But that night, she drank the wine and added to her spreadsheet of fun and it did not feel fine. It did not feel fun, either, which was what her husband specifically asked for. “We need to have some fun,” he had said. And he was right. They were never laughing anymore. They were hardly sleeping together. It was tricky, with her body always feeling so wrong. But she wanted to do something for him. Something she had never done. Something fun.
“When you get home, I want to make you cum,” she typed out on her phone to her husband. But just looking at the word cum made her nervous. So she deleted it, wrote come instead of cum, and then turned it back to cum, because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?
WHEN MATT CAME home from drinks, he came with champagne. Very rarely did he buy champagne. When he did, he felt compelled to make a joke about it.
“I hunted and gathered us some champagne,” he said.
“Are we celebrating something?” Phoebe asked. “Or are we just drinking champagne?”
She watched him get two flutes. She waited for him to say something about her text, but he didn’t. Did she send it to the wrong person? She picked up her phone, but no, there was the text, dangling so awkwardly at the end of the thread.
“We’re celebrating,” he said. “I have news.”
They never came home from work with real news. Work was always the same. It was either good or bad or busy or just fine. The students were either lazy or enthusiastic or inspiring or depressing. They were misspelling the names of historical figures or they were drawing graduate-level comparisons between Virginia Woolf and Cubism. They were missing the midterm because their grandmother died again (so suddenly and in the night!) or they were ready to go, pens upright.
“What’s the news?” she asked.
The champagne bottle stood on the counter like a green god. She hated this bad feeling in her stomach. This assumption that her husband’s good news couldn’t possibly be hers.
“I found out that I won the Arts and Letters Scholar of the Year award,” he said. Her husband twisted off the cork, and it made a loud gunshot noise across the room.
“Oh, wow,” Phoebe said.
How did people celebrate? Phoebe remembered throwing confetti in the air on New Year’s Eve. She remembered yip-yip-yipping at the top of the canyon in Arkansas. But overall, they were pretty out of practice.
“I kind of can’t believe it,” he said.
Phoebe could believe it—she knew he’d win the award at some point. The College of Arts and Letters was one of the smallest programs at their university, and they used to joke that the award would happen to most of the professors if they stayed there long enough—though it would never happen to Phoebe, because adjuncts did not get awards. They did not get health benefits, either, even though she did the exact same job as her husband, a now tenured professor of philosophy with a health insurance plan that covered their cat’s visit to the dentist. And that was okay then, because they were married and had enough love and money between them to buy a house and do the things that people who recently bought houses do, like start a garden and renovate the kitchen with a quartzite slab and make six embryos at a lab.
But it did not feel okay when her husband won awards. It did not feel okay when they were at a faculty event, and someone suggested she apply for the new tenure-track job in English. What an opportunity, what a fortuitous time for Jack Hayes to die. But she knew they wouldn’t seriously consider her for the position. She’d only had one publication since graduation, and that was not enough. It was Matt who had to say the things Phoebe couldn’t, like, “Phoebe is still working on her book,” and then they asked what the book was about, but Phoebe found that she couldn’t describe it. She said something about the domestic spaces in Jane Eyre. Something about the walking culture of the Victorian era. About feminism? But Phoebe didn’t really know anymore. The whole thing bored her now. Every time she opened her dissertation on the computer, it felt like sitting down for coffee with an old boyfriend she couldn’t imagine ever loving again.
“Congratulations,” Phoebe said to her husband. “That’s really great.”
Phoebe smiled and kissed Matt on the cheek. Squeezed his arm like she might fuck him silly later, and maybe she would. Maybe he’d notice the text and pull her upstairs and tonight would be the night when everything changed, when she would lean over the bed as he took her from behind. Or maybe they’d do it face-forward, look into each other’s eyes, like they did when they first fell in love.
“I’ll have to give a speech at the awards dinner in February,” her husband said.
“Is a speech bad?”
If Phoebe had to give a speech in February, that would be very bad. Phoebe had started to hate standing in front of her students each day, all of them waiting in silence for her to prove herself. Because hadn’t she proved herself yesterday? And the day before? Why did she have to wake up every day just to prove herself if it didn’t seem to matter how often she proved herself? By the end of the hour, she was exhausted, and didn’t feel better until she was at home, drinking a glass of wine.
“A speech is great,” Matt said. “We need things to look forward to.”
He was right. They had nothing to look forward to, which was the entire point of planning the vacation.
“Here.” He handed her a champagne flute. It was flimsy and delicate. It made her nervous, just holding it. “I know it doesn’t really mean anything for promotion, but it’s got to help at least a little.”
Her husband’s goal used to be marrying her and starting a family. Now he was concentrating very hard on promotion.
“Of course,” she said. “Everything helps.”
“Cheers.”
She drank.
“This is good champagne,” he said.
She couldn’t help but note that in the history of her husband’s life, he had never yet purchased bad champagne.
“It is,” she said. She really loved the first sip of champagne. The first sip always brought her back to life. To the park where they made their first toast as a married couple. To the warm and snowy balconies on New Year’s Eve. But the second and third sip were always so dry, they killed her again. “It really is.”
Her husband—what a great scholar. And the students loved him. They were always gathered outside his office, eyes glowing with worship, saying, “He’s a genius, and yet not even an asshole about it.” And it was true. He knew a lot. He spoke three languages and could hold a long conversation about everything from the drinking culture of ancient Greece to the local politics of St. Louis to the problem of blood-doping in the Olympics to the species of bird at their feeder. His intelligence was one of the reasons that she fell in love with him. But it was annoying to see young women worship it, because nobody worshipped hers. People were either surprised by it or disapproving of it. Not even Bob was a fan anymore.
“You know what your problem is, Phoebe?” Bob had asked a few days prior. Bob was technically her colleague now, no longer her dissertation advisor, no longer required to worry about her publication record. Yet he did. And Phoebe understood. Phoebe was worried, too. It had been ten years since she graduated, and she was still here at the same university, walking the same academic halls, teaching as an adjunct, never having moved on like the others in her program, never able to turn her dissertation into an actual book. She didn’t know what her problem was, and she hated how eager she was for Bob to tell her: How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her? That was her problem, she knew. But Bob said, “You think too much,” and it genuinely surprised her. Wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t that the entire point of being an academic?
IT WAS NOT until later in bed when Matt saw the text.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I didn’t see this. I’m sorry.”
He apologized but didn’t reach over to touch her. She was so embarrassed by that point, she changed the subject.
“We should book the Cornwall,” Phoebe said.
“Huh?” Matt asked.
“The hotel. For spring break. The Cornwall.”
“Was that the expensive one?”
