“I want to point out that it’s only nine in the morning and you’re already talking about yourself in the third person,” Phoebe says, and Lila laughs.
“Lila is too busy today to be worried about that right now.”
But Phoebe is worried—she’s not sure she’s ready for a full day with Gary. She’s supposed to be letting go of him.
“Why doesn’t Jim take Gary?” Phoebe asks.
“Because Gary has to try on his tux and go to the barber, and I just don’t trust Jim. I feel certain that Jim would somehow send Gary back with a pink suit and a shaved head.”
Phoebe wants to say something else but isn’t sure what. Lila turns toward the door.
“You have your speech for tonight ready?” Lila asks.
“I do,” Phoebe says.
“I can’t wait.”
Lila leaves, and Phoebe looks at the speech again.
“Oh no,” she says. In the brutal light of morning, the speech is all wrong. It is way too honest. Nothing at all about Gary and Lila. Part op-ed, part long literary analysis, part sermon on the most extravagant, wasteful weddings in literature. “Every wedding, even a successful wedding, is a waste,” Phoebe wrote, followed by a series of examples from literature that prove how the modern wedding has gotten totally out of control, how she blamed Queen Victoria for most of it, because prior to her big white dress, weddings in nineteenth-century literature were small affairs that happened in a sentence: “Reader, I married him.” Then, a final and totally random concluding side point about how annoying it is when the female protagonist claims she never wants to get married, yet somehow gets to have the biggest wedding in town.
It seems I’ll just be winging it, Phoebe thinks, and feels surprised at how excited she is by the challenge. She always gave her best lectures when she didn’t plan them too much, when she was too busy to prep. If she planned too intensely, if she wrote it all beforehand, she got flustered halfway through, because they were always longer than she realized. She overdid it. She rarely trusted herself to be herself, even though the students liked it more when she looked at them, when she just stood there like a person and was honest about all the things she knew and all the things she didn’t know.
GARY WAITS OUTSIDE the lobby in his car—a nonvintage, regular Hyundai. He is already in the passenger seat. Phoebe gets in to drive.
“I hear you’re in pain,” Phoebe says.
“So much pain,” he says. “Do you want to hear all about it?”
“If it will make the pain go away, sure.”
“It will make the pain feel … useful. Give us something to talk about, you know.”
Phoebe rolls down her window. She wants to feel the ocean air.
“So, the pain,” he says.
“Is it … painful?”
“Right. That’s the word. Painful.”
They laugh. They take off. He talks about his aches and pains, and then she talks about her aches and pains, and then they talk about how much more fun it is to talk about their aches and pains than their younger selves expected it would be.
“It honestly doesn’t even feel like complaining,” Gary says. “It’s just like, valid subject material.”
“I agree,” she says. “How are we not supposed to talk about the slow decay of our bodies?”
“It’s truly the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to us,” he says. “It’s basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you’re never allowed to acknowledge that the ship is sinking.”
“And then people roll their eyes every time you mention that the ship might be sinking,” Phoebe says.
A car pulls up next to them at the light, blasting Kesha so loudly, it ends the conversation. They just sit there and wait, two faithful subjects of Kesha’s universe.
“I truly cannot believe it when people drive by with their music that loud,” Gary says after Phoebe takes a right.
“Maybe they think we like it,” Phoebe says. “Sort of like when you’re obsessed with a favorite song and you can’t imagine anyone else not wanting to hear it a thousand times. They’re probably just driving around thinking they’re doing us a service, like, Everybodyyyy likes my music!!”
She sings that last part loudly, and Gary cracks up. He rolls down his window and repeats her song. “Everybodyyyyyy likes my music!”
This is her last day with Gary. She knows this. It deeply saddens her, and yet, at the same time, she is grateful for it. Excited, even. Determined to enjoy it, to want nothing from it but the day itself.
“I aspire to be them, in some way,” Phoebe says.
“Really? I’m so embarrassed about my musical tastes, I don’t even like turning the radio on when someone is in the car.”
“What would you do if I asked you to turn on some music right now?”
“I would deflect the question and ask what you would like to listen to since you’re the driver. Dealer’s choice.”
“Oh, so you’d make your anxiety seem like some noble self-sacrifice.”
“Exactly.”
She feels playful, like everything is a grand laugh. Even their aches and pains—just a joke between them. A thing to be shared. She turns left onto Bellevue Avenue, and if Phoebe forgets he is getting married tomorrow, and that her life is over, it is a beautiful drive.
They stop at the liquor store. “This should only take a minute,” he says. “It’s preordered.”
They go inside and Gary moves to pick up the box but can’t do it with his back. “Shit.”
