But then she is startled by a knock on the door. She opens it.
“Oh,” Gary says. “You’re not Lila.”
Phoebe tightens the belt of her robe.
“Lila fell asleep in my bed,” Phoebe says. “Don’t ask. We had a long night.”
“We had a long night, too.”
Gary sits down on the floral love seat. Phoebe gets this terrible feeling, the same feeling she got when she looked at her cat in those final weeks before he died. How horrible, Phoebe thinks, to not know the truth about your own life.
“Was it a good one at least?” Phoebe asks.
“A weird one,” Gary says. “Let’s just say that I’m not the twenty-eight-year-old groom Jim remembers me to be. And now I’m just … drunk.”
Phoebe will not tell Gary what Lila confessed, of course. She would never. But not telling him makes her nervous. She doesn’t like this feeling of being dishonest with Gary.
“Why was it so weird?” Phoebe asks.
“He threw me the same exact bachelor party,” Gary says. “Brought us to the same exact cigar lounge. The same golf course. Bought me the same bottle of whiskey. I honestly don’t know if it’s because he was so drunk at the last one he didn’t remember what we did. Or if he is just … trying to upset me.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Gary says. “I can’t shake this feeling that he’s mad at me.”
“For what?”
“Moving on. Forgetting his sister.”
“But you haven’t forgotten his sister.”
“But I think it’s what Jim thinks.”
Ever since Wendy’s diagnosis, Jim was the best friend he had. He was truly there for all of them after. He did everything. He cooked, he cleaned. Cried with Gary at Wendy’s grave, and they were brothers in that way. After, they went to Wyoming and shat side by side in the woods, then laughed hysterically with Juice into the night. But ever since he got engaged to Lila, it’s been different.
“I can get married again,” Gary says. “But he doesn’t get a new sister. Nobody can ever make that better. And I can’t explain it other than to say that sometimes, I feel like I’m betraying him.”
“I doubt he thinks of it that way,” Phoebe says.
“I promised to take care of his sister for the rest of her life.”
“And … you did.”
“But her life was supposed to be longer,” he says. “I’m a fucking doctor.”
“But wasn’t it lung cancer? That’s not even your specialization. Field? How do medical doctors say it?”
“Field,” he says.
But he’s too caught up in the emotion to joke.
“She complained about this cough, you know. And I kept telling her to go to the doctor, to be better when she cleaned her paints. I had known since art school that she needed to be more careful with that stuff. But I didn’t want to nag. She hated when people told her what to do, especially me.”
“That’s not why she got cancer,” Phoebe says. Maybe it’s the fatigue, or maybe this kind of thinking is just too close to her own, but she gets irritated. “If that was true, then every painter would be dead at thirty-five. It’s actually ridiculous to think any of this is your fault.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” he says. “I advise people medically all the time.”
“God, we’re all so ridiculous! Why do we all think everything is our fault all the time?”
“Must be some evolutionary thing.”
“Helps us survive somehow,” Phoebe says. “Even as it destroys us.”
“Yeah.”
Phoebe aches for him. Gary is lost. Stuck somewhere between his first marriage and his second marriage.
“What was she like?” Phoebe asks. “Wendy.”
“She was just this whirlwind of a person,” he says. “We met in college. She was an art student, and I was premed. I used to walk by the open studios on my way back from the hospital. That’s the first time I saw her, standing in front of this painting that was entirely red, and it was like she knew I didn’t get it. ‘It’s thirty shades of red,’ she said, and still I couldn’t see it. Not until she started pointing them out to me. And I fucking loved this about her. She could always see things I couldn’t. Seriously, all I could see was one giant blob of red. But then, a few days later, I saw all these different colors. And it was amazing.”
“I think that might be the best description of falling in love that I’ve ever heard,” Phoebe says.
They lived in Tiverton, in a beautiful old farmhouse that was featured in a small magazine about Tiverton. They had good friends, poets, writers, artists, actors, farmers who came over to drink beers in their backyard. Juice went to some private school in town where she bonded with other kids who thought it was fun to watch caterpillars build cocoons.
“We used to be fun. Once we stayed up and watched all three Godfather movies in one night. We used to create themed drinks for, like, Presidents’ Day. And it was perfect. It really was. But life is strange, always thinking this one thing is going to make you happy, because then you get it, and then maybe you’re not as happy as you imagined you would be, because every day is still just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big, you have no choice but to live inside of it, until you can no longer see it or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else—you want a child, and then the child is here, and that happiness is so big, it begins to feel like nothing. Like just the air around you.”
Until it is gone, of course. Until you bury your wife or divorce your husband and then what? What do you do? Do you start all over again? Do you fixate on the new thing that you are sure is going to make you happy? How many times does a person do this over a lifetime? Is that just what life is?
