It is over, and they walk out, one by one, each woman pairing up with a groomsman. Phoebe links arms with Jim. His arm feels good in hers. It is solid, the arm of a man who probably balances well on a ridgeline.
Maybe tonight I’ll sleep with Jim, Phoebe thinks.
She’s surprised by the thought. Jim feels more like a brother to her. But maybe they both need to redirect their desire. Have a night with each other. She’s never had sex with a younger man before. Something about spending too much time around students. Their youth was appalling to her. How much they didn’t know. How little they thought about the Battle of the Bulge.
But Jim is a good man. An engineer. He is building a seaplane.
“You ever finish that speech?” Phoebe asks him as they turn the corner back into the Great Hall where they started.
“I did, actually,” Jim says, and he sounds proud.
BACK AT THE hotel, the patio has been transformed into a magical fairy-tale forest for the rehearsal dinner. Oak farmhouse tables, set up in rows, torches lining the border of the stone floor. White roses hanging from the balconies above. And right in the middle of it all stand Lila and Gary, staring at the giant painting of Patricia naked.
“Who brought this painting here?” Lila asks when Phoebe and Jim join them. “I did not ask for this to be brought here.”
“It was your mother’s idea,” Gary says. “She wanted to surprise you. She knows how much it means to us.”
“Right,” Lila says, and nods slowly. “But there are children here.”
“Technically only two,” Jim says.
“Juice has seen this painting a million times,” Gary says, confused.
“And Oliver seems … advanced,” Phoebe says.
Phoebe looks at the painting of Patricia for the first time. There stands the cubist abstraction of a naked mother in the bright sun of a hyperrealistic garden. If the mother didn’t look so fragmented, or if the garden didn’t look so dead, it wouldn’t work. But it does. It’s beautiful. And sad. Beautiful because it’s sad or sad because it’s beautiful.
“I’ll grab us a drink,” Gary says to Lila.
When he walks away, Lila says, “I just don’t understand why my mother must make even my wedding about her naked body.”
Jim walks closer to the painting as if he might figure it out.
“Please do not get so close to my mother, Jim,” Lila says.
He points to the book that Withers painted in Patricia’s hand.
“Is the title of this book really No One Gardens Alone?” he asks.
“Wait, seriously?” Lila asks. She bursts out laughing. She looks closer at the painting. “I bought my mother that book for her birthday. I thought she might like, need a hobby or something.”
Jim looks at her. “See? In that way, this painting actually is all about you.”
“From one bullshitter to the next, that is some serious bullshit,” Lila says.
He laughs.
“But thanks for trying,” Lila says.
She stares at Jim tenderly, and Phoebe looks away as if she is witnessing a private moment she shouldn’t. Something about the exchange, the meeting of their eyes. An uncanny moment when the universe is presenting the right order of things, or at least another possible order of things. If Lila’s father had chosen a different doctor. If Jim hadn’t brought Gary to the gallery that day.
But in this universe, she watches the two of them walk away from each other. Lila headed for her drink at the bar, Jim looping arms with Gary’s mother. She wonders what will become of Jim, and worries that losing Lila might set him back another decade. Imagines he might become a man who finds it easier to build a seaplane before he builds a family. The kind of man who lives alone for so long, he ends up treating his own house like a country, carrying everything he needs as he walks the perimeter, his loud laugh the anthem the neighbors hear from afar. But maybe one day, he’ll finally scrub the oil off his hands for the last time and think, Where did everybody go?
And Lila—where will she be by then? Ten years into marriage with Gary. Perhaps with two children. Already on her second sleeping pill in the upstairs bedroom. Starting to understand why her mother day drinks.
“SO, WHAT DID it actually feel like to be a sniper?” Phoebe asks Roy by the appetizer table. Maybe she’ll go for Roy instead, she thinks. Roy is the only man here seemingly not in love with someone else. And he is big, tall, like some action hero who is too large for every suit in the known world.
“It was phenomenal,” Roy says.
“Phenomenal?” Phoebe says. “You mean in the traditional sense of the word?”
“What do you mean, in the traditional sense of the word?”
“Like when people back in the day used to say phenomenal to describe something celestial made visible.”
“Huh?”
“Like a shooting star was phenomenal, because they believed it to be a sign from God.”
Roy gives her a long look like maybe he understands what she’s trying to say. But then he leans in and whispers, “Want to fuck?”
Perhaps it is not so strange of a request, two people at a wedding not their own. It happens in movies all the time. It probably happens to Roy all the time.
“Do people fuck you just because you ask?” Phoebe asks, genuinely curious.
“The ones who look me in the eye,” he says. “In Iraq, the only women who look men directly in the eyes are prostitutes.”
“That can’t be true,” Phoebe says.
