He doesn’t even seem to notice that she spoke.
This isn’t about you, but—I’m definitely leaving Liz.
[a day later]
Did you really give up the burner? Or are you just ignoring me?
[eight hours later]
Do you talk to other people on this burner? Do you have other burners?
[a day later]
Dammit, HW, I’m going to call you on your other phone.
[one minute later]
Please don’t.
Are you seeing these messages?
Yes.
OK.
I don’t know what to say.
My marriage has been over for a long time. Again, this has nothing to do with you.
I’m married.
I know.
I’m happy.
If you say so. Clearly some need was going unfulfilled.
Still open to working with you
I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.
You usually don’t
I don’t want to be one of the shitty men. So many shitty men out there.
You’re telling me
They go back to therapy. Liz literally doesn’t know what to say. She has been spying on Phil for so long, it’s hard to remember what she does know, what she might know, and what she can’t know. She isn’t temperamentally suited to this level of deception. By nature, she is an honest person. Whereas Phil has always been in favor of the judicious lie, the lies people tell while rationalizing that they are sparing someone else’s feelings but are really mainly sparing themselves the inconvenience of the truth.
Liz says to the therapist, “He seems very distracted to me. Since this spring.”
It’s summer now. She has too much free time. She exercises more, she gets a new haircut, adds highlights, window-shops at galleries, looking for things to fill all the walls she added to the house during its renovation. A house with walls needs a lot more art.
Phil says: “She’s so cold. All I want is love and affection. When I walk through the door, I feel as if I’m just a giant imposition, a wallet for her to plunder, like Jane Jetson.”
“He travels a lot.”
“For my job.”
“You don’t have to travel that much.”
“You could travel with me.”
“I have a job.”
“You don’t have to have a job.”
Without a job, who would she be, what would she do? There’s nothing left to renovate, not in the house, not on herself.
Hi?
Hi
How are you?
Fine How’s therapy going
Ok. I guess I owe it to her.
To yourself too.
Thanks. You’re a good friend.
We’re better as friends, don’t you think?
Shrug
I’m happy with J
What changed?
I was taking him for granted. If you really love someone, embers are always there.
I feel that I’m taken for granted. She doesn’t even have a real job! Our lifestyle, our house—she just takes that as her due.
Maybe she feels taken for granted?
Maybe. Hey did I ever tell you the story about the time my father tried to teach me how to score a baseball game?
It’s a funny story, yet a sad one too. Liz knows it, of course.
They had been together for three months. She and Phil were in bed in her room in the apartment she shared with three other girls. Her room was the largest, but it wasn’t well insulated. That was the trade-off. Huddled beneath two blankets and a quilt for warmth, they began telling new kinds of stories, the tragic stories that people think define them when they are young. She talked about her father, a serial cheater who was forever sneaking out to meet up with other women. “The dark end of the street,” Phil warbled mournfully. She had never heard the song before.
Then Phil told her about his father, who wanted to do the fatherly things but always botched them. The day he tried to teach Phil how to score a baseball game he ended up screaming at him, calling him a moron.
Touched by Phil’s vulnerability, Liz did what women were never supposed to do: she said “I love you” first. Phil then did what nineteen-year-old men were not supposed to do three months into a college romance: he asked her to marry him. They were engaged for eighteen months, married a week after their graduation. How smart they had felt in their certainty, how lucky.
Now here is Phil’s familiar story, text box after text box, with barely a comment back. Her husband is preening for this other woman, strutting with his feathers in full view.
According to the Greeks, the peacock owes its appearance to adultery. Hera asked the watchman Argus, with his one hundred eyes, to keep guard over a white cow, Io, one of Zeus’s loves that he had tried to disguise to keep her from Hera’s wrath. It was Zeus’s solution to send a disguised Hermes to Argus. He talked and talked and talked until finally all one hundred of Argus’s eyes closed.
And Hermes killed him.
Argus’s eyes were added to the peacock’s tails. And what became of Zeus’s love? Hera sent stinging flies to torture her, until she ran all the way to Egypt and regained human form, one of the happier endings for a lover of Zeus.
Liz loves Phil. She loves him so much that it hurts, watching him make a fool of himself in front of a young woman who clearly has no interest in him. How can someone not love you when you love him this much?
She and Phil have the exact same problem. If only she could tell him that.
I’m going to be in SF again at month’s end.
Oh
Dinner?
I don’t know
We’re friends. Friends have dinner, right?
No one has dinner anymore except Insta influencers
Funny
[curtsy]
No, seriously, can we have dinner?
Where are you staying?
Fairmont
Nice. Old school, but nice
I’m old school. But nice.
<g>
So dinner?
Date?
NOT a date! DINNER.
Haha You know what I mean
Oct 30.
That works J will be in Shanghai
If he were here, would you tell him you were meeting me?
Does Liz know you’re still talking to me?
We’re separated as of last week.
Oh
Not that it’s relevant to you.
I don’t know what to say.
I’m going to be happy. This has nothing to do with you. I deserve to be happy.
You do. Everyone does.
They are not separated. He floated the idea of a trial separation at their last counseling session. Liz refused to discuss it. The only way to save a marriage, she believes, is to stay and fight. Once Phil is out the door, he will never be back.
But he also will never stop straying. And she is no Hera. She cannot send stinging flies after the poor girl trapped inside the white cow. It’s not this girl’s fault, and it won’t be the next girl’s fault.
Oh god, there’s going to be a next girl—and that’s the best-case scenario.
He whistles as he packs for San Francisco. Liz realized long ago, the first time, that he is kindest to her when he believes his relationship with HW is going well. He must think that she is going to leave her husband for him, despite the denials. Phil has always gotten what he wants. A short man, boyish and charming, he has a big personality. He’s irresistible. It’s only a matter of time before he gets what he wants. What he thinks he wants.