Then he looks at her, like he is somewhat astonished by her presence. Like maybe he doesn’t quite believe in this moment, the way she can’t quite believe it. She wants to reach out, touch him. She wants to believe that something even more amazing can happen next. She feels certain that this moment, and moments like this, are what she stayed alive for.
“I know what you mean,” she says.
But at a certain point, a person can no longer be in a hot tub anymore, no matter how much they want to be. It’s just too hot. The body can’t take it. She stands up and remembers that she is only in her black lingerie.
The man looks away. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she says. “I mean, I’m the one in my underwear. I should be sorry.”
But she’s not. She doesn’t even reach for her robe. She just continues standing there. Because why should underwear be more embarrassing than a bathing suit?
“To be honest, I never really understood the logic of it,” she says. “I mean, underwear covers the same exact parts of my body, and yet because it’s made out of different fabric, it’s suddenly inappropriate?”
“I’ve wondered that myself before,” he says. “But it does seem categorically different somehow.”
“Well,” Phoebe says.
She could invite him up to her room. And why not? Her marriage is over. He’s not wearing a wedding ring. And they have a connection. Phoebe is certain of it, because it has been so long since Phoebe has felt connected to anybody, even herself. Their connection is the most obvious thing—the only thing she can feel at the moment.
But Phoebe hesitates. The old Phoebe never made the first move. Not even with her husband after years of marriage—she always waited for him to initiate. She was always too embarrassed to admit that she ever wanted anything, as if there was something humiliating about being a person with desires. But what would it feel like to be different? To be totally honest about what she wants?
“I want to fuck you,” she says to the man.
“Oh,” the man says. He sits up straighter in the tub, no longer relaxed. “I really wasn’t expecting you to say that.”
“I wasn’t, either,” Phoebe says. “Just figured in the spirit of total honesty—”
“In the spirit of total honesty, I should tell you that I—”
“You’re with someone,” she interrupts, because there is the old Phoebe, rushing back to save her. The old Phoebe who assumes she knows all the terrible things that people are thinking, so she says them first, as if this somehow protects her from the truth. “Of course.”
But he doesn’t seem offended or embarrassed by what she said. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just watches her with curiosity, like she’s some kind of rare deer spotted in the woods that will vanish if he makes another sound. And suddenly, the old Phoebe seems like the fool. So defensive, so afraid, so silly in the face of this very honest moment of two people just wanting each other.
“I am,” he finally says.
She nods, ties her robe closed.
“Well, I sincerely hope someone beats the shit out of you this week,” Phoebe says.
“Thanks,” he laughs. “Me too.”
She smiles the whole way to the elevator. Her heart pounds wildly as she stands there. She feels alive. She feels so real. Like she could do just about anything, so she starts to turn around more books on the shelf. The House of Mirth. Huckleberry Finn. She doesn’t stop until she pulls out Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf.
She holds Mrs. Dalloway in her hand as if it is a message from the universe, even though the old Phoebe doesn’t believe in messages from the universe. It’s just a book that belongs to the hotel. It’s just a book they probably got when they ordered books in bulk from some used bookstore. But it’s also the last book she never finished.
She puts it under her arm, gets in the elevator, and that’s how it becomes hers.
UPSTAIRS, SHE THROWS out the cigarettes. She opens the minibar, which the room literature insists is a “beverage cooler.” She pulls out a guava hibiscus kombucha.
“Don’t eat from the minibar,” her husband always said.
But she doesn’t care if she gets ripped off. She wants to get ripped off. She has chosen this overpriced hotel just to be ripped off. She feels giddy as she cracks open the can. Then she opens Lila’s gift bag and takes out the Oreos that are not Oreos because they are made from love and not trans fats. She holds up a not-Oreo in her palm and then eats an entire sleeve, like her husband used to. Until his affair, Oreos were the one thing her husband couldn’t keep under control.
“They’re just so damn good,” he would say. “I don’t know how anybody stops eating them.”
And they were. She bites into one and thinks, Even not-Oreos are so damn good.
She opens Mrs. Dalloway. She doesn’t want to think of her husband anymore. She has already thought about her husband so many times, and she has never once finished Mrs. Dalloway. She always told herself it was because she didn’t care for Woolf’s style, the circular sentences, the never-ending thoughts punctuated with semicolons; like this; and this; and then this.
“If you ever want to learn how to use a semicolon, don’t go to Woolf,” she used to tell her students.
If she were being honest, though, Phoebe would have admitted that she didn’t care about Mrs. Dalloway’s inner life. Mrs. Dalloway was too old, too unhappy, too married, already beyond the years of life that interested Phoebe at the time. And she hated Septimus for the same reasons—he was back from the war, threatening suicide, and after he jumped out the window, she felt betrayed by the book, betrayed by Woolf and all the other great authors who killed themselves. It was too horrible to know that getting married wasn’t enough. That creating their masterpieces hadn’t been enough, that going to World War II hadn’t been enough, that being a valedictorian of both her high school and then her college wasn’t enough—her father was still depressed. Still alone, always just sitting on his chair watching Vietnam War movies.
That’s how she found him when she returned from St. Louis after her first year of graduate school—dead on his chair. She assumed it was suicide, because that’s what she had always worried about, but then she saw the cereal bowl spilled all over his potbelly and she looked away. A stroke, she thought. Or maybe a heart attack. And when she looked at him again, the sadness was blinding.
She went back to school, and the darkness was all she could see for days. She was alone. Truly alone. She would walk around the Forest Park gardens and notice only the fungus on the leaves. The whiskey smell of Bob’s breath in the hallway. And Nancy, the department administrator, who ate tuna for lunch every day of her life and then got cancer and then quietly died offstage and was replaced by someone with the same exact haircut.
So she read the novels about slow, incremental improvement, about sisters who were also good friends, women who were too witty for the sincerity of their landscapes, women who were above marriage and its conventions and, yet, got to be beautiful and experience the joys of it anyway. She devoted her career to these books because she needed them. She didn’t care that most of the other graduate students thought this was boring. These stories were like little bibles to her, teaching her how to be normal, how to dream, how to believe that happiness and a new family would arrive in a single moment, on a single page, like the sudden crescendo of a symphony. She needed to believe these people were out there looking for her, these good and moral people with big estates and bigger hearts who would fall madly in love with just how alone she was, because wasn’t life fucking hard enough?
But now she needs something else. Now she rests her head on the coconut pillow and begins to read Mrs. Dalloway. Now she knows what it feels like to be beyond the traditional plot points of a life, to sit on a chair in an empty room feeling like there is nothing more than this solemn march forward. Yet, there must be something else. She is suddenly gripped with such curiosity it feels primal. She needs to know: After the war, after the marriage, after the suicide—what happens next?
Before they fell in love, Phoebe and her husband sat next to each other in the graduate computer lab for two months, not talking to each other. They were both busy trying to finish their dissertations before their sixth year ended, both gifted with some ungodly ability to focus relentlessly on a task, even on the hottest St. Louis afternoons when thunderstorms split open the sky above. They typed and typed and typed, and probably would have gone on like this forever if the power had not gone out.
“Shit,” Phoebe said.
The room shut down like a body that had died. For a moment, it was too quiet.
“I can’t remember the last time I hit Save,” Phoebe said.
