Now, this is Phil’s own story, and Liz knows it well. It’s a first-date story. Maybe second or third. Again, this is what happens when a relationship is stuck in the second gear of “friendship.” Chug, chug, chug. Charm, charm, charm. Has he not noticed that HW never responds in kind? Her texts are short and to the point. Of course, she’s younger, a millennial. Her generation grew up with texts. (Part of her TED Talk centered on an excruciating experience with AOL Messenger, in which she claimed to have a terminal disease and traumatized her entire eighth-grade class.)
Phil is a Gen X’er. Like Liz. Not old enough to be HW’s father. Just old enough to be her creepy uncle.
She almost feels sorry for him. Almost.
I’m going to be in SF next month. Lunch? Dinner?
OK
Where do you want to go? Your town, your pick—but I pay
No
It’s a write-off for me. You’re my contractor.
I’ll wear a tool belt
It’s not spying to read something in plain sight, Liz tells herself. It’s normal; it’s human nature, like walking down an alley and stealing looks into lighted windows. Liz had been strangely disappointed to find out that other people did this. She had thought herself unusually sensitive as a teenager, the Jane Eyre of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
As a teen, Liz was a lonely, gawky girl, convinced of her own unattractiveness despite the insistence of those around her that she was lovely. Her mother was a great beauty, a fate Liz wouldn’t wish on anyone. Except, possibly, HW.
She met Phil senior year of college. She worked at the information desk in the student center. He bought a Friday New York Times, sat down in a nearby easy chair, and worked the crossword puzzle in forty-five minutes, then put it in front of her.
“What do you think of that?”
There’s a line in a novel that haunts her. She can’t remember the novel. She can’t remember the exact line, and she worries that it’s a bad novel, that she would be embarrassed to have one of its lines stuck in her head for eternity. But the line is about how everything that would come to characterize a relationship, for better or worse, was there from the beginning. Liz wishes she had said to Phil: “I think I’m not your mother.” Or: “I think you must be very good at crossword puzzles.” Maybe: “Have you mistaken me for your second-grade teacher?”
What she said was: “Wow—I can’t even do Wednesdays by myself.”
And because it was 1994, they slept together that night and that meant something then. Not a lot but a little. He told her all his stories. She told hers. But they were young when they met, and they ran out of stories quickly. So they made stories together. The hilarious mix-up in Mérida. The Indian restaurant in Knightsbridge. The handsy tailor in Turkey who cupped Phil’s balls when measuring him for a suit and said, when Phil objected: “But this is the most important part.”
What they didn’t make was a child. By the time they got serious about it, Liz was almost forty, shades of Lichtenstein. Her body wouldn’t make a baby and Phil started the new company and adoption was hard and he met HW and who needs a baby when a twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind is batting her baby blues at you, explaining to you that a person’s “tech type” wasn’t just a random collection of tics and social inadequacies, but a particular kind of emotional intelligence that can be harnessed to make companies more competitive and more compassionate.
Really, what kind of man-boy brandishes his crossword puzzle at a stranger and demands her attention? The one that Liz married, the one that Liz loves, the one that is stuck in this permanent not-quite-a-betrayal-but-definitely-a-humiliation loop. How will they ever get out? How does this end?
But Liz knows the answer to that question. It’s never going to end. Phil needs to be new, and that’s the one thing he can never be with Liz.
What happened? I was so worried about you when you didn’t show and then I got the message at my hotel that you couldn’t make it.
Sorry! I lost the phone! And then J surprised me with a reservation at our favorite place and what could I do? I totally spaced that it was our anniversary
Freudian slip?
No one wears slips anymore Freudian camisole, maybe
But you have yr phone now?
OBVIOUSLY ;)
Glad you’re safe. I was just disappointed. Was looking forward to seeing your face.
It’s aging rapidly
Don’t be silly.
I spend $175 on face cream.
Again, don’t be silly. Anyway, I’ll be back in San Francisco next month, staying at my usual place. We can try again.
Can’t wait
Oh, Phil. You’re being played. Can’t you see? But Liz knows he cannot, that men have no understanding of the subtle ways in which women keep them on hold forever.
When Phil is home in Chicago, he’s careful with the burner phone, keeping it in his desk. Sometimes, she notices him absentmindedly stroking the drawer while he’s talking to her. Maybe it’s the phone he’s in love with, not HW. He’s in love with the idea of love; he’s in love with this eternally puerile game. His texts might as well read: Do you like me? Yes. No. As a friend.
There should be a fourth alternative: You’re just another horndog man I tolerate for my job, but if you want to think this is mutual, go for it.
So it’s a wrap
There will be more projects, more companies that need your unique skills.
I don’t think there should be
Why not? I love working with you.
Maybe too much
What?
It was OK for you to use a burner. Your wife is crazy jealous. But when I got a burner—we both know this isn’t right
We’re FRIENDS.
Right. Friends who hide our friendship from our spouses
I don’t. Liz knows everything now. EVERYTHING
Srsly?
Srsly
But that doesn’t make it right. This is not right
I’m leaving her.
Liz breathes in so sharply it feels like a little knife in her diaphragm. This is not true, this is not true. Phil has said nothing of the sort to her.
But even after this exchange, she is not prepared when Phil announces he wants a divorce.
He doesn’t ask right away. There are several days of stormy moods, blowups over nothing. He’s still texting, but no replies are coming back. Liz is sure of it. You wouldn’t need access to a phone to know something is up. He has been cut off. He has been used. Liz has been waiting for this day to come. She assumed he would be happy to run back to the safe haven of their marriage, to the woman who has always stood by him, no matter how much he humiliates her.
Only Phil doesn’t know that, does he? He really believes Liz knows nothing, believes she has given up spying. And she can’t tell him what she knows unless she’s willing to tell him how she knows, and that’s unthinkable. She has to keep the moral high ground. Especially now that he’s saying he wants to end their marriage.
Of all the scenarios she imagined, she never thought that he would see this as a sign that he needed to leave her. Had HW really made him that happy? Is the thought of being without her that devastating?
“I know—” she begins that night at bedtime, then stops. What does she know?