Chapter 3
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 br?lée 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.