“Of course, Lila was horribly embarrassed by the painting,” Patricia says. “She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after I brought it to the gallery. She was hysterical, kept saying, Dad is sick and you strip naked for another man? So I said, Honey, your father loves Cubism.”
She laughs to herself.
“Of course now I know it took Henry his entire life to admit the truth about who he was, too,” Patricia says. “I hope it doesn’t take Lila that long.”
She turns to Phoebe.
“Is she horribly embarrassed of me?” Patricia asks. “What a humiliating question for a mother to ask.”
“She’s angry at you.”
Patricia nods again. “She’s been angry at me ever since Henry got sick.”
“And you’ve been angry at her.”
The comment takes Patricia by surprise, as if she hadn’t quite been able to admit this aloud yet.
“When Lila gave away the painting to Gary for free, what a slap in the face that was. Never mind that a William Withers painting goes for at least twenty thousand at auction these days. That painting was priceless to me. It wasn’t even for sale, and she knew it. She said, Yes, you kept saying it was literally priceless, so I gave it away for free.”
Patricia sighs.
“It’s not easy being angry at your own creation. It’s like being angry at yourself.”
She worries it’s her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.
“The girl spills a bottle of red wine on the brand-new couch, and we just get a new one. It is as simple as that. Everything is replaceable. The windows in the bedroom, the Barbies whose heads popped off sometimes for no reason I could understand, replaceable. Her world is a world of one million Barbies; a world of cartoons, where Daffy Duck can get baked into a cake or fall out of a tree and never bleed. Her father was the first thing she ever truly lost, and so what else does she do but try to immediately replace him with a man who works in corporeal waste management.”
She finishes off her cocktail.
“Anyway. Nothing can be done now. The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.”
“I suppose I didn’t realize that’s what it would feel like getting older,” Phoebe confesses. She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked. A concretization of your personality and all the things that made you who you were. “But it’s not, is it?”
Patricia shakes her head.
“Pamela, it is all about moving on. Saying goodbye to whoever you thought you were, whoever you thought you would be. Let me demonstrate.”
She gets up, opens the bag of clothes. Holds up her sweater to the light.
“Henry was always trying to make me a sequins gal, but now that he’s gone, I can finally admit, I am not a sequins gal. So, goodbye.”
She drops the shirt in Phoebe’s lap.
“In full disclosure, I’m not a sequins gal, either,” Phoebe says. “I mean, it was fun for a day.”
“It was fun for a life,” Patricia says. “But now I wear linen and drink in the afternoon, and so be it. Because when did afternoons get so long? I mean, Christ, let’s just get on with the evening, shall we?”
The bachelorette party begins with a “water journey” at a nearby spa.
“I just wish they wouldn’t call it a water journey,” Marla says, standing in the changing room. “Then I could actually enjoy it.”
“Shh,” Suz says, and points to a sign on the door demanding that they whisper at all times. Not just for other guests, but for themselves. This is proving to be tricky for Marla and Lila, though.
“This is sort of like the hot springs in Baden-Baden, except not,” Lila says.
“Shouldn’t we be allowed to have our phones if this is our own personal journey?” Marla asks.
Phoebe waits for Lila to respond but then remembers that Lila almost never speaks directly to Marla, just stands there and lets Marla say whatever she wants.
“You can’t heal and sext at the same time,” Phoebe says. Phoebe meant this as a joke, but Suz takes it literally.
“Marla, oh my God, you sext?” Suz asks.
“Don’t we all sext?” Nat asks.
“Do we?” Lila asks, looking off-balance in her tiny body and giant fake veil.
“Shh,” Marla says and gives Phoebe a look. But Phoebe has no time for it.
“Okay, so the woman at check-in told me we’re allowed to go in naked since this is a private event,” Phoebe whispers.
“Why would we want to be naked?” Marla asks.
“Why wouldn’t we want to be naked?” Suz whispers.
While the women debate in loud and hushed tones, Phoebe just takes off her clothes. She quotes Patricia without quoting Patricia.
“We’re too young not to be naked all of the time,” Phoebe says, and the women all disrobe, except for Marla.
