Are you okay? Bob wrote. Because Bob is not a total jerk. Bob is wondering where she is. Does she need a medical leave of absence? Does he need to get another adjunct to cover the semester for her? Will she be back?
And then there are the texts from her husband. They start on late Tuesday, just before midnight.
Phoebe, her husband texted. It might be weird to say this, but it felt equally weird not to have wished you a good start to the semester when I saw you today in the office. So, I guess what I am trying to say is, I hope your classes went well today.
But by this morning, he was concerned.
Hate to bug you again, but Bob emailed and is wondering where you are. I told him I don’t know. Are you okay?
And now he is very concerned.
Phoebe, I know I don’t have a right to ask, but if you could please let me know if you’re okay, I’d really appreciate that. I’m very worried about you.
Now he’s worried? She is stunned by his sudden concern. Because why wasn’t he worried two years ago when he left? Or on her birthday last May, when she woke up and the first sound out of her mouth was a sob that had sounded so much like an animal dying in the woods it spooked Phoebe into silence?
She doesn’t respond. Maybe I’ll never respond again, she thinks.
But she should write to Bob. She types and deletes a few responses.
But none of this is true. Writing these emails makes her feel like her students lying their way out of something. And she is lying—she has no idea what she will do after the wedding. She can’t imagine going back now. But she also can’t imagine not going back.
I will need someone to cover my classes this week, she writes to Bob. I am very sorry for taking off without any notice, and I’ll write as soon as I can when I have more information about what I am going to do regarding the rest of the semester. Thank you for understanding.
She uses the flashlight on her phone to finish Mrs. Dalloway. But when she’s done, she doesn’t go inside. She wants to stay and look up at the stars. At home, she would never sit out in the dark alone. But nighttime in a hotel is a different thing. At night, a hotel comes alive. The fairy lights in the garden start to sparkle. The experimental harpist and cellist begin to play. The wedding people sprawl out of the parlor and assemble on the patio. They are still partying. The wedding people are always partying. It feels like what they are sent here by God to do. To have loose ties around their white collared shirts and to laugh very hard while slamming the tables with their palms.
She read something once about how the cello is soothing because it mirrors something about our physiology. Phoebe can’t remember what exactly. But it does soothe her. So do the sounds of doors closing, opening, closing, opening. The sink running next door. The roll of laughter so steady and constant, rising and falling like waves. The constant motion of the world. The whole place is designed to keep her from descending into despair. On every wall, there is evidence that somebody has thought about her stay here. The little candles on the tables below. The torches that come on automatically at dusk.
It is so easy to hate Mrs. Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride, she thinks. But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point. It’s Mrs. Dalloway who brings them all together in a modern world full of railroads and wars and illnesses that are always tearing people apart. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.
THURSDAY
The Bachelorette Party
Phoebe wakes at sunrise with an urgency to touch the ocean. It’s time. She puts on Lila’s mother’s sweater again (must get new clothes today, she decides) and heads downstairs to the Cliff Walk.
On the way out, she’s surprised to spot Gary and Lila in the conservatory—they are being photographed under two giant ferns. It feels too early for something like that, to be dressed so formally before the ocean mist has evaporated, but there they are, leaning into each other. They look like well-dressed cartoons. Something about Lila’s pants looking too clean or Gary’s blazer too checked.
Phoebe pours herself some coffee as they pose. She thinks Lila looks beautiful in her silk tube top, though Phoebe imagines Lila does not call it a tube top. She can hear Lila in her head saying, Tube tops are for teens in the nineties at the mall, Phoebe. Strapless blouses are for women about to get married.
“If you can just put your hand there,” the photographer suggests to Gary, so Gary puts his hand there. Moves the hair off her shoulder. Yes, yes, like that. Lean back into him. And Lila does, but her face is too stiff, the way people’s faces look when their abs are slightly clenched.
Lila sees her. She waves and Gary nods. Phoebe nods back, then slips out of the room. There is something embarrassing about watching a couple take photos like this. Watching a couple try to be a couple, even though they are a couple.
ON THE CLIFF WALK, there are no people out yet. Just someone’s yellow dog milling around the Forty Steps entrance, though she doesn’t see anyone connected to the dog. She starts to walk faster, which tricks the dog into thinking it’s a competition, and that’s how she starts racing this random dog on the Cliff Walk.
I will get a dog, she thinks. No offense to Harry. But the dog will go walking with her in the morning. The dog will keep her out in the world. And it feels amazing to just decide something like that, like, I will get a dog.
The dog slows to a happy trot two steps ahead of her. Together, they pass signs telling them to stay on the path, but there are thin dirt trails made by those who did not listen, like this dog, who starts walking down to the rocks.
HIGH RISK OF INJURY, the sign warns, complete with a helpful picture of a man falling off to his death. Yet Phoebe follows, because people, like dogs and the fisherman down below, will do anything to get closer to the water.
“Hey, hey!” the fisherman says as soon as he sees the dog. The dog barks. “Thanks for bringing him to me.”
The fisherman is smiling, like she did the dog a great service. When he looks at her, his headlight blasts her in her eyes.
“Sorry,” he says, fumbling with the thing. “I sometimes forget I’ve got this thing on my head.”
“It’s okay,” she says.
He turns back to the water, and she sits down on a rock, even though he has not asked for her company. But she decides that’s how some people are (she decides that she likes deciding things now that she is forty and alone, that’s how some people are). Some people don’t ask for what they need. Some people are like religious children that way, mistaking suffering with goodness. Her father acted like being lonely was a good workout, something that would pay off in the end, and sometimes it didn’t, but when he was fishing, it did: He always filled his bucket, dropping in each fish unceremoniously, saying to Phoebe, “Don’t get excited, folks. Just a trash fish.”
She always liked that her father did this—said “folks” when it was just her, as if Phoebe was a grand audience. Yet Phoebe stood there stoically as instructed, like she was just a girl who liked being a good girl, and good girls did not like killing things. Good girls liked the breeze through their long hair and the flush on a man’s face when he smacked the fish against a rock. Killed it instantly. Threw it in the bucket.
The waves build in the distance and crash against the rocks, and she can’t look away. Phoebe feels grateful, like she has achieved something monumental just by sitting here at sea level, even though from down here on the rocks, the ocean is terrifying. It’s the closest embodiment to what eternity might look like. She can’t see the end of it or the bottom of it. She can’t see the darkness of its expanse, but she knows there are creatures who have to live in it. Who think it’s normal. She reaches out her hand and she touches it.
Her phone dings.
Please tell me you’re okay and that I shouldn’t call the police, Matt texts.
This is how her husband shows affection. Like her father, who was most comfortable showing love by announcing the ways he thought Phoebe might die—you’re going to trip on these socks and break your neck! You could slip on some black ice and drive right off the road! He was always worried about protecting Phoebe from herself. Like when Phoebe was pregnant, Matt looked at the two lines on the stick and said, “It’s too early to get excited, isn’t it?” and she agreed, but when she started bleeding ten weeks later, she hated herself for agreeing, for not getting excited when she had the chance.
So she doesn’t respond to her husband. He doesn’t deserve a response, she thinks. He deserves to suffer like she did, to spiral out of control. Because that was the problem. He never lost control. Neither did she.
“Hey, hey!” the fisherman shouts, and starts pulling on his line. “I got one!”
