“Hey ho!” Jim shouts, and everybody cheers.
Phoebe is ready to believe in them as a couple. She waits to hear what it sounds like when Gary and Lila talk directly to each other. She wants to understand what makes them laugh. How they flirt. She is ready to accept things as they are. But after they kiss, they are entirely public-facing, embracing their guests, telling stories to them, and not each other. And every so often, Gary looks back at Juice and Phoebe like he wants to say something. Eventually, he does.
“Juice, please throw the sandwich away if you aren’t going to eat it,” Gary says. “It’s melting on this man’s boat.”
“It’s not actually melting, though!” Juice says. “See?”
Juice is sort of right. It doesn’t really melt. It still keeps its shape, which Phoebe admits is disturbing. But her father is not impressed. The father can only see litter. “Throw it out,” he says.
“Fine!” Juice yells.
Juice throws the sandwich overboard, and Marla says, “See? I knew this would happen. Littering is a slippery slope,” and Gary says, “Drop it, Marla,” and then looks at Juice like he’s about to punish her but doesn’t. He returns to his bride, and Juice looks out at the water like she’s contemplating something damning about her father, or Lila, or her life in general, but Phoebe knows she’s just trying to keep herself from crying. Phoebe knows this move. She watches Juice pick up her phone again.
“Do you think he really loved his mistress?” Juice asks.
“Excuse me?” Phoebe asks.
“Albert Schuyler.”
“I suppose he must have,” Phoebe says. “You don’t make buildings for people who are just sort of okay.”
But it’s a different kind of love, Phoebe knows. The wife is the reason the man becomes the architect. The mistress is the reason the architect keeps building. The blueprints of his dreams that he may never realize, so he keeps it in his drawer.
“Good point,” Juice says. “Though to be honest, I could never love anyone named Albert.”
“Alberts are people, too,” Phoebe says.
Juice cracks up. She repeats the line to herself, “Alberts are people, too.”
Juice continues reading to Phoebe about the hotel in hushed tones, like she’s telling a secret story after bedtime, and Phoebe is surprised to find herself genuinely interested, though she doesn’t know why she’s surprised, since this is exactly the kind of thing that she likes to think about.
By the time they are almost back to the wharf, everybody seems drunk and happy again. Gary and Lila are laughing at something Nat is saying. Marla and Jim are deep in conversation with Marla’s father about Roy. And Juice is really leaning on Phoebe now like she’s a bookend. As the people prepare to get off the boat, Phoebe closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to move. Like when Harry was on her lap and he was so cute, Phoebe wouldn’t even take a sip of coffee. Phoebe doesn’t want to ruin the moment.
But then they are docked, and Phoebe looks up at the wharf, at all the people and the houses and the new life that waits behind it.
“That was so fun,” Lila announces as she stands up.
“So fun,” Suz agrees.
Nat holds up her camera. “Kiss!”
And so they kiss.
Back at the hotel, Pauline stands behind the front desk in a navy linen dress. She has the expression of a woman who has been fielding requests that are impossible to field all day long, yet when she sees the wedding people, she gives a cheerful, “Hello! Welcome back! How was your sail?”
“Phenomenal,” Lila says. “Oh, that reminds me. I need to talk to you about my mattress.”
Lila turns to Pauline, and the group scatters. Nat and Suz are off to get their nails done. Marla and Juice require naps. Jim heads to the bar with Gary’s father to meet Uncle Jim. And Gary and Phoebe wait for the elevator in silence, listening to Lila explain to Pauline that the mattress is not soft enough.
“Not as soft as I was hoping,” Lila says.
Phoebe wonders if this is how Lila operates. Lila is upset about the funeral on the boat, but she can’t say anything about that, so she complains about the mattress to Pauline, because that’s where Pauline stands most of the day, waiting for complaints. Pauline is ready to fix any problem, which is why Phoebe is not surprised to see that Pauline has already restored the books on the shelf to their original positions, pages facing out.
“Is there anything you can do?” Lila asks.
“I’m just not sure there is anything we can do about the actual mattress,” Pauline says. “I mean, they’re brand-new mattresses.”
“Unfortunately, those brand-new mattresses are not very comfortable,” Lila says.
Gary looks down at his feet like he’s embarrassed, but then again, what does Phoebe know about Gary really? Gary could like this about Lila. Many men do—it took her a long time to realize that. Some men like the fuss. Some men like being told what to do, because then they never have to make any decisions, never have to think. It was probably very helpful when Lila told him where to hang the nude painting, probably for the same reasons that Phoebe always liked watching Matt roll up his belt into a neat and tidy ball. She liked watching his hand sweep the gutter clean. It’s arousing to see someone passionately take care of all the problems. Especially for someone like Phoebe, the perpetual passenger of the relationship, according to her therapist—the one who always asked, “Where do you want to go to dinner?” hoping the other person knew where they wanted to go.
But then Gary reaches out and makes a decision. He turns a book around just like she had.
Great Expectations.
Gary holds up his fist. “Free the books,” he says, and Phoebe laughs. She is surprised. Maybe she doesn’t know Gary at all. Maybe Gary makes decisions like that all the time. And why is she always trying to reduce people, squeeze them into these knowable, tiny boxes where there is room for only one or two personality traits? Gary is the stage and Lila is the song, she thinks. But then she thinks: Nobody is ever like anything all of the time. Because one day, Phoebe woke up and decided to kill herself, and that is not what the perpetual passenger of life does. The perpetual passenger of life just continues sitting in bed.
“Free the books,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe turns a book around, too. They continue on like that, freeing the books, while Pauline tries to appease Lila.
“The mattresses may take some time to, you know, break in,” Pauline says.
“Don’t mattresses famously get worse over time?”
“Well, I just don’t know what we can do about the mattresses, to be honest. They are, unfortunately, already here.”
“What about a topper?” Lila asks.
