The Opening Reception
The hotel looks exactly as Phoebe hoped. It sits on the edge of the cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival. She can’t see the ocean behind it, but she knows it’s there, the same way she could pull into her driveway and feel her husband in his office typing his manuscript.
Love was an invisible wire, connecting them always.
Phoebe steps out of the cab. A man in burgundy approaches with such seriousness, the moment feels as if it has been choreographed long ago. It makes her certain that what she is doing is right.
“Good evening,” the man says. “Welcome to the Cornwall Inn. May I take your luggage?”
“I don’t have any luggage,” Phoebe says.
When she left St. Louis, it felt important to leave everything behind— the husband, the house, the luggage. It was time to move on, which she knew because that was what they had all agreed to last year at the end of the divorce hearing. Phoebe was so stunned by the finality of their conversation, by the way her husband said, “Okay, take care now,” like he was the mailman wishing her well. She could not bring herself to do a single thing after except climb in bed and drink gin and tonics and listen to the sound of the refrigerator making ice. Not that there was anywhere to go. This was mid-lockdown, when she only left the house for gin and toilet paper and taught her virtual classes in the same black blouse every day because what else were people supposed to wear? By the time lockdown was over, she couldn’t remember.
But now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn. She and her husband never did anything fancy enough for it. They were professors. They were easygoing. Relaxed. So comfortable by the fire with the little cat on their laps. They liked regular things, whatever was on tap, whatever was on TV, whatever was in the fridge, whatever shirt looked the most normal, because wasn’t that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal?
To prove that every day, no matter what, you were a person who could put on a shirt?
But that morning, before she got on the plane, Phoebe woke and knew she was no longer normal. Yet she made toast. Took a shower. Dried her hair. Gathered her lecture notes for her second day of the fall semester. Opened her closet and looked at all the clothes she once bought simply because they looked like shirts a professor should wear to work. Rows of solid-colored blouses, the female versions of things her husband wore. She pulled out a gray one, held it up in front of the mirror, but could not bring herself to put it on. Could not go to work and stand at the office printer and hold her face in a steady expression of interest while her colleague talked at length about the surprising importance of cheese in medieval theology.
Instead, she slipped on the emerald dress. The gold heels from her wedding. The thick pearls her husband had lain across her eyes like a blindfold on their wedding night. She got on a plane, drank an impressively good gin and tonic, and it was so nice and cool down her throat she hardly felt her blisters exiting the plane.
“Right this way, ma’am,” the man in burgundy says.
Phoebe gives the man twenty dollars, and he seems surprised to be tipped for doing nothing, but to Phoebe it is not nothing. It’s been a long time since a man has stood up immediately upon seeing her get out of a car. Years since her husband emerged from his office to greet her when she got home. It is nice to be stood for, to feel like her arrival is an important event. To hear her heels click as she walks up the old brick entranceway. She always wanted to make this sound, to feel grand and dignified when walking into a lecture hall, but her university was made of carpet.
She goes up the stairs, passes the big black lanterns and the granite lions guarding the doors. She walks through the curtains into the lobby, and this feels right, too. Like stepping back in time to an older world that probably was not better, but at least was heavily draped in velvet.
Then she sees the check-in line.
It’s so long—the kind of line she expected to see at the airport, and not at a Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean. Yet there the line is, stretching all the way through the lobby and past the historic oak staircase.
The people in it look wrong, too—wearing windbreakers and jeans and sneakers. The normal shirts Phoebe used to wear. They look comically ordinary next to the velvet drapes and the gilt-framed portraits of bearded men lining the walls. They look like solid, modern people, tethered to the earth by their titanium-strength suitcases. Some are talking on their phones. Some are reading off their phones, like they’re prepared to be in this line forever and maybe they are. Maybe they don’t have families anymore, either. It’s tempting for Phoebe to think like this now—to believe that everybody is as alone as she is.
But they’re not alone. They stand in pairs of two or three, some with linked arms, some with single hands resting on a back. They’re happy, which Phoebe knows because every so often one of them announces how happy they are.
“Jim!” an old man says, opening up his arms like a bear. “I’m so happy to see you!”
“Hey, Grandpa Jim,” a younger man says back, because it seems practically everyone in line is named Jim. The Jims exchange violent hugs and hellos. “Where’s Uncle Jim? Already on the course?”
Even the young woman working the front desk seems happy—so dedicated to looking each guest deeply in the eye, asking them why they’re here, even though they all say the same thing, and so she replies with the same thing: “Oh, you’re here for the wedding! How wonderful.” She sounds genuinely excited about the wedding and maybe she is. Maybe she’s still so young that she believes everybody else’s wedding is somehow about her. That’s how Phoebe always felt when she was young, worrying about what dress to wear for a month, even though she sat in the outer orbit of every wedding she attended.
Phoebe gets in line. She stands behind two young women carrying matching green dresses on their arms. One still wears her cheetah-print airplane neck pillow. The other has a bun so high the messy red tendrils dangle over her forehead as she flips through a People magazine. They are engaged in whispery debate over whose flight here was worse and how old is this hotel really and why are people so obsessed with Kylie Jenner now? Are we supposed to care that she’s hotter than Kim Kardashian?
“Is she?” Neck Pillow asks. “I’ve actually always thought they were both ugly in some way.”
“I think that’s true about all people, though,” High Bun says. “All people have one thing that makes them ugly. Even people who are like, professionally hot. It’s like the golden rule or something.”
“I think you mean cardinal rule.”
“Maybe.” High Bun says that even though she understands she’s baseline attractive, something that has taken her five years of therapy to admit, she knows that her gums show too much when she smiles.
“I’ve never noticed that,” Neck Pillow says.
“That’s because I don’t smile all the way.”
“This entire time I’ve known you, you haven’t been fully smiling?”
“Not since high school.”
The line moves forward, and Phoebe looks up at the coffered ceiling, which is so high, she starts to wonder how they clean it.
Another “Oh! You’re here for the wedding!” and Phoebe begins to realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much. Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it looks like it could survive a trip to the moon. The men in burgundy pile it all into high, sturdy towers of suitcases, right next to a large white sign that says WELCOME TO THE WEDDING OF LILA AND GARY.
“Your rule is definitely not true about Lila, though,” Neck Pillow says. “I mean, I seriously can’t think of one way she’s ugly.”
“That’s true,” High Bun says.
“Remember when she was chosen to be the bride in our fashion show senior year?”
“Oh yeah. Sometimes I forget about that.”
“How can you forget about that? I think about how weird it was once a week.”
“You mean because our guidance counselor insisted on walking down the aisle with her?”
“I mean more like, some people are just born to be brides.”
“I actually think our guidance counselor is coming to the wedding.”
“That’s weird. But good. Then I’ll actually know someone at this wedding,” Neck Pillow says.
“I know. I pretty much don’t know anyone anymore,” High Bun says.
“I know, ever since the pandemic, I’m like, okay, I guess I just have no friends now.”
“Right? The only person I know now is basically my mom.”
They laugh and then trade war stories of their terrible flights here and Phoebe does her best to ignore them, to keep her eyes focused on the magnificence of the lobby. But it’s hard. Wedding people are much louder than regular people.
She closes her eyes. Her feet begin to ache, and she wonders for the first time since she left home if she should have brought a pair of sensible shoes. She has so many lined up in her closet, being navy, doing nothing.
“So what do you know about the groom?” Neck Pillow whispers.
High Bun only knows what Lila briefly told her over the phone and what she learned from stalking him on the internet.
“Gary is actually kind of boring to stalk,” High Bun says, then whispers something about him being a Gen X doctor with a receding hairline so minor, it seems like there’s a good chance he’ll die with most of his hair. “How did you not stalk him after Lila asked you to be a bridesmaid?”
“I’ve been off the internet,” Neck Pillow says. “My therapist demanded it.”
“For two years?”
“They’ve been engaged that long?”
“He proposed just before the pandemic.”
They inch forward in line again.
“God—Look at this wallpaper!”
Neck Pillow hopes that her room faces the ocean. “Staring at the ocean makes you five percent happier. I read a study.”
Finally, they are quiet. In their silence, Phoebe is grateful. She can think again. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s looking at her husband across the kitchen, admiring his laugh. Phoebe always loved his laugh, the way it
sounded from afar. Like a foghorn in the distance, reminding her of where to go. But then one of the Jims yells, “Here comes the bride!”
“Jim!” the bride says.
The bride steps out of the elevator and into the lobby wearing a glittering sash that says BRIDE so there is no confusion. Not that there could be any confusion. She is clearly the bride; she walks like the bride and smiles like the bride and twirls bride-ishly when she approaches High Bun and Neck Pillow in line, because the bride gets to do things like this for two or three days. She is a momentary celebrity, the reason everybody has paid thousands of dollars to come here.
“I’m so happy to see you!” the bride cries. She opens her arms for a hug, gift bags hanging from her wrists like bracelets made of woven seagrass.
Neck Pillow and High Bun were right. Phoebe can’t identify one thing that is ugly about the bride, which might be the one thing that’s ugly about her. She looks exactly how she is supposed to look—somehow both willowy and petite in her white summer dress, with no trace of any undergarment beneath. Her blond hair is arranged in such a romantic and complicated tangle of braids, Phoebe wonders how many tutorials she watched on Instagram.
“You look beautiful,” High Bun says.
“Thank you, thank you,” the bride says. “How were your flights?”
“Uneventful,” Neck Pillow lies.
They do not mention the surprise flock of seagulls or the emergency landing because the bride is here. It is their job for the entire wedding to lie to the bride, to have loved their journeys here, to be thrilled by the prospect of a Newport wedding after two years of doing practically nothing.
“When do we meet Gary?” High Bun asks.
“He’ll be at the reception later, obviously.”
“I mean, obviously,” Neck Pillow says, and they laugh.
The bride hands out the seagrass bags (with “emergency supplies”) and the women gasp as they pull out full-sized bottles of liquor. All different kinds, the bride explains. Things she picked up when she and Gary were traveling in Europe last month.
Scotch. Rioja. Vodka.
“Oh, how fancy,” High Bun says.
The bride smiles, proud of herself. Proud to be the kind of woman who thinks of other, less fortunate women while traveling Europe with her doctor fiancé. Proud that she returned a woman who knows what to drink and not to drink.
“Here you go,” the bride says to Phoebe with such intimacy it makes Phoebe feel like she is a long-lost cousin from childhood. Like maybe once upon a time, they played checkers together in their grandfather’s dodgy basement or something. She hands Phoebe one of the bags, then gives her a really strong hug, as if she has been practicing bridal hugs the way Phoebe’s husband used to practice professorial handshakes before interviews. “Just a little something to say thank you for coming all this way. We know it wasn’t easy to get here!”
It was actually very easy for Phoebe to get here. She didn’t stop the mail or line up a kid in the neighborhood to water the garden or get Bob to cover her classes like she always did before vacations. She didn’t even clean up the crumbs from her toast on the counter. She just put on the dress and walked out of the house and left in a way she’s never left anything before.
“Oh, I…” Phoebe begins to say.
“I know, I know what you’re thinking,” the bride says. “Who the hell drinks chocolate wine?”
The bride is good. A very good bride. It’s startling to be spoken to like this after two years of intense isolation, of saying, “What is literature?” to a sea of black boxes on her computer, and none of the boxes knew, or none of the boxes cared, or none of the boxes were even listening. “What is literature?” Phoebe asked, again and again, until not even she knew the answer.
And now to be given a hug and a bag of chocolate wine for no reason. To be looked in the eye by a beautiful stranger after so many years of her husband not looking her in the eye. It makes Phoebe want to cry. It makes her wish she were here for the wedding.
“But it’s better than you think,” the bride says. “Germans love it, apparently.”
The bride smiles and Phoebe sees a bit of food stuck between her two front teeth. There it is: the one thing that makes the bride ugly today.
“Next?” the front desk woman calls.
It takes a moment for Phoebe to realize it’s her turn. She sees High Bun and Neck Pillow already walking into the elevator. She takes the bag, thanks the bride, and walks toward the front desk.
“You must be here for the wedding, too?” the woman asks. Her name is Pauline.
“No,” Phoebe admits. “I’m not.”
“Oh,” Pauline says. She sounds disappointed. Confused, actually. Her eyes flicker to the bride in the distance. “I thought everybody here was here for the wedding.”
“I am definitely not here for the wedding. But I made a reservation this morning.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Pauline says, typing as she speaks. “I just think that someone here has made a very big mistake. It might have even been me! You’ll have to excuse us, we’re a little understaffed since Covid.”
Phoebe nods. “Labor shortage.”
“Exactly,” Pauline says. “Okay, what’s your name?”
“Phoebe Stone.”
This is true. This is her name, the name she has come to think of as hers. Yet it feels like she’s lying when she says it now, because it’s her husband’s family’s name. Whenever she hears herself say it, it somehow pushes her outside of her body. It makes her see herself from up above like a bird, the way the wedding people must see her, and she’s sure from up there, they can spot the one thing that is ugly about her, too: her hair. Something should be done about that hair. She completely forgot to comb it this morning.
“Here you are,” Pauline says. She is so focused now on giving quality service she does not even look up when one of the wedding people walks through the doors and slips on the floor behind Phoebe.
“Uncle Jim! Oh my God! Are you okay?” the bride shouts.
Uncle Jim is not okay. He is on the floor, yelling something about his ankle, and also the floor, which is a terrible floor, he says, not to mention, total bullshit. The men in burgundy gather around him and start apologizing
to him about the floor, which yes, yes, they agree is the worst floor, even though Phoebe can see it’s some kind of Italian marble.
“There it is,” Pauline says. Pauline is a hero. “You’re in the Roaring Twenties.”
“Is each room a decade?” Phoebe asks. She pictures each room having its own hairstyle. Its own war. Its own set of stock market triumphs and failures. Its own definition of feminism.
“You know, I don’t actually know what all the themes are!” Pauline says. “I’m new. They seem kind of random to me. But that’s a great question.”
She opens the drawer, searches for the right key.
“It’s our penthouse suite,” she says. “The only one with a proper view of the ocean.”
It feels practiced, as if Pauline whispers something to each guest to make them feel special. It’s our only room with a desk from the Vanderbilts’ family home. It’s our only room with an infinite supply of toilet paper.
“Wonderful,” Phoebe says.
“So what brings you to the Cornwall Inn?”
Even though she knew this question was coming, Phoebe is startled by it. When she imagined herself here, she didn’t imagine herself having to speak to anybody. She is, simply, out of practice.
“This is my happy place,” Phoebe blurts out. It’s not the entire truth, but it’s not a lie.
“Oh, so you’ve stayed with us before?” Pauline asks.
“No,” Phoebe says.
Two years ago, Phoebe saw the hotel advertised in some magazine, the kind she only ever read while waiting in the fertility clinic. She looked at the pictures of the Victorian canopy bed, overlooking the ocean, and she thought, Who actually plans their vacations by looking through a travel magazine? She felt angry at these people, not that she knew anybody who did things like that. Yet days later, when her therapist asked her to close her eyes and describe her happy place, she pictured herself on that canopy bed because she could only imagine herself happy in a place she had never been, a bed she had never slept in.
“Well, this is a happy place, indeed,” Pauline says.
Phoebe picks up the key. It’s already been too much conversation. Too much pretending to be normal, and she is not paying eight hundred dollars just to stay here and pretend to be normal. She could have easily done that at home. She feels herself grow weary, but Pauline has so many more questions. Would she like to add a spa package? Would she like to book a visit with their in-house tarot reader? Would she like a normal pillow or a coconut pillow?
“What’s a coconut pillow?” Phoebe asks.
“A pillow,” Pauline says, “with coconut in it.”
“Are pillows better that way?” she asks. “With coconut inside them?”
That’s what her husband would have asked. A bad habit of hers, a product of being married for a decade—always imagining what her husband might say. Even when he’s not around. Especially when he’s not around. Phoebe didn’t think she’d end up being a woman like this. But if the last few years have taught her anything, it’s that you really can’t ever know who you are going to become.
“Pillows are much better that way,” Pauline says. “Trust me. We’ll have one sent right up.”
Phoebe walks into the elevator and feels relief when the doors start to close. Finally, to be getting away from the wedding people. To be doing something for a change. To have a key to a place that is not her house.
“Hold the elevator!” a woman calls out.
Phoebe knows it’s the bride before she sees her. She yells like she deserves this elevator. But nobody deserves anything. Not even the bride. Phoebe presses the button to close the doors, but the bride slides a hand between them. They don’t bounce open like they’re supposed to, maybe because the Cornwall was built in 1864. An old hotel has no mercy, not even for the bride.
“Fuck!” the bride shouts.
“Oh, God!” Phoebe says. She pries the doors back open, then stares at the bride’s hand in disbelief. “You’re bleeding.”
The bride holds up the gash across the back of her knuckles like a child and takes the tissue Phoebe offers without saying thank you. Phoebe presses
the button, and the doors close again. The women don’t say anything as the bride politely bleeds into the tissue and they begin to ascend. Phoebe hears the bride try to steady her breath, watches the tissue darken.
“I’m really sorry,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t realize that would happen.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” the bride struggles to say. She clears her throat. “So, are you in Gary’s family?”
“No,” Phoebe says.
“Are you in my family?”
“You don’t know who’s in your own family?” Phoebe asks. The question makes Phoebe want to laugh, and it’s a strange feeling. The first time she has wanted to laugh in months. Years maybe. Because how does the bride not know her own family? Phoebe knew everybody in her family. She had no choice. It was so small. Just Phoebe and her father, tiny enough to fit inside his old fishing cabin.
“I have a very large family,” the bride says, like it’s a big problem.
“Well, I’m not in your family,” Phoebe clarifies.
“But you have to be in one of our families.”
“No,” Phoebe says. “I’m not in any family.”
It had been a crushing realization, one that started slowly after the divorce, and got stronger with each passing holiday, until she woke up this morning to such a quiet house, she finally understood what it meant to have no family. She understood it would always be like this—just her, in bed, alone. No longer even the sound of her cat, Harry, meowing at the door.
“But everybody is here for the wedding. I made sure of it.” The bride eyes the gift bag in Phoebe’s hands, confused. “This has to be some kind of mistake.”
The bride says it as if Phoebe is the big nightmare she has always been dreading. Phoebe is something going wrong at a time when nothing is supposed to go wrong. Because every little thing during a wedding has the power to feel like an omen—like the high winds through the park that flipped over the paper plates and sent a chill down Phoebe’s spine on her own wedding day. We should have gotten real plates, she thought, something with weight and substance.
“There’s no mistake,” Phoebe says.
This is Phoebe’s happy place. The place Phoebe has chosen out of all the possible places. How dare the bride make Phoebe feel like she’s not supposed to be here.
“But if you’re not here for the wedding, then what are you here for?” the bride asks in a much lower pitch, as if her real voice has finally emerged. Because now in this private space with a person not attending the wedding, the bride doesn’t have to be the bride. She can speak however she wants. And so can Phoebe. Phoebe is not High Bun or Neck Pillow. She is nobody, and the only good thing about being nobody is that she can now say whatever the fuck she wants. Even to the bride.
“I’m here to kill myself,” Phoebe says.
She says it without drama or emotion, as if it’s just a fact. Because that’s what it is. She waits for the truth of it to stun the bride into an awkward silence, but the bride only looks confused.
“Um, what did you just say?” the bride asks.
“I said, I’m here to kill myself,” Phoebe repeats, more firmly this time. It feels good to say it out loud. If she can’t say it aloud, then she probably won’t be able to do it. And she has to do it. She has decided. She has come all this way. She feels relief as the doors begin to open, but the bride presses the button to close them.
“No,” the bride says.
“No?” Phoebe asks.
“No. You definitely cannot kill yourself. This is my wedding week.”
“Your wedding is a week?”
“Well, like, six days, if you want to be technical about it.”
“That’s a … long wedding.”
Phoebe’s wedding was a single night. She had tried not to make a big deal out of it. And why? It seems silly now, to have not celebrated something good when she had the chance. But Phoebe and her husband were a year out of graduate school, trained to live on a stipend with a cheap bottle of wine and a nice tree in the distance. And a wedding was such a spectacle, Phoebe thought. Every time she ordered flowers or sampled another piece of cake or told her friends how happy she was, she got this horrible feeling that she was bragging.
“A week is actually pretty standard now,” the bride says with a tone that makes Phoebe feel old. “And people are coming a long way to be here.”
But Phoebe doesn’t care.
“This is the most important week of my life,” the bride pleads.
“Same,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe presses for the doors to open, but the bride closes them again, and it makes Phoebe angry, the way she gets only when she’s stuck in traffic on the way to work. All those taillights ahead made her want to scream, and yet she never did, not even in the privacy of her own car. She was not a screamer. Not the kind of woman who ever made demands of the world, did not expect the streets to clear just because she was in a rush. She was not like the bride, who stands so entitled in her glittering sash like she’s the only bride to have ever existed. It makes Phoebe want to rip off the sash, whip out her own wedding photo, show her that she had been a bride once, and brides can become anything. Even Phoebe.
But then the bloody tissue falls to the ground. As the bride picks it up, she lets out a half sob, then looks at Phoebe as though her entire life has already been ruined.
“Please don’t do this,” the bride begs, and it gives Phoebe that feeling again, as if she knows her, like the bride is asking from one cousin to another.
“I’ll be very quiet,” Phoebe promises. “I mean, I might put on some light jazz in the background, but you won’t hear it.”
“Are you joking? Is this a sick prank or something? Did Jim put you up to this?”
From her purse, Phoebe pulls out her ancient Discman and a CD titled Sax for Lovers. One of the only things she brought from home. From the first night of their honeymoon in the Ozarks. A small motel on the side of a canyon with a heart-shaped hot tub that made the whole room humid. Her husband found the CD in the stereo. Sax for Lovers, he read aloud, and they laughed and laughed. Well, put it on, lover, she said, and they danced until they undressed each other.
“Oh my God,” the bride says. “You’re serious. You’re going to do it here? In your room? When?”
“Tonight,” Phoebe says. “At sunset.”
She is going to smoke a cigarette on the balcony. She is going to order room service. Have a nice meal while looking out at the water. Eat an elaborate dessert. Listen to the CD. Take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers and fall asleep in the large king-sized canopy bed as the sun goes down. It is going to be quick, beautiful, and entirely bloodless, because Phoebe refuses to make the staff clean like her friend Mia cleaned after her husband Tom slit his wrists. That’s just selfish, Phoebe’s husband said when they heard, and Phoebe agreed, because Tom survived. Because it felt important for a husband and wife to agree on something like that. But also because Phoebe is a tidy person, afflicted by the belief that each book has its rightful place on the shelf and blood should always be inside our bodies, even after death, especially after death, and how awful for Mia, to have to kneel down and scrub her husband’s blood out of the grout.
“There will be no mess,” Phoebe promises.
“No,” the bride says firmly. “Absolutely not. This can’t happen. This can’t be real.”
But her wound is a red circle that keeps expanding. The bride looks at it and says, “How could you do this to me?”
Is Phoebe really doing anything to her, though? If it’s not Phoebe, something else will ruin it. That’s how weddings go. That’s how life goes. It’s always one thing after another. Time the bride learns.
“Believe it or not, this actually has nothing to do with you,” Phoebe says.
“Of course it does!” the bride says. “This is my wedding! I’ve been planning this my entire life!”
“I’ve been planning this my entire life.”
It’s not until Phoebe says it that she realizes it’s true. Not that she’s always wanted to end her life. But it’s been an idea, a self-destruct button Phoebe never forgot was there, even during her happiest moments. And where did this sadness come from? Did her father pass it on like a blood disease?
“Please,” the bride says. “Please don’t do this here.”
But she has to. This is the only place that feels right: a five-star hotel a thousand miles from home, full of rich strangers who won’t be upset about her death and a staff so well trained that they will simply nod over her corpse and then quietly move her through the service elevator in the morning.
But here is the bride, already upset.
“Please,” the bride says again, like a child, and it occurs to Phoebe that that is what she is. Twenty-six. Twenty-eight, maybe? A child the way she and her husband were children when they got married. The bride doesn’t understand yet, what it means to be married. To share everything. To have one bank account. To pee with the door wide open while telling your husband a story about penguins at the zoo. And then one day, to wake up entirely alone. To look back at your whole life like it was just a dream and think, What the fuck was that?
“What about your husband?” the bride tries, noticing Phoebe’s wedding ring. “Your children?”
Phoebe is done explaining herself. She hands her one last tissue.
“Consider it a wedding gift,” Phoebe says. “I hope you two will be very happy.”
The doors open. The top floor. Phoebe is finally here. But of course, it doesn’t really matter where she is. She can be on the top floor, by the ocean, or in the small bedroom of her house. There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place. When they went on those terrible vacations in the Ozarks, they were so happy, they laughed at nearly everything. And the towels were so shitty and short, but it was fine, because they revealed her husband’s athletic legs up to the thigh. You’re scandalizing me, she said.
“Lila!” High Bun shouts from the end of the hall.
There is no escaping for either of them. The bride flattens out her dress, prepares herself to be the bride again, but then spots a red dot on her hem.
“Is that blood?” she asks Phoebe.
The dress is ruined. They both know it. They are two women who have bled on their underwear for the majority of their lives, and they know there
is no unruining it. But the bride takes a deep breath as High Bun and Neck Pillow approach, holds out her arms wide to greet them all over again. Phoebe wonders how many times tonight the bride will have to do this.
“We’re on the same floor!” High Bun says, while Neck Pillow eyes the gash on Lila’s hand but says nothing. They are good bridesmaids, refusing to point out the things that make the bride ugly.
“What room are you in?” Lila asks.
“The Gloucester,” High Bun says. “Is that how you pronounce it?”
“I think you’re supposed to say Gloster,” Neck Pillow says.
Phoebe begins walking down the hall, leaving the bride fully caught in the web of her wedding, the one she spun for herself as a small girl, dreaming of this moment.
And will High Bun and Neck Pillow remember her tomorrow morning after her body is removed? Will they think, Is the dead woman that one we saw you with in the elevator? Or will they only remember seeing the bride?
The hall gets darker as she goes, lit up by only one perfectly placed copper sconce. Phoebe walks by an alcove with an ice machine that reminds her of other hotels, lesser hotels, the kind she would stay at in her old life when she used to go to conferences and give talks on the marriage plots of the nineteenth century. There is a vending machine, too, but it’s hidden behind a tall gold-leaf wall, like some kind of agreement among rich people. This is a nice hotel. If you want to do something you shouldn’t, please do it in private.
Inside the room, Phoebe locks the door. She is satisfied by the sharp, metallic sound. She is alone again. She leans her back against the door, and before she admires the ocean view or the golden tassels on the lamps, she looks down to realize she is still holding the gift bag. She takes out the German chocolate wine. A small bottle of something called Everybody Water. A candle hand-poured by the maid of honor, whoever she is. A pack of cookies that look as much like Oreos as they legally can. I will never have another Oreo, Phoebe thinks. And it’s these small things she can’t accept. The never drinking wine again. The never again feeling her husband’s finger down her spine. The body always wanting to be a body.
She opens the German chocolate wine and takes a sip. The bride is right. It’s better than you’d think.
“At the Cornwall, we can go sailing on an America’s Cup winner,” Phoebe said to her husband, Matt.
“We can rent a vintage car and drive it around like dumb bastards,” Matt said.
This was January two years ago. They were in bed, searching the internet, trying to plan their most indulgent vacation ever—a thing Phoebe and Matt decided they needed after their final visit to the fertility clinic. The embryos had been bad, it had all been a waste, and Phoebe had miscarried —though the doctor would never say it like that. He said, “It was a nonviable pregnancy,” and “I’d suggest not doing a sixth cycle at this point,” and the whole drive home, Phoebe couldn’t stop feeling like her body had nothing to do with her. Her body was just some piece of land, like the overharvested soybean fields along the highway. Phoebe drank whiskey for the first time in months, and Matt stared at the moon through the window until he said, “Let’s go somewhere fun for spring break.”
That’s when Phoebe remembered the Victorian hotel from the magazine. She found the Cornwall Inn online.
“Look, we can sit in the hot tub while staring at the ocean,” Phoebe said.
“We can slurp oysters and somehow laugh at the same exact time,” he added, and it felt good to make this list of new things they suddenly wanted together.
Eventually, Matt fell asleep, but Phoebe’s body was still too uncomfortable to sleep. She was still bleeding. She stayed up looking at the hotel, analyzing the rooms and the excursions—there were so many possible excursions. They could paddleboard with seals. Go on a “water journey” at a nearby spa. Visit Edith Wharton’s house on the Cliff Walk. Do yoga by the ocean, not that she had ever done yoga. But she liked the thought of becoming a woman who casually did yoga by the sea.
She made a detailed spreadsheet of excursions, because she was a researcher by profession. Kept a long list of every book she ever read and her favorite lines from them. Wrote a dissertation tracking each time Jane
Eyre went on a walk in Brontë’s novel. Became proficient in German one year, then Middle English the next. And after sex with her husband, she always wanted to think more deeply about it, like: What was the first use of the word cunt in the English language? And Matt would laugh and say, “Shakespeare, probably?” and Phoebe would continue: “I bet it was Chaucer.” And then they both looked it up to learn that two hundred years before Chaucer, there was a street in Oxfordshire called Gropecunt Lane.
She loved the way Matt indulged her. They were very similar—he was a researcher, too, though he would never call himself that. He was a philosopher. He read books on Friday nights and overanalyzed commercials with her, and engaged her in long debates about what they should call their private parts during sex, even if all they could agree on was that they would never call them private parts.
But when Phoebe showed him the spreadsheet the next morning, Matt said, “You made a spreadsheet of fun?” the same way he once said, “You made a spreadsheet of sex?” And yes. Phoebe was thirty-eight. They couldn’t afford to be casual anymore about trying to have a baby. But when the time came for sex, he looked at her across the bed like, Okay, are we on schedule? and she looked at him like he was nothing at all, just the vase on the end table.
“You honestly expect me to believe that people go on vacations without making a spreadsheet of fun first?” Phoebe asked.
It was a joke, but he didn’t take it as one, so it didn’t feel like one. He just looked at her like he was deciding something about her. A short glance, but her husband did not need much to come to a conclusion. Her husband was a careful and astute reader of text. He once wrote a thirty-four-page article about a single word in Plato.
“I’m sure it’s great,” he said, and then kissed her goodbye.
Matt was not the most handsome man in the world, but he had been to her. And he seemed to get better-looking with age. The light gray taking over his brown hair, the smile that devastated her every time. Her husband could still go out into the world and have children without her—it was a thought she had every time he left the house for work. She wondered if he thought it, too.
“See you at dinner,” she said, and they went to teach at the same university in separate cars. She taught literature, while he taught philosophy. She ate a CLIF bar at her desk. She left for a meeting and passed Bob’s giant office, the consolation prize for having to be department chair. He was listening to a string quartet loud enough for her to hear. “’Ello,” he said, even though he was not British. She went upstairs, walked by her husband’s door, which was open, but not really, because he was with a student. A brunette. A girl. He always kept the door open if a girl was in his office, even when all he was doing was listening to her describe her relationship to the Bible.
“I never realized you could read it like it was just a book,” the girl said. “I never understood that actual human beings wrote the Bible. I thought God wrote it. Is that stupid?”
“That is not stupid,” Phoebe’s husband assured her.
Then Phoebe went to the Adjunct Lounge Committee meeting, made up entirely of men with monosyllabic nicknames that somehow passed as professional names. Jack. Jeff. Stan. Russ. Vince. Mike. Phoebe was the only woman and the only adjunct, brought in to answer questions about what a woman and an adjunct might want from this future office space.
“Phoebe?” Mike asked. “What do you think?”
It was a nonviable pregnancy.
“Do you think the chairs should have tablets or no tablets? Russ thinks the tablets look too industrial,” he said. “We want you to feel at home. But the tablets do eliminate the need for coffee tables.”
Successful men all over the world are always celebrated for their ability to eliminate something so they can make more room for something else. Like the three polyps Dr. Barr removed from her uterus to make room for her future children.
“I think the real coffee tables would be nice,” Phoebe said. And then they all went home—the men to their wives and Phoebe to her husband. But he was not there yet.
Getting a drink with some work people, he texted.
She poured herself some leftover wine and wondered who the work people were. She couldn’t ask, because she knew that would get classified
as overbearing, and she tried so hard never to be overbearing, especially at this delicate stage of their marriage. She tried so hard not to give a shit about the ways she was losing her husband, but why? Of course, she gave a shit. He was her husband.
Was he drinking with Bob? Bob kept a bottle of something in his desk the way professors do in movies about professors. But she knew that her husband didn’t really like drinking with Bob. “The man drinks to annihilate himself,” he said one night, coming home from a faculty party that went on for too long, mostly because of Bob.
It’s possible that he drinks with Rick or Adam or Paula from his department. Maybe Mia? Though ever since Mia and Tom had a baby nine months ago, Mia hadn’t really reentered the world yet. And Matt would have invited her if he went with Mia, because Mia was Phoebe’s best friend at work, if people at work were allowed to have best friends. Phoebe was never sure. But they had grown close in their adjacent offices, and even closer after Mia’s husband attempted suicide two years ago. Phoebe had made it a point to invite Mia and Tom over for dinner nearly every weekend, because Mia made it a point to talk to Phoebe when many of the other tenured professors did not. At these dinners, Tom would talk about all the things he was doing to feel better—meditating three times a day, subscribing to hiking magazines, and quitting refined sugar because that was his trigger, something he explained to them one night when they offered him cake. Tom needed to be honest and open about his depression now, because being ashamed of his depression only made him more depressed. They all nodded in agreement, they totally got it, and yet Phoebe and Matt couldn’t help but exchange glances after Mia and Tom left the house.
“I don’t know what Tom could be so depressed about. Aren’t they trying to have a baby? And Mia is beautiful,” Phoebe had said to Matt, because that’s how confident she was in her husband’s love for her. She could admit when other women were more beautiful, had learned at a young age that she was not the most attractive woman in the room. It had been fine then.
But that night, she drank the wine and added to her spreadsheet of fun and it did not feel fine. It did not feel fun, either, which was what her
husband specifically asked for. “We need to have some fun,” he had said. And he was right. They were never laughing anymore. They were hardly sleeping together. It was tricky, with her body always feeling so wrong. But she wanted to do something for him. Something she had never done. Something fun.
“When you get home, I want to make you cum,” she typed out on her phone to her husband. But just looking at the word cum made her nervous. So she deleted it, wrote come instead of cum, and then turned it back to cum, because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?
WHEN MATT CAME home from drinks, he came with champagne. Very rarely did he buy champagne. When he did, he felt compelled to make a joke about it.
“I hunted and gathered us some champagne,” he said.
“Are we celebrating something?” Phoebe asked. “Or are we just drinking champagne?”
She watched him get two flutes. She waited for him to say something about her text, but he didn’t. Did she send it to the wrong person? She picked up her phone, but no, there was the text, dangling so awkwardly at the end of the thread.
“We’re celebrating,” he said. “I have news.”
They never came home from work with real news. Work was always the same. It was either good or bad or busy or just fine. The students were either lazy or enthusiastic or inspiring or depressing. They were misspelling the names of historical figures or they were drawing graduate-level comparisons between Virginia Woolf and Cubism. They were missing the midterm because their grandmother died again (so suddenly and in the night!) or they were ready to go, pens upright.
“What’s the news?” she asked.
The champagne bottle stood on the counter like a green god. She hated this bad feeling in her stomach. This assumption that her husband’s good news couldn’t possibly be hers.
“I found out that I won the Arts and Letters Scholar of the Year award,” he said. Her husband twisted off the cork, and it made a loud gunshot noise across the room.
“Oh, wow,” Phoebe said.
How did people celebrate? Phoebe remembered throwing confetti in the air on New Year’s Eve. She remembered yip-yip-yipping at the top of the canyon in Arkansas. But overall, they were pretty out of practice.
“I kind of can’t believe it,” he said.
Phoebe could believe it—she knew he’d win the award at some point. The College of Arts and Letters was one of the smallest programs at their university, and they used to joke that the award would happen to most of the professors if they stayed there long enough—though it would never happen to Phoebe, because adjuncts did not get awards. They did not get health benefits, either, even though she did the exact same job as her husband, a now tenured professor of philosophy with a health insurance plan that covered their cat’s visit to the dentist. And that was okay then, because they were married and had enough love and money between them to buy a house and do the things that people who recently bought houses do, like start a garden and renovate the kitchen with a quartzite slab and make six embryos at a lab.
But it did not feel okay when her husband won awards. It did not feel okay when they were at a faculty event, and someone suggested she apply for the new tenure-track job in English. What an opportunity, what a fortuitous time for Jack Hayes to die. But she knew they wouldn’t seriously consider her for the position. She’d only had one publication since graduation, and that was not enough. It was Matt who had to say the things Phoebe couldn’t, like, “Phoebe is still working on her book,” and then they asked what the book was about, but Phoebe found that she couldn’t describe it. She said something about the domestic spaces in Jane Eyre. Something about the walking culture of the Victorian era. About feminism? But Phoebe didn’t really know anymore. The whole thing bored her now. Every time she opened her dissertation on the computer, it felt like sitting down for coffee with an old boyfriend she couldn’t imagine ever loving again.
“Congratulations,” Phoebe said to her husband. “That’s really great.”
Phoebe smiled and kissed Matt on the cheek. Squeezed his arm like she might fuck him silly later, and maybe she would. Maybe he’d notice the text and pull her upstairs and tonight would be the night when everything changed, when she would lean over the bed as he took her from behind. Or maybe they’d do it face-forward, look into each other’s eyes, like they did when they first fell in love.
“I’ll have to give a speech at the awards dinner in February,” her husband said.
“Is a speech bad?”
If Phoebe had to give a speech in February, that would be very bad. Phoebe had started to hate standing in front of her students each day, all of them waiting in silence for her to prove herself. Because hadn’t she proved herself yesterday? And the day before? Why did she have to wake up every day just to prove herself if it didn’t seem to matter how often she proved herself? By the end of the hour, she was exhausted, and didn’t feel better until she was at home, drinking a glass of wine.
“A speech is great,” Matt said. “We need things to look forward to.”
He was right. They had nothing to look forward to, which was the entire point of planning the vacation.
“Here.” He handed her a champagne flute. It was flimsy and delicate. It made her nervous, just holding it. “I know it doesn’t really mean anything for promotion, but it’s got to help at least a little.”
Her husband’s goal used to be marrying her and starting a family. Now he was concentrating very hard on promotion.
“Of course,” she said. “Everything helps.”
“Cheers.”
She drank.
“This is good champagne,” he said.
She couldn’t help but note that in the history of her husband’s life, he had never yet purchased bad champagne.
“It is,” she said. She really loved the first sip of champagne. The first sip always brought her back to life. To the park where they made their first toast as a married couple. To the warm and snowy balconies on New Year’s
Eve. But the second and third sip were always so dry, they killed her again. “It really is.”
Her husband—what a great scholar. And the students loved him. They were always gathered outside his office, eyes glowing with worship, saying, “He’s a genius, and yet not even an asshole about it.” And it was true. He knew a lot. He spoke three languages and could hold a long conversation about everything from the drinking culture of ancient Greece to the local politics of St. Louis to the problem of blood-doping in the Olympics to the species of bird at their feeder. His intelligence was one of the reasons that she fell in love with him. But it was annoying to see young women worship it, because nobody worshipped hers. People were either surprised by it or disapproving of it. Not even Bob was a fan anymore.
“You know what your problem is, Phoebe?” Bob had asked a few days prior. Bob was technically her colleague now, no longer her dissertation advisor, no longer required to worry about her publication record. Yet he did. And Phoebe understood. Phoebe was worried, too. It had been ten years since she graduated, and she was still here at the same university, walking the same academic halls, teaching as an adjunct, never having moved on like the others in her program, never able to turn her dissertation into an actual book. She didn’t know what her problem was, and she hated how eager she was for Bob to tell her: How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her? That was her problem, she knew. But Bob said, “You think too much,” and it genuinely surprised her. Wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t that the entire point of being an academic?
IT WAS NOT until later in bed when Matt saw the text.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I didn’t see this. I’m sorry.”
He apologized but didn’t reach over to touch her. She was so embarrassed by that point, she changed the subject.
“We should book the Cornwall,” Phoebe said.
“Huh?” Matt asked.
“The hotel. For spring break. The Cornwall.”
“Was that the expensive one?”
“Very expensive.”
“Like remortgaging the house expensive?”
“Like, eight hundred a night.”
“That’s … too much, Phoebe.”
But wasn’t that the point? To be too much? To be reckless? To be extravagant? To do whatever the fuck they wanted because if they couldn’t have children, they could at least have fun spending the savings account that Phoebe had started ten years ago for their children?
Phoebe needed that. But she could feel that he no longer did. He had changed his mind today. He had won his award. He had his fun thing to look forward to, and he didn’t even have to buy it. He simply earned it, and how wonderful that must feel for him now—to have earned back his dignified place in the world.
“Why don’t we just go to the Ozarks?” Matt said. “We always like it there.”
Phoebe looked up at the dark ceiling. She felt a panicked feeling, like when she was a kid, lost in the supermarket looking around and realizing everybody in town sort of looked like her father. They all wore the same jeans.
“No,” Phoebe said.
They always went to the Ozarks. They honeymooned in the Ozarks and they took spring breaks in the Ozarks, and the hikes were long and beautiful things that made Phoebe feel proud enough to enjoy their evening happy hour. Phoebe had always felt her fun must be earned, her vacations must also be work, require a lot of gear.
But Phoebe was tired of work. Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversations with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal. That even without a baby, they would be happy. And even without a book, the ten years she had spent trying to write one had been worth it. Because it was getting harder to believe that. Most
nights, she looked back at all of her research, all of her spreadsheets, all of her journals and her papers and her injections and thought, What the fuck?
“The Ozarks are for families,” Phoebe said to Matt.
They were full of kids flying kites. Parents that wore matching hats and walked through the woods eating American flag ice pops.
“We’re a family,” Matt said.
“But we don’t have a family.”
“We have Harry.”
Harry was their cat, always curled up between them just before bed. They bought him ten years ago when they really wanted a dog but then decided it was not the right time for a dog. Yet they went to the shelter “just to browse” only to learn that there was no browsing at a shelter. There was a little orange kitten with its nose pressed up to the cage, going, Meowmeowmeowmeow.
Harry, Matt read off the adoption file, and it sounded wrong to them, overly human, but they spent a decade loving Harry more than they thought normal. They gave Harry treats for doing nothing at all and then wondered whether it was wrong to give Harry a treat for doing nothing at all. For just being a cat? “Why do I expect you to be more than a cat when all I want is for you to just be a cat?” Phoebe asked Harry, like he was a psychiatrist sitting between them, and often that’s what Harry looked like—so dignified, with one little paw crossed over the other like he was patiently waiting his turn to say something wise.
“Harry is not our family,” Phoebe reminded him. “He’s our psychiatrist.”
“Oh right. It’s such a blurry line.”
They used to crack themselves up by asking Harry deep, dark, existential questions. Am I self-sabotaging at work because I had no mother, Harry? And Matt would say, Absolutely, in Harry’s voice—she had no idea how to describe it other than it was the voice they both knew to be Harry’s.
“Harry thinks we should go to the Ozarks,” Matt said, and she softened for a moment. She always felt deeply connected to Matt when they were talking to each other like this, through Harry. It made her feel like maybe
the three of them really could be a family. “Harry wants to hike the canyon again.”
“Fine, but you can tell Harry that if we wind up staying in that really shitty motel one more time, I will kill myself,” Phoebe said.
They both laughed a little because Harry opened his eyes and looked at Phoebe like he had understood, but also because they knew that Phoebe was not the type to kill herself. Phoebe had taken a multivitamin every day since she was a child. Phoebe brushed her hair before bed. Phoebe was very normal, and her husband liked that. Being normal was his big dream— something her husband confessed on their very first date.
“Ever since I was a kid, I just knew I wanted to grow up and be normal,” he had joked. “But seriously. It’s true.” And Phoebe understood. Her childhood had been exceptionally lonely—with a dead mother and a depressed father and no siblings to talk to at night, which is why she started reading books. Fairy tales at first, because they were about girls just like her, girls whose mothers were killed off in one quick sentence. “Your mother was a wonderful woman who died giving birth to you,” was how her father put it one morning and she felt awful. She felt like she had ruined something just by existing, and she had. Her mother! That beautiful woman who was always hiking in all their photographs. And her father—he was in the picture, too. He was smiling and hiking through the Ozarks with his pregnant wife, and Phoebe had ached for that normal man she never got to know. The normal girl she never got to be.
“But why does being normal feel like a crime here?” Phoebe had asked Matt.
In graduate school, it had been embarrassing to be normal. Everyone Phoebe had met was on a mission to be spectacularly, deliciously weird, and she was impressed and confused by how her colleagues looked so good in socks and high heels. Phoebe could not wear things like that, could not push fashion boundaries, and she didn’t know why exactly, except for the reason that she never wanted anyone to know she was strange.
So, she wore jean shorts and Tevas as soon as the temperatures rose above fifty. She never dyed her hair and had no idea what to say when a poet brought her to a noise concert on a date except, This is a little noisy.
The poet kissed her at the end of the night, laughed in her mouth a little as he said, You’re so, like, normal, and it felt like a compliment at the time, but days of his silence later, she saw her collection of cardigans from Banana Republic lined up neatly in the same direction and knew it wasn’t.
“Well, good, because I’m very normal,” she had said to Matt. It was a relief not to feel like she had to buy a whole new wardrobe just to go to a pub with him.
“It’s settled then,” he said. “Where’s the preacher?”
And that’s how everything had felt for years—so wonderfully normal. They got married in a public park, invited only their closest friends and family, because they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling. The more wedding you need, the less happy you must be.
Phoebe truly believed this then. But now the utter simplicity of their lives felt crushing. When Matt reached over to touch her, Phoebe could see and feel the whole experience even before it started.
“I wish I saw your text earlier,” Matt said. “I really wish I did.”
When he leaned over to kiss her, she flinched at his tenderness. She hated his softness. She had been fantasizing, lately, about him doing terrible things to her. Things so awful she couldn’t ever tell him, because she knew it meant something was changing inside of her, some darkness was hardening into sludge. So, she just said, “I love you.”
THEY BOOKED A hotel in the Ozarks for March. And every day after, Matt was up early in a tie and then off to work. But Phoebe moved a little slower. Some mornings, she felt wildly emotional, and some mornings impenetrably numb. She didn’t know how to explain the contradiction to her new therapist when he asked. She kept saying, I feel … disconnected. No, I feel sad. No, I feel … and she would trail off and hope the therapist would fill in the blank, but he never did.
“I feel fucking crazy,” she said to Harry the night before her husband’s awards ceremony. Harry was the only one who knew how often she said fuck while grading papers. “I mean, seriously, what the fuck?”
When she proposed the Fairy Tale course, she thought it would be fun. But she was increasingly disturbed by each student paper that compared Rapunzel’s mother’s infertility to “a kind of poison.” She had forgotten about all the barren women in these stories or maybe she just never noticed them before. She had been too distracted by all the dead mothers.
“And why are all the mothers in fairy tales always dead?” Phoebe asked Matt, who was grading on the couch next to her.
“Because they were premodern. The mothers were often … dead.”
But it had to be about more than that. It seemed like the story wouldn’t even work if the mother wasn’t dead—the dead mother was an important plot point, a necessary precondition for the girl’s story. Because Cinderella never would have been at the center of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre, she thought). The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation, because that’s what the story was always about. That’s why she had liked them. Watch the good girl grow up, watch the girl try very hard to get everything she wants, then watch how happy she becomes.
The end.
And that had been Phoebe’s story, too—she had been so good. So quiet. So studious. Valedictorian of her high school, then college, and then went off to graduate school to make a life for herself, which she did. She fell in love, got a PhD, got married. Bought a house with her husband. And then, after five grueling cycles of IVF, when all seemed lost, she finally got pregnant using their last embryo. For ten weeks, she rubbed lotion on her belly, and she could feel it, how she was hurtling toward the happy ending that would make everything, even her mother’s death, seem like a necessary part of the story.
But then it was over, in under a sentence. One day she had been pregnant, and then the next day, she was not. She had felt the blood between her legs, and every time she remembered the blood, she thought, No, no, no, this can’t be how it ends. Because this ending made a mockery of her mother’s death. This ending was just tragic. More like a Russian novel, where all the characters go on a great wild adventure just to be killed off in the end.
“The Russians got it right,” Phoebe said the morning of the awards ceremony, and she loved that she could say things like this to Matt. “Maybe I just need to accept that my life is a Russian novel.”
“You forget I haven’t read the Russian novels,” Matt said, pouring coffee in his to-go mug.
“I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it’s written.”
“That’s true,” Matt said. “But you’re not at the end.”
Matt clearly wasn’t ready to be a character in a Russian novel. He wasn’t ready for his life to be a tragedy, albeit a beautiful one. He was off to work, where he was going to write his speech and pitch a new book to his editor about the philosophy of doing things, while Phoebe stayed at home to write. “Why are all the mothers dead?” she typed, but then felt too depressed to continue. So she got up and made an elaborate breakfast. She touched herself in bed and thought of her husband holding her against a wall by her neck, calling her terrible things. Then, she went for a walk and admired novelty door knockers. She stopped at Joe’s wine shop on the way home. They bought wine exclusively from Joe, a bald man with big thick muscles who asked a lot of questions about the English language every time she purchased something.
“Hey, Professor. Is conversate a word?” Joe asked. “Never heard of it. But girlie over here says it’s a word.”
He pointed to the young girlie, who was always sitting on the stool next to the register, all eyeliner and purple nails. There was always a young girlie —sometimes they worked in the store, and sometimes they just came to visit Joe and sit on a stool for hours because that’s what girlies seemed to like.
“Everything’s a word,” the girlie said. “If you say it enough. Isn’t that right, Dr. Stone?”
This girlie was a student at the university, dark brown hair, dark eyes. Studying psychology. She had never had Phoebe as a professor, but said she had “heard about” her.
“That’s true,” Phoebe said. “Say it for ten years, and it ends up in the dictionary.”
“Ten years,” Joe said. “That’s all it takes?”
Joe wanted Phoebe to like him because Joe wanted all women to like him. Liking him seemed to be the first step to fucking him. And sometimes, she liked Joe. When Joe was railing against the authoritarian undertones of popular politicians or watching a Disney movie on his computer and laughing at all the slapstick. But then she saw the girlie on his stool and the cup in front of the register that said PUSSY FUND.
Right then, it was half-full.
“That’s right,” Phoebe said.
Her husband never commented on the Pussy Fund after they left, as if it were not right to call out another man on his Pussy Fund, or like, if they actually called him out on it, they’d have to find another place to buy wine, and this one was really the most convenient with the best selection. So, she paid for the bottles, and she said, “See ya, Joe,” and she tried not to wonder if her husband ever dropped his spare change in the Pussy Fund when she was not there.
EVERY FEBRUARY, THE awards ceremony, and every year they went, and every time, Phoebe wore the same dress. A black Calvin Klein that she bought years ago for her job orientation. A dress that nobody ever complimented but nobody ever insulted. A dress designed not to be noticed.
She was surprised that it still fit, still made her look the way she always looked, and this depressed her. Tonight, she wanted to feel different. She wanted to walk into the awards ceremony and be noticed. Because if she wasn’t going to have children, she should at least have magnificent dresses. So she drove to the mall and didn’t stop shopping until the emerald dress caught her eye. The silk felt amazing, like cool water dripping down her body—why had she always been afraid to wear silk? To wear color? She looked good in emerald. It highlighted the red tones of her brown hair. The green specks of her eyes. Her olive skin.
She bought it without thinking, without wondering what her husband might think, what Bob might think, what Mia might think. That’s how much she loved it.
But before the dinner, when she put it on again, she felt ridiculous standing on her beige carpet next to her flannel sheets. The silk dress was too much. Five hundred dollars. And the dinner was going to be in the gymnasium. What was she thinking? It was floor-length, a dress meant for a wedding, not for an awards ceremony at a cash-strapped university in Missouri.
She put the black dress on again. She didn’t want to embarrass her husband. She knew she had been embarrassing her husband lately. She knew she had been a little sloppy, sometimes too drunk when he came home.
“Did you write today?” he asked her when he returned to pick her up. He suggested they take one car.
“Yes,” she lied.
She looked at herself in the mirror. There she was again, she thought, and yet, she felt like she was somewhere far away, still in the fertility clinic, watching Matt shake hands with the doctor. Or maybe she was at the River Ouse, watching Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones. She wondered how many stones Woolf used. How cold was the water?
“You look beautiful,” he said, and when he said it, she felt it.
She combed her hair and off they went to dinner.
THE DINNER WAS an elaborate affair for a gymnasium. The university paid five grand a year to bring in a guest speaker, some celebrity scholar who could talk both about the crisis in the Middle East and the value of a liberal arts education or the labor conditions in China and the value of a liberal arts education or the recession and the value of a liberal arts education.
“You really look so beautiful,” her husband said again before they entered the gym. He seemed to be telling both of them. He put his arm around her and just like that, they were husband and wife again.
They drank white wine and ate chicken marsala with steamed vegetables. They sat at a table of people just like her husband. People with real jobs. Bob. Susan. Brian. Mia.
Then, a series of speeches and applauses for the various achievements of other people and then, chocolate lava cake. They ate the cake and talked about how the cake was not very lavalike. They talked about their students, their jobs as a whole, and the consensus at the table was that they were very rewarding but also very hard.
“Hard?” Bob’s wife asked. She was a surgeon at a local hospital. “All Bob ever does in his office is drink German beers and listen to Bach.”
“And not to mention your summers off!” said Tom. With his doctor’s schedule, Tom and Mia could only take a one-week vacation each year, and then they talked about that vacation for the rest of the year. “So, no complaining, you professors!”
They laughed. Tom was right. Their jobs were wonderful, her husband confessed with his hands up.
The lights dimmed and the student choir began singing from the stage with candles. But even in the dark, Phoebe could feel the truth: the gym underneath her feet. The foul line that cut across the dance floor. The way they looked at her like she was just Matt’s wife. Especially the ones who didn’t really know her, like Susan from the philosophy department who forgot her name every year. She always had the same question for Phoebe: “And what do you do?”
“I teach,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe actually teaches here,” her husband said.
“Oh wonderful, what do you teach?” Susan asked.
“Pretty much whatever Bob asks me to teach,” Phoebe said. “Mostly the survey lit courses that all freshmen are required to take. Everything from the beginning of literature to the internet.”
“But what’s your field?” Susan asked.
“Victorian literature,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe actually teaches a seminar on the fairy tale right now,” Matt added. “And she’s finishing a book on Jane Eyre.”
For ten years, Phoebe has been finishing her book on Jane Eyre.
Then more awards. When her husband’s name was called, he smiled. He put down his napkin. He walked onstage. He took his award, and everybody at the table clapped and smiled at him. Mia leaned into Phoebe’s shoulder.
“You must be proud,” Mia said.
She was. Look at my husband, she thought, as he took his place behind the podium. He gave a short speech about the value of a liberal arts education, but Phoebe barely heard a word. Look at him, she thought, as he returned to the table smiling. My husband. He sat back down, and everybody congratulated him, while he tried very hard not to appear too pleased.
“They’ve got to give it to everybody at some point,” he said, which felt like a small betrayal, because this had been their joke. “I bet you even Bob will get it one day.”
Bob laughed.
“The students just love him,” Mia said, and it was something about the way she said it, as if she knew the students better than Phoebe. As if Mia and Matt occupied a house together without her.
But she didn’t say anything. She felt ill and said, “Excuse me.” She went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror.
Your husband thinks you are beautiful, she thought, until she felt better.
But before she returned to the table, she saw her husband talking to Mia. Mia threw her head back to laugh, and her husband laughed, too, opened his mouth wide, wider than Phoebe had seen in months. Even when they watched TV and Phoebe curled into him, he kept his mouth pressed shut.
But in this moment with Mia, she could see the old Matt, the one she first met years ago in the computer room, who was light and funny and happy. And Mia looked happy, too. Something she had not really seemed since Tom got depressed years ago.
Phoebe sat back down at the table, and all of a sudden Mia’s beauty seemed different. It was not just a basic fact. It was a situation.
PHOEBE DIDN’T BRING Mia up until they were home, back inside the house.
“It doesn’t seem fair that Mia can have three books and also be so goddamned beautiful,” Phoebe said. She hoped it sounded like a joke.
“Oh,” Matt said. “Yeah. She is a good laugh.”
“I didn’t say that. I said she was beautiful.”
“What are you doing?” he asked. “I thought we had a nice time tonight.”
“We did,” she said.
He kissed her. “You looked beautiful tonight.”
He wanted to have sex; she could tell. But she didn’t want to. Or maybe she didn’t want him to be sweet in that moment. In her fantasies, he was never sweet to her anymore. In her fantasies, it was no longer even her that he was fucking, though the therapist had insisted the fantasy was still good news.
“It’s good that it at least involves your husband,” he had said.
As she went to undress, her husband said, “No, keep the dress on.” He took off his shirt, his pants, and when he walked toward her, she imagined him walking into Joe’s wine shop, seeing the girlie sitting on the stool like usual. She’s doing homework for her class. No, she doesn’t know where Joe is.
“Anything new today?” her husband asks, and the girlie says, “Let me show you what we’ve got.” She is bringing her husband to the back to show him the latest shipment of wine. She bends over to pick up a few bottles and her husband walks toward her, puts his hands on her waist, and centers her the way he does when he really wants to fuck, when he wants her to just be tits and ass and ponytail. He pulls on her hair, and that’s when her thighs clench tight around him—and it is only then, when Phoebe pretended that she didn’t know her husband at all, that she could come.
After they had sex, they couldn’t look each other in the eye. She took off her black dress and her husband poured himself a glass of whiskey and he didn’t bother with ice cubes and he went outside to look at the stars because that’s what people have done since the beginning of time. And still, Phoebe did not think it was the end. She couldn’t really conceive of the end. She thought that in a few weeks, they’d go to the Ozarks for spring break, and then maybe, just maybe, she would try IVF one more time, because who knows? Maybe it would work the sixth time. Maybe the doctors were wrong.
But a few weeks later, in March, the world shut down and they did nothing at all. They sat in the house. They taught through their computers.
They looked out windows a lot. She cried too much, and he drank too much, and sometimes, she worried he might leave her. Sometimes, she wanted to leave. But when she imagined herself leaving, her husband always begged her to stay. He got on his knees, pressed his face against her thighs, and clutched her like a child. Please, Phoebe, he said in the fantasy. Please. I need you. Then he explained all the ways he needed her, and how the kids needed her, too. And so, she stayed. Every time she imagined leaving her husband, she always ended up staying. It was a fantasy, in which there were children and the children always needed her. She had to imagine leaving only so she could imagine staying. She had to imagine herself at the door and her husband shouting, “No, Phoebe, no!” like she was a dog. And she really didn’t know why, in her fantasy, she wanted to be treated like this.
“SO, HOW WAS your day?” Matt asked.
It was August, the night before their fall semester began. Their last dinner together, but Phoebe didn’t know it yet. Maybe Matt didn’t know it yet, either. Maybe during that dinner, he was still deciding. Maybe if she had said something more interesting in response, something other than, “Good,” he might have stayed.
“Good!” he said. “Good. Did you write today?”
“A little.”
That morning, Phoebe tried so hard to write. Their summer break was ending, and she had nothing to show for it, so she set up her coffee and her computer and closed the blinds and put out two fingers of whiskey and one cigarette on her desk, her future reward for finishing a page, and then she finished, and she slowly sipped on the whiskey, and she lit the cigarette but didn’t smoke it. She just liked the smell, the feeling of holding it between her fingers, and it started to feel like she was in her office not to write but to drink and pretend to smoke.
Matt left his office, a door slam, and she put out the cigarette. She finally understood what her advisor meant when he said, “Don’t combine your good habits with your bad habits.” When Bob had said it years ago,
she only had good habits. She ran 3.1 miles every other day, she drank ginger shots at the local café, she always did her laundry on Sundays, she planned her courses in June before the summer got away from her, and these good things had always been enough. They had been at the center of her life. Her house. Her students. Her research. Her husband, her physical tether to this world from the day she met him. But now they could not even look each other in the eye when they asked each other questions.
“Were you smoking in your office earlier?” Matt asked.
“No,” she said, and it was not technically a lie. But Matt didn’t understand. Matt said he could smell the smoke, said it was bad for her body, which ironically made her want to smoke. For years all she had been thinking about was what she should put in her body to make it a super womb, and she was tired of it. Fuck my body, she thought, but did not say it.
“How was your day?” she asked, and felt like one of the awful characters in a T. S. Eliot poem.
What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?
Yet when Matt left her later that night, it truly did surprise her. Nothing had ever shocked her more. He did what he always did before sleep. Took off his belt and rolled it into a ball. Took a shower and then put on the kind of junk shirt he only wore around the house. But then he put on jeans, slipped on his belt, and packed a bag. “I am in love with Mia,” he kept saying, and she didn’t really believe it. This was not how her fantasy went.
But this wasn’t her fantasy. It was his, and she didn’t know how it worked. She just watched him, waited for him to drop his bag, but he didn’t.
The golden tassel lamps of the Roaring Twenties make Phoebe want to drink before she should be drinking, and it’s ridiculous that she still thinks things like that, still tries to impose rules on herself like, I should not be drinking, when she is hours from taking her own life.
She pours herself a full glass of the German chocolate wine. She refuses to spend her last hours on this planet worrying. She has spent too much time worrying about what to drink, where to vacation, what to wear, what to say, was it hotter to write cum or come, and what was the point? What did it matter how she spelled it? Her husband left anyway.
Phoebe takes a sip of wine. She opens the drapes. They are heavy and teal, fit for a queen or a movie star. They could block out all the world’s light if she wanted them to, but Phoebe wants to see the ocean. Phoebe has never been to the ocean before, a fact that appalled most people but charmed her husband. He once liked that Phoebe did not run around feeling the pressure to conquer each worldly experience.
Yet Phoebe thought it was wrong to leave the world before seeing the ocean, the way she thought it was wrong for Matt to ask for a divorce thirty miles away on Zoom. He should have returned from Mia’s house one last time to remind himself of the beauty of their world. The trim he had hand- painted himself. But it was five months into the pandemic when he asked for the divorce, and he said he couldn’t return. Matt, Mia, and her baby were already a “pod.” He sat in front of a shelf lined with Mia’s trinkets from Paris like they were his and said, “I’m so sorry.” And “Are you okay?” And “Please tell me you’re okay.”
Phoebe sets the cat’s painkillers on the nightstand. She looks out at the ocean spread before her. From up here, the water looks calm. Like a flat and reliable rug, as if it knows nothing about what is to come. Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future—foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave.
But so be it. She picks up the phone.
“Hello,” she says. “May I place an order for room service, please?”
Phoebe wants to have a big, decadent meal before she dies. She wants to have lobster and crab. She wants to eat oysters and drink wine and crack a crème brûlée top one last time.
“Unfortunately, we’ve suspended room service for the opening reception tonight,” Pauline says.
“The opening reception?” Phoebe asks. “That’s what she’s calling it?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience,” Pauline says. She sounds truly devastated. “Please understand we are a little understaffed from Covid.”
“Right, okay,” Phoebe says, but she feels panicked by the news. “There’s really nothing at all?”
“Well, there’s food down at the reception,” Pauline says.
Phoebe hangs up. She can’t go downstairs. She definitely can’t go to the reception. She did not come all this way just to watch happy people eat expensive food. And she refuses to have her last meal be imitation Oreos from the wedding bag or Doritos from the vending machine. There’s something just too sad about that.
So, fine, she will not eat. What’s the point anyway? Why take perfectly good oysters down with her?
But then she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She had planned on eating for an hour or two. She had planned on the meal feeling like the final event of her life. She sits on the bed and stares at the water and it’s an odd feeling—this having nothing at all to do except feel the ocean breeze on her face. For the past ten years, there has been too much to do and not enough time. There was the dissertation that needed to become a book, the research that needed to become PowerPoints, the sex that needed to become a baby, and the students that needed her to run their lives. That’s how her student Adam put it yesterday morning when he came into her office and announced that Phoebe was now in charge of his life.
“But I’m not your advisor,” Phoebe told him.
“You’re not?”
“No,” Phoebe said.
The conversation would have ended there, had her husband and Mia not walked into her office, which was also the photocopier room and the coffee
station. The university never built the adjunct faculty lounge—the committee went bust after pandemic budget cuts. Then Bob had given away her old office to the new hire after Phoebe chose to continue teaching virtually during the second year of the pandemic. And now that she was back, Bob was at a loss. There was nowhere else to put her except next to the Keurig and the pound cake that Jane the admin brought in.
Mia and Matt looked shocked to see Phoebe there but then quickly said, “Hello,” as if she were any other colleague in the department, and Phoebe could not think. Could not breathe. Could not say hello. She just stared at her student Adam, focused intensely on his nose as she said, “But maybe I can still help you?”
“Well, I’m thinking of dropping out of college,” Adam said. She heard her husband pour the two coffees, and Mia put in the cream. “I want to make pants.”
“You want to make pants?” Phoebe asked, and she did not know what a person asked next, so she said, “What kind of pants?”
Her husband stirred in the sugar, and maybe her husband was looking at her, maybe he recognized the black Calvin Klein dress she wore just so he might remember the last time he fucked her in it. But she could not bring herself to look.
“Any kind, all the pants,” Adam said.
Her husband and Mia put the lids on their cups.
“But can’t you make pants and also be in school at the same time?” Phoebe asked, and then her husband and Mia were gone, and Adam said, “Maybe,” and Phoebe felt like she might throw up or faint.
After, she packed up her books and went to class where she tried to teach a John Donne poem, but her Brit Lit students weren’t fans.
“Why is the speaker being, like, ravished by God?” a student asked.
Everyone laughed. They were waiting for Phoebe to say something, for context, a frame in which to put all the confusing and strange things.
“It is, essentially, a love letter to the Lord,” Phoebe said.
“Why would anyone write a love letter to the Lord?” another student asked.
“Oh my God, it’s not a love letter,” the girl said. “He’s basically asking for God to rape him.”
“That’s what I got from the poem, too,” another kid said. “But I’m glad you said it.”
This made a few kids snicker, which made another student raise her hand and proclaim that there was “nothing funny about rape, not in the 1600s, not now, and not even when it happened to a dead white man.”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Phoebe clarified.
“Well, of course it’s not funny, the man is being raped, Dr. Stone. By God!”
“So is it like, a gay poem? Is God gay?”
“God is like, famously not gay.”
“Why are you all laughing? It’s seriously not funny!”
“I’m not trying to be funny! You know I’m gay!”
Phoebe stumbled backward into the desk.
“It’s about knowing you want to be better,” Phoebe says. “But not knowing how to fix yourself. That’s why he’s begging the Lord to force him to be better, to fix him.”
“That’s like, messed up,” a student said, and Phoebe agreed.
“It is,” she said, and Phoebe can’t remember much after that except one of the boys standing at her desk, saying, “You okay, Dr. Stone?”
“I’m fine,” Phoebe said.
The students seemed completely unchanged as they left, except the girl who was still ranting about the poem to a friend, “I just don’t think anybody should teach that poem.”
Phoebe went back to her office that wasn’t really an office. She was not fine—but maybe she could be fine. She just needed a cup of coffee. And to make copies of a Whitman poem before her Intro to Lit class. She didn’t have time to do it yesterday—she had been too busy, too overwhelmed, getting her nails done, touching up her roots, getting herself ready for her big return to campus. Was the black dress too much for the first day or not enough? she wondered, because she hadn’t seen her husband since the divorce hearing, and a tiny part of her still felt like if she wore the black dress, it would turn them back into husband and wife again.
But there was only Mia—this time at the photocopier. There Mia would always be, Phoebe realized.
“Paper jam,” Mia said, and Phoebe nodded because a paper jam was nobody’s fault. It just happened sometimes, which is exactly what her husband had said about the affair. It just happened.
But why? Phoebe couldn’t bring herself to ask her husband this. Because she knew why. She looked at Mia in her big wooden earrings and her cropped black jeans and an oversize pink blazer that somehow made her seem skinnier. It made Phoebe feel foolish to think that her husband would be wooed back by a simple A-line black dress. Was this why it was so hard to be mad at Mia? Because Phoebe knew on some level that Mia was just better? Always standing there in her big earrings, making Phoebe wonder why Phoebe always had to be herself.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said.
Mia got down on her knees. In Phoebe’s fantasies, this was how Mia always apologized to her: literally groveled at her feet. Phoebe couldn’t believe it was actually happening and felt herself get excited.
But then Mia added, “I’m sorry, this will only take a minute,” and it made Phoebe so angry. Because a paper jam always took longer than a minute. Phoebe knew this. Mia knew this. Mia started opening up all the drawers the machine told her to open, but even then, Mia couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know where drawer five was, and this is when Phoebe normally would have helped her look for drawer five, but she refused.
“This is what you’re sorry about?” Phoebe asked.
Mia’s eyes flickered over to the admin’s desk, as if to suggest Phoebe not do this here, so close to Jane’s pound cake, and Phoebe could suddenly understand why affairs ended with someone dead. Her rage felt ruinous, too big for the hum of this small, quiet office.
“You slept with my husband,” Phoebe said, not so loud to be yelling but loud enough for Jane to hear.
“Look, I’m sorry I hurt you,” Mia whispered. “I’m sorry it happened the way it did. But I’m not sorry it happened. I can’t be. I love him.”
“No, I love him,” Phoebe said. “He’s my husband.”
It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document. This was not how it was supposed to go. In her fantasy, Phoebe doesn’t ever mention her husband. Instead, Phoebe delivers an impassioned and loud monologue about what an awful woman Mia is, the biggest traitor of all the traitors, an embarrassment to women, and then Phoebe walks out of the office, out of the building, feeling victorious, never to return again.
“He’s not your husband,” Mia said. “Not anymore.”
Phoebe felt crazy. She felt like she was a kid, crying over a bath her father wouldn’t let her take because he had to go to work. “Fine, Phoebe, have a tantrum, see what good that will do,” her father had said. And that’s when she learned it did nothing except make her father leave a room.
“I thought you were my friend,” Phoebe said calmly. She was trying to compose herself. She couldn’t bear it if Mia walked out, if she left her alone with this horrible feeling.
“I was your friend,” Mia said. “And I will always regret damaging our friendship.”
“Damaging? You ruined it. You ruined everything. My life. My job. My marriage.”
“I really do like you, Phoebe. And I hope we can somehow be friends at the end of this. But I did not ruin your marriage. That is not on me. The only reason Matt fell in love with me was because your marriage was already over.”
As if to conclude her argument, Mia pulled out the piece of paper. Mia solved the jam, but it was too late. Class had started five minutes ago. Phoebe was already divorced. Phoebe had signed the final papers. There was nothing her anger could do here.
The door opened. Stan, the Americanist, took one look at her black dress and said, “Wowwee, Phoebe, nice dress!”
She didn’t know what else to do but say, “Thanks.”
Then Mia snuck out of the office with her papers, and Phoebe stood there for a moment, feeling utterly bereft and flattened, like land right after a bomb hits. She walked to class empty-handed, said hello to her students, and yes, she understood why they never said hello back—a lesson Phoebe
learned in yoga class last month when the instructor said hello, and everyone waited for someone else to do it. Everyone always hoped it was someone else who would be bold. They were like Phoebe.
But Phoebe was sick of them. Sick of herself. Sick of everything.
She walked out of the class without a word, got in her car, and drove home. By the time she walked into her kitchen, her hands were shaking. Something was wrong. She called her therapist, thinking he might help, but he sounded wrong, too.
“Listen, before we have another session, there’s something you need to know,” he said, and why did he sound just like her husband before he left?
“I have thought long and hard about this, Phoebe, but unfortunately, I am going to have to drop your new health insurer,” her therapist said. “They’re just too unethical to do business with, and I refuse to work that way.”
Then he reminded her that what he was doing was setting a boundary, like this might be a learning moment for her.
“You’ll have to pay out of pocket for this session, and all future sessions, if you want to go forward,” he added.
She hung up on him. She couldn’t afford to go forward. She got small alimony payments from Matt, but they were only enough to cover the new insurance payments she made ever since losing coverage after the divorce. A thousand dollars a month, just for catastrophic. Trying to stay alive was starting to bankrupt her, and even though Phoebe had been as good a saver as she was a researcher, the children’s savings fund was starting to run out. She was going to have to apply to teaching jobs all over again, which she already knew was hopeless, because she had tried it last August.
So she was going to have to sell the house. It was the only solution. But she couldn’t bear to sell the house. The house was the only thing she had left. And Harry.
“Assuming you take United,” she joked, and at least she could still joke. At least she still had Harry. Where was Harry anyway? She rattled his bottle of painkillers, which always made Harry come running because the pills were flavored like tuna. But Harry didn’t come running, and she knew. Before she found him in the basement, curled up into himself, she knew.
She was too distraught to bury him. Instead, she just left Harry there, drove to Joe’s, got mind-blisteringly drunk, and woke up the next morning with such a headache, such a weight on her chest, she knew her life was over.
But still, it was Tuesday. The second day of the semester. She had another Intro to Lit at ten-thirty. She made toast. She looked over her old lecture notes on Leaves of Grass. She saw the scribbles of her past self in the margins next to the lines, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death … Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” She had always secretly thought those lines were bullshit until that morning when she held up the gray blouse in front of the mirror. No, she wouldn’t put on that blouse. She wouldn’t go to work. Why bother? She could already see the whole day— the whole long and lonely life—before it happened.
Whitman was right. How lucky it would be to die, she thought—to just be the dirt. To just be a plant. To be made beautiful again by becoming part of the earth.
It is a lovely way to think about death. It’s circular. And she always loved circular endings in literature, even if they were completely unrealistic. Probably why she was the only one in her Victorian literature class who actually liked the ending of Jane Eyre. She liked the endings of all marriage plots. The books were orderly and deliberate. They succeeded on their own terms. The endings always reflected the beginnings. The authors had powerful control of the narratives. The deaths were put into a kind of cosmic order that made everybody feel better about being alive, because they happened offstage, in the South of Italy or at the seaside, where characters were given the grace and dignity to die on beds more beautiful than their own.
She put down the blouse. She looked at Harry’s painkillers, and she booked a room at the Cornwall.
She sits on the canopy bed and tries to relax, but being relaxed about her death is proving to be difficult, even on this king-sized pillow-top. She still feels like she should be doing something significant. She still feels too much like herself in her head, worrying about all the small things that are already ruining her beautiful ending, like the blood on the bride’s dress. The sound of the toilet flushing next door. The smell of the air conditioner, not to mention the wedding people gathering on the patio below.
The bride’s opening reception has begun.
She puts on the headphones of her old Discman to drown out the people talking below. But the CD is so scratched, the music skips. Instead of making her feel calm, it makes her anxious. So she takes them off, goes out to the balcony, and lights a cigarette.
This time, she actually smokes it. She hopes that it will make sitting on a chair seem more elevated than just sitting on a chair. Takes one puff like she’s posing for a painting. Woman Smoking and Drinking While Having Some Thoughts, she’d call it.
But when she blows the smoke out into the salty air, she starts coughing so hard, it burns her lungs.
“Shit,” she says. Not a good feeling. “Ugh. This is truly awful.”
Yet she takes another puff, because when she imagined her death, she imagined herself smoking. She imagined it would work like a metronome keeping the time. Keeping her steady. Because she has nothing to keep her steady. No dinner to eat, no music to enjoy, no luggage to unpack, no husband to call, no book to finish, no counters to clean, no hormone shots to inject, no vacations to research, no future life to organize into spreadsheets. There is no more time left and so there is weirdly no urgency for anything.
She smokes the rest of the cigarette slowly. She does not want to feel rushed. She does not want to go out frantic and through a window like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, a scene that upset her so much, it became the only book in graduate school that she never finished reading.
Her stomach growls. She hopes she doesn’t get too hungry to kill herself. She takes another sip of the chocolate wine. At least the wine is
partly chocolate, she thinks. At least I have this balcony. She watches the waves in the distance start to gather, but they never get large enough to break. Sort of like the jazz from the reception below—the notes rising and falling and rising and falling but never coming to an end.
She leans over the edge to get a better look at the reception. She’s curious, she admits. She’s always loved a wedding, will watch any TV show or read any book to the end if it promises a wedding. That’s how she got through those long novels in graduate school, reading hundreds of pages just to watch people get married.
She scans for the bride but sees only High Bun and Neck Pillow, picking up long-stemmed drinks from a tray. The Jims standing under some fairy lights, arguing with faces of men who want to kill each other, and it surprises her when they break into laughter.
At least I’m on the top floor, she thinks—up on the balcony from where she can stare and pass judgment without being noticed, like the seagulls that circle high above. From here, she can see it all, even what it will be like to be dead, because that is one of the few gifts that depression gives her: aerial vision. She already knows what the world will look like without her, because last August, she sat at home while everyone returned to their offices, their routines, their roles—and she knows the bride will be able to do this, too. The bride may gasp at the news of Phoebe’s suicide, but then she’ll take a walk down the beach to calm herself. She will feel the breeze blow her hair back. She will be grateful for the sun. For her champagne. She will laugh and lean on her groom’s shoulder, beautiful hair falling into her face, and Phoebe will be forgotten by sunset.
“Just get on with it,” Phoebe tells herself.
But then there is a knock on the door, as if someone heard her. She puts the cigarette out quickly, closes the balcony door, and the feeling of hiding her cigarette is strangely familiar. It makes her hope that her husband is at the door, though of course he’s not. He doesn’t even know where she is.
“Are you seriously smoking?” the bride asks.
The bride walks into the room as if it is her own. The bride’s dress is bloodless now—another white one, but gauzier and with dramatic fluttery sleeves.
“Sure, yes, please do come in,” Phoebe says.
The bride’s hand is wrapped in gauze, and Phoebe wonders who wrapped it. Gary, the groom with the barely receding hairline? Her loving mother? Is the bride the kind of woman who has a loving mother? Yes, Phoebe decides. Phoebe has become good over the years at detecting who has a loving mother and who does not, because Phoebe believes a loving mother gives a person a kind of confidence to exist that Phoebe never quite had. Phoebe could never burst into someone else’s room and give orders like it’s her own.
“You can’t smoke,” the bride says.
The bride talks louder than she needs to, the way actors on the stage are present but locked and preserved behind the fourth wall, and for the first time, Phoebe wonders what the bride actually does for a living. Is she an actress? Or maybe she is an airline attendant, good at announcing things to forty-seven passengers.
“Actually, it’s one of the few things left that I can do,” Phoebe says.
As if to prove this, Phoebe walks back out to the balcony.
“Actually, no,” the bride says, following her. “This is a nonsmoking room.”
“Good thing I’m out here on the balcony, then.”
“How did you get a real balcony, by the way?” the bride asks, like this is the real betrayal. “My balcony is just like, the suggestion of a balcony.”
She pauses to study the view.
“I mean, you can see the whole ocean from here! Why on earth wouldn’t Pauline put me in this room? I specifically requested a shoreline room.”
“Well, a shoreline room presumably faces … the shoreline.”
“But I thought shoreline meant … that you could see the shore.”
“Shoreline refers to the line where the ocean meets the land.”
Phoebe waits for Lila to blush, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. She just gets angrier.
“Who on earth would want a shoreline room then?” Lila asks. “Why would they even advertise a shoreline view like it’s something special? If I
wanted to look at houses, I’d just stay home and look out my own window at houses. You know?”
Phoebe lights another cigarette, hoping the smoke will make the bride leave. But she doesn’t budge.
“The balcony is part of the room, by the way,” the bride says. “So you can’t actually smoke on it.”
Phoebe feels the sudden urge to argue. She has a contrarian impulse that stirred within her during class or at a party when anybody had the audacity to talk in absolutes. She never acted on it, though, because she never wanted to be accused of talking in absolutes. Those people were her least favorite.
But what does she care now? Might as well go out showing the world what she got from all those years of studying.
“The word balcony is borrowed from Italian balcone,” Phoebe says. “Derived from medieval Italian balco, which originally meant ‘scaffold.’ And that comes from a Proto-Germanic word balkô, which probably meant something like ‘beam.’”
The bride stands there, confused.
“So, taken all together, we know that the word balcony originally referred to the beam or structure that holds up the balcony.” Phoebe releases a long, slow exhale of smoke before her final conclusion. “That’s how far outside the room it is. The balcony is not even the balcony.”
“Who are you?” the bride asks.
The bride sounds genuinely impressed, and Phoebe will admit that she has not lost the capacity to enjoy this kind of moment. Knowledge is power, all her teachers told her as a kid, which is why she spent the best part of her youth in quiet corners of libraries, reading books as quickly as she could. She wanted to be stronger, bigger. She knew that she would never be taller than her father, never be bigger or stronger, and that this was the only way to one day see beyond her father’s house.
“I’m a Victorianist,” Phoebe says.
“Huh?”
“A nineteenth centuryist,” Phoebe rephrases, thinking it might make more sense to the bride.
“I still don’t know what that means,” the bride says.
“I research nineteenth-century literature.”
“And people pay you for this?”
“Not well.”
“And the nineteenth century is really the 1800s?”
“Right.”
“I always have the hardest time with that.”
“A lot of my students do.”
“But I’m twenty-eight. I work at an art gallery,” the bride says. “I should know that.”
Phoebe is surprised enough by this new information to want to ask her first question of the bride.
“Are you a curator?” Phoebe asks.
“That’s my mother,” the bride says. “I’m her assistant. But one day, I’m supposed to be the curator.”
Lila waits as if Phoebe should ask follow-up questions, but Phoebe doesn’t want to know anything more.
“Though honestly, after I get married, I think I’m going to quit,” the bride says. “I’m just not very good at it.”
She confesses to getting Bs all the way through her art history degree in college.
“I never understood why my mother was so obsessed with art. I studied it for four years, and honestly, I get it even less now. Like seriously, what’s the point of it?”
Again, the bride looks at Phoebe and waits.
“Are you asking me?” Phoebe asks.
“Have you never been in a conversation before?”
“It’s been a while, actually.”
“I can tell.”
“And to be honest, I’m not sure I get the point, either.”
When Phoebe left for graduate school, she had very clear and beautiful ideas about art, how art is what elevates us, art is the magnificence wrung from the ugly dish towel of existence. Art helps us feel alive. And this had been true for Phoebe—Phoebe used to read books and feel astounded. She
used to walk around galleries, inspired by the beautiful human urge to create. But that was years ago. Now she can’t stand the sight of her books. Can’t bear the thought of reading hundreds of pages just to watch Jane Eyre get married again.
“Well, that’s a relief to hear,” the bride says, like they’re old cousins again. “Nobody ever admits that. Everyone at the gallery walks around like, Oh, my, look at this white canvas. Look at what this painter has done with all this white space. He has chosen not to paint it! He has defied the conventions of painting by not actually painting! Isn’t that bold? Doesn’t that make you want to pay thousands of dollars for it? And some of the people are like, Yes, yes, it does, actually.”
Phoebe can feel how easy it would be to slip into this casual conversation about the false promises of art. She can feel herself wanting to rant about literature and how it didn’t end up saving her in the end, but the sun is starting to set. Phoebe is halfway done with her second cigarette. She looks back at the pills on the nightstand.
“What did you come in here for again?” Phoebe asks.
The bride seems offended by the directness of the question.
“I came to tell you to stop smoking,” the bride says with that edge to her voice again. “And to warn you that if you don’t change your mind about…”
But she can’t say the words.
“Killing myself?” Phoebe says.
“Yes. Then I am going to tell the front desk.”
“They can’t make a paying guest leave because the guest is sad.” Phoebe is amused by the thought. “‘I am so sorry, but we’ve all had a vote, and we’ve come to the conclusion that you are too sad to be here.’”
“You’re not sad, you’re suicidal,” the bride says. “You should leave the hotel and seek help immediately.”
“Tried that.”
After her husband left, Phoebe tried so many things. She applied to forty-two teaching jobs. She took a virtual painting class. She purchased a brand-new bike with cute handlebars like her virtual therapist suggested. Go have real experiences, the virtual therapist commanded. Go read real books on your condition. So she read real books on depression. Books by real,
depressed people. She journaled in real journals. She downloaded a meditation app. Ate bananas for breakfast every day. Started Lexapro, then stopped, because it didn’t make her feel any better, just made it impossible to orgasm. And that was the only time she felt relief from herself—in those few moments when she could make herself come, thinking of her husband being a terrible man.
But orgasming didn’t save her, because after, she was still herself. She sobbed. She signed up for online dating sites, exchanged texts with a man who called himself Transatlantic and talked a lot about his job in biotech. But then Transatlantic met someone else, someone in real life, he explained, and she deleted her profile, turned on the TV, and basically never shut it off.
“Then at least wait until the wedding week is over!” the bride demands.
“I’m not rescheduling,” Phoebe says. “This is not a dentist appointment.”
“I seriously don’t get it. What’s the rush? You’re going to be dead forever, you know. You might as well wait a week.”
Because if she doesn’t do it tonight, Phoebe knows she will lose the feeling. She knows this is the kind of thing that requires a certain feeling. And if she loses that feeling, she will have to wake up tomorrow and go home. She will have to clean up the crumbs on the counter. She will have to bury Harry. Then, she will have to drive to school in her gray blouse and watch her husband get coffee every morning with another woman.
“It’s not like you’re going to live for much longer,” the bride says. “Might as well wait it out.”
“Do you know something about my medical history that I don’t?” Phoebe asks.
“You’re middle-aged, obviously. And you smoke. And drink. I’d give you like, twenty years, tops.”
“That’s really encouraging. Thanks.”
“My father was perfectly healthy, used to run every other day and take these giant green vitamins from Switzerland, and he didn’t even make it to seventy.”
“Maybe it was the vitamins that killed him,” Phoebe says.
“It was colon cancer.”
Phoebe knows she is supposed to say “I’m sorry for your loss.” But she can’t feel sorry for anyone else right now. So she doesn’t say anything.
“How does it not scare you?” the bride asks. “I’m literally terrified of dying. All I worried about for the last two years was catching Covid and dying before I could have my wedding.”
“Well, that explains it! I already had my wedding,” Phoebe says. “It seems I’m cleared to go.”
“But what if you go to Hell?”
“There’s no such thing as Hell,” Phoebe says.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what I believe,” Phoebe says. One of the few things Nietzsche wrote that she agreed with in graduate school. “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Lila says. “I always worry so much about going to Hell.”
“Who did you murder?”
“Nobody,” Lila says. “But don’t you think I’m just like, a little too rich? All we ever did in Catholic school was talk about how impossible it was for rich people like me to get into Heaven. And then they had us write this paper on Dante’s Inferno, which I actually got an A on, but for years, I had nightmares about being stuck in his different versions of Hell. It got so bad, I started seeing the guidance counselor about it.”
She said her dread of Hell was extra annoying, because despite going to a Catholic boarding school, her parents didn’t raise her to have any particular religion. Her parents couldn’t decide which one. Yes, she went to Portsmouth Abbey but only because that’s where her Catholic father went to school. And her mother was from a family of Protestants who dated back to the Mayflower and whenever Lila came home for the holidays, her mother whispered things about the Catholics being full of shit.
“And I was like, Hey thanks, this isn’t confusing at all,” Lila says.
The nightmares went on for years.
“They were really creepy, too. Like once I was stuck running around a racetrack getting beaten with my own leg. Another time I was turned into
the oak tree outside my father’s house and I bled every time my mother plucked one of my leaves.”
Phoebe releases the smoke so slowly in the air, it’s almost beautiful. She is getting good, she thinks.
“That’s what happens to the suicides in Dante,” Lila clarifies. “Except it’s not my mother plucking the leaves, obviously. It’s like, a bunch of random harpies.”
“So I’ve read,” Phoebe says.
“Then how can you take that risk? I’m not saying Dante is right. But I mean, what if Dante is right?”
Phoebe learned trying to explain her feelings to her husband that you can’t explain this kind of darkness to someone who has never felt it. And the bride is very much like her husband. Phoebe can tell by the way she dresses, everything so tailored to her body. Up close, Phoebe can see that the romantic tangle of braids is actually a calculated system with the exact same number of braids on each side of her head. She is like a character from an Austen novel, sometimes disappointed in the sequence of events, but never psychically destroyed by them. Never paralyzed by existential horror. Always able to find relief from a long walk through the countryside or the busyness of the day. And that’s how Phoebe had been, too, during graduate school and most of her marriage. She couldn’t understand why someone like Tom wanted to die. But Mia is so beautiful? But Tom’s a doctor? But they have a baby? Phoebe could only think practically about such a thing then, just like the bride now.
So Phoebe tries her best to speak the bride’s language.
“The point is, this hotel is very expensive,” Phoebe says. “I can’t afford to stay here and wait all week.”
“Problem solved,” the bride says. “I’ll pay.”
“No,” Phoebe refuses.
“Why not?”
“I don’t even know you. And that’s too much money.”
“Do you want to know how much I’ve already spent on this wedding?” The bride looks excited, like she has been dying to tell someone all day.
“No.” The more Phoebe learns about the wedding, the harder this will become.
“A million dollars,” she says, and then turns toward the ocean view like she might cry. “That’s what my father gave me when he got sick. Told me it was his dying wish to see his only daughter get married before he died. But then before we could have it, he died. And then there was a global pandemic for two years. So the least you could do is not die, too.”
Phoebe can hear in her voice that she is about to cry. Now more than ever it is important to sound forceful.
“My death has nothing to do with you,” Phoebe says.
“Of course it does! It’s going to happen here, during my opening reception!”
The bride starts to slowly breathe in, then counts to four as she breathes out. Watching her, Phoebe feels an old impulse, a tenderness, the kind of thing she felt when a student sat in her office on the brink of tears. She was being presented with a choice: She could remain silent and pretend she didn’t notice the despair because she had to get to class in five minutes and unpacking despair usually took longer than that. Or she could soften her voice and ask one more question, like, “What is this really about? Are you okay?” And that’s when the student would burst into a teary tale of their entire life story. Phoebe would be late to class, but the student would feel better, and so would she.
But the bride is not her student. Phoebe has no responsibility to care or even pretend to care. She will not ask questions about her dead father. She will not concern herself with the wedding. She will not reschedule her suicide.
“Do you know how much I spent on just tonight alone?” the bride asks.
Phoebe watches the cigarette burn between her fingers, a long nose of ash growing with each silent second. Phoebe will wait this out.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” she says. “Yep, that’s right. Fifty thousand dollars.”
But Phoebe must not look too impressed, because the bride continues.
“I special-ordered rare orchids from Borneo for the centerpieces. I took a calligraphy class so I could learn how to handwrite every single table
card. I had each cocktail glass hand-sprayed in guanciale fat. I flew in the same jazz band that played at Prince William’s wedding. And do you know how long it took to figure out who played at Prince William’s wedding? How many hours I spent on message boards?”
“You didn’t hire a wedding planner to do that?” Phoebe asks, genuinely shocked.
“You think I’d trust a wedding planner with my dead father’s money?” Lila asks.
“I mean, yeah?”
“This money was the last thing my father ever gave me in this life. I wasn’t about to give thirty-three percent of it away to some wedding planner who suggested it might be nice to parachute into my own reception. No. I wanted my father to be proud of how I spent it, and I know he would be. I know this is going to be the most beautiful fucking wedding, and if I wake up to your corpse being rolled into the lobby tomorrow morning, you should know I’ll never recover from something like that.”
“Neither will I,” Phoebe says.
“Stop doing that!” Lila says.
The bride starts to actually cry, and it’s weirdly satisfying and horrifying to watch. Like watching a beautiful building be demolished.
“How can you joke about this?” the bride asks through her tears.
Phoebe doesn’t know. But after her husband left, her first impulse was to joke about it. She spent days making phone calls to friends from grad school that she hadn’t spoken to in years, saying, “Well, I never really liked the guy anyway,” in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like hers, because she wanted to impress people the way she had been impressed when she read what Edith Wharton said after seeing the names “Mr. and Mrs. Wharton” written in a guest book at a hotel she had never visited.
“Apparently I have been here before,” Wharton said.
But her friends laughed uneasily. Her friends had been at her wedding, had seen how in love Phoebe had been. “It’s okay to be sad that your husband left you,” one of them said, and it made Phoebe feel stupid for trying to joke about it—joking was all she had left.
“Just get out,” Phoebe says in a stern voice.
“You can’t tell me to get out,” the bride says. “This is my wedding hotel. You get out!”
Phoebe doesn’t know how some girls grow up to become women like the bride, or like Mia, who treat everything, even this nineteenth-century mansion, even Phoebe’s husband, as their inheritance. Phoebe had been raised to feel sorry for everything—sorry for being born, sorry for almost drowning, sorry for getting an A-minus on my exam, sorry for not bearing children, sorry for not getting to the last three slides of the PowerPoint, everybody. Sometimes, Phoebe sent her class apology emails after lectures when she didn’t finish on time. Because she was a good professor. A good woman. But where is the line? When did Phoebe being good become Phoebe being nothing?
She doesn’t know. But she does know this.
“I paid eight hundred and thirty-six dollars to stay in this room for one single night!” Phoebe yells. “This is my fucking room!”
The bride looks stunned, as if nobody has ever shouted at her this loudly before. In the bride’s silence, Phoebe waits for some bad, foolish feeling to come, but she feels so exhilarated she wishes she had yelled at Mia like this. At her husband after he told her about the affair—but she couldn’t yell then. She was still trying so hard to be her best self, to stay reasonable, to save the marriage, to ask the right questions, gather all the information, as if understanding could help her solve the problem. But it didn’t matter how much he told her—she never understood. She was sick with information, sick with all the things she never said or did.
“Get out!” Phoebe screams.
“Fine,” the bride says. “Whatever. What do I care? Just die.”
“I will!”
Phoebe came here to die and so she will die.
But then the bride says “Good” so angrily, she bares her teeth just enough for Phoebe to see it again: the food.
Phoebe can’t believe it’s still there. Phoebe figured one of her friends would have told her by now. But maybe the bride is the kind of woman who doesn’t have friends like that, friends who are honest even when it’s
embarrassing. Maybe that is why she is here in Phoebe’s room instead of down at her reception sipping on a fat-washed cocktail.
“Have a nice time in Hell,” the bride adds.
The cigarette ash falls on Phoebe’s leg. She is surprised by the burn. It feels like something awful being set in motion. The world gone bad. The bride will be sent down to her reception with food in her teeth and Phoebe will die.
But not yet.
“Wait,” Phoebe says, because she cannot send a woman out to her wedding with food stuck in her teeth. Whatever the bride might think, Phoebe is not a monster.
“You have something in your teeth.”
The bride’s face falls. “But I haven’t eaten since this morning.”
The bride walks to the bathroom mirror, which is as tall as the room itself. She picks at her teeth as she says, “I’ve seriously been going around all day with food in my teeth and nobody said a word?”
“Maybe nobody noticed.”
“Oh, trust me, the people here notice everything.”
She leans closer to the mirror, picks harder.
“Gary’s mother has noticed that my dress tonight is ‘very young,’ which is code for her saying I look like a godless whore. And Marla, my future sister-in-law, has noticed how expensive this hotel is, though she won’t ever say it. She’ll just list off the price of every single item on the menu until we all want to scream.”
Lila backs away from the mirror. “Do you have any floss?”
“I seem to have forgotten the floss.”
Lila looks around the bathroom. “They’re supposed to have everything here.”
Phoebe helps her search through the contents of the most beautiful wicker basket she has ever seen, but there is only ginseng lotion. Hibiscus bath salts. Thyme bodywash. By the time she looks up, the bride is at the phone.
“Can you bring floss to the Roaring Twenties?” the bride says. “Yes, that’s fine. I’ll wait. Thank you.”
“Why are you having him bring it here?” Phoebe asks when she hangs up.
“Let’s wait on the balcony” is all the bride says, like they are a team now and their only job is to restore Lila’s teeth to their perfect condition. But when Phoebe doesn’t budge, she adds, “I think you can hold off on eternity for thirty minutes. Oh, hey, there’s the bird watching kit I bought for everybody.”
She picks up a pair of binoculars from the desk and ignores the pamphlet about North Atlantic birds.
“Thirty minutes?” Phoebe asks, but she follows the bride out to the balcony. “How long does it take to bring up some floss?”
“Carlson has to go to CVS to buy it. Apparently they don’t have any.”
“So he’s going to CVS to get it?”
“It’s literally his job.”
“Is it?”
Lila shrugs and crosses her legs. “I’m Lila, by the way.”
It sounds funny to hear Lila introduce herself so formally after all this, and Phoebe must be smirking because Lila says, “Is there something amusing about my name?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “It’s a beautiful name.”
It was a name Phoebe had wanted for herself when she was younger. Phoebe had read too many Sweet Valley High books, in which the most beautiful girl at the school was named Lila. One of the first beauty icons with brown hair that Phoebe had encountered—until Lyla from Friday Night Lights, who had long brown hair so thick, it made Phoebe want to move south and join a football team.
“It’s a nickname. My name is actually Delilah,” Lila says. “My mother named me after her favorite artist. And not even like a classically famous artist. Just some woman who lives in Bushwick and makes millions painting abstractions of babies eating womb-shaped fruit.”
Phoebe pours herself a little bit more of the wine, then offers the bottle to the bride. Why not? They have thirty minutes. And it’s her wine.
“This is better than I thought it would be,” the bride says, taking a sip. She leans over the edge to see the reception in full swing below. “Wow, you
can really see the whole thing from up here.”
The bride looks through the binoculars and starts announcing names like she’s spotting wild animals at the zoo.
“There’s Nat and Suz,” Lila says. “Marla. My mother. Jim. Uncle Jim.”
Phoebe can feel the bride still wanting her to ask questions, and she does find herself wondering.
“How many people in your family are named Jim?” Phoebe asks.
“The Jims are in Gary’s family,” she says. “Gary’s father, uncle, and Gary’s dead wife’s brother.”
“Oh. Gary was married before?”
“Yeah. They had a daughter. Then his wife died of cancer. Weird, right?”
“I don’t know. Was she supposed to be immortal?”
“I mean, it’s weird that his dead wife’s brother is here as his best man. Gary insisted on Jim. He kept being like, Lila, come on, the man is my brother.”
She says it’s true that they’re really close.
“They watched a woman die together, and now they’re like, bonded for life, I guess,” she says. “Jim comes over like every Saturday, even though that’s Gary’s one day off, and we spend it watching Jim cut up monkfish at the kitchen table while he brags about himself. He’s like, Oh, I’ve just been at home building my seaplane, even though I know for a fact he doesn’t have any of the parts. And did you know his great-uncle used to be in the Mob?”
“How deep was his uncle in the Mob?”
“That’s really not the point,” Lila says.
“What’s the point?”
“The point is, I don’t get why Jim has to be around all of the time. They’d never be friends if Gary didn’t marry his sister.”
She explains that her fiancé, Gary, is this handsome doctor who lives in Tiverton and spends his one day off running science experiments in the garden with his daughter, and Jim is an engineer who can’t keep a girlfriend longer than a month so he is always kind of hitting on everyone.
“Even me,” she says. “He like, bought me a skirt for my birthday. I mean, isn’t that weird?”
“I don’t know. Did you need a skirt?”
“That’s exactly what Gary asked, and I was like, It doesn’t even matter if I needed a skirt! Why would my fiancé’s brother-in-law buy me a skirt for my birthday? It’s not even a normal skirt.”
“What’s a normal skirt?”
“Whatever kind of skirt you can buy a woman and it wouldn’t be weird.”
“I don’t think that skirt exists.”
“This was some kind of professional skirt. The kind you’d buy at Macy’s or something to wear with a matching jacket. And when I showed Gary, he was just like, Yeah, I don’t think Jim understands how to buy presents for women.”
Phoebe likes how Lila does Gary’s voice, too. Lila, it seems, is good at voices.
“He was like, Lila, this is a man who used to buy his own sister tampons in bulk whenever they were on sale at Costco.”
“That’s kind of nice, actually,” Phoebe says. Phoebe’s father mostly pretended her period didn’t exist, and so Phoebe pretended it didn’t exist. She felt criminal throwing a tampon in the trash, like she was throwing out a bloody carcass, because her father didn’t think to keep the can lined, so she often flushed them down the toilet. When the toilet backed up once a year, she knew it was her fault but watched her father with the plunger and said nothing.
“Gary thought so, too,” she says. “Gary is such a doctor. He like, truly only sees the good in everybody.”
“That is … not my experience with doctors.”
“Well, maybe he’s just got this blind spot when it comes to Jim. It’s like, Wendy died and Jim did their dishes for a year straight, and took his daughter to school when Gary didn’t have the strength, and now Jim is a forever hero. And so is Wendy. That’s the dead wife.”
The words dead wife land hard at Phoebe’s feet.
“Might I suggest alternate phrasing?” Phoebe asks.
“There’s seriously no other way to describe her,” she says. “You can’t use her name. Anytime her name is spoken, somebody is required to have a complete mental breakdown. Sometimes it’s his daughter. Often, it’s me. But still.”
Lila clutches the wine bottle, looks back down at her party.
“We’ll all be having a nice time sitting at the beach or something, and out of nowhere, Jim will just be like, Remember when Wendy tried to make a kite out of beer cans?”
“Is that possible?”
“Apparently, it didn’t fly,” Lila says. “And fine, I get it. In his eyes, I’m his dead sister’s replacement and he always wants me to remember that. But this is my wedding week. And I can’t stop having this horrible feeling that somehow Jim is going to ruin it. I mean, if you don’t beat him to it.”
Then Lila scans the reception with the binoculars again like she’s looking for Jim. When she finds him, she narrows her eyes with alarm.
“Oh my God, is Jim seriously hitting on my mother?”
She hands the binoculars to Phoebe.
“Which one is your mother?” Phoebe asks.
“The one who looks like she’s just about to go on Dancing with the Stars.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“That’s actually very specific,” Lila says. But then she points to a woman in a yellow dress.
Even with the binoculars, Phoebe can’t see much beyond a man and a woman talking with drinks in their hands. Every so often, Jim leans in, puts his hand on her mother’s shoulder. But it doesn’t look especially flirtatious. More familial.
“They look like they’re just, you know, talking,” Phoebe says.
“Oh, there is no just talking with my mother,” Lila says. “With her, it’s like always this intense spewing of information, like here is the last book on Gaudi that I just read and now I am going to tell you all about it verbatim. And my father used to just sit there and take it for thirty years, until he finally exploded and told us that he hated modern art. He actually confessed that to us on his deathbed. Isn’t that awful?”
“Wait, what?” Phoebe asks. “Your father confessed on his deathbed that he didn’t like modern art?”
“That’s right,” Lila says. “My father called from the hospital and asked to be put on speaker, and we were all gathered around, because we never knew which call was going to be his last, and he was like, My darlings, every man must come to terms with his true nature at the end of his life, and it is time I do the same, and my mother was like, Are you sure that’s a good idea, Henry? And my father was just like, I have always despised modern art, particularly the Cubists and everything that followed.”
Her father blamed Picasso, especially, for bringing dignity to the whole movement away from painting as representation.
“And maybe in some families this wouldn’t seem like a big confession, but my parents’ marriage had basically been built on the fact that they were these great, benevolent supporters of contemporary art,” Lila says. “My father bought my mother her first painting.”
Buying art together was how they fell in love. They made a name for themselves building one of the country’s most important collections of contemporary artists. They gave a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to the NEA each year. All of this helped make sense of the millions her father made in waste management. Helped give meaning to the landfills of trash her father owned across the country.
“So to find out that he only did all this just to impress my mother in the beginning,” Lila says. “Insert a montage of monologues from my mother about how her mother was right, how she never should have married a much older man who was literally in the business of trash, and how dare that man call anything a waste, let alone Cubism, and she knows now she really should have married her cousin’s cousin Gregory Lancaster like her mother had suggested, because the joke’s on her. Gregory is still alive.”
Phoebe looks through the binoculars and watches Jim walk away. She waits to see if anything comes over Lila’s mother’s face. She wonders if it’s hard to be at this wedding alone after her husband’s death. Is she worried about who she is going to talk to next? How long she’ll have to stand there alone?
“And so now my mother is convinced that I’m making a mistake marrying Gary, just like her,” Lila says.
“How do you know?”
“She tells me! When she’s really loaded at two in the afternoon, she just says these things. She’s like, Lila, you don’t have to get married just because your father’s dying wish was to see you get married. What does it matter? He’s already dead! And then she goes off about how I might want to think twice about marrying an older man in waste management like she did.”
“I thought Gary was a doctor?”
“My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they’re both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit.”
Lila is quiet for a moment, like she is considering something deeply, perhaps the entire trajectory of her life.
“Can you imagine having a mother who talks to you like that?”
“My mother is dead,” Phoebe says.
“Oh. Well, you’re lucky then. My mother, she just monologues,” Lila says, as if she were not doing the same exact thing right now. “Which is absolutely why she is not getting a speech at this wedding. I kept telling her, Mom, the mother of the bride doesn’t even get a speech, and she was like, Yes, and why do we think that is, Lila? Why do you think the men have always wanted the mother of the bride to be silent?”
The bride takes another sip.
“And I’m like, It’s not about men! It’s about you! Why would I trust you with a speech? You’re just going to get loaded and stand up there and talk about how Gary is too old for me or something!”
Phoebe wonders how long Lila could go on without a response. Again, she wonders if this is the difference between growing up with and without a mother. Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it. In her
teens, Phoebe was regularly astonished by how awful her friends were to their mothers, and the mothers just took it, because the mothers knew that sometimes they were awful, too. The mothers had made their own mistakes.
But Phoebe’s mother sat high up on the fireplace mantel, in a gilded frame, like a martyred saint. Under her gaze, Phoebe was careful never to make any mistakes. Phoebe was quiet and obedient, never talking too fast or too loudly, because she never wanted to be a burden to her father. She had felt this way in her marriage, too—careful never to cry too hard or tell meandering stories at dinner. Careful always to wear nice pajamas to bed. Careful never to lose control. Even at the end, when she learned about the affair, she stayed so calm that her husband was confused. “You’re being so nice about this,” Matt said.
But Lila talks without end, without clear transitions from topic to topic, assuming that Phoebe, a total stranger who has already announced multiple times that she wants to die, is interested in hearing every detail about her personal life. Phoebe can’t tell if it’s the most appalling or most impressive display she’s ever witnessed.
Either way, Phoebe is interested.
“How much older than you is Gary?” Phoebe asks.
“Only eleven and a half years,” the bride says. “He’s forty, but you can barely tell.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says, genuinely not impressed. “That’s not bad. I’ve seen much worse.”
“Like what?” The bride looks hopeful.
“Like this seventy-five-year-old historian at my university had an affair with the twenty-six-year-old admin.”
“Jesus. That’s just weird.”
“Especially since she wasn’t even trying to get her PhD,” Phoebe says. It feels good to talk about her old life so casually like that. As if it were all just funny subject material to share in conversation with Lila. “I mean, we could never figure out why she was doing it exactly. Like what would this admin with no aspirations in higher ed gain from dating a married geriatric academic?”
“Maybe she was in love,” the bride says. “Not everything is a pathology, you know. I was like, Mom, not everything is about Dad dying! I didn’t even know Dad was dying when I met Gary. Gary just randomly came to our art gallery looking for some paintings to fill up his new house, and then two days later, I took my dad to his GI because we were expecting bad news, and I was shocked to see that Gary was the doctor. I mean, truly a wild coincidence. Gary and I both knew it had to mean something.”
But her mother was not convinced.
“My mother is like, We all knew on some level that your father was going to die. And I’m like, Well yeah, I’ve always known that someday my father will die. But maybe, just maybe, it’s possible that Gary and I love each other? I mean, why does everything have to be about my father one day dying? And my mother is like, I didn’t make the rules, sweetheart. Take it up with Freud.”
The bride sighs.
“We should have just gotten married right after he proposed,” Lila says. “My father was actually doing really well then, responding to the treatments the way Gary said he would. But we had just gone into lockdown, and so we kept postponing the wedding, thinking the lockdown would end at any moment. And then my dad got so much worse and after he was hospitalized, it didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. I mean, he hardly made any sense at the end. He was so high on morphine, it became unbearable to take his phone calls. We’d put him on speaker and be like, Hi, Dad, but then there would be nothing but this long dramatic pause until finally, he was like … Herbbbbballll Essences!”
Phoebe is confused. “Herbal Essences?”
“I don’t know,” the bride says. “That’s what he said. It made no sense. It was just … silence … and then Herbbballlllll Essences! And I was like, Okay, Dad. What about Herbal Essences? But he hung up. And then he died. And those were literally my father’s last words to me.”
Phoebe looks at Lila and Lila looks at Phoebe. The sadness of the story is so stark, her voice so monotone when she delivered it, they erupt into a laughter so intense it surprises Phoebe. Every time they are about to calm
down, the bride says, “Herrbbbballl Essences!” and Phoebe starts laughing all over again. It makes her feel high.
“Stop,” Phoebe says. “I can’t breathe.”
“Isn’t that your goal?” the bride asks.
The snipe makes it feel serious between them again. Phoebe can’t remember the last time she laughed like that. Maybe that time with her husband in the Ozarks when they found the Sax for Lovers CD? But that was so long ago. And they didn’t even really laugh—they smiled and joked and then had sex. But they had never, Phoebe thought, really laughed.
Phoebe looks down at the reception, sees waiters in white shirts passing out tiny dots of food. Women in cocktail dresses eating olives off toothpicks. People already on their second drink. Phoebe wonders why Lila is so worried about her million-dollar wedding being ruined yet doesn’t seem concerned to be missing the start of it.
“It’s actually Gary’s sister, Marla, who is the worst about it all,” the bride says.
“The worst about what?”
“Our age gap.”
“I thought we were talking about your dad.”
“I am tired of talking about my dad. My dad is dead. It’s been a year and a half and it is time to finally accept that, even if my mother cannot.”
“Okay, so Marla.”
“Marla keeps making this big deal about me being super young whenever we’re together. Like earlier today in the lobby, she was like, Wait, what do twenty-eight-year-olds know again? I forget. And she doesn’t even think this is rude. She acts like it’s just professional curiosity, like she’s just getting to know twenty-eight-year-olds as a species.”
“Is she an anthropologist?”
“She’s a lawyer, or well, she was until she became the mayor of her town. And now she acts like she’s the most moral human being to have ever walked the earth. Meanwhile, she’s the one who will probably have to resign for having an affair with a federal judge. And do I say a word about it? No.”
Now Phoebe is really interested. She is curious about affairs, as if any affair can teach her something about her husband’s.
“Why did she have an affair with a federal judge?”
“She must have a fetish for judges, because that is exactly what her husband is, too,” Lila says. “Except he’s just like, a regular judge. But honestly, I don’t know much more than that. Gary doesn’t like to talk about his sister’s sex life, understandably, and the rest of the family doesn’t know about it. And she never talks to me about it, obviously. We’re not close. But I do know that her children and husband barely speak to her right now, which is why they probably aren’t coming to the wedding. And serves her right. Because she fucked up her life, for real. And sometimes, I just want to be like, What do you know, Marla? Do you know anything? Because even twenty-eight-year-olds know that being the mayor and then having an affair with a federal judge is definitely a terrible idea.”
“Did you say that to her?”
“No! I’d never say that to Marla. You can’t really say anything to Marla. She’s very defensive.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Lila rushes to open it.
“Your floss,” Carlson says, and presents it on a regal brass platter like it’s a meal. It looks so small on the plate, it makes Phoebe want to laugh again. But the humor is lost on Lila.
“Thank you, Carlson,” Lila says.
Lila starts flossing while Phoebe tips him.
“I feel so much better now,” Lila says after, like all the problems are gone now that the body has been restored to perfection. She picks up the brush from the wicker basket. She combs her feathery bangs back into place. She puts a cold washcloth to the back of her neck. She is so quiet, so steady, it almost feels holy, like watching a nun prepare herself for the Lord.
“I guess I should get back down there,” the bride says, as if now she doesn’t even want to go. Now, she just wants to stay here and drink wine that is really chocolate and talk shit about her entire family with Phoebe. Phoebe almost wants that, too. Phoebe hasn’t sat and talked like this with another woman in so long. But Lila puts her hand on the doorknob.
“What can you do?” Lila asks.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s what my father said to me after we got his diagnosis. I couldn’t stop crying about it, and he was like, Lila, is there one thing you feel capable of doing right now instead of crying? And there always was.”
“What was it?” Phoebe asks.
“I would take a very long bath,” the bride says.
After the bride leaves, Phoebe feels surprisingly lonely in the big room. The way she did after she shut off the TV at home. All of those characters distracting her from the reality of her own life—the monologuing mother and the dying father and the sleazy brother-in-law and the kind doctor and the groom’s sister—gone.
That’s when the darkness returns. That’s when she is returned to herself, and she hates always having to return to herself, to live alone inside her nonviable body. It reminds her why she is here, what she came to do, but something feels off now. The sun is too low in the sky, and she is thinking about all the wrong things, like, Will Marla have to resign? Is Lila really just marrying her father? And is that what Phoebe did, too?
No. She will not think of her father or her husband. She has spent too much of her life thinking of them.
Phoebe pours herself the last of the wine. She just wants to stop thinking. She opens the bottle of painkillers, and the smell of fish is nauseating. She forgot the pills were tuna-flavored. But she will not veer from her plan. She will not prove her therapist right, who once told her that she’d never kill herself.
“You’re not really the type,” he said, and she had been so floored by his statement that she’d refused to see him for three weeks.
“That’s a wildly inappropriate thing to say,” she said when she returned, and he agreed.
“This is good, we’re making progress, I’m happy to hear you being openly critical of me,” he said.
But his comment had wounded her, had confirmed her worst fears about herself: She didn’t even have the guts to kill herself. She was not the bold type. She was not like Mia, who cut her hair short over the pandemic, who finished her third book with the word Bitch in the title, who had the audacity to not only fuck someone else’s husband, but to start a new life with him. Mia was a Modernist, liked experiments, bold forms, poems that made no fucking sense. If Mia wanted to kill herself, she would put the stones in her pocket and walk into the water like Virginia Woolf.
But Phoebe did not want to die outdoors. She did not want to be cold. She did not want to battle mosquitoes. She did not want to sink to the depths of the murky, endless sea. She liked knowable, comfortable things. She liked cozy reading nooks. Books that always ended the same way, characters in novels who were easily recognizable by their outfits. Beds with elaborate canopies that protected her from the world, and maybe that is the problem. Maybe this bed is too beautiful. It makes her feel grateful to be so far away from her own.
She is not tired, either. She feels very alert. Very aware of the bride’s perfume. She can still smell it in the air, though she can’t identify it. She can see the bride’s lipstick on the rim of the wine bottle, a mauve red that Phoebe imagines she picked out one year ago just for this week. She knows too much about the bride already. Her real name—Delilah.
But she shouldn’t think of Lila, either. She shouldn’t think at all. Bob was right—she thinks too much. She thinks and thinks and thinks until she gets so tired of thinking, she never properly finishes whatever she started. She never turned the dissertation into a book; rarely finished a lecture on time; couldn’t decide when to start having children until it was too late. And now here she is, doing the same thing, trying so hard to make sure her suicide is a masterpiece, something the critics might applaud for years to come, when really, she should just do it. Be fearless for once in her life, like Mia. Like Woolf. Open the bottle and swallow all the pills with one quick gulp of water, which is exactly what she does.
And then it is done. For a moment, she feels proud of herself. She did it. But as soon as she sits back on the bed and closes her eyes, she starts thinking again. Will the pills be enough? How different are cat doses from human doses?
Then there’s a knock on the door.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says.
She fully expects it to be the bride again, but it’s Pauline.
“Your coconut pillow,” Pauline says. This time, the pillow looks comically large for the brass tray.
“Oh,” Phoebe says. “The pillow.”
“Can I help you with anything else? Can I book any complimentary spa treatments for you tomorrow, to make up for our lack of room service tonight?”
Pauline sounds so eager to help that Phoebe is tempted. Maybe Pauline would go down to CVS and get her more pills?
“No, thank you,” Phoebe says. “But you’re very nice to offer that.”
“People here are always saying that,” Pauline says. “But the truth is, I’m not really that nice. I’m just from the Midwest!”
“So am I,” Phoebe says, and continues to stand in the doorway, though she’s not sure why. Phoebe doesn’t really want to be talking to Pauline as she drops dead, but there’s also something very familiar to Phoebe about Pauline. Reminds her of home.
“No kidding!” Pauline says, then explains how she just graduated from Kansas State with a degree in hospitality and is astounded to have gotten this job right away. “I seriously just applied to be a waiter here. But they called and asked me if I would be the property manager! They told me I had to wear coastal business casual, and I honestly had to google it.”
Pauline laughs like this is a great joke between the two of them, and Phoebe looks at her tight body-con black dress with an overly formal boat neckline. Normally, Phoebe wouldn’t say anything, but she feels bad for Pauline, a girl who showed up to her new life in the wrong dress. She wants to help, as if this could be her last act of kindness on earth.
“That’s not quite right,” Phoebe says gently.
“No?” Pauline asks, looking down at her outfit.
“The boat neck is a little formal.”
“I thought the boat neck was like, relaxed and boaty.”
“Try more blues. And whites. And loose linens.”
“Oh my God, thank you for actually being honest. This job is extremely important to me, and while I am doing my best to learn, it’s all happening so fast. I’m actually not sure I’m even qualified? But anyway. Please let me know whatever I can do to enhance your stay.”
Phoebe feels a sudden wave of exhaustion come over her.
“Thanks,” Phoebe says.
She closes the door. The pills are working. What’s done is done. And Pauline cannot help. Pauline is not her mother. Pauline is just a recent grad with a degree in hospitality.
Phoebe rests her head on the coconut pillow, which looks like a normal pillow and feels like a normal pillow but smells undeniably like coconut. Phoebe is mystified. She presses her nose deeper into the pillow but can’t figure out where the coconut is located. It seems to be permeated throughout the pillow, part of the pillow’s constitution. Like Pauline has woven the coconut fibers into the thread herself. And maybe it’s the pills, maybe it’s the image of Pauline weaving, but Phoebe starts to feel funny again.
Phoebe Stone, professor and scholar, found dead on an artisanal coconut pillow at the Cornwall Inn.
No. She can’t die on a coconut pillow. She goes back to the balcony to hear the music. The jazz is soft but lively. She picks up the binoculars to get a look at the band, but in the dark, she can’t see much. In the dark, each musician looks exactly like his instrument. Like they must curl themselves around their instruments when they go to sleep each night, and the image makes her want to cry. It makes her think about how beautiful the world can be. How long have these men been practicing just to come together and create this perfect harmony?
The bride emerges—that’s what she looks like again down on the patio. No longer Lila with the dead father and passive-aggressive mother, but the beautiful bride with her white fluttery dress perfectly suited for cliffside cocktails. She takes a glass from a waiter, and then searches for someone. She looks eager. Quick to move, quick to laugh and say hello. She kisses a few people on the cheek, then leans into a tall man Phoebe assumes must be the groom because she rests her head on his shoulder. Phoebe can’t make out his features, but she can see his age—there is a lack of urgency in his movements. A sense that there is no real rush to do anything, like he could stand right there with his arm around his fiancée all night and be fine about it.
They kiss. They look, from a distance, like they are very much in love, and how weird it is to be dying on a balcony while two people are down
below, being in love. How weird to think that once Phoebe was the same bride, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder, and now she is here, moments from death.
How does this happen?
The question makes Phoebe dizzy. She lies down on the bed and that’s when the jazz stops.
“Good evening, everyone,” a woman says into a microphone. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Patricia, the mother of the bride. And before this party gets away from us, I thought I’d give a little speech.”
Phoebe feels herself suddenly get tense, as if she were down there in the audience. This can’t be good, she thinks, and it’s not. Patricia begins by saying how unfair it is that the mother of the bride does not have a properly designated time to give a speech at any point throughout the wedding and that she had to specifically carve out this time for herself.
“On a Tuesday,” she says, and the crowd laughs. “But anyway, before I’m raked offstage, let me just say something about my daughter, Lila. As many of you may know, Lila was not an especially humorous or playful child. Most mothers might have been disappointed by this, but I will confess, I was impressed. Lila was never trying to be funny like the other children, never running around like some tiny unpaid performer.”
It’s a troubling start. Lila was right; her mother does not sound like a very good mother, not that Phoebe understands what that is. Phoebe was raised by a father whose most complicated relationship was to televised sports. But Phoebe spent a lifetime studying mothers, paying close attention to them when they showed up in movies, and the best mothers were always the ones who died young. The ones who lived had to make pancakes a lot and wear a long braid and show up whenever nobody expected with large bags of multicolored taffy, laughing at everything the children said, until the moment they must get serious. Dispense a kind of hard truth that the child won’t appreciate until long after the mother is dead.
“Time and time again I tried to engage Lila in creative play, but no, Lila wouldn’t stand for it. I would point to the ducks at the pond and say, Lila, what secrets do you think the ducks are trying to tell us? And Lila would turn to me with a face more serious than Churchill and say, ‘How would I
know? They don’t speak English.’ God, this made me laugh. So I said, ‘Oh, do the ducks speak Spanish?’ And again, Lila said, ‘How would I know? I don’t speak Spanish!’”
The crowd laughs, and Phoebe wonders if Lila is laughing. She wonders if this story has pleased her or mortally wounded her in some way. If this story has confirmed all her worst fears about herself, about her mother, or if there was actually something sweet communicated here that only Lila can understand. Phoebe doubts it but hopes so. Phoebe hopes that the mother will somehow turn it around soon, dig herself out of this hole, repackage Lila’s lack of imagination as her best quality, not to mention the reason she is so perfectly suited for the groom—Phoebe’s favorite part of any wedding speech.
But Phoebe will never know what happens—by the time Lila’s mother is finished talking, Phoebe will be dead. Phoebe will not get to know how the speech ends—or how anything ends. And Phoebe does not like this. Phoebe always finishes a book or a movie, even a bad one. “Don’t you want to know if they get married?” she asked, when Matt suggested they turn it off. But Matt did not need to know. Matt said, “This is a terrible movie. Of course they’re going to get married.” And Matt could do that—turn off the TV, quit a marriage—right in the middle of the climactic scene.
She feels knocked over by another wave of fatigue. The sudden sleepiness scares her. It feels too much like being too drunk. Or like that time she almost drowned in the river when she was fishing with her father, the last time he ever brought her. Phoebe had been leaning too close to the edge of the boat, and then she was in the water, and how terrifyingly fast the water moved her to places she didn’t recognize. After, her father found her curled up in a shallow eddy where the river spit her out, shouting, “What were you doing so close to the edge like that? You could have died!”
She knows that’s what he would be shouting now if he were here, watching her be so careless with her life again. “What are you doing so close to the edge like that?” he’d shout. And maybe her mother would be with him, and maybe she would be furious, too, shouting something directly into the microphone.
“She’s truly one of a kind,” the mother says. “She’s the reason I get up every morning. The reason I don’t have my own life anymore!”
The crowd laughs loudly, and Phoebe opens her eyes. What is she doing?
She is about to die, she knows, and the mother is about to do it—make the end circle back to the beginning, make the worst thing about Lila be the best thing about Lila. Because the mother must do this. The mother can’t end it here—she can’t just insult her own daughter’s imagination in front of all these people and then take a bow. Phoebe can’t bear it, thinking of Lila getting ready this afternoon, laying out her dress, putting on her lipstick, combing her hair, feeling so beautiful, only to wind up with her fists clenched under the table, trying not to cry.
“Now, honey, come stand up here with me,” the mother says. “Come on, get up here!”
Yes, Phoebe thinks. Get up get up get up. Because Phoebe doesn’t want to die. No, Phoebe just wants to hear the rest of the speech. She realizes it with such sudden certainty it feels like the only thing that she has ever known to be true about herself.
So she gets up.
She doesn’t call 911. She doesn’t yell down for Gary the doctor. She doesn’t want to ruin the wedding. And these are just pills for cats. And how many did she take? Ten? Eleven?
She runs to the bathroom, because that’s what people do in movies about this moment. She hopes they are medically accurate. She sticks her finger down her throat and throws up chocolate wine and bile until there is no more chocolate wine left, only a raw burning.
After, she is too tired to move. She just sits there, listening to the end of the speech in the really beautiful bathroom. White marble all the way to the ceiling. Calacatta, the kind with gold veining that Phoebe had dreamed of getting for their kitchen. She presses her face against it. She wants to feel like a sick child for a few moments longer, head pressed to the cool floor, listening to the mother’s voice as if it were her own mother’s voice.
“Lila, you are a grown woman now, something I have been realizing each day you work for me at the gallery. And it’s impressive. I mean, this
woman can sell a piece of art like her father could sell a piece of trash—and I mean that as a compliment. She’s organized. In this way, she is very much her father’s daughter; rest in peace, my late husband, Henry. She keeps a damn good spreadsheet. And trust me, that’s a skill most artists do not have. Most of them are living far away in their imagination, always pretending to be something they’re not, painting like Picasso one day or Rembrandt the next! They’re delusional! They’re never going to make it in this business! But my daughter will, and do you know why? My daughter has only ever been interested in being herself, for better or worse. That’s what makes her one of a kind. And when Gary came to the gallery that day and asked about one of our paintings, she thankfully did not do what I carefully trained her to do. She did not describe the way William Withers juxtaposed the hyperrealism of the garden with the cubist representation of the woman. She said nothing about the way Withers masterfully navigated the tension between the white space of the canvas and his subject. That’s what she should have done—that’s what the painting was all about. I should know— it was a painting of me! But no. My daughter was all business. My daughter saw what only my daughter would see and said, ‘This painting is three by five feet, would look great over a mantel or high up on the wall in the bathroom, and can easily be taken home yourself in any standard-sized crossover SUV.’”
The crowd laughs.
“And Gary bought it. I mean, he literally bought it! I knew in that moment he must be a real easy mark—”
The wedding people laugh again.
“Or that he must have really fallen for my daughter.”
Everyone claps. And that’s how Phoebe falls asleep—on the bathroom floor with the balcony door wide open so she can listen to all the impromptu speeches that the mother inspired. All the others who were not given a designated time to speak, like Gary’s cousin Roy, a former sniper who flew all the way from Kennebunkport to suggest inappropriate things about a secret tattoo that Gary might have on his thigh. Suz, one of Lila’s best friends from Portsmouth Abbey, who had nothing else to say other than that she loves loves loves Lila so so so much and thinks Gary is so so so
wonderful. And finally, the father of the groom, who concludes the night with his gravelly Boston accent. He thanks everybody for coming to the reception, says they should all look out for tonight’s dinner bill in the mail.
“Just kidding,” the father says. “You all know I’m not paying for this.”
Everybody laughs.
“More seriously, Lila and Gary, we’re so thrilled to be celebrating with you this week. Let’s all raise a glass to the happy couple.”