“Marla keeps making this big deal about me being super young whenever we’re together. Like earlier today in the lobby, she was like, Wait, what do twenty-eight-year-olds know again? I forget. And she doesn’t even think this is rude. She acts like it’s just professional curiosity, like she’s just getting to know twenty-eight-year-olds as a species.”
“Is she an anthropologist?”
“She’s a lawyer, or well, she was until she became the mayor of her town. And now she acts like she’s the most moral human being to have ever walked the earth. Meanwhile, she’s the one who will probably have to resign for having an affair with a federal judge. And do I say a word about it? No.”
Now Phoebe is really interested. She is curious about affairs, as if any affair can teach her something about her husband’s.
“Why did she have an affair with a federal judge?”
“She must have a fetish for judges, because that is exactly what her husband is, too,” Lila says. “Except he’s just like, a regular judge. But honestly, I don’t know much more than that. Gary doesn’t like to talk about his sister’s sex life, understandably, and the rest of the family doesn’t know about it. And she never talks to me about it, obviously. We’re not close. But I do know that her children and husband barely speak to her right now, which is why they probably aren’t coming to the wedding. And serves her right. Because she fucked up her life, for real. And sometimes, I just want to be like, What do you know, Marla? Do you know anything? Because even twenty-eight-year-olds know that being the mayor and then having an affair with a federal judge is definitely a terrible idea.”
“Did you say that to her?”
“No! I’d never say that to Marla. You can’t really say anything to Marla. She’s very defensive.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Lila rushes to open it.
“Your floss,” Carlson says, and presents it on a regal brass platter like it’s a meal. It looks so small on the plate, it makes Phoebe want to laugh again. But the humor is lost on Lila.
“Thank you, Carlson,” Lila says.
Lila starts flossing while Phoebe tips him.
“I feel so much better now,” Lila says after, like all the problems are gone now that the body has been restored to perfection. She picks up the brush from the wicker basket. She combs her feathery bangs back into place. She puts a cold washcloth to the back of her neck. She is so quiet, so steady, it almost feels holy, like watching a nun prepare herself for the Lord.
“I guess I should get back down there,” the bride says, as if now she doesn’t even want to go. Now, she just wants to stay here and drink wine that is really chocolate and talk shit about her entire family with Phoebe. Phoebe almost wants that, too. Phoebe hasn’t sat and talked like this with another woman in so long. But Lila puts her hand on the doorknob.
“What can you do?” Lila asks.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s what my father said to me after we got his diagnosis. I couldn’t stop crying about it, and he was like, Lila, is there one thing you feel capable of doing right now instead of crying? And there always was.”
“What was it?” Phoebe asks.
“I would take a very long bath,” the bride says.
After the bride leaves, Phoebe feels surprisingly lonely in the big room. The way she did after she shut off the TV at home. All of those characters distracting her from the reality of her own life—the monologuing mother and the dying father and the sleazy brother-in-law and the kind doctor and the groom’s sister—gone.
That’s when the darkness returns. That’s when she is returned to herself, and she hates always having to return to herself, to live alone inside her nonviable body. It reminds her why she is here, what she came to do, but something feels off now. The sun is too low in the sky, and she is thinking about all the wrong things, like, Will Marla have to resign? Is Lila really just marrying her father? And is that what Phoebe did, too?
No. She will not think of her father or her husband. She has spent too much of her life thinking of them.
Phoebe pours herself the last of the wine. She just wants to stop thinking. She opens the bottle of painkillers, and the smell of fish is nauseating. She forgot the pills were tuna-flavored. But she will not veer from her plan. She will not prove her therapist right, who once told her that she’d never kill herself.
“You’re not really the type,” he said, and she had been so floored by his statement that she’d refused to see him for three weeks.
“That’s a wildly inappropriate thing to say,” she said when she returned, and he agreed.
“This is good, we’re making progress, I’m happy to hear you being openly critical of me,” he said.
But his comment had wounded her, had confirmed her worst fears about herself: She didn’t even have the guts to kill herself. She was not the bold type. She was not like Mia, who cut her hair short over the pandemic, who finished her third book with the word Bitch in the title, who had the audacity to not only fuck someone else’s husband, but to start a new life with him. Mia was a Modernist, liked experiments, bold forms, poems that made no fucking sense. If Mia wanted to kill herself, she would put the stones in her pocket and walk into the water like Virginia Woolf.
But Phoebe did not want to die outdoors. She did not want to be cold. She did not want to battle mosquitoes. She did not want to sink to the depths of the murky, endless sea. She liked knowable, comfortable things. She liked cozy reading nooks. Books that always ended the same way, characters in novels who were easily recognizable by their outfits. Beds with elaborate canopies that protected her from the world, and maybe that is the problem. Maybe this bed is too beautiful. It makes her feel grateful to be so far away from her own.
She is not tired, either. She feels very alert. Very aware of the bride’s perfume. She can still smell it in the air, though she can’t identify it. She can see the bride’s lipstick on the rim of the wine bottle, a mauve red that Phoebe imagines she picked out one year ago just for this week. She knows too much about the bride already. Her real name—Delilah.
But she shouldn’t think of Lila, either. She shouldn’t think at all. Bob was right—she thinks too much. She thinks and thinks and thinks until she gets so tired of thinking, she never properly finishes whatever she started. She never turned the dissertation into a book; rarely finished a lecture on time; couldn’t decide when to start having children until it was too late. And now here she is, doing the same thing, trying so hard to make sure her suicide is a masterpiece, something the critics might applaud for years to come, when really, she should just do it. Be fearless for once in her life, like Mia. Like Woolf. Open the bottle and swallow all the pills with one quick gulp of water, which is exactly what she does.
And then it is done. For a moment, she feels proud of herself. She did it. But as soon as she sits back on the bed and closes her eyes, she starts thinking again. Will the pills be enough? How different are cat doses from human doses?
Then there’s a knock on the door.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says.
She fully expects it to be the bride again, but it’s Pauline.
“Your coconut pillow,” Pauline says. This time, the pillow looks comically large for the brass tray.
“Oh,” Phoebe says. “The pillow.”
“Can I help you with anything else? Can I book any complimentary spa treatments for you tomorrow, to make up for our lack of room service tonight?”
Pauline sounds so eager to help that Phoebe is tempted. Maybe Pauline would go down to CVS and get her more pills?
“No, thank you,” Phoebe says. “But you’re very nice to offer that.”
“People here are always saying that,” Pauline says. “But the truth is, I’m not really that nice. I’m just from the Midwest!”
