“Does she eat any real food yet?” he asked Mia.
It had been their last Thanksgiving together, three months before the affair started. Mia and Tom had come over with their new baby because Matt didn’t have a big family, either. The people at the university are my family, he always said. And that made sense for him. He was wedded to them for life.
“Today is going to be her first day of real food, actually,” Mia said.
“Wow,” Matt said. Phoebe’s husband looked genuinely thrilled by this, but Phoebe didn’t know how to look genuinely thrilled. She mostly just felt fat from her most recent IVF cycle. “She’s going to expect a Thanksgiving dinner every day from now on.”
“Right,” Mia said. “She’ll have the most complicated palate at preschool. Like, I’m sorry, but where is the turkey jus?”
They laughed, and even though the affair hadn’t started yet, Phoebe already felt outside of something they shared. They were different somehow—they were the ones making jokes over the turkey. They were the ones debating whether the Waldorf school would be good for the child, and Phoebe was the one just trying to hang on. Trying to smile. Phoebe was becoming like Tom. She looked to Tom in solidarity, but Tom was assessing the turkey.
“Are these the giblets?” Tom asked.
Phoebe felt like she was in a dream, watching Mia and her husband and the Waldorf Child continue on so merrily with Thanksgiving dinner. Tom asking why the turkey was flipped upside down, and Matt saying, “It’s the only way you can make it.”
Her husband was full of advice like that. He knew how to best do everything, and Tom seemed interested in being like this, too. Tom asked him a lot of questions while Mia had her breast out, and Phoebe didn’t remember if it was rude to look at the breast or rude not to look.
Phoebe tried to say something nice about the Waldorf Child. She imagined what some other woman would say. Another mother.
“Oh, how cute, look at those little killer whales on the baby’s onesie,” she said.
“I think we say orcas now,” Mia said.
And normally, Phoebe could have looked to her husband in this moment and laughed. I think we say orcas now, Phoebe imagined them saying. But nobody met her eye. She was left alone with her scolding. It was not a joke, just a fact. Parents say orcas, not killer whales. Ho hum. Then they ate the meal and she continued to notice how none of them really looked her in the eye. When they told stories, they bypassed Phoebe, as if she were not part of the conversation. Did it have something to do with her hair? It was a taupe wall that blended in with the taupe wall. The table roared. Her husband laughed, head back, and looked at the Waldorf Child with such tenderness. It occurred to her that if her husband didn’t leave her, she would probably have to leave him. Looking at him look at a child that way.
When they left, Phoebe didn’t feel relieved. She felt nervous, as if they took real life with them. The extra pie. The Waldorf Child. The whole life. She started to clean up, hoping it would return her to herself.
“I like children,” Phoebe said, and why did she feel the need to say this? “It’s just boring to make them the center of attention all the time. It’s like bringing a new toy to dinner and only looking at the new toy and only talking about the new toy and expecting everybody else to care about it.”
Her husband didn’t say anything at first. Just washed the turkey plate. “I thought it was fun.”
Was this the moment he fell out of love with her and in love with Mia? Was that what he was trying to tell her in the kitchen? Stop being so negative. Just be fun. Just say orcas.
It wasn’t until after Valentine’s Day when the actual affair began. But Phoebe knew something had shifted after Thanksgiving, because they stopped touching in the kitchen when they walked by each other. They stopped having sex, and Phoebe was scared by how easy it became to live without sex with her husband. She got spooked by the fact that she preferred some other version of her husband, the one she created in her fantasies. She thought of this husband when she masturbated in the mornings. She got lightheaded. She felt empty, but in a clean kind of way. Not having sex sometimes felt like giving up meat or pasta. Sometimes, she felt absurdly proud of herself.
But after three months of this, she sometimes missed her real husband so much, she walked over to him at the couch, kissed him on the mouth.
“It’s a simple prompt,” he said, while grading papers. It was February, only a few weeks into the spring semester, and he was already very annoyed by them. It wasn’t like him. “Analyze the crow metaphor. But they keep getting it wrong. They keep describing the crow as some harbinger of death, even though nothing about the passage suggests death. But they expect crows to be harbingers of death, so they can’t see that the author is trying to say something about how crows are actually very curious and social creatures! That’s what I want to write on their papers—Do you see the words on the page? Do you even know what a crow is?”
By lunch, her husband was still so angry about the crows that he had to take a break to eat lunch. Then he decided to go grade on campus because he had to finish up some committee work there. He and Mia had been tasked to pick the art for the humanities center hallway, and he needed to go look at the paintings that had been delivered.
Even though it was planned, it felt like a miracle seeing Mia in the hallway—that’s what he told Phoebe in their first conversation about the affair. He said he had been grading papers at home and feeling so depressed about everything—about his life, about their marriage, about his students and the crows—and when they were done talking about the paintings, he didn’t want to go home. He asked Mia if she wanted a drink, and Phoebe wonders if he said it the way he once said it to her—Hey, want a beer?
By then, it was whiskey, though. Her husband was off beer. He was a grown man, a professor, and drank amber liquids only while they talked about their lives—about Tom’s depression, about Phoebe’s depression, about how easy it was to become depressed by someone else’s depression. And then when the drink was over, it started to rain, which he said felt like a reason to stay put and have another, because neither of them wanted to walk across campus in the rain. And then her husband had the thought, What if I never have to go home again? It truly never occurred to him, but once it did, he couldn’t stop thinking it. He could just never go home. He could start a new life. Take the hands of the woman before him and say, “I love you.”
He said it just came out, like a sneeze he could not help. Once he said it, he understood it to be entirely true. He could see a whole future with Mia and the Waldorf Child. Mia said “I love you” back right away.
Neither of them knew it until that moment. He said that falling in love with Mia was like being a frog sitting in water that was slowly coming to a boil, and Phoebe said, “I take it that’s not the romantic metaphor you use when talking with her about it?” and he said, “I just mean it was slow, okay, so slow I didn’t realize it,” and she said, “But isn’t the frog in boiling water a myth? A frog wouldn’t jump out of boiling water, it would just die.” She was hoping he might riff on this with her, that together they would unpack the metaphor until it had no meaning.
“I love her,” he said again.
“You love that she has a baby,” Phoebe said.
“Not everything is about that, Phoebe.”
He said it wasn’t about sex, either, which he seemed to think would make her feel better but only made her feel worse. They had only slept together once before the pandemic started, and it had been a mistake. He should have waited, he knew. He should have talked to Phoebe about what he was feeling for Mia. But then it was the pandemic, and he didn’t know what to do. It was always Matt and Phoebe stuck in their home all summer, Mia and Tom in theirs. He thought he could wait until the pandemic was over, but at a certain point, lying to Phoebe made Matt feel too awful. Sneaking out to call Mia was just wrong. By the end of that summer, he knew he would have to make a decision about how he wanted to live. And so, in August, he did.
“She brought me to life again,” Matt told Phoebe. “I can’t help it. I need to see this through.”
For months after he left, it made her want to vomit thinking of another woman making her husband feel alive. Phoebe had been so jealous—but not just of Mia. Her husband felt alive again. She couldn’t even imagine it.
PHOEBE FEELS A tiny thrill as the car hugs the curve of the country. To feel alive on this beautiful road, to be at the border of sea and land. To be here, driving this beautiful car on this beautiful day.
“Lila is such a bitch,” Juice says.
Juice doesn’t say it until Phoebe starts looking for parking, as if Phoebe’s ability to ride in complete silence, her insistence on not making Juice talk, has impressed her into actual speech.
“Why do you say that?” Phoebe asks. She has long practiced this art of keeping an even tone with students, making her questions sound like statements.
“Aren’t you going to scold me for calling your best friend a bitch?” Juice asks.
“No,” Phoebe says.
Juice looks confused, as if she’s never met this kind of adult. The one who doesn’t give a shit. And this is one of the great things about not having kids, Phoebe realizes. She truly doesn’t have to give a shit. She doesn’t have to worry about Juice’s development and whether or not the phone is reprogramming her brain, even though of course it is. She is not Juice’s mother, not even a professor anymore, no longer standing in front of the classroom in a completely appropriate blouse and a skirt that shows a little knee, but of course not too much knee. She is free now in a way that people like Gary or Mia never will be. She can wear her skirt however high she wants. She can speak to Juice as if she’s just another person in the car, because that’s what she is.
“But I want to know why you would say that,” Phoebe says. “If you’re going to call someone a bitch, you should have a pretty good reason.”
“Honestly, I bet she was just born that way.”
