her, blowing the dust off their joint old times, a checking-in, a checking-up, wanting to know if Phoebe has allowed someone to stick, to roost—not them, they know, though they had all tried hard.
But her mother also says that the men from Phoebe’s past will always hang on, because she gave them up in the limerence phase, when romantic euphoria is at its peak. Maybe her mother is right; maybe that’s why she has no flesh-and-blood man, only the perfect golem she dreamt up.
Raquel is holding her coffee cup and doing calf raises at the kitchen counter, and Phoebe says, “Raquel, you have to keep the dry food bowl filled, okay. And fresh water in his bowl, morning and night. And if he hasn’t touched the wet, just dump it out and give him a fresh dollop or two.”
“It’ll be like having my own baby for a few days. I want my own, like right this minute, but I’ll wait until I land my first really big role or a global campaign.”
Phoebe has never asked Raquel the questions she’d ask if they were becoming friends—if she graduated from college, or went to acting school, or auditions regularly for roles, or what category she is considered to inhabit as a model—and it dawns on her that perhaps she’s misjudged, that Raquel must have some measure of success because the rents in this lovely two-story building are high.
“Is there anything big on the horizon for you?” she asks.
“Yes! The Brazilians love me. I’m on billboards there selling Fanta and suntan lotion. And in a month I’ll know if I’m the face and body of a hot Rio designer’s clothing line.”
The look on Raquel’s face is absolutely honest—she’s not telling any lies. And Phoebe is certain that life will turn out ideally for Raquel—she’ll book that new campaign, find a solid man like Simon to love, be pregnant by next year.
Unfair, unfair, she thinks. Raquel will have it all. Simon already has it all. Camille seems to have no interest in marriage or a child of her own, but Phoebe wants those things. She strives and succeeds and reaps the benefits, but the rewards she desperately wants remain out of reach.
Best as she can, she abstains from thinking about a child because there are tsunamic emotions and morning hangovers. All that control exercised in her earlier years, all that prophylactic womb-protecting, when now, even if unguarded, likely nothing would stay behind, take root, reside within her walls for the duration. She is, after all, two years from forty.
Her weekends away with the imaginary Aaron Green, meant to uncover love, haven’t panned out, have instead become indulgent curatives she uses to try and settle into the truth: no one is going to show up—not the man to love, nor a child, a cooing baby in her arms, fairy-tale-named Annabelle or Daisy or Giselle. When the charges appear on her credit card statement, she is always surprised that she indeed spent that weekend eating, drinking, and treating herself at the hotel spas, and spending some amount of time researching on her laptop where she supposedly is with her lover, noting it all down, because her family always asks for detailed recitations of her trips.
Last month, at the Laguna Niguel Capri, she was impressed with how adept she has become at eating by herself in sumptuous hotel restaurants, sampling intricate cocktails perched on stools at burnished bars or outside under the stars, and found herself having impulsive relations, loud and uninhibited, with a Philadelphia heart surgeon there for a conference. He had been swimming laps in the hotel’s pool, and she, on her way to swim laps herself, was diverted by the whirlpool and by the pool boy asking if she would like a cocktail, and was lounging with a specialty drink in the hot bubbling water when the heart surgeon joined her and struck up a conversation. He was married, twenty years and counting, ten years older than she, with a nice build and manner, and she had gone with him to his room, engaged with him as she hasn’t with anyone else during these weekends away. He has since sent her several long romantic email missives, a poet misshaped as a doctor.
She responded only once because the love of her life will not take the form of a married man. When she received his latest email, she had nearly typed, Best to your wife!, then deleted it. Why raise his infidelity when it affected her not at all, when she had no intention of ever seeing him again? Who was she to judge another, when she had a pretend lover named Aaron Green?
Raquel hugs her tight, says, “Have a blasto time. Benny will be fine. He’ll be alive and happy when you come home. I promise I won’t lose your spare key.” Then she is gone from Phoebe’s apartment.
PHOEBE RINSES THEIR CUPS, locks the front door, snuggles Benny to her chest, and rubs her forehead against his. Then she is at the back door, hanging bag over her arm, wheeling her suitcase out, bumping her way down the stairs, along the concrete path bordered by the rubber trees that prosper, and the hapless, wilted flowers that struggle under the heavy shade, to the row of small single-car garages that belong to the building, where her own car is housed.
It isn’t that she, as the eldest Tabor child, expected to outshine her siblings—they all heard their father’s exhortations that success in life turns on elements more substantial than money. That fiery lesson he instilled when he burned the dollar bills she and Camille once fought over, saying with the force of paternal disappointment, “We do not fight about money in this family.” It seemed a fortune he sent up in smoke when she was nine, especially since he bellowed when they left lights on in rooms they had vacated. She’s learned Harry’s lesson, about money not being everything, although at that age she’d been confused—were they poor and in danger of the lights being permanently turned off, or rich if money could be burned? It was six years before she stopped worrying, learned they “had money in the bank,” as Harry said, dating back to his stockbroker days, the earnings accruing because of his deftness at trading for his own accounts, but that even with deftness, success in the market was mostly a matter of uncertain luck and the exercise of a discipline that forbade seeking out the big score. “Losing it all can happen so fast, it would make your head spin,” he told her during that same conversation. “I left the stock market behind in nineteen eighty-six and have never again ventured in. You are not to enter the market at all.” And she never has. She earns serious money these days heading up her own firm, and follows her father’s precepts and actions for a well-balanced, useful, and honest life, doing mitzvahs, like offering her legal services pro bono to talented, impoverished artists, but she has failed anyway. She was sure by now she would have attained what her parents attained, what Simon has, the natural additions to that well-balanced life: a beloved spouse, a child or two, road-trip vacations with the kids to places they would not otherwise see, just as Roma and Harry had done with the three of them.
Objectively, she isn’t, but there are times she feels like the loneliest girl in the world, and she refuses to emend the terminology, for a lonely woman seems infinitely more pathetic than a lonely girl rightfully still wrapped up in teenage angst and despair.
Still, the critical question remains: How does she keep hope alive when this solitary existence is stunting her as surely as the rubber trees stunt the flowers wriggling hard up through the dirt, only to find themselves in shade, their petals curling, browning, falling away. Death comes early to flowers, to most living things, when there is no sunlight. It’s not hard for her to imagine a similar outcome for herself if love and motherhood escape her forever.
She unlocks the garage door and pushes it up. She drops the suitcase in the trunk, hangs the bagged gown on the backseat hook, and backs out of the small garage. Then she is out of the car again, pulling down the door and locking it, strapping in, checking her rearview mirror, backing out into the street, shifting into drive, reaching the long traffic light, which has just turned red.
She tries casting away the momentary descent into darkness by listing her attributes: mildly eclectic, highly educated, the owner of a voluminous vocabulary, which she flexibly mines. Lovely smile employed frequently, contagious laugh. She knows her thoughts are self-absorbed, but if not she herself, who will consider her life? Not her parents or her siblings, or her clients, who range from amenable to misanthropic, whom she handles with a preternatural ease. Given her level of engagement in their singular worlds and the busyness of her firm, it would seem right to assume that her personal life is similarly riotously full. For bursts of time it is, or has been: hours racked up in weekend exercise;