“People love creating false binaries,” Matt said. “It’s clarifying.”
In November, she was offered her first job—a tenure-track position at a college in Wisconsin. She looked up the town online, researched it like a book, agonized about what to do. She knew it was an opportunity, but when she pictured herself there, she could only picture herself as her father, sitting on a chair in a dark room, entirely alone.
“It’s your decision, of course,” Matt said, and Phoebe was disappointed. She didn’t want it to be her decision. She wanted him to decide—to be the captain.
She made no decision. She read drafts of Matt’s new article, and it was easier to fix his work than her own. She made suggestions in the form of questions: Do you know the shape of your argument? When you close your eyes, can you see it?
“Let’s go to the park,” he said one afternoon.
Everyone they knew was going to the park. Everyone had been obsessed with the eclipse for two days now. Even their friends who didn’t believe in things seemed to think it meant something. There was a metaphor in it. Somehow, it represented something. And she wanted to feel it, whatever it was, so she looked straight at the dark center that was once the sun. The red light was supposed to be blinding, but they were fine, protected. They were in love, not to mention wearing special glasses, holding hands in a park, surrounded by mansions built during the World’s Fair. Phoebe thought it was all so beautiful.
“Hey,” Matt whispered in her ear, “want to get married here?”
He whispered it so casually, it stunned Phoebe. The same way he said, Hey, let’s have a beer. Like their marriage was a thing so natural, so organic, it grew all around them like grass.
At noon, Phoebe wakes to a loud knock on her door.
“I knew you wouldn’t do it,” Lila says. She walks in and stands in front of the bathroom mirror. “What do you think of this hat?”
The mother of the bride was right, Phoebe thinks. The bride has little imagination. Phoebe can’t imagine being a person with so little curiosity about other people. Can’t imagine walking into someone else’s hotel room, someone who is openly suicidal, and not asking, “How are you?” She couldn’t even start her therapy session on Zoom without asking her therapist, “How are you?” which made her very annoyed because wasn’t she paying him just so she didn’t have to consider the fact that he was a human being? But when she saw his face, he was so clearly another human being, and she began to wonder what it was like to sit on Zoom for nine hours a day listening to people like her talk about how they don’t want to fuck their husbands anymore.
“Too much like a sailor’s hat?” Lila asks.
“I guess it depends,” Phoebe asks. “How much do you want to look like a sailor?”
“I don’t really know,” Lila says, like this is a big problem.
Yesterday, Lila’s lack of concern would have seemed like more evidence for her aloneness. But this morning, Lila’s indifference is a gift. Because Phoebe can’t explain last night. She doesn’t want to explain last night. It feels like a secret that she has with only the universe—and the man in the hot tub—a secret that will become a foundational memory she will carry with her everywhere she goes. Like the memory of meeting her husband, which was so life-affirming, it sustained her for a decade.
“We’re going sailing,” Lila says. “And Nat and Suz said it looked cute. But now I feel like I can’t even trust them anymore.”
Lila looks out at the ocean view, as if it is an old lover walking by.
“God, I fucking love your view,” Lila says. She walks out to the balcony, sits down. Sighs. “I swear, you’ve become the only one I can trust here.”
Phoebe joins her on the balcony, waits for Lila to speak, because Phoebe is sure any minute now, the bride will begin her monologue. But Lila doesn’t say anything.
“Why can’t you trust Nat and Suz?” Phoebe asks, like she knows them.
“They’re supposed to be my best friends, but they just let me humiliate myself yesterday, walking around with food in my teeth,” Lila says. “Then, after the reception, they were like, Such a perfect night! Such great speeches! Your mother was so so so wonderful! And I mean, just no. Did they hear my mother last night?”
“She turned it around at the end, I thought.”
“No. Like, I’m sorry I don’t speak to ducks,” Lila says. “Jesus. My entire life this woman has been expecting things from me that I just don’t think mothers should expect from their children. And she didn’t even get the story right! Gary didn’t buy the painting that first day we met at the gallery. He came again a week later to buy it. And she wasn’t even there!”
Lila takes off the hat.
“And now I don’t know what my friends mean when they tell me something is wonderful,” she says. “That’s the only word Suz and Nat have been able to use since they got here. Oh, Lila, Gary is so so so wonderful!”
“Is Gary not wonderful?”
“He’s Gary.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Christmas is wonderful. A vacation in Tuscany is wonderful. A kayak around the lake is wonderful. Those tiny soufflés that you have to order an hour in advance at restaurants are wonderful. But Garys are not wonderful. That’s just not what they are meant to be.”
Phoebe feels the professor come alive in her. The professor is always tempted to say something wise that will get the student to reflect on their own words—something like, If you don’t think he’s wonderful, maybe everybody else isn’t the problem. Because isn’t that what Lila is coming here for? The truth about her sailor hat?
“What are Garys supposed to be?” Phoebe asks.
But Lila doesn’t answer. She suddenly looks confused, like maybe she has no idea what Garys were put on this earth to do.
“Ugh,” she says, looking at her phone. “I have to go. Apparently there’s something wrong with my mother’s room.”
Lila walks to the door but is stopped by the sight of Phoebe’s unmade bed.
“If you’re depressed, you should really try making your bed in the morning,” Lila says. “It’s supposed to make you happier. I read a study.”
“Well, you should tell the researchers that you know a woman who made her bed every single day of her life for forty years and it didn’t work.”
“But maybe it did work. Maybe you would have killed yourself years earlier if you hadn’t been making the bed. See? You never know.”
“I invite you to make the bed then. This is your wedding week. You should have all the happiness that’s available.”
“No, I mean, it literally has to be your bed to get the happiness.”
“Well, this isn’t really my bed, so.”
