Frances Coletti is a serial first-dater. I know this because she is my best friend. The people she has dated, and there have been many, in our nine-year-long friendship are all extremely varied, physically and mentally, financially and emotionally. The commonalities between all of these people is that none of them ever made it past the first date. Some of them she had met online, some in bars, some at school, one at an airport, and three at the laundromat down the street. Some took her to get drinks, some took her to get dessert, one took her bowling and brought his own ball. Some touched her arm, some kissed her with tongue, some couldn’t even make eye contact with her when they spoke. When the bill came, she would always hesitate to see what they would do. Some paid it in entirety, some asked her to go dutch, some acted as if they hadn’t noticed it being put on the table at all.

“You can tell a lot about a person by the way they act around money,” her newly-single mother often told us. “Frances, your father, he would get so nervous whenever the bill came around, he’d break out in a cold sweat, I swear to God. Pathetic! He’d nearly have a fit each time we went out!”

If she liked the person on the date, Frances would pay the entire bill. And she did like them, often. Often enough to sleep with them immediately proceeding. But, at the end of the night, she would become panicked and evasive, leaving in such a hurry that the date had no time to say goodbye. She felt as if in no way could she commit herself to them. So she would text them, minutes after they had parted ways, that she could not see them again, and sorry. Then she’d call me and tell me about how I was the only person who understood her, and I’d say, “Don’t worry, things will work out next time, on the next date, with the next person.”

By the time she turned 21, we had estimated that she’d been on one-hundred-and-forty-four first dates. She kept a list in her phone of first names.

The thing about Frances, you see, was that she was unusually magnetic. The magnetism she exuded was rare and substantial; she was full of life. She was interested in what you had to say and she looked you in the eyes when she spoke to you. She made you feel very important. She was also just beautiful. Her mother was German, her father Catholic-Sicilian. She had a gigantic mop of curls that she was always pushing out of her eyes. We couldn’t go anywhere without someone making a fuss over her hair. She smiled a lot, with all of her teeth. She was a genuinely good person. I knew her better than anyone else, and yet I still felt sometimes that I didn’t know her at all.

Her parents were still fighting their way through a divorce. To them, she was becoming a a lower priority than ensuring custody of the dinnerware. She only ever mentioned it in passing.

My relationships had always been quite conventional. I had been dating my boyfriend, Brandon, for four months, and as we fell deeply in love and lust, Frances seemed to lose faith in her ability to ever do the same. The only conventional relationship she had was ours.

The day after the one-hundred-and-forty-fourth date was a Thursday. I had slept at Frances’ mom’s house and woke up around half past eleven.

“Brigitte,” Frances said to me, “Remember what you told me about Erin Saunders the other day?”

Erin Saunders was a girl that we had gone to high school with. She was blonde and generically pretty. I had heard from a friend that Erin had acquired a new source of income: an older man whom she had met online was paying her to spend time with him. This idea of having a “sugar daddy” was not unbeknownst to us but it was scandalous to find out that someone so close to us actually had one. Passing it off simply as fantastic gossip, I hadn’t thought about it since. Frances clearly had. On the computer that morning, she was setting up a profile on the website.

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“I went into overdraft last night.” She showed me a bank statement. “I have no money. My mom is driving me crazy. I have to get out of this house. I have to find somewhere to live and then I have to pay rent. And I can’t because I have no money.”

We were both three years out of high school. I had found my “path”, per se, and was studying Interior Design at university, minoring in Spanish studies. I wasn’t learning much but it gave me a sense of purpose. Frances still had no idea what to do with herself. We were both working part-time waiting tables. I had some savings but Frances spent her money frivolously, anxious about money all the time but never changing her spending habits. She loved charcuterie boards before meals and taking taxis everywhere she went, paying for it all out of small yellow tip envelopes. Spending cash on luxurious, expendable things made Frances feel like she was doing okay. It was her solution to not having to think about the future. The problem was that she had run out of envelopes. Her parents were too busy dealing with their separation for her to go to them with any sort of problem.

“OK,” I told her, “Can’t you pick up more shifts at work?”

“You know I’ve already asked like four times.”

“I can help you talk to your mom.”

“She’s crazy. You know she’s crazy. There’s no use in reasoning with her. She hates me because I remind her of my dad.”

“Okay, but Frances, there must be another option. Maybe you can start babysitting again. Like, these guys are going to be old, maybe even older than your parents. They’re going to act like they own you. Think about how you’d actually feel in that position.”

“I know. And I have. For the last few days. But think about how much experience I have dating. I could treat this like a job. Strictly business. You know I’d be good at it.”

There was no time to argue, as I was running late for school. Besides, it was impossible to talk Frances out of anything that she set her mind to. I hoped that she would drop it once she considered the implications, but by the time I got to Spanish class, she was already sending me information off of the men’s profiles: net worths, yearly incomes, number of houses owned. By Sunday, she had two dates lined up for the week.

The first date, Thomas, came and went with anticlimax. We were both nervous leading up to it, creating an exit plan in case of emergency. When it came down to it, Frances said it was just another bad first date. She knew it was going south when he showed her a photo of an I.Q. test that he had taken, after talking about his “unparalleled intelligence” for nearly a half hour. When the waiter brought the cheque, Thomas made a point of peeling bills out of a money clip slowly and intentionally, making eye contact with her the entire time. Frances politely told him that she could not see him again. We nearly hyperventilated laughing as she gave me a full account over the phone.

“He told me that he thought I was a sex worker.”

“Did you feel like a sex worker?”

“Not really. ”

“Do you want to maybe stop now?”

“Of course not. It’s getting interesting.”

The second date was with a man named Chris. His online profile listed him as an “hedge fund manager, aged 36, annual income $165K”. He was taking Frances out for drinks at a bar downtown. I waited for her usual hopeless recap, trying to keep myself awake in case she needed me. I texted my boyfriend, practiced my Spanish grammar, painted my nails. She didn’t call. I fell asleep.

The next morning, my phone lit up during class, a text from Frances:

“I love him.”

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“I’m coming to meet you after your class to tell u. See you soon!”

And then:

“Also how do I get to ur school?”

When class let out, she was sitting on a bench, smiling up at me.

“You look beautiful,” she told me.

“Never mind me,” I said, “what happened last night?”

“Sit down, please. Oh, you smell nice, is that new shampoo? It smells like someone I know. Do you know who I’m talking about? I can’t remember who smells like that.”

“Oh my god, Frances, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just tell me what happened last night.”

“Okay, okay, relax.” She was unable to sit still. “First thing, and don’t freak out; he’s not actually thirty-six. He’s in his forties.”

“How deep into his forties?”

“He’s forty-nine.”

“…So he’s your dad’s age?”

“Don’t be disgusting. You know my dad is old.”

“He celebrated his fifty-second birthday last year. I was at the party.”

“Yeah, but what I mean is that my dad seems old, and not just because he’s my dad. Chris is, like…so normal. I don’t know how to describe it. He’s very classy with his money, not showy at all, but very generous. He gave me three hundred dollars last night and we didn’t even discuss sleeping together.” She waited for me to reply, but I didn’t know what to say.

“He’s really nice, too, I mean I don’t just like him because of the money. He just seems so sure of himself. It’s refreshing. He said he’d pay off my credit card debt. He said he’d take me to France.”

“You hated France.”

“Chris says that maybe I wasn’t old enough to appreciate it when I went before. He owns a flat in Antibes. He says that it’s beautiful this time of year.”

“He owns a flat? Just say apartment. You’re not European.”

“Don’t be like that. Don’t be mean.”

“I’m really not trying to be. This just doesn’t sound like you.”

“Well, maybe it’s because I’m happy.”

Over the next month, as I finished up my semester at school, Frances quit her job and began seeing Chris almost every day. I wrote an essay; she went to a hotel for the weekend. I saw a movie; she saw an opera. I finished my final exams; she moved into an apartment downtown. By the time school was over, she had changed her lifestyle so drastically that I felt as if I no longer fit. When I spoke to her on the phone, all she talked about was him. As she spoke, it sounded as she was talking herself into developing romantic feelings for him. She kept telling me that Chris was teaching her so much about “real life”, and that he said that she was teaching him a lot, too.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“I think so. Not like I’d introduce him to anyone as that, though. Seeing as he’s not a boy.”

“Do your parents know?”

“No, of course not. I told them I’ve moved in with a girl off of Craigslist.”

I still hadn’t met him. If I’m being honest, the whole thing made me a bit queasy. When I thought about “Chris”, I thought of a secretly perverted, classically handsome movie star. A Jay Gatsby-type, in a peach coloured suit. Wounded eyes. Streaks of grey in his dirty blonde hair. Very gentle, very charming, but something dark underneath it all that made it hard to figure him out. Someone who wore their age gracefully. And then when I thought of Frances, I wondered if it were possible that she actually liked him, or if she had just guilted herself into thinking that because of the financial compensation. She had no other real relationship to compare it to. This had gone so far past her initial plan for it to be just a source of income. I worried about her a lot. Things had moved so fast.

The Tuesday after my last exam, Frances invited me to her ‘flat’ to meet Chris. Things were tense because we hadn’t seen each other in an unusually long amount of time. When I walked in the door, she greeted me with a hug so familiar that it had been like no time had passed. Coming out of the embrace, though, I felt as if I was intruding on someone else’s life. The apartment was decorated like an open house, very beige and unassuming, with no sense of taste whatsoever. There were framed photos of a family hung on the east-facing wall. I couldn’t tell if they were maybe people related to Chris or just the original photos that came inside the frames. A lengthy chandelier hung over a bouquet on the dining table. Even the flowers appeared beige.

As I was looking around, Chris emerged from another room. After all of these weeks of Frances building him up, it was startling now to see him in person. He was not as I had pictured him whatsoever. His age preceded him. His eyes were hollowed in and tired. His cheeks were slightly sagged. He had a subtle droop below his chin that would, I assume, fully descend in the next few years. His hair was thin and grey. He was not wearing a peach coloured suit, he was wearing what seemed to be a track suit. He was not Gatsby in the slightest. He was just a man.

“Hello, Brigette. So nice to meet you.” He shook my hand after looking at me from my feet up. “This is a shoes-off house, if you don’t mind. We’re renting, unfortunately.”

“Oh,” was all that I could think to say as I unlaced my sneakers. I awkwardly bent over in the place where I’d been standing, having not thought to sit down. My cheeks started to burn as I struggled to get my shoes off. It was a good five minutes before I was in my socks.

“So, how were your exams, Bridge?” Frances had positioned herself on the beige couch with Chris, his arm draped over her shoulder, leaving me to sit on the only other available seat which directly opposed them. It was as if I were being interviewed for a job.

“They were fine, I guess. Not too bad. What have you guys been up to?”

“So much stuff! How do you like the place? Great, right?”

“Yeah, great.”

“And the chandelier? Cute, right?”
“Yeah, very cute.”

“Do you like those flowers? Chris brought them this morning.”

 “Yeah, the flowers are great.”

It was as if we were an improvisation group and I’d forgotten to use the cardinal “yes, and” rule. My last words hung in a tangible, beige silence. I couldn’t then think of a single thing more to say.

“How would you ladies like a drink?” Chris said after a moment, moving the scene along. “I’ve just got to make a business call in the other room, but I’ll grab a bottle of white on my way back.” He kissed Frances on the forehead. “Excuse me for a minute.”

They kept smiling at each other as he exited stage left. Frances motioned for me to take his place on the couch.

“So, be honest, what do you think?”

“Honestly?” I was trying my very best to be delicate, but it was becoming hard to find the right words. “He’s old.”

“Anything else? Don’t you think he’s nice?”

“Nice, yeah. But what is nice? Like, that’s not a reason to date someone, because they’re nice.”
“Brigette.”

“Okay, so he’s nice and he’s old. And he’s rich. He got you this apartment, that’s cool.”

“And?”

“And, I don’t know, Frances. Let’s not pretend that this is more than it is.”

“And how would you know what it is? You just met him.”

“Yeah, but I know you. And I know that you must see how weird this all is. Look, I get it. He supports you, so you feel like you owe him a relationship. But what happened to this being ‘strictly business’?”

“Excuse me? You’ve been at school. You don’t know what this has been like for me. I finally have money, I finally have some freedom. Why can’t you be happy about that?”

“Because this is not freedom. And if you really think that it is…I feel sorry for you. I don’t know what you’re doing with this guy, honestly. But you don’t have to lie to me.”
“I think you’re jealous.”
“Trust me when I say I’m not.”

Chris walked back in then, three long-stemmed wine glasses laced in between his left-hand fingers and a bottle of wine in his right. Frances and I had abruptly stopped our whispered conversation, and Chris took the our silence as an opportunity to give an unsolicited lesson on Californian grapes. I sat in disbelief.

“Listen, I think I should go,” I said then, interrupting him, “I forgot that I have an appointment that I can’t miss.”

“Well, that’s a real shame. I was looking forward to getting to know you.” Chris said.

“Yeah,” I said, “A real shame.”

I stepped into my shoes, crushing the heels and not bothering to tie them back up. I looked back at Frances for any sign of my best friend. She was looking down at her phone.

I left then, and I cried on my way home.

I thought that maybe what I had said to her would make her see what I saw in Chris, what I knew that she really did see in him but couldn’t admit, but she never called me to apologize. I left it alone, finished the semester, spent more time with my boyfriend, got a second job. I saw online that Frances did go to Antibes, redecorated her apartment, got a puppy. Other friends asked me all the time how she was funding this new, glamorous lifestyle, and although I was still angry at her, I never told.

A few weeks later, I got a voicemail from Frances as I got out of the shower. My stomach dropped. Our open-ended uncoupling had changed the last few months of my life, and I still resented her. I felt as if I had grown individually in the time apart, but I was lonely. For a second, I contemplated deleting the message entirely out of spite, but I let it play, out of curiosity and bitterness.

“Hi, Bridge,” she said, “… I didn’t really want to leave a voicemail, but here we are. I wanted to tell you how much I miss you. You’re my best friend, and I really miss you. I broke up with Chris. It was fun for a while until it just wasn’t anymore. It was too big a thing to hide from my family, and it became this whole other ordeal…anyways. I’ve moved back in with my mom and it’s been really nice. She’s calmed down a lot. I told her about Chris. I mean, I left out most of the details, but anyways, at least she knows. It was weird. I hope you’ve been well, and that you’ll please call me back. I…anyways. I love you. Okay, bye.”

I knew then, as I had always known, that Frances and I belonged together. Our relationship, although platonic, was important to me in ways that romantic ones could never be. So I called her back, and we talked all night, into the morning. We talked about her parents, and money, and love. Chris hardly came up. He was never the point anyway.