HW is blonde and dimpled, like Linney. Liz has watched her TED Talk, multiple times.
Liz closes the phone. They say eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, but that’s the point of eavesdropping. It’s a form of espionage, a device, used by the Greeks and Shakespeare and daytime soap operas. The difference is that nowadays the device is done via device. A flip phone, a laptop. What device will she use to spy on Phil next time?
And there will be a next time, Liz realizes. She’s not the only one in need of drama in her life. Phil works twelve, fourteen hours a day and is immensely prized within his world. But he’s not one of the tech CEOs who receives ceaseless public attention. He’s the money guy behind the “geniuses.” Phil goes to TED Talks, but he will never be asked to give one.
What’s up?
Not much. Work. Life.
Same here. Work. Wife. Life.
Damn autocorrect.
Yes, last I checked, you don’t have a wife, but you young people are so what’s the word fluid. Or maybe J told you he’s going to transition?
That’s a weird thing to say. Kinda transphobic
Sorry. If J didn’t exist—would that change things?
For me? Of course
And me? What would it mean for me?
We’re friends
We are. But things can change. I’m sorry if this lands on you unwanted. But things could change, if we both wanted them to change.
Don’t cross the streams
Now you get it.
Liz flicks through her phone, looking for a selfie taken on their trip to Barcelona last year. It’s blurry, unflattering. A shadow mars half her face. (Bad foreshadowing, shadow! Too obvious. Too on the nose. THE SHADOW IS LITERALLY ON HER NOSE.) But she loves this photo of herself because she looks insanely happy.
Loved, she loved the photo, past tense. Now the photo is simply evidence of how dumb she was to believe herself happy. The trip to Barcelona had been a business trip for Phil but also a celebration. They had survived the darkest days of their marriage. It hadn’t been easy. Phil did not see how his emails to HW could count as a betrayal when there had been no sex. A kiss, yes, just one kiss, and they had agreed the next day it was a mistake and it had never happened again.
“Agreed?” Liz had said in counseling. “She basically stopped answering your emails after you kissed her, and you took it out on me for weeks.”
That had been a mistake, because it wounded his ego. It also reminded Phil that Liz had spied on him, and he insisted her invasiveness was as egregious as what he had done. He rejected the term emotional affair. His needs weren’t being met at home; he should be praised for not cheating.
That was August 2017. October 2017 brought #MeToo, but Phil had a clear conscience. He hadn’t masturbated in front of anyone. He hadn’t lured vulnerable young women into his hotel room and taken off his clothes, or dangled quid pro quo deals in front of them. He had fallen in love, but it was a first-act Camelot kind of love. He loved her in silence.
Then Phil’s company began working with a start-up that desperately needed the exact service HW provided, a sophisticated psych test that identifies and treats problem personalities. She wanted the contract. If she didn’t get it—well, who knows what might happen? Phil hadn’t understood at the time that he had done anything wrong, given that she was no longer under contract when he started mooning after her. In fact, the kiss had occurred after a simple wrap-up dinner to commemorate the project’s end.
Now he gets it. Now. He understands that the patriarchy never sleeps, that he might have ceased to be HW’s supervisor, but he still had power over her, which forced her to be polite about the kiss, which was awkward for her, as she, too, had a spouse. What could he do? He had to give her the new contract or she could go public with his blunder.
By the time he told all this to Liz, he had, in fact, already given HW the new contract.
“Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” Liz said when Phil came clean. He didn’t even recognize the reference, much less its significance. Their first real date had been to a Laurel and Hardy film festival.
Well, it was a very long time ago, so long ago that it might have been a different place. The Chicago of their college days has been replaced by something shinier and more generic. Or maybe Chicago is the same and they’re the ones who changed.
Good morning, what city are you waking up in?
W-ville
?????
I don’t visit cities. I occupy a series of interchangeable W hotel rooms.
If there was a city outside your room, what would it be called on a map.
Checking. Double-decker bus, traffic on the wrong side. All our instruments agree: London
London! Oh, I have a great restaurant suggestion. Wait—you don’t eat meat.
Nothing with a face.
But you can do Indian, right, you upright millennial? There’s this amazing place in Mayfair that I stumbled on a few years ago. Hard to get a res, but there’s a communal table and a bar . . .
Knightsbridge, Liz thinks when she reads this exchange. It was in Knightsbridge, Phil. And I was the one who found it.
Their therapist had a word for the stuck-in-second-gear nature of the emotional affair, but Liz has forgotten it. Besides, #MeToo changed the emotional affair. Why is no one talking about this? People thrown together in work environments, hyperaware of the new rules, are probably more likely to have emotional affairs now. Perpetual anticipation, as the Sondheim song warns, is not good for the heart.
Liz used to love musicals. Lately not so much. They are too linear about love. People fall in, people fall out, but they seldom fall in and out and in again. She doesn’t like rom-coms anymore either. Has anyone noticed how easily people jettison their partners in rom-coms? Liz has.
At any rate, she recognizes Burner Phil, as she thinks of him. It is the Phil she knew when they first started dating—solicitous, eager to share, impress. Solicitous Phil wanted to recommend restaurants and books and obscure films. Solicitous Phil wanted to take you on adventures! “Let’s get in the car,” Solicitous Phil would say. “I’ve got a surprise, I’ve got something to show you.”
They had been together ten years when Liz realized that the whole point of Solicitous Phil’s surprise quests was that he determined the agenda. They went where he chose to go, ate what he preferred to eat. By casting his plans as surprises, he was always in control. Heck, she made him go to that awful production of Lysistrata just because she wanted, on principle, to be the one who made the plan for once.
Still she loves him. That’s what rom-coms get right. Love isn’t logical. Only in rom-coms, the two people seem mismatched, then find their antipathy is really just their way of fighting their mad attraction to one another.
Whereas in real life, the mad attraction feels logical and then these rifts are exposed, yet you go on loving the other person anyway.
What’s up? Who’s up? Who’s on first? What’s on second?
I’m up. Body’s in California but thinks it’s in London
You do get around.
My carbon footprint :{
Oh, I’m sure you have the daintiest of carbon footprints. In fact, I bet there is a prince out there with a glass slipper, trying to find whose sooty sole it fits. Did I ever tell you the story about when I was 7 and I insisted that the story of Cinderfella was the “real” story and Cinderella was copying it? I was adamant that it was about a guy, that everyone else was wrong.