Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Livers behaved in some erratic ways, sure, all the organs do. But the liver was unique in the way that it healed. It was full of forgiveness. It understood that you needed a few chances before you got your life right. And it wouldn’t just forgive you; it would practically forget. It would allow you to start over in a way that he could not imagine was true in any other avenue of life. We should all be like the liver, he thought. We should all regenerate like this when we’re injured.

There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen.

He loved the dusk—the blue twilight, especially in summer, when the streets crowded with people who had knowledge of winter, who had seen endless days where the streets were inhospitable.

But here’s what he didn’t know, I told him, and what he would learn: A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.

“Marriage always reminds me of that old saying about democracy,” I told him. “It’s the worst form of government, other than all the other forms of government.”

But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it.

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.