But still, it was Tuesday. The second day of the semester. She had another Intro to Lit at ten-thirty. She made toast. She looked over her old lecture notes on Leaves of Grass. She saw the scribbles of her past self in the margins next to the lines, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death … Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” She had always secretly thought those lines were bullshit until that morning when she held up the gray blouse in front of the mirror. No, she wouldn’t put on that blouse. She wouldn’t go to work. Why bother? She could already see the whole day—the whole long and lonely life—before it happened.
Whitman was right. How lucky it would be to die, she thought—to just be the dirt. To just be a plant. To be made beautiful again by becoming part of the earth.
It is a lovely way to think about death. It’s circular. And she always loved circular endings in literature, even if they were completely unrealistic. Probably why she was the only one in her Victorian literature class who actually liked the ending of Jane Eyre. She liked the endings of all marriage plots. The books were orderly and deliberate. They succeeded on their own terms. The endings always reflected the beginnings. The authors had powerful control of the narratives. The deaths were put into a kind of cosmic order that made everybody feel better about being alive, because they happened offstage, in the South of Italy or at the seaside, where characters were given the grace and dignity to die on beds more beautiful than their own.
She put down the blouse. She looked at Harry’s painkillers, and she booked a room at the Cornwall.
She sits on the canopy bed and tries to relax, but being relaxed about her death is proving to be difficult, even on this king-sized pillow-top. She still feels like she should be doing something significant. She still feels too much like herself in her head, worrying about all the small things that are already ruining her beautiful ending, like the blood on the bride’s dress. The sound of the toilet flushing next door. The smell of the air conditioner, not to mention the wedding people gathering on the patio below.
The bride’s opening reception has begun.
She puts on the headphones of her old Discman to drown out the people talking below. But the CD is so scratched, the music skips. Instead of making her feel calm, it makes her anxious. So she takes them off, goes out to the balcony, and lights a cigarette.
This time, she actually smokes it. She hopes that it will make sitting on a chair seem more elevated than just sitting on a chair. Takes one puff like she’s posing for a painting. Woman Smoking and Drinking While Having Some Thoughts, she’d call it.
But when she blows the smoke out into the salty air, she starts coughing so hard, it burns her lungs.
“Shit,” she says. Not a good feeling. “Ugh. This is truly awful.”
Yet she takes another puff, because when she imagined her death, she imagined herself smoking. She imagined it would work like a metronome keeping the time. Keeping her steady. Because she has nothing to keep her steady. No dinner to eat, no music to enjoy, no luggage to unpack, no husband to call, no book to finish, no counters to clean, no hormone shots to inject, no vacations to research, no future life to organize into spreadsheets. There is no more time left and so there is weirdly no urgency for anything.
She smokes the rest of the cigarette slowly. She does not want to feel rushed. She does not want to go out frantic and through a window like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, a scene that upset her so much, it became the only book in graduate school that she never finished reading.
Her stomach growls. She hopes she doesn’t get too hungry to kill herself. She takes another sip of the chocolate wine. At least the wine is partly chocolate, she thinks. At least I have this balcony. She watches the waves in the distance start to gather, but they never get large enough to break. Sort of like the jazz from the reception below—the notes rising and falling and rising and falling but never coming to an end.
She leans over the edge to get a better look at the reception. She’s curious, she admits. She’s always loved a wedding, will watch any TV show or read any book to the end if it promises a wedding. That’s how she got through those long novels in graduate school, reading hundreds of pages just to watch people get married.
She scans for the bride but sees only High Bun and Neck Pillow, picking up long-stemmed drinks from a tray. The Jims standing under some fairy lights, arguing with faces of men who want to kill each other, and it surprises her when they break into laughter.
At least I’m on the top floor, she thinks—up on the balcony from where she can stare and pass judgment without being noticed, like the seagulls that circle high above. From here, she can see it all, even what it will be like to be dead, because that is one of the few gifts that depression gives her: aerial vision. She already knows what the world will look like without her, because last August, she sat at home while everyone returned to their offices, their routines, their roles—and she knows the bride will be able to do this, too. The bride may gasp at the news of Phoebe’s suicide, but then she’ll take a walk down the beach to calm herself. She will feel the breeze blow her hair back. She will be grateful for the sun. For her champagne. She will laugh and lean on her groom’s shoulder, beautiful hair falling into her face, and Phoebe will be forgotten by sunset.
“Just get on with it,” Phoebe tells herself.
But then there is a knock on the door, as if someone heard her. She puts the cigarette out quickly, closes the balcony door, and the feeling of hiding her cigarette is strangely familiar. It makes her hope that her husband is at the door, though of course he’s not. He doesn’t even know where she is.
“Are you seriously smoking?” the bride asks.
The bride walks into the room as if it is her own. The bride’s dress is bloodless now—another white one, but gauzier and with dramatic fluttery sleeves.
“Sure, yes, please do come in,” Phoebe says.
The bride’s hand is wrapped in gauze, and Phoebe wonders who wrapped it. Gary, the groom with the barely receding hairline? Her loving mother? Is the bride the kind of woman who has a loving mother? Yes, Phoebe decides. Phoebe has become good over the years at detecting who has a loving mother and who does not, because Phoebe believes a loving mother gives a person a kind of confidence to exist that Phoebe never quite had. Phoebe could never burst into someone else’s room and give orders like it’s her own.
“You can’t smoke,” the bride says.
The bride talks louder than she needs to, the way actors on the stage are present but locked and preserved behind the fourth wall, and for the first time, Phoebe wonders what the bride actually does for a living. Is she an actress? Or maybe she is an airline attendant, good at announcing things to forty-seven passengers.
“Actually, it’s one of the few things left that I can do,” Phoebe says.
As if to prove this, Phoebe walks back out to the balcony.
“Actually, no,” the bride says, following her. “This is a nonsmoking room.”
“Good thing I’m out here on the balcony, then.”
“How did you get a real balcony, by the way?” the bride asks, like this is the real betrayal. “My balcony is just like, the suggestion of a balcony.”
She pauses to study the view.
“I mean, you can see the whole ocean from here! Why on earth wouldn’t Pauline put me in this room? I specifically requested a shoreline room.”
“Well, a shoreline room presumably faces … the shoreline.”
“But I thought shoreline meant … that you could see the shore.”
“Shoreline refers to the line where the ocean meets the land.”
Phoebe waits for Lila to blush, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. She just gets angrier.
“Who on earth would want a shoreline room then?” Lila asks. “Why would they even advertise a shoreline view like it’s something special? If I wanted to look at houses, I’d just stay home and look out my own window at houses. You know?”
Phoebe lights another cigarette, hoping the smoke will make the bride leave. But she doesn’t budge.
“The balcony is part of the room, by the way,” the bride says. “So you can’t actually smoke on it.”
Phoebe feels the sudden urge to argue. She has a contrarian impulse that stirred within her during class or at a party when anybody had the audacity to talk in absolutes. She never acted on it, though, because she never wanted to be accused of talking in absolutes. Those people were her least favorite.
But what does she care now? Might as well go out showing the world what she got from all those years of studying.
