Last Couple Standing

by Matthew Norman

  “Can I be one hundred percent honest with you about something?” Ellen asked. “Since we’re neighbors and all.”

  “Okay,” Mitch said.

  “I had a drink before I got here. Two, actually.”

  Mitch saw a woman in a pink dress. Pink wasn’t red, though. Another woman wore something that could possibly be described as burgundy. “Well,” he said, “it’s Friday, right?”

  “I’m nervous. This whole thing is terrifying. How do people do this day in and day out? If this is single life, honestly, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” he said. “You look nice. That dress is great. I dig the stripes.”

  She looked down at herself. “Thanks. It’s flattering, right? I just got it. Tonight’s the maiden voyage.” She made a little sound like a ship’s horn. “Okay, more honesty. I changed into this at the last second. I had on this red thing at first. Serious vamp dress. It was so tight I could barely breathe. But I totally chickened out. I was like, Do I wanna show up to my first new encounter with a man in twenty years looking like some middle-aged prostitute?”

  The mingling noises in the bar all faded to a dull hum in the background as Mitch stared at the cubes of ice floating in his drink. “Did you say it was red?” he asked.

  Ellen nodded. “Very red. Like a fire truck.”

  He looked back at the door one last time. El wasn’t coming, of course. El was right here. El was Ellen. He picked up his drink, took it down in two gulps, and ordered another one.

  “And you wanna hear something that’s really pathetic?” she asked.

  “I’d love to,” he said.

  “I’ve been reading a book. Self-help. I know how cliché that sounds, but, well, it got me out of the house, right? Here, look.” She unzipped her purse and showed him the cover. Light Your Own Fire: Why Feeling Better Is Up to You.

  Mitch probably would’ve rolled his eyes at this a month before—hell, maybe an hour before. But as he sat there, thoroughly married and on an unwitting hookup date with his next-door neighbor, he knew that he was in no position to judge anyone for anything.

  “It goes on and on,” she said. “Blah, blah. These kindsa books always do. But the crux of it? It’s so simple. Stop letting other people be in charge of your happiness—of your self-worth. If you’re sad, then, guess what? It’s up to you to get unsad.”

  Her drinks were starting to add up. Mitch could see that. The alcohol swirling in her system gave her words a dose of heartbreaking sincerity.

  “Sounds like good advice,” he said.

  “A self-help book that actually helped. Who knew?” She looked at the hostess stand. The first signs of worry were starting to show on her face. “Come on, Will,” she whispered. “Where are you at, buddy?”

  Mitch felt sad for her. And then he felt sad for himself, too, and for Jessica, and for the Husbands and the Wives, and for everyone there at Tark’s, and for the world at large: for humanity in general.

  Fifteen minutes later, her fourth drink mostly gone, all hope lost, Ellen tugged at the shoulders of her new dress. “Janice Perkins can kiss my ass,” she said.

  “Who’s Janice Perkins?”

  “The author of this dumb fucking book, that’s who.”

  “It’s not dumb,” he said. “Like you said, you’re out. You’re dressed up. It’s a win, right?”

  “If you had any idea how uncomfortable this bra is, you wouldn’t call it a win.”

  “Maybe he was nervous, too,” said Mitch, trying. “This Will guy. You know, maybe he’s scared to get back on his own horse. Like you said, this stuff is scary.”

  She tried to get the bartender’s attention but failed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do men really think like that? Do men actually have feelings?”

  He finished his Jack and Coke and smiled as best he could. “Believe it or not,” he said, “they do.”

  * * *

  —

  As he drove back toward his neighborhood—their neighborhood—the incongruity of Ellen’s presence in the passenger seat of his car was so vivid that he kept glancing over at her as if she wasn’t quite real.

  To the best of his recollection, a woman had never sat there who wasn’t his wife. She positioned her arm on the door differently than Jessica did. She crossed her feet on the floor mat in a way that Jessica didn’t. Ellen was shorter than Jessica, so her head touched the headrest differently.

  “Thanks for driving me,” she said.

  “Oh. Yeah. It’s on the way. Obviously.”

  They both tried to laugh.

  “So, what’s all that stuff in the back?” she asked.

  He could see the pieces of wood in the rearview mirror, cracked and splintered and jagged, bouncing as they drove.

  “Is it a…bed frame?”

  “We’re getting a new one,” he said. “The garbagemen wouldn’t take it, so I put it back there. I need to take it to…wherever you take things like that.”

  He braced himself for a follow-up question, but it didn’t come. Instead, she touched her window absently with her knuckles—in a way, again, that Jessica never did. “I was gonna Uber home,” she said. “Responsible, right?”

  “Very,” he said.

  “Or maybe I was gonna let him drive me home. Because, you know, maybe that’s how the night would’ve played out. Maybe we’d’ve gone to his place for a nightcap. I was kinda winging it, I guess.”

  NPR whispered through the car stereo, something about birds migrating across Delaware. He lowered the sound until it was just wheels on pavement.

  “I guess that was the point, though, right?” she said. “The fact that I didn’t know what was gonna happen. That I was open to whatever. Now that I think about it, that was the most exciting part of it, you know. The possibilities.”

  A mile up, he turned onto Buckingham Road. They were only a few minutes from their respective houses when she asked him to pull over.

  “Are you okay? Are you sick?”

  “No. I don’t know, exactly. I just need a second.”

  He steered off to a small, U-shaped run of gravel and stopped some twenty feet from the road. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, a truck from an organic farm up north parked there and sold fruits and vegetables, but it was clear now. He shifted to park, and Ellen folded her hands in her lap and looked out the windshield. Some insects floated drunkenly out ahead of them, catching the light from a street lamp nearby.

  “Ellen?” he said. “You okay? You good?”

  “You’re not wearing your wedding ring,” she said.

  He touched the absence there—the dent in his skin.

  “I noticed in the bar earlier. I didn’t know you and Jessica were having problems.”

  “We’re not,” he said. “Well, not exactly. It’s…not straightforward.”

  A truck rumbled by, shaking the ground. “I understand. It happens slowly, right? Then it happens all of a sudden. One day you’re arguing about whether or not to paint the first-floor powder room, the next day you’re smashing some stupid ship in a bottle in his home office.”

  The car felt stuffy. He turned on the AC, and the air hummed.

  “I have a question for you,” she said.

  “Ellen,” he said. “Just—”

  “You’re Will, aren’t you? You’re my date.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I didn’t figure it all out until you said that thing about your dress. I didn’t know if I should say anything.”

  She sighed, then laughed. “It’s actually a relief. I thought I got ditched. I was scared maybe he saw me and took off.”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “And he didn’t.”

  “Our profile pictures,” she said. “Neither of them look very much like us, do they?”

  “Not really, no.”


  “That’s probably a sign,” she said. “For both of us.”

  Ellen had stumble-walked her way to his car through the parking lot when they left together. But she sounded perfectly coherent now—downright levelheaded.

  “A sign of what?” he asked.

  “That we’re not ready for this. I mean, we’re ready enough to go online and fill out the questions. That’s something. But we’re not ready enough to actually do it. We’re in transition.”

  Mitch was just going with it now, because this was all beyond explanation, even to himself—a misunderstanding on top of a misunderstanding overlooking a deserted suburban access road. He reached down to shift into drive, but she put her hand on his hand.

  “What did you think when you saw me?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t recognize me at first. For a few seconds, I was just a woman in a bar.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Her seatbelt was off. Her body was turned to his. Her dress was tight against her chest. “Were you attracted to me?”

  In truth, the answer was no. Mitch wasn’t attracted to her or unattracted to her. He was too nervous to be anything. He couldn’t tell her this, though. She’d bought a dress. She’d changed her hair and put on makeup and called an Uber. She’d read a book. She’d allowed herself to be excited, and none of this was her fault. “I thought you were lovely,” he said.

  Ellen smiled. “You did?”

  “Of course. Yeah. Totally.”

  She touched his hand, stopping him again from putting the car in drive. She’d let her uncomfortable-looking heels fall to the floor of the car, and now her legs were curled up under her. The bottoms of the windows were beginning to fog against the cool April air outside. “Maybe we could help each other,” she said. “You know, help each other get through the transition part.”

  He looked at his dashboard, all the gauges and lights and numbers.

  “The fact that we know each other—that we’re not strangers—might make it less scary.”

  And then she kissed him.

  Her lips were different than Jessica’s. Add that to the list. They were drier and fuller. The blur of her face was different, too, just centimeters away. When she removed her mouth from his, she opened her eyes slowly and rested her forehead against his forehead. “That felt good,” she said. “I’ve missed that.”

  “Ellen,” he said. “I think—”

  “Shh,” she said. “Don’t talk. I wanna feel that again.”

  32

  Luke had seen Scarlett’s Instagram before.

  The boys at Ruxton Academy were very familiar with their female classmates’ social media accounts.

  A lot of the girls at school put it all out there online. They posted grids full of bikini pics every summer from pool chairs and beach houses: a never-ending montage of sunburned skin and hips and midriffs. They stuck their tongues out and wore halter tops and made blow-job eyes at their phones. They pretended to make out with their girlfriends and licked giant ice cream cones suggestively.

  Scarlett’s Instagram, though—in fact, her entire online persona—was pretty frustrating.

  As he scrolled down, there were close-ups of her pen tattoos and sketches from her notebook. A grim reaper drawing. A deer with enormous black eyes. There was a whole series of pictures of a beat-up pair of red Chuck Taylors set against different backdrops. Band posters. Vintage movie artwork. A boomerang of raindrops splashing off a puddle in a parking lot. A dying flower drooping next to a flower in full bloom.

  The shots that actually did feature her weren’t much more revealing. They were always of her alone, because she didn’t really have any girlfriends that Luke knew of, and she was never smiling, either. He stopped on a photo of her in a baggy sweater with her hair tied up in a bun. She’d pulled the woolly neck up over her mouth, so it was just her nose and her eyes. Midway down, he found one he’d seen before, a selfie, in which she rolled her eyes. There was a lake behind her, and an out-of-focus sailboat. It showed her from the mid-chest up, and he could see just enough to know that she was wearing a swimsuit—possibly a bikini. One of the straps had slid slightly askew, revealing a faint tan line.

  Since experiencing the full impact of Scarlett’s attention at the suicide assembly—as bored as she’d seemed—his mind kept coming back to her. She’d busted him staring at her several times since then, which was embarrassing. Once in the hallway. That was Thursday. He played it off with a wave, which seemed reasonable, since she’d talked to him and all when they were sitting next to each other, but she’d just frowned at him. That very afternoon, she’d caught him looking at her foot in Mr. Butler’s class. Her legs had been crossed, and one of her Sperry boat shoes dangled from her toes. When he moved up from her shoe to her face, he found that she was looking at him, like, Why are you staring at my foot, you fucking weirdo?

  He checked his bedroom door.

  This was just force of habit; his mom was out. She was in her red dress earlier, and then she was in her striped dress, all flustered and nervous, the Uber sitting out in the driveway. “Don’t wait up!” she’d told him, laughing as she dashed out of the house.

  He untied the drawstring at the waist of his shorts and focused on Scarlett’s lips in the lake picture.

  Luke had kissed exactly two girls in his life, the first of whom hardly counted, since it’d been eighth grade and a dare. Kissing Scarlett would be an entirely different sensation, he imagined, like the difference between flying in an airplane and being launched into the atmosphere aboard the space shuttle.

  And then Luke saw headlights through the gaps in his blinds.

  It was just a car—not a huge deal—but on a Friday night, their block was usually still and quiet, so it was unusual enough to stop him from doing what he was about to do.

  The car moved along at a normal clip, but then it slowed. And then it pulled to the curb one house down from his and stopped all together.

  It was Mr. Butler’s Honda CR-V. The headlights went dark.

  Luke pulled his shorts back into place and went to the window. There were two people in the car, talking. He could see their silhouettes through the windshield. Mr. and Mrs. Butler, he assumed. When the passenger door opened, Luke leaned closer to the window, and he saw a woman step out. She looked back and said something. The headlights came on again and the car pulled away from the curb. Luke recognized the dress. The striped one. It definitely wasn’t Mrs. Butler.

  The security alarm beeped.

  He went downstairs and found his mom taking off her shoes in the entryway. She tried to set her purse on the hall table, but she missed, and it fell to the floor. “Fucking A,” she said.

  Luke flipped on the light, and she looked up, startled. “Luke, Jesus,” she said. She’d spent an hour on her makeup earlier, making sure it was just right, but it was different now, smeared at her mouth.

  He thought of how happy she’d looked before, laughing on her way to the Uber. She didn’t look like that now. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Luke,” she said.

  “Why were you with—”

  She stopped him, though, her voice sharp. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “Turn out the lights and lock things up, okay?”

  33

  Jessica heard the front door open.

  She listened as Mitch climbed the stairs.

  The fact that he was stepping so carefully—like he was trying to be quiet—was actually funny, as if somehow she might be asleep instead of sitting up in their floor bed waiting for him to come home.

  Oh, sorry, dear. I must’ve dozed off while you were out having sex with the woman I found for you on the Internet.

  Before he left for his date, Jessica had kissed him. You’d think she’d have gone all out, like she was kissing a marine on his way to fight some endless
war, but it was as standard and absentminded as any goodbye kiss she’d ever given him.

  He didn’t come to their room right away, because he never came to their room right away. He followed the path he always followed. Jude’s room first, because it was closest to the stairs. He spent a minute there, and then he went to Emily’s room. All the while, Jessica sat wondering what exactly she wanted him to tell her.

  Yes, I did it. We’re even.

  No, I didn’t. Because I couldn’t.

  And then there he was, standing in the bedroom doorway. His jacket was off and his shirt untucked. He looked tired, but no more tired than he always looked at this time of night. She read his face, searching for meaning.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “How was your night?” he asked.

  Jessica laughed. “Mitch, I don’t know if this situation really calls for small talk.”

  “That’s fair,” he said.

  They stood looking at each other—her waiting, him not talking—and for Jessica, all the doubt she’d felt was erased. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she was suddenly sure. Right or wrong. Even or not. It didn’t matter. Jessica wanted him to tell her that he hadn’t done it.

  “Just a minute,” he said. He grabbed a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from the top drawer of his dresser. “I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  —

  In his closet, standing among his clothes and shoes, Mitch looked in the mirror.

  He slid out of his jeans and took his socks off and then looked at the mirror again. Pantsless and barefoot in an untucked oxford shirt isn’t a great look for a guy his age, so he looked away as fast as he could. He thought about what had just happened, and about what he was going to tell Jessica.

  He stepped into his mesh sleeping shorts, and then he took his shirt off. The wound on his right shoulder—reopened now—was pink and tacky with blood.

  The second time Ellen kissed him had been far more intense than the first time. Her hands got involved. They gripped his thighs and then slid over his crotch. Somehow, she was able to maneuver herself over the center console between them, and before he fully understood what was happening, she was planted between him and the steering wheel, straddling him.