Installation 22: Rumors previous
There were as many accounts of what happened to Phoebe on her date with James Trehorn as there were employees at The Museum. Most of the stories were traded over lunch in the staff lounge, although a few got passed along at the urinals and some at the guard desk as shifts were changing. And, as often happened with gossip, somewhere in the middle of it all lay a small kernel of truth, planted by James Trehorn on Monday morning when he unburdened himself to Penn Bradley, a trusted friend who worked as Assistant Curator in the Drawings Department.
“Don't say anything to anyone,” James said to Penn after blathering on for forty minutes about the date and the horror of having to break down his own bathroom door to get to Phoebe.
“Of course not,” Penn said, doing his best to look both trustworthy and grave.
“And if you do, by chance, find you must say something,” James continued. “Please make sure you let everyone know that she's a crazy bitch. With a drug problem.”
By noon it was widely believed that Phoebe had a problem with heroin and that she'd gone into James' bathroom for a fix, only to nod off. This didn't explain why she was naked from the waist down, but then people did crazy things under the influence of drugs. Maybe the only good veins left were in her very upper thigh. Or stomach. Or ass. Who knows?
Another story, with roots in the Development Office, had Phoebe on a mix of anti-depressants and liquor and agitated over something that happened in high school. Corey Feldman insisted it was something to do with a failed prom night.
Still others, bored as they waited in front of the microwave for leftover spaghetti to reheat, insisted it was a botched suicide attempt.
“I heard there was blood all over the floor,” Mary Ellen Hightower said. “From her cutting her wrists. But of course she cut them horizontally. It was a cry for help.”
“Or the mark of an amateur,” Phillip Mantou said.
“She acted very strangely when I found her asleep in the back hallway last week,” Bronson Menard said, in case anyone had forgotten his role in the story.
“Maybe James just bored her to death,” Corey Reeves speculated as she carried her Diet Coke, salad of mixed greens and baguette to a table. “And she fell asleep in the bathroom. It happened to me once.”
The only thing everyone knew for sure was that Phoebe wasn't talking. In fact, Phoebe was absent on Monday and then again on Tuesday. A few people checked for her on Wednesday, but her desk remained empty.
At home, Phoebe lay on the couch in her pajamas and tried to watch People’s Court but it wasn’t the same without Judge Wapner. She considered whether or not she could call in sick all week. Maybe two weeks. Maybe she’d never go back. The life of a shut-in certainly had its appeals.
She closed her eyes and the image of James and Andrew breaking down the bathroom door and jolting her from her slumber on the bathmat floated up in the darkness, followed by James turning away in disgust. Andrew came with a mop and bucket for the vomit and put her back into her underwear. He gave her a t-shirt to wear and made a bed on the couch.
In the morning, Andrew didn’t say anything as Phoebe tried to explain that someone at the party had given her something and that, in general, she'd been feeling strange for the past week. He only came out of his silence to answer her when she finally thought to ask where James was.
“He has a migraine,” Andrew explained. “And asked that I take you home.”
James Trehorn was not a man who liked to clean up messes.