There is no escaping for either of them. The bride flattens out her dress, prepares herself to be the bride again, but then spots a red dot on her hem.
“Is that blood?” she asks Phoebe.
The dress is ruined. They both know it. They are two women who have bled on their underwear for the majority of their lives, and they know there is no unruining it. But the bride takes a deep breath as High Bun and Neck Pillow approach, holds out her arms wide to greet them all over again. Phoebe wonders how many times tonight the bride will have to do this.
“We’re on the same floor!” High Bun says, while Neck Pillow eyes the gash on Lila’s hand but says nothing. They are good bridesmaids, refusing to point out the things that make the bride ugly.
“What room are you in?” Lila asks.
“The Gloucester,” High Bun says. “Is that how you pronounce it?”
“I think you’re supposed to say Gloster,” Neck Pillow says.
Phoebe begins walking down the hall, leaving the bride fully caught in the web of her wedding, the one she spun for herself as a small girl, dreaming of this moment.
And will High Bun and Neck Pillow remember her tomorrow morning after her body is removed? Will they think, Is the dead woman that one we saw you with in the elevator? Or will they only remember seeing the bride?
The hall gets darker as she goes, lit up by only one perfectly placed copper sconce. Phoebe walks by an alcove with an ice machine that reminds her of other hotels, lesser hotels, the kind she would stay at in her old life when she used to go to conferences and give talks on the marriage plots of the nineteenth century. There is a vending machine, too, but it’s hidden behind a tall gold-leaf wall, like some kind of agreement among rich people. This is a nice hotel. If you want to do something you shouldn’t, please do it in private.
Inside the room, Phoebe locks the door. She is satisfied by the sharp, metallic sound. She is alone again. She leans her back against the door, and before she admires the ocean view or the golden tassels on the lamps, she looks down to realize she is still holding the gift bag. She takes out the German chocolate wine. A small bottle of something called Everybody Water. A candle hand-poured by the maid of honor, whoever she is. A pack of cookies that look as much like Oreos as they legally can. I will never have another Oreo, Phoebe thinks. And it’s these small things she can’t accept. The never drinking wine again. The never again feeling her husband’s finger down her spine. The body always wanting to be a body.
She opens the German chocolate wine and takes a sip. The bride is right. It’s better than you’d think.
“At the Cornwall, we can go sailing on an America’s Cup winner,” Phoebe said to her husband, Matt.
“We can rent a vintage car and drive it around like dumb bastards,” Matt said.
This was January two years ago. They were in bed, searching the internet, trying to plan their most indulgent vacation ever—a thing Phoebe and Matt decided they needed after their final visit to the fertility clinic. The embryos had been bad, it had all been a waste, and Phoebe had miscarried—though the doctor would never say it like that. He said, “It was a nonviable pregnancy,” and “I’d suggest not doing a sixth cycle at this point,” and the whole drive home, Phoebe couldn’t stop feeling like her body had nothing to do with her. Her body was just some piece of land, like the overharvested soybean fields along the highway. Phoebe drank whiskey for the first time in months, and Matt stared at the moon through the window until he said, “Let’s go somewhere fun for spring break.”
That’s when Phoebe remembered the Victorian hotel from the magazine. She found the Cornwall Inn online.
“Look, we can sit in the hot tub while staring at the ocean,” Phoebe said.
“We can slurp oysters and somehow laugh at the same exact time,” he added, and it felt good to make this list of new things they suddenly wanted together.
Eventually, Matt fell asleep, but Phoebe’s body was still too uncomfortable to sleep. She was still bleeding. She stayed up looking at the hotel, analyzing the rooms and the excursions—there were so many possible excursions. They could paddleboard with seals. Go on a “water journey” at a nearby spa. Visit Edith Wharton’s house on the Cliff Walk. Do yoga by the ocean, not that she had ever done yoga. But she liked the thought of becoming a woman who casually did yoga by the sea.
She made a detailed spreadsheet of excursions, because she was a researcher by profession. Kept a long list of every book she ever read and her favorite lines from them. Wrote a dissertation tracking each time Jane Eyre went on a walk in Brontë’s novel. Became proficient in German one year, then Middle English the next. And after sex with her husband, she always wanted to think more deeply about it, like: What was the first use of the word cunt in the English language? And Matt would laugh and say, “Shakespeare, probably?” and Phoebe would continue: “I bet it was Chaucer.” And then they both looked it up to learn that two hundred years before Chaucer, there was a street in Oxfordshire called Gropecunt Lane.
She loved the way Matt indulged her. They were very similar—he was a researcher, too, though he would never call himself that. He was a philosopher. He read books on Friday nights and overanalyzed commercials with her, and engaged her in long debates about what they should call their private parts during sex, even if all they could agree on was that they would never call them private parts.
But when Phoebe showed him the spreadsheet the next morning, Matt said, “You made a spreadsheet of fun?” the same way he once said, “You made a spreadsheet of sex?” And yes. Phoebe was thirty-eight. They couldn’t afford to be casual anymore about trying to have a baby. But when the time came for sex, he looked at her across the bed like, Okay, are we on schedule? and she looked at him like he was nothing at all, just the vase on the end table.
“You honestly expect me to believe that people go on vacations without making a spreadsheet of fun first?” Phoebe asked.
It was a joke, but he didn’t take it as one, so it didn’t feel like one. He just looked at her like he was deciding something about her. A short glance, but her husband did not need much to come to a conclusion. Her husband was a careful and astute reader of text. He once wrote a thirty-four-page article about a single word in Plato.
“I’m sure it’s great,” he said, and then kissed her goodbye.
Matt was not the most handsome man in the world, but he had been to her. And he seemed to get better-looking with age. The light gray taking over his brown hair, the smile that devastated her every time. Her husband could still go out into the world and have children without her—it was a thought she had every time he left the house for work. She wondered if he thought it, too.
“See you at dinner,” she said, and they went to teach at the same university in separate cars. She taught literature, while he taught philosophy. She ate a CLIF bar at her desk. She left for a meeting and passed Bob’s giant office, the consolation prize for having to be department chair. He was listening to a string quartet loud enough for her to hear. “’Ello,” he said, even though he was not British. She went upstairs, walked by her husband’s door, which was open, but not really, because he was with a student. A brunette. A girl. He always kept the door open if a girl was in his office, even when all he was doing was listening to her describe her relationship to the Bible.
“I never realized you could read it like it was just a book,” the girl said. “I never understood that actual human beings wrote the Bible. I thought God wrote it. Is that stupid?”
“That is not stupid,” Phoebe’s husband assured her.
Then Phoebe went to the Adjunct Lounge Committee meeting, made up entirely of men with monosyllabic nicknames that somehow passed as professional names. Jack. Jeff. Stan. Russ. Vince. Mike. Phoebe was the only woman and the only adjunct, brought in to answer questions about what a woman and an adjunct might want from this future office space.
“Phoebe?” Mike asked. “What do you think?”
It was a nonviable pregnancy.
“Do you think the chairs should have tablets or no tablets? Russ thinks the tablets look too industrial,” he said. “We want you to feel at home. But the tablets do eliminate the need for coffee tables.”
Successful men all over the world are always celebrated for their ability to eliminate something so they can make more room for something else. Like the three polyps Dr. Barr removed from her uterus to make room for her future children.
“I think the real coffee tables would be nice,” Phoebe said. And then they all went home—the men to their wives and Phoebe to her husband. But he was not there yet.
Getting a drink with some work people, he texted.
She poured herself some leftover wine and wondered who the work people were. She couldn’t ask, because she knew that would get classified as overbearing, and she tried so hard never to be overbearing, especially at this delicate stage of their marriage. She tried so hard not to give a shit about the ways she was losing her husband, but why? Of course, she gave a shit. He was her husband.
Was he drinking with Bob? Bob kept a bottle of something in his desk the way professors do in movies about professors. But she knew that her husband didn’t really like drinking with Bob. “The man drinks to annihilate himself,” he said one night, coming home from a faculty party that went on for too long, mostly because of Bob.
It’s possible that he drinks with Rick or Adam or Paula from his department. Maybe Mia? Though ever since Mia and Tom had a baby nine months ago, Mia hadn’t really reentered the world yet. And Matt would have invited her if he went with Mia, because Mia was Phoebe’s best friend at work, if people at work were allowed to have best friends. Phoebe was never sure. But they had grown close in their adjacent offices, and even closer after Mia’s husband attempted suicide two years ago. Phoebe had made it a point to invite Mia and Tom over for dinner nearly every weekend, because Mia made it a point to talk to Phoebe when many of the other tenured professors did not. At these dinners, Tom would talk about all the things he was doing to feel better—meditating three times a day, subscribing to hiking magazines, and quitting refined sugar because that was his trigger, something he explained to them one night when they offered him cake. Tom needed to be honest and open about his depression now, because being ashamed of his depression only made him more depressed. They all nodded in agreement, they totally got it, and yet Phoebe and Matt couldn’t help but exchange glances after Mia and Tom left the house.
“I don’t know what Tom could be so depressed about. Aren’t they trying to have a baby? And Mia is beautiful,” Phoebe had said to Matt, because that’s how confident she was in her husband’s love for her. She could admit when other women were more beautiful, had learned at a young age that she was not the most attractive woman in the room. It had been fine then.
