"At the Cornwall, we can go sailing on an America's Cup winner," Phoebe said to her husband, Matt.
"We can rent a vintage car and drive it around like dumb bastards," Matt said.
This was January, two years ago. They were in bed, scrolling through the internet, trying to plan the most indulgent vacation they had ever taken—a thing Phoebe and Matt decided they needed after their final visit to the fertility clinic. The embryos had been bad; it had all been a waste. Phoebe had miscarried, though the doctor would never say it like that. He said, "It was a nonviable pregnancy," and, "I'd suggest not doing a sixth cycle at this point." The whole drive home, Phoebe couldn't stop feeling like her body had nothing to do with her. Her body was just some piece of land, like the overharvested soybean fields along the highway. Phoebe drank whiskey for the first time in months, and Matt stared at the moon through the window until he said, "Let's go somewhere fun for spring break."
That's when Phoebe remembered the Victorian hotel from the magazine. She found the Cornwall Inn online.
"Look, we can sit in the hot tub while staring at the ocean," Phoebe said.
"We can slurp oysters and somehow laugh at the same exact time," he added. It felt good to make this list of new things they suddenly wanted together.
Eventually, Matt fell asleep, but Phoebe's body was still too uncomfortable to sleep. She was still bleeding. She stayed up looking at the hotel, analyzing the rooms and the excursions—there were so many possible excursions. They could paddleboard with seals. Go on a "water journey" at a nearby spa. Visit Edith Wharton's house on the Cliff Walk. Do yoga by the ocean, not that she had ever done yoga. But she liked the thought of becoming a woman who casually did yoga by the sea.
She made a detailed spreadsheet of excursions, because she was a researcher by profession. She kept a long list of every book she ever read and her favorite lines from them. She wrote a dissertation tracking each time Jane Eyre went on a walk in Brontë's novel. She became proficient in German one year, then Middle English the next. And after sex with her husband, she always wanted to think more deeply about it, like: What was the first use of the word *cunt* in the English language? And Matt would laugh and say, "Shakespeare, probably?" and Phoebe would continue, "I bet it was Chaucer." Then they both looked it up to learn that two hundred years before Chaucer, there was a street in Oxfordshire called Gropecunt Lane.
She loved the way Matt indulged her. They were very similar—he was a researcher, too, though he would never call himself that. He was a philosopher. He read books on Friday nights and overanalyzed commercials with her, and engaged her in long debates about what they should call their private parts during sex, even if all they could agree on was that they would never call them private parts.
But when Phoebe showed him the spreadsheet the next morning, Matt said, "You made a spreadsheet of fun?" the same way he once said, "You made a spreadsheet of sex?" And yes. Phoebe was thirty-eight. They couldn't afford to be casual anymore about trying to have a baby. But when the time came for sex, he looked at her across the bed like, *Okay, are we on schedule?* and she looked at him like he was nothing at all, just the vase on the end table.
"You honestly expect me to believe that people go on vacations without making a spreadsheet of fun first?" Phoebe asked.
It was a joke, but he didn't take it as one, so it didn't feel like one. He just looked at her like he was deciding something about her. A short glance, but her husband did not need much to come to a conclusion. Her husband was a careful and astute reader of text. He once wrote a thirty-four-page article about a single word in Plato.
"I'm sure it's great," he said, and then kissed her goodbye.
Matt was not the most handsome man in the world, but he had been to her. And he seemed to get better-looking with age. The light gray taking over his brown hair, the smile that devastated her every time. Her husband could still go out into the world and have children without her—it was a thought she had every time he left the house for work. She wondered if he thought it, too.
"See you at dinner," she said, and they went to teach at the same university in separate cars. She taught literature, while he taught philosophy. She ate a CLIF bar at her desk. She left for a meeting and passed Bob's giant office, the consolation prize for having to be department chair. He was listening to a string quartet loud enough for her to hear.
"'Ello," he said, even though he was not British.
She went upstairs, walked by her husband's door, which was open, but not really, because he was with a student. A brunette. A girl. He always kept the door open if a girl was in his office, even when all he was doing was listening to her describe her relationship to the Bible.
"I never realized you could read it like it was just a book," the girl said. "I never understood that actual human beings wrote the Bible. I thought God wrote it. Is that stupid?"
"That is not stupid," Phoebe's husband assured her.
Then Phoebe went to the Adjunct Lounge Committee meeting, made up entirely of men with monosyllabic nicknames that somehow passed as professional names. Jack. Jeff. Stan. Russ. Vince. Mike. Phoebe was the only woman and the only adjunct, brought in to answer questions about what a woman and an adjunct might want from this future office space.
"Phoebe?" Mike asked. "What do you think?"
*It was a nonviable pregnancy.*
"Do you think the chairs should have tablets or no tablets? Russ thinks the tablets look too industrial," he said. "We want you to feel at home. But the tablets do eliminate the need for coffee tables."
Successful men all over the world are always celebrated for their ability to eliminate something so they can make more room for something else. Like the three polyps Dr. Barr removed from her uterus to make room for her future children.
"I think the real coffee tables would be nice," Phoebe said.
And then they all went home—the men to their wives and Phoebe to her husband. But he was not there yet.
*Getting a drink with some work people,* he texted.
She poured herself some leftover wine and wondered who the work people were. She couldn't ask, because she knew that would get classified as overbearing, and she tried so hard never to be overbearing, especially at this delicate stage of their marriage. She tried so hard not to give a shit about the ways she was losing her husband, but why? Of course, she gave a shit. He was her husband.
Was he drinking with Bob? Bob kept a bottle of something in his desk the way professors do in movies about professors. But she knew that her husband didn't really like drinking with Bob. "The man drinks to annihilate himself," he said one night, coming home from a faculty party that went on for too long, mostly because of Bob.
It's possible that he drinks with Rick or Adam or Paula from his department. Maybe Mia? Though ever since Mia and Tom had a baby nine months ago, Mia hadn't really reentered the world yet. And Matt would have invited her if he went with Mia, because Mia was Phoebe's best friend at work, if people at work were allowed to have best friends. Phoebe was never sure. But they had grown close in their adjacent offices, and even closer after Mia's husband attempted suicide two years ago. Phoebe had made it a point to invite Mia and Tom over for dinner nearly every weekend, because Mia made it a point to talk to Phoebe when many of the other tenured professors did not. At these dinners, Tom would talk about all the things he was doing to feel better—meditating three times a day, subscribing to hiking magazines, and quitting refined sugar because that was his trigger, something he explained to them one night when they offered him cake. Tom needed to be honest and open about his depression now, because being ashamed of his depression only made him more depressed. They all nodded in agreement, they totally got it, and yet Phoebe and Matt couldn't help but exchange glances after Mia and Tom left the house.
"I don't know what Tom could be so depressed about. Aren't they trying to have a baby? And Mia is beautiful," Phoebe had said to Matt, because that's how confident she was in her husband's love for her. She could admit when other women were more beautiful, had learned at a young age that she was not the most attractive woman in the room. It had been fine then.
But that night, she drank the wine and added to her spreadsheet of fun and it did not feel fine. It did not feel fun, either, which was what her husband specifically asked for. "We need to have some fun," he had said. And he was right. They were never laughing anymore. They were hardly sleeping together. It was tricky, with her body always feeling so wrong. But she wanted to do something for him. Something she had never done. Something fun.
"When you get home, I want to make you cum," she typed out on her phone to her husband. But just looking at the word *cum* made her nervous. So she deleted it, wrote *come* instead of *cum*, and then turned it back to *cum*, because she didn't know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?
When Matt came home from drinks, he came with champagne. Very rarely did he buy champagne. When he did, he felt compelled to make a joke about it.
"I hunted and gathered us some champagne," he said.
"Are we celebrating something?" Phoebe asked. "Or are we just drinking champagne?"
She watched him get two flutes. She waited for him to say something about her text, but he didn't. Did she send it to the wrong person? She picked up her phone, but no, there was the text, dangling so awkwardly at the end of the thread.
"We're celebrating," he said. "I have news."
They never came home from work with real news. Work was always the same. It was either good or bad or busy or just fine. The students were either lazy or enthusiastic or inspiring or depressing. They were misspelling the names of historical figures or they were drawing graduate-level comparisons between Virginia Woolf and Cubism. They were missing the midterm because their grandmother died again (so suddenly and in the night!) or they were ready to go, pens upright.
"What's the news?" she asked.
The champagne bottle stood on the counter like a green god. She hated this bad feeling in her stomach. This assumption that her husband's good news couldn't possibly be hers.
"I found out that I won the Arts and Letters Scholar of the Year award," he said. Her husband twisted off the cork, and it made a loud gunshot noise across the room.
"Oh, wow," Phoebe said.
How did people celebrate? Phoebe remembered throwing confetti in the air on New Year's Eve. She remembered yip-yip-yipping at the top of the canyon in Arkansas. But overall, they were pretty out of practice.
"I kind of can't believe it," he said.
Phoebe could believe it—she knew he'd win the award at some point. The College of Arts and Letters was one of the smallest programs at their university, and they used to joke that the award would happen to most of the professors if they stayed there long enough—though it would never happen to Phoebe, because adjuncts did not get awards. They did not get health benefits, either, even though she did the exact same job as her husband, a now tenured professor of philosophy with a health insurance plan that covered their cat's visit to the dentist. And that was okay then, because they were married and had enough love and money between them to buy a house and do the things that people who recently bought houses do, like start a garden and renovate the kitchen with a quartzite slab and make six embryos at a lab.
But it did not feel okay when her husband won awards. It did not feel okay when they were at a faculty event, and someone suggested she apply for the new tenure-track job in English. What an opportunity, what a fortuitous time for Jack Hayes to die. But she knew they wouldn't seriously consider her for the position. She'd only had one publication since graduation, and that was not enough. It was Matt who had to say the things Phoebe couldn't, like, "Phoebe is still working on her book," and then they asked what the book was about, but Phoebe found that she couldn't describe it. She said something about the domestic spaces in *Jane Eyre*. Something about the walking culture of the Victorian era. About feminism? But Phoebe didn't really know anymore. The whole thing bored her now. Every time she opened her dissertation on the computer, it felt like sitting down for coffee with an old boyfriend she couldn't imagine ever loving again.
"Congratulations," Phoebe said to her husband. "That's really great."
Phoebe smiled and kissed Matt on the cheek. Squeezed his arm like she might fuck him silly later, and maybe she would. Maybe he'd notice the text and pull her upstairs and tonight would be the night when everything changed, when she would lean over the bed as he took her from behind. Or maybe they'd do it face-forward, look into each other's eyes, like they did when they first fell in love.
"I'll have to give a speech at the awards dinner in February," her husband said.
"Is a speech bad?"
If Phoebe had to give a speech in February, that would be very bad. Phoebe had started to hate standing in front of her students each day, all of them waiting in silence for her to prove herself. Because hadn't she proved herself yesterday? And the day before? Why did she have to wake up every day just to prove herself if it didn't seem to matter how often she proved herself? By the end of the hour, she was exhausted, and didn't feel better until she was at home, drinking a glass of wine.
"A speech is great," Matt said. "We need things to look forward to."
He was right. They had nothing to look forward to, which was the entire point of planning the vacation.
"Here." He handed her a champagne flute. It was flimsy and delicate. It made her nervous, just holding it. "I know it doesn't really mean anything for promotion, but it's got to help at least a little."
Her husband's goal used to be marrying her and starting a family. Now he was concentrating very hard on promotion.
"Of course," she said. "Everything helps."
"Cheers."
She drank.
"This is good champagne," he said.
She couldn't help but note that in the history of her husband's life, he had never yet purchased bad champagne.
"It is," she said. She really loved the first sip of champagne. The first sip always brought her back to life. To the park where they made their first toast as a married couple. To the warm and snowy balconies on New Year's Eve. But the second and third sip were always so dry, they killed her again. "It really is."
Her husband—what a great scholar. And the students loved him. They were always gathered outside his office, eyes glowing with worship, saying, "He's a genius, and yet not even an asshole about it." And it was true. He knew a lot. He spoke three languages and could hold a long conversation about everything from the drinking culture of ancient Greece to the local politics of St. Louis to the problem of blood-doping in the Olympics to the species of bird at their feeder. His intelligence was one of the reasons that she fell in love with him. But it was annoying to see young women worship it, because nobody worshipped hers. People were either surprised by it or disapproving of it. Not even Bob was a fan anymore.
"You know what your problem is, Phoebe?" Bob had asked a few days prior. Bob was technically her colleague now, no longer her dissertation advisor, no longer required to worry about her publication record. Yet he did. And Phoebe understood. Phoebe was worried, too. It had been ten years since she graduated, and she was still here at the same university, walking the same academic halls, teaching as an adjunct, never having moved on like the others in her program, never able to turn her dissertation into an actual book. She didn't know what her problem was, and she hated how eager she was for Bob to tell her: How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her? That was her problem, she knew. But Bob said, "You think too much," and it genuinely surprised her. Wasn't that a good thing? Wasn't that the entire point of being an academic?
It was not until later in bed when Matt saw the text.
"Oh, shit," he said. "I didn't see this. I'm sorry."
He apologized but didn't reach over to touch her. She was so embarrassed by that point, she changed the subject.
"We should book the Cornwall," Phoebe said.
"Huh?" Matt asked.
"The hotel. For spring break. The Cornwall."
"Was that the expensive one?"
"Very expensive."
"Like remortgaging the house expensive?"
"Like, eight hundred a night."
"That's… too much, Phoebe."
But wasn't that the point? To be too much? To be reckless? To be extravagant? To do whatever the fuck they wanted because if they couldn't have children, they could at least have fun spending the savings account that Phoebe had started ten years ago for their children?
Phoebe needed that. But she could feel that he no longer did. He had changed his mind today. He had won his award. He had his fun thing to look forward to, and he didn't even have to buy it. He simply earned it, and how wonderful that must feel for him now—to have earned back his dignified place in the world.
"Why don't we just go to the Ozarks?" Matt said. "We always like it there."
Phoebe looked up at the dark ceiling. She felt a panicked feeling, like when she was a kid, lost in the supermarket looking around and realizing everybody in town sort of looked like her father. They all wore the same jeans.
"No," Phoebe said.
They always went to the Ozarks. They honeymooned in the Ozarks and they took spring breaks in the Ozarks, and the hikes were long and beautiful things that made Phoebe feel proud enough to enjoy their evening happy hour. Phoebe had always felt her fun must be earned, her vacations must also be work, require a lot of gear.
But Phoebe was tired of work. Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversations with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal. That even without a baby, they would be happy. And even without a book, the ten years she had spent trying to write one had been worth it. Because it was getting harder to believe that. Most nights, she looked back at all of her research, all of her spreadsheets, all of her journals and her papers and her injections and thought, *What the fuck?*
"The Ozarks are for families," Phoebe said to Matt.
They were full of kids flying kites. Parents that wore matching hats and walked through the woods eating American flag ice pops.
"We're a family," Matt said.
"But we don't have a family."
"We have Harry."
Harry was their cat, always curled up between them just before bed. They bought him ten years ago when they really wanted a dog but then decided it was not the right time for a dog. Yet they went to the shelter "just to browse" only to learn that there was no browsing at a shelter. There was a little orange kitten with its nose pressed up to the cage, going, *Meowmeowmeowmeow*.
*Harry*, Matt read off the adoption file, and it sounded wrong to them, overly human, but they spent a decade loving Harry more than they thought normal. They gave Harry treats for doing nothing at all and then wondered whether it was wrong to give Harry a treat for doing nothing at all. For just being a cat? "Why do I expect you to be more than a cat when all I want is for you to just be a cat?" Phoebe asked Harry, like he was a psychiatrist sitting between them, and often that's what Harry looked like—so dignified, with one little paw crossed over the other like he was patiently waiting his turn to say something wise.
"Harry is not our family," Phoebe reminded him. "He's our psychiatrist."
"Oh right. It's such a blurry line."
They used to crack themselves up by asking Harry deep, dark, existential questions. *Am I self-sabotaging at work because I had no mother, Harry?* And Matt would say, *Absolutely*, in Harry's voice—she had no idea how to describe it other than it was the voice they both knew to be Harry's.
"Harry thinks we should go to the Ozarks," Matt said, and she softened for a moment. She always felt deeply connected to Matt when they were talking to each other like this, through Harry. It made her feel like maybe the three of them really could be a family. "Harry wants to hike the canyon again."
"Fine, but you can tell Harry that if we wind up staying in that really shitty motel one more time, I will kill myself," Phoebe said.
They both laughed a little because Harry opened his eyes and looked at Phoebe like he had understood, but also because they knew that Phoebe was not the type to kill herself. Phoebe had taken a multivitamin every day since she was a child. Phoebe brushed her hair before bed. Phoebe was very normal, and her husband liked that. Being normal was his big dream—something her husband confessed on their very first date.
"Ever since I was a kid, I just knew I wanted to grow up and be normal," he had joked. "But seriously. It's true." And Phoebe understood. Her childhood had been exceptionally lonely—with a dead mother and a depressed father and no siblings to talk to at night, which is why she started reading books. Fairy tales at first, because they were about girls just like her, girls whose mothers were killed off in one quick sentence. "Your mother was a wonderful woman who died giving birth to you," was how her father put it one morning and she felt awful. She felt like she had ruined something just by existing, and she had. Her mother! That beautiful woman who was always hiking in all their photographs. And her father—he was in the picture, too. He was smiling and hiking through the Ozarks with his pregnant wife, and Phoebe had ached for that normal man she never got to know. The normal girl she never got to be.
"But why does being normal feel like a crime here?" Phoebe had asked Matt.
In graduate school, it had been embarrassing to be normal. Everyone Phoebe had met was on a mission to be spectacularly, deliciously weird, and she was impressed and confused by how her colleagues looked so good in socks and high heels. Phoebe could not wear things like that, could not push fashion boundaries, and she didn't know why exactly, except for the reason that she never wanted anyone to know she was strange.
So, she wore jean shorts and Tevas as soon as the temperatures rose above fifty. She never dyed her hair and had no idea what to say when a poet brought her to a noise concert on a date except, *This is a little noisy.* The poet kissed her at the end of the night, laughed in her mouth a little as he said, *You're so, like, normal,* and it felt like a compliment at the time, but days of his silence later, she saw her collection of cardigans from Banana Republic lined up neatly in the same direction and knew it wasn't.
"Well, good, because I'm very normal," she had said to Matt. It was a relief not to feel like she had to buy a whole new wardrobe just to go to a pub with him.
"It's settled then," he said. "Where's the preacher?"
And that's how everything had felt for years—so wonderfully normal. They got married in a public park, invited only their closest friends and family, because they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling. The more wedding you need, the less happy you must be.
Phoebe truly believed this then. But now the utter simplicity of their lives felt crushing. When Matt reached over to touch her, Phoebe could see and feel the whole experience even before it started.
"I wish I saw your text earlier," Matt said. "I really wish I did."
When he leaned over to kiss her, she flinched at his tenderness. She hated his softness. She had been fantasizing, lately, about him doing terrible things to her. Things so awful she couldn't ever tell him, because she knew it meant something was changing inside of her, some darkness was hardening into sludge. So, she just said, "I love you."
They booked a hotel in the Ozarks for March. And every day after, Matt was up early in a tie and then off to work. But Phoebe moved a little slower. Some mornings, she felt wildly emotional, and some mornings impenetrably numb. She didn't know how to explain the contradiction to her new therapist when he asked. She kept saying, *I feel… disconnected. No, I feel sad. No, I feel…* and she would trail off and hope the therapist would fill in the blank, but he never did.
"I feel fucking crazy," she said to Harry the night before her husband's awards ceremony. Harry was the only one who knew how often she said *fuck* while grading papers. "I mean, seriously, what the fuck?"
When she proposed the Fairy Tale course, she thought it would be fun. But she was increasingly disturbed by each student paper that compared Rapunzel's mother's infertility to "a kind of poison." She had forgotten about all the barren women in these stories or maybe she just never noticed them before. She had been too distracted by all the dead mothers.
"And why are all the mothers in fairy tales always dead?" Phoebe asked Matt, who was grading on the couch next to her.
"Because they were premodern. The mothers were often… dead."
But it had to be about more than that. It seemed like the story wouldn't even work if the mother wasn't dead—the dead mother was an important plot point, a necessary precondition for the girl's story. Because Cinderella never would have been at the center of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre, she thought). The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation, because that's what the story was always about. That's why she had liked them. Watch the good girl grow up, watch the girl try very hard to get everything she wants, then watch how happy she becomes.
The end.
And that had been Phoebe's story, too—she had been so good. So quiet. So studious. Valedictorian of her high school, then college, and then went off to graduate school to make a life for herself, which she did. She fell in love, got a PhD, got married. Bought a house with her husband. And then, after five grueling cycles of IVF, when all seemed lost, she finally got pregnant using their last embryo. For ten weeks, she rubbed lotion on her belly, and she could feel it, how she was hurtling toward the happy ending that would make everything, even her mother's death, seem like a necessary part of the story.
But then it was over, in under a sentence. One day she had been pregnant, and then the next day, she was not. She had felt the blood between her legs, and every time she remembered the blood, she thought, *No, no, no, this can't be how it ends.* Because this ending made a mockery of her mother's death. This ending was just tragic. More like a Russian novel, where all the characters go on a great wild adventure just to be killed off in the end.
"The Russians got it right," Phoebe said the morning of the awards ceremony, and she loved that she could say things like this to Matt. "Maybe I just need to accept that my life is a Russian novel."
"You forget I haven't read the Russian novels," Matt said, pouring coffee in his to-go mug.
"I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it's written."
"That's true," Matt said. "But you're not at the end."
Matt clearly wasn't ready to be a character in a Russian novel. He wasn't ready for his life to be a tragedy, albeit a beautiful one. He was off to work, where he was going to write his speech and pitch a new book to his editor about the philosophy of doing things, while Phoebe stayed at home to write. "Why are all the mothers dead?" she typed, but then felt too depressed to continue. So she got up and made an elaborate breakfast. She touched herself in bed and thought of her husband holding her against a wall by her neck, calling her terrible things. Then, she went for a walk and admired novelty door knockers. She stopped at Joe's wine shop on the way home. They bought wine exclusively from Joe, a bald man with big thick muscles who asked a lot of questions about the English language every time she purchased something.
"Hey, Professor. Is *conversate* a word?" Joe asked. "Never heard of it. But girlie over here says it's a word."
He pointed to the young girlie, who was always sitting on the stool next to the register, all eyeliner and purple nails. There was always a young girlie—sometimes they worked in the store, and sometimes they just came to visit Joe and sit on a stool for hours because that's what girlies seemed to like.
"Everything's a word," the girlie said. "If you say it enough. Isn't that right, Dr. Stone?"
This girlie was a student at the university, dark brown hair, dark eyes. Studying psychology. She had never had Phoebe as a professor, but said she had "heard about" her.
"That's true," Phoebe said. "Say it for ten years, and it ends up in the dictionary."
"Ten years," Joe said. "That's all it takes?"
Joe wanted Phoebe to like him because Joe wanted all women to like him. Liking him seemed to be the first step to fucking him. And sometimes, she liked Joe. When Joe was railing against the authoritarian undertones of popular politicians or watching a Disney movie on his computer and laughing at all the slapstick. But then she saw the girlie on his stool and the cup in front of the register that said PUSSY FUND.
Right then, it was half-full.
"That's right," Phoebe said.
Her husband never commented on the Pussy Fund after they left, as if it were not right to call out another man on his Pussy Fund, or like, if they actually called him out on it, they'd have to find another place to buy wine, and this one was really the most convenient with the best selection. So, she paid for the bottles, and she said, "See ya, Joe," and she tried not to wonder if her husband ever dropped his spare change in the Pussy Fund when she was not there.
Every February, the awards ceremony, and every year they went, and every time, Phoebe wore the same dress. A black Calvin Klein that she bought years ago for her job orientation. A dress that nobody ever complimented but nobody ever insulted. A dress designed not to be noticed.
She was surprised that it still fit, still made her look the way she always looked, and this depressed her. Tonight, she wanted to feel different. She wanted to walk into the awards ceremony and be noticed. Because if she wasn't going to have children, she should at least have magnificent dresses. So she drove to the mall and didn't stop shopping until the emerald dress caught her eye. The silk felt amazing, like cool water dripping down her body—why had she always been afraid to wear silk? To wear color? She looked good in emerald. It highlighted the red tones of her brown hair. The green specks of her eyes. Her olive skin.
She bought it without thinking, without wondering what her husband might think, what Bob might think, what Mia might think. That's how much she loved it.
But before the dinner, when she put it on again, she felt ridiculous standing on her beige carpet next to her flannel sheets. The silk dress was too much. Five hundred dollars. And the dinner was going to be in the gymnasium. What was she thinking? It was floor-length, a dress meant for a wedding, not for an awards ceremony at a cash-strapped university in Missouri.
She put the black dress on again. She didn't want to embarrass her husband. She knew she had been embarrassing her husband lately. She knew she had been a little sloppy, sometimes too drunk when he came home.
"Did you write today?" he asked her when he returned to pick her up. He suggested they take one car.
"Yes," she lied.
She looked at herself in the mirror. There she was again, she thought, and yet, she felt like she was somewhere far away, still in the fertility clinic, watching Matt shake hands with the doctor. Or maybe she was at the River Ouse, watching Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones. She wondered how many stones Woolf used. How cold was the water?
"You look beautiful," he said, and when he said it, she felt it.
She combed her hair and off they went to dinner.
The dinner was an elaborate affair for a gymnasium. The university paid five grand a year to bring in a guest speaker, some celebrity scholar who could talk both about the crisis in the Middle East and the value of a liberal arts education or the labor conditions in China and the value of a liberal arts education or the recession and the value of a liberal arts education.
"You really look so beautiful," her husband said again before they entered the gym. He seemed to be telling both of them. He put his arm around her and just like that, they were husband and wife again.
They drank white wine and ate chicken marsala with steamed vegetables. They sat at a table of people just like her husband. People with real jobs. Bob. Susan. Brian. Mia.
Then, a series of speeches and applauses for the various achievements of other people and then, chocolate lava cake. They ate the cake and talked about how the cake was not very lavalike. They talked about their students, their jobs as a whole, and the consensus at the table was that they were very rewarding but also very hard.
"Hard?" Bob's wife asked. She was a surgeon at a local hospital. "All Bob ever does in his office is drink German beers and listen to Bach."
"And not to mention your summers off!" said Tom. With his doctor's schedule, Tom and Mia could only take a one-week vacation each year, and then they talked about that vacation for the rest of the year. "So, no complaining, you professors!"
They laughed. Tom was right. Their jobs were wonderful, her husband confessed with his hands up.
The lights dimmed and the student choir began singing from the stage with candles. But even in the dark, Phoebe could feel the truth: the gym underneath her feet. The foul line that cut across the dance floor. The way they looked at her like she was just Matt's wife. Especially the ones who didn't really know her, like Susan from the philosophy department who forgot her name every year. She always had the same question for Phoebe: "And what do you do?"
"I teach," Phoebe said.
"Phoebe actually teaches here," her husband said.
"Oh wonderful, what do you teach?" Susan asked.
"Pretty much whatever Bob asks me to teach," Phoebe said. "Mostly the survey lit courses that all freshmen are required to take. Everything from the beginning of literature to the internet."
"But what's your field?" Susan asked.
"Victorian literature," Phoebe said.
"Phoebe actually teaches a seminar on the fairy tale right now," Matt added. "And she's finishing a book on *Jane Eyre*."
For ten years, Phoebe has been finishing her book on *Jane Eyre*.
Then more awards. When her husband's name was called, he smiled. He put down his napkin. He walked onstage. He took his award, and everybody at the table clapped and smiled at him. Mia leaned into Phoebe's shoulder.
"You must be proud," Mia said.
She was. Look at my husband, she thought, as he took his place behind the podium. He gave a short speech about the value of a liberal arts education, but Phoebe barely heard a word. Look at him, she thought, as he returned to the table smiling. My husband. He sat back down, and everybody congratulated him, while he tried very hard not to appear too pleased.
"They've got to give it to everybody at some point," he said, which felt like a small betrayal, because this had been their joke. "I bet you even Bob will get it one day."
Bob laughed.
"The students just love him," Mia said, and it was something about the way she said it, as if she knew the students better than Phoebe. As if Mia and Matt occupied a house together without her.
But she didn't say anything. She felt ill and said, "Excuse me." She went to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror.
*Your husband thinks you are beautiful,* she thought, until she felt better.
But before she returned to the table, she saw her husband talking to Mia. Mia threw her head back to laugh, and her husband laughed, too, opened his mouth wide, wider than Phoebe had seen in months. Even when they watched TV and Phoebe curled into him, he kept his mouth pressed shut.
But in this moment with Mia, she could see the old Matt, the one she first met years ago in the computer room, who was light and funny and happy. And Mia looked happy, too. Something she had not really seemed since Tom got depressed years ago.
Phoebe sat back down at the table, and all of a sudden Mia's beauty seemed different. It was not just a basic fact. It was a situation.
Phoebe didn't bring Mia up until they were home, back inside the house.
"It doesn't seem fair that Mia can have three books and also be so goddamned beautiful," Phoebe said. She hoped it sounded like a joke.
"Oh," Matt said. "Yeah. She is a good laugh."
"I didn't say that. I said she was beautiful."
"What are you doing?" he asked. "I thought we had a nice time tonight."
"We did," she said.
He kissed her. "You looked beautiful tonight."
He wanted to have sex; she could tell. But she didn't want to. Or maybe she didn't want him to be sweet in that moment. In her fantasies, he was never sweet to her anymore. In her fantasies, it was no longer even her that he was fucking, though the therapist had insisted the fantasy was still good news.
"It's good that it at least involves your husband," he had said.
As she went to undress, her husband said, "No, keep the dress on." He took off his shirt, his pants, and when he walked toward her, she imagined him walking into Joe's wine shop, seeing the girlie sitting on the stool like usual. She's doing homework for her class. No, she doesn't know where Joe is.
"Anything new today?" her husband asks, and the girlie says, "Let me show you what we've got." She is bringing her husband to the back to show him the latest shipment of wine. She bends over to pick up a few bottles and her husband walks toward her, puts his hands on her waist, and centers her the way he does when he really wants to fuck, when he wants her to just be tits and ass and ponytail. He pulls on her hair, and that's when her thighs clench tight around him—and it is only then, when Phoebe pretended that she didn't know her husband at all, that she could come.
After they had sex, they couldn't look each other in the eye. She took off her black dress and her husband poured himself a glass of whiskey and he didn't bother with ice cubes and he went outside to look at the stars because that's what people have done since the beginning of time. And still, Phoebe did not think it was the end. She couldn't really conceive of the end. She thought that in a few weeks, they'd go to the Ozarks for spring break, and then maybe, just maybe, she would try IVF one more time, because who knows? Maybe it would work the sixth time. Maybe the doctors were wrong.
But a few weeks later, in March, the world shut down and they did nothing at all. They sat in the house. They taught through their computers. They looked out windows a lot. She cried too much, and he drank too much, and sometimes, she worried he might leave her. Sometimes, she wanted to leave. But when she imagined herself leaving, her husband always begged her to stay. He got on his knees, pressed his face against her thighs, and clutched her like a child. *Please, Phoebe,* he said in the fantasy. *Please. I need you.* Then he explained all the ways he needed her, and how the kids needed her, too. And so, she stayed. Every time she imagined leaving her husband, she always ended up staying. It was a fantasy, in which there were children and the children always needed her. She had to imagine leaving only so she could imagine staying. She had to imagine herself at the door and her husband shouting, "No, Phoebe, no!" like she was a dog. And she really didn't know why, in her fantasy, she wanted to be treated like this.
"So, how was your day?" Matt asked.
It was August, the night before their fall semester began. Their last dinner together, but Phoebe didn't know it yet. Maybe Matt didn't know it yet, either. Maybe during that dinner, he was still deciding. Maybe if she had said something more interesting in response, something other than, "Good," he might have stayed.
"Good!" he said. "Good. Did you write today?"
"A little."
That morning, Phoebe tried so hard to write. Their summer break was ending, and she had nothing to show for it, so she set up her coffee and her computer and closed the blinds and put out two fingers of whiskey and one cigarette on her desk, her future reward for finishing a page, and then she finished, and she slowly sipped on the whiskey, and she lit the cigarette but didn't smoke it. She just liked the smell, the feeling of holding it between her fingers, and it started to feel like she was in her office not to write but to drink and pretend to smoke.
Matt left his office, a door slam, and she put out the cigarette. She finally understood what her advisor meant when he said, "Don't combine your good habits with your bad habits." When Bob had said it years ago, she only had good habits. She ran 3.1 miles every other day, she drank ginger shots at the local café, she always did her laundry on Sundays, she planned her courses in June before the summer got away from her, and these good things had always been enough. They had been at the center of her life. Her house. Her students. Her research. Her husband, her physical tether to this world from the day she met him. But now they could not even look each other in the eye when they asked each other questions.
"Were you smoking in your office earlier?" Matt asked.
"No," she said, and it was not technically a lie. But Matt didn't understand. Matt said he could smell the smoke, said it was bad for her body, which ironically made her want to smoke. For years all she had been thinking about was what she should put in her body to make it a super womb, and she was tired of it. *Fuck my body,* she thought, but did not say it.
"How was your day?" she asked, and felt like one of the awful characters in a T. S. Eliot poem.
*What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?*
Yet when Matt left her later that night, it truly did surprise her. Nothing had ever shocked her more. He did what he always did before sleep. Took off his belt and rolled it into a ball. Took a shower and then put on the kind of junk shirt he only wore around the house. But then he put on jeans, slipped on his belt, and packed a bag. "I am in love with Mia," he kept saying, and she didn't really believe it. This was not how her fantasy went.
But this wasn't her fantasy. It was his, and she didn't know how it worked. She just watched him, waited for him to drop his bag, but he didn't.