“But what’s your field?” Susan asked.
“Victorian literature,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe actually teaches a seminar on the fairy tale right now,” Matt added. “And she’s finishing a book on Jane Eyre.”
For ten years, Phoebe has been finishing her book on Jane Eyre.
Then more awards. When her husband’s name was called, he smiled. He put down his napkin. He walked onstage. He took his award, and everybody at the table clapped and smiled at him. Mia leaned into Phoebe’s shoulder.
“You must be proud,” Mia said.
She was. Look at my husband, she thought, as he took his place behind the podium. He gave a short speech about the value of a liberal arts education, but Phoebe barely heard a word. Look at him, she thought, as he returned to the table smiling. My husband. He sat back down, and everybody congratulated him, while he tried very hard not to appear too pleased.
“They’ve got to give it to everybody at some point,” he said, which felt like a small betrayal, because this had been their joke. “I bet you even Bob will get it one day.”
Bob laughed.
“The students just love him,” Mia said, and it was something about the way she said it, as if she knew the students better than Phoebe. As if Mia and Matt occupied a house together without her.
But she didn’t say anything. She felt ill and said, “Excuse me.” She went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror.
Your husband thinks you are beautiful, she thought, until she felt better.
But before she returned to the table, she saw her husband talking to Mia. Mia threw her head back to laugh, and her husband laughed, too, opened his mouth wide, wider than Phoebe had seen in months. Even when they watched TV and Phoebe curled into him, he kept his mouth pressed shut.
But in this moment with Mia, she could see the old Matt, the one she first met years ago in the computer room, who was light and funny and happy. And Mia looked happy, too. Something she had not really seemed since Tom got depressed years ago.
Phoebe sat back down at the table, and all of a sudden Mia’s beauty seemed different. It was not just a basic fact. It was a situation.
PHOEBE DIDN’T BRING Mia up until they were home, back inside the house.
“It doesn’t seem fair that Mia can have three books and also be so goddamned beautiful,” Phoebe said. She hoped it sounded like a joke.
“Oh,” Matt said. “Yeah. She is a good laugh.”
“I didn’t say that. I said she was beautiful.”
“What are you doing?” he asked. “I thought we had a nice time tonight.”
“We did,” she said.
He kissed her. “You looked beautiful tonight.”
He wanted to have sex; she could tell. But she didn’t want to. Or maybe she didn’t want him to be sweet in that moment. In her fantasies, he was never sweet to her anymore. In her fantasies, it was no longer even her that he was fucking, though the therapist had insisted the fantasy was still good news.
“It’s good that it at least involves your husband,” he had said.
As she went to undress, her husband said, “No, keep the dress on.” He took off his shirt, his pants, and when he walked toward her, she imagined him walking into Joe’s wine shop, seeing the girlie sitting on the stool like usual. She’s doing homework for her class. No, she doesn’t know where Joe is.
“Anything new today?” her husband asks, and the girlie says, “Let me show you what we’ve got.” She is bringing her husband to the back to show him the latest shipment of wine. She bends over to pick up a few bottles and her husband walks toward her, puts his hands on her waist, and centers her the way he does when he really wants to fuck, when he wants her to just be tits and ass and ponytail. He pulls on her hair, and that’s when her thighs clench tight around him—and it is only then, when Phoebe pretended that she didn’t know her husband at all, that she could come.
After they had sex, they couldn’t look each other in the eye. She took off her black dress and her husband poured himself a glass of whiskey and he didn’t bother with ice cubes and he went outside to look at the stars because that’s what people have done since the beginning of time. And still, Phoebe did not think it was the end. She couldn’t really conceive of the end. She thought that in a few weeks, they’d go to the Ozarks for spring break, and then maybe, just maybe, she would try IVF one more time, because who knows? Maybe it would work the sixth time. Maybe the doctors were wrong.
But a few weeks later, in March, the world shut down and they did nothing at all. They sat in the house. They taught through their computers. They looked out windows a lot. She cried too much, and he drank too much, and sometimes, she worried he might leave her. Sometimes, she wanted to leave. But when she imagined herself leaving, her husband always begged her to stay. He got on his knees, pressed his face against her thighs, and clutched her like a child. Please, Phoebe, he said in the fantasy. Please. I need you. Then he explained all the ways he needed her, and how the kids needed her, too. And so, she stayed. Every time she imagined leaving her husband, she always ended up staying. It was a fantasy, in which there were children and the children always needed her. She had to imagine leaving only so she could imagine staying. She had to imagine herself at the door and her husband shouting, “No, Phoebe, no!” like she was a dog. And she really didn’t know why, in her fantasy, she wanted to be treated like this.
“SO, HOW WAS your day?” Matt asked.
It was August, the night before their fall semester began. Their last dinner together, but Phoebe didn’t know it yet. Maybe Matt didn’t know it yet, either. Maybe during that dinner, he was still deciding. Maybe if she had said something more interesting in response, something other than, “Good,” he might have stayed.
“Good!” he said. “Good. Did you write today?”
“A little.”
That morning, Phoebe tried so hard to write. Their summer break was ending, and she had nothing to show for it, so she set up her coffee and her computer and closed the blinds and put out two fingers of whiskey and one cigarette on her desk, her future reward for finishing a page, and then she finished, and she slowly sipped on the whiskey, and she lit the cigarette but didn’t smoke it. She just liked the smell, the feeling of holding it between her fingers, and it started to feel like she was in her office not to write but to drink and pretend to smoke.
Matt left his office, a door slam, and she put out the cigarette. She finally understood what her advisor meant when he said, “Don’t combine your good habits with your bad habits.” When Bob had said it years ago, she only had good habits. She ran 3.1 miles every other day, she drank ginger shots at the local café, she always did her laundry on Sundays, she planned her courses in June before the summer got away from her, and these good things had always been enough. They had been at the center of her life. Her house. Her students. Her research. Her husband, her physical tether to this world from the day she met him. But now they could not even look each other in the eye when they asked each other questions.
“Were you smoking in your office earlier?” Matt asked.
“No,” she said, and it was not technically a lie. But Matt didn’t understand. Matt said he could smell the smoke, said it was bad for her body, which ironically made her want to smoke. For years all she had been thinking about was what she should put in her body to make it a super womb, and she was tired of it. Fuck my body, she thought, but did not say it.
“How was your day?” she asked, and felt like one of the awful characters in a T. S. Eliot poem.
What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?
Yet when Matt left her later that night, it truly did surprise her. Nothing had ever shocked her more. He did what he always did before sleep. Took off his belt and rolled it into a ball. Took a shower and then put on the kind of junk shirt he only wore around the house. But then he put on jeans, slipped on his belt, and packed a bag. “I am in love with Mia,” he kept saying, and she didn’t really believe it. This was not how her fantasy went.
But this wasn’t her fantasy. It was his, and she didn’t know how it worked. She just watched him, waited for him to drop his bag, but he didn’t.
