The golden tassel lamps of the Roaring Twenties make Phoebe want to drink before she should be drinking, and it’s ridiculous that she still thinks things like that, still tries to impose rules on herself like, I should not be drinking, when she is hours from taking her own life.
She pours herself a full glass of the German chocolate wine. She refuses to spend her last hours on this planet worrying. She has spent too much time worrying about what to drink, where to vacation, what to wear, what to say, was it hotter to write cum or come, and what was the point? What did it matter how she spelled it? Her husband left anyway.
Phoebe takes a sip of wine. She opens the drapes. They are heavy and teal, fit for a queen or a movie star. They could block out all the world’s light if she wanted them to, but Phoebe wants to see the ocean. Phoebe has never been to the ocean before, a fact that appalled most people but charmed her husband. He once liked that Phoebe did not run around feeling the pressure to conquer each worldly experience.
Yet Phoebe thought it was wrong to leave the world before seeing the ocean, the way she thought it was wrong for Matt to ask for a divorce thirty miles away on Zoom. He should have returned from Mia’s house one last time to remind himself of the beauty of their world. The trim he had hand-painted himself. But it was five months into the pandemic when he asked for the divorce, and he said he couldn’t return. Matt, Mia, and her baby were already a “pod.” He sat in front of a shelf lined with Mia’s trinkets from Paris like they were his and said, “I’m so sorry.” And “Are you okay?” And “Please tell me you’re okay.”
Phoebe sets the cat’s painkillers on the nightstand. She looks out at the ocean spread before her. From up here, the water looks calm. Like a flat and reliable rug, as if it knows nothing about what is to come. Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future—foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave.
But so be it. She picks up the phone.
“Hello,” she says. “May I place an order for room service, please?”
Phoebe wants to have a big, decadent meal before she dies. She wants to have lobster and crab. She wants to eat oysters and drink wine and crack a crème brûlée top one last time.
“Unfortunately, we’ve suspended room service for the opening reception tonight,” Pauline says.
“The opening reception?” Phoebe asks. “That’s what she’s calling it?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience,” Pauline says. She sounds truly devastated. “Please understand we are a little understaffed from Covid.”
“Right, okay,” Phoebe says, but she feels panicked by the news. “There’s really nothing at all?”
“Well, there’s food down at the reception,” Pauline says.
Phoebe hangs up. She can’t go downstairs. She definitely can’t go to the reception. She did not come all this way just to watch happy people eat expensive food. And she refuses to have her last meal be imitation Oreos from the wedding bag or Doritos from the vending machine. There’s something just too sad about that.
So, fine, she will not eat. What’s the point anyway? Why take perfectly good oysters down with her?
But then she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She had planned on eating for an hour or two. She had planned on the meal feeling like the final event of her life. She sits on the bed and stares at the water and it’s an odd feeling—this having nothing at all to do except feel the ocean breeze on her face. For the past ten years, there has been too much to do and not enough time. There was the dissertation that needed to become a book, the research that needed to become PowerPoints, the sex that needed to become a baby, and the students that needed her to run their lives. That’s how her student Adam put it yesterday morning when he came into her office and announced that Phoebe was now in charge of his life.
“But I’m not your advisor,” Phoebe told him.
“You’re not?”
“No,” Phoebe said.
The conversation would have ended there, had her husband and Mia not walked into her office, which was also the photocopier room and the coffee station. The university never built the adjunct faculty lounge—the committee went bust after pandemic budget cuts. Then Bob had given away her old office to the new hire after Phoebe chose to continue teaching virtually during the second year of the pandemic. And now that she was back, Bob was at a loss. There was nowhere else to put her except next to the Keurig and the pound cake that Jane the admin brought in.
Mia and Matt looked shocked to see Phoebe there but then quickly said, “Hello,” as if she were any other colleague in the department, and Phoebe could not think. Could not breathe. Could not say hello. She just stared at her student Adam, focused intensely on his nose as she said, “But maybe I can still help you?”
“Well, I’m thinking of dropping out of college,” Adam said. She heard her husband pour the two coffees, and Mia put in the cream. “I want to make pants.”
“You want to make pants?” Phoebe asked, and she did not know what a person asked next, so she said, “What kind of pants?”
Her husband stirred in the sugar, and maybe her husband was looking at her, maybe he recognized the black Calvin Klein dress she wore just so he might remember the last time he fucked her in it. But she could not bring herself to look.
“Any kind, all the pants,” Adam said.
Her husband and Mia put the lids on their cups.
“But can’t you make pants and also be in school at the same time?” Phoebe asked, and then her husband and Mia were gone, and Adam said, “Maybe,” and Phoebe felt like she might throw up or faint.
After, she packed up her books and went to class where she tried to teach a John Donne poem, but her Brit Lit students weren’t fans.
“Why is the speaker being, like, ravished by God?” a student asked.
Everyone laughed. They were waiting for Phoebe to say something, for context, a frame in which to put all the confusing and strange things.
“It is, essentially, a love letter to the Lord,” Phoebe said.
“Why would anyone write a love letter to the Lord?” another student asked.
“Oh my God, it’s not a love letter,” the girl said. “He’s basically asking for God to rape him.”
“That’s what I got from the poem, too,” another kid said. “But I’m glad you said it.”
This made a few kids snicker, which made another student raise her hand and proclaim that there was “nothing funny about rape, not in the 1600s, not now, and not even when it happened to a dead white man.”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Phoebe clarified.
“Well, of course it’s not funny, the man is being raped, Dr. Stone. By God!”
“So is it like, a gay poem? Is God gay?”
“God is like, famously not gay.”
“Why are you all laughing? It’s seriously not funny!”
