Last Couple Standing Read online

  Last Couple Standing is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Norman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Norman, Matthew, author.

  Title: Last couple standing: a novel / Matthew Norman.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019038078 (print) | LCCN 2019038079 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984821065 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984821072 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3614.O7626 L37 2020 (print) | LCC PS3614.O7626 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019038078

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019038079

  Ebook ISBN 9781984821072

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adpated for ebook

  Cover design: Jessie Sayward Bright

  Cover images: Jim Craigmyle /Getty Images (bed); rawpixel (headboard)

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: The Divorces

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two: The Rules

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three: Smalltimore

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Part Four: The Friction P•Int

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Part Five: Date Night

  Chapter 54

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Matthew Norman

  About the Author

  1

  Everything that went so thoroughly wrong that spring can be traced back to The Divorces.

  Capital T, capital D, for emphasis. The Divorces.

  They came in a set of three, like celebrity deaths and plane crashes, and ruined everything, leaving the once invincible Core Four broken and tattered.

  That’s what they called themselves: the Core Four. They were a group of friends who’d been together for more than two decades. Their origin story was both convoluted and utterly mundane, because, well, that’s how it is with friends.

  They met in college at Johns Hopkins. Mitch and Alan had a chem lab together and became fast friends, mostly because they were the two worst students in the class. Megan was the bridge that linked the genders. She lived in Alan’s dorm and was way, way smarter than Alan and Mitch, so she helped them through their dreaded science requirements in exchange for occasional access to Alan’s Honda Accord. Sarah worked with Megan at the campus bookstore, where they bonded over Margaret Atwood while selling Hopkins hoodies. They scored a couple of fake IDs sophomore year and hit the Greene Turtle one night after work, where they ran into Alan, who’d just smuggled Mitch in through the back door.

  Mitch had a minor crush on Megan—a three on a scale of ten—but he never acted on it because Megan called him “buddy” whenever possible and clearly thought he was a bit of a doofus. Sarah could’ve been persuaded to like Alan if the stars had aligned, but they never did, even in the face of so much casual drunkenness, which was a sign that it was simply never meant to be. Consequently, Mitch, Alan, Megan, and Sarah became one of those flirty but platonic little cohorts that are the foundation of any decent college experience.

  And then Alan met Doug while playing intramural basketball. Doug was lights out from three-point range—a natural-born athlete—but he couldn’t dribble to save his life. He joined the group from time to time at trivia night in the rec center, and became a permanent fixture one Thursday when they all went to a Counting Crows concert at the last minute in D.C. and had a blast. Sarah and Doug made out during the song “Mr. Jones” and became the group’s first couple.

  Terry, who had a part-time job at Doug’s favorite used-music store, started showing up, too. Terry lived in a house off campus and had a seemingly endless supply of vintage concert T-shirts, which was cool, and he had the best sideburns that any of them had ever seen, straight out of Beverly Hills 90210. Sideburns, like Counting Crows, were a thing people talked about a lot in the nineties. Terry was an indie alternative to the typical preppy Hopkins guy, and Megan was into it right away. They started dating almost immediately.

  Amber and Jessica were late additions to the group, recruited during blurry nights out in the city. Mitch saw Jessica at a bar in Canton and was instantaneously dazzled by her, despite her enormous flannel and her complete indifference toward him. Mitch famously told Alan later that night that he was “gonna make that girl love me if it’s the last thing I ever do.” A few months later they were all at a house party in a sketchy neighborhood near Camden Yards when in walked Amber. “Wow, look at her!” Alan yelled over the music—as smooth as ever.

  They paired off over the sixteen months leading up to the end of their senior year: Megan with Terry and Amber with Alan in 1998, and then Jessica with Mitch and Sarah with Doug in 1999. Henceforth they were officially the Core Four. And, like any group legit enough to have its own name, they did everything together. This eventually included graduating, becoming gainfully employed, and getting married.

  Megan and Terry and Sarah and Doug had their weddings a few months apart in the summer. Both ceremonies were lovely, featuring epic toasts, discarded bow ties, and, in Megan and Terry’s case, a break-dancing
ring bearer.

  Alan and Amber had an ill-advised winter ceremony: always a dicey proposition in the Northeast. An ice storm a few hours before the rehearsal dinner tested everyone’s resolve, particularly that of the caterer, who everyone later agreed had to have been on some kind of mood stabilizer.

  Jessica and Mitch’s wedding was last, in the spring, on Fenwick Island in Delaware, and it was perfect. Well, almost perfect. Two seagulls destroyed the wedding cake during the reception, but the guests were all drunk by then, so everyone would remember it as hilarious.

  The Core Four drank together in an endless loop of Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Eves and Halloweens and charity bar crawls in the city.

  They waited a while to have kids, the Core Four, because what was the rush? And when they finally did, all the Wives but Amber got pregnant in unison. The little ones learned to walk together, wrestled in rented bouncy houses at sweaty birthday parties, and started pre-K at the same time.

  Then, when it was time—when parking hassles and crime rates got to be too much—they all moved to the suburbs the same year. Their houses formed an odd square that covered 5.4 miles in the wooded suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland.

  They celebrated holidays as a group. They watched the Oscars together. They all got dressed up and went to the Preakness. Their lives were intertwined, their experiences collective and referenced in first person plural—the royal “we.” They had keys to one another’s houses. They knew one another’s garage codes and secrets. They were a big, sprawling, man-made modern American family.

  And now that family was broken. By every reasonable standard of measurement, they were adults. Yet, one by one, they failed at the most basic adult institution of all.

  Marriage.

  MEGAN AND TERRY

  Megan and Terry were the first to go down.

  Their breakup was a surprise but, looking back, not a surprise surprise, because, quite honestly, they seemed to love each other the least. Still, everyone was pretty shaken up by it. The group’s reaction, collectively, was: Holy shit. Megan and Terry? Are you serious?

  Typically in divorce situations, everyone immediately blames the guy. Well, in this case, everyone was right. There was a woman on the side—younger, of course. There was a secret credit card, a secret email address, even a secret Skype account, which, technologically speaking, was pretty old-school. After the divorce, Terry moved to an elaborate apartment downtown and bought the most enormous flat-screen TV he could find. It arrived in a cardboard box the size of a Ping-Pong table.

  The other woman—the younger one—was out of the picture by then. She liked Terry and all, and she’d had a lot of fun, but not enough, it turned out, to leave her husband and family in Roland Park.

  Everything changed after that. Things snowballed. Dominoes fell. Floodgates burst wide open. Shit hit the fan.

  SARAH AND DOUG

  Sarah and Doug were next.

  This one actually was a shocker. Of all of them, Sarah and Doug seemed most likely to make it. For starters, they were the best-looking of the group—the perfect aesthetic match. Sarah was naturally blond and dabbled in Pilates and yoga. Doug had wavy, effortlessly good hair and great arms. They were the kind of attractive that if you didn’t know them, you’d assume they had to be monsters. They weren’t, though. They were just normal people who happened to look like they belonged in a commercial for home exercise equipment.

  The real kicker, beyond their mutual hotness, was that they genuinely seemed to love each other. They kissed in public. They still held hands at movies. He sent her flowers sometimes, just for the hell of it, and she said adorable things about him on Facebook, which was sweet, even though it grossed a lot of people out.

  The infidelity thing in their case was more complicated than in Megan and Terry’s situation. It was a whole “marriage in the age of the Internet” kind of thing. Sarah started communicating with a long-lost ex-boyfriend on Instagram, which devolved into sexy Twitter DMs. While this was happening, Doug was in the throes of a full-scale email romance with his work wife from the accounting department. The phrase “emotional affair” was introduced and debated extensively in the group. Quiet betrayals were made. Cracks in the foundation were formed. Then the whole thing came toppling down.

  When Sarah and Doug announced via group text that they were splitting, too, it felt like when a great restaurant boards its windows in the middle of the night and suddenly no longer exists.

  The group’s reaction this time was something just shy of full-blown panic. Jesus H. Christ. You guys. What’s happening to us?

  AMBER AND ALAN

  Four months later, it was Amber and Alan’s turn.

  In terms of perceived marital health, they fit squarely between Megan and Terry and Doug and Sarah. They were solid. They were dependable. Stable. Safe. They were the Subaru Outback of married people.

  Sure, Alan drank a little too much sometimes, especially at parties, but who doesn’t drink a little too much sometimes at parties? Amber always seemed vaguely discontent—a little depressed—but, again, how could you not be a little depressed in present-day America, what with its being an uncontainable dumpster fire and all?

  Infidelity wasn’t the problem for Amber and Alan—real or virtual. Their issue was that they were never actually in love. Never. Not even in the beginning.

  They discovered this six sessions deep into wildly expensive couples counseling. Their friends splitting in such rapid succession gave them permission, finally, to admit it. And, once they did…it was such a relief.

  I don’t think I ever loved you either.

  You didn’t? Oh, thank God.

  Did we get married because we both liked the Cure so much?

  I think maybe we did.

  They didn’t have kids, Amber and Alan, so there was far less drama. Everyone else agreed, for lack of more elegant words, that their breakup didn’t count as much as the others, because when childless couples divorce, really, they might as well be two high school kids calling it quits at their lockers.

  Here’re the CDs I borrowed.

  Here’s your sweatshirt back.

  It’s not you; it’s me. Well, it’s kind of you…but mostly me.

  Can we stay friends?

  That left Jessica and Mitch. The Butlers.

  The last of the Core Four.

  2

  It was a lot to think about, the swift, systematic dismantling of their friend group—of their entire social structure. And on that early spring evening, that was exactly what Jessica was doing. Thinking about it—all of it—as she stood outside Bar Vasquez, watching Mitch through the restaurant’s front window.

  He was waiting for her inside, wearing his English-teacher blazer, trying to look like he belonged there in the dim, trendy place, which, of course, he didn’t. He was forty years old, and it was a Wednesday night, of all unholy things, and it was clear to her just by looking at him that he’d rather be home in his fleece sweatpants watching SportsCenter.

  She watched him squint at his cocktail menu.

  It felt weird spying on him like this, but it was fascinating, too, like doing fieldwork again. When Mitch finally gave up and used the candle at the center of the table as a do-it-yourself flashlight, a familiar matchstrike of love flared up in her chest.

  Who was she to judge his sweatpants, anyway? She looked down at the tan slingback monstrosities clamped to her feet. How satisfying would it be to kick them off onto the gray Baltimore pavement?

  Through the window, she watched Mitch pick up his phone and type. A moment later, her purse vibrated gently.

  Woman! Where are you? I’m utterly alone in here.

  Still, though, she watched him.

  A twentysomething girl in a short yellow dress walked by his table. She was hot, in that obvious way that so many girls in their t
wenties are hot. Mitch’s antenna activated, and Jessica watched her husband discreetly check out the girl’s ass.

  “You dork,” said Jessica, shaking her head.

  Lately, she found herself wondering how often Mitch thought about sex.

  Some pretty compelling neurological studies suggested that average, healthy American men think about it every seven seconds, but, good God, could that possibly be true? As an experiment, she counted to seven in her head and discovered that it’s actually a lot longer than you think.

  “Can…umm. Can we help you, ma’am?”

  It was one of the valet kids. There was a troop of three of them, bored looking, in matching windbreakers. She only noticed them just then, and she realized that she must seem crazy.

  “No thanks, guys,” she said. “I’m just stalking my husband.”

  * * *

  —

  Fifteen years.

  Fif…teen.

  That was how long they’d been married.

  Sometimes it felt like forever. She’d have to exhale before saying the number aloud, the way you might talk about an eight-hundred-mile car trip. Sometimes, though, it was like they were just getting started. A couple of newlyweds, with all the time in the world.