TUESDAY

The Opening Reception
The hotel looks exactly as Phoebe hoped. It sits on the edge of the
cliff like an old and stately dog, patiently waiting for her arrival. She
can’t see the ocean behind it, but she knows it’s there, the same
way she could pull into her driveway and feel her husband in his
office typing his manuscript.
Love was an invisible wire, connecting them always.
Phoebe steps out of the cab. A man in burgundy approaches with
such seriousness, the moment feels as if it has been choreographed
long ago. It makes her certain that what she is doing is right.
“Good evening,” the man says. “Welcome to the Cornwall Inn.
May I take your luggage?”
“I don’t have any luggage,” Phoebe says.
When she left St. Louis, it felt important to leave everything
behind—the husband, the house, the luggage. It was time to move
on, which she knew because that was what they had all agreed to
last year at the end of the divorce hearing. Phoebe was so stunned
by the finality of their conversation, by the way her husband said,
“Okay, take care now,” like he was the mailman wishing her well.
She could not bring herself to do a single thing after except climb in
bed and drink gin and tonics and listen to the sound of the
refrigerator making ice. Not that there was anywhere to go. This was
mid-lockdown, when she only left the house for gin and toilet paper
and taught her virtual classes in the same black blouse every day
because what else were people supposed to wear? By the time
lockdown was over, she couldn’t remember.
But now Phoebe stands before a nineteenth-century Newport
hotel in an emerald silk dress, the only item in her closet she can
honestly say she still loves, probably because it was the one thing
she had never worn. She and her husband never did anything fancy
enough for it. They were professors. They were easygoing. Relaxed.
So comfortable by the fire with the little cat on their laps. They liked
regular things, whatever was on tap, whatever was on TV, whatever
was in the fridge, whatever shirt looked the most normal, because
wasn’t that the point of clothing? To prove that you were normal? To
prove that every day, no matter what, you were a person who could
put on a shirt?
But that morning, before she got on the plane, Phoebe woke and
knew she was no longer normal. Yet she made toast. Took a shower.
Dried her hair. Gathered her lecture notes for her second day of the
fall semester. Opened her closet and looked at all the clothes she
once bought simply because they looked like shirts a professor
should wear to work. Rows of solid-colored blouses, the female
versions of things her husband wore. She pulled out a gray one, held
it up in front of the mirror, but could not bring herself to put it on.
Could not go to work and stand at the office printer and hold her
face in a steady expression of interest while her colleague talked at
length about the surprising importance of cheese in medieval
theology.
Instead, she slipped on the emerald dress. The gold heels from
her wedding. The thick pearls her husband had lain across her eyes
like a blindfold on their wedding night. She got on a plane, drank an
impressively good gin and tonic, and it was so nice and cool down
her throat she hardly felt her blisters exiting the plane.
“Right this way, ma’am,” the man in burgundy says.
Phoebe gives the man twenty dollars, and he seems surprised to
be tipped for doing nothing, but to Phoebe it is not nothing. It’s
been a long time since a man has stood up immediately upon seeing
her get out of a car. Years since her husband emerged from his
office to greet her when she got home. It is nice to be stood for, to
feel like her arrival is an important event. To hear her heels click as
she walks up the old brick entranceway. She always wanted to make
this sound, to feel grand and dignified when walking into a lecture
hall, but her university was made of carpet.
She goes up the stairs, passes the big black lanterns and the
granite lions guarding the doors. She walks through the curtains into
the lobby, and this feels right, too. Like stepping back in time to an
older world that probably was not better, but at least was heavily
draped in velvet.
Then she sees the check-in line.
It’s so long—the kind of line she expected to see at the airport,
and not at a Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean. Yet there the
line is, stretching all the way through the lobby and past the historic
oak staircase. The people in it look wrong, too—wearing
windbreakers and jeans and sneakers. The normal shirts Phoebe
used to wear. They look comically ordinary next to the velvet drapes
and the gilt-framed portraits of bearded men lining the walls. They
look like solid, modern people, tethered to the earth by their
titanium-strength suitcases. Some are talking on their phones. Some
are reading off their phones, like they’re prepared to be in this line
forever and maybe they are. Maybe they don’t have families
anymore, either. It’s tempting for Phoebe to think like this now—to
believe that everybody is as alone as she is.
But they’re not alone. They stand in pairs of two or three, some
with linked arms, some with single hands resting on a back. They’re
happy, which Phoebe knows because every so often one of them
announces how happy they are.
“Jim!” an old man says, opening up his arms like a bear. “I’m so
happy to see you!”
“Hey, Grandpa Jim,” a younger man says back, because it seems
practically everyone in line is named Jim. The Jims exchange violent
hugs and hellos. “Where’s Uncle Jim? Already on the course?”
Even the young woman working the front desk seems happy—so
dedicated to looking each guest deeply in the eye, asking them why
they’re here, even though they all say the same thing, and so she
replies with the same thing: “Oh, you’re here for the wedding! How
wonderful.” She sounds genuinely excited about the wedding and
maybe she is. Maybe she’s still so young that she believes everybody
else’s wedding is somehow about her. That’s how Phoebe always felt
when she was young, worrying about what dress to wear for a
month, even though she sat in the outer orbit of every wedding she
attended.
Phoebe gets in line. She stands behind two young women
carrying matching green dresses on their arms. One still wears her
cheetah-print airplane neck pillow. The other has a bun so high the
messy red tendrils dangle over her forehead as she flips through a
People magazine. They are engaged in whispery debate over whose
flight here was worse and how old is this hotel really and why are
people so obsessed with Kylie Jenner now? Are we supposed to care
that she’s hotter than Kim Kardashian?
“Is she?” Neck Pillow asks. “I’ve actually always thought they
were both ugly in some way.”
“I think that’s true about all people, though,” High Bun says. “All
people have one thing that makes them ugly. Even people who are
like, professionally hot. It’s like the golden rule or something.”
“I think you mean cardinal rule.”
“Maybe.” High Bun says that even though she understands she’s
baseline attractive, something that has taken her five years of
therapy to admit, she knows that her gums show too much when
she smiles.
“I’ve never noticed that,” Neck Pillow says.
“That’s because I don’t smile all the way.”
“This entire time I’ve known you, you haven’t been fully smiling?”
“Not since high school.”
The line moves forward, and Phoebe looks up at the coffered
ceiling, which is so high, she starts to wonder how they clean it.
Another “Oh! You’re here for the wedding!” and Phoebe begins to
realize just how many wedding people there are in the lobby. It’s
unsettling, like in that movie The Birds her husband loved so much.
Once she spots a few, she sees them everywhere. Wedding people
lounging on the mauve velvet bench. Wedding people leaning on the
built-in bookcase. Wedding people pulling luggage so futuristic it
looks like it could survive a trip to the moon. The men in burgundy
pile it all into high, sturdy towers of suitcases, right next to a large
white sign that says WELCOME TO THE WEDDING OF LILA AND GARY.
“Your rule is definitely not true about Lila, though,” Neck Pillow
says. “I mean, I seriously can’t think of one way she’s ugly.”
“That’s true,” High Bun says.
“Remember when she was chosen to be the bride in our fashion
show senior year?”
“Oh yeah. Sometimes I forget about that.”
“How can you forget about that? I think about how weird it was
once a week.”
“You mean because our guidance counselor insisted on walking
down the aisle with her?”
“I mean more like, some people are just born to be brides.”
“I actually think our guidance counselor is coming to the
wedding.”
“That’s weird. But good. Then I’ll actually know someone at this
wedding,” Neck Pillow says.
“I know. I pretty much don’t know anyone anymore,” High Bun
says.
“I know, ever since the pandemic, I’m like, okay, I guess I just
have no friends now.”
“Right? The only person I know now is basically my mom.”
They laugh and then trade war stories of their terrible flights
here and Phoebe does her best to ignore them, to keep her eyes
focused on the magnificence of the lobby. But it’s hard. Wedding
people are much louder than regular people.
She closes her eyes. Her feet begin to ache, and she wonders for
the first time since she left home if she should have brought a pair
of sensible shoes. She has so many lined up in her closet, being
navy, doing nothing.
“So what do you know about the groom?” Neck Pillow whispers.
High Bun only knows what Lila briefly told her over the phone
and what she learned from stalking him on the internet.
“Gary is actually kind of boring to stalk,” High Bun says, then
whispers something about him being a Gen X doctor with a receding
hairline so minor, it seems like there’s a good chance he’ll die with
most of his hair. “How did you not stalk him after Lila asked you to
be a bridesmaid?”
“I’ve been off the internet,” Neck Pillow says. “My therapist
demanded it.”
“For two years?”
“They’ve been engaged that long?”
“He proposed just before the pandemic.”
They inch forward in line again.
“God—Look at this wallpaper!”
Neck Pillow hopes that her room faces the ocean. “Staring at the
ocean makes you five percent happier. I read a study.”
Finally, they are quiet. In their silence, Phoebe is grateful. She
can think again. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s looking at
her husband across the kitchen, admiring his laugh. Phoebe always
loved his laugh, the way it sounded from afar. Like a foghorn in the
distance, reminding her of where to go. But then one of the Jims
yells, “Here comes the bride!”
“Jim!” the bride says.
The bride steps out of the elevator and into the lobby wearing a
glittering sash that says BRIDE so there is no confusion. Not that
there could be any confusion. She is clearly the bride; she walks like
the bride and smiles like the bride and twirls bride-ishly when she
approaches High Bun and Neck Pillow in line, because the bride gets
to do things like this for two or three days. She is a momentary
celebrity, the reason everybody has paid thousands of dollars to
come here.
“I’m so happy to see you!” the bride cries. She opens her arms
for a hug, gift bags hanging from her wrists like bracelets made of
woven seagrass.
Neck Pillow and High Bun were right. Phoebe can’t identify one
thing that is ugly about the bride, which might be the one thing
that’s ugly about her. She looks exactly how she is supposed to look
—somehow both willowy and petite in her white summer dress, with
no trace of any undergarment beneath. Her blond hair is arranged in
such a romantic and complicated tangle of braids, Phoebe wonders
how many tutorials she watched on Instagram.
“You look beautiful,” High Bun says.
“Thank you, thank you,” the bride says. “How were your flights?”
“Uneventful,” Neck Pillow lies.
They do not mention the surprise flock of seagulls or the
emergency landing because the bride is here. It is their job for the
entire wedding to lie to the bride, to have loved th