“So am I,” Phoebe says, and continues to stand in the doorway, though she’s not sure why. Phoebe doesn’t really want to be talking to Pauline as she drops dead, but there’s also something very familiar to Phoebe about Pauline. Reminds her of home.
“No kidding!” Pauline says, then explains how she just graduated from Kansas State with a degree in hospitality and is astounded to have gotten this job right away. “I seriously just applied to be a waiter here. But they called and asked me if I would be the property manager! They told me I had to wear coastal business casual, and I honestly had to google it.”
Pauline laughs like this is a great joke between the two of them, and Phoebe looks at her tight body-con black dress with an overly formal boat neckline. Normally, Phoebe wouldn’t say anything, but she feels bad for Pauline, a girl who showed up to her new life in the wrong dress. She wants to help, as if this could be her last act of kindness on earth.
“That’s not quite right,” Phoebe says gently.
“No?” Pauline asks, looking down at her outfit.
“The boat neck is a little formal.”
“I thought the boat neck was like, relaxed and boaty.”
“Try more blues. And whites. And loose linens.”
“Oh my God, thank you for actually being honest. This job is extremely important to me, and while I am doing my best to learn, it’s all happening so fast. I’m actually not sure I’m even qualified? But anyway. Please let me know whatever I can do to enhance your stay.”
Phoebe feels a sudden wave of exhaustion come over her.
“Thanks,” Phoebe says.
She closes the door. The pills are working. What’s done is done. And Pauline cannot help. Pauline is not her mother. Pauline is just a recent grad with a degree in hospitality.
Phoebe rests her head on the coconut pillow, which looks like a normal pillow and feels like a normal pillow but smells undeniably like coconut. Phoebe is mystified. She presses her nose deeper into the pillow but can’t figure out where the coconut is located. It seems to be permeated throughout the pillow, part of the pillow’s constitution. Like Pauline has woven the coconut fibers into the thread herself. And maybe it’s the pills, maybe it’s the image of Pauline weaving, but Phoebe starts to feel funny again.
Phoebe Stone, professor and scholar, found dead on an artisanal coconut pillow at the Cornwall Inn.
No. She can’t die on a coconut pillow. She goes back to the balcony to hear the music. The jazz is soft but lively. She picks up the binoculars to get a look at the band, but in the dark, she can’t see much. In the dark, each musician looks exactly like his instrument. Like they must curl themselves around their instruments when they go to sleep each night, and the image makes her want to cry. It makes her think about how beautiful the world can be. How long have these men been practicing just to come together and create this perfect harmony?
The bride emerges—that’s what she looks like again down on the patio. No longer Lila with the dead father and passive-aggressive mother, but the beautiful bride with her white fluttery dress perfectly suited for cliffside cocktails. She takes a glass from a waiter, and then searches for someone. She looks eager. Quick to move, quick to laugh and say hello. She kisses a few people on the cheek, then leans into a tall man Phoebe assumes must be the groom because she rests her head on his shoulder. Phoebe can’t make out his features, but she can see his age—there is a lack of urgency in his movements. A sense that there is no real rush to do anything, like he could stand right there with his arm around his fiancée all night and be fine about it.
They kiss. They look, from a distance, like they are very much in love, and how weird it is to be dying on a balcony while two people are down below, being in love. How weird to think that once Phoebe was the same bride, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder, and now she is here, moments from death.
How does this happen?
The question makes Phoebe dizzy. She lies down on the bed and that’s when the jazz stops.
“Good evening, everyone,” a woman says into a microphone. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Patricia, the mother of the bride. And before this party gets away from us, I thought I’d give a little speech.”
Phoebe feels herself suddenly get tense, as if she were down there in the audience. This can’t be good, she thinks, and it’s not. Patricia begins by saying how unfair it is that the mother of the bride does not have a properly designated time to give a speech at any point throughout the wedding and that she had to specifically carve out this time for herself.
“On a Tuesday,” she says, and the crowd laughs. “But anyway, before I’m raked offstage, let me just say something about my daughter, Lila. As many of you may know, Lila was not an especially humorous or playful child. Most mothers might have been disappointed by this, but I will confess, I was impressed. Lila was never trying to be funny like the other children, never running around like some tiny unpaid performer.”
It’s a troubling start. Lila was right; her mother does not sound like a very good mother, not that Phoebe understands what that is. Phoebe was raised by a father whose most complicated relationship was to televised sports. But Phoebe spent a lifetime studying mothers, paying close attention to them when they showed up in movies, and the best mothers were always the ones who died young. The ones who lived had to make pancakes a lot and wear a long braid and show up whenever nobody expected with large bags of multicolored taffy, laughing at everything the children said, until the moment they must get serious. Dispense a kind of hard truth that the child won’t appreciate until long after the mother is dead.
“Time and time again I tried to engage Lila in creative play, but no, Lila wouldn’t stand for it. I would point to the ducks at the pond and say, Lila, what secrets do you think the ducks are trying to tell us? And Lila would turn to me with a face more serious than Churchill and say, ‘How would I know? They don’t speak English.’ God, this made me laugh. So I said, ‘Oh, do the ducks speak Spanish?’ And again, Lila said, ‘How would I know? I don’t speak Spanish!’”
The crowd laughs, and Phoebe wonders if Lila is laughing. She wonders if this story has pleased her or mortally wounded her in some way. If this story has confirmed all her worst fears about herself, about her mother, or if there was actually something sweet communicated here that only Lila can understand. Phoebe doubts it but hopes so. Phoebe hopes that the mother will somehow turn it around soon, dig herself out of this hole, repackage Lila’s lack of imagination as her best quality, not to mention the reason she is so perfectly suited for the groom—Phoebe’s favorite part of any wedding speech.
But Phoebe will never know what happens—by the time Lila’s mother is finished talking, Phoebe will be dead. Phoebe will not get to know how the speech ends—or how anything ends. And Phoebe does not like this. Phoebe always finishes a book or a movie, even a bad one. “Don’t you want to know if they get married?” she asked, when Matt suggested they turn it off. But Matt did not need to know. Matt said, “This is a terrible movie. Of course they’re going to get married.” And Matt could do that—turn off the TV, quit a marriage—right in the middle of the climactic scene.
She feels knocked over by another wave of fatigue. The sudden sleepiness scares her. It feels too much like being too drunk. Or like that time she almost drowned in the river when she was fishing with her father, the last time he ever brought her. Phoebe had been leaning too close to the edge of the boat, and then she was in the water, and how terrifyingly fast the water moved her to places she didn’t recognize. After, her father found her curled up in a shallow eddy where the river spit her out, shouting, “What were you doing so close to the edge like that? You could have died!”
She knows that’s what he would be shouting now if he were here, watching her be so careless with her life again. “What are you doing so close to the edge like that?” he’d shout. And maybe her mother would be with him, and maybe she would be furious, too, shouting something directly into the microphone.
“She’s truly one of a kind,” the mother says. “She’s the reason I get up every morning. The reason I don’t have my own life anymore!”
The crowd laughs loudly, and Phoebe opens her eyes. What is she doing?
She is about to die, she knows, and the mother is about to do it—make the end circle back to the beginning, make the worst thing about Lila be the best thing about Lila. Because the mother must do this. The mother can’t end it here—she can’t just insult her own daughter’s imagination in front of all these people and then take a bow. Phoebe can’t bear it, thinking of Lila getting ready this afternoon, laying out her dress, putting on her lipstick, combing her hair, feeling so beautiful, only to wind up with her fists clenched under the table, trying not to cry.
“Now, honey, come stand up here with me,” the mother says. “Come on, get up here!”
Yes, Phoebe thinks. Get up get up get up. Because Phoebe doesn’t want to die. No, Phoebe just wants to hear the rest of the speech. She realizes it with such sudden certainty it feels like the only thing that she has ever known to be true about herself.
So she gets up.
She doesn’t call 911. She doesn’t yell down for Gary the doctor. She doesn’t want to ruin the wedding. And these are just pills for cats. And how many did she take? Ten? Eleven?
She runs to the bathroom, because that’s what people do in movies about this moment. She hopes they are medically accurate. She sticks her finger down her throat and throws up chocolate wine and bile until there is no more chocolate wine left, only a raw burning.
After, she is too tired to move. She just sits there, listening to the end of the speech in the really beautiful bathroom. White marble all the way to the ceiling. Calacatta, the kind with gold veining that Phoebe had dreamed of getting for their kitchen. She presses her face against it. She wants to feel like a sick child for a few moments longer, head pressed to the cool floor, listening to the mother’s voice as if it were her own mother’s voice.
“Lila, you are a grown woman now, something I have been realizing each day you work for me at the gallery. And it’s impressive. I mean, this woman can sell a piece of art like her father could sell a piece of trash—and I mean that as a compliment. She’s organized. In this way, she is very much her father’s daughter; rest in peace, my late husband, Henry. She keeps a damn good spreadsheet. And trust me, that’s a skill most artists do not have. Most of them are living far away in their imagination, always pretending to be something they’re not, painting like Picasso one day or Rembrandt the next! They’re delusional! They’re never going to make it in this business! But my daughter will, and do you know why? My daughter has only ever been interested in being herself, for better or worse. That’s what makes her one of a kind. And when Gary came to the gallery that day and asked about one of our paintings, she thankfully did not do what I carefully trained her to do. She did not describe the way William Withers juxtaposed the hyperrealism of the garden with the cubist representation of the woman. She said nothing about the way Withers masterfully navigated the tension between the white space of the canvas and his subject. That’s what she should have done—that’s what the painting was all about. I should know—it was a painting of me! But no. My daughter was all business. My daughter saw what only my daughter would see and said, ‘This painting is three by five feet, would look great over a mantel or high up on the wall in the bathroom, and can easily be taken home yourself in any standard-sized crossover SUV.’”
The crowd laughs.
“And Gary bought it. I mean, he literally bought it! I knew in that moment he must be a real easy mark—”
