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.