Slow Burner (Hush collection) Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Laura Lippman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  eISBN: 9781542022170

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  Hi, it’s Phil. New phone, who dis, ha ha. I got a second phone.

  Pourquoi

  Going to use regular # for business, this # for trying to bring you up to speed on seminal films of the 1980s and ’90s. Welcome to the friend zone, matey.

  Funny

  No parking in the friend zone—remember when I showed you the movie Airplane! that time in Santa Monica?

  Yeah

  Thrilled to be working with you again. You are absolutely aces, the best in the biz. Would have been devastated if you didn’t want to work with me again but not surprised. I’m really sorry I crossed the line. Crossed the streams, if you will.

  ?

  Ghostbusters reference.

  Loved the new one. Never saw original

  Opposite for me.

  Misogynist

  Hey!

  JK

  I’m in SF next month, maybe dinner?

  Lemme check date

  Liz is gathering the laundry when the phone slides out of Phil’s khakis’ pocket. It’s a cheap basic model. It looks like a toy, but why would Phil have a toy? Liz and Phil don’t have kids; they don’t even have friends with kids.

  She looks at the phone on the bathroom floor. What to do with it? It seems natural, innocent even, definitely innocent, to pick it up and manipulate its buttons until this text thread comes into view. Liz has found several lost phones in their Logan Square neighborhood over the years, and she has always done her best to reunite them with their owners. She assumes Phil has found someone’s phone while walking their dog, then didn’t follow through on finding the phone’s rightful owner.

  Only—Phil is the not-so-rightful owner, hiding behind a Utah area code. His correspondent—San Francisco area code—appears to be the contractor, HW, who almost wrecked Liz and Phil’s marriage eighteen months ago. That was the code Phil used for her in his contacts, HW. A private joke, one Liz never sussed out.

  Now what? Liz cannot put the phone back in Phil’s pocket and then put his pants in the wash, because the phone will be destroyed and he will replace it with another phone, one he will safeguard more carefully.

  Yet she also cannot ask Phil about the phone, much less the text. She promised she would never spy on him again. It was an easy promise to make and keep because she believed they were happy again and there would be no reason, going forward, to doubt him.

  She believed they were happy until a strange cheap phone clattered to the bathroom floor.

  It is early April in Chicago, and the only thing predictable about the weather is how unpredictable it is. Phil left his denim jacket slung over the sofa when he came home last night, a habit of long standing, and headed out the door this morning in a peacoat. He had to walk ten steps past the hooks in the vestibule to avoid hanging up his jacket, but he does that almost every day. Liz has tried everything to encourage Phil to hang up his jacket. Finally, at great expense—Phil’s expense, to be fair, but he runs a venture capital firm and she’s a private-school teacher—she hired a carpenter to come to the house and restore the vestibule that a previous owner had dismantled, the final renovation in their home of almost twenty-five years.

  Their house was built in the early twentieth century, a sturdy stone home for one of the financial whizzes of that era, then divided into apartments in the 1970s. The Kelseys rented the first floor as newlyweds, bought the house fifteen years later, and eventually began to restore it, floor by floor, room by room. One now enters a toasty vestibule with a mission bench, hooks for coats, cubbies for wet shoes, and an antique umbrella stand. Almost every day, Phil sits on the mission bench and takes off his shoes; he puts his umbrella in the stand—then pushes open the heavy oak door with the stained glass window and throws his jacket on the sofa.

  Liz puts the phone in the denim jacket’s right breast pocket. Phil is a man who is forever losing keys, wallets, phones. (This absentmindedness is deemed proof of his genius.) Clearly, he is not in the habit, not yet, of taking this second phone everywhere he goes. He won’t remember that he left it in his khakis. All he will feel is relief at finding it.

  Later that night, she notices him roaming the house, fidgeting, picking up piles of magazines and newspapers, poking under the mission bench in the vestibule.

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “I thought I left . . . my keys in my pocket.”

  “I hung your keys by the front door.” There is a charming iron arrow by the front door with multiple hooks for keys. Phil never uses it.

  “Oh.” He continues to pace, poke, search. At some point, he must slide his hand into the pocket of his denim jacket and find his new friend waiting for him. At any rate, he comes into the den, where Liz is reading, suddenly jovial and relaxed.

  “Do you want to watch a movie?”

  “Sure,” she says, although she doesn’t. She curls into his side on the sofa. Their pug crawls into her lap, snuffling wetly. Phil chooses Ghostbusters, the all-female reboot.

  “How old were we when the first one came out?”

  “I was ten, you were nine.” She has never minded being older than he is. It’s only a year, and Liz knows she looks good for her age.

  She also knows the old saying that cautions men to remember, whenever they meet a beautiful woman, that somewhere, someone is tired of her.

  Throughout the movie, Phil’s fingers twitch as if yearning for purchase, the feel of the new phone. Who you gonna call? Who you gonna text? He will write about this later. The movie, his memories of the original.

  You were right about Ghostbusters. I love the original, but the all-female reboot is better.

 

  I can’t believe all the misogynist crap it had to withstand. Not to mention the racist stuff. You were right. Sometimes, I’m so embarrassed to be a man.

  Love Kate McKinnon!

  “No bread for me,” Phil says at dinner. “And no potatoes.”

  Dinner is roast chicken, with carrots and potatoes roasted in its pan juices, homemade cheddar biscuits, and a salad. It’s a perfect meal for the blustery night. Phil eats only white meat chicken and preempts the salad course.

  “Are you doing . . . keto?”

  “Nothing that formal. Just cutting out bread, starches. They make me logy. And you know I’m never really off the clock because I’m working with people across time zones. London’s six hours ahead, San Francisco is two hours behind. I have to keep a clear head. Been reading this book, Grain Brain. It’s interesting.”

  “You used to say that all diets were frauds, that every eating plan was, at bottom, just a gimmicky way to reduce caloric intake.”

  She liked that Phil. She misses that Phil.

  “I still think that. But I also find my head is so much clearer now. Giving up alcohol helps too.” He takes a sip of La Croix.

  Liz pours herself another glass of wi
ne. It’s a pinot noir, which pairs better with chicken than most white wines. There’s no way she’s going to give up alcohol right now.

  I ran five miles today.

  Ouch

  Started again a few weeks ago. Gotta get fit. I’m an old man in a young man’s game. Gotta keep up.

  You’re not old

  Says the 29-year-old who looks like she’s 22. You can’t imagine being old. But you know what? I can’t imagine you being old either. You will never be old.

  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.”

  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.”