“You’re gorgeous and brilliant and your turn’s coming,” they said to her, and when Phoebe’s turn never did come, they peppered her with questions: Did she really want to marry, have a child, make room in her industrious life for others?
Disbelieving when she said, “Professional success isn’t the sum total of me, it’s not all that I want, but I don’t seem to be having any luck.”
Her friends, her friends, would say, “Well, if you really want it, as you say you do, then—,” that then so forbidding, undefinable, completely elusive, as if they held the secret and were unwilling to share, as if their attainment of the marital, the maternal, the pronoun replacements—from I to we and then to us—resulted in their crowning, their elevation, while she remained on the ground, assumed to be lacking the requisite nurturing abilities that would give rise to love and marriage and motherhood.
All day, every day, Phoebe nurtures everyone, her clients, her associates, her support staff, attending their opening nights, their launches, their engagement parties and weddings, and when dancing is required, she dances as if delighted to be there—what better proof is there that she possesses the necessary talents for success in her personal life? And yet she hasn’t attained love, marriage, motherhood, the poles of the true shelter she seeks, with her wished-for family, a solid place against inclement weather, toasty inside, living each day together, making plans for the future.
As full as she has made her life, as large as it often is, that she might never again feel crazy in love, never feel her child growing inside, that she might spend the rest of her years alone—it is incalculable sadness, bottomless grief, wide and swollen rivers of self-pity. What is she supposed to do with the pulsing love in her heart, the love she has to give, if husband and baby never appear?
Raquel is still chattering, and Phoebe hears her say, “Really, that’s how it works, you only introduce a real love to the family. Right?”
“Right,” Phoebe immediately says.
The art opening had happened; the client was real, an ageless sprite named Zabi, with her magenta lipstick and Turkish slippers, her enormous fired-metal pieces hanging off the walls, like devices to protect the soft innards of some forgotten race of people less strong than sun-fried Los Angelenos. Zabi introduced Phoebe as her lawyerly god, and Phoebe had smiled, feeling her white teeth perfectly strung in her mouth, and all the time she was scanning the crowd, wishing for just one man who might make her laugh, who would know instinctively how to metaphorically strip her to her core. But there had been nobody. Or rather, there had been many, including attractive men who smiled at her, but none had taken even a half step in her direction.
Driving home, she’d thought about how she insists her clients identify their professional aims, and the personal problems that might hamper their achievement, and she took stock of herself. She was beautiful—an acknowledgment, rather than an assertion of vanity; she had an excellent brain, and a big heart, so why couldn’t she achieve her personal aims? What was missing?
It took a quarter of an hour before she realized what was missing was luck.
When it came to love, she’d once had an abundance of compelling luck. Second grade loves that lasted an hour or a day; sixth grade boys who handed over their pencils when hers broke; high school boys with crushes she turned into boyfriends. College and law school admirers had lined up, relationships in which she determined when they started and ended. Then, well, him, and her luck held for a while, then sputtered and died.
It was luck she needed to rebirth, but how did one rebirth luck?
And what she thought was love begets love. There was a particular energy one exuded when in love. She’d experienced it herself long ago, the way she became a magnet for even more love, love she couldn’t then use because she was already happily in love.
How could she again draw the energy of love directly to her?
That steamy, decidedly unwintery January night, Phoebe deleted her family’s messages, then walked naked, as she never did, into the living room, and searched the spines of her novels, flipping through their pages, finding a name to bestow upon the man she was inventing, a love story as balm, trips to places ripened by dreams.
It was the only way she could think of to remagnetize herself, and when she found real love, no one would ever need to know that to obtain it, she had feigned being a woman in love.
Raquel has sugared her coffee and sipped—“De-lish”—and Phoebe says, “Follow me. Benny’s on the bed. I want him to get used to you,” and Raquel follows along, beneath the kitchen arch, into the dining room and out, a left down the long, well-lit hallway, and across the transom.
“Jesus, Feebs. SOS, big time. You should get those trees cut back.”
Phoebe takes in the big bosomy leaves of the rubber trees pressing against the large north-facing windows, preventing the entry of outside light, causing the dim watery atmosphere of her bedroom in which she sleeps, dreams, and dresses. She ought to call someone, but she’s grown used to the intimacies of her life spent alone in this oxygenated version of being underwater.
“OMG, OMG, I always forget how totes adorb he is,” Raquel says. Always meaning the two times she’s been invited over, when Benny kept to himself, hiding away in here, behaving unlike the social creature that he is. Aware of the change in airflow, Benny, on the bed, cocks open an eye, gives Raquel a hard stare, then rolls himself tight into a ball, crosses his paws over his head. Phoebe feels proud.
She shows Raquel the heating pad, the trickle of water in the bathroom, how much dry and wet food to set out in his bowls on the black-and-white checkerboard kitchen floor bright with sunshine.
Raquel jerks her head at the coffee machine.
“Sure. Help yourself.”
“Am I taking care of Benny because your brother’s going to Palm Springs, too?”
Phoebe is as nonplussed by the disappearance of Raquel’s usually overexcited voice as by the words Raquel has spoken.
“Yes. With his family. He’s married, Raquel, with two kids.”
“Oh, I know. But he’s the kind of solid guy I want to end up with. I love chatting with him.”
Simon chatting with Raquel? Phoebe can’t imagine what they would chat about, but her brother is that kind of very nice guy, wouldn’t blow off his sister’s inquisitive neighbor in case he did any harm.
She looks at Raquel, takes in the wide blue eyes, the pink bowed mouth, the itsy-bitsy top from which pulchritude overflows, the extremely short shorts, the bare feet with toenails painted watermelon, for she has come into Phoebe’s apartment shoeless.
Could Simon find this girl attractive? No, too obvious, too overly flirtatious. Especially compared to Elena, who is tall and lithe, a combination of sweet and tough. Her brother’s eyes have never roamed since the day he met his wife.
Simon has Elena.
Camille has Valentine.
They are cozy in love, and it spears her straight through, skewers her heart.
Why is she the crescent moon waning when her siblings seem always to be waxing?
Her mother says Phoebe’s
