TY
Hey I had a meeting with Willoughby.
That guy
Did I ever tell you how I came to meet him? It’s a funny story. Three years ago, I was in Seattle and I had to take a meeting with him what a pig. He made us meet him for this dreadful vegan food, then insisted on going out for gelato and when someone said gelato wasn’t vegan, he got so angry, argued about it all night. That’s Willoughby in a nutshell. His type—that’s the reason we need people like you. We have to move away from this idea that having a great business model is a license to be rotten to people. The hubris on these guys—and they’re all guys.
[twenty-four hours later]
Just seeing this sorry
He has left the phone in his jacket pocket, but the April day is mild, a classic Chicago tease, so his jacket is once again on the back of the sofa. Liz finds it when she comes in from a walk with Pugsley, and she can’t help patting the pockets as she hangs it up. Ah, a lump! It makes her sad, embarrassed for him, to see the inequity of the exchange—Phil’s logorrheic style, the girl’s terse replies that she can’t be bothered to punctuate.
This is how it happened before, eighteen months ago. He became conscientious about food, exercise. He bought new clothes. Liz started snooping, found his love letters to HW, who clearly was keeping him at arm’s length but also wanted to continue working with him. He was a pipeline for future contracts, after all.
Liz and Phil went to counseling. Liz admitted all her flaws and then some. She had been angry; she had been resentful of the chasm between their worlds, the high-flying venture capitalist and the high school English teacher. She had been cold.
But she’d changed, become more solicitous, realized that the world’s ego stroking meant nothing to Phil if he didn’t feel attended to at home. She had saved their marriage.
Or so she had thought.
Got my own burner
New phone who dis
Haha
Why are you using a burner?
It’s . . . fun. Like a secret club, walkie talkies like that TV show you’re always talking about
The Wire
That’s it
I can’t believe you still haven’t watched it. Everything OK at home?
J saw that you were texting me again
OH
Life’s just easier if you don’t pop up on my screen when I’m with J
I get it. Liz is the same way—I feel like she needs to stir up drama because she doesn’t really have that much going on. She blows everything out of proportion. Or she renovates. And now that she’s renovated every room in our house, she’s buying art. She’s always on me to pick out something for my office, like I care. She’s bored.
Sad
“Miss Kelsey?”
“Ms.,” she corrects absentmindedly, her thoughts far from this classroom, her thoughts locked on the 2.8-inch display of a Samsung flip phone, wondering what messages might be flying back and forth. “Msssssssss. Mrs. Kelsey is OK too. But not Miss.”
“Mssssssss. Kelsey—why was Zeus so awful?”
“Awful?”
“He’s a rapist.”
Liz has been teaching a Greek mythology unit every spring for ten years now. She begins with Demeter and Persephone; Chicago Aprils make it easy to imagine a world where spring might never come again. It’s a private school, a progressive one verging on what her mother called hippy-dippy, and her students have always been quick to recognize the vagaries of the gods.
Since #MeToo, however, they are even more disturbed by how the gods behave. Hades is a kidnapper, plain and simple; why should Persephone be punished for eating a few seeds? Why is Medusa demonized for being raped? Why does Zeus force himself on unwilling women? (Liz has always encouraged that inquiry, teaching Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan,” which recognizes how frightened Leda must have been, carried skyward by a swan. Liz leans hard on Yeats’s choice of terrified.) To teenagers, the gods are like adults, taking themselves much too seriously, demanding respect they have not earned, changing the rules as it suits them while torturing the puny mortals in their care. Gods are hypocrites and bullies.
The students are not wrong.
“As a god,” Liz says, “Zeus believed himself entitled to what he wanted when he wanted it.”
“Why does Hera put up with him?”
“There aren’t a lot of choices for gods when it comes to marriage.”
“She’s his sister.”
“Gods can’t be married to mortals. Mortals can’t even look at the gods in their authentic state. Remember what happened to the mother of Dionysius when she asked to see Zeus in his true raiment.”
“Hera tricked her into asking that. Why does Hera go after the women? Why doesn’t she kill Zeus?”
“Because he’s immortal.”
Phil is not a god, but he is often treated like one because he gathers and allocates money for ideas that might change the world. He does not force himself on young women. He does not take on disguises to seduce them, nor does he turn them into creatures to hide his dalliances from his wife of almost twenty-five years.
Phil’s weakness—his Achilles’ heel, Liz thinks—is that he cannot resist the delight of being new to someone, anyone. To tell the stories that Liz already knows, having lived through many of them.
Did I ever tell you about the time that I realized I was sitting in front of David Foster Wallace at the theater?
?
It was in New York. A production of Lysistrata that had been a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had been brought over. It was a hot ticket. They set it in the 1970s—the design, the look was borrowed from a satire of Marin County life, called The Serial.
The podcast
No, not Serial. _The Serial_. It ran in newspapers in San Francisco, just like Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin.
Gesundheit
Haha. Anyway, they took the humor really low. Scatological even. There was this running joke about a woman with bulimia. It was gross. Maybe it worked in Scotland, but it was dying in New York. The third or fourth time the character fake vomited, the theater was dead silent—and then this big, booming laugh came from behind me. Turns out David Foster Wallace loved a good vomit joke.
It wasn’t David Foster Wallace, Liz thinks, staring at the phone. It was William Styron. How could he confuse the two? Then she realizes—HW wouldn’t be impressed by Styron. But DFW is a writer her generation might know. Phil is not only changing the story; he’s tailoring it to make it more appealing to HW.
And, of course, there is no mention of Liz, who was the one who recognized Styron in the first place, who chose that production over the musical she really wanted to see because Phil hated musicals. It was her thirtieth birthday weekend. She felt so old. She was so young. In the wake of Alexander Hamilton’s indiscretions, his wife sings that she’s taking herself out of history. But Phil is taking Liz out of his. If she doesn’t exist in Phil’s stories, will she eventually not exist in his life?
She’s surprised Phil even remembers The Serial, a book that was quite dear to her. As for Tales of the City—he never read those books, but he watched the PBS television adaptation with her. He liked Laura Linney. “She’s my type,” he said to his brown-eyed, brunette wife. “I mean, my type before I met you.”