“Well, don’t worry,” he says. “I promise I won’t make you talk to me.”
“That’s too bad,” she says. “I was actually hoping you would talk to me.”
He seems surprised by her frankness.
“Really? You aren’t tired of talking yet?” he asks. “All I’ve been doing at this wedding is just talking to people and then talking to more people.”
“What have you been talking about?”
“How was your flight?” he says. “What do you think of the hotel? What shows did you watch during the pandemic? How did you better yourself with all that free time?”
“Well?” she asks. “How did you?”
The man strokes his chin as if he’s thinking hard. “Mostly, I just grew this quarantine beard.”
“It’s a better beard than that,” she says. “Very trendy.”
“Oh, come on! Don’t say that,” he says. “Beards cannot be trendy. People have always had beards.”
“Have they?”
“Jesus had a beard,” the man says. “Darwin had a beard. Marx had a beard.”
“Yeah, but not the way people have beards now.”
“How do people have beards now?”
“People now have … ironic beards.”
“And what did Darwin have?” he asks. “A sincere beard?”
“My best guess,” she says, “is that Darwin’s beard was a product of Victorian notions of masculinity and naturalist beliefs, all coming together…”
“On the bottom of his chin…”
“To form Darwin’s beard.”
“Right,” he says. “Right. Okay, well, very good. Thank you for this peer review of my beard. I’ll certainly incorporate your feedback.”
She laughs. Who is this man? Is he an academic? Is he flirting? Is she flirting? It’s been so long, Phoebe can’t remember the difference between having fun and flirting. Maybe there is no difference. She lifts up her feet, lets her legs float in the water.
“What about you?” he asks. “How did you better yourself during lockdown?”
She could lie, give him the answers he’s likely been hearing all day, the things she told her colleagues when she got back on campus yesterday. Oh, I wrote a ton during the pandemic. The book is really coming along!
But that is how it happens, she realizes. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.
“I drank a lot,” she says.
“Did it help?” he asks.
“It helped me not care about the fact that I basically stopped changing my clothes,” she says. “Or that my dissertation was actually a piece of shit.”
She waits for him to break eye contact, to look at his phone, find some excuse to get out of this conversation. But he keeps looking at her, so she continues.
“And my advisor kept emailing me being like, Who cares if it’s a piece of shit! Everybody’s dissertation is a piece of shit. That’s what dissertations are.”
He laughs. “Are you in grad school?”
“I’m a professor.”
“I didn’t know we had a professor in the family.” He looks at her like he’s trying to figure something out. “You don’t look familiar. Are you in the Winthrop family?”
“No.”
“The Rossi family?”
“I’m not actually here for the wedding.”
He looks confused. “I thought Lila said everyone was supposed to be here for the wedding. I distinctly remember that being a very big deal to her.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“So you’re on vacation and you get surprised by a wedding?”
“I’m not here on vacation.”
“This is becoming very mysterious.”
