The wedding people, p.26
The Wedding People, page 26
But Phoebe is not tired of Lila. Phoebe is not tired of anybody. Phoebe feels like she has just returned from somewhere very far away. Phoebe is here.
“Ugh. My key is not working,” Lila says. “It must be your key.”
“Is your key not in your purse?” Phoebe asks.
“I don’t know. I’m too drunk to find it. I’ll just call Gary. I gave him an extra key.”
Lila leaves a message on his phone asking for help. When she hangs up, Phoebe is about to suggest that she search through Lila’s bag or go downstairs to get another key, but Lila slides the key into Phoebe’s lock.
“Ugh. I can’t get over this view,” Lila says, opening the door.
“It’s pitch-black.”
Lila gets on Phoebe’s bed. She leans back on a pillow like she is going to go right to sleep, so Phoebe takes off her shoes. There is blood on the back of Lila’s heel.
“Ugh. I’m bleeding again,” Lila says.
The blood darkens her mood.
“Nat is right,” Lila says. “I never think about what I might actually like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I just worry,” Lila says. “I don’t think about what I want, I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening. And when I think I know what I want, I don’t even really know, because what I want is too … weird.”
“I thought you said you didn’t like anything weird.”
“It’s not like that kind of weird,” she says. “It’s awful weird.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Just say it.”
“It’s too scary.”
“I told you I wanted to die. What could be scarier than that?”
Lila nods. “Okay. Fine. The last time I got really turned on, it was by Jim. Isn’t that awful?”
“Not necessarily,” Phoebe says. She takes off Lila’s earrings. Her sash. Lila holds her hands up like a child.
“We had a bonfire at the beach last night after the reception,” Lila says. “And Jim looked so good all night, oh my God, Phoebe. He sat next to me by the fire and he cracked a beer, and I was just looking at him, transfixed, and he like, caught me staring at him. He was like, What? And I don’t know why, but we just laughed. We laughed so hard, Phoebe, I can’t even explain it.
“And then I went to bed and I had this dream. I was in this big beach house. And Jim was there. But it’s not really Jim. And I am leaving the kitchen to go meet my guidance counselor, weirdly, but Jim won’t let me out of the house. Jim just stands there, blocking my way. He’s like, No. You can’t go meet your guidance counselor. And then he puts me up against the kitchen island and flips up my skirt and he says the dirtiest things to me … but it’s like Jim’s disgustingness is what turns me on. Isn’t that awful?”
“No,” Phoebe says.
“It’s awful.”
Phoebe tells her about her own fantasies, the ones of her ex-husband being awful to her.
“But you were thinking of your husband,” she says. “I like, never think about having sex with Gary. Not even when I’m having sex with Gary. I think about Jim.”
“Well, thinking of Jim doesn’t have to mean anything,” Phoebe says.
“It feels like it means something.”
“It could mean that you want his approval. Maybe it’s symbolic. Like, you want him to stand aside, give you permission, because of Wendy?”
“Oh my God, you sound like my mother now.”
“It would make sense.”
“What if I just … want to fuck him?” Lila asks. “Sometimes I want him so much I can’t stand it.”
“Then you want him.”
“But I can’t want him!” Lila says. “I’m Gary’s Vermeer painting. And Gary is so wonderful. I know he is. He treats me so well. He’s so smart. He’s such a good dad. But sometimes I just hate him.”
“You hate him?” Phoebe asks. “Why?”
“Because that day in his office, he put his hand on my shoulder, and he was like, This will all be okay. This new treatment can work. And the way he said it made me believe him. I really believed him. I loved him for it. I really did. But then my dad died. And it wasn’t okay. It’s still not okay. I mean, how could Gary just let my father die?”
The thought of her father makes her sob, and Phoebe holds her. Her body is frail, skinnier than it seems.
“And we never talked about it. We never talk about anything. We always just pretend like everything is fine,” she says. “Like it was in the beginning. But it’s not. Because sometimes, I just can’t stand it when he touches me.”
Lila explains that this is why she’s always making sure they are busy doing amazing things.
“But then we’re at the Louvre, and I was bored. I was bored in Spain. Bored in Florence. I just kept thinking, Wow, Lila, you’re in Italy with your fiancé. Look at all those buildings. Look at those paintings. This old church. The cobblestones! And Gary was so fascinated, kept being like, Imagine the builders putting each one of these stones here by hand. But the whole time, I was honestly just like, I don’t care. I mean, how does anyone really care about stones?”
She wipes her nose.
“Anyway. That’s what being with Gary sometimes feels like.”
“It’s like trying to care about stones?”
“It’s like having nothing to talk about anymore so you talk about stones,” she says. “And I’ve never been good at caring about those things. My mother is right. I’ve never had any imagination. I’m practically dead inside. Sometimes, I feel like I have nothing real to say ever.”
Phoebe shakes her head.
“No,” Phoebe says. “That’s not true. That’s not even what your mother really thinks.”
“No?”
“No,” Phoebe says. “And I don’t believe it, either.”
Phoebe has sat with so many students who confessed similar things. Students who did not describe themselves as “readers,” students who shrugged and were like, “Sorry, stories about women just aren’t my thing,” but then one day, something would click. One day, they were sitting down with her talking about how Rochester was such an asshole.
“It takes time,” Phoebe says. “Gary is twelve years older than you. He’s had a lot more time to … cultivate an interest in stones.”
“But you care about stones.”
“I’m twelve years older than you, too.”
“Then maybe you should be with Gary.”
“Why would you say that?” Phoebe asks, but Lila doesn’t answer. So Phoebe looks at her. Like a soldier, Phoebe remembers her first responsibility to the bride. To always be honest. To say what nobody else at this wedding will say.
“Do you want to marry Gary?” Phoebe asks.
“I don’t want to not marry Gary,” Lila says. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“You can be married and be very alone,” Phoebe says. “More alone than you are when you’re, well, alone. Trust me.”
Lila doesn’t say anything but looks at Phoebe, waiting for her to go on.
“Your husband is not going to take care of you the way you think,” Phoebe says. “Nobody can take care of you the way you need to take care of yourself. It’s your job to take care of yourself like that.”
“Did you read that on a pillow or something?” Lila asks, then grabs a pillow and puts it over her face, like she knows she’s admitted too much, even to Phoebe. Because saying things out loud is the first step to them becoming real.
“It’s a little long for a pillow,” Phoebe says.
“This pillow is so coconutty,” Lila says. “Ugh. I don’t know what I’m even saying. I just don’t know why it’s so hard to be a person sometimes. It shouldn’t be this hard. It makes no sense.”
They wait in silence for a moment. And then, from underneath the pillow, a voice: “What if I don’t want to marry Gary?”
Phoebe is careful to say nothing, because Phoebe is confused. On the eve of her own wedding night, Phoebe had no doubts. She wanted to marry Matt, wholly and purely. This is why it confuses her. She doesn’t know what you’re supposed to feel like. She doesn’t know what ensures a happy marriage. She doesn’t know if Lila’s ambivalence toward Gary means that they are doomed or if ambivalence means there is room to grow, room to become sure over the years.
But this is clear: “I don’t want to marry Gary,” Lila says again.
Phoebe takes the pillow off her face, and this strikes Lila as so suddenly funny, she starts hysterically laughing. When she laughs, Phoebe can see what Lila must have been like as a little girl, when she was still called Delilah, sleeping in her mother’s bed.
“Oh my God,” Lila says. She stands up on the bed. She shouts it. “Phoebe! I don’t want to marry Gary!”
“Okay,” Phoebe says, and pulls her back down. “Just maybe don’t shout it.”
“But I need to tell him. I need everyone to know.”
“In the morning.”
Maybe it’s the thought of morning or catching sight of her veil in the mirror, but she stops smiling.
“Ugh. This is not okay,” Lila says. “He’s going to be so upset. Everyone is. What am I going to do?”
“Nothing now. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up and we’ll tell everyone together.”
“You’ll be with me?”
“Of course,” she says. “But for now just get some sleep.”
“I am really glad you’re here.”
“Me too.”
“And don’t worry,” Lila says. “I don’t snore.”
* * *
LILA DOES SNORE.
She snores so loudly, Phoebe can’t sleep in the room. It reminds her too much of sleeping next to her husband, his loud vibrations taking over everything. Phoebe undresses in the dark corner, then wraps herself up in the fluffy robe.
She digs through Lila’s purse until she finds the other room key, lets herself in to the bridal suite, which is not very bridal. It’s called the Colonel. There are bright red floral curtains and red floral prints everywhere. A stuffy white carpet. A shoreline view that is somewhat ruined by a giant flagpole that cuts it in half. And a picture of a dead man on the wall who she assumes is the colonel.
She is surprised by how messy Lila is. She would have thought Lila to be aggressively organized. But her underwear is everywhere. Her life, spread out all over the room.
Phoebe starts to pick up some of Lila’s dresses, so that the morning won’t seem so overwhelming. It will be overwhelming enough, having to cancel this giant wedding. Having to tell everyone the truth. At least she can wake up to a clean floor.
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?
“We had a whole life,” he says. “And that whole life … is gone. It seems absurd that I’m supposed to just get over that.”
“I don’t know if you are,” she says.
“But I have to,” he says. “I can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?”
“There was this quiet that came after my wife died,” he says. “This normal routine that developed that wasn’t really life but was very much like life. I could get through the day if I just concentrated on these very menial tasks. I used to love nothing more than like, just peeling potatoes for dinner. I swear I could feel okay as long as I was just peeling those potatoes. But then you asked me in the hot tub when I started to feel better, and it’s a hard thing to answer, because I’m actually not sure I’m better. I think I’ve just been stuck in that neutral place ever since. Where everything is … fine.”
He says being here is weirder than he expected.
“Everyone keeps looking at me and saying, Congratulations, you must be so happy,” he says.
“Why is that weird?”
“I’m not sure happy is a feeling for me anymore,” he says. “Ever since Wendy died, I don’t really think about what will make me happy. It’s like I decided at some point that I can’t ever be happy again, so I should just think about what will make other people happy.”
She nods. She looks out at the fireworks.
“That’s really why I went to Lila’s art gallery that day,” Gary says. “Because Jim really wanted to go. I said no, I was too bummed out. It was my wedding anniversary. But Jim kept pushing for it, and I wanted to make Jim happy. After all he did for us. I didn’t get why Jim of all people wanted to go to an art gallery. I think he thought he was making me happy, giving me something to do on a sad day. But whatever. We went.”
