The Wedding People

Chapter 12

Phoebe wakes at sunrise with an urgency to touch the ocean. It’s time. She puts on Lila’s mother’s sweater again (must get new clothes today, she decides) and heads downstairs to the Cliff Walk.

On the way out, she’s surprised to spot Gary and Lila in the conservatory—they are being photographed under two giant ferns. It feels too early for something like that, to be dressed so formally before the ocean mist has evaporated, but there they are, leaning into each other. They look like well-dressed cartoons. Something about Lila’s pants looking too clean or Gary’s blazer too checked.

Phoebe pours herself some coffee as they pose. She thinks Lila looks beautiful in her silk tube top, though Phoebe imagines Lila does not call it a tube top. She can hear Lila in her head saying, Tube tops are for teens in the nineties at the mall, Phoebe. Strapless blouses are for women about to get married.

“If you can just put your hand there ,” the photographer suggests to Gary, so Gary puts his hand there. Moves the hair off her shoulder. Yes, yes, like that. Lean back into him. And Lila does, but her face is too stiff, the way people’s faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.

Lila sees her. She waves and Gary nods. Phoebe nods back, then slips out of the room. There is something embarrassing about watching a couple take photos like this. Watching a couple try to be a couple, even though they are a couple.

O N THE C LIFF W ALK , there are no people out yet. Just someone’s yellow dog milling around the Forty Steps entrance, though she doesn’t see anyone connected to the dog. She starts to walk faster, which tricks the dog into thinking it’s a competition, and that’s how she starts racing this random dog on the Cliff Walk.

I will get a dog, she thinks. No offense to Harry. But the dog will go walking with her in the morning. The dog will keep her out in the world. And it feels amazing to just decide something like that, like, I will get a dog.

The dog slows to a happy trot two steps ahead of her. Together, they pass signs telling them to stay on the path, but there are thin dirt trails made by those who did not listen, like this dog, who starts walking down to the rocks.

HIGH RISK OF INJURY , the sign warns, complete with a helpful picture of a man falling off to his death. Yet Phoebe follows, because people, like dogs and the fisherman down below, will do anything to get closer to the water.

“Hey, hey!” the fisherman says as soon as he sees the dog. The dog barks. “Thanks for bringing him to me.”

The fisherman is smiling, like she did the dog a great service. When he looks at her, his headlight blasts her in her eyes.

“Sorry,” he says, fumbling with the thing. “I sometimes forget I’ve got this thing on my head.”

“It’s okay,” she says.

He turns back to the water, and she sits down on a rock, even though he has not asked for her company. But she decides that’s how some people are (she decides that she likes deciding things now that she is forty and alone, that’s how some people are ). Some people don’t ask for what they need. Some people are like religious children that way, mistaking suffering with goodness. Her father acted like being lonely was a good workout, something that would pay off in the end, and sometimes it didn’t, but when he was fishing, it did: He always filled his bucket, dropping in each fish unceremoniously, saying to Phoebe, “Don’t get excited, folks. Just a trash fish.”

She always liked that her father did this—said “folks” when it was just her, as if Phoebe was a grand audience. Yet Phoebe stood there stoically as instructed, like she was just a girl who liked being a good girl, and good girls did not like killing things. Good girls liked the breeze through their long hair and the flush on a man’s face when he smacked the fish against a rock. Killed it instantly. Threw it in the bucket.

The waves build in the distance and crash against the rocks, and she can’t look away. Phoebe feels grateful, like she has achieved something monumental just by sitting here at sea level, even though from down here on the rocks, the ocean is terrifying. It’s the closest embodiment to what eternity might look like. She can’t see the end of it or the bottom of it. She can’t see the darkness of its expanse, but she knows there are creatures who have to live in it. Who think it’s normal. She reaches out her hand and she touches it.

Her phone dings.

Please tell me you’re okay and that I shouldn’t call the police , Matt texts.

This is how her husband shows affection. Like her father, who was most comfortable showing love by announcing the ways he thought Phoebe might die—you’re going to trip on these socks and break your neck! You could slip on some black ice and drive right off the road! He was always worried about protecting Phoebe from herself. Like when Phoebe was pregnant, Matt looked at the two lines on the stick and said, “It’s too early to get excited, isn’t it?” and she agreed, but when she started bleeding ten weeks later, she hated herself for agreeing, for not getting excited when she had the chance.

So she doesn’t respond to her husband. He doesn’t deserve a response, she thinks. He deserves to suffer like she did, to spiral out of control. Because that was the problem. He never lost control. Neither did she.

“Hey, hey!” the fisherman shouts, and starts pulling on his line. “I got one!”

He looks over at Phoebe, so excited. He needs Phoebe to see the fish. And Phoebe wants to see. But by the time she gets to him, he’s lost it.

“Shit,” he says. “Mind holding this for me? I bet he took the bait.”

“Happy to,” she says.

He bends down to get more squid from his bucket. Phoebe feels the heavy pull of the water. Much stronger than the pull of the river. It takes strength to hold the rod still, to not be scared as the water breaks against the rocks and pools around her feet. She imagines it’s easy to get wiped out by a wave here.

But the man acts like standing here on the slippery rocks is just business. Holds up some fresh squid and tells her to reel in the hook. But she starts to feel little nibbles, the small bites of something alive in the water.

“I think I got something,” she says, and pulls the rod up sharply to set the hook. “Got it!”

She reels it in, slowly until the fish is dangling above the water. It’s so jarring—this fish yanked from its dark watery world, plunged into an entirely new one, where the most ordinary things like light and air are shocking. The fish shakes wildly on the end of the line, the force of his will to live so enormous. He is like Virginia Woolf’s moth, fluttering its wings—all struggle, all life.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“Agh,” the fisherman says. “Just a sea robin. Nobody buys those.”

She takes the fish off the hook, looks at its big ugly mouth, and throws it back into the sea. Wipes her hands on her leggings and gives the rod back to the fisherman.

“You’ve got a lucky touch,” he says. “Want to do another?”

“I need to get going,” she says.

She wants to see Edith Wharton’s house before the bridal brunch. She says goodbye, pats the dog on the head, climbs back up the rocks. On the way, Phoebe slips, falls, scrapes her knee, but does not slide into the water like the little man on the warning sign.

“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day,” Woolf wrote.

And it’s true. How easy to be dead. How lucky to be alive, even for just one day. Charlotte Bront?’s father understood this—the man had lost every single one of his children except for Charlotte, which is why he repeatedly turned down her final suitor. He worried marriage and the childbirth that followed marriage would kill her. And one year later, it did.

But Phoebe has made it out alive. She is back up on the path. Nothing has destroyed Phoebe. She feels very aware of this as she continues walking.

She was never much of a walker, never really understood the point of walking just to walk, which made her feel like a bad Victorianist sometimes. She didn’t take walks like Jane Eyre or wander the moors like the Bront?s, though she always imagined she might if she had a moor at her disposal.

And now she does. An ocean is like a moor, she thinks. It’s an open watery horizon, and she walks along its edge until she reaches Land’s End. Edith Wharton’s house. Not that it’s really Wharton’s house anymore. The new owners are some random people from Connecticut, which is all she can gather from her phone.

She tries to get a better look, scrambles over some rocks, and she’s not an ardent enough Wharton fan for this to feel like a holy pilgrimage, mostly because her books ended in too much tragedy, a Romeo and Juliet–style fatal miscommunication that Phoebe respected yet hated. But she loved everything up to that point. The parties, the clothing, the conversations. She loved Wharton’s sense of humor. Her careful eye. She loved Lily Bart and was devastated when she killed herself at the end.

But Wharton hadn’t published any of her books while she lived in this house. At Land’s End, she had been unknown, an unhappy married woman. She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.

T HE WALK BACK feels longer, but she likes feeling her legs strain as she passes mansion after mansion on her left. She is suddenly curious about what she has not yet become, and is proud of herself when she returns to the Forty Steps. And maybe that’s who she will become—a woman who enjoys a good walk alone.

Phoebe, I’m at the house and it truly looks like you were abducted in the middle of making breakfast. Where are you? Did you bring Harry with you?

It’s unsettling to think that after all this time he is actually at the house. He is back among their things, walking up and down the stairs. But he is too late in arriving. Like a party guest you hate for showing up when you are throwing out all the uneaten food.

I just found Harry in the basement under a blanket. I presume you know that Harry is dead?

“Yes, I know Harry is dead,” she says to her phone. “So fuck you, you fucking fuck.”

She feels the urge to throw her phone off the cliff, to get him away from her, like his texts might grow more powerful the longer she keeps them in her hand.

“Uh-oh,” a man says.

She turns to see Gary standing there in his jogging clothes. Phoebe is disarmed.

“Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to live a new life?” he asks.

“Yes,” Phoebe says. “And in the next scene, you can find me waiting in line at the Apple store to buy a new phone, like, immediately.”

“Like just hours of you shopping for a phone and making small decisions about how to set it up?”

“That’s basically how the movie ends.”

“Very experimental.”

“A commentary.”

“Somebody give this woman an Oscar,” he says, facing the ocean like it’s the audience.

“Thank you, thank you,” Phoebe says. She feels light and funny again.

“Lila sent me to come get you,” Gary says. “Your absence at the bridal brunch has been noticed.”

“Oh,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t realize how long I was out here.”

Gary must be wondering why she was invited to the bridal brunch if she’s not really part of the wedding. But he doesn’t ask.

Her phone starts vibrating, and they both stare at it like it’s the fish, exhausting itself until it dies.

“Everything okay?” Gary asks.

“It’s my husband calling,” Phoebe says. “My ex-husband, I mean. I have to practice saying that.”

“Good luck,” he says. “I still have trouble saying ‘my dead wife.’”

“There have to be better options.”

“Nothing else sounds much better,” he says. “My deceased wife?”

“Too formal,” Phoebe says.

“My late wife?”

“Too old-fashioned.”

“My first wife.”

“Asshole.”

“My departed spouse.”

“Okay, now you just sound like you murdered her. You’re right. I see your problem.”

“There is always the option of just calling her Wendy,” he says. “But it feels wrong to do it around Lila. It feels… rude somehow.”

Which is a real shame, he says, because he always liked the name Wendy. So did Juice, who said “Wendy” even before she said “Mama,” maybe something to do with how many times Juice watched Peter Pan , he wasn’t sure.

“Wendy was disappointed by it, she was like, what am I, her co-worker?” Gary says. “But after she died, I was glad that from the very beginning she could see her mother as a person.”

“That’s a nice way to think about it,” Phoebe says. “Can I ask how Juice got the nickname?”

“It’s something Wendy used to call her,” Gary says. He explains that Juice had so much energy as a toddler, zipping back and forth across the room, with this incredible strength. Wendy would always laugh about her being juiced up.

“We stopped calling her that a long time ago, but after Wendy died, Juice started asking to be called that again,” Gary says. Then, as if he fears he has been rude for talking so much about his family, he asks, “Do you have kids?”

“No,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I tried.”

She tells him about all the trying. About IVF. About how that might have been when the depression started. It was hard to say. Hard to work backward and see the beginning. All those appointments and by the end, Matt didn’t want to come.

“Matt?”

“My ex-husband,” she says. “He never wanted to come. He said he was okay doing IVF but then would look at the medications in the fridge and say, This is all so expensive. And it was. But I also know it was his way of telling me he wanted it to happen naturally. He wanted the child to light up inside me like a firefly. He wanted it to be so obvious, so natural, that no doubt had any room to creep in.”

But they had appointments. Phoebe had polyps. She had operations.

“Then the egg-stractions,” she says.

“Egg-stractions?”

“Technically, they’re called retrievals. But they should be called Eggstractions, right? I mean, come on. It’s just sitting right there.”

The Eggstraction, she joked with her husband. Sounds like a horror story someone should write.

“But Matt wouldn’t joke about it with me. He was just like, Oh God, who would read that story?”

“A lot of people would.”

The hotel is visible now. The bridal brunch is waiting inside. Phoebe takes small, slow steps.

“Here we go,” Gary says.

“Not ready to talk to people again?”

“It’s just been a lot of family,” Gary says. “I’m supposed to be having coffee with them right now, but there are only so many times I can listen to Marla list off the price of various houses in the neighborhood.”

“Marla’s pretty funny,” Phoebe says.

“She really is,” Gary says. “Even though I know she can be a lot for people.”

“A lot can be okay. It can be good. It’s better than nothing.”

It’s what Phoebe longed for in the silence of her house growing up. Her father was not a loud person, and neither was she, but she wanted to be. She longed for a lot of noise in the kitchen, for clanging pots, for the sounds of people laughing by the fire.

“I used to dream of having one of those big families in nineteenth-century British novels,” Phoebe says.

“I thought you dreamed of being an orphan?”

“Well, if I couldn’t be an orphan, then I wanted a big messy family,” she says. “Like in Pride and Prejudice or something.”

“I’ll just nod and pretend I read it, too.”

“It’s one of those books that are about the big family, and what the big family is up to, and how the big family changes over time, and all the little ways the members of the big family irritate each other but also love each other.”

“I see,” Gary says. “So I’ll just pretend that I’m a character in an Austen novel I’ve never read, and all will be well.”

“Totally healthy,” Phoebe says.

He holds open the hotel door like a butler. “The ladies await, Maid of Honor.”

She blushes. So Lila told him.

“ G ARY , YOU ’ RE LATE for your Bourbon Bubbler,” Lila says as soon as they walk into the conservatory.

“What’s a Bourbon Bubbler?” Nat asks.

“And how do we get one?” Suz asks.

“Sorry,” Lila says. “It’s a massage for men only.”

“How can a massage be only for men?” Marla asks.

“That’s like when they tried to market wine just for bros,” Nat says. “As if there are some grapes that are manlier than other grapes.”

“Wine for bros,” Juice repeats, and laughs.

“I for one can only feel okay about being rubbed down if it’s done with literal poison,” Gary says, and the women laugh.

“Are you ready for some very relaxing poison, bro?” Juice asks, pretending to be a masseuse.

“Oh come on. It’s a classic bourbon sugar scrub,” Lila says. “People have been doing it for… years.”

Lila kisses Gary goodbye. Every kiss they have in public seems grander than the last—designed to produce applause. Phoebe feels her stomach lurch. Maybe she’s hungry. Maybe she needs a big breakfast, like the kind she used to order for herself when hungover. Phoebe sits down at the table of women, looks at the menu, while the bride tries to order a coffee.

“That’s all I am trying to do here,” Lila says to the waiter. He wears a name tag that says, RYUN, DRINK CONCIERGE .

“Oh, we have free coffee in the samovar,” Ryun says.

“What’s a samovar?” Juice asks.

Phoebe imagines that when Ryun is not being asked, What’s a samovar, he’s spending a lot of time trying to explain why his name is spelled with a U and not an A .

“It’s that jug of coffee over there,” Ryun says, pointing to a table.

“Right, but I don’t want free coffee from the samovar,” Lila says. She points to the menu. “I want this coffee.”

“But it’s the same coffee,” Ryun says, smiling. “The only difference is that this coffee is just six dollars more.”

“Look, I am just trying to order the coffee that’s on the menu here. Can you please give me that coffee?”

Juice and Marla give each other eyes across the table. Ryun nods.

“Right, okay, I understand,” he says, and then goes to get a cup of coffee out of the samovar. When he brings it over to Lila, the cup wobbles violently on the saucer.

“Thank you,” Lila says.

Lila is the only one at the table not embarrassed.

“Here is your binder, Maid of Honor,” Lila says.

Being maid of honor comes with a schedule of events and a list of duties, some already crossed out, like “Research old restaurant that Oprah loves,” “Book the water spa,” and some duties yet to be crossed out: “Buy compostable dick-themed flatware,” “Confirm tarot reading, 7 p.m.,” and “Confirm Sex Woman, 5 p.m.”

“Confirm Sex Woman?” Phoebe asks.

“What’s a Sex Woman?” Juice asks.

“Nobody knows, sweetheart,” Marla says.

“I’m not supposed to know,” Lila says, closing the binder. “Today is supposed to be a surprise.”

“I bet she’s one of those women who show up with toys and things, and, like, teaches us how to have sex,” Suz says.

“Do you not know how to have sex, bro?” Juice asks Lila.

“Mel, please don’t call me bro,” Lila says.

“Bro, please don’t call me Mel.”

“But Mel is a beautiful name,” Lila says. “And Juice is actually the nickname of a professional football player who was famously tried for murder.”

Marla looks at Lila accusingly, and Juice asks, “Wait, what?”

“It’s true,” Marla says, with an apologetic look. “O. J. Simpson.”

“Then why did my mom call me that?” Juice asks.

“I honestly can’t remember,” Marla confesses.

Juice is not pleased. She looks at Lila like it’s her fault that her nickname is forever ruined now. She sits back and crosses her arms in defeat.

“So what’s good here?” Phoebe asks, closing the binder.

“I highly suggest the squash toast,” Lila says.

“What happened to avocado toast?” Phoebe asks.

“That’s over now,” Lila says.

“So soon? I just started understanding the appeal.”

“Too late. Squash toast is like, the next generation,” Lila says.

“Avocado toast was a total scam,” Marla says. “And squash toast is even more of a scam.”

“How can it be a scam?” Lila asks. “The menu says how much it costs.”

“Yeah, twenty-two dollars! It’s somehow even more expensive than avocado toast, despite the fact that gourds are historically the cheapest vegetable known to mankind.”

“What are gourds?” Juice asks.

“Squash,” Phoebe says.

“Why don’t people just say ‘squash’ then?” Juice asks.

The Drink Concierge returns.

“I’ll have the gourd toast,” Juice says, but the Drink Concierge doesn’t break character.

“Anyone else?” he asks.

“Same,” Phoebe says.

Phoebe doesn’t give a shit how much it costs. Phoebe is hungry. Phoebe is still buzzing from the walk. Phoebe wants to feed her body.

“Cheers,” she says when she finally takes a bite.

But Phoebe knows that if she were really at this wedding the way Marla is really at this wedding, if she were the Phoebe of ten years ago, she would be making a mental bill in her head, too, tallying up everything, trying to create some big argument about how wasteful it all is.

But now she is counting other things.

“In just this room alone, there are ten doors,” Phoebe says, and she loves this about historic houses, though nobody else looks astonished.

“Is this supposed to be the start of a game or something?” Suz asks.

Juice rips a sugar pack in half over her coffee.

“Juice!” Marla says, when half of it gets on the table. “You just got sugar everywhere.”

“It’s fine,” Juice says. “I’ll lick it up like I’m a priest.”

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe says. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”

“Grandma said that when the priest spills the wine, he has to lick it off the floor,” Juice says. “Because it’s literally Jesus. And if you don’t, then Jesus will just sit there on the linoleum for the rest of time.”

“Wait, seriously?” Nat asks, and Juice nods, then licks the sugar off the table.

Lila turns her gaze to Phoebe.

“You know what open-toed shoes are?” Lila asks.

“Is this a maid of honor test?” Phoebe asks.

“I certainly hope not. You know, right?”

“I refuse to dignify that with a response.”

“See?” Lila says to Juice, who is still licking up the sugar. “That’s what I told Mel. I mean, Juice. Everybody knows what open-toed shoes are.”

Juice pulls away from the table with sudden coolness. “Well, sorry, I don’t.”

“Phoebe is going to take you to get open-toed shoes today.”

“Was that in the binder?” Phoebe asks.

It’s not really what she imagined for the day. She imagined getting a massage. She imagined lying by the pool.

“You both need shoes,” Lila says. “You can take the vintage car.”

Lila looks at Juice for some expression of excitement, but there is only disdain.

“The one we took yesterday?” Juice asks. “I hate that car.”

“It’s a beautiful car,” Lila says.

“It’s embarrassing,” Juice says. “People just look at you while you drive.”

“That’s the point,” Lila says.

“Why do you want people to just look at you all the time?”

Lila opens her mouth to respond, but Phoebe stands up as a way to finish the argument.

“Let’s do it,” Phoebe says. “Juice, I’ll meet you in the lobby at noon.”

“You should get some dresses while you’re out,” Lila says, and no one asks why Phoebe is the maid of honor and yet has brought no dresses for the week. They are three days into the wedding now, ready to accept whatever reality the bride dictates. “One for every night. Go down to Bellevue. That’s where they have the best stuff.”

More wedding people arrive, and the bride is bombarded. She shrieks as she stands up. She hugs them and then introduces each one to the bridal party. Her cousin, a skier who almost made it to the Olympics. Her uncle, who wears a full linen suit. And then her grandmother, who calls herself “Bootsie” and then introduces the man next to her as “my guy.” She is old, just on the cusp of ancient, and she looks around at the room like she’s never stayed in a hotel in her life.

“I don’t understand why you couldn’t have the wedding at home,” Bootsie says. “Like Jackie.”

“We talked about this, Grandmother,” Lila says, kissing her on the cheek. “This isn’t Jackie’s wedding. We do things differently now.”

“But the Breakers is very gaudy. A poor man’s imitation of a European castle,” Bootsie says.

Lila looks at My Guy. “Can you help Grandmother get settled in the St. Georges room?”

They watch Bootsie go, and Phoebe whispers, “Who is Jackie?”

“Jackie Kennedy.”

I N THE R OARING T WENTIES , Phoebe opens the maid of honor binder and feels like her old self, about to embark on a series of tasks. She finds herself wanting to make today perfect for Lila. She starts by calling the number for the Sex Woman.

“Hello?” a woman answers.

Phoebe was hoping she would answer by introducing herself the way many businesses do.

“Hi, are you the…” Phoebe begins. “I am calling to confirm your visit to Lila Rossi-Winthrop’s bachelorette party tonight at five p.m.?”

“Rossi-Winthrop?” the Sex Woman says. “Will you hold please?”

For a Sex Woman, she seems very formal. She types a lot of information into the system and makes no attempt to fill the silence with conversation.

“Okay, that’s right. Five p.m.,” she says. “And will there be a projector?”

“Do you require one?” Phoebe asks.

“Historically, yes,” the Sex Woman says.

A T THE FRONT desk, while Phoebe waits for Juice, she asks Pauline where she might find compostable dick-themed flatware in this town.

“Oh!” Pauline says, and if she thinks this is a weird question, she doesn’t show it. “Does that exist? I don’t know if that exists. But if it does, it would be at a place called Coastal Intimates down in the Navy district. I can get you a driver?”

“No, I’ll be taking the vintage car,” Phoebe says. “Oh, and we’ll need a projector at five p.m. sharp in the billiards room for the bachelorette party.”

“Of course, absolutely!” Pauline says, like this is the most sensible request in the world.

Phoebe turns around to see Juice waiting by the double doors. She looks out of place standing in front of the velvet drapes in her big black combat boots. Like a girl from the future, lost in time.

“Hey,” Phoebe says.

But Juice just waves. She has gone quiet again like she did on the drive to the wharf. Phoebe doesn’t know if this is because this is the first time they are alone without her family or if this is just something that happens to Juice in the bright hot sun of the afternoon.

“Your car is ready,” the man in burgundy says.