke used the miracle of peripheral vision to look at Scarlett’s thigh, which was currently a mere inch from his own.

  At least twice a day, some teacher—usually female—told Scarlett to roll her skirt down immediately, but then she’d just roll it back up five minutes later, thank God, and now very little was left to Luke’s vivid imagination.

  He saw his female classmates’ thighs all the time, of course—gym class and sports and all that. Most girls shaved from the knee down, he noticed, but not Scarlett. Her thighs were as smooth and hairless as anything on earth, and Luke was left desperately trying to will away what he feared was going to be a pretty obvious boner.

  “It hardly counts, right?” Scarlett said.

  Luke was startled to find that she was talking to him. She barely even bothered trying to whisper.

  “I mean, com
e on. Advil? That’s JV-team shit. You’d have better luck killing yourself with a bag of gummy bears.”

  He looked around to makes sure no teachers were looking. “I know, right?” he whispered.

  He felt like a dick for making a joke. It wasn’t that he didn’t get the gravity of the situation—of why they were all there, packed into the gym. But it was Advil, after all, as Scarlett pointed out, and there was a Magic Marker tattoo on Scarlett’s ankle. Scarlettkind, it read, in intricate cursive. It was mostly faded, but he still found it hot as hell.

  “Of course, this is a school—and you’re all students,” said Principal Michaels. “But I like to think of us as one very large, very tight-knit family.”

  “Oh God,” said Scarlett.

  “And when one member of that family is hurting or struggling or otherwise in trouble, it impacts all of us.”

  Scarlett leaned her shoulder into Luke’s and made a whacking-off gesture with her loosely cupped hand. He was afraid of getting in trouble—of being guilty by association. And he was also imagining what it’d be like to get a hand job from Scarlett Powers. The combination of these disparate thoughts was nearly more than the fly of his uniform khakis could handle.

  “It’s like Romeo and Juliet, you know,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her breath smelled like coffee, but he didn’t mind.

  “Come on, pay attention. Lit Suicide 101. If you’re gonna kill yourself, kill yourself, right? Go all in.”

  “Oh,” said Luke. “Yeah.”

  Mr. Butler’s face appeared. Teachers were sprinkled in among the students like prison guards, and Mr. Butler sat a few rows down. He turned and gave Luke and Scarlett a look. “Come on, you guys,” he whispered, and Luke did his best to create a facial expression that appeased his favorite teacher without looking super lame in front of Scarlett.

  “And now I’d like to introduce you to our very special guest,” said Principal Michaels. “Dr. Aarav Gambir joins us today from down the street at Hopkins, and he’s here to talk about how we can all look out for one another.”

  Most of the students in the gym made a go at polite applause; even Scarlett, although hers seemed sarcastic. Dr. Gambir was an Indian man in his forties, Luke guessed. He wore a crisp white shirt and an Orioles tie, and when he spoke, he didn’t have an accent like Luke was expecting. “Thanks for having me, Patty,” he said.