“Get you ready for the night,” Carlson says.
“That’s a service you provide here?”
Phoebe imagines Carlson pulling down her sheets, tucking her in like her father once had. Telling Phoebe sweet things about the universe like her husband used to. Petting her head as she drifts off into a sleep with no dreams.
“Yes,” Carlson says. “We are so sorry to have suspended it for the reception last night.”
Phoebe watches Carlson turn down the room. Lower the shades. Turn on the lights, fluff the coconut pillow. Pull the bedsheet down.
It is nice, this ritual. She likes that there is a specific phrase for it, this turning down of the room, this recognition that night is something we must prepare for. Because the night is hard.
Usually the worst time of day for Phoebe, when the depression surfaces like a cyst. Her therapist suggested that maybe it was body-related, maybe she just had a sugar deficiency, and maybe she would be happier if she ate six snacks a day. But she started to eat six snacks a day and the sun would begin to set and she would look at her husband’s shoes still by the door and she sobbed so loudly in the empty kitchen that it scared her. She would crawl into bed and think of all the different women she could have become. All the different ways better women end their days. How did Mia end her day?
She didn’t know why the end of each day always felt like such a test, but it did. It felt like a rehearsal for the end of life, which did not bode well for her, because Phoebe often did it with a drink in her hand, watching endless episodes of some period drama. Phoebe turned on all the lights at home and then her TV and lowered the woofer because the sounds of the British rifles were too realistic.
“Anything else you need?” Carlson asks.
It is nice the way everyone here keeps asking this, even if it’s just their job. Each time feels like another chance to practice asking for what she needs, something that used to be so difficult for Phoebe. I need to go on that vacation in March, she should have said. I need you to tell me that you love me more often right now, she should have said. But it had felt humiliating. Because her husband needed nothing—he was always so busy, so totally fine, always walking out the door with a million papers in his hand.
But Carlson waits, gives Phoebe time to think, looks at her as if he really wants to help, and maybe he does.
“I need a phone charger,” Phoebe says.
“Sure thing,” he says. “Anything else?”
“And a drain stopper for the tub.”
“Absolutely,” Carlson says. “I’ll be right back.”
“You’re not going to CVS, right?” she asks.
He laughs. “No. Just downstairs.”
She likes his Southern drawl and wonders if, like Pauline, he sounds nicer than he is. Though she suspects this is true of most people, especially herself. Because Phoebe was not nice. No—Phoebe was just trying very hard to be liked, even by Mia and her husband, even after the affair. She behaved like she was a very nice woman in an Ibsen play, waiting for the audience to clap or turn on her at any moment. To declare her a terrible woman or a great woman. But in her fantasies, she didn’t think nice things. She always wished bad things for them both.
“Here you go,” Carlson says when he returns, and presents the drain stopper and the phone charger on the brass platter. This time, she actually laughs.
“These brass platters are funny,” Phoebe says.
“We have to do it,” he says, and smiles.
“Where are you from?”
“Georgia, but I’m coming up from South Carolina,” he says. He works at their resort down there. He’s just here to offer some help as they get settled again after Covid. “We’re short-staffed.”
“Well, thank you for your service,” she says, and it’s so overly formal, it makes him laugh.
He does a grand bow. “You’re welcome, my dear. Now you enjoy your evening.”
HOW DOES ONE enjoy an evening?
She charges her phone. She puts on the fluffy robe. She fills the Victorian tub. She lets out her hair. Combs it with the softest brush she has ever felt as the sky turns pink.
She steps in the warm water one foot at a time. She opens Mrs. Dalloway. She makes it to Septimus’s suicide and then she reads on until the water gets cold. She turns on the hot water again and begins to wash. She picks up the shower head, and washing is less romantic than it appears it would be in a tub with vintage brass hardware. She goes to wet her hair and sprays water all over the floor by accident.
“Shit,” she says.
Eventually she gives up trying to bathe beautifully in this tub. She gives up trying to feel like she’s in a painting. She doesn’t have to be beautiful in this moment. She doesn’t have to be anything, ever. Her husband is not watching. Her father is not watching. Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.
“Can you take a different approach?” her therapist asked her. “Can you sometimes just try to love what you hate about yourself?”
She didn’t understand this question at the time. She didn’t understand how she could love herself. She didn’t understand what people even meant when they said they loved themselves. She honestly didn’t believe them. How could you love yourself? How could you love yourself when you know every single horrible thing you’ve ever thought? When you end most nights fantasizing about your husband fucking his mistress against the wall? And sometimes, Phoebe is in the fantasy, too. Phoebe is there to watch, to tell her husband he must do it harder and harder and harder.
“It’s sick,” Phoebe told her therapist.
“Why does it have to be sick?” he asks. “Why can’t it just be you, wanting to be a part of it?”
“Okay, so it’s sick and pathetic,” Phoebe said.
“It’s not pathetic to want things, Phoebe,” he said. “It’s good.”
“It’s not good to want that.”
But now she can understand what he was trying to tell her. It is good to want things, even the humiliating things. Even the things you aren’t supposed to want, like Gary, the groom. Because every time she thinks of sitting in that hot tub with Gary, she feels so lucky to be alive. She can’t believe she almost missed the chance to meet him. She can’t believe she almost threw her body away. This beautiful body, she thinks, and runs her fingers over the soft fuzz of hair that has grown on her legs. The scar on her knee. Her breasts, sticking out of the water like two smooth and ancient rocks in the ocean. And it turns her on a little, just looking at her breasts, so she starts to touch herself. She always thought it was a myth, all these water orgasms women were having in movies, but she can feel herself get close, feel her whole body begin to shake, when the door opens.
“Phoebe!” Lila shouts as she walks in.
“Jesus,” Phoebe says, sitting up so fast, water spills over the edges. She is flushed from the hot water, the heat of being caught. But Lila only notices the soaked phone on the ground.
