“Well, I’m confused.”
“What are you confused about?”
“Whether or not you are pretending to be something right now.”
He pauses. “I’m pretending I don’t want to say something to you right now. I’m pretending that it does not make me very nervous.”
“Can I ask what’s so scary about it?”
“I don’t know how to phrase it. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know what happens after I say it.”
She gets the feeling that if this conversation continues, something irrevocable will happen.
“But unfortunately there’s no one else I can tell,” he says. “No one to talk to about it with … except you.”
“Then talk to me about it.”
“It’s so easy with you,” he says. “I don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“I felt it when we talked that first night. I honestly cannot stop thinking about that first night in the tub. And trust me, I’ve tried. I have been trying to figure out why I can’t stop thinking about you, because I am getting married tomorrow.”
“Yes,” she says. “You are getting married tomorrow.”
“But I feel so drawn to you,” he says. “I just want to be around you, Phoebe. Because when I’m around you, I feel good. I feel honest. I feel like myself. Like maybe I understand what life is again. I know what to say, finally, after years of never knowing what the hell to do or say. Do you know what I mean?”
Phoebe knows. She feels this way, too. Exactly. And she wants to tell him. It would feel so good to tell him.
“Is that crazy?” Gary asks. “You’re looking at me like that’s crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s crazy. I think it’s scary.”
“It’s scary,” he says.
“It’s very scary that you’re saying this all to me the night before your wedding,” she says. “I don’t think you should be doing that.”
“When else am I supposed to be doing it?” Gary asks. “If I don’t do it now, when do I do it?”
The door dings. Nick is back.
“You got to use a fucking credit card now,” Nick says. “So, the usual?”
“The usual,” Gary says.
Gary gets up, slowly. Phoebe watches as Nick takes the clippers to the thick mass of Gary’s beard. Phoebe watches Nick work, like a sculptor, who is trimming off layers of Gary, until he arrives at “the usual.” It makes Phoebe nervous, seeing pieces of Gary fall off in giant clumps to the floor. After, Nick puts a towel over Gary’s face and, for some reason, when he starts to shave him, Phoebe can’t watch. Looks down at her magazine. She has always liked the sound of the razor against a man’s stubble. Like the sound of a mason spreading mortar on a brick.
When he’s nearly done, Phoebe looks up, and they lock eyes in the mirror. They stay like that for a moment, just looking at each other. Nick nicks him on the back of the neck. Phoebe instinctively leans forward as if to help with the blood. But Nick’s got it.
“Happens all the time,” Nick says, and puts a towel to his skin.
“I’m not sure I’d go around telling your clients that,” Gary says, and the two men laugh.
“So you’re still a wise ass,” Nick says.
THE WHOLE WAY home, it’s like driving with a different Gary.
“Is it weird?” Gary asks. “Do I have beard face?”
“What’s beard face?”
“It’s like glasses face. When you’ve only seen someone with glasses and they take them off, and all of a sudden, they’re a different person.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I think it’s more like when someone brings a dog to the groomer and the dog comes out looking like it’s been robbed.”
“Oh, gee, thanks. A dog that’s been robbed. Totally the look I was going for.”
They laugh. He looks at himself in the mirror, rubs his chin, like he can’t get used to it.
“I do feel a little like I’ve been robbed,” he says.
Maybe this is when one of them would have started up their conversation from Nick’s again, but Gary says, “Shit, I forgot about cash for the vendors. I’m sorry. One more thing.”
“No problem,” Phoebe says.
THEY CAN’T TAKE out enough cash at the first bank, so they drive to another bank, and at the second bank, Phoebe just waits in the car. She watches him disappear into the building, and then studies the strangers on the road. She sees families on vacation. Non-wedding people eating ice cream. Collagen shot lattes. People just shopping, carrying on. People who have no idea that Lila and Gary exist.
Amazing to think that just last week, Phoebe was one of those people, too. She had been so bold then, doing exactly what she wanted for maybe the first time in her life. She wants to feel that feeling again, the one she felt in the elevator, the one she felt in the tub, the feeling of standing up proudly in her lingerie, of owing Lila absolutely nothing, being loyal to nobody but herself. Because Phoebe knows what Lila cannot know yet: There is no reason to make decisions you don’t want to make at twenty-eight. No reason to marry a man with gray sideburns if you hate the look of them. They are only going to get grayer.
