The Wedding People

Chapter 11

Back at the hotel, Pauline stands behind the front desk in a navy linen dress. She has the expression of a woman who has been fielding requests that are impossible to field all day long, yet when she sees the wedding people, she gives a cheerful, “Hello! Welcome back! How was your sail?”

“Phenomenal,” Lila says. “Oh, that reminds me. I need to talk to you about my mattress.”

Lila turns to Pauline, and the group scatters. Nat and Suz are off to get their nails done. Marla and Juice require naps. Jim heads to the bar with Gary’s father to meet Uncle Jim. And Gary and Phoebe wait for the elevator in silence, listening to Lila explain to Pauline that the mattress is not soft enough.

“Not as soft as I was hoping,” Lila says.

Phoebe wonders if this is how Lila operates. Lila is upset about the funeral on the boat, but she can’t say anything about that, so she complains about the mattress to Pauline, because that’s where Pauline stands most of the day, waiting for complaints. Pauline is ready to fix any problem, which is why Phoebe is not surprised to see that Pauline has already restored the books on the shelf to their original positions, pages facing out.

“Is there anything you can do?” Lila asks.

“I’m just not sure there is anything we can do about the actual mattress,” Pauline says. “I mean, they’re brand-new mattresses.”

“Unfortunately, those brand-new mattresses are not very comfortable,” Lila says.

Gary looks down at his feet like he’s embarrassed, but then again, what does Phoebe know about Gary really? Gary could like this about Lila. Many men do—it took her a long time to realize that. Some men like the fuss. Some men like being told what to do, because then they never have to make any decisions, never have to think. It was probably very helpful when Lila told him where to hang the nude painting, probably for the same reasons that Phoebe always liked watching Matt roll up his belt into a neat and tidy ball. She liked watching his hand sweep the gutter clean. It’s arousing to see someone passionately take care of all the problems. Especially for someone like Phoebe, the perpetual passenger of the relationship, according to her therapist—the one who always asked, “Where do you want to go to dinner?” hoping the other person knew where they wanted to go.

But then Gary reaches out and makes a decision. He turns a book around just like she had.

Great Expectations .

Gary holds up his fist. “Free the books,” he says, and Phoebe laughs. She is surprised. Maybe she doesn’t know Gary at all. Maybe Gary makes decisions like that all the time. And why is she always trying to reduce people, squeeze them into these knowable, tiny boxes where there is room for only one or two personality traits? Gary is the stage and Lila is the song, she thinks. But then she thinks: Nobody is ever like anything all of the time. Because one day, Phoebe woke up and decided to kill herself, and that is not what the perpetual passenger of life does. The perpetual passenger of life just continues sitting in bed.

“Free the books,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe turns a book around, too. They continue on like that, freeing the books, while Pauline tries to appease Lila.

“The mattresses may take some time to, you know, break in,” Pauline says.

“Don’t mattresses famously get worse over time?”

“Well, I just don’t know what we can do about the mattresses, to be honest. They are, unfortunately, already here.”

“What about a topper?” Lila asks.

“A topper?” Pauline says. “Yes. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll get you a topper.”

Pauline says the word topper as if it’s foreign, and Phoebe imagines she is writing down on a little pad, What’s a topper? Either way, Pauline sounds relieved.

By the time Lila returns, Gary and Phoebe have freed two shelves of books.

“What are you doing to the décor?” Lila asks. She looks at them like she’s stumbled upon a bank robbery.

“They’re books, not décor,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe doesn’t have too many beliefs, but this is one of them.

“Are you going to tell me that books have souls now or something?” Lila asks.

The elevator doors open.

“I am going to tell you that they are books,” Phoebe says. “They’re meant to be read. That’s what books are.”

“Okay, Siddhartha,” Lila says, then pauses, as if she caught herself being too much like the Lila that she is around Phoebe. “Pauline says she’ll get me a topper. Do you want one, too?”

“No,” Gary says. “I need a firm mattress.”

“Right,” Lila says. “Your back. How is it?”

“It’s, you know, still my back,” he says, and chuckles softly to himself. Then they ride in silence until Lila says, “Why is this elevator so slow?”

“It’s from 1922,” Phoebe says, reading the plaque.

“But why wouldn’t they have renovated it when they redid the hotel?”

“Beats me,” Gary says, and then they are at the top.

“Well, that was fun,” Lila says. “A fun day.”

“Absolutely,” Gary says. “Very fun. A great idea.”

But Phoebe hates the word fun . Phoebe thinks that if people could just stop using the word fun , stop expecting everything to be fun, everything could be fun again. She was exhausted by her husband’s insistence that everything should be fun. He never used to speak like that, when things were actually fun, but at the very end, when nothing was fun, he would say, “Let’s go for drinks, it’ll be fun.” “Let’s go hiking, it’ll be fun.” And wasn’t that why she suggested they go to the Cornwall in the first place? “Let’s do something fun for spring break,” he had said.

“So Vivian, my maid of honor, will be flying in from Chicago tonight,” Lila says. “She’s my best friend from college. She’s amazing. I know you’re both going to love her.”

“I’m sure we will,” Gary says.

Then Lila lists off other good things that will happen today: “The reception will start at seven on the patio. Nat will be playing the harp with an award-winning cellist who served in Iraq and learned to play cello as part of his PTSD treatment, and maybe it would be good to tell Roy that.”

“I’ll let him know,” Gary says.

The doors open.

“Oh, good,” the mother of the bride says, kissing Gary and Lila on the cheek. “You’re back.”

She looks like the kind of woman Phoebe might see at a very high-end flea market. Flowy linen that matches the color of her hair. She gives Phoebe a kiss on the cheek.

“My sweater looks good on you,” the mother says, and pulls away to get a look at her.

Phoebe forgot she wasn’t wearing her own clothes, though how she could forget about sequins on her shoulders and a sunflower wedged between her toes, she’s not sure.

“Mom,” Lila says. “This is Phoebe.”

“So you’re the woman from Missouri who didn’t bring a sweater to the ocean.”

Phoebe smiles and shrugs. “First-timer.”

“I didn’t realize there were people still like that! Well, you certainly need this sweater more than I do.”

Up close, the mother of the bride has a strong jaw, like it’s been strengthened over the years from staring blankly at the ocean. She smells faintly of booze, though what kind Phoebe cannot tell.

“Do be kind to it,” the mother says. “It was the last gift your father ever bought me, you know.”

“Oh,” Phoebe says, horrified. “You know what? I’ll take it off.”

“Don’t be silly,” the mother says, waving her hand. She gives Phoebe a look that suggests she is not, at this point in her life, ever getting anything back. “Enjoy it. It’s yours.”

“Mom,” Lila says, looking at her mother’s door. “Why are there a bunch of statues lined up outside your door?”

“Oh, Carlson is going to remove them,” she says. “This hotel is very lovely, but the art in the room is just terrible . So morbid.”

She picks up one of the statues. “Who would put a sculpture of this dead bird in an old woman’s room?”

They all study the bird sculpture. Lila looks disturbed by it but says, “I don’t think that bird is dead.”

“Is it sleeping?” Phoebe asks.

“I bet it’s just sleeping,” Gary says.

“Since when do birds sleep with their necks all crooked like that?” the mother asks. She points to the other birds against the wall. “Look at them all. They look like they’ve been assassinated.”

“Well, yeah, when you line them up against the wall like that, it’s creepy,” Lila says.

Phoebe takes a closer look. “Ravens actually sleep like that.”

“Of course you know things about the sleeping habits of ravens,” Lila says.

“They tuck their heads into their chests,” Phoebe adds.

“Well, that doesn’t seem very comfortable for them,” the mother says.

“And why is everybody messing with the hotel’s décor?” Lila asks. “The Cornwall hired award-winning designers to plan out every detail of this place. You can’t just move things around.”

“Carlson said I can do what I like,” the mother says.

Lila looks at Gary and Phoebe. “Go on without me.”

Lila starts to bring the bird sculptures back inside her mother’s room as Gary and Phoebe walk down the hall. They don’t say a word until they turn the corner.

“How do you know things about the sleeping habits of ravens?” Gary asks.

“At some point, every lit professor has to spend a full day researching ravens,” Phoebe says. “They’re everywhere. Writers can’t resist a raven. You know, symbols of death and grief and the underworld and all that jazz.”

“Oh, yeah, love that jazz,” Gary says. “Poe, right? That was the raven poem?”

“Nevermore, nevermore.”

“God, I haven’t read that since high school,” he says. “I remember liking it, but now I don’t remember why.”

“It’s very emo,” she says. “Most of my students tend to respond to it for that reason. Brokenhearted man never gets over dead wife.”

She says it without thinking, but he doesn’t seem rocked by her words.

“I’m just impressed they care about the middle-aged longings of a grieving widower, to be honest,” Gary says.

“My students tend to love characters who sentence themselves to never-ending grief,” Phoebe says. “It seems noble to young people, I think.”

“Little do they know the truly heroic thing is somehow… taking a shower and getting yourself to the grocery store.”

They laugh.

“I just want to say thanks for helping Juice with her dog,” Gary says, still sounding caught up in some emotion from earlier that day. “I know it probably seemed weird, making such a fuss over a little toy, but she got the dog from her mother just before she died.”

“Oh, trust me, I get it,” Phoebe says. “I could tell it wasn’t just any dog.”

He said that even as Juice got too old for it, she checked on Human Princess every day. She still announced her major achievements at breakfast, like, “The Human Princess is eating,” or “The Human Princess has not been tucked in,” and he and his wife would laugh so hard they’d cry.

“I told her I’d get her a new one after the wedding,” Gary says. “But that’s crazy, right? I mean, even as I said it, I didn’t believe myself. We probably won’t get her a new one. I mean, she’s going to be twelve soon. And my dad’s probably right, it’s probably best we get her a real dog, no?”

“Probably,” she says. “But then again, real dogs require real work. You can’t just drop them in the ocean when they die.”

She and Matt debated for years about how much work a dog would be and would it be worth it. Sometimes, she thought just getting a dog would have been easier than endlessly debating about whether to get a dog.

“But maybe it’s a good thing you can’t just drop them in the ocean?” he asks.

They both seem to feel confused for a moment, thinking about Human Princess falling to the floor of the ocean, not being fed, not being tucked into its virtual bed, when Gary’s Uncle Jim and Aunt Gina come out of their room.

“Gary, the man of the hour,” Uncle Jim says, and pats Gary on the back.

“How are you two doing?” Gary asks, in what sounds like his doctor voice. He turns it on very quickly—smooth, controlled, friendly without being overbearing.

“Oh, just terrible,” Aunt Gina says. “Your uncle slipped on the floor yesterday and hurt his ankle, then played a terrible round this morning.”

“Just terrible,” Uncle Jim says.

Some days Uncle Jim does great. Some days Uncle Jim stinks.

“Lost my swing,” he says.

“You’ll get it back,” Aunt Gina says. “You always do.”

“I’m not worried , Gina,” Uncle Jim says. “I know I’ll get it back. Jesus.”

Then Uncle Jim leans in and says, “Hey, son, we have a question for you. It’s about your Aunt Gina’s bowels.”

“It’s terrible,” Aunt Gina says. “I haven’t gone since Friday. Travel always does this to me.”

“You just came from Cranston,” Gary says. “It’s only thirty minutes away.”

“Just the idea of traveling gets me,” Aunt Gina says.

“I can come by later,” Gary says, and pats his uncle on the back. “But you know I can’t give you actual medical advice, right? I’m not your doctor.”

“Oh, stop it,” Uncle Jim says. “You’re our nephew. Of course you can. What’s the point of my nephew being a shit doctor if we can’t get some free medical advice?”

When they walk away, it takes only one look from Gary to make Phoebe burst into laughter. Everything is light between them again, like earlier on the boat. Like last night in the hot tub.

“You must get that a lot, don’t you?” Phoebe asks.

“Let’s just say that I know the shape and size and color of the shits of about fifty percent of the inhabitants in any given room,” Gary says.

They laugh. She knows she should head into her room now. She knows they have been talking for too long. But she is not quite ready to leave yet. She doesn’t want to go back to being entirely alone in her room again.

“Hey, I’m sorry I was so forward in the hot tub last night,” Phoebe says. “Had I known.”

“Please don’t apologize,” he says. “I should have told you I was the groom.”

“Yeah, why didn’t you tell me you were the groom?”

“I don’t normally go around introducing myself as a groom.”

“You might need to start. You made me think you were…”

“What?”

“A regular person in a hot tub.”

“You made me think you were a regular person, too. But apparently you’re Lila’s friend from the art gallery?”

“I’m not,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I guess I became her friend, like literally last night. Or maybe this morning. I’m not sure. But we didn’t meet at an art gallery.”

“Why would Lila say you met at the gallery then?” Gary looks concerned, as if Phoebe is going to say something that might reveal the true character of his future wife. And Phoebe doesn’t know why Lila lied to them all but suspected it had something to do with how Marla’s face lit up when she mentioned the gallery. Or how embarrassing it would be to explain to everyone how Phoebe and Lila really met.

“Better to lie than tell everyone on the boat that I’m the crazy suicidal woman she met in the elevator yesterday,” Phoebe says.

“You’re not crazy,” Gary says. “Please don’t say that. That’s truly all I ask.”

She nods. She won’t. “But I could have been—”

“No, you were great,” he says. “You were so…”

Gary thinks for a moment, not like he is hesitating, but like he is trying to find the most accurate word.

“So what?” she asks.

She is surprised that she genuinely wants to know. She has always been so afraid to know things about herself—so afraid of reading the truth in course evaluations, or seeing her large nose in a photograph, or listening to her therapist draw unbearably accurate conclusions about her. “Have you always been this critical of yourself?” he asked her. And yes. Yes. She has. “I’m literally a critic,” she reminded her therapist, and he laughed. And where did she learn this? How did she become so good at identifying flaws? At seeing only the fungus on the trees?

“Alive,” Gary says. “You struck me as a person who was fully alive. It was inspiring, actually.”

Maybe it should be embarrassing to talk like this, to be so sincere in the middle of a hotel hallway at five in the evening, but Gary doesn’t seem embarrassed about it. Maybe one becomes comfortable with sincerity when they listen to people talk about their own shit with the utmost seriousness. He spends his days in a small room where people can only ever live or die. He is the one trusted with telling people the absolute truth about their assholes. Not to mention, their fates. Whereas Phoebe was trained in the depressive school of her father, and then the snark of graduate school, taught to poke holes in everyone’s arguments, to see the fatal flaws in papers, and it had been exciting for a short period of time. “For Matthews to claim that Jane Eyre is or is not a feminist text is to misunderstand what feminism is,” Phoebe wrote in her one published paper. She had been proud when it came out, but then for months after, she had a sour taste in her mouth, like she had put something rotten out into the world, and every time she worked on her book, she felt like she was just waiting for a critic to point out the ways it was spoiled. Who cares how many times Jane Eyre goes walking? How can Stone claim the natural world is both a domestic space and a public space at the same time? And how does the freedom Eyre experiences on those walks with Rochester not contradict Stone’s earlier claim that Jane is “trapped in the ‘unnatural’ world of a man’s making”? That’s usually when Phoebe stopped working on her book and picked up her cigarette.

Phoebe prefers this new way of talking. And maybe this is just one of the really nice things about getting older. Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.

“Thank you for saying that,” Phoebe says.

“Will we see you at the… reception then?” Gary says, so awkwardly that it feels like it’s the end of a date. And how easy it would all be if it were the end of a date. How nice it would feel to lean forward and kiss him.

But it’s not a date. Lila is coming down the hall. Lila belongs to Gary and Gary belongs to Lila, and Phoebe belongs to no one.

“No,” Phoebe says. “Like I said, I’m really not a part of the wedding.”

“Take care then,” Gary says. He gives her a long hard look, like he knows this will be the last time they ever see each other.

“Bye,” she says.

I N THE ROOM , Phoebe feels disappointed to return to the facts of her own life, to the night she will spend in the Roaring Twenties all alone. Not to mention, the life she will spend alone. And why does she do this? Why does she have a nice day with people, feel connected to them, and then, when alone, think only about the possible horrors of her isolation ahead?

“You catastrophize,” her therapist said to her once. “Depressive realism.”

She knows that. Yet her thoughts still have power over her anyway. They make her feel pinned to the checkered rug, to her solitary existence.

She thinks she should probably call a new therapist. But she still has this feeling that she is outside of time. She is supposed to be dead, and she’s not—it helps every time she remembers she’s living in some kind of bonus afterlife where she has a view of the ocean and a man named Carlson who shows up at sunset to “turn down” the room.

“Turn down?” Phoebe asks.

“Get you ready for the night,” Carlson says.

“That’s a service you provide here?”

Phoebe imagines Carlson pulling down her sheets, tucking her in like her father once had. Telling Phoebe sweet things about the universe like her husband used to. Petting her head as she drifts off into a sleep with no dreams.

“Yes,” Carlson says. “We are so sorry to have suspended it for the reception last night.”

Phoebe watches Carlson turn down the room. Lower the shades. Turn on the lights, fluff the coconut pillow. Pull the bedsheet down.

It is nice, this ritual. She likes that there is a specific phrase for it, this turning down of the room, this recognition that night is something we must prepare for. Because the night is hard.

Usually the worst time of day for Phoebe, when the depression surfaces like a cyst. Her therapist suggested that maybe it was body-related, maybe she just had a sugar deficiency, and maybe she would be happier if she ate six snacks a day. But she started to eat six snacks a day and the sun would begin to set and she would look at her husband’s shoes still by the door and she sobbed so loudly in the empty kitchen that it scared her. She would crawl into bed and think of all the different women she could have become. All the different ways better women end their days. How did Mia end her day?

She didn’t know why the end of each day always felt like such a test, but it did. It felt like a rehearsal for the end of life, which did not bode well for her, because Phoebe often did it with a drink in her hand, watching endless episodes of some period drama. Phoebe turned on all the lights at home and then her TV and lowered the woofer because the sounds of the British rifles were too realistic.

“Anything else you need?” Carlson asks.

It is nice the way everyone here keeps asking this, even if it’s just their job. Each time feels like another chance to practice asking for what she needs, something that used to be so difficult for Phoebe. I need to go on that vacation in March, she should have said. I need you to tell me that you love me more often right now, she should have said. But it had felt humiliating. Because her husband needed nothing—he was always so busy, so totally fine, always walking out the door with a million papers in his hand.

But Carlson waits, gives Phoebe time to think, looks at her as if he really wants to help, and maybe he does.

“I need a phone charger,” Phoebe says.

“Sure thing,” he says. “Anything else?”

“And a drain stopper for the tub.”

“Absolutely,” Carlson says. “I’ll be right back.”

“You’re not going to CVS, right?” she asks.

He laughs. “No. Just downstairs.”

She likes his Southern drawl and wonders if, like Pauline, he sounds nicer than he is. Though she suspects this is true of most people, especially herself. Because Phoebe was not nice. No—Phoebe was just trying very hard to be liked, even by Mia and her husband, even after the affair. She behaved like she was a very nice woman in an Ibsen play, waiting for the audience to clap or turn on her at any moment. To declare her a terrible woman or a great woman. But in her fantasies, she didn’t think nice things. She always wished bad things for them both.

“Here you go,” Carlson says when he returns, and presents the drain stopper and the phone charger on the brass platter. This time, she actually laughs.

“These brass platters are funny,” Phoebe says.

“We have to do it,” he says, and smiles.

“Where are you from?”

“Georgia, but I’m coming up from South Carolina,” he says. He works at their resort down there. He’s just here to offer some help as they get settled again after Covid. “We’re short-staffed.”

“Well, thank you for your service,” she says, and it’s so overly formal, it makes him laugh.

He does a grand bow. “You’re welcome, my dear. Now you enjoy your evening.”

H OW DOES ONE enjoy an evening?

She charges her phone. She puts on the fluffy robe. She fills the Victorian tub. She lets out her hair. Combs it with the softest brush she has ever felt as the sky turns pink.

She steps in the warm water one foot at a time. She opens Mrs. Dalloway . She makes it to Septimus’s suicide and then she reads on until the water gets cold. She turns on the hot water again and begins to wash. She picks up the shower head, and washing is less romantic than it appears it would be in a tub with vintage brass hardware. She goes to wet her hair and sprays water all over the floor by accident.

“Shit,” she says.

Eventually she gives up trying to bathe beautifully in this tub. She gives up trying to feel like she’s in a painting. She doesn’t have to be beautiful in this moment. She doesn’t have to be anything, ever. Her husband is not watching. Her father is not watching. Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.

“Can you take a different approach?” her therapist asked her. “Can you sometimes just try to love what you hate about yourself?”

She didn’t understand this question at the time. She didn’t understand how she could love herself. She didn’t understand what people even meant when they said they loved themselves. She honestly didn’t believe them. How could you love yourself? How could you love yourself when you know every single horrible thing you’ve ever thought? When you end most nights fantasizing about your husband fucking his mistress against the wall? And sometimes, Phoebe is in the fantasy, too. Phoebe is there to watch, to tell her husband he must do it harder and harder and harder.

“It’s sick,” Phoebe told her therapist.

“Why does it have to be sick?” he asks. “Why can’t it just be you, wanting to be a part of it?”

“Okay, so it’s sick and pathetic,” Phoebe said.

“It’s not pathetic to want things, Phoebe,” he said. “It’s good.”

“It’s not good to want that.”

But now she can understand what he was trying to tell her. It is good to want things, even the humiliating things. Even the things you aren’t supposed to want, like Gary, the groom. Because every time she thinks of sitting in that hot tub with Gary, she feels so lucky to be alive. She can’t believe she almost missed the chance to meet him. She can’t believe she almost threw her body away. This beautiful body, she thinks, and runs her fingers over the soft fuzz of hair that has grown on her legs. The scar on her knee. Her breasts, sticking out of the water like two smooth and ancient rocks in the ocean. And it turns her on a little, just looking at her breasts, so she starts to touch herself. She always thought it was a myth, all these water orgasms women were having in movies, but she can feel herself get close, feel her whole body begin to shake, when the door opens.

“Phoebe!” Lila shouts as she walks in.

“Jesus,” Phoebe says, sitting up so fast, water spills over the edges. She is flushed from the hot water, the heat of being caught. But Lila only notices the soaked phone on the ground.

“You can put that in dry rice and it’ll be fine,” Lila says. “I’m sure Pauline can get you some from the kitchen. Want me to call?”

“No,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe is not worried about the phone. Phoebe is more worried about how Lila got in here. But Lila just starts talking.

“God, I don’t know how Gary is related to Marla,” Lila says. “Could you believe Marla today? Honestly, the Vacation in a Cup thing. I don’t even know why I bother being so nice to her. And Juice, too. It’s like they hate me! They probably do hate me. And fine, I get it. I’m really fucking rich. I know it’s annoying. But I’m not rude to people. I’m not a bitch like Marla! And I know I’m not supposed to call another woman that, but what am I supposed to do if she’s just a bitch?”

Phoebe stares in disbelief as Lila sits down on the tiny black bathroom chair, which suddenly looks like it was put there just so Lila could sit on it and call people bitches.

“She was even worse at the cocktail party tonight,” Lila says. “I coughed, because I got some vodka down the wrong pipe, and Marla looked at me and was like, I’m sorry, but you just can’t cough like that in public anymore. And I said nothing, of course. Because she’s going to be my sister-in-law. I am going to have to spend the rest of the week with her. I mean, the rest of my life, technically. Though we don’t have to spend every holiday together. Like, we get Halloween to ourselves, right?”

The tub is cold again. Phoebe turns on the hot water, but it’s too hot and burns Phoebe’s fingers. This is how it happens. She just lets people around her do what they want. She doesn’t call them on their shit. She pretends like she has no needs, like it’s just fine to walk into her room when she was in the middle of trying to have an orgasm.

“How did you get in here?” Phoebe asks.

“I have a key,” Lila says.

“You have a key?”

“Yeah, I got a key when I booked the room for the week,” Lila says.

“Okay,” Phoebe says. “But that doesn’t mean you can just walk in on me while I’m in the middle of taking a bath.”

“Oh, I don’t mind you being naked,” Lila says, staring directly at Phoebe’s breasts. “I lived in a dorm room all my life. Seeing a naked woman is basically like seeing wallpaper.”

“That wasn’t my point, either,” Phoebe says.

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is, I was about to have an orgasm!”

“In the water? That actually works?”

“Now we’ll never know, will we?”

“And my life is not perfect. Have you even been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”

“I have, yes,” Phoebe says. “You have a sister-in-law who doesn’t want to get Covid. A mother who is not dead and in attendance at your wedding. Not to mention a fiancé who is really wonderful.”

“Oh my God, not you, too,” Lila says. “You sound like Nat and Suz.”

“Nat and Suz are right,” Phoebe says. “He’s wonderful.”

“What do you think is so wonderful about him?”

“Don’t you already know what’s wonderful about him?”

“Of course I know. But it’s more interesting to hear what you think is wonderful.”

Lila waits.

“Please?”

“He’s sincere,” Phoebe says, because if Lila wants honesty, she will get honesty. “He seems to accept that people are, well, human.”

“Okay,” Lila says, clearly unsatisfied. “But what else?”

“He’s smart. But he’s curious, too. A lifelong learner type.”

“A lifelong learner?”

“He’s engaged with the world. Like he’s on a mission to know it better. And he’s funny, but not in-your-face funny. Just in that dry kind of way that’s hard to notice at first, because he looks more friendly than funny, but once you do, you can’t stop seeing it.”

“But do you think he’s attractive?” Lila asks.

“You want to know if I think your fiancé is attractive?”

“I’m curious what you see.”

“Yes, I think he’s attractive,” Phoebe says, and it feels good to admit it out loud. Especially to Lila. “Very attractive, actually.”

This seems to please Lila, but then she looks momentarily doubtful. “Even with the beard?”

“The beard is maybe the best part.”

“But it’s gray .”

“A sexy kind of gray.”

“Gray is not sexy.”

“It’s like just a touch of gray,” Phoebe says. “Just enough to make him seem wizened.”

“That sounds way too close to wizard.”

“They’re actually not etymologically related.”

“Sometimes he does look like a wizard, though.”

“He does not look like a wizard,” Phoebe says. “He looks like a man with a beard.”

“Every man with a beard looks a little like a wizard.”

“Trust me, Gary seriously has the most ideal hair situation for a man his age.”

“That’s what I used to think,” Lila says. “But then he grew his beard and it came out all gray. I think if he just shaves the beard, it might be better.”

“I’m not sure it’s ever that simple.”

“That sounds cryptic.”

“Not cryptic.”

“Yes cryptic. Are you mad at me or something?”

“No, I’m not mad at you,” Phoebe says, but then remembers she is trying to be honest. “I’m annoyed.”

“With me ? Why?”

“Because I was trying to take a bath!” Phoebe says. “And you just waltz in without even knocking, then sit down and bitch about your sister-in-law and your fiancé’s sexy gray beard and your million-dollar wedding to a naked and suicidal and divorced woman in a tub, and you think that’s really how I want to spend my bath? You think that’s fair to do to me?”

Lila looks hurt or confused or both. But Phoebe doesn’t care.

“And you do, I think!” Phoebe says. “You really think you can just walk around, spewing your inner monologue onto everything, but you can’t. You have to respect people. You have to knock on their doors before walking into their bedroom. Nobody cares that you’re the fucking bride. It doesn’t give you a license to just watch people bathe. You’re not God. You’re just another fucking woman, put here on earth like the rest of us.”

“But I did knock on your door,” Lila says. “You didn’t answer.”

“If a person doesn’t answer, that means you don’t come in.”

“Well, excuse me, but I was worried you might be dead!”

“Oh,” Phoebe says.

It honestly didn’t occur to Phoebe that Lila might still be worried about her, since Lila never seems particularly worried about anything but her wedding. Yet Phoebe is softened by the thought. Lila was worried she might be dead. Of course. That’s what happens when you tell people you’re suicidal. They worry about you. They worry about you so much, it makes them angry, too.

“You really want to talk about fair?” Lila asks. “You think it’s okay to tell someone that you want to die, then kick them out of the room, and then act like it’s not going to affect them in any way whatsoever? I’m not a monster, Phoebe. I would care if a woman died at my wedding. I have feelings. But everybody thinks that just because I’m like really fucking blond or something, I don’t have feelings, but you know what? My hair is not even blond!”

“It’s not?” Phoebe asks. “It’s impressively natural seeming.”

“Well, it’s brown, just like my father’s! And my grandfather’s! We’re Italian!”

“You are?”

“Like, a quarter! My dad’s dad was Italian,” she says. “My name is actually Lila Rossi-Winthrop, a hyphen that my parents fought over their entire lives. My father was so proud to be Italian, never really forgave my mother for not taking his name, even though he’s a total hypocrite. Because when I grew out my dark hair in college, do you know what my father said? He said, I liked you better as a blonde. And so now I am here, with super blond hair, because not even my own father likes my real hair. Which is really just his hair. The man gave it to me, then acts like it’s my fault for growing it!”

Lila stands up.

“Everybody in my life is always telling me I can be anyone I want, but then whenever I do one thing they don’t like, they act like I’ve ruined myself,” Lila says. “And so I come up here, because you’re the only person at this wedding who doesn’t seem to give a shit what I do.”

None of what Lila says is a surprise to Phoebe, yet it’s a surprise to hear Lila say it. Phoebe looks at Lila, a bride still in her white silk reception dress. It has cherries on the trim. It makes her look a few years younger than she is. It must have taken her hours to get ready for the reception, carefully considering each decision, and yet, she is not even at the reception. It makes Phoebe feel suddenly tender toward Lila, like Lila is the old Phoebe now. Lila is the one hiding in the library or in the dark of her room because she feels most comfortable there.

“That’s really why you’re here?” Phoebe asks.

“Yes,” she says. “And also because my maid of honor, Vivian, just called to say she’s not coming. I was upset.”

They laugh.

“Shit,” Phoebe says.

“Her son has Covid.”

“Double shit.”

“But does she need to really be there if he has Covid? Like, can’t Max take care of the kid for once?” Lila wonders. “Max is seriously the worst, by the way. I mean, he’s the best in the worst kind of way.”

“You lost me.”

“He researches endangered jaguars or something. They like, fell in love on some research trip trying to save the last living jaguar in South America. But now that they have a kid, she is always at home, while he’s traveling the world counting up all the jaguars, I guess. Needless to say it’s very… annoying. For Viv, I mean. Viv is always stuck taking care of the kid.”

“Maybe she’s not stuck. Maybe she likes it.”

“Nobody likes that .”

“Some people like it.”

“I try to like it,” Lila confesses. “But most nights, Gary doesn’t make it home in time from work and it’s always just me and Mel at dinner. Sometimes, it’s okay. Sometimes we just watch a movie or something. But sometimes, when I make her sit at the table, it’s excruciating.”

And she doesn’t know if this is Juice’s fault or her own.

“She hardly ever speaks to me,” Lila says. “And I never know what to say to her. I ask her about school, about her friends, about why she wants to be called Juice now. But she’s just like, It’s none of your business, which means that it has something to do with her mom, but she won’t say it. She’s just like, Because my name is Juice now, and so I’m supposed to just start calling her Juice?”

She sighs.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not very good at being around children. My mother was right. I didn’t even know how to be a child when I was a child. And sometimes I wonder if the people who say they love being around children are lying. It’s like people who claim to like raisins. They just want to be people who like raisins.”

“I like raisins.”

“Well, of course you like raisins.”

“My hands are like raisins,” Phoebe says, holding up her pruned fingertips.

“You should probably get out of the tub,” Lila says.

“But I haven’t even washed my hair yet. To be honest, it’s actually really hard to bathe in this thing. I’ve decided it’s one of those things that looks more romantic than it is.”

“Like chocolate,” Lila says.

“And cross-country skiing in the forest.”

“And paddleboats. I loathe paddleboats.”

The thing she is starting to love about Lila is this: She begins to shampoo Phoebe’s hair without a word and continues her angry chatter in such fixed tones, it becomes soothing to Phoebe.

“Do you think it’s weird that you’re the only one I can tell all this stuff to?” Lila asks.

“I wouldn’t say weird,” Phoebe says. “But maybe it’s a little sad.”

“It is sad,” Lila admits. “It’s really sad. And how did that happen? How did I end up becoming a person who has nobody?”

“You have Gary.”

“But I can’t be honest with Gary,” she says. “I can’t tell him that I’m not sure I really like his daughter. That I pretty much hate his sister. That I’m sick and tired of hearing about his dead wife.”

“What about Nat and Suz? You could tell them.”

“Not really.”

Lila admits she does not do the best job of keeping in touch with her friends when they are no longer right in front of her face. She has no idea what’s going on in their lives, really. She knows that Viv is somewhat responsible for repopulating the Atlanta Zoo with the giant panda. She knows that Nat is married to the third violin in the Detroit Symphony. And she knows that Suz has a baby, and she thinks it’s weird how she calls the baby a little worm, but also maybe it’s cute. The point is—Lila doesn’t know. She wishes she could ask, but they don’t ask each other real things like that anymore.

“When my father died, none of them called,” Lila says.

They just sent texts. Heart emojis. They said, We’re here for you, Lila , and Suz sent a picture of the Little Worm like she was the moral support. And it weirdly made Lila feel like she couldn’t call them. All she wanted to do was sob in their arms like she had once in high school. But the time for that seemed to be over.

“Ever since I arrived here, I’ve had this feeling that we’re just pretending to still be friends. Reenacting the friendship the way it used to be, when we were actually close,” Lila says.

That was how Phoebe felt at the end of her marriage. They reenacted the beginning—went on date nights, invited each other to things. Matt was always saying, Sure, yes, come to happy hour. But she could feel how he didn’t really care if she came. Her presence had somehow become irrelevant to her own husband, and how are people supposed to tolerate that kind of pain? How are you supposed to go from being the center of someone’s world to being irrelevant? To sobbing in your best friend’s arms unthinkingly to being afraid to call them after your father dies? Phoebe doesn’t know. She, too, was caught unprepared by that kind of loss.

“That’s sort of how it is with everyone here,” Lila says. “Like I’m pretending. Acting out this idea of what we once were or what we could be.”

Phoebe wants to ask what she pretends to be with Gary. But it doesn’t seem right. She’s in a fragile state. It feels like one small pull of the thread, and Lila will unravel. And Lila surely has to go back out to her cocktail party. It’s only eight.

“When does the pretending stop?” Lila asks.

“I’d like to say whenever you want it to,” Phoebe says, but she knows this isn’t true. It’s harder than that. “But I think it stops when you get fed up.”

“Fed up with what?”

“Yourself,” Phoebe says.

“But how long does that take?” Lila asks, as if she’s at the doctor, writing down notes.

“It took me forty years.”

“Well, that’s not promising. Forty is so far away.”

“I mean, it doesn’t have to happen at exactly forty.”

But Lila puts her face in her hands. “Ugh. I can’t believe I have no maid of honor.”

“Maybe Pauline will do it.”

Lila doesn’t smile. She doesn’t seem to like the joke. “Will you do it?”

“I’m not in the wedding.”

“I’m the bride. I get to decide who’s in the wedding. It’s like being the president of your very own country. So ta-da, now you’re in the wedding.”

“But I don’t even know you,” Phoebe says, and as soon as she says it, Phoebe regrets saying it. She knows it’s no longer true.

“You already know me better than most people at this wedding,” Lila says. “Except for maybe my high school guidance counselor.”

“Why did you invite your high school guidance counselor, by the way?”

“Is that weird?”

“It’s a little weird.”

“Well, he’s local. And he was really very kind to me when I was a kid,” she says. “A better mother to me than my own mother. Even gave me his sweater once when I got my period on his office chair.”

“Even stranger.”

“You think so?”

“I think he probably got the invitation and was like, Wait, what? The girl who menstruated on my chair?”

Lila laughs loudly and looks truly happy for a second.

“He probably did,” she says. “Because actually it is a little weird. I finally had a chance to talk to him, and he was so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, halfway through the convo, I was like, Wait, who are you? Why did I invite you?”

She laughs again and it’s good to hear Lila make fun of herself. But Phoebe is starting to understand that on some nights, Lila is probably the loneliest girl in the world, just like Phoebe. And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world. Lila has no maid of honor and Phoebe has never been a maid of honor. It has always been a mark of shame for her, that no woman in this world was willing to claim her.

“Anyway. It’s not even like you have to do that much,” Lila says. “Viv already planned everything. You’ll see tomorrow, it’s all in the binder. You just kind of have to like, read the binder and then stand there and do what Viv would have done.”

“You do remember that I came to this hotel to kill myself,” Phoebe says.

Saying it aloud makes her feel very far away from that woman who put on her green dress and came here to die—to think of someone being in that much pain. To think of herself walking in here like she had no other option. Phoebe wants to hug that woman, not hurt her.

Her therapist was right. She won’t kill herself. She is not the type. She has always known this about herself but somehow forgot. Somehow, everything felt so dark back at home, and only now that she is here can Phoebe look back and see just how dark. At the time, the darkness felt like life. Phoebe was too familiar with it, the way she was too familiar with her own house. She could walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, no problem—she knew the knobs on every door, could feel the walls of her house like they were the walls of her own body. To be stuck inside her house was to be stuck inside herself and all the choices she made over the years.

“I’ll do it,” Phoebe says. Saying it aloud feels like grabbing on to something.

“Yes!” Lila says. She claps her hands and Phoebe starts to feel a tiny bit excited. Phoebe does not have to go back—not yet. “Tomorrow morning, you can join us for the bridal brunch in the conservatory.”

A ridiculous sentence if Phoebe ever heard one. But she’s cheered by the thought.

“Only if you get this shampoo out of my hair,” Phoebe says.

Lila holds the shower head above Phoebe. The water is warm down her back. Phoebe sinks deeper into the tub.

“Have you tried the back scrubber?” Lila asks.

“There’s no back scrubber.”

“They didn’t give you a back scrubber?”

“I don’t need a back scrubber.”

“How else were you planning on scrubbing your back?”

“Do I need to scrub my back?”

“Have you never washed your back before?”

“Maybe not?”

The only time she ever washed her back was when she showered with her husband. At the start of their relationship. Their first trip to the Ozarks, in the little B&B, how they would wash each other. She remembers the feeling of him spreading the soap over her back, his hands sliding down her spine.

“Head back,” the bride says.

Just submit, Phoebe thinks. Put your head back and close your eyes and let the water rush down your body. Let the bride wash the shampoo out of your hair if that’s what the bride wants to do. You’re the maid of honor now.

B Y THE TIME Phoebe turns her phone on, it is dark outside. She sits on the balcony and listens to all the messages come in at once. A familiar ding, yet the phone feels foreign in her hand, like some object pulled from an archaeological dig, filled with messages that no longer have anything to do with her.

Bob asking why she took off in the middle of her Intro to Lit class.

Her student Sam who wants her to know that she didn’t come to class today because her grandmother had a bloody nose and her bloody nose got all over Leaves of Grass and she thinks it’s probably a biohazard to bring the book into a public space now, though she knows how Dr. Stone feels about students who do not bring their books, but the syllabus doesn’t mention what to do if the book is covered in actual human blood? This is what Sam needs to know. Thanks! , she wrote.

And then Bob again.

Are you okay? Bob wrote. Because Bob is not a total jerk. Bob is wondering where she is. Does she need a medical leave of absence? Does he need to get another adjunct to cover the semester for her? Will she be back?

And then there are the texts from her husband. They start on late Tuesday, just before midnight.

Phoebe , her husband texted. It might be weird to say this, but it felt equally weird not to have wished you a good start to the semester when I saw you today in the office. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, I hope your classes went well today.

But by this morning, he was concerned.

Hate to bug you again, but Bob emailed and is wondering where you are. I told him I don’t know. Are you okay?

And now he is very concerned.

Phoebe, I know I don’t have a right to ask, but if you could please let me know if you’re okay, I’d really appreciate that. I’m very worried about you.

Now he’s worried? She is stunned by his sudden concern. Because why wasn’t he worried two years ago when he left? Or on her birthday last May, when she woke up and the first sound out of her mouth was a sob that had sounded so much like an animal dying in the woods it spooked Phoebe into silence?

She doesn’t respond. Maybe I’ll never respond again, she thinks.

But she should write to Bob. She types and deletes a few responses.

I am going to be back in a week, after I finish taking care of my dying grandmother’s estate.

I am researching 19th-century estates on the East Coast for my book, which I am going to seek publication for in 2023. (Did you know Edith Wharton lived in Newport?) My research might take all semester.

But none of this is true. Writing these emails makes her feel like her students lying their way out of something. And she is lying—she has no idea what she will do after the wedding. She can’t imagine going back now. But she also can’t imagine not going back.

I will need someone to cover my classes this week , she writes to Bob. I am very sorry for taking off without any notice, and I’ll write as soon as I can when I have more information about what I am going to do regarding the rest of the semester. Thank you for understanding.

She uses the flashlight on her phone to finish Mrs. Dalloway. But when she’s done, she doesn’t go inside. She wants to stay and look up at the stars. At home, she would never sit out in the dark alone. But nighttime in a hotel is a different thing. At night, a hotel comes alive. The fairy lights in the garden start to sparkle. The experimental harpist and cellist begin to play. The wedding people sprawl out of the parlor and assemble on the patio. They are still partying. The wedding people are always partying. It feels like what they are sent here by God to do. To have loose ties around their white collared shirts and to laugh very hard while slamming the tables with their palms.

She read something once about how the cello is soothing because it mirrors something about our physiology. Phoebe can’t remember what exactly. But it does soothe her. So do the sounds of doors closing, opening, closing, opening. The sink running next door. The roll of laughter so steady and constant, rising and falling like waves. The constant motion of the world. The whole place is designed to keep her from descending into despair. On every wall, there is evidence that somebody has thought about her stay here. The little candles on the tables below. The torches that come on automatically at dusk.

It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.