The Wedding People

Chapter 6

When Phoebe wakes, it takes a moment to remember who and where she is. But then she sees the tassel lamps. She smells the coconut pillow.

“I am alive,” she says out loud, just to make sure.

Outside, the patio is quiet. The party is over. And the pillow smells so much of coconut, it actually makes it difficult to get back to sleep. So does the giant alarm clock, keeping time quite dramatically. It’s three a.m. The grief hour, according to Phoebe’s therapist. The demon hour, according to medieval peasants. The hour that you wake up when you have excess cortisol in your body, according to a doctor Phoebe once saw.

Whatever it is, it’s the hour that Phoebe often wakes up.

The bride is right. Phoebe has been to enough weddings to know that the bride is always right. Phoebe has to do a thing. She has to get up and do any single thing because she knows the feeling that will come if she lets herself sit in the empty shame of three in the morning, especially after trying to kill herself.

Normally, she would just sit in bed and ask herself questions that made her feel like garbage, like, What kind of psycho tries to kill herself? And, What is her husband doing at this exact moment? Was he sleeping? Was he having sex with Mia this very second? Was he still at a bar somewhere, getting free drinks because people always liked to give him free things for some reason? Then she would probably pull up Mia’s Instagram page, even though it made her feel like shit. Because it made her feel like shit. There Mia always was, in bright lipstick, saying, Look at my big red lips. Look at us on our autumnal weekend. Look at this pie that I made for July Fourth and look at my baby taking a tiny baby bite of this pie, isn’t she such a baby.

But luckily, Phoebe’s phone is dead. She decides never to look at her phone again. She doesn’t see the point in staying alive only to do all the same things that made her want to die.

So Phoebe thinks: What is one thing I can do right now instead?

Lila’s question surprised Phoebe, and she’s not sure if that’s because she didn’t expect insightful questions from someone wearing so much self-tanner or if it’s because she spent the last few years overwhelmed by all the things she could not do, the papers she could not grade, the conversations she could not bear to have, the baby she could not create, the awards she’d never win, the marriage she could not fix.

It’s time, she knows, to imagine the things she can do.

Right now, it’s not much. Her body feels worn out and weary. But she can brush her teeth. She can use mouthwash. She can drink a bottle of water. Then she can take a very long bath in the beautiful soaking tub.

But when she turns on the faucet, she realizes she can’t actually take a bath. There’s no drain stopper.

But that’s fine, she thinks. Even better. She can go down to the hotel’s hot tub and look at the ocean instead.

She undresses to her underwear. Black lace, the fanciest she owns, because she had refused to die in bad underwear. She wraps herself in the giant fluffy robe, the kind she’s seen at hotels before but for some reason has never once thought about wearing. Yet now it seems like it was put there by God just so she could feel soft in this moment.

She reaches for the door handle and looks down at her wedding ring. She takes it off, puts it on the black marble tray in the bathroom, and decides never to wear it again.

D OWNSTAIRS , SHE WALKS through the empty lobby. She passes the built-in oak bookcase and for the first time notices something very wrong with the books. They are all turned backward so only their pages show. It creates a monochromatic scheme—a trend she saw once on an HGTV show. Madness. She was offended by it then and is more offended by it now in real life.

She pulls out one of the books.

Sonnets by Shakespeare.

She looks back at the front desk to see if Pauline is watching, but it’s Carlson.

“Hello, Phoebe,” Carlson says.

It must be a house rule to say hello to each guest, to learn their name, the way it is also a house rule never to set any house rules. Never question what the guest is doing. The guest is paying too much money to be questioned. Make the guest feel the hotel is their home, even at three-thirty in the morning when the wedding people at the bar demand one more Manhattan. She sees the bartender pour them with the energy of a man who just woke up.

“Hello,” she says.

She puts the book back on the shelf so that the spine is showing. Then she walks out to the hot tub, proud to have saved Shakespeare.

P HOEBE THINKS YOU can tell a lot about a hotel by its hot tub, the way she could tell a lot about her husband by looking at his fingernails when she first met him in the computer lab. She could see that he clipped them short, all the same length. He was not a nail-biter. If he had fixations, they had nothing to do with his hands.

And this hot tub—if it has flaws, she cannot see them. It sits right on the edge of the deck, like nothing separates it from the ocean in the distance.

She steps into the tub and feels her whole body warm. She sits with her back against the jets. It doesn’t really feel like a massage, but she pretends it’s a massage. She closes her eyes. Lila is right. Water helps. It feels good to be warm. Good to have a body. She dangles her arms out and lets them float. She sits like that for a long time in a sleepy haze. When she finally opens her eyes to look up at the stars, she sees a man stepping into the tub.

“Hello,” the man says.

There really is no getting away from the wedding people here. And this one—he looks directly at her as he gets in. Normally, this would be enough human interaction to make her leave a hot tub, but she’s electrified by the direct eye contact. It’s nice to be seen in this moment. Nice not to fear the sight of other people. She is the only person she is afraid of now—she is the only one here who just tried to kill her.

“Hello,” she says.

The man has a long, angular face, softened at the edges by a beard. He is handsome in the way Phoebe always imagined coastal New Englanders to be. A kind of beauty that’s been weathered by wind and water, like he’s been out sailing every day of his life for a little too long. And maybe he has been. Maybe that’s why he’s wrinkled around the eyes or why he slowly sits down in the tub with a long sigh.

“I didn’t think anyone would be here at four in the morning,” the man says.

“Neither did I.”

“Well, don’t worry,” he says. “I promise I won’t make you talk to me.”

“That’s too bad,” she says. “I was actually hoping you would talk to me.”

He seems surprised by her frankness.

“Really? You aren’t tired of talking yet?” he asks. “All I’ve been doing at this wedding is just talking to people and then talking to more people.”

“What have you been talking about?”

“How was your flight?” he says. “What do you think of the hotel? What shows did you watch during the pandemic? How did you better yourself with all that free time?”

“Well?” she asks. “How did you?”

The man strokes his chin as if he’s thinking hard. “Mostly, I just grew this quarantine beard.”

“It’s a better beard than that,” she says. “Very trendy.”

“Oh, come on! Don’t say that,” he says. “Beards can not be trendy. People have always had beards.”

“Have they?”

“Jesus had a beard,” the man says. “Darwin had a beard. Marx had a beard.”

“Yeah, but not the way people have beards now.”

“How do people have beards now?”

“People now have… ironic beards.”

“And what did Darwin have?” he asks. “A sincere beard?”

“My best guess,” she says, “is that Darwin’s beard was a product of Victorian notions of masculinity and naturalist beliefs, all coming together…”

“On the bottom of his chin…”

“To form Darwin’s beard.”

“Right,” he says. “Right. Okay, well, very good. Thank you for this peer review of my beard. I’ll certainly incorporate your feedback.”

She laughs. Who is this man? Is he an academic? Is he flirting? Is she flirting? It’s been so long, Phoebe can’t remember the difference between having fun and flirting. Maybe there is no difference. She lifts up her feet, lets her legs float in the water.

“What about you?” he asks. “How did you better yourself during lockdown?”

She could lie, give him the answers he’s likely been hearing all day, the things she told her colleagues when she got back on campus yesterday. Oh, I wrote a ton during the pandemic. The book is really coming along!

But that is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.

“I drank a lot,” she says.

“Did it help?” he asks.

“It helped me not care about the fact that I basically stopped changing my clothes,” she says. “Or that my dissertation was actually a piece of shit.”

She waits for him to break eye contact, to look at his phone, find some excuse to get out of this conversation. But he keeps looking at her, so she continues.

“And my advisor kept emailing me being like, Who cares if it’s a piece of shit! Everybody’s dissertation is a piece of shit. That’s what dissertations are .”

He laughs. “Are you in grad school?”

“I’m a professor.”

“I didn’t know we had a professor in the family.” He looks at her like he’s trying to figure something out. “You don’t look familiar. Are you in the Winthrop family?”

“No.”

“The Rossi family?”

“I’m not actually here for the wedding.”

He looks confused. “I thought Lila said everyone was supposed to be here for the wedding. I distinctly remember that being a very big deal to her.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“So you’re on vacation and you get surprised by a wedding?”

“I’m not here on vacation.”

“This is becoming very mysterious.”

“I came here to kill myself,” she blurts out.

This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing—the freedom to say or be anything around them. Because who cares? He doesn’t know her, will never know her. He will list all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t die, and she will tell him that she is not planning to die anymore, and then they will get out of the hot tub and carry on with their lives and never think about each other again.

But all he says is “Shit,” like she stepped in a puddle of mud. It makes what she said sound small and fixable. Like something he understood.

“Perhaps I should have added that I decided not to,” she says.

“That’s actually a pretty crucial detail,” he says. Then he adds, “I shouldn’t joke like that. I’m sorry.”

“No, please. Joke,” she says. “It’s the only part of this that could ever be any fun.”

“May I ask how you were going to do it?”

“Professor Stone, with the cat painkillers, in the Roaring Twenties,” she says.

“Cat painkillers? That’s a little…”

“Cliché?”

“No,” he laughs. “Ineffective. Who uses cat painkillers?”

“Apparently people who are not setting themselves up for success.”

“So, you came all this way to kill yourself with some cat’s painkillers—”

“I mean, it wasn’t just some cat. It was my cat.”

“—and get surprised by a fucking wedding?”

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I couldn’t do it. That and the lack of room service.”

“Personally, I never kill myself unless there’s room service,” he says.

She laughs—it feels like a cloud slipping out her mouth, floating up to the sky.

“And the air conditioner,” she says, “smelled weird.”

“Say no more.”

Suddenly, it all seems so ridiculous to her. So funny.

“I’m sorry you’ve been in that much pain,” he says. “I know what that can feel like.”

She stares at him. Now she’s the one surprised by his honesty. “Have you ever… tried?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “But I came close. A few years ago, I used to think about it a lot.”

“And now you don’t?”

“Now I don’t.”

“How did you stop?”

“Honestly, I think I just waited. That, and I watched Breaking Bad every night for a month.”

“The therapeutic cures of drug deals gone awry.”

“You joke, but by the end of it, I felt actual relief that I was not Walter White. Like, at least I didn’t shoot myself with my own machine gun after being hunted by my own brother-in-law.”

“Hey, spoiler,” she says.

He laughs. “It’s been ten years! Come on.”

Then they just sit there in silence, heads rested back against the tub, and enjoy the warmth, as if they’ve shared something vital. As if they are no longer alone with themselves or their secrets. She looks up at the sky, and his foot brushes against her leg.

“Sorry,” he says, very quickly, but she likes it. She feels a flutter of something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She has just been touched after hours by a man who is not her husband, and yes, it was just an accidental foot tap, but it felt unbelievable to her. Maybe because she is supposed to be dead by now or maybe because she is supposed to be her husband’s wife. Or maybe she just wants to fuck him?

“Do you have any other secrets?” she asks.

“Of course.”

“Tell me one.”

“I don’t even know you,” he says.

“Isn’t it better that way?” she asks.

He considers this. “Once in college, I became addicted to my girlfriend’s romance novels. We started reading one together as a joke, but then I actually got hooked. I mean, I got completely addicted. Read them for months. So there you have it.”

“That’s not that embarrassing. What’s wrong with that?”

“Clearly there is something very wrong with that,” he says. “A twenty-one-year-old boy in his dorm reading Confessions of a Victorian Virgin ?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve always been weirdly impressed by people who read four hundred pages just to have a single orgasm. That’s a lot of work. Watching a video would have been astronomically easier.”

“Thanks for the support, but I have a feeling my time might have been better spent actually finishing Moby-Dick or something.”

“ Moby-Dick is porn, too,” she says.

“ Moby-Dick is not porn.”

“It’s ship porn!” she says. “The total fantasy of being a man on a ship, having a wild adventure. But instead of it ending with a woman having a triple orgasm, it ends with a…”

“Hey, no spoilers!”

“Giant whale…”

“Having a triple orgasm?”

“Exactly. Then it smashes into the ship and basically everyone dies.”

“Ugh, I knew it,” he says, and they laugh. She spreads her arms out and trails her fingers along the warm water, looks up at the moon. Life is unbelievable, she thinks. Last night, she was about to die alone in her hotel room and now she is here, in a hot tub, flirting with a man she would have deemed “too attractive” before. She would have seen him out at a bar and dismissed him because he was beautiful. And how ridiculous is that? That she made rules about not being attracted to people who were too attractive for the same reason her husband refused to hire a philosopher with an agent. “I mean, we have to ask ourselves, Is someone that famous going to want to teach our Intro to Ethics course?” he asked her. “I think not.” And she agreed, because this is often what she wondered when she met men. Is someone that handsome going to want to wipe up the spills on the counter? Hold our daughter’s hair when she vomits with the flu? Listen to me talk at length about the ideological underpinnings of the Victorian beard trend?

No. She couldn’t imagine it. She could only imagine beautiful people doing beautiful things. But right now, she feels equally beautiful. More beautiful. She is alive. Enchanted. I have fingers, she thinks, and brings them to the surface of the water. Look at these magical fucking fingers.

“So what’s your specialty, Professor?” he says. “Your field? Not sure how you say it.”

“My field is Victorian literature,” she says. “Novels, mostly. The marriage plots. The Jane Eyres.”

“The book about the orphan girl?” he asks. “Or am I thinking of Annie?”

“They’re both orphans.”

“So your field is… orphans?”

“Yes,” she jokes. “I specialize in… orphans.”

She tells him she was always drawn to their stories.

“Were you… an orphan?” he asks.

“No. But I always wanted to be one.”

“Who doesn’t?” he says. “Orphans, they’re living the life.”

“I mean, my mother died when I was born.”

“Okay. So you were halfway to the dream.”

“But my father raised me.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Yes, a real tragedy.” She laughs. “No. He was a good man. I loved him. But he also was so depressed about my mother being dead that much of the time it was like he was hardly there at all. So I think I convinced myself that I functionally had no parents, yet was still bound by the rules of my father.”

“An orphan without all the perks.”

“Lonely with no street cred.”

“Strange the things we convince ourselves as kids,” he says. “I always wanted to get the shit kicked out of me when I was younger.”

“Why?”

“Boys were always getting the shit kicked out of them in movies, and it just seemed like a rite of passage. Like I couldn’t grow up and be a real man until someone deviated the hell out of my septum or something.”

“That’s what all the real men say.”

“Unfortunately, it never happened,” he says. “A notorious people pleaser.”

He grows quiet. He leans back.

“Did you just get tired of talking?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “I just got actually tired. This doesn’t really feel like talking.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Just feels like being here,” he says. “It’s relaxing.”

Then he looks at her, like he is somewhat astonished by her presence. Like maybe he doesn’t quite believe in this moment, the way she can’t quite believe it. She wants to reach out, touch him. She wants to believe that something even more amazing can happen next. She feels certain that this moment, and moments like this, are what she stayed alive for.

“I know what you mean,” she says.

But at a certain point, a person can no longer be in a hot tub anymore, no matter how much they want to be. It’s just too hot. The body can’t take it. She stands up and remembers that she is only in her black lingerie.

The man looks away. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “I mean, I’m the one in my underwear. I should be sorry.”

But she’s not. She doesn’t even reach for her robe. She just continues standing there. Because why should underwear be more embarrassing than a bathing suit?

“To be honest, I never really understood the logic of it,” she says. “I mean, underwear covers the same exact parts of my body, and yet because it’s made out of different fabric, it’s suddenly inappropriate?”

“I’ve wondered that myself before,” he says. “But it does seem categorically different somehow.”

“Well,” Phoebe says.

She could invite him up to her room. And why not? Her marriage is over. He’s not wearing a wedding ring. And they have a connection. Phoebe is certain of it, because it has been so long since Phoebe has felt connected to anybody, even herself. Their connection is the most obvious thing—the only thing she can feel at the moment.

But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage—she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?

“I want to fuck you,” she says to the man.

“Oh,” the man says. He sits up straighter in the tub, no longer relaxed. “I really wasn’t expecting you to say that.”

“I wasn’t, either,” Phoebe says. “Just figured in the spirit of total honesty—”

“In the spirit of total honesty, I should tell you that I—”

“You’re with someone,” she interrupts, because there is the old Phoebe, rushing back to save her. The old Phoebe who assumes she knows all the terrible things that people are thinking, so she says them first, as if this somehow protects her from the truth. “Of course.”

But he doesn’t seem offended or embarrassed by what she said. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just watches her with curiosity, like she’s some kind of rare deer spotted in the woods that will vanish if he makes another sound. And suddenly, the old Phoebe seems like the fool. So defensive, so afraid, so silly in the face of this very honest moment of two people just wanting each other.

“I am,” he finally says.

She nods, ties her robe closed.

“Well, I sincerely hope someone beats the shit out of you this week,” Phoebe says.

“Thanks,” he laughs. “Me too.”

She smiles the whole way to the elevator. Her heart pounds wildly as she stands there. She feels alive. She feels so real. Like she could do just about anything, so she starts to turn around more books on the shelf. The House of Mirth . Huckleberry Finn. She doesn’t stop until she pulls out Mrs. Dalloway , by Virginia Woolf.

She holds Mrs. Dalloway in her hand as if it is a message from the universe, even though the old Phoebe doesn’t believe in messages from the universe. It’s just a book that belongs to the hotel. It’s just a book they probably got when they ordered books in bulk from some used bookstore. But it’s also the last book she never finished.

She puts it under her arm, gets in the elevator, and that’s how it becomes hers.

U PSTAIRS , SHE THROWS out the cigarettes. She opens the minibar, which the room literature insists is a “beverage cooler.” She pulls out a guava hibiscus kombucha.

“Don’t eat from the minibar,” her husband always said.

But she doesn’t care if she gets ripped off. She wants to get ripped off. She has chosen this overpriced hotel just to be ripped off. She feels giddy as she cracks open the can. Then she opens Lila’s gift bag and takes out the Oreos that are not Oreos because they are made from love and not trans fats. She holds up a not-Oreo in her palm and then eats an entire sleeve, like her husband used to. Until his affair, Oreos were the one thing her husband couldn’t keep under control.

“They’re just so damn good,” he would say. “I don’t know how anybody stops eating them.”

And they were. She bites into one and thinks, Even not-Oreos are so damn good.

She opens Mrs. Dalloway . She doesn’t want to think of her husband anymore. She has already thought about her husband so many times, and she has never once finished Mrs. Dalloway . She always told herself it was because she didn’t care for Woolf’s style, the circular sentences, the never-ending thoughts punctuated with semicolons; like this; and this; and then this.

“If you ever want to learn how to use a semicolon, don’t go to Woolf,” she used to tell her students.

If she were being honest, though, Phoebe would have admitted that she didn’t care about Mrs. Dalloway’s inner life. Mrs. Dalloway was too old, too unhappy, too married, already beyond the years of life that interested Phoebe at the time. And she hated Septimus for the same reasons—he was back from the war, threatening suicide, and after he jumped out the window, she felt betrayed by the book, betrayed by Woolf and all the other great authors who killed themselves. It was too horrible to know that getting married wasn’t enough. That creating their masterpieces hadn’t been enough, that going to World War II hadn’t been enough, that being a valedictorian of both her high school and then her college wasn’t enough—her father was still depressed. Still alone, always just sitting on his chair watching Vietnam War movies.

That’s how she found him when she returned from St. Louis after her first year of graduate school—dead on his chair. She assumed it was suicide, because that’s what she had always worried about, but then she saw the cereal bowl spilled all over his potbelly and she looked away. A stroke, she thought. Or maybe a heart attack. And when she looked at him again, the sadness was blinding.

She went back to school, and the darkness was all she could see for days. She was alone. Truly alone. She would walk around the Forest Park gardens and notice only the fungus on the leaves. The whiskey smell of Bob’s breath in the hallway. And Nancy, the department administrator, who ate tuna for lunch every day of her life and then got cancer and then quietly died offstage and was replaced by someone with the same exact haircut.

So she read the novels about slow, incremental improvement, about sisters who were also good friends, women who were too witty for the sincerity of their landscapes, women who were above marriage and its conventions and, yet, got to be beautiful and experience the joys of it anyway. She devoted her career to these books because she needed them. She didn’t care that most of the other graduate students thought this was boring. These stories were like little bibles to her, teaching her how to be normal, how to dream, how to believe that happiness and a new family would arrive in a single moment, on a single page, like the sudden crescendo of a symphony. She needed to believe these people were out there looking for her, these good and moral people with big estates and bigger hearts who would fall madly in love with just how alone she was, because wasn’t life fucking hard enough?

But now she needs something else. Now she rests her head on the coconut pillow and begins to read Mrs. Dalloway . Now she knows what it feels like to be beyond the traditional plot points of a life, to sit on a chair in an empty room feeling like there is nothing more than this solemn march forward. Yet, there must be something else. She is suddenly gripped with such curiosity it feels primal. She needs to know: After the war, after the marriage, after the suicide—what happens next?