“I’m not trying to be funny! You know I’m gay!”
Phoebe stumbled backward into the desk.
“It’s about knowing you want to be better,” Phoebe says. “But not knowing how to fix yourself. That’s why he’s begging the Lord to force him to be better, to fix him.”
“That’s like, messed up,” a student said, and Phoebe agreed.
“It is,” she said, and Phoebe can’t remember much after that except one of the boys standing at her desk, saying, “You okay, Dr. Stone?”
“I’m fine,” Phoebe said.
The students seemed completely unchanged as they left, except the girl who was still ranting about the poem to a friend, “I just don’t think anybody should teach that poem.”
Phoebe went back to her office that wasn’t really an office. She was not fine—but maybe she could be fine. She just needed a cup of coffee. And to make copies of a Whitman poem before her Intro to Lit class. She didn’t have time to do it yesterday—she had been too busy, too overwhelmed, getting her nails done, touching up her roots, getting herself ready for her big return to campus. Was the black dress too much for the first day or not enough? she wondered, because she hadn’t seen her husband since the divorce hearing, and a tiny part of her still felt like if she wore the black dress, it would turn them back into husband and wife again.
But there was only Mia—this time at the photocopier. There Mia would always be, Phoebe realized.
“Paper jam,” Mia said, and Phoebe nodded because a paper jam was nobody’s fault. It just happened sometimes, which is exactly what her husband had said about the affair. It just happened.
But why? Phoebe couldn’t bring herself to ask her husband this. Because she knew why. She looked at Mia in her big wooden earrings and her cropped black jeans and an oversize pink blazer that somehow made her seem skinnier. It made Phoebe feel foolish to think that her husband would be wooed back by a simple A-line black dress. Was this why it was so hard to be mad at Mia? Because Phoebe knew on some level that Mia was just better? Always standing there in her big earrings, making Phoebe wonder why Phoebe always had to be herself.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said.
Mia got down on her knees. In Phoebe’s fantasies, this was how Mia always apologized to her: literally groveled at her feet. Phoebe couldn’t believe it was actually happening and felt herself get excited.
But then Mia added, “I’m sorry, this will only take a minute,” and it made Phoebe so angry. Because a paper jam always took longer than a minute. Phoebe knew this. Mia knew this. Mia started opening up all the drawers the machine told her to open, but even then, Mia couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know where drawer five was, and this is when Phoebe normally would have helped her look for drawer five, but she refused.
“This is what you’re sorry about?” Phoebe asked.
Mia’s eyes flickered over to the admin’s desk, as if to suggest Phoebe not do this here, so close to Jane’s pound cake, and Phoebe could suddenly understand why affairs ended with someone dead. Her rage felt ruinous, too big for the hum of this small, quiet office.
“You slept with my husband,” Phoebe said, not so loud to be yelling but loud enough for Jane to hear.
“Look, I’m sorry I hurt you,” Mia whispered. “I’m sorry it happened the way it did. But I’m not sorry it happened. I can’t be. I love him.”
“No, I love him,” Phoebe said. “He’s my husband.”
It made her feel silly, fighting over her husband with a female colleague who had her arm wedged in drawer five, like she was about to help birth a document. This was not how it was supposed to go. In her fantasy, Phoebe doesn’t ever mention her husband. Instead, Phoebe delivers an impassioned and loud monologue about what an awful woman Mia is, the biggest traitor of all the traitors, an embarrassment to women, and then Phoebe walks out of the office, out of the building, feeling victorious, never to return again.
“He’s not your husband,” Mia said. “Not anymore.”
Phoebe felt crazy. She felt like she was a kid, crying over a bath her father wouldn’t let her take because he had to go to work. “Fine, Phoebe, have a tantrum, see what good that will do,” her father had said. And that’s when she learned it did nothing except make her father leave a room.
“I thought you were my friend,” Phoebe said calmly. She was trying to compose herself. She couldn’t bear it if Mia walked out, if she left her alone with this horrible feeling.
“I was your friend,” Mia said. “And I will always regret damaging our friendship.”
“Damaging? You ruined it. You ruined everything. My life. My job. My marriage.”
“I really do like you, Phoebe. And I hope we can somehow be friends at the end of this. But I did not ruin your marriage. That is not on me. The only reason Matt fell in love with me was because your marriage was already over.”
As if to conclude her argument, Mia pulled out the piece of paper. Mia solved the jam, but it was too late. Class had started five minutes ago. Phoebe was already divorced. Phoebe had signed the final papers. There was nothing her anger could do here.
The door opened. Stan, the Americanist, took one look at her black dress and said, “Wowwee, Phoebe, nice dress!”
She didn’t know what else to do but say, “Thanks.”
Then Mia snuck out of the office with her papers, and Phoebe stood there for a moment, feeling utterly bereft and flattened, like land right after a bomb hits. She walked to class empty-handed, said hello to her students, and yes, she understood why they never said hello back—a lesson Phoebe learned in yoga class last month when the instructor said hello, and everyone waited for someone else to do it. Everyone always hoped it was someone else who would be bold. They were like Phoebe.
But Phoebe was sick of them. Sick of herself. Sick of everything.
She walked out of the class without a word, got in her car, and drove home. By the time she walked into her kitchen, her hands were shaking. Something was wrong. She called her therapist, thinking he might help, but he sounded wrong, too.
“Listen, before we have another session, there’s something you need to know,” he said, and why did he sound just like her husband before he left?
“I have thought long and hard about this, Phoebe, but unfortunately, I am going to have to drop your new health insurer,” her therapist said. “They’re just too unethical to do business with, and I refuse to work that way.”
Then he reminded her that what he was doing was setting a boundary, like this might be a learning moment for her.
“You’ll have to pay out of pocket for this session, and all future sessions, if you want to go forward,” he added.
She hung up on him. She couldn’t afford to go forward. She got small alimony payments from Matt, but they were only enough to cover the new insurance payments she made ever since losing coverage after the divorce. A thousand dollars a month, just for catastrophic. Trying to stay alive was starting to bankrupt her, and even though Phoebe had been as good a saver as she was a researcher, the children’s savings fund was starting to run out. She was going to have to apply to teaching jobs all over again, which she already knew was hopeless, because she had tried it last August.
So she was going to have to sell the house. It was the only solution. But she couldn’t bear to sell the house. The house was the only thing she had left. And Harry.
“Assuming you take United,” she joked, and at least she could still joke. At least she still had Harry. Where was Harry anyway? She rattled his bottle of painkillers, which always made Harry come running because the pills were flavored like tuna. But Harry didn’t come running, and she knew. Before she found him in the basement, curled up into himself, she knew.
She was too distraught to bury him. Instead, she just left Harry there, drove to Joe’s, got mind-blisteringly drunk, and woke up the next morning with such a headache, such a weight on her chest, she knew her life was over.
