“This place is nice,” Colleen said. “How much are you paying?” She sat down on the bed and leaned back against the pillows, kicking her legs up, which made me smile. Only my college friends would lie down on my bed, uninvited, and ask how much my rent was. There was something refreshing about being around someone who wouldn’t hesitate to open my cabinets and help herself to anything in the refrigerator.
We spent the next two hours chatting. Colleen had become obsessed with politics since moving to DC and rarely talked about anything else, except when she was discussing actual people in DC who worked in media or were otherwise important.
The refreshing thing—because honestly I don’t know if we would have stayed friends if she only talked about politics—was that Colleen remained a devoted watcher of The Real Housewives and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I only tuned in by accident, but she taped them all. She was the only person I knew who seemed genuinely concerned about Kim Kardashian’s future. She had just said to me, “I just don’t think she’s choosing the right guys,” when we heard the front door open.
“Hello?” Matt called.
“We’re up here,” I said.
Matt was already loosening his tie and getting ready to pull it off when he walked into the bedroom, but he stopped when he saw Colleen.
“Oh, well hello,” Matt said. “Look who’s here.”
“Hey, Dogpants,” Colleen said. (She still, almost exclusively, called him Dogpants. Once in a while, I heard her call him Matt and it just sounded wrong.)
Normally, Matt would’ve kissed Colleen on the cheek, but I could tell he was a little uncomfortable that she was lying on our bed, so he just waved from across the room and said, “So, what have you two been up to?”
“Got our nails done, caught up, tried to find Beth a job and convince her this isn’t the worst place in America to live. You know, the usual.”
Matt laughed. “Oh yeah? Any luck?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m now fully employed and I love it here.”
They both laughed, even though my joke wasn’t particularly funny. Matt perched on the bench at the end of our bed, and he and Colleen started talking about how Colleen’s husband, Bruce, wanted to take Matt golfing soon. Bruce was seventeen years older than Colleen, which somehow still surprised me. The first time I met him, the four of us went to get drinks at a dark hotel bar that served snacks in white ceramic dishes and had egg whites in most of the cocktails. It was noisy, and Bruce kept leaning forward and cupping his ear toward whoever was talking, which was the same thing my dad did in crowded restaurants.
We all figured they’d break up eventually, that the age difference would be too much—he had two daughters, who were nine and eleven, and I thought at least that would change Colleen’s mind. But they stayed together and got married on Long Island in the church where Colleen grew up. It was by far the strangest wedding I’ve ever been to. All the girls from college were bridesmaids and Bruce’s daughters were junior bridesmaids. We had to walk down the aisle with Bruce’s nearly middle-aged friends, who were just as uncomfortable with the situation as we were.
Matt always took on a nonjudgmental attitude when we talked about Colleen and Bruce. He didn’t like to gossip or talk behind people’s backs, which I know is a good trait, but could be very frustrating, especially when I was dying to dissect a scandalous situation. Sometimes I pressed him, trying to get him to admit that it was a weird coupling. “You can’t help who you fall in love with,” he said more than once. (Which I’ve always thought was a ridiculous saying, because of course you can help it—you just don’t do it. You remove yourself from the situation.) But at Colleen’s wedding, when Bruce danced with Colleen’s mom, Matt (who was a little drunk) leaned over and whispered to me, “Well, now, they make a nice couple.”
I closed my eyes on the bed and listened to Matt and Colleen talk. She suggested that the four of us get together for dinner that Sunday, and I said without opening my eyes, “We can’t. We have to go to the Kellys’.”
They continued talking, and I just lay there. I was thinking about something that Colleen had said when we were getting our nails done. She was telling me how smart it was that Matt took this job, what a good move it was for him.
“But what about for me?” I’d said.
“You don’t even have a job right now,” she’d said. “So what’s the difference?”
And just like that, it was like I stopped being part of the equation. Like nothing I did mattered anymore—it was all about Matt now.
—