She can’t destroy a wedding. This wedding is too big to fail. This wedding is like the revolution of the earth. It’s going to happen whether Phoebe says anything or not. Whether anybody is in love or not. What right does she have to say anything?
“Where to?” she asks.
She needs to go back, needs to get out of this car before she says anything.
“To the barber,” Gary says.
THEY GO TO this guy Nick that he used to see when he was a boy. It’s out of the way but worth it, he says on the drive. Nick used to carve lightning bolts in the side of his head. Nick gave him his first buzz cut. Then a shave for his first wedding. But it’s been years—Gary invested in self–hair cutting tools during Covid and never looked back. Yet here they are, pulling onto a side street, and Gary sounds excited, like they’re traveling back in time.
“You got an appointment?” Nick says as soon as they walk in, but he doesn’t turn his head from the man’s hair he is clipping.
“You don’t do appointments,” Gary says.
“I do appointments now,” Nick says. “Since Covid.”
Gary looks at the line of men waiting on chairs and says he would have made one had he known.
“I’ve got some room on Monday,” Nick says.
“Monday is too late. But thanks anyway, Nick.”
“Too late? You off to fight the British or something?”
“Getting married,” Gary says.
“Are you the lucky bride?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “I’m just a friend.”
Nick looks at the two of them like he doesn’t quite believe it. Why else would she be here, watching him get a shave?
“For you, the groom, I’ll make time,” Nick says. “You’ll just have to wait.”
While they wait, they don’t talk. They listen to the men on TV talk about the Celtics. Then the wind turbines going up on the coast. Then the hotly debated bike lanes in Providence. There is something routine about the silence, like sitting in a church pew where everybody knows not to talk, even the small boy who just kicks his legs. It’s not until the last man is called to Nick’s chair when Gary speaks.
“So you really won’t miss teaching?” Gary asks, as if they had been in some long conversation about it.
“I’ll miss some things about teaching,” Phoebe says.
“Which things?”
“The moments of connecting with students,” she says. “The moments when they really do learn something. The back-and-forth. The way it feels to have a really good class. I did love it when I first started.”
“What won’t you miss?”
“The pretending,” she says. “I never realized how much pretending was involved.”
“Pretending to be what?”
“Pretending to be excited. Pretending you haven’t said the same exact joke over and over again. Pretending knowledge is some beautiful, fortuitous interweaving quilt of facts. Pretending that everything that happens can be strung along a satisfying, linear narrative.”
“Is that what you said during your job interview?”
“I said something worse. I invoked Marx.”
“Solid move. Everybody wants to hire a Marxist.”
“I was pretty committed to pretending I was a Marxist then. I went on and on about how difficult it is to measure student progress, how there’s no guarantee that they’ve learned anything, and how teachers, too, are alienated from their labor. We so rarely get to understand our effect on the students, yet we work anyway.”
This is why she always needed research and writing.
“It was nice to create something,” she says. She loved the thrill of discovery, of being able to look at the document at the end of the day and say, I did that. Like being a barber, she imagines. Getting to see the final creation. Trimming a man’s hair just over the ears, then dusting him off. And when she stopped wanting to write, it was an actual loss. She can see this now, how she has been grieving that, too. The loss of her creativity.
“Bastards put in meters while we were all asleep during Covid,” Nick says. He picks up change out of an old ash tray. “Got to feed this thing four times a day. When I’m back, you’re up.”
Then they’re alone in the shop. They don’t speak. It is only the sound of the TV that threatens to dull the moment, turn it into nothing.
“Are you pretending to be something right now?” Gary asks.
“Excuse me?”
She grows hot. She is pretending, yes. She is pretending to talk about pretending to be a Marxist when really she just wants to tell him that she thinks she might be in love with him, that she hasn’t felt this connected to anybody ever, not even her husband, because she has never looked her husband in the eye and admitted she wanted to die, never actually showed her husband her full self. This whole week has bonded her to him and running errands with him does not help. Something about watching him sign papers at the office, watching him wait at the barber, watching him just be ordinary Gary.
But she had love once, great love, and that didn’t end up mattering.
“I’m pretending not to be confused,” Phoebe says. “How am I doing?”
“Excellent performance,” he says. “You never seem confused.”
