sistermagpie: Classic magpie (Default)
sistermagpie ([personal profile] sistermagpie) wrote in [community profile] theamericans 2014-02-25 02:48 am (UTC)

There really are some interesting parallels there. With Philip he thought he was just dealing with a guy he'd worked with for a long time, and then Gregory throws this affair at him to at least in part to hurt him. In Elizabeth's case she knows what she's going into, ostensibly, but it might be very different listening to it. She's probably had her own pov on Philip's honeytraps for years, and now sitting here listening to this woman talk about ways he's been good to her. She's talking about this guy that she loves and feels has been so good to her, and Elizabeth's got to be surprised at how that feelings. I mean, even though she knows that it's not real, I'll bet it's very uncomfortable listening to these stories of intimacy, which is closer to her and Gregory than she'd probably imagined. I mean, again, she knows it's not real and in so many ways it's nothing like Gregory, but she is being confronted with somebody who's suddenly a real person with a real relationship with Philip, and I think that's partly why she'd focus on things like that he's doing something sexually with her that he's not with Elizabeth.

It's possible that Martha isn't even that explicit, exactly. She may just say something about how he's better than other people, that he's shown her things about her body or whatever, that she feels like she can ask him for things or whatever, or that he's just made her feel ways she's never feel. That could lead to Elizabeth asking him, vaguely to start, what exactly he's doing with this woman. He'd probably just shrug it off at first--whatever she likes. But that would open up the subject for Elizabeth to ask what she likes and maybe realize that for all the time they've been together, Philip maybe knows Martha physically better than he knows Elizabeth--and then more disturbing, maybe that means Martha knows her body more than Elizabeth does in that way because there are ways that Martha's approached her relationship with Philip that Elizabeth never thought about and it actually got her something valuable that Elizabeth isn't sure she is.

So it's kind of flipped in a way--with Gregory Philip had to face that he was offering this to Elizabeth, but she couldn't accept it from him. She wanted it from Gregory. With Martha it might be more that Elizabeth realizes that she never asked for it, but he was offering it.

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