He looks over at Phoebe, so excited. He needs Phoebe to see the fish. And Phoebe wants to see. But by the time she gets to him, he’s lost it.
“Shit,” he says. “Mind holding this for me? I bet he took the bait.”
“Happy to,” she says.
He bends down to get more squid from his bucket. Phoebe feels the heavy pull of the water. Much stronger than the pull of the river. It takes strength to hold the rod still, to not be scared as the water breaks against the rocks and pools around her feet. She imagines it’s easy to get wiped out by a wave here.
But the man acts like standing here on the slippery rocks is just business. Holds up some fresh squid and tells her to reel in the hook. But she starts to feel little nibbles, the small bites of something alive in the water.
“I think I got something,” she says, and pulls the rod up sharply to set the hook. “Got it!”
She reels it in, slowly until the fish is dangling above the water. It’s so jarring—this fish yanked from its dark watery world, plunged into an entirely new one, where the most ordinary things like light and air are shocking. The fish shakes wildly on the end of the line, the force of his will to live so enormous. He is like Virginia Woolf’s moth, fluttering its wings—all struggle, all life.
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
“Agh,” the fisherman says. “Just a sea robin. Nobody buys those.”
She takes the fish off the hook, looks at its big ugly mouth, and throws it back into the sea. Wipes her hands on her leggings and gives the rod back to the fisherman.
“You’ve got a lucky touch,” he says. “Want to do another?”
“I need to get going,” she says.
She wants to see Edith Wharton’s house before the bridal brunch. She says goodbye, pats the dog on the head, climbs back up the rocks. On the way, Phoebe slips, falls, scrapes her knee, but does not slide into the water like the little man on the warning sign.
“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day,” Woolf wrote.
And it’s true. How easy to be dead. How lucky to be alive, even for just one day. Charlotte Brontë’s father understood this—the man had lost every single one of his children except for Charlotte, which is why he repeatedly turned down her final suitor. He worried marriage and the childbirth that followed marriage would kill her. And one year later, it did.
But Phoebe has made it out alive. She is back up on the path. Nothing has destroyed Phoebe. She feels very aware of this as she continues walking.
She was never much of a walker, never really understood the point of walking just to walk, which made her feel like a bad Victorianist sometimes. She didn’t take walks like Jane Eyre or wander the moors like the Brontës, though she always imagined she might if she had a moor at her disposal.
And now she does. An ocean is like a moor, she thinks. It’s an open watery horizon, and she walks along its edge until she reaches Land’s End. Edith Wharton’s house. Not that it’s really Wharton’s house anymore. The new owners are some random people from Connecticut, which is all she can gather from her phone.
She tries to get a better look, scrambles over some rocks, and she’s not an ardent enough Wharton fan for this to feel like a holy pilgrimage, mostly because her books ended in too much tragedy, a Romeo and Juliet–style fatal miscommunication that Phoebe respected yet hated. But she loved everything up to that point. The parties, the clothing, the conversations. She loved Wharton’s sense of humor. Her careful eye. She loved Lily Bart and was devastated when she killed herself at the end.
But Wharton hadn’t published any of her books while she lived in this house. At Land’s End, she had been unknown, an unhappy married woman. She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.
THE WALK BACK feels longer, but she likes feeling her legs strain as she passes mansion after mansion on her left. She is suddenly curious about what she has not yet become, and is proud of herself when she returns to the Forty Steps. And maybe that’s who she will become—a woman who enjoys a good walk alone.
Phoebe, I’m at the house and it truly looks like you were abducted in the middle of making breakfast. Where are you? Did you bring Harry with you?
It’s unsettling to think that after all this time he is actually at the house. He is back among their things, walking up and down the stairs. But he is too late in arriving. Like a party guest you hate for showing up when you are throwing out all the uneaten food.
I just found Harry in the basement under a blanket. I presume you know that Harry is dead?
“Yes, I know Harry is dead,” she says to her phone. “So fuck you, you fucking fuck.”
She feels the urge to throw her phone off the cliff, to get him away from her, like his texts might grow more powerful the longer she keeps them in her hand.
“Uh-oh,” a man says.
She turns to see Gary standing there in his jogging clothes. Phoebe is disarmed.
“Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to live a new life?” he asks.
“Yes,” Phoebe says. “And in the next scene, you can find me waiting in line at the Apple store to buy a new phone, like, immediately.”
“Like just hours of you shopping for a phone and making small decisions about how to set it up?”
“That’s basically how the movie ends.”
“Very experimental.”
“A commentary.”
“Somebody give this woman an Oscar,” he says, facing the ocean like it’s the audience.
“Thank you, thank you,” Phoebe says. She feels light and funny again.
“Lila sent me to come get you,” Gary says. “Your absence at the bridal brunch has been noticed.”
“Oh,” Phoebe says. “I didn’t realize how long I was out here.”
Gary must be wondering why she was invited to the bridal brunch if she’s not really part of the wedding. But he doesn’t ask.
Her phone starts vibrating, and they both stare at it like it’s the fish, exhausting itself until it dies.
