“It’s terrible,” Aunt Gina says. “I haven’t gone since Friday. Travel always does this to me.”
“You just came from Cranston,” Gary says. “It’s only thirty minutes away.”
“Just the idea of traveling gets me,” Aunt Gina says.
“I can come by later,” Gary says, and pats his uncle on the back. “But you know I can’t give you actual medical advice, right? I’m not your doctor.”
“Oh, stop it,” Uncle Jim says. “You’re our nephew. Of course you can. What’s the point of my nephew being a shit doctor if we can’t get some free medical advice?”
When they walk away, it takes only one look from Gary to make Phoebe burst into laughter. Everything is light between them again, like earlier on the boat. Like last night in the hot tub.
“You must get that a lot, don’t you?” Phoebe asks.
“Let’s just say that I know the shape and size and color of the shits of about fifty percent of the inhabitants in any given room,” Gary says.
They laugh. She knows she should head into her room now. She knows they have been talking for too long. But she is not quite ready to leave yet. She doesn’t want to go back to being entirely alone in her room again.
“Hey, I’m sorry I was so forward in the hot tub last night,” Phoebe says. “Had I known.”
“Please don’t apologize,” he says. “I should have told you I was the groom.”
“Yeah, why didn’t you tell me you were the groom?”
“I don’t normally go around introducing myself as a groom.”
“You might need to start. You made me think you were…”
“What?”
“A regular person in a hot tub.”
“You made me think you were a regular person, too. But apparently you’re Lila’s friend from the art gallery?”
“I’m not,” Phoebe says. “I mean, I guess I became her friend, like literally last night. Or maybe this morning. I’m not sure. But we didn’t meet at an art gallery.”
“Why would Lila say you met at the gallery then?” Gary looks concerned, as if Phoebe is going to say something that might reveal the true character of his future wife. And Phoebe doesn’t know why Lila lied to them all but suspected it had something to do with how Marla’s face lit up when she mentioned the gallery. Or how embarrassing it would be to explain to everyone how Phoebe and Lila really met.
“Better to lie than tell everyone on the boat that I’m the crazy suicidal woman she met in the elevator yesterday,” Phoebe says.
“You’re not crazy,” Gary says. “Please don’t say that. That’s truly all I ask.”
She nods. She won’t. “But I could have been—”
“No, you were great,” he says. “You were so…”
Gary thinks for a moment, not like he is hesitating, but like he is trying to find the most accurate word.
“So what?” she asks.
She is surprised that she genuinely wants to know. She has always been so afraid to know things about herself—so afraid of reading the truth in course evaluations, or seeing her large nose in a photograph, or listening to her therapist draw unbearably accurate conclusions about her. “Have you always been this critical of yourself?” he asked her. And yes. Yes. She has. “I’m literally a critic,” she reminded her therapist, and he laughed. And where did she learn this? How did she become so good at identifying flaws? At seeing only the fungus on the trees?
“Alive,” Gary says. “You struck me as a person who was fully alive. It was inspiring, actually.”
Maybe it should be embarrassing to talk like this, to be so sincere in the middle of a hotel hallway at five in the evening, but Gary doesn’t seem embarrassed about it. Maybe one becomes comfortable with sincerity when they listen to people talk about their own shit with the utmost seriousness. He spends his days in a small room where people can only ever live or die. He is the one trusted with telling people the absolute truth about their assholes. Not to mention, their fates. Whereas Phoebe was trained in the depressive school of her father, and then the snark of graduate school, taught to poke holes in everyone’s arguments, to see the fatal flaws in papers, and it had been exciting for a short period of time. “For Matthews to claim that Jane Eyre is or is not a feminist text is to misunderstand what feminism is,” Phoebe wrote in her one published paper. She had been proud when it came out, but then for months after, she had a sour taste in her mouth, like she had put something rotten out into the world, and every time she worked on her book, she felt like she was just waiting for a critic to point out the ways it was spoiled. Who cares how many times Jane Eyre goes walking? How can Stone claim the natural world is both a domestic space and a public space at the same time? And how does the freedom Eyre experiences on those walks with Rochester not contradict Stone’s earlier claim that Jane is “trapped in the ‘unnatural’ world of a man’s making”? That’s usually when Phoebe stopped working on her book and picked up her cigarette.
Phoebe prefers this new way of talking. And maybe this is just one of the really nice things about getting older. Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.
“Thank you for saying that,” Phoebe says.
“Will we see you at the … reception then?” Gary says, so awkwardly that it feels like it’s the end of a date. And how easy it would all be if it were the end of a date. How nice it would feel to lean forward and kiss him.
But it’s not a date. Lila is coming down the hall. Lila belongs to Gary and Gary belongs to Lila, and Phoebe belongs to no one.
“No,” Phoebe says. “Like I said, I’m really not a part of the wedding.”
“Take care then,” Gary says. He gives her a long hard look, like he knows this will be the last time they ever see each other.
“Bye,” she says.
IN THE ROOM, Phoebe feels disappointed to return to the facts of her own life, to the night she will spend in the Roaring Twenties all alone. Not to mention, the life she will spend alone. And why does she do this? Why does she have a nice day with people, feel connected to them, and then, when alone, think only about the possible horrors of her isolation ahead?
“You catastrophize,” her therapist said to her once. “Depressive realism.”
She knows that. Yet her thoughts still have power over her anyway. They make her feel pinned to the checkered rug, to her solitary existence.
She thinks she should probably call a new therapist. But she still has this feeling that she is outside of time. She is supposed to be dead, and she’s not—it helps every time she remembers she’s living in some kind of bonus afterlife where she has a view of the ocean and a man named Carlson who shows up at sunset to “turn down” the room.
“Turn down?” Phoebe asks.
