Slow Burner (Hush collection) Read online

  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 The Chicago of their college days has been replaced by something shinier and more generic.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.

  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?

  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.