“Do you want to know how much I’ve already spent on this wedding?” The bride looks excited, like she has been dying to tell someone all day.
“No.” The more Phoebe learns about the wedding, the harder this will become.
“A million dollars,” she says, and then turns toward the ocean view like she might cry. “That’s what my father gave me when he got sick. Told me it was his dying wish to see his only daughter get married before he died. But then before we could have it, he died. And then there was a global pandemic for two years. So the least you could do is not die, too.”
Phoebe can hear in her voice that she is about to cry. Now more than ever it is important to sound forceful.
“My death has nothing to do with you,” Phoebe says.
“Of course it does! It’s going to happen here, during my opening reception!”
The bride starts to slowly breathe in, then counts to four as she breathes out. Watching her, Phoebe feels an old impulse, a tenderness, the kind of thing she felt when a student sat in her office on the brink of tears. She was being presented with a choice: She could remain silent and pretend she didn’t notice the despair because she had to get to class in five minutes and unpacking despair usually took longer than that. Or she could soften her voice and ask one more question, like, “What is this really about? Are you okay?” And that’s when the student would burst into a teary tale of their entire life story. Phoebe would be late to class, but the student would feel better, and so would she.
But the bride is not her student. Phoebe has no responsibility to care or even pretend to care. She will not ask questions about her dead father. She will not concern herself with the wedding. She will not reschedule her suicide.
“Do you know how much I spent on just tonight alone?” the bride asks.
Phoebe watches the cigarette burn between her fingers, a long nose of ash growing with each silent second. Phoebe will wait this out.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” she says. “Yep, that’s right. Fifty thousand dollars.”
But Phoebe must not look too impressed, because the bride continues.
“I special-ordered rare orchids from Borneo for the centerpieces. I took a calligraphy class so I could learn how to handwrite every single table card. I had each cocktail glass hand-sprayed in guanciale fat. I flew in the same jazz band that played at Prince William’s wedding. And do you know how long it took to figure out who played at Prince William’s wedding? How many hours I spent on message boards?”
“You didn’t hire a wedding planner to do that?” Phoebe asks, genuinely shocked.
“You think I’d trust a wedding planner with my dead father’s money?” Lila asks.
“I mean, yeah?”
“This money was the last thing my father ever gave me in this life. I wasn’t about to give thirty-three percent of it away to some wedding planner who suggested it might be nice to parachute into my own reception. No. I wanted my father to be proud of how I spent it, and I know he would be. I know this is going to be the most beautiful fucking wedding, and if I wake up to your corpse being rolled into the lobby tomorrow morning, you should know I’ll never recover from something like that.”
“Neither will I,” Phoebe says.
“Stop doing that!” Lila says.
The bride starts to actually cry, and it’s weirdly satisfying and horrifying to watch. Like watching a beautiful building be demolished.
“How can you joke about this?” the bride asks through her tears.
Phoebe doesn’t know. But after her husband left, her first impulse was to joke about it. She spent days making phone calls to friends from grad school that she hadn’t spoken to in years, saying, “Well, I never really liked the guy anyway,” in a high-pitched voice that didn’t sound like hers, because she wanted to impress people the way she had been impressed when she read what Edith Wharton said after seeing the names “Mr. and Mrs. Wharton” written in a guest book at a hotel she had never visited.
“Apparently I have been here before,” Wharton said.
But her friends laughed uneasily. Her friends had been at her wedding, had seen how in love Phoebe had been. “It’s okay to be sad that your husband left you,” one of them said, and it made Phoebe feel stupid for trying to joke about it—joking was all she had left.
“Just get out,” Phoebe says in a stern voice.
“You can’t tell me to get out,” the bride says. “This is my wedding hotel. You get out!”
Phoebe doesn’t know how some girls grow up to become women like the bride, or like Mia, who treat everything, even this nineteenth-century mansion, even Phoebe’s husband, as their inheritance. Phoebe had been raised to feel sorry for everything—sorry for being born, sorry for almost drowning, sorry for getting an A-minus on my exam, sorry for not bearing children, sorry for not getting to the last three slides of the PowerPoint, everybody. Sometimes, Phoebe sent her class apology emails after lectures when she didn’t finish on time. Because she was a good professor. A good woman. But where is the line? When did Phoebe being good become Phoebe being nothing?
She doesn’t know. But she does know this.
“I paid eight hundred and thirty-six dollars to stay in this room for one single night!” Phoebe yells. “This is my fucking room!”
The bride looks stunned, as if nobody has ever shouted at her this loudly before. In the bride’s silence, Phoebe waits for some bad, foolish feeling to come, but she feels so exhilarated she wishes she had yelled at Mia like this. At her husband after he told her about the affair—but she couldn’t yell then. She was still trying so hard to be her best self, to stay reasonable, to save the marriage, to ask the right questions, gather all the information, as if understanding could help her solve the problem. But it didn’t matter how much he told her—she never understood. She was sick with information, sick with all the things she never said or did.
“Get out!” Phoebe screams.
“Fine,” the bride says. “Whatever. What do I care? Just die.”
“I will!”
Phoebe came here to die and so she will die.
But then the bride says “Good” so angrily, she bares her teeth just enough for Phoebe to see it again: the food.
Phoebe can’t believe it’s still there. Phoebe figured one of her friends would have told her by now. But maybe the bride is the kind of woman who doesn’t have friends like that, friends who are honest even when it’s embarrassing. Maybe that is why she is here in Phoebe’s room instead of down at her reception sipping on a fat-washed cocktail.
“Have a nice time in Hell,” the bride adds.
The cigarette ash falls on Phoebe’s leg. She is surprised by the burn. It feels like something awful being set in motion. The world gone bad. The bride will be sent down to her reception with food in her teeth and Phoebe will die.
But not yet.
“Wait,” Phoebe says, because she cannot send a woman out to her wedding with food stuck in her teeth. Whatever the bride might think, Phoebe is not a monster.
