The Bachelorette Party
Phoebe wakes at sunrise with an urgency to touch the ocean. It’s time. She puts on Lila’s mother’s sweater again (must get new clothes today, she decides) and heads downstairs to the Cliff Walk.
On the way out, she’s surprised to spot Gary and Lila in the conservatory—they are being photographed under two giant ferns. It feels too early for something like that, to be dressed so formally before the ocean mist has evaporated, but there they are, leaning into each other. They look like well-dressed cartoons. Something about Lila’s pants looking too clean or Gary’s blazer too checked.
Phoebe pours herself some coffee as they pose. She thinks Lila looks beautiful in her silk tube top, though Phoebe imagines Lila does not call it a tube top. She can hear Lila in her head saying, Tube tops are for teens in the nineties at the mall, Phoebe. Strapless blouses are for women about to get married.
“If you can just put your hand there,” the photographer suggests to Gary, so Gary puts his hand there. Moves the hair off her shoulder. Yes, yes, like that. Lean back into him. And Lila does, but her face is too stiff, the way people’s faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.
Lila sees her. She waves and Gary nods. Phoebe nods back, then slips out of the room. There is something embarrassing about watching a couple take photos like this. Watching a couple try to be a couple, even though they are a couple.
ON THE CLIFF WALK, there are no people out yet. Just someone’s yellow dog milling around the Forty Steps entrance, though she doesn’t see anyone connected to the dog. She starts to walk faster, which tricks the dog into thinking it’s a competition, and that’s how she starts racing this random dog on the Cliff Walk.
I will get a dog, she thinks. No offense to Harry. But the dog will go walking with her in the morning. The dog will keep her out in the world.
And it feels amazing to just decide something like that, like, I will get a dog.
The dog slows to a happy trot two steps ahead of her. Together, they pass signs telling them to stay on the path, but there are thin dirt trails made by those who did not listen, like this dog, who starts walking down to the rocks.
HIGH RISK OF INJURY, the sign warns, complete with a helpful picture of a man falling off to his death. Yet Phoebe follows, because people, like dogs and the fisherman down below, will do anything to get closer to the water.
“Hey, hey!” the fisherman says as soon as he sees the dog. The dog barks. “Thanks for bringing him to me.”
The fisherman is smiling, like she did the dog a great service. When he looks at her, his headlight blasts her in her eyes.
“Sorry,” he says, fumbling with the thing. “I sometimes forget I’ve got this thing on my head.”
“It’s okay,” she says.
He turns back to the water, and she sits down on a rock, even though he has not asked for her company. But she decides that’s how some people are (she decides that she likes deciding things now that she is forty and alone, that’s how some people are). Some people don’t ask for what they need. Some people are like religious children that way, mistaking suffering with goodness. Her father acted like being lonely was a good workout, something that would pay off in the end, and sometimes it didn’t, but when he was fishing, it did: He always filled his bucket, dropping in each fish unceremoniously, saying to Phoebe, “Don’t get excited, folks. Just a trash fish.”
She always liked that her father did this—said “folks” when it was just her, as if Phoebe was a grand audience. Yet Phoebe stood there stoically as instructed, like she was just a girl who liked being a good girl, and good girls did not like killing things. Good girls liked the breeze through their long hair and the flush on a man’s face when he smacked the fish against a rock. Killed it instantly. Threw it in the bucket.
The waves build in the distance and crash against the rocks, and she can’t look away. Phoebe feels grateful, like she has achieved something
monumental just by sitting here at sea level, even though from down here on the rocks, the ocean is terrifying. It’s the closest embodiment to what eternity might look like. She can’t see the end of it or the bottom of it. She can’t see the darkness of its expanse, but she knows there are creatures who have to live in it. Who think it’s normal. She reaches out her hand and she touches it.
Her phone dings.
Please tell me you’re okay and that I shouldn’t call the police, Matt texts.
This is how her husband shows affection. Like her father, who was most comfortable showing love by announcing the ways he thought Phoebe might die—you’re going to trip on these socks and break your neck! You could slip on some black ice and drive right off the road! He was always worried about protecting Phoebe from herself. Like when Phoebe was pregnant, Matt looked at the two lines on the stick and said, “It’s too early to get excited, isn’t it?” and she agreed, but when she started bleeding ten weeks later, she hated herself for agreeing, for not getting excited when she had the chance.
So she doesn’t respond to her husband. He doesn’t deserve a response, she thinks. He deserves to suffer like she did, to spiral out of control. Because that was the problem. He never lost control. Neither did she.
“Hey, hey!” the fisherman shouts, and starts pulling on his line. “I got one!”
He looks over at Phoebe, so excited. He needs Phoebe to see the fish. And Phoebe wants to see. But by the time she gets to him, he’s lost it.
“Shit,” he says. “Mind holding this for me? I bet he took the bait.”
“Happy to,” she says.
He bends down to get more squid from his bucket. Phoebe feels the heavy pull of the water. Much stronger than the pull of the river. It takes strength to hold the rod still, to not be scared as the water breaks against the rocks and pools around her feet. She imagines it’s easy to get wiped out by a wave here.
But the man acts like standing here on the slippery rocks is just business. Holds up some fresh squid and tells her to reel in the hook. But
she starts to feel little nibbles, the small bites of something alive in the water.
“I think I got something,” she says, and pulls the rod up sharply to set the hook. “Got it!”
She reels it in, slowly until the fish is dangling above the water. It’s so jarring—this fish yanked from its dark watery world, plunged into an entirely new one, where the most ordinary things like light and air are shocking. The fish shakes wildly on the end of the line, the force of his will to live so enormous. He is like Virginia Woolf’s moth, fluttering its wings— all struggle, all life.
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
“Agh,” the fisherman says. “Just a sea robin. Nobody buys those.”
She takes the fish off the hook, looks at its big ugly mouth, and throws it back into the sea. Wipes her hands on her leggings and gives the rod back to the fisherman.
“You’ve got a lucky touch,” he says. “Want to do another?”
“I need to get going,” she says.
She wants to see Edith Wharton’s house before the bridal brunch. She says goodbye, pats the dog on the head, climbs back up the rocks. On the way, Phoebe slips, falls, scrapes her knee, but does not slide into the water like the little man on the warning sign.
“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day,” Woolf wrote.
And it’s true. How easy to be dead. How lucky to be alive, even for just one day. Charlotte Brontë’s father understood this—the man had lost every single one of his children except for Charlotte, which is why he repeatedly turned down her final suitor. He worried marriage and the childbirth that followed marriage would kill her. And one year later, it did.
But Phoebe has made it out alive. She is back up on the path. Nothing has destroyed Phoebe. She feels very aware of this as she continues walking.
She was never much of a walker, never really understood the point of walking just to walk, which made her feel like a bad Victorianist sometimes. She didn’t take walks like Jane Eyre or wander the moors like
the Brontës, though she always imagined she might if she had a moor at her disposal.
And now she does. An ocean is like a moor, she thinks. It’s an open watery horizon, and she walks along its edge until she reaches Land’s End. Edith Wharton’s house. Not that it’s really Wharton’s house anymore. The new owners are some random people from Connecticut, which is all she can gather from her phone.
She tries to get a better look, scrambles over some rocks, and she’s not an ardent enough Wharton fan for this to feel like a holy pilgrimage, mostly because her books ended in too much tragedy, a Romeo and Juliet–style fatal miscommunication that Phoebe respected yet hated. But she loved everything up to that point. The parties, the clothing, the conversations. She loved Wharton’s sense of humor. Her careful eye. She loved Lily Bart and was devastated when she killed herself at the end.
But Wharton hadn’t published any of her books while she lived in this house. At Land’s End, she had been unknown, an unhappy married woman. She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.
THE WALK BACK feels longer, but she likes feeling her legs strain as she passes mansion after mansion on her left. She is suddenly curious about what she has not yet become, and is proud of herself when she returns to the Forty Steps. And maybe that’s who she will become—a woman who enjoys a good walk alone.
Phoebe, I’m at the house and it truly looks like you were abducted in the middle of making breakfast. Where are you? Did you bring Harry with you?
It’s unsettling to think that after all this time he is actually at the house. He is back among their things, walking up and down the stairs. But he is too late in arriving. Like a party guest you hate for showing up when you are throwing out all the uneaten food.
I just found Harry in the basement under a blanket. I presume you know that Harry is dead?
“Yes, I know Harry is dead,” she says to her phone. “So fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
She feels the urge to throw her phone off the cliff, to get him away from her, like his texts might grow more powerful the longer she keeps them in her hand.
“Uh-oh,” a man says.
She turns to see Gary standing there in his jogging clothes. Phoebe is disarmed.
“Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to live a new life?” he asks.
“Yes,” Phoebe says. “And in the next scene, you can find me waiting in line at the Apple store to buy a new phone, like, immediately.”
“Like just hours of you shopping for a phone and making small decisions about how to set it up?”
“That’s basically how the movie ends.”
“Very experimental.”
“A commentary.”
“Somebody give this woman an Oscar,” he says, facing the ocean like it’s the audience.
“Thank you, thank you,” Phoebe says. She feels light and funny again.
“Lila sent me to come get you,” Gary says. “Your absence at the bridal brunch has been noticed.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t realize how long I was out here.”
Gary must be wondering why she was invited to the bridal brunch if she’s not really part of the wedding. But he doesn’t ask.
Her phone starts vibrating, and they both stare at it like it’s the fish, exhausting itself until it dies.
“Everything okay?” Gary asks.
“It’s my husband calling,” Phoebe says. “My ex-husband, I mean. I have to practice saying that.”
“Good luck,” he says. “I still have trouble saying ‘my dead wife.’”
“There have to be better options.”
“Nothing else sounds much better,” he says. “My deceased wife?”
“Too formal,” Phoebe says.
“My late wife?”
“Too old-fashioned.”
“My first wife.”
“Asshole.”
“My departed spouse.”
“Okay, now you just sound like you murdered her. You’re right. I see your problem.”
“There is always the option of just calling her Wendy,” he says. “But it feels wrong to do it around Lila. It feels … rude somehow.”
Which is a real shame, he says, because he always liked the name Wendy. So did Juice, who said “Wendy” even before she said “Mama,” maybe something to do with how many times Juice watched Peter Pan, he wasn’t sure.
“Wendy was disappointed by it, she was like, what am I, her co- worker?” Gary says. “But after she died, I was glad that from the very beginning she could see her mother as a person.”
“That’s a nice way to think about it,” Phoebe says. “Can I ask how Juice got the nickname?”
“It’s something Wendy used to call her,” Gary says. He explains that Juice had so much energy as a toddler, zipping back and forth across the room, with this incredible strength. Wendy would always laugh about her being juiced up.
“We stopped calling her that a long time ago, but after Wendy died, Juice started asking to be called that again,” Gary says. Then, as if he fears he has been rude for talking so much about his family, he asks, “Do you have kids?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I tried.”
She tells him about all the trying. About IVF. About how that might have been when the depression started. It was hard to say. Hard to work backward and see the beginning. All those appointments and by the end, Matt didn’t want to come.
“Matt?”
“My ex-husband,” she says. “He never wanted to come. He said he was okay doing IVF but then would look at the medications in the fridge and say, This is all so expensive. And it was. But I also know it was his way of telling me he wanted it to happen naturally. He wanted the child to light up inside me like a firefly. He wanted it to be so obvious, so natural, that no doubt had any room to creep in.”
But they had appointments. Phoebe had polyps. She had operations.
“Then the egg-stractions,” she says.
“Egg-stractions?”
“Technically, they’re called retrievals. But they should be called Eggstractions, right? I mean, come on. It’s just sitting right there.”
The Eggstraction, she joked with her husband. Sounds like a horror story someone should write.
“But Matt wouldn’t joke about it with me. He was just like, Oh God, who would read that story?”
“A lot of people would.”
The hotel is visible now. The bridal brunch is waiting inside. Phoebe takes small, slow steps.
“Here we go,” Gary says.
“Not ready to talk to people again?”
“It’s just been a lot of family,” Gary says. “I’m supposed to be having coffee with them right now, but there are only so many times I can listen to Marla list off the price of various houses in the neighborhood.”
“Marla’s pretty funny,” Phoebe says.
“She really is,” Gary says. “Even though I know she can be a lot for people.”
“A lot can be okay. It can be good. It’s better than nothing.”
It’s what Phoebe longed for in the silence of her house growing up. Her father was not a loud person, and neither was she, but she wanted to be. She longed for a lot of noise in the kitchen, for clanging pots, for the sounds of people laughing by the fire.
“I used to dream of having one of those big families in nineteenth- century British novels,” Phoebe says.
“I thought you dreamed of being an orphan?”
“Well, if I couldn’t be an orphan, then I wanted a big messy family,” she says. “Like in Pride and Prejudice or something.”
“I’ll just nod and pretend I read it, too.”
“It’s one of those books that are about the big family, and what the big family is up to, and how the big family changes over time, and all the little ways the members of the big family irritate each other but also love each other.”
“I see,” Gary says. “So I’ll just pretend that I’m a character in an Austen novel I’ve never read, and all will be well.”
“Totally healthy,” Phoebe says.
He holds open the hotel door like a butler. “The ladies await, Maid of Honor.”
She blushes. So Lila told him.
“GARY, YOU’RE LATE for your Bourbon Bubbler,” Lila says as soon as they walk into the conservatory.
“What’s a Bourbon Bubbler?” Nat asks.
“And how do we get one?” Suz asks.
“Sorry,” Lila says. “It’s a massage for men only.”
“How can a massage be only for men?” Marla asks.
“That’s like when they tried to market wine just for bros,” Nat says. “As if there are some grapes that are manlier than other grapes.”
“Wine for bros,” Juice repeats, and laughs.
“I for one can only feel okay about being rubbed down if it’s done with literal poison,” Gary says, and the women laugh.
“Are you ready for some very relaxing poison, bro?” Juice asks, pretending to be a masseuse.
“Oh come on. It’s a classic bourbon sugar scrub,” Lila says. “People have been doing it for … years.”
Lila kisses Gary goodbye. Every kiss they have in public seems grander than the last—designed to produce applause. Phoebe feels her stomach lurch. Maybe she’s hungry. Maybe she needs a big breakfast, like the kind
she used to order for herself when hungover. Phoebe sits down at the table of women, looks at the menu, while the bride tries to order a coffee.
“That’s all I am trying to do here,” Lila says to the waiter. He wears a name tag that says, RYUN, DRINK CONCIERGE.
“Oh, we have free coffee in the samovar,” Ryun says.
“What’s a samovar?” Juice asks.
Phoebe imagines that when Ryun is not being asked, What’s a samovar, he’s spending a lot of time trying to explain why his name is spelled with a U and not an A.
“It’s that jug of coffee over there,” Ryun says, pointing to a table.
“Right, but I don’t want free coffee from the samovar,” Lila says. She points to the menu. “I want this coffee.”
“But it’s the same coffee,” Ryun says, smiling. “The only difference is that this coffee is just six dollars more.”
“Look, I am just trying to order the coffee that’s on the menu here. Can you please give me that coffee?”
Juice and Marla give each other eyes across the table. Ryun nods.
“Right, okay, I understand,” he says, and then goes to get a cup of coffee out of the samovar. When he brings it over to Lila, the cup wobbles violently on the saucer.
“Thank you,” Lila says.
Lila is the only one at the table not embarrassed.
“Here is your binder, Maid of Honor,” Lila says.
Being maid of honor comes with a schedule of events and a list of duties, some already crossed out, like “Research old restaurant that Oprah loves,” “Book the water spa,” and some duties yet to be crossed out: “Buy compostable dick-themed flatware,” “Confirm tarot reading, 7 p.m.,” and “Confirm Sex Woman, 5 p.m.”
“Confirm Sex Woman?” Phoebe asks.
“What’s a Sex Woman?” Juice asks.
“Nobody knows, sweetheart,” Marla says.
“I’m not supposed to know,” Lila says, closing the binder. “Today is supposed to be a surprise.”
“I bet she’s one of those women who show up with toys and things, and, like, teaches us how to have sex,” Suz says.
“Do you not know how to have sex, bro?” Juice asks Lila.
“Mel, please don’t call me bro,” Lila says.
“Bro, please don’t call me Mel.”
“But Mel is a beautiful name,” Lila says. “And Juice is actually the nickname of a professional football player who was famously tried for murder.”
Marla looks at Lila accusingly, and Juice asks, “Wait, what?”
“It’s true,” Marla says, with an apologetic look. “O. J. Simpson.”
“Then why did my mom call me that?” Juice asks.
“I honestly can’t remember,” Marla confesses.
Juice is not pleased. She looks at Lila like it’s her fault that her nickname is forever ruined now. She sits back and crosses her arms in defeat.
“So what’s good here?” Phoebe asks, closing the binder.
“I highly suggest the squash toast,” Lila says.
“What happened to avocado toast?” Phoebe asks.
“That’s over now,” Lila says.
“So soon? I just started understanding the appeal.”
“Too late. Squash toast is like, the next generation,” Lila says.
“Avocado toast was a total scam,” Marla says. “And squash toast is even more of a scam.”
“How can it be a scam?” Lila asks. “The menu says how much it costs.”
“Yeah, twenty-two dollars! It’s somehow even more expensive than avocado toast, despite the fact that gourds are historically the cheapest vegetable known to mankind.”
“What are gourds?” Juice asks.
“Squash,” Phoebe says.
“Why don’t people just say ‘squash’ then?” Juice asks.
The Drink Concierge returns.
“I’ll have the gourd toast,” Juice says, but the Drink Concierge doesn’t break character.
“Anyone else?” he asks.
“Same,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe doesn’t give a shit how much it costs. Phoebe is hungry. Phoebe is still buzzing from the walk. Phoebe wants to feed her body.
“Cheers,” she says when she finally takes a bite.
But Phoebe knows that if she were really at this wedding the way Marla is really at this wedding, if she were the Phoebe of ten years ago, she would be making a mental bill in her head, too, tallying up everything, trying to create some big argument about how wasteful it all is.
But now she is counting other things.
“In just this room alone, there are ten doors,” Phoebe says, and she loves this about historic houses, though nobody else looks astonished.
“Is this supposed to be the start of a game or something?” Suz asks.
Juice rips a sugar pack in half over her coffee.
“Juice!” Marla says, when half of it gets on the table. “You just got sugar everywhere.”
“It’s fine,” Juice says. “I’ll lick it up like I’m a priest.”
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe says. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“Grandma said that when the priest spills the wine, he has to lick it off the floor,” Juice says. “Because it’s literally Jesus. And if you don’t, then Jesus will just sit there on the linoleum for the rest of time.”
“Wait, seriously?” Nat asks, and Juice nods, then licks the sugar off the table.
Lila turns her gaze to Phoebe.
“You know what open-toed shoes are?” Lila asks.
“Is this a maid of honor test?” Phoebe asks.
“I certainly hope not. You know, right?”
“I refuse to dignify that with a response.”
“See?” Lila says to Juice, who is still licking up the sugar. “That’s what I told Mel. I mean, Juice. Everybody knows what open-toed shoes are.”
Juice pulls away from the table with sudden coolness. “Well, sorry, I don’t.”
“Phoebe is going to take you to get open-toed shoes today.”
“Was that in the binder?” Phoebe asks.
It’s not really what she imagined for the day. She imagined getting a massage. She imagined lying by the pool.
“You both need shoes,” Lila says. “You can take the vintage car.”
Lila looks at Juice for some expression of excitement, but there is only disdain.
“The one we took yesterday?” Juice asks. “I hate that car.”
“It’s a beautiful car,” Lila says.
“It’s embarrassing,” Juice says. “People just look at you while you drive.”
“That’s the point,” Lila says.
“Why do you want people to just look at you all the time?”
Lila opens her mouth to respond, but Phoebe stands up as a way to finish the argument.
“Let’s do it,” Phoebe says. “Juice, I’ll meet you in the lobby at noon.”
“You should get some dresses while you’re out,” Lila says, and no one asks why Phoebe is the maid of honor and yet has brought no dresses for the week. They are three days into the wedding now, ready to accept whatever reality the bride dictates. “One for every night. Go down to Bellevue. That’s where they have the best stuff.”
More wedding people arrive, and the bride is bombarded. She shrieks as she stands up. She hugs them and then introduces each one to the bridal party. Her cousin, a skier who almost made it to the Olympics. Her uncle, who wears a full linen suit. And then her grandmother, who calls herself “Bootsie” and then introduces the man next to her as “my guy.” She is old, just on the cusp of ancient, and she looks around at the room like she’s never stayed in a hotel in her life.
“I don’t understand why you couldn’t have the wedding at home,” Bootsie says. “Like Jackie.”
“We talked about this, Grandmother,” Lila says, kissing her on the cheek. “This isn’t Jackie’s wedding. We do things differently now.”
“But the Breakers is very gaudy. A poor man’s imitation of a European castle,” Bootsie says.
Lila looks at My Guy. “Can you help Grandmother get settled in the St. Georges room?”
They watch Bootsie go, and Phoebe whispers, “Who is Jackie?”
“Jackie Kennedy.”
IN THE ROARING TWENTIES, Phoebe opens the maid of honor binder and feels like her old self, about to embark on a series of tasks. She finds herself wanting to make today perfect for Lila. She starts by calling the number for the Sex Woman.
“Hello?” a woman answers.
Phoebe was hoping she would answer by introducing herself the way many businesses do.
“Hi, are you the…” Phoebe begins. “I am calling to confirm your visit to Lila Rossi-Winthrop’s bachelorette party tonight at five p.m.?”
“Rossi-Winthrop?” the Sex Woman says. “Will you hold please?”
For a Sex Woman, she seems very formal. She types a lot of information into the system and makes no attempt to fill the silence with conversation.
“Okay, that’s right. Five p.m.,” she says. “And will there be a projector?”
“Do you require one?” Phoebe asks.
“Historically, yes,” the Sex Woman says.
AT THE FRONT desk, while Phoebe waits for Juice, she asks Pauline where she might find compostable dick-themed flatware in this town.
“Oh!” Pauline says, and if she thinks this is a weird question, she doesn’t show it. “Does that exist? I don’t know if that exists. But if it does, it would be at a place called Coastal Intimates down in the Navy district. I can get you a driver?”
“No, I’ll be taking the vintage car,” Phoebe says. “Oh, and we’ll need a projector at five p.m. sharp in the billiards room for the bachelorette party.”
“Of course, absolutely!” Pauline says, like this is the most sensible request in the world.
Phoebe turns around to see Juice waiting by the double doors. She looks out of place standing in front of the velvet drapes in her big black combat boots. Like a girl from the future, lost in time.
“Hey,” Phoebe says.
But Juice just waves. She has gone quiet again like she did on the drive to the wharf. Phoebe doesn’t know if this is because this is the first time they are alone without her family or if this is just something that happens to Juice in the bright hot sun of the afternoon.
“Your car is ready,” the man in burgundy says.
Phoebe drives fast, but not so fast that it would scare Juice. Juice seems to relax into the speed, reads something off her phone, and the silence is fine with Phoebe. A relief, really. Phoebe hates having to perform happiness in front of other people’s children. This is probably why Phoebe has been told many times that she is not particularly maternal, but she thinks what people mean by this is that she does not act like a mother on TV, who is often loud, always trying to hug someone, doesn’t really matter who.
But Phoebe is not a hugger. Her father was not a hugger. He gave a small pat on the back whenever he wanted to say “I love you.” He did not oohh and ahh over Phoebe, and so Phoebe did not oohh or ahh over other people’s children.
But this did not mean she didn’t enjoy kids. She just didn’t feel the need to try so hard with them, like her husband always did. She suspected kids didn’t really like it when adults tried too hard, mostly because Phoebe never liked that as a child. Then again, the first time her husband picked up Mia’s new baby, he swung her around like she was an airplane, and she seemed to really like it.
“Does she eat any real food yet?” he asked Mia.
It had been their last Thanksgiving together, three months before the affair started. Mia and Tom had come over with their new baby because Matt didn’t have a big family, either. The people at the university are my family, he always said. And that made sense for him. He was wedded to them for life.
“Today is going to be her first day of real food, actually,” Mia said.
“Wow,” Matt said. Phoebe’s husband looked genuinely thrilled by this, but Phoebe didn’t know how to look genuinely thrilled. She mostly just felt fat from her most recent IVF cycle. “She’s going to expect a Thanksgiving dinner every day from now on.”
“Right,” Mia said. “She’ll have the most complicated palate at preschool. Like, I’m sorry, but where is the turkey jus?”
They laughed, and even though the affair hadn’t started yet, Phoebe already felt outside of something they shared. They were different somehow
—they were the ones making jokes over the turkey. They were the ones debating whether the Waldorf school would be good for the child, and Phoebe was the one just trying to hang on. Trying to smile. Phoebe was becoming like Tom. She looked to Tom in solidarity, but Tom was assessing the turkey.
“Are these the giblets?” Tom asked.
Phoebe felt like she was in a dream, watching Mia and her husband and the Waldorf Child continue on so merrily with Thanksgiving dinner. Tom asking why the turkey was flipped upside down, and Matt saying, “It’s the only way you can make it.”
Her husband was full of advice like that. He knew how to best do everything, and Tom seemed interested in being like this, too. Tom asked him a lot of questions while Mia had her breast out, and Phoebe didn’t remember if it was rude to look at the breast or rude not to look.
Phoebe tried to say something nice about the Waldorf Child. She imagined what some other woman would say. Another mother.
“Oh, how cute, look at those little killer whales on the baby’s onesie,” she said.
“I think we say orcas now,” Mia said.
And normally, Phoebe could have looked to her husband in this moment and laughed. I think we say orcas now, Phoebe imagined them saying. But nobody met her eye. She was left alone with her scolding. It was not a joke, just a fact. Parents say orcas, not killer whales. Ho hum. Then they ate the meal and she continued to notice how none of them really looked her in the eye. When they told stories, they bypassed Phoebe, as if she were not part of the conversation. Did it have something to do with her hair? It was a taupe wall that blended in with the taupe wall. The table roared. Her husband laughed, head back, and looked at the Waldorf Child with such tenderness. It occurred to her that if her husband didn’t leave her, she would probably have to leave him. Looking at him look at a child that way.
When they left, Phoebe didn’t feel relieved. She felt nervous, as if they took real life with them. The extra pie. The Waldorf Child. The whole life. She started to clean up, hoping it would return her to herself.
“I like children,” Phoebe said, and why did she feel the need to say this? “It’s just boring to make them the center of attention all the time. It’s like bringing a new toy to dinner and only looking at the new toy and only talking about the new toy and expecting everybody else to care about it.”
Her husband didn’t say anything at first. Just washed the turkey plate. “I thought it was fun.”
Was this the moment he fell out of love with her and in love with Mia? Was that what he was trying to tell her in the kitchen? Stop being so negative. Just be fun. Just say orcas.
It wasn’t until after Valentine’s Day when the actual affair began. But Phoebe knew something had shifted after Thanksgiving, because they stopped touching in the kitchen when they walked by each other. They stopped having sex, and Phoebe was scared by how easy it became to live without sex with her husband. She got spooked by the fact that she preferred some other version of her husband, the one she created in her fantasies. She thought of this husband when she masturbated in the mornings. She got lightheaded. She felt empty, but in a clean kind of way. Not having sex sometimes felt like giving up meat or pasta. Sometimes, she felt absurdly proud of herself.
But after three months of this, she sometimes missed her real husband so much, she walked over to him at the couch, kissed him on the mouth.
“It’s a simple prompt,” he said, while grading papers. It was February, only a few weeks into the spring semester, and he was already very annoyed by them. It wasn’t like him. “Analyze the crow metaphor. But they keep getting it wrong. They keep describing the crow as some harbinger of death, even though nothing about the passage suggests death. But they expect crows to be harbingers of death, so they can’t see that the author is trying to say something about how crows are actually very curious and social creatures! That’s what I want to write on their papers—Do you see the words on the page? Do you even know what a crow is?”
By lunch, her husband was still so angry about the crows that he had to take a break to eat lunch. Then he decided to go grade on campus because he had to finish up some committee work there. He and Mia had been
tasked to pick the art for the humanities center hallway, and he needed to go look at the paintings that had been delivered.
Even though it was planned, it felt like a miracle seeing Mia in the hallway—that’s what he told Phoebe in their first conversation about the affair. He said he had been grading papers at home and feeling so depressed about everything—about his life, about their marriage, about his students and the crows—and when they were done talking about the paintings, he didn’t want to go home. He asked Mia if she wanted a drink, and Phoebe wonders if he said it the way he once said it to her—Hey, want a beer?
By then, it was whiskey, though. Her husband was off beer. He was a grown man, a professor, and drank amber liquids only while they talked about their lives—about Tom’s depression, about Phoebe’s depression, about how easy it was to become depressed by someone else’s depression. And then when the drink was over, it started to rain, which he said felt like a reason to stay put and have another, because neither of them wanted to walk across campus in the rain. And then her husband had the thought, What if I never have to go home again? It truly never occurred to him, but once it did, he couldn’t stop thinking it. He could just never go home. He could start a new life. Take the hands of the woman before him and say, “I love you.”
He said it just came out, like a sneeze he could not help. Once he said it, he understood it to be entirely true. He could see a whole future with Mia and the Waldorf Child. Mia said “I love you” back right away.
Neither of them knew it until that moment. He said that falling in love with Mia was like being a frog sitting in water that was slowly coming to a boil, and Phoebe said, “I take it that’s not the romantic metaphor you use when talking with her about it?” and he said, “I just mean it was slow, okay, so slow I didn’t realize it,” and she said, “But isn’t the frog in boiling water a myth? A frog wouldn’t jump out of boiling water, it would just die.” She was hoping he might riff on this with her, that together they would unpack the metaphor until it had no meaning.
“I love her,” he said again.
“You love that she has a baby,” Phoebe said.
“Not everything is about that, Phoebe.”
He said it wasn’t about sex, either, which he seemed to think would make her feel better but only made her feel worse. They had only slept together once before the pandemic started, and it had been a mistake. He should have waited, he knew. He should have talked to Phoebe about what he was feeling for Mia. But then it was the pandemic, and he didn’t know what to do. It was always Matt and Phoebe stuck in their home all summer, Mia and Tom in theirs. He thought he could wait until the pandemic was over, but at a certain point, lying to Phoebe made Matt feel too awful. Sneaking out to call Mia was just wrong. By the end of that summer, he knew he would have to make a decision about how he wanted to live. And so, in August, he did.
“She brought me to life again,” Matt told Phoebe. “I can’t help it. I need to see this through.”
For months after he left, it made her want to vomit thinking of another woman making her husband feel alive. Phoebe had been so jealous—but not just of Mia. Her husband felt alive again. She couldn’t even imagine it.
PHOEBE FEELS A tiny thrill as the car hugs the curve of the country. To feel alive on this beautiful road, to be at the border of sea and land. To be here, driving this beautiful car on this beautiful day.
“Lila is such a bitch,” Juice says.
Juice doesn’t say it until Phoebe starts looking for parking, as if Phoebe’s ability to ride in complete silence, her insistence on not making Juice talk, has impressed her into actual speech.
“Why do you say that?” Phoebe asks. She has long practiced this art of keeping an even tone with students, making her questions sound like statements.
“Aren’t you going to scold me for calling your best friend a bitch?” Juice asks.
“No,” Phoebe says.
Juice looks confused, as if she’s never met this kind of adult. The one who doesn’t give a shit. And this is one of the great things about not having kids, Phoebe realizes. She truly doesn’t have to give a shit. She doesn’t
have to worry about Juice’s development and whether or not the phone is reprogramming her brain, even though of course it is. She is not Juice’s mother, not even a professor anymore, no longer standing in front of the classroom in a completely appropriate blouse and a skirt that shows a little knee, but of course not too much knee. She is free now in a way that people like Gary or Mia never will be. She can wear her skirt however high she wants. She can speak to Juice as if she’s just another person in the car, because that’s what she is.
“But I want to know why you would say that,” Phoebe says. “If you’re going to call someone a bitch, you should have a pretty good reason.”
“Honestly, I bet she was just born that way.”
“So like one of those babies that emerges from the womb as a total bitch?”
“Exactly,” Juice says.
“Lila slid out, and the doctors were like, Congratulations, Mom and Dad, it’s … a bitch!”
“Yes!” Juice laughs. Once she gets the joke, she can’t stop. “Surprise! It’s a giant bitch!”
“Would you like to swaddle your giant bitch?” Phoebe asks, and this sends Juice over the edge.
They get out of the car. They walk down Bellevue Avenue and Juice stops in front of an art gallery.
“Ugh,” she says. “I wish my dad never walked into this gallery.”
The Winthrop Gallery of International Art. The door is locked, the lights are off, but through the window, Phoebe can see big canvasses and shiny frames in the dark. She tries to imagine Gary walking in there, Lila at the desk.
“Wait, is that a Hudson River School painting?” Phoebe asks.
Juice shrugs. “What’s a Hudson River School?”
They enter the boutique next door because Phoebe spots shoes against the back wall.
“I seriously don’t get it,” Juice says. “I already have shoes!”
Phoebe looks at Juice’s combat boots. “Not open-toed ones.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Boots don’t reveal your toes.”
“Yeah, because my toes are actually kind of private.”
“Not for much longer, I’m afraid,” Phoebe says. “At this wedding, there are public toes only.”
“Has anyone ever asked themselves … why? Why do we want to see other people’s toes so much?”
“Juice,” Phoebe says. “Let me make your life a lot simpler. You always need the shoes that the bride wants you to have.”
“But why? I’m tired of doing everything she wants.”
“It’s just one of those rules.”
“One of what rules?”
“Like, nobody can make fun of your father but you. Don’t eat a giant cake before running. And always buy the shoes that the bride wants you to buy.”
Juice looks impressed. “What other rules do you know?”
“Too many,” Phoebe says.
PHOEBE HELPS JUICE pick out gold shoes that she doesn’t completely hate more than life itself, and Phoebe gets a black pair for herself. She tries them on and they look so good, she feels proud of her feet.
“What do you think?” Phoebe asks, stretching out her leg.
“It looks like a foot,” Juice says. “With a shoe on it.”
“But do you like it?”
“You sound like Lila,” Juice says. “Lila’s obsessed with her feet.”
“What do you mean, she’s obsessed with her feet?”
“During the pandemic she spent hours watching TV and soaking her feet in this pedicure machine she bought. And it was my pedicure machine. I mean, she gave it to me for my birthday. And she was like, Yeah, but you never use it. And I was like, Well yeah, why would I use that? I mean, who cares what someone’s feet look like? It’s like she has no idea that we’re all just going to die someday.”
Juice leans over to unbuckle her shoe.
“Is that what you said?” Phoebe asks.
“Once,” Juice says.
“Harsh.”
“Well, it’s not normal. She’s obsessed with the way she looks. It literally takes her hours to figure out what to wear … to the bathroom. It’s such a waste of time.”
It’s a similar kind of thing Phoebe used to tell herself in graduate school when everybody showed up to class looking like they had spent all morning turning themselves into a postmodern painting. It made her feel better about just wearing jeans. But Phoebe no longer believes this is the whole truth.
“A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself,” Phoebe says. “It’s a line from an Edith Wharton novel.”
A line that struck Phoebe as very true, even though her students always thought it sounded shallow. So does Juice.
“Well, that’s just sad,” Juice says. “You shouldn’t ask someone out because of their clothes.”
“I think Wharton meant something more than that,” Phoebe says. “I think she wants us to think about the secret things people reveal through their clothing choices. Like when we admire someone’s dress or jacket, we’re really admiring something else.”
“Like their body?” Juice asks. “Like how much money they have?”
And yes, yes. But no.
“Clearly you’ve never fallen in love with a man because he wore the same leather belt every day,” Phoebe says.
Juice laughs. “Wait, you fell in love with a man because of his belt?”
“My ex-husband wore it on our first date,” Phoebe says. “I remember admiring how the leather was smooth and tan, and then I kept noticing him wear it again and again.”
It was a good belt, Matt told her when she finally asked about it, said he bought it when he was eighteen, and that he hoped to keep it until he died. And she could see it all, how this man would care for this one belt his whole life, how he would walk the perimeter of their house each night, making sure the doors were locked and the cups were in perfect order in the cabinet.
“Did he?” Juice asks.
“Yes,” Phoebe says.
“Then why aren’t you still married?”
“He had an affair.”
“Oh. Like Albert Schuyler?”
“Like Albert Schuyler.”
“Did he build his mistress a building, too?”
Phoebe chuckles. It feels good to finally laugh about it for real.
“Not quite,” she says.
“So you were wrong about the belt,” Juice says. “He didn’t take care of you forever.”
“No,” Phoebe says. “But I was not wrong about the belt.”
Phoebe remembers the last night she spent with her husband, watching him undress for bed, rolling up the belt into a little ball. Here was a man who took care of everything, she thought. A man who folded his laundry with the precision of a dressmaker. So why couldn’t he take care of this, too? Why did she believe that somehow he could always save her, like her womb was a cupboard with cups in all the wrong places? A place her husband would rearrange, if only he could get to it.
“The belt revealed what we both wanted him to be,” Phoebe says. “But we can’t always be what we want every second. And that’s okay. That’s just life, you know?”
Juice picks up her boots and stares at them like they look different to her now.
“What do you want your boots to say about you?” Phoebe asks.
When Juice doesn’t say anything, Phoebe worries she’s lost her, that this might be too much for the kid, the way she used to worry about losing her students when they fell silent in class. Because their silence during the pandemic was excruciating. Their silence sounded like proof that they hated her, proof that they couldn’t wait to leave, too.
But Phoebe had not always felt that way about teaching. When she first started, she loved it so much, she often felt bad for the parents of her students who didn’t get to know their children in the way Phoebe sometimes did. Because a professor was in a unique position to open students up. They seemed inclined to trust that when Phoebe asked a
question, it was leading somewhere worthwhile. It was nice, Phoebe thought, how often they went with her. How they trusted her to be a good professor, and she trusted them to be good students who sat in silence not because they hated her but because they were thinking.
So she decides to trust in Juice’s silence. She does not retract her question or apologize for it. She just waits, until finally, Juice speaks.
“I guess I want people to know that I don’t care what my feet look like,” Juice says. “That I’m not like Lila at all.”
“What are you like?”
“Like my mom.”
“What was she like?”
“Really fun,” Juice says. “We used to paint a lot together. She used to let me use my hands and feet and walk all over the canvas like a monkey. And once we all built this mini-sculpture of our house out of pancakes. And after we ate it all, my mom was like, Uh-oh, where are we going to live? We laughed so hard. And sometimes I feel like my dad doesn’t even remember that day. It’s like he’s totally forgotten her.”
“He hasn’t forgotten her,” Phoebe says. “Trust me.”
“But how do you know?”
“Because he talked to me about her just this morning.”
“Really?” Juice says.
“Really,” Phoebe says. “And you can tell your dad these things, you know. You don’t have to rely on your boots to do all the talking for you.”
“Well, that’s good,” Juice says. “Because they’re actually getting kind of sweaty. It’s really hot out.”
Phoebe laughs, picks a pair of Tevas off the shelf, and holds them up. “What about these?”
AT THE OTHER boutiques, Phoebe tries on dresses that hug her body. She stands in the three-way mirror of the dressing room and admires herself in a plum-colored floor-length dress. It feels good to be wearing a form-fitting dress, to see the outline of her body again.
“What do you think?” Phoebe asks Juice. She steps out of the dressing room.
“I don’t know why you keep asking me that,” Juice says. “I don’t know what looks good on people.”
Phoebe can feel Juice’s embarrassment at being asked. She can feel it because Phoebe used to be embarrassed like that. That’s why Phoebe was a terrible shopper—always too burdened by thoughts of future embarrassment, so she never bought anything that could potentially be considered excessive, like a dress with puffed sleeves or three drinks at a bar.
“First gut reaction.”
“You look like Miss Scarlet from Clue,” Juice says.
“Is Miss Scarlet hot?”
Juice laughs. “Oh my God, nobody from Clue is hot. That’s so not what Clue is about, Phoebe.”
Phoebe laughs. It feels good to hear Juice say her name.
“I’m buying it,” Phoebe says.
It’s an epic shopping trip. Phoebe needs practically everything. Before they are done, Phoebe has picked up five other dresses, new clothes for the week, makeup, two bathing suits, and anything else she thinks she might need while here, including a comically large sun hat that seems more like something the wedding people would wear.
“This hat should have its own police escort,” Phoebe says to Juice, but Juice is by the register now and only the woman behind the desk hears her.
“You picked the prettiest one in the store,” she says.
Phoebe feels guilty, because picking it up had only been a joke. The clerk stares at her with such admiring eyes, until Phoebe feels pressured into purchasing it, and outside the store, when Phoebe puts on the giant sun hat, Juice says, “Oh my God. It’s so big. It’s so embarrassing.”
But Juice says it with a smile, like now, in the anonymity of the street, now with Phoebe’s guidance, it’s good to be so embarrassing. It’s funny. People on the street step out of the way to avoid brushing Phoebe’s brim with their shoulders, and when they do, Juice and Phoebe look at each other and crack up.
“Make way!” Phoebe shouts, and they walk down the cobblestone.
“Clear the streets!” Juice yells.
When it begins to rain, Phoebe says, “Look, we don’t even need an umbrella. You can just get under the hat.”
Phoebe pulls her in close.
“I’d never carry an umbrella anyway,” Juice says.
“Why not?”
“It’s so embarrassing.”
“To carry an umbrella?”
“It’s … humiliating.”
Phoebe is fascinated by Juice’s relentless embarrassment. Phoebe wants to know everything about it, study it like a book. She is used to being around college students who are usually a bit more okay being embarrassed.
“It’s humiliating to not be rained on?”
“It’s humiliating to be so … prepared.”
After, they buy lunch from a café that asks if they want collagen shots in their lattes. Phoebe likes the way the barista talks, how her voice is much louder than she expects it to be. Phoebe takes a sip of the warm coffee, and as they pass the art gallery on the way to the car, Phoebe can feel Juice’s sourness return.
“I seriously just don’t get why anybody cares about their car,” Juice says, opening the car door. “It’s just a hunk of metal.”
“Some people might say that your dog was just a piece of plastic,” Phoebe says.
“It’s different.”
“You’re right. It is different,” Phoebe says, “because you loved that piece of plastic.”
“Yeah, fine, I loved a piece of plastic. So what!”
“Exactly!” Phoebe says. “So what? Love your piece of plastic. And let other people love their hunk of metal.”
“Fine,” Juice says, but she does not sound satisfied. Phoebe is not letting her do the one thing she wants to do, which is talk shit about her future stepmother.
“But I can’t really talk about my mom with my dad,” Juice says. “Because Lila is always there. And Lila won’t let us.”
“Has she ever told you not to talk about her?”
“She just gets this look on her face. And it’s like we all know that if we talk about her she’s going to get upset.”
“She probably will get upset.”
“But why? She’s my mom. And when Lila gets upset, it’s like all of a sudden, I’m not allowed to have a mom anymore. We have to pretend she never existed. My dad does, too. He’s so weird around her. Like she’s this queen or something. He’ll like, put out a glass of white wine when she gets out of the shower, like her shower was oh so traumatic.”
“That’s actually nice.”
“He never did that stuff with my mom.”
“Maybe he became nicer after she died.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Clearly not,” Phoebe says, and Juice laughs.
“I want to be nice,” Juice says. “It’s just that we have nothing in common.”
“You both enjoy air. And food.”
“Okay, yeah fine, we both like breathing. But we don’t have anything important in common.”
“You’re right. Air is so not important.”
“Who needs air? I, personally, hate air.”
Phoebe puts the keys in the ignition.
“I mean, I guess we both love all things Disney,” Juice says.
“That’s something,” Phoebe says, and starts the car. “That’s something.”
For the rest of the ride, Juice asks to be quizzed on the things she knows, like the country’s capitals. She has a test next week. But she also just thinks it’s fun. She likes maps. She likes knowing where things are. She likes using Waze and pointing out things on the street, like the most impressive mansions. They drive out of the historic district, and Phoebe looks for a parking space that’s not right in front of the sex shop. She parks two stores down in front of an animal shelter.
“Oh my God, it’s fate,” Juice says. “Can I get a dog?”
“That’s a question for your father,” Phoebe says.
“But he always says no. Lila hates dogs.”
“Nobody hates dogs.”
“I just want to go look.”
“Trust me, there’s no just looking when you’re at a shelter,” Phoebe says.
“But I’m ready for more than a piece of plastic.”
“Okay, fine. You have ten minutes to go adore nonplastic animals.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
Phoebe is not ready for it, can’t bear to see all those little animals with their noses pressed against the cages.
“I need to run this last errand. I’ll meet you back at the car.”
Juice claps her hands and goes alone into the shelter, while Phoebe looks down at her phone. She finally listens to the voicemail from her husband.
I don’t know what you know about Harry, or where you are, but I thought I should tell you that I buried him in the backyard. Please call me back, Phoebe.
His voice—it sounds just like him, though she doesn’t know why this should be surprising. It makes her cry, thinking of her husband getting the shovel, probably her father’s old one that she keeps in the garage. She wonders where he buried him. By the stone near the pine?
But she doesn’t call him back. She has no responsibility to make her husband feel better about anything at this point. He is her ex-husband, she repeats. Ex-husband. And she is a maid of honor. She wipes her tears, drops her phone into the purse, and walks into the sex shop.
PHOEBE HAS PASSED sex shops hundreds of times on the St. Louis highways but has never actually stopped in one. It never even occurred to her to enter, the way it never occurred to her to stop at a church. She was a married woman who never watched porn, never orgasmed theatrically, never saw a need for props. She didn’t like anything too weird, she told Matt.
So she is surprised by how not weird it is inside, set up like any other store, except where the blouses should be, there are silicone vaginas. Chains on the wall. Panties everywhere.
“Can I help you?” the saleswoman asks.
“I’m looking for dick-themed flatware,” Phoebe says, slightly embarrassed at first. It helps that the saleswoman is not. She looks as bored as she might working at Kohl’s.
“We have straws shaped liked dicks,” the woman says. “And those silicone vaginas that I guess you could like, use as a bowl or something?”
“Are the dick straws compostable?” Phoebe asks.
“No. But I think they’re recyclable.”
“I need compostable.”
“The only thing we have that is close to being compostable is the edible underwear in the back. I mean, assuming you eat it all. Zero waste.”
The whole exchange is so businesslike, Phoebe wishes she could go back and speak the same way when in bed with her husband. She wishes she could have had the courage to ask for what she wanted, even if it sounded weird. Because she is starting to suspect that she actually likes weird things. That everybody likes weird things, which is why sex shops are open in the middle of a Thursday afternoon.
She picks up the plastic penis straws and wonders if with Mia, for whatever reason, Matt can be weird. If that is why he needs her. If that is what made him feel alive again. And for the first time, the thought doesn’t fill her with horror but with hope. Maybe one day she will find someone and together they will be weird.
She pays for the penis straws, as well as a few strappy red thongs simply because she imagines it’s impossible not to feel sexy while wearing them.
OUTSIDE, JUICE IS not in the car. Phoebe pauses in front of the shelter, looks through the window to see Juice on a chair holding a small yellow dog. Juice looks so happy, and Phoebe decides to go in. She wants to be a part of it. It’s okay, the therapist said, to want to be a part of it.
“Oh my God, Phoebe, you should come hold him!” Juice says.
So Phoebe picks up the dog. Feels the animal’s soft fluffy paws. “What’s your name?”
“Unfortunately, it’s Frank,” Juice says. “But you can change that, right?”
“Me?” Phoebe asks like this is crazy, even though she can already imagine it. This is Frank, her new dog. They’ll go on long walks together. They’ll go clamming in the mornings when nobody is awake. “I can’t buy a dog. The hotel doesn’t allow them.”
“Well, someone has to buy Frank,” Juice says. She points to a smaller beagle in a cage. “I’ve already decided I’m going to get that one.”
The entire ride home, Juice tries to come up with new names for Phoebe’s dog. But when they walk back into the hotel, Phoebe breaks the news.
“I don’t know, Juice,” she says. “I think I like the name Frank.”
Before Phoebe leaves for the bachelorette party, she returns Lila’s mother’s outfit. She knocks on the door of the Raven.
“Thank you for letting me borrow your clothes,” Phoebe says, and hands her the bag.
Patricia stands there with a cocktail in one hand, surprised, as if she truly said goodbye to the outfit in her mind and can’t comprehend how it is here, back from the dead.
“Just put them there,” Patricia says, pointing to the marble table where the raven sculptures sit, like that is where all the dead things must go. Phoebe puts the bag down next to the ravens, all of them turned around so they are facing the wall, like they’re in trouble.
It only takes one quick glance around the room to see that the ravens are everywhere, one painted just above the bed, one sitting under the lampshade on the nightstand. Next to it, Phoebe sees two books, How to Be Your Own Best Friend and We Die Alone.
Patricia turns back to where she had been sitting, which feels like a sign that Phoebe should go, but Phoebe feels compelled to stay. Maybe this woman will die alone, but she shouldn’t have to drink alone.
“May I join you for a drink?” Phoebe asks.
“You want to join me for a drink?” Patricia looks equally confused and delighted, like she just witnessed a sudden snowfall. “Usually Lila’s friends can’t get away from me fast enough. They think poor old widows are the plague.”
Patricia pulls out a glass for Phoebe and opens the beverage cooler.
“I went to your gallery today,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I looked in the window.”
“Thirty years we’ve been building that collection,” Patricia says.
“It must be impressive.”
“At first it was just living artists. And then, as we got older, and some of those living artists, well, died, we started to branch out into dead ones. That really opened things up for us.”
Now they host a huge collection of the Hudson River School paintings, not to mention one Warhol.
“You have a Warhol?”
“I should donate it to the hotel, honestly, give them something worthy to hang on the walls,” she says, then looks to the painting above her bed. “Tell me, Professor, this is a death painting, is it not?”
Phoebe looks at the image of a raven perched on a dried-up orange slice.
“That is undeniably a death painting,” Phoebe says.
“Thank you,” Patricia says. “Finally, someone with a little sense. Lila refuses to acknowledge it, no surprise there. And I understand the hotel is trying to achieve some level of authenticity here, bringing in the Victorian macabre, but must they hang it right over an old woman’s bed? It’s hard enough getting to sleep without the bird of death watching me.”
Patricia holds up a yellow bottle.
“I wasn’t sure about this spicy margarita elderberry hibiscus concoction,” Patricia says. “I’m quite suspicious of any cocktail with such a long name. But it’s delicious.”
Patricia pours her a glass.
“I’m sure Lila has told you all kinds of things about my drinking in the afternoon, even though I keep explaining to her that my doctor was the one who suggested I start day-drinking. I simply can’t drink at night anymore. Just two glasses of wine at dinner, and I’ll never fall asleep.”
Phoebe takes the glass and sips.
“It’s good,” Phoebe says. “Spicy.”
But Patricia is not listening.
“And honestly, what else does the girl expect me to do up here all day? She tells me I can’t bring a date to my own daughter’s wedding. Tells me I can’t give a speech. I can’t drink in the afternoons. Can’t come to the bachelorette party. She expects me to just sit up here with nothing to do. I’m like Rapunzel. Except nobody wants to abduct me. And my hair hasn’t grown past my ears since Bush Senior was our president.”
Phoebe laughs.
“Tell me, friend of Lila’s I know almost nothing about. How did I not know you before this week?”
“I’m not local,” Phoebe says.
“But to never have even heard of you,” Patricia says. “Lila’s closest friend in the world, and I don’t hear a peep? This is what it’s been like, Pamela.”
“Phoebe, actually.”
“See? I don’t even know your goddamned name. Ever since her father died, Lila keeps herself so buttoned up, so closed off to me. She used to tell me things. We used to be what you might call friends before her father got sick. Not that I believe in the whole mothers-and-daughters-being-best- friends thing. That’s, frankly, unnatural. But I do miss her. The real Lila, the one who used to sit in my bed and talk my ear off. Do you know what a talker Lila really is?”
“I do, actually,” Phoebe says.
“God, as a little girl, she was even worse. Total stream of consciousness. Like living with a little Salinger novel. When she lost her teeth, I heard every gruesome detail. When she got her period, I was the first one she told. Besides her guidance counselor, but that couldn’t be helped. The whole thing happened on his chair, which is a little odd, I’m now realizing.”
Patricia takes a sip.
“Wait, Lila wasn’t molested by her high school guidance counselor, was she?” Patricia asks. “Is that why he’s here?”
“Oh no. She wasn’t. If she was, I doubt he’d be here, you know?”
“What a relief,” Patricia says. “It’s not easy having a daughter who’s always been attracted to much older men. That girl fell in love with her sixty-year-old piano teacher when she was nine. I’m the only mother I know who had to force her own child to quit piano. And you don’t have to tell me, I know it was all my fault. I, as Lila said so recently, set the tone.”
“Was Henry a lot older than you?” Phoebe asks.
“Fifteen years,” Patricia says. “I was twenty-six when I met him. God, such a little baby. I had no idea what I was doing, except driving my mother slowly insane. That was clear. After we got engaged, she said to me, No
daughter of Paul Winthrop is marrying a Catholic who calls himself the Trash King of Rhode Island.”
“That’s what Henry called himself?”
“It was the name of his business. It’s what everyone in Newport called Henry back then, after he started making his fortune. But my mother didn’t understand. She kept asking me if he was in the Mob, and I kept telling her he was only pretending to be in the Mob. That was his entire advertising strategy, and it worked, and did my mother care that he basically built a million-dollar business in under three years?” Patricia says. “No. My mother is a true snob, and trust me, she’d take that as a compliment. She prides herself on being a snob, on telling everyone how embarrassing it was that JFK’s family wore tails to the reception while Jackie’s family knew to arrive in linen. But I was a kid in the sixties, you know. I didn’t want to be snob. I didn’t want to sit around with my mother and gossip about who didn’t wear linen. I wanted to wear bell-bottoms. I wanted to be American. One of the people. I wanted to go to Woodstock and marry a handsome entrepreneur who seemed to have come out of the dust fields of Ohio in a cowboy hat just to save me from my horrible snobbish family. But my mother, she was not wrong about everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“She kept telling me, Patricia, do not marry this man thinking he can save you from who you really are,” Patricia says. “You’re a Winthrop. A terrible snob, just like me. And one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll see the Trash King of Rhode Island for what he really is. And she was right. I did.”
“What was he?”
“A mortal!” she says. “A mere human being! When the first doctor gave him three months to live, I was so shocked, I started to laugh hysterically right there in the office. I couldn’t understand. My big strong Henry? I actually said, But this is the Trash King of Rhode Island! And so Lila barred me from going to the next doctor’s appointment.
“God, I worshipped Henry in the beginning,” she says, and smiles. “He was so exciting. A man of business, building an empire. He bought me my first painting, you know? And we’d go on these long boozy dates, and I’d listen to him talk about his landfills at dinner like he was talking about
Leonardo’s Gran Cavallo. I had no chance, really. The younger woman never has a chance. She’s always doomed to worship, right from the start.”
“I don’t think Lila worships Gary like that, though,” Phoebe says. “I really don’t get that vibe.”
“You should have seen when she came home from that doctor’s appointment with Gary. Her eyes were glowing, Pamela.”
“Phoebe.”
“I’m sorry, once I decide on a name in my head, it might as well be your name,” Patricia says. “It was like the girl was on drugs. She went on, telling me all about this wonderful doctor who was going to save Henry, all we needed was a little optimism like Gary. But I was under no such illusion. I knew the first doctor had been right. I knew Henry was dying. I would try to tell her that, get her ready, but she wouldn’t listen. She had Gary and his second opinion.”
Patricia sighs.
“She’s always been like that, though,” Patricia says.
“Like what?”
“Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be. But she never got engaged to any of them. She never took it this far. This is just ridiculous, and it’s all Henry’s fault.”
“Why?”
“He told her that his only dying wish was to see his little girl get married before he died. And what do you know, but a week later, they’re engaged!”
“You don’t think they love each other?”
“My daughter doesn’t fully love people yet,” Patricia says. “Not the way she will.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I mean she loves Gary the way that I love this cocktail. The way that I have come to love a foam body pillow. The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But
loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”
She wonders if this is what it’s like to have a mother, to sit together, drinking in the afternoon, listening to her meandering stories about what it means to truly love. Phoebe feels like she’s watching a woman write her posthumous autobiography aloud, like Patricia is the dead version of herself whose saving grace is somehow knowing everything.
“How did losing Henry make you better?” Phoebe asks.
“Henry quickly deteriorated after the first diagnosis, and I couldn’t stop having this horrible feeling like I was dying, too.”
At night, she stared at her sagging breasts and her blue veins and the thin skin over her hands and wondered what happened to her. How did her skin become so thin? How had she come to own so many paintings by dead artists? How had she wound up on the board of the Preservation Society? How had she come to be a woman who put on lip liner just like her mother? She had once been so young, so beautiful that an artist from her gallery asked to paint her, and why didn’t she say yes?
“I had been too embarrassed then,” she says. “Simply put, I thought I was fat. And I didn’t think it was tasteful for a married woman to do something like that. My mother was right. I was a terrible snob. But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.”
When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist.
“It had been decades,” Patricia says. “But I just called William like no time had passed and said, I’m ready to pose for you. God, that’s what impresses me now the most. How I just did that. It felt like the boldest thing I had ever done, somehow scarier than even getting married.
“William and I didn’t have an affair,” she adds. “Even though I know that’s what Lila must think. I just wanted him to paint me. I needed him to document my body as it was at that precise moment. Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing
he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit. To feel proud, actually. That saved me. But let me be clear. Not from myself.”
“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I didn’t want to be saved from myself. Nobody does! All we want is permission to stand there naked and be our damned selves.”
This sounds true to Phoebe. This sounds like exactly what she wants, what she has secretly always wanted. To read books when she wanted to read books. To be sad when she was sad. To be scared when she was scared. To be angry when she was angry. To be boring when she felt boring.
“Of course, Lila was horribly embarrassed by the painting,” Patricia says. “She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after I brought it to the gallery. She was hysterical, kept saying, Dad is sick and you strip naked for another man? So I said, Honey, your father loves Cubism.”
She laughs to herself.
“Of course now I know it took Henry his entire life to admit the truth about who he was, too,” Patricia says. “I hope it doesn’t take Lila that long.”
She turns to Phoebe.
“Is she horribly embarrassed of me?” Patricia asks. “What a humiliating question for a mother to ask.”
“She’s angry at you.”
Patricia nods again. “She’s been angry at me ever since Henry got sick.”
“And you’ve been angry at her.”
The comment takes Patricia by surprise, as if she hadn’t quite been able to admit this aloud yet.
“When Lila gave away the painting to Gary for free, what a slap in the face that was. Never mind that a William Withers painting goes for at least twenty thousand at auction these days. That painting was priceless to me. It wasn’t even for sale, and she knew it. She said, Yes, you kept saying it was literally priceless, so I gave it away for free.”
Patricia sighs.
“It’s not easy being angry at your own creation. It’s like being angry at yourself.”
She worries it’s her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.
“The girl spills a bottle of red wine on the brand-new couch, and we just get a new one. It is as simple as that. Everything is replaceable. The windows in the bedroom, the Barbies whose heads popped off sometimes for no reason I could understand, replaceable. Her world is a world of one million Barbies; a world of cartoons, where Daffy Duck can get baked into a cake or fall out of a tree and never bleed. Her father was the first thing she ever truly lost, and so what else does she do but try to immediately replace him with a man who works in corporeal waste management.”
She finishes off her cocktail.
“Anyway. Nothing can be done now. The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.”
“I suppose I didn’t realize that’s what it would feel like getting older,” Phoebe confesses. She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked. A concretization of your personality and all the things that made you who you were. “But it’s not, is it?”
Patricia shakes her head.
“Pamela, it is all about moving on. Saying goodbye to whoever you thought you were, whoever you thought you would be. Let me demonstrate.”
She gets up, opens the bag of clothes. Holds up her sweater to the light.
“Henry was always trying to make me a sequins gal, but now that he’s gone, I can finally admit, I am not a sequins gal. So, goodbye.”
She drops the shirt in Phoebe’s lap.
“In full disclosure, I’m not a sequins gal, either,” Phoebe says. “I mean, it was fun for a day.”
“It was fun for a life,” Patricia says. “But now I wear linen and drink in the afternoon, and so be it. Because when did afternoons get so long? I mean, Christ, let’s just get on with the evening, shall we?”
The bachelorette party begins with a “water journey” at a nearby spa.
“I just wish they wouldn’t call it a water journey,” Marla says, standing in the changing room. “Then I could actually enjoy it.”
“Shh,” Suz says, and points to a sign on the door demanding that they whisper at all times. Not just for other guests, but for themselves. This is proving to be tricky for Marla and Lila, though.
“This is sort of like the hot springs in Baden-Baden, except not,” Lila says.
“Shouldn’t we be allowed to have our phones if this is our own personal journey?” Marla asks.
Phoebe waits for Lila to respond but then remembers that Lila almost never speaks directly to Marla, just stands there and lets Marla say whatever she wants.
“You can’t heal and sext at the same time,” Phoebe says. Phoebe meant this as a joke, but Suz takes it literally.
“Marla, oh my God, you sext?” Suz asks.
“Don’t we all sext?” Nat asks.
“Do we?” Lila asks, looking off-balance in her tiny body and giant fake veil.
“Shh,” Marla says and gives Phoebe a look. But Phoebe has no time for it.
“Okay, so the woman at check-in told me we’re allowed to go in naked since this is a private event,” Phoebe whispers.
“Why would we want to be naked?” Marla asks.
“Why wouldn’t we want to be naked?” Suz whispers.
While the women debate in loud and hushed tones, Phoebe just takes off her clothes. She quotes Patricia without quoting Patricia.
“We’re too young not to be naked all of the time,” Phoebe says, and the women all disrobe, except for Marla.
“Marla, come on,” Suz insists as they enter the pool area. “If you’re not naked, that somehow makes us more naked.”
“You can’t be more or less naked than naked,” Marla says.
“So, those over there are the cold pools,” Phoebe whispers. “Fifty-five degrees.”
“Sounds painful,” Marla says.
“Apparently,” Phoebe says, reading from the literature, “cold pools help with inflammation, boost your immune system, cure your depression—”
“Fix your relationship with your mother-in-law,” Suz adds.
“And sometimes go grocery shopping for you,” Nat adds.
The women all separate into different tubs, each going on their own journey. Or maybe they just want an excuse to have some time alone. Marla goes to the hottest pool, and Phoebe gets in the cold one simply because it’s the one that promises to cure depression, though she knows that’s not how depression works. There is no quick fix, and sometimes trying to fix it only made it worse. Going to yoga three times a week only confirmed that she was truly a lost cause since not even yoga could make her feel better. But what else can a person do except keep trying? And the cold pool is easy enough. All she has to do is sit in it and be cold. Success, she thinks, as her toes start to go numb. She can feel herself start to relax, until Lila joins her.
“Gary’s mother cornered me for the third time this morning and asked why God has not yet made an appearance at this wedding,” Lila whispers as soon as she gets in. “I was like, Oh no, I completely forgot to invite him.”
Lila says it hasn’t been easy being so annoyed with a woman who has the beginnings of dementia.
“It feels truly evil to get mad at her,” Lila says. “But how many times do I have to explain that I’m godless? That I can’t get married at a church, because what church? I don’t have a church!”
She said she doesn’t believe in anything, except money. And what’s so bad about that? Money keeps the mansions upright on Bellevue, does it not? Money makes art, does it not? Money makes the world handicapped accessible, does it not? Did God do that? Maybe. If God made money.
“But Gary’s mother thinks that the marriage will be invalid unless I do it at a church. And who knew Gary’s family was that Catholic? Like, Marla and Gary never talk about God. They must be traumatized or something.”
Phoebe looks at her. “You’re paying a lot of money to relax right now. I suggest you try.”
“I’ve never been very comfortable relaxing,” Lila says. But then she slips a little farther into the water. “What do we do, just like, sit here? It’s so cold. Marla’s right. I don’t get it.”
“Take a breath,” Phoebe says.
The pool is so cold, the shock of it hasn’t worn off yet. But Phoebe likes the shock—likes how it reminds her she’s alive.
“Oh, remind me to tell you about my dream later,” Lila says. “It was about Jim. And it was awful.”
“Take another breath,” Phoebe says, and so Lila takes a deep breath. She leans her head back. She doesn’t seem to care that the hem of her fake veil sits in the water. Soon, the whole room quiets down, and it feels nice again. There is only the sound of water, dripping from each woman as they get out of a pool and into another. There is, finally, peace. Quiet unity among them as they silently pass each other until their journeys are complete.
BY THE TIME they return to the hotel, Phoebe feels truly relaxed. So does Lila, whose face looks lost in some dream. When she is stopped by Jim in the lobby, it takes her a long moment to figure out what he’s saying.
“We have a problem,” Jim says. He has the red face of a man who has either been drinking all day or golfing all day or both. “Somebody fucked the vintage car in the parking lot.”
Nobody understands what this means, especially not the bride.
“Somebody fucked it up?” Lila asks.
“No. Somebody fucked it.”
The other women give Lila a little wave goodbye like this is none of their business. Suz mouths, Shower, before they all take off, but Lila doesn’t notice.
“I hear the words you are saying, Jim, but I truly don’t understand,” Lila says.
“I truly don’t know how else to say it, Lila. That’s what happened. The vintage car was … fucked.”
Lila stands there as if he just tossed a bucket of red paint on her.
“Right,” Phoebe interjects. “But I think our confusion is … what does that mean exactly?”
“Somebody literally stuck their dick in the tailpipe and ya know.”
“Ya know?” Lila asks.
“Ya know,” Jim says.
“Why would anyone do that to my wedding car?”
“Why would anyone do that to any car?” Jim asks.
“How does someone do that?” Phoebe is genuinely curious. She’s having trouble visualizing it, when Gary walks in with his golf clubs. Lila goes to him at once.
“Somebody fucked our car, Gary,” Lila says.
“Excuse me?” Gary asks.
He sets down the clubs, and a man in burgundy takes them away.
“Tell him, Jim,” Lila says, as if she had been there when it happened, as if now in front of Gary who knows nothing, Jim and Lila are the couple, the bearers of bad news, telling Gary what happened.
“Well, I was putting my clubs back into my car, and I saw the car just sitting there in the sunlight, and I thought, God, now that’s a beautiful vehicle,” Jim says.
“Jim, you don’t need to set the scene,” Lila says.
“I literally said one sentence,” Jim says.
“Well, it was a run-on,” Lila says. “Just get to the point.”
“I would already be at the point, if you hadn’t interrupted.”
“Okay, so just tell me what happened,” Gary says.
“So I was just standing there, looking at the car, admiring it, and then this guy just came into focus, standing right behind the car, with his thing in the tailpipe, and you know, it’s been a long day, I thought I was hallucinating for a second. But then I yelled at him to get the hell out of here, and he bolted.”
Gary doesn’t look horrified, but Phoebe is learning that Gary never reacts wildly to any situation. It seems important to him, as a doctor, as the only parent, to be presented with a problem and immediately go on a search for a solution. Like okay, yes, the car was fucked, but luckily he had prepared for this.
“We should tell the front desk,” Gary says.
“What’s the front desk going to do?” Jim asks.
“Call the police!” Lila says.
“And say what, Help, someone fucked my car?” Jim asks.
“I’m sorry, but I just don’t think you can fuck a car,” Phoebe says. She will die on this hill. “It’s a car. It can’t be fucked the way … a lawn mower can’t be fucked because it’s a lawn mower and not a living being.”
But Lila is not persuaded. She sits down on the velvet couch. Another thing ruined, just when she was starting to relax. She presses her fingers to her temples. Gary sits down next to her.
“I’m sort of having a panic attack,” Lila says.
“A real one? Or a figurative one?” Gary asks.
“A real one, Gary.”
But she doesn’t move or do anything at all. She just stoically shifts the hair out of her eyes. Reframes the veil around her face. The world’s classiest panic attack.
“What can I do?” Gary asks.
“I need you to ask Pauline for a different car,” Lila says.
“A new car?” Jim asks. “Why? That car is perfect.”
“The car has been fucked, Jim!” Lila says, but it’s Gary who flinches. “I can’t take that thing to our wedding, knowing what happened to it.”
“I mean, technically, the car is kind of the victim here,” Jim says.
“I am the victim here,” Lila says sternly.
Nobody speaks. Jim looks at Gary with raised eyebrows. But Gary doesn’t return the expression. Doesn’t say a word. Just puts his arm around her like he did when Juice melted down on the wharf.
“Okay,” Gary says. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Good.” Lila adjusts her veil again, as if this will transform her back into the relaxed and happy bride who had not yet walked into the lobby. “I need to go get dressed for my bachelorette party.”
Lila walks away into the elevator. Jim and Gary and Phoebe all look at one another.
“Jim, why did you tell her that?” Gary asks.
“Because it happened!”
“Lila doesn’t need to know every single thing that goes wrong.”
“She’s not a child.”
“I know she’s not a child,” Gary says. “She’s an adult who is now stressed out for no reason. Like she would have even known?”
“She’d find out eventually.”
“How? No. She really wouldn’t have.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jim says. “I’ll handle it.”
“No, I’ll handle it,” Gary says.
“Fine, I’ll go back outside. See if I can find this pervert.”
Jim leaves Gary and Phoebe alone in the lobby. The groom and the maid of honor, left to handle the situation, and it gives Phoebe the feeling that they are Lila’s parents now.
“I honestly still don’t get it, though,” Phoebe says. “Is the tailpipe even the right size for that?”
“I guess it depends on the guy.”
“I guess he’d have to have like … used his hand first and then go into it?”
“Because you can’t like, use it as a…”
“No.”
“Shit.”
They laugh. Lila’s grandmother walks in.
“Gary,” Bootsie says, and she hands him a Tupperware container full of clear liquid.
For a second, Gary looks horrified, like it might be a urine sample.
“It’s a gimlet,” Bootsie says. “Can you make sure this gets to the Breakers for the reception?”
“Of course,” Gary says. “But that’s days away, Bootsie. And you know they can make you a gimlet at the wedding.”
“I make it a rule not to trust anything that comes out of the Breakers,” she says. “And nobody makes it like my guy. He’s only had forty years of practice. And who are you, my dear?”
“I’m Phoebe,” she says. “The maid of honor.”
Lila’s grandmother accepts this. Funny how people just believe you are who you say you are, Phoebe thinks. She’s not sure why she never realized
this power that she had before. But it’s true. She is the maid of honor. She puts her hand on Gary’s shoulder and says, “I’ll handle it,” and Gary mouths, Thank you.
“Excuse me,” Phoebe says to Pauline at the front desk. “It seems that the bride will need a new car.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” Pauline asks.
She can see Jim’s problem: “Made love” is too weird. “Had sex with” doesn’t capture the spirit of the crime.
“Someone fucked it,” Phoebe says.
Pauline does not even blink, not even when one of her fake eyelashes falls off. She just continues to stand there, as if she is in the middle of training herself never to have another reaction again.
“That’s … highly unusual. We are very sorry for that. We will … make a note of it. None of our cars have ever … We’ll arrange for a new one right away. Oh, and please tell the bride that the Commodore’s Punch Bowl tonight is on me.”
Phoebe leaves and wonders how long Pauline will wait before she reaches out to pick up her eyelashes.
UPSTAIRS, PHOEBE TAKES a long shower to wash off the oils from the spa. Water—she can’t get enough of it this week. She is sure that she could live forever if she could always be in this shower. She turns off all the lights and scrubs herself with something called Oat Milk Soap for Human Beings. It works. She sits on the watery floor and feels more like a human being than she has in years.
She puts on her dress and then applies the makeup she bought earlier. She used to feel some kind of professorial obligation to despise the stuff, but if she is being honest with herself, she likes putting on makeup. She missed it during the pandemic. It’s a nice ritual, and if you do anything enough, that’s what it becomes. A ritual that has the power to make you feel something. She spreads the bold red stick across her lips, and she feels suddenly awake, ready for the evening.
DOWNSTAIRS AT THE bar, the women are clumped around Lila. They look bright against the dark-blue drapes, their cocktail dresses like different lollipops. But when Phoebe joins them, the mood is heavy.
“Do you think it had something to do with how beautiful the car was?” Suz asks.
“Like that’s why a person chooses to fuck some cars over others?” Nat wonders.
The women don’t know. None of them can begin to understand the psychology of car-fucking, except for Marla.
“That’s not how it works,” Marla says. “It has nothing to do with how hot the car is.”
“Can we not talk about the car?” Lila asks, with a new edge to her voice. She sounds like the Lila that Phoebe first met in the elevator.
“Let’s get some cocktails and bring them upstairs for the Sex Woman,” Phoebe says.
“Where’s the Drink Concierge?” Lila asks.
Suz gets a text, which is a public event for all of them, because she insists on keeping the phone face up on the table at all times.
“Ugh. I don’t know why my husband keeps texting me every little detail about the Little Worm’s shit,” Suz says. “Like he thinks I must know, right now, about what color it is. I’m at a bachelorette party!”
But it doesn’t feel like one until Ryun arrives with five glasses of the Commodore’s Punch. Lila looks relieved. She sips her cocktail, while Marla asks Ryun, “What’s the difference between a Drink Concierge and a bartender?” and “Why the u?”
“Guess my parents thought it’d be more original,” Ryun says.
“Ugh. Why does everybody need to be so original these days?” Lila asks.
“Just wanted me to be special, I suppose.”
“But that’s the worst part!” Lila says. “Why were they so afraid that you wouldn’t be special? Why couldn’t you just be an ordinary baby?”
Ryun shrugs. He doesn’t know. “Turns out the joke’s on them because I’m not very special.”
Ryun is a surfer. Works here to support his lifestyle.
“I have literally no other ambition than that,” he says. He doesn’t even want to be a professional surfer. He is realistic. He knows that’s no life. He just wants to … do it.
“Well, good for you,” Lila says. “Don’t make anything of yourself. My mother wanted me to be special, too. She expects me to be her grand masterpiece. And she’s not even a painter!”
Ryun laughs, looks at her in her big fake veil and glittering sash. “You seem pretty special.”
Lila’s cheeks flush like she is already drunk, and maybe she is. “Thanks.”
Marla gives Ryun a death stare for flirting with the bride. Phoebe holds up her glass.
“A toast to the bride,” Phoebe says, and Lila smiles. “Now let’s go see the Sex Woman.”
THE SEX WOMAN is already in the billiards room when they arrive.
“You’re late,” she says.
She stands behind a giant projector in a taupe suit and a low ponytail. She reminds Phoebe of her old self in the classroom, secretly angry at all the late students but trying desperately not to seem so. Maybe this is why Phoebe apologizes.
“Very, very sorry,” Phoebe says.
They sit down on the teal couch with their drinks. Lila gives them all a big smile, like she is better now. Ready to have some fun.
“Good evening, ladies,” the Sex Woman says. “And who is the special bride tonight?”
Lila raises her hand and the women cheer.
“Well, congratulations,” the Sex Woman says. “As you likely know, I’m a former colleague of Viv’s. We worked together not long ago while I was at the Atlanta Zoo.”
They all nod like they knew this.
“But ever since the pandemic, I’ve obviously made a bit of a career shift. Turns out there’s more money in bachelorette parties than the nonprofit sector,” she jokes, and everyone laughs. “But more seriously, in case Viv didn’t tell you, let me introduce myself. I am the world’s foremost international mating expert for the Ailuropoda melanoleuca, otherwise known as the giant panda. I have been the chief consultant to three national zoos. I have appeared on two different PBS conservation specials and have personally participated in the sexual intercourse of at least four pandas across the world.”
Nat and Suz laugh. Marla looks at Phoebe and nods her head, as if she’s genuinely impressed by the Sex Woman’s credentials. But Lila looks confused, whispers, “Is this Viv’s idea of a joke?” and they shrug. Phoebe suspects that if they were in grade school, this is when they would break into uncontrollable laughter. But they don’t. They are adult women. It does not feel right to make fun of any woman standing before them, not to mention pandas. It feels more like she’s at an academic conference and should raise her hand, inquire about the pandas. But it’s Marla who does it.
“You participated in panda sex?” Marla asks. “What does that mean?”
“Good question,” the Sex Woman says. She pulls up the first slide. “This is Mei Mei.”
She points to a sad photograph of a panda holding a single stalk of bamboo.
“I helped Mei Mei make love for the first time, probably one of the biggest achievements on my CV to date. For seven years, Mei Mei showed no interest in mating with the other pandas at the Atlanta Zoo. Our research suggests this is largely due to being in a state of captivity. In captivity, the giant panda has forgotten how to have sex. By trying to protect the pandas, we have nearly killed them.”
More photos of pandas in separate rooms. Pandas looking forlorn.
“This is actually very upsetting,” Suz whispers.
Phoebe is concerned, too. Phoebe wonders when she will break character, morph into the opposite of herself, rip out her low ponytail, pass out vibrators for each of them, like the stripper cop who arrives at the
bachelor party angry and ready to make arrests, just before she removes her pants.
But maybe this is not a character? Maybe she’s truly just here to talk about pandas. Maybe Viv was a terrible maid of honor. Phoebe should have asked the Sex Woman on the phone what it meant to be a Sex Woman. But it’s too late now. Lila is staring at the Sex Woman like this is the worst kind of Sex Woman out there: the boring kind.
“During the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home every day, I realized that we, too, were in captivity. And just like Mei Mei, I, too, stopped wanting to have sex. And the only thing that carried me through this dark time was believing that there were other miserable and sexless folks out there who felt the same.”
She started hosting Zoom sex workshops, sharing her research, her discoveries. Clips from her workshops went viral, and by the time the pandemic was over, she had helped millions of people around the world want sex again.
“What we’ve learned from studying pandas in captivity is that they are, essentially, trapped in paradise. There is too much leisure, too much comfort, too much bamboo. Too much ESPN, if you know what I mean.”
Suz nods knowingly.
“The males stopped trying and the females no longer rubbed their anal glands over nearby trees like they did in the wild,” the Sex Woman adds, and Suz stops nodding. “All their needs were met. There was no flirtation, no foreplay, no delicate dance, because through captivity, we eliminated almost all of the natural Darwinian factors in panda mating. What we know now, what we all know now, is that we can’t just put two animals in a room and expect them to have sex. We can’t even expect them to want it. So why do we expect this of ourselves?”
The Sex Woman, and her colleagues, spent years teaching the pandas how to remember to want it.
“We showed them videos of other pandas mating,” the Sex Woman says. “Videos to stimulate them.”
“Like panda porn?” Suz asks.
“Yes.”
“Do pandas actually get turned on when they watch other pandas have sex?” Nat asks.
“Of course.”
“That’s kind of beautiful,” Suz says and looks at the rest of the group. But Lila is unmoved.
“It’s not beautiful,” Lila insists. “It’s porn, Suz.”
“Yeah, but panda porn.”
“Porn is not suddenly beautiful just because two bears are doing it,” Lila says.
“Are there … like … panda storylines?” Marla asks.
“Two pandas, one a billiards champion and the other needs to learn,” Nat says.
This was eerily close to a video Phoebe had caught Matt watching once. When she found him, she made it a point to join in on it, because he was so embarrassed to be caught. So they sat there and watched it and they critiqued the plot as if they were critiquing a television show—as if they didn’t enjoy it at all. But at some point during the billiards game, they fell silent. They watched as the man went up behind the blonde and stroked her arm, put her on the table. And Matt reached out for Phoebe. They had good sex for the first time in months, but after, Matt never brought it up again. Neither did she.
“You joke, but for pandas, it’s the matter of their continued survival,” the Sex Woman says. “And for you as well, no?”
The women nod.
“So, bride-to-be, this brings me to you,” the Sex Woman says.
“How in the world does this bring you to me?” Lila asks.
“Before you enter into your captivity, I mean, marriage,” she says, and winks, “I am here to give you the skills you need to make sure you always want it with your husband. I want you to leave here knowing that you will have not just a good sex life but the longest, and the wettest, and the hottest sex with your man.”
But first, she needs a little information.
“What’s his name again?”
“Gary.”
Then she asks Lila to describe her current sex life with Gary in one word.
“That’s so personal,” Lila says.
“That’s what we’re here to be, my bride,” the Sex Woman says.
“Okay, well, wonderful,” Lila admits.
“Wonderful!” the Sex Woman says, then asks the other women to do the same.
“Evolving,” Nat says.
“Verbal,” Marla says.
“Dead,” Suz says.
“Germinating,” Phoebe says.
“Now, I want you to think about the last time you got really turned on. See if you can locate what it was that got you so turned on. What made you really want to have sex? Not because your partner wanted to, and not because it had been weeks and you started to worry about how it had been weeks. But because you were overcome with desire. Because you didn’t want to do anything else but fuck.”
Then the Sex Woman passes out pieces of paper. They all write things down, and eventually, the Sex Woman says, “Let’s start with the bride. What was the last thing that really turned you on about Gary?”
Lila blushes and looks at Marla. “I can’t say with Marla here.”
“I am very aware that Gary’s a human being who has sex,” Marla says. “In fact, I caught him once.”
But Lila looks flustered. The difference between Lila inside Phoebe’s hotel room and Lila outside Phoebe’s hotel room is becoming jarring to Phoebe. Phoebe has become used to Lila’s honesty, the storming in, the sitting down, the immediate confession about whatever it was that was making her unhappy. It made Phoebe feel like a priest or a therapist. But out here, around these women, Lila is private. Guarded. Like it’s too difficult to be honest in front of Marla. Or maybe there is something about her sex life that she is terribly embarrassed about. But what is it?
“Oh, don’t be a bore,” Nat says. “This is your sex workshop, by the way.”
“Okay, fine, he’s a really good kisser,” Lila says.
“Can you be more specific about that?” the Sex Woman asks. “Do you remember a specific kiss? Was there anything special about it? Was it passionate? Did he use tongue?”
“Like a regular amount of tongue.”
But then her face gets red, like she’s already admitted too much.
“Why don’t I move on,” the Sex Woman says, and turns to Suz, who talks at length about a man she met at her college reunion, a man who used to tease her, a man who knew her before the Little Worm. Then Nat says something about her wife, Laurel, gardening, the dirt on her face, the passion she had for doing something totally unnecessary.
“The last time I was really turned on, I was being choked,” Marla says.
“Robert chokes you? I seriously cannot picture that,” Lila says.
“Not Robert,” Marla says, and then bursts out crying. “Robert would never choke me. Not even when I asked.”
Robert is a man who uses bullet points on his Valentine’s Day cards to explain the three reasons why he loves her, and they aren’t even all that nice. He is a man who is pathologically incapable of complimenting her.
“And do you know what it’s like to never be complimented by your own husband?” Marla asks. “I always thought it was because he was a judge. He was like, professionally neutral. But then we’re at this work thing and I’m talking to this other judge, and he compliments my dress, like no big deal, and the next thing I know, we’re at his house on the Chesapeake, watching the midterm primaries—”
They burst into laughter. “Hot,” Suz says.
“I personally like to get choked while watching C-SPAN,” Nat says.
“Samesies,” Suz says. “But wait, how did he choke you?”
“He just reached out his hand and choked me.”
“I seriously do not get the appeal,” Lila says.
The Sex Woman reminds them all not to judge. “This is just about sharing,” she says. “Keeping in touch with our desires.”
She turns to Phoebe. “And what about you?”
“I was talking to a total stranger,” Phoebe says. “It was the first time I really wanted to have sex after I got divorced.”
“Wait, you’re divorced?” Lila asks.
“How do you not know that?” Marla asks. “She’s your maid of honor.”
“Let’s focus less on the divorce and more on what turned you on about this stranger?” the Sex Woman says.
“I don’t know,” Phoebe says. She thinks back to that night, that moment of sitting with him in the pink light of dawn. How when she told him she had come here to kill herself, he did not look away. “I liked that he made eye contact.”
“Eye contact can be very sexy.”
“He wasn’t afraid of looking at me. He wasn’t afraid of what I was saying. He wasn’t afraid of the worst parts of me. And this made me feel like those parts were okay. Like I could say anything. Be anything.”
The memory makes Phoebe smile, and the Sex Woman becomes curious. “What is making you smile right now?”
“I actually told him I wanted to fuck, and that should have been embarrassing, but it was really hot.”
“Announcing our own desires,” the Sex Woman says. “That can be very powerful. And now you know this about yourself. Now you know that when you are not in the mood, whenever you are starting to feel disconnected from yourself, you can ask yourself: What are you not being honest about?”
For the rest of the hour, the Sex Woman shows them short tutorials on how to touch themselves with various herbal lubricants, then concludes with a video of two pandas humping.
“May you all know such carnal bliss,” the Sex Woman jokes, and the women laugh and clap. Then the Sex Woman unceremoniously dumps a bunch of sex toys on the coffee table. One of the dicks rolls onto the ground.
“A vibrator can be a memory tool,” the Sex Woman says.
She tells them that, like the pandas, it’s important to stay in communication with their desires. Important to recognize their kinks when they start to show themselves. Important to touch our bodies if we have forgotten what it feels like to be touched. Then she looks at her watch. In only this way, she is like a stripper. Loyal to the minute hand of the clock.
“My hour is up!” She shuts down the projector. “Now, who wants to buy a dick?”
The women laugh. They all reach out, and Phoebe picks up a purple one.
“I almost forgot!” the Sex Woman says. “The complimentary Cum Rags.”
Suz holds one in her hand like it’s cashmere. “Wow—such a good idea.”
“So environmental,” Nat says.
“WHY WOULD VIV hire that Sex Woman?” Lila asks at the restaurant.
“From what you used to tell us about Viv, it’s so like Viv to hire her,” Suz says.
They are having dinner at the White Horse Tavern. The oldest tavern in America, according to the menu. Dark green walls, high-back chairs, and thick wooden beams, yet food that is perfectly on trend. Shaved brussels sprouts and cabbage salads. Scallops in lemon herb sauce. Twin lobster tails on Phoebe’s plate. The house wine sits on the table in clear jugs, like they are Romans. It’s a little watered down and warm, but that seems to be the point.
“But we’re like, not pandas,” Lila says. “Like now when I have sex, all I’m going to think about is being a panda. I don’t see how that’s going to help anything.”
“I thought she was great,” Nat says. “You just didn’t share anything, so she couldn’t help you.”
“Why do I need help?” Lila says. “Our sex life is good.”
Everyone is getting bored of Lila’s refusal to say anything real. Marla turns to Phoebe and says, “So why did you get divorced?”
“You can’t just ask someone that,” Nat says.
“It’s okay,” Phoebe says. “My husband had an affair.”
“Asshole,” they all say in unison, except Marla.
“And you couldn’t forgive him?” Marla asks.
“He didn’t even ask me to,” Phoebe says.
“Are you going to get a divorce?” Suz asks Marla.
“I don’t think we should be talking about divorce,” Lila reminds them.
“Right,” Suz says. “Okay. So, uh, what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done in bed? Me first.”
Then Suz admits that once she sort of liked it when this guy in college poured hot wax on her.
“I wasn’t against it, but I wasn’t really for it,” Suz says.
Nat once pretended to be a nurse/tennis player in front of the camera for a college girlfriend, but only because it was her camera and she could delete the footage.
“A nurse and a tennis player at the same time?” Suz asks.
“A true theatrical challenge,” Phoebe says.
They laugh.
“That’s what she wanted,” Nat says. “An athletic nurse. Someone who can both be sporty and save lives.”
“What about you, Lila?” Nat asks.
“From the groom,” the waiter says, and interrupts with a bottle of wine that Gary had handpicked and delivered for Lila’s party. They all clap as the old man pours the wine into the glasses.
“Gary is so sweet,” Suz says. “Marc would never do that.”
“So?” Nat asks Lila. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever done?”
“I really don’t feel comfortable saying with Marla here.”
“Is it really that weird?” Nat asks.
“I’m not surprised,” Suz says. “All doctors are weird in bed.”
“All doctors are not weird in bed,” Lila says. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“Trust me, I slept with a lot of doctors during med school,” Suz says. “And they were all so bored of bodies, they always needed something extra.”
“Gary is so not like that,” Lila says.
“Then what is he like?” Suz asks.
“Just share with us,” Nat says. “We’re just trying to know you better. That’s all.”
“Okay, well,” Lila says, seemingly touched. “Gary’s just really sweet. The last time we had sex, Gary stopped halfway through to tell me that I looked so beautiful in the sunlight, I was like a Vermeer painting.”
The table is silenced.
“That’s not weird,” Nat says.
“That’s like, really beautiful,” Suz says.
“It would seriously take Robert two decades of therapy to ever say something like that,” Marla says.
“Well, I told you, we don’t do anything weird!” Lila says.
“It’s not even close to weird.”
“Why does our sex have to be weird? It’s not like it’s more special the weirder it is. Can’t I just have beautiful sex and be happy about it?”
“I don’t know,” Nat says. “Can you be happy about it?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lila asks.
“You just don’t sound that happy about your beautiful sex,” Nat says.
Lila looks at Phoebe like she’s sending Phoebe a private message. Asking her with her eyes to end this conversation.
“Oh, I forgot!” Phoebe says.
Phoebe pulls out the pack of penis straws and puts them in the wineglasses. But the glasses are too short, the straws too long, the dicks too heavy. They look perpetually at risk of falling out of the glasses. They look wrong, too neon and vulgar for this quiet rustic tavern. The waiter eyes them suspiciously when he clears the plates, but Lila looks pleased by them. Pleased that sex is just a stupid joke again among friends. She leans in and takes a sip from the dick.
“It’s a real bachelorette party now,” Lila says.
But Marla reminds them that Gary bought this Bordeaux. Went to an actual award-winning vineyard to research it and pick it out.
“I refuse to suck a fifty-year-old bottle of Bordeaux through a neon- green dick,” Marla says. “This wine is meant to be savored.”
“Suck it slowly then,” Nat says, and everyone laughs.
“What would you think of men who drank beer out of plastic vaginas?” Marla asks.
“Can we not talk about sex?” Lila asks, as she takes a big sip from the tiny dick. “It’s so … historic here. I feel we should be talking about like … something meaningful.”
“Okay, like what?” Suz asks.
“Like Cubism,” Lila says.
“You want to talk about Cubism?” Nat asks.
“What is Cubism?” Suz asks.
“It’s honestly not all that interesting,” Phoebe says.
“Oh good, of course Phoebe knows. Say something about Cubism,” the bride demands.
They all look at her. Phoebe laughs a little. Cubism facts on demand.
“Well, it was an artistic and intellectual movement in the early twentieth century,” Phoebe says. “They believed if you aren’t seeing something from all sides, you aren’t seeing it fully. Should I seriously go on?”
“God no,” Suz says, but the bride nods.
BACK AT THE hotel, the bridesmaids meet in the blue parlor for the in-house tarot reader.
“I’m Thyme,” says a woman sitting behind a glowing candle. Then she turns to the bride. “Would the bride like to go first?”
Lila nods, and Nat and Suz clap.
“Come with me,” Thyme says.
Outside the parlor, the bridesmaids take a breath in the hallway. Then like in the spa, they all go on their separate journeys. Suz calls her husband. Nat goes to her room for a power nap. Marla looks at Phoebe and says, “Drink?”
As soon as they sit down, Marla wastes no time.
“Do you hate me because I had an affair like your ex-husband?” Marla looks at Phoebe as if she’s waiting to be condemned.
Phoebe doesn’t nod or shake her head. “I don’t hate you. You’re not my ex-husband. And honestly, I don’t even hate him.”
“That’s a relief.”
“To be honest, the only reason I’d hate you is that you aren’t very kind to Lila.”
Marla nods. “It’s true.”
“If you bothered getting to know her, you’d realize she’s actually an interesting person,” Phoebe says. “And a good friend.”
“That’s very hard to picture.”
“You make her nervous,” Phoebe says. “She’s different around you.”
“Look, I know she’s your friend or whatever,” Marla says. “But I don’t have to like her just because she’s marrying my brother. She’s so spoiled. And ridiculous.”
“Well, you’re mean,” Phoebe says. “And having an affair.”
“See, you do hate me for it,” Marla says. “And I don’t blame you. I hate me for it. Some days, I just can’t believe I did that to Robert.”
“So why did you?”
“I felt like I would die if I didn’t.”
Twenty years of attending events together, twenty years of her husband looking at her in her dress and saying, “Not so shabby.”
“So the judge had something that your husband didn’t?” Phoebe asks.
But Marla doesn’t see it that way. She can see now that it wasn’t really about either of them.
“It was more about what I didn’t have,” Marla says. “According to our therapist, at least. The affair is the easy way out—the fantasy of believing someone else can give you what you don’t know how to give yourself.”
Phoebe imagines this is likely true about her husband.
“I think my husband fantasized about losing control,” Phoebe says. Her husband, so tightly wound, like his belt. A man who would only eat Oreos in private. “He couldn’t loosen up fully around me, and I don’t know why.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s your fault,” Marla says. “It’s his fault. For not being able to do that. For not asking for whatever it was he needed from you.”
“I am starting to see that, I guess,” Phoebe says.
“I’m learning how to ask Robert for compliments. And he says he can’t, so the therapist suggested we start sexting. Like some kind of gateway drug into real compliments. And now I’m on the path to forgiving Robert and Robert is on the path to forgiving me,” Marla says. “That’s how the therapist describes it. And when we get to the end of the path, I guess we’re allowed to start having real sex again.”
She’s worried about how long this path will be.
“We’ve only been sexting since Tuesday and I’ve already run out of ways to describe my vagina,” Marla says. “It’s also very difficult sexting with one hand.”
“Is it working?” Phoebe asks.
“Inconclusive,” Marla says. “Mostly we just say filthy things to each other in between other very practical things, like, Suck my balls, dirty girl, and then, Did the guy come to check out the dishwasher leak?”
They laugh. “That’s marriage,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe thinks back to the failed sext she sent her husband, how scared she had been, how afraid. Phoebe feels such tenderness for that person who pressed Send.
“Do you regret it?” Phoebe asks.
“I regret hurting Robert,” Marla says. “I regret lying. I regret that I’m going to have to resign. But even before the affair, the trust was already gone. We were fooling ourselves to think it wasn’t. We had hurt each other in a million ways over the years, but then pretended like we hadn’t. The affair just brought all of that to the surface. And now look at us! We’re sexting! Look! My husband is telling me that he wants to pound my pussy as we speak!”
She holds up the phone.
“Progress,” Marla says. “Maybe when he gets here, we can actually have sex. That’s what I’m hoping for.”
BY THE TIME it’s Phoebe’s turn to meet Thyme on the yellow couch, the candle is melted.
“It’ll still work, even without the candle,” Thyme says. Thyme picks up the cards. “Do you have a question for me?”
“Oh,” Phoebe says. “I haven’t really thought of one.”
“We can do a general time period, if you like.”
“No,” Phoebe says. She wants to have a question. “I guess I’ve been wondering what to do.”
“About what?”
“About anything. Like, where do I go from here? What’s next?”
She hasn’t yet let herself think about it—what happens after the wedding is over. Where does Phoebe go?
“Okay,” Thyme says. She pulls the cards. “Oh, wow. So the two cards I thought might appear appeared. The children and the career card. The Ten of Pentacles—it’s a card where she’s very focused on the pentacles. There’s no other focus. It’s one thing or the other for you, it seems. Which means you have probably been facing a big decision. Does that seem right to you?”
“It does.”
“The Empress is on her way out, so to me that reads as pregnancy is on the way out. This is tarot, okay, it’s your life, only you know, but what I am seeing is that children are not happening for you right now.”
Phoebe nods.
“But you have here the Hermit card. Your card. That’s you.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“That’s a great sign, actually. I am really happy to see that, because that means that no matter what happens, you will always be here.”
She feels embarrassed at how quickly this has moved her. She doesn’t even believe it, and yet it’s affecting her. Sort of like watching horror movies that you know are fake, and yet you pull the blanket over your eyes every time someone gets stabbed. It feels so real.
“I’m seeing the Hanged Man,” Thyme says. “Your soulmate? He is hesitant. Or you are. One of you is stepping back. One of you is concerned. You’ve had a big conversation, it seems? Something has been decided?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever it was, here is the Eight of Wands. That means moving. Travel. You are going to be moving. Not Eat Pray Love–style. No. I am sorry, you will not be going to India. I am not seeing India in your future. But you may do something else. Something smaller. You may … buy a small property. And this property, it has something to do with money. It is a lot of money or there’s money in it. I’m not sure.”
It is no small thing to hear this woman reimagine a future for her. It doesn’t matter if it turns out to be true. It doesn’t matter if it’s bullshit. It doesn’t matter that Thyme is actually, as she confesses at some point, an
aspiring writer trying to sell historical fiction about the American Revolution. For so long, Phoebe could not imagine another possible future for herself, and she marvels at how easily this woman conjures up a new property for her. It is so obvious to Thyme that Phoebe is destined for greatness, and also a lot of money, and maybe a waterfront duplex, and as soon as she says it, Phoebe wants it to be true. That is how these things work. That is why people come.
Thyme turns another card.
“And what is this? Your King of Cups is here,” Thyme says. “Your great love. Cups are love. And the king, well, he has, like, obviously the most of them. But this is in the future. This is not right now. The cups are moving toward you, but not here. Do not be impatient for it. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She flips her last card. “And you! The Hermit. You keep coming up. This is so unusual. You are so present in this reading. It’s like the cards are telling me that no matter what happens, you are here. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific than that. That is all I can gather. You are here. Does that have any meaning to you?”
Phoebe begins to cry between her knees. “Yes.”
IN THE UBER on the way to the Boom Boom Room, the women share what Thyme predicted for each of them.
Suz is going to have seven children.
Marla is going to do well in e-commerce someday.
“That’s very specific,” Phoebe says. “Why not regular commerce?”
“She kept saying, E-commerce! I see you marrying an e-vendor!” Marla says.
“So much hotter than regular vendors,” Suz says.
“My wife and I are going to have a son,” Nat says. “And then immediately go to Italy.”
“I am going to come into property,” Phoebe says.
But when it’s Lila’s turn to share, she says, “She was just way off.”
“I thought you said she was amazing?” Marla asks.
“Did I?” Lila asks.
The tone is sharp, too serious. The sound of a day going bad. Maybe she has consumed too much alcohol for her size 4 body. Maybe it’s heels on all this cobblestone. Phoebe can feel the blisters forming.
But then they enter the Boom Boom Room, and Lila says, “Let’s dance!”
Nat and Suz shriek, as if nothing at all is wrong, and start dancing together in a way that reminds Phoebe of girls from her college. Phoebe never danced in college. Hardly danced at her own wedding. She and Matt, they weren’t dancers. They took lessons, though, learned the steps, learned enough to do a foxtrot. But she never danced like these women, without thinking because they have danced together like this so many times before, in their dorm rooms, at parties, hands in the air. She wonders if this is what high school was like for them—Lila being upset, then Lila not being upset. Then, wild dancing.
“Come on!” Lila says to Phoebe.
And so Phoebe joins. Phoebe has no other option left but to join—she tried to opt out, tried to sit on the sidelines, tried to leave this world. But she is still here. So she walks into the group, and they celebrate her arrival, clap and twirl around her. She feels silly at first, but they make it so easy. They are generous with their enthusiasm. They give it all to Phoebe, hold her hands and bump her hips, and by the time the song is over, Phoebe feels so overwhelmed, so part of the group, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. She looks in the mirror.
I am here, she thinks.
“Shots!” Lila exclaims when Phoebe returns.
But Marla doesn’t understand. “What’s the point of doing shots at this age?”
“I believe the point is to get drunk really fast,” Phoebe says.
“Right. But why? Haven’t we all been drunk before?”
“If you don’t want to get drunk really fast, then I can’t ever explain it to you,” Nat says.
“Come on, Marla!” Lila says. “Be my sister.”
Marla seems touched.
“Okay,” Marla says, like, What the fuck, why not? I’ll be a sister. Marla takes a shot. Then another. “Let’s get drunk really fast.”
“I can’t believe I’m getting married!” Lila screams, and they all go back to the dance floor. Lila flips her hair, shows off moves learned from a childhood of dance recitals. She is the happy bride again, so girlish and excited with her friends, and it’s good to see.
But then the night is over, and the Uber can’t come for an hour. Too many people trying to get a cab at the same exact time. A man on the sidewalk chucks a glass at another man’s face, and it explodes everywhere.
They walk home. It’s a longer walk than Marla made it sound. By the time they reach their street, Lila takes off her veil. In the quiet space of night, with the courage of her drunkenness, she confesses that she knows Thyme was right about her.
“Right about what?” Suz asks.
“That I have no personality,” Lila says.
“She said that to you?” Nat asks, like there is no graver insult.
“She said, ‘My dear, you are a thousand different people orbiting around a pole,’” Lila says, in a French accent.
“She wasn’t French, though,” Marla says.
“Aren’t we all that pole?” Suz says. “I feel like that pole sometimes.”
Phoebe does, too. “Though sometimes I’m not sure there is even a pole.”
They laugh. Lila looks lighter. Relieved. But Nat looks at them all, disgusted. “Seriously, what’s wrong with you straight women?”
“This has nothing to do with us being straight,” Lila says.
“Yeah, what does this have to do with us being straight?” Suz asks.
“I just spent my whole life trying to determine who I am and what I like so nobody does it for me,” Nat says. “It’s important to me. But it’s like, none of you even bother to do that. You don’t even bother to think about who you are and what you might actually like.”
Nat is angry. Nat looks like she’s been wanting to say this for years.
“Well yeah, like I just said,” Lila says. “I have no idea who the fuck I am.”
Lila is stunned into a kind of silence by her own confession. Nat, too. It makes Nat burst out laughing, like she’s thrilled to have finally said what she’s always wanted to say. She puts her arm around Lila.
“We’ll figure it out,” Nat says.
Then it is silence, the sound of cobblestones and heels, all the way back to the hotel.
IN THE LOBBY, Lila seems startled by the lights of the hotel, even though it is mostly soft candlelight. She leans on Phoebe for balance.
“Shit,” Lila says. “I’m going to be sick.”
Lila vomits in the plant pot near the stairs. She keeps her face at the trunk of the olive tree. She laughs. She says, “Who put dirt in this bowl?”
Softly, from behind the desk, Pauline says, “Me.”
PHOEBE IS THE one who walks Lila back upstairs. The other women seem grateful. They seem very tired. Ready for bed. Six days is too long for any wedding.
But Phoebe is not tired of Lila. Phoebe is not tired of anybody. Phoebe feels like she has just returned from somewhere very far away. Phoebe is here.
“Ugh. My key is not working,” Lila says. “It must be your key.”
“Is your key not in your purse?” Phoebe asks.
“I don’t know. I’m too drunk to find it. I’ll just call Gary. I gave him an extra key.”
Lila leaves a message on his phone asking for help. When she hangs up, Phoebe is about to suggest that she search through Lila’s bag or go downstairs to get another key, but Lila slides the key into Phoebe’s lock.
“Ugh. I can’t get over this view,” Lila says, opening the door.
“It’s pitch-black.”
Lila gets on Phoebe’s bed. She leans back on a pillow like she is going to go right to sleep, so Phoebe takes off her shoes. There is blood on the
back of Lila’s heel.
“Ugh. I’m bleeding again,” Lila says.
The blood darkens her mood.
“Nat is right,” Lila says. “I never think about what I might actually like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I just worry,” Lila says. “I don’t think about what I want, I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening. And when I think I know what I want, I don’t even really know, because what I want is too … weird.”
“I thought you said you didn’t like anything weird.”
“It’s not like that kind of weird,” she says. “It’s awful weird.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Just say it.”
“It’s too scary.”
“I told you I wanted to die. What could be scarier than that?”
Lila nods. “Okay. Fine. The last time I got really turned on, it was by Jim. Isn’t that awful?”
“Not necessarily,” Phoebe says. She takes off Lila’s earrings. Her sash. Lila holds her hands up like a child.
“We had a bonfire at the beach last night after the reception,” Lila says. “And Jim looked so good all night, oh my God, Phoebe. He sat next to me by the fire and he cracked a beer, and I was just looking at him, transfixed, and he like, caught me staring at him. He was like, What? And I don’t know why, but we just laughed. We laughed so hard, Phoebe, I can’t even explain it.
“And then I went to bed and I had this dream. I was in this big beach house. And Jim was there. But it’s not really Jim. And I am leaving the kitchen to go meet my guidance counselor, weirdly, but Jim won’t let me out of the house. Jim just stands there, blocking my way. He’s like, No. You can’t go meet your guidance counselor. And then he puts me up against the kitchen island and flips up my skirt and he says the dirtiest things to me … but it’s like Jim’s disgustingness is what turns me on. Isn’t that awful?”
“No,” Phoebe says.
“It’s awful.”
Phoebe tells her about her own fantasies, the ones of her ex-husband being awful to her.
“But you were thinking of your husband,” she says. “I like, never think about having sex with Gary. Not even when I’m having sex with Gary. I think about Jim.”
“Well, thinking of Jim doesn’t have to mean anything,” Phoebe says.
“It feels like it means something.”
“It could mean that you want his approval. Maybe it’s symbolic. Like, you want him to stand aside, give you permission, because of Wendy?”
“Oh my God, you sound like my mother now.”
“It would make sense.”
“What if I just … want to fuck him?” Lila asks. “Sometimes I want him so much I can’t stand it.”
“Then you want him.”
“But I can’t want him!” Lila says. “I’m Gary’s Vermeer painting. And Gary is so wonderful. I know he is. He treats me so well. He’s so smart. He’s such a good dad. But sometimes I just hate him.”
“You hate him?” Phoebe asks. “Why?”
“Because that day in his office, he put his hand on my shoulder, and he was like, This will all be okay. This new treatment can work. And the way he said it made me believe him. I really believed him. I loved him for it. I really did. But then my dad died. And it wasn’t okay. It’s still not okay. I mean, how could Gary just let my father die?”
The thought of her father makes her sob, and Phoebe holds her. Her body is frail, skinnier than it seems.
“And we never talked about it. We never talk about anything. We always just pretend like everything is fine,” she says. “Like it was in the beginning. But it’s not. Because sometimes, I just can’t stand it when he touches me.”
Lila explains that this is why she’s always making sure they are busy doing amazing things.
“But then we’re at the Louvre, and I was bored. I was bored in Spain. Bored in Florence. I just kept thinking, Wow, Lila, you’re in Italy with your fiancé. Look at all those buildings. Look at those paintings. This old church. The cobblestones! And Gary was so fascinated, kept being like, Imagine the builders putting each one of these stones here by hand. But the whole time, I was honestly just like, I don’t care. I mean, how does anyone really care about stones?”
She wipes her nose.
“Anyway. That’s what being with Gary sometimes feels like.”
“It’s like trying to care about stones?”
“It’s like having nothing to talk about anymore so you talk about stones,” she says. “And I’ve never been good at caring about those things. My mother is right. I’ve never had any imagination. I’m practically dead inside. Sometimes, I feel like I have nothing real to say ever.”
Phoebe shakes her head.
“No,” Phoebe says. “That’s not true. That’s not even what your mother really thinks.”
“No?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “And I don’t believe it, either.”
Phoebe has sat with so many students who confessed similar things. Students who did not describe themselves as “readers,” students who shrugged and were like, “Sorry, stories about women just aren’t my thing,” but then one day, something would click. One day, they were sitting down with her talking about how Rochester was such an asshole.
“It takes time,” Phoebe says. “Gary is twelve years older than you. He’s had a lot more time to … cultivate an interest in stones.”
“But you care about stones.”
“I’m twelve years older than you, too.”
“Then maybe you should be with Gary.”
“Why would you say that?” Phoebe asks, but Lila doesn’t answer. So Phoebe looks at her. Like a soldier, Phoebe remembers her first responsibility to the bride. To always be honest. To say what nobody else at this wedding will say.
“Do you want to marry Gary?” Phoebe asks.
“I don’t want to not marry Gary,” Lila says. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“You can be married and be very alone,” Phoebe says. “More alone than you are when you’re, well, alone. Trust me.”
Lila doesn’t say anything but looks at Phoebe, waiting for her to go on.
“Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think,” Phoebe says. “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It’s your job to take care of yourself like that.”
“Did you read that on a pillow or something?” Lila asks, then grabs a pillow and puts it over her face, like she knows she’s admitted too much, even to Phoebe. Because saying things out loud is the first step to them becoming real.
“It’s a little long for a pillow,” Phoebe says.
“This pillow is so coconutty,” Lila says. “Ugh. I don’t know what I’m even saying. I just don’t know why it’s so hard to be a person sometimes. It shouldn’t be this hard. It makes no sense.”
They wait in silence for a moment. And then, from underneath the pillow, a voice: “What if I don’t want to marry Gary?”
Phoebe is careful to say nothing, because Phoebe is confused. On the eve of her own wedding night, Phoebe had no doubts. She wanted to marry Matt, wholly and purely. This is why it confuses her. She doesn’t know what you’re supposed to feel like. She doesn’t know what ensures a happy marriage. She doesn’t know if Lila’s ambivalence toward Gary means that they are doomed or if ambivalence means there is room to grow, room to become sure over the years.
But this is clear: “I don’t want to marry Gary,” Lila says again.
Phoebe takes the pillow off her face, and this strikes Lila as so suddenly funny, she starts hysterically laughing. When she laughs, Phoebe can see what Lila must have been like as a little girl, when she was still called Delilah, sleeping in her mother’s bed.
“Oh my God,” Lila says. She stands up on the bed. She shouts it. “Phoebe! I don’t want to marry Gary!”
“Okay,” Phoebe says, and pulls her back down. “Just maybe don’t shout it.”
“But I need to tell him. I need everyone to know.”
“In the morning.”
Maybe it’s the thought of morning or catching sight of her veil in the mirror, but she stops smiling.
“Ugh. This is not okay,” Lila says. “He’s going to be so upset. Everyone is. What am I going to do?”
“Nothing now. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up and we’ll tell everyone together.”
“You’ll be with me?”
“Of course,” she says. “But for now just get some sleep.”
“I am really glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“And don’t worry,” Lila says. “I don’t snore.”
LILA DOES SNORE.
She snores so loudly, Phoebe can’t sleep in the room. It reminds her too much of sleeping next to her husband, his loud vibrations taking over everything. Phoebe undresses in the dark corner, then wraps herself up in the fluffy robe.
She digs through Lila’s purse until she finds the other room key, lets herself in to the bridal suite, which is not very bridal. It’s called the Colonel. There are bright red floral curtains and red floral prints everywhere. A stuffy white carpet. A shoreline view that is somewhat ruined by a giant flagpole that cuts it in half. And a picture of a dead man on the wall who she assumes is the colonel.
She is surprised by how messy Lila is. She would have thought Lila to be aggressively organized. But her underwear is everywhere. Her life, spread out all over the room.
Phoebe starts to pick up some of Lila’s dresses, so that the morning won’t seem so overwhelming. It will be overwhelming enough, having to cancel this giant wedding. Having to tell everyone the truth. At least she can wake up to a clean floor.
But then she is startled by a knock on the door. She opens it.
“Oh,” Gary says. “You’re not Lila.”
Phoebe tightens the belt of her robe.
“Lila fell asleep in my bed,” Phoebe says. “Don’t ask. We had a long night.”
“We had a long night, too.”
Gary sits down on the floral love seat. Phoebe gets this terrible feeling, the same feeling she got when she looked at her cat in those final weeks before he died. How horrible, Phoebe thinks, to not know the truth about your own life.
“Was it a good one at least?” Phoebe asks.
“A weird one,” Gary says. “Let’s just say that I’m not the twenty-eight- year-old groom Jim remembers me to be. And now I’m just … drunk.”
Phoebe will not tell Gary what Lila confessed, of course. She would never. But not telling him makes her nervous. She doesn’t like this feeling of being dishonest with Gary.
“Why was it so weird?” Phoebe asks.
“He threw me the same exact bachelor party,” Gary says. “Brought us to the same exact cigar lounge. The same golf course. Bought me the same bottle of whiskey. I honestly don’t know if it’s because he was so drunk at the last one he didn’t remember what we did. Or if he is just … trying to upset me.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Gary says. “I can’t shake this feeling that he’s mad at me.”
“For what?”
“Moving on. Forgetting his sister.”
“But you haven’t forgotten his sister.”
“But I think it’s what Jim thinks.”
Ever since Wendy’s diagnosis, Jim was the best friend he had. He was truly there for all of them after. He did everything. He cooked, he cleaned. Cried with Gary at Wendy’s grave, and they were brothers in that way. After, they went to Wyoming and shat side by side in the woods, then laughed hysterically with Juice into the night. But ever since he got engaged to Lila, it’s been different.
“I can get married again,” Gary says. “But he doesn’t get a new sister. Nobody can ever make that better. And I can’t explain it other than to say that sometimes, I feel like I’m betraying him.”
“I doubt he thinks of it that way,” Phoebe says.
“I promised to take care of his sister for the rest of her life.”
“And … you did.”
“But her life was supposed to be longer,” he says. “I’m a fucking doctor.”
“But wasn’t it lung cancer? That’s not even your specialization. Field? How do medical doctors say it?”
“Field,” he says.
But he’s too caught up in the emotion to joke.
“She complained about this cough, you know. And I kept telling her to go to the doctor, to be better when she cleaned her paints. I had known since art school that she needed to be more careful with that stuff. But I didn’t want to nag. She hated when people told her what to do, especially me.”
“That’s not why she got cancer,” Phoebe says. Maybe it’s the fatigue, or maybe this kind of thinking is just too close to her own, but she gets irritated. “If that was true, then every painter would be dead at thirty-five. It’s actually ridiculous to think any of this is your fault.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” he says. “I advise people medically all the time.”
“God, we’re all so ridiculous! Why do we all think everything is our fault all the time?”
“Must be some evolutionary thing.”
“Helps us survive somehow,” Phoebe says. “Even as it destroys us.”
“Yeah.”
Phoebe aches for him. Gary is lost. Stuck somewhere between his first marriage and his second marriage.
“What was she like?” Phoebe asks. “Wendy.”
“She was just this whirlwind of a person,” he says. “We met in college. She was an art student, and I was premed. I used to walk by the open studios on my way back from the hospital. That’s the first time I saw her, standing in front of this painting that was entirely red, and it was like she knew I didn’t get it. ‘It’s thirty shades of red,’ she said, and still I couldn’t
see it. Not until she started pointing them out to me. And I fucking loved this about her. She could always see things I couldn’t. Seriously, all I could see was one giant blob of red. But then, a few days later, I saw all these different colors. And it was amazing.”
“I think that might be the best description of falling in love that I’ve ever heard,” Phoebe says.
They lived in Tiverton, in a beautiful old farmhouse that was featured in a small magazine about Tiverton. They had good friends, poets, writers, artists, actors, farmers who came over to drink beers in their backyard. Juice went to some private school in town where she bonded with other kids who thought it was fun to watch caterpillars build cocoons.
“We used to be fun. Once we stayed up and watched all three Godfather movies in one night. We used to create themed drinks for, like, Presidents’ Day. And it was perfect. It really was. But life is strange, always thinking this one thing is going to make you happy, because then you get it, and then maybe you’re not as happy as you imagined you would be, because every day is still just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big, you have no choice but to live inside of it, until you can no longer see it or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else—you want a child, and then the child is here, and that happiness is so big, it begins to feel like nothing. Like just the air around you.”
Until it is gone, of course. Until you bury your wife or divorce your husband and then what? What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?
“We had a whole life,” he says. “And that whole life … is gone. It seems absurd that I’m supposed to just get over that.”
“I don’t know if you are,” she says.
“But I have to,” he says. “I can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?”
“There was this quiet that came after my wife died,” he says. “This normal routine that developed that wasn’t really life but was very much like life. I could get through the day if I just concentrated on these very menial
tasks. I used to love nothing more than like, just peeling potatoes for dinner. I swear I could feel okay as long as I was just peeling those potatoes. But then you asked me in the hot tub when I started to feel better, and it’s a hard thing to answer, because I’m actually not sure I’m better. I think I’ve just been stuck in that neutral place ever since. Where everything is … fine.”
He says being here is weirder than he expected.
“Everyone keeps looking at me and saying, Congratulations, you must be so happy,” he says.
“Why is that weird?”
“I’m not sure happy is a feeling for me anymore,” he says. “Ever since Wendy died, I don’t really think about what will make me happy. It’s like I decided at some point that I can’t ever be happy again, so I should just think about what will make other people happy.”
She nods. She looks out at the fireworks.
“That’s really why I went to Lila’s art gallery that day,” Gary says. “Because Jim really wanted to go. I said no, I was too bummed out. It was my wedding anniversary. But Jim kept pushing for it, and I wanted to make Jim happy. After all he did for us. I didn’t get why Jim of all people wanted to go to an art gallery. I think he thought he was making me happy, giving me something to do on a sad day. But whatever. We went.”
He walked around Lila’s mother’s gallery, annoyed with Jim, annoyed with himself. He knew the motions, the nodding of the head, the looking deeply at the colors to take in each one. But he couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything, and he didn’t know if this meant something was wrong with him or the paintings. It was always Wendy who was the art critic—the one who would deem them bad or good, whereas Gary always went by the price. If the painting was being sold for a hundred thousand dollars, it must be good.
“But the painting of Patricia had no price on it,” he says. “It felt like an opportunity, a test. I stared at it for so long, thinking, Is this a good painting? Or bad?”
He had felt guilty when Lila came over and started talking like she expected him to take the painting home. Started describing where he could hang it, when it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy it.
“And then Lila walks into my office a few days later,” he says. “They had come to me for a second opinion. And it felt like such a coincidence, like we were being brought together for a reason. Lila was so hopeful that I became hopeful.”
Hope is a powerful thing. He looked at the old man’s pictures from the colonoscopy, and he saw the mass, but it all looked potentially fixable to him.
“I know I save lives, but I also ruin lives. I say a few words and then watch a person go from being one thing to another thing entirely. I didn’t understand that until a doctor did it to me and Wendy,” he says. “So I suggested one more round of chemo. I suggested this could work. Or at least potentially extend his life by years. And they were so happy. Man, I loved that feeling. It was such a high. I wanted more of it. I wanted to make her happy again. So I went back to the gallery and actually bought the painting.”
“At least, I tried to,” he says. “But she insisted I take it for free. A gift for taking care of her father.”
It felt good to take the painting home. To put it in his bathroom, just like Lila suggested. It felt like the first thing he had done since his wife died. A small step back into the world, a nice gesture, a fight against the entropy, something he could do to be human to another human. But mostly it was a decision to say: I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I think this painting is meaningful.
“Because that’s the point of art, isn’t it?” Gary asks. “Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning. Wendy was always looking at her own suffering and trying to see something in it. Even at the end, when she was dying. And I think that’s why I’ve always been jealous of artists. Every day, I look at a colon and I either see … death or shit,” Gary says. “I relied on Wendy to see other, more beautiful things for me.”
He leans back.
“Honestly, it’s nice to hear you talk this way about art,” Phoebe says. “I’ve actually been a little down on art.”
She tells him how lately she worries she always read books just for the feelings they gave her in the end, and she’s not sure how this is any
different from reading porn.
“Weren’t you the one who told me you were impressed by those people?” Gary asks. “Those people who will read four hundred pages just to get off?”
“Oh, you mean like you?” she says, and he smiles.
“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Gary says. “How much work we’ll do just to feel something. I don’t think there is anything more human than that.”
Phoebe agrees. She feels such tenderness for him, but she doesn’t know how to say that, so she says, “I’ve missed talking like this.”
She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her—shape-shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.
“I’ve missed talking like this, too,” Gary says. “It’s very easy to tell you things, you know. Is this the effect you have on everybody?”
“Historically, no,” she says. “Often I’ve been known to make people more uncomfortable than they were before they started talking to me.”
“I can’t imagine it,” he says. “I feel like I could tell you anything.”
The honesty of his comment cuts right through her, and she can hardly bear it.
“You’re drunk.”
“It’s not just that,” he says, and looks hurt.
She should stand up. Go back to her room. But then she thinks of Lila standing on her bed, shouting, “I don’t want to marry Gary.” She thinks, this wedding is over. This man deserves to hear something true.
“I know,” she says. “I feel it, too.”
He scratches his beard, something he does, she notices, when he gets a little nervous. Once the wedding is called off, she thinks, Gary won’t have to shave it. It’s the first time Phoebe allows herself to fantasize about the wedding being called off. About a future where she can reach out and touch his face.
In some other version of this story, she would. And they would kiss. Then wake up and feel awful about it in the morning. But Phoebe knows too much to do that now. Phoebe has had too many awful mornings for a
lifetime. So Phoebe just stands there, admiring his face, even the gray at the edges. Especially the gray. She didn’t understand that this is what happens as you get older—that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the same exact thing that draws her near now. There is something incredibly sexy to Phoebe about Gary’s gray hairs, his exhaustion, his genuine confusion about life, and she’s not sure she even understands why. She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life, to the man who has loved deeply and then lost suddenly and carries on. A man who has buried his wife and walked away and woke up to peel potatoes for dinner. A man who has lived through enough to appreciate the stones beneath his feet.
“So when did Lila tell you it was a naked painting of her mother?” Phoebe asks.
It’s good to see him laugh.
“Three months,” he says. “For three months I took a shower next to my naked future mother-in-law.”
She takes his hand and squeezes it. Gary looks surprised by her touch, but not confused. Sort of the way he looked when she stood before him in the hot tub and told him she wanted to fuck. As if he wants it, too, but cannot bring himself to admit it.
“I should go back to my room,” he says.
“Good night,” she says.
Gary leaves, and Phoebe gets in Lila’s bed. This time, she doesn’t fantasize about her husband or Mia or the girlies at Joe’s wine shop. She just thinks of Gary, how warm his hand felt, how the entire time she held it, he didn’t look away.