Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

He hadn’t looked at another woman once during his marriage, so in love with Rachel was he—so in love was he with any kind of institution or system.

“You can’t pull this kind of shit, Rachel.” He only said her name at the end of sentences now, Rachel.

The first thing people wanted to know was how long things in the marriage had been bad for: Were you unhappy that night at the school gala, when you were showing off your college swing dancing lessons? Were you unhappy at that bat mitzvah when you took her hand and kissed it absentmindedly during the speeches? Was I right that at parent-teacher conferences when you stood by the coffee and she stood by the office checking her phone you were actually fighting? How it shook people to see someone extricate themselves from a bad situation; how people so brazenly wondered aloud every private thing there was to wonder.

These questions weren’t really about him; no, they were questions about how perceptive people were and what they missed and who else was about to announce their divorce and whether the undercurrent of tension in their own marriages would eventually lead to their demise. Did the fight I had with my wife on our actual anniversary that was particularly vicious mean we’re going to get divorced? Do we argue too much? Do we have enough sex? Is everyone else having more sex? Can you get divorced within six months of an absentminded hand-kiss at a bat mitzvah? How miserable is too miserable? How miserable is too miserable? One day he would not be recently divorced, but he would never forget those questions, the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.

He knew he could allude to Rachel’s craziness, her anger, her tantrums, her unwillingness to immerse herself in her children’s lives—he could say things like “I mean, I’m sure you noticed that she never came to STEM Night?”—but he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to undermine Rachel’s status at school out of an old sense of protectiveness that he couldn’t quite shake. She was a monster, yes, but she had always been a monster, and she was still his monster, for she had not yet been claimed by another,

And there had been Rachel, who didn’t look at him like he was too short or too pathetic, even though he was, he was. He looked across the room to her at that party, and she looked back at him and smiled. So much time had passed since then, and yet that was Rachel for him. He had spent so many years in the service of trying to relocate that Rachel within the Rachel that she kept proving herself to be. But even now, it was that version of Rachel that was the first that ever came to mind when he thought of her. He felt he would be doing worlds better if it weren’t.

Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan;

She wore the leggings the other moms wore to exercise classes and the tank tops (BUT FIRST, COFFEE, read one of hers. Another: BRUNCH SO HARD), but those had their own professionalism to them. She felt that with all the alternatives to pants now—yoga pants, leggings, etc.—sweatpants had become an overt, if definitionally passive, statement on a woman’s state of mind. “Sweatpants,” she always said. “That’s just giving up.”

As he walked, he hit the search function on his screen, where he found a sampling of the women nearby who were available for digital insertion and nipple stimulation and hand job execution and other adult activity at eight-thirty A.M. on a Friday: an Indian woman in her late forties holding an infant; a droopy-eyed white woman with black nails in her mid-forties sucking on a lollipop; one with orange-tan skin and pastel purple hair and tortoiseshell glasses; a pale woman of indeterminate age (but adult) with a pacifier in her mouth; a freckled woman’s cleavage (just her cleavage); a pale woman’s ass crack (just her ass crack); a pockmarked woman with scared eyes who wore a heavy layer of wrongly matched foundation that had the effect of spackle and a button-down shirt, whose mouth was tightlipped and betrayed a nervousness at the act of being photographed; a brunette whose hair was in two Swiss Miss braids and who was holding one of them across her upper lip to make a mustache; a silver-haired woman who looked to be his mother’s age holding a martini glass, a sliver of a man’s shoulder not cropped out completely. There were also the usual numerous women holding nieces and nephews to signal a kind of casually incidental maternalism in case the reviewer of the photo was looking, consciously or not, for a permanent situation instead of just some of that digital insertion, etc. He swiped right on a woman who’d angled her photo so that she was literally hanging off her bed at a...

There was something in him that liked the world as his dating app presented it, something that liked to think of New York as a city covered with people just having sex constantly. People who walked around with only one imperative: to fuck, or to somehow otherwise touch/lick/suck/penetrate/apply hot breath to, the first warm body who agreed to it, people crazed with sex and fire, people who were still alive, maybe after a few years of death, like him, and who looked just like regular people but were deep down barel...

when he looked at Facebook, he became despondent and overwhelmed by the number of people he hadn’t yet told about his divorce. But Facebook was also a landscape of roads not taken and moments of bliss, real or staged, that he couldn’t bear. The marriages that seemed plain and the posts that seemed incidental and not pointed, because they telegraphed not an aggressively great status in life but a just-fine one, those were the ones that left him clutching his heart. Toby hadn’t dreamed of great and transcendent things for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn’t an idiot. He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn’t he just have regular, silly things? His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She’d apparently gotten three strikes. “What a night,” she’d written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write “Enjoy this for now” or “All desire is death.” It was best to stay off Facebook.

he sat and stared at the questions, knowing the truth wouldn’t quite work. What would he be if he weren’t what he was (a book critic is somewhat true and a good choice, right?), what his spirit animal was (what? What did that mean?), his favorite food (hummus? It was true, but is there a food that’s less sexy than hummus? There is not), his favorite movie (he wanted to put down Annie Hall but wasn’t sure that was still okay), how he liked to spend a rainy afternoon (reading and watching porn and masturbating). He was stymied. It wasn’t that he couldn’t fill out the forms; it wasn’t that he wasn’t ready to date—truly, by the time a marriage is over and the leaving is done, a person is more than ready for something new. But the paperwork. As if the prospect of combing through New Yorkers looking for love weren’t its own existential nightmare. He had done this when he was younger, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he resolved it? Hadn’t he ended this bullshit by getting married?

[eggplant emoji] [double purple devil emoji] [investigator emoji] [woman dancing possible samba in evening gown emoji] Let’s fuck?

the messages he was getting—women who wanted to LOL at his every joke, and send winkies, and pictures, and set his weary heart afire with double entendre. Some sent emojis like [smiley face] or [winky face]. Some sent absolute operas with their emojis, like: [woman raising her hand emoji] plus [male construction worker emoji] plus [man and woman emoji] plus [bathtub emoji], which he cannot begin to describe how this turned him on.

Face, face, face, face, full body, face, face, just collarbone, face, face, face, just ass crack, face, tongue, just sideboob, oh man just lips, face.

It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.

they mostly still wanted children—even the ones who pretended they didn’t out of some silly imperative to seem cool or wild or other or invulnerable or more like a man, as if that’s what men wanted. These young women could be easily led astray by kindness, and Toby didn’t want to have to worry that treating a woman well would result in some sort of expectation of an upward, forward-pointing trajectory. He could not imagine himself on any trajectory right now, much less an upward, forward-pointing one. He knew that was an unpopular point of view for a man in his position—our friend Seth would barely believe him if he confessed this; his own Hr search parameters had begun at twenty and expired at twenty-seven despite the fact that he, like us, was forty-one. “Why not nineteen?” Toby asked. “Or eighteen even? That’s legal.” “I’m not a perv,” Seth said, even though there were literally hundreds of women who would absolutely have classified Seth as a perv.

So as he was entering the park that morning, his need for confirmation of his fellow New Yorkers as a rabid bunch of writhing hornballs who could not make it to lunchtime without an orgasm validated, his phone began to ring and it disconcerted him for a minute. It was Joanie, her blushing ID photo picture coming up through the hospital’s internal caller app. Her picture overtook the picture of a personal trainer in a bikini, confusing the superhighway in his brain that had been prepping itself for lust.

his phone began to ring and it disconcerted him for a minute. It was Joanie, her blushing ID photo picture coming up through the hospital’s internal caller app. Her picture overtook the picture of a personal trainer in a bikini, confusing the superhighway in his brain that had been prepping itself for lust.

We didn’t know yet that there were variations on insecurity; we thought we were all maximally insecure,

He said he’d walk me to the bus stop, and I began to stand and then so did he, but when he stopped standing, I kept going, one inch, two inches, three inches. Toby was used to being short; I wasn’t used to being very tall.

We went to a couples therapist. He told her that she had too much contempt. He said contempt is one of the four horsemen of the marital apocalypse.”

when Adam and I went over to their place for dinner, and it was a nightmare. Sweet, affable Adam tried to make conversation with Rachel about the agency business, and she answered his questions like she was a Miss America pageant contestant, in full sentences, no room for follow-up, and kept rushing the courses.

When I told people what I did, they’d say, “Being a mother is the hardest job there is.” But it wasn’t. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick. Back when I had a job, no one ever said to me, “Having an actual job and being a mother is the hardest job there is.” We had to not say those things so that we could tiptoe around all the feelings of inadequacy that we projected onto the stay-at-home mothers; in fact, you couldn’t even ask a woman you suspected of stay-at-homery what she did because there was no not-awkward way to ask it. (“Do you work?” I once asked a woman back when I had a job. “Of course I work,” she said. “I’m a mom.” But I was a mom, too, so what was what I did called?) But also: No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too.

Entrusting them to a stranger who was available for babysitting by virtue of the fact that she was incapable of doing anything else is not something that fills a person with faith and relaxation. Now that I have worked and stayed at home, I can confirm all of this. Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud. But now that I don’t work, no one is listening. No one listens to stay-at-home mothers, which, I guess, is why we were so careful about their feelings in the first place. Anyway.

It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff...

And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.

Sexual awakenings were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men.

“Or maybe when we get married we have no ability to know how long forever could possibly be,” he said as he ate an egg-white omelet. “Think about all the times something feels like it lasts forever. Forever seems like the duration of high school, which is four years but that’s only because we’ve only been alive for sixteen years and so four years of that is a huge chunk of our lifetime—a quarter of it. By the time we make this decision, to hook ourselves to a person for the rest of our lives, we’re what? Twenty-five? Thirty? We’re babies. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with. How could we fathom what it would be like to be on our best behavior for that long? Or know what is funny or charming to us now but intolerable in the future? How will we know what we need? Your tastes in TV haven’t even changed yet. I loved Friends when I was young and then I loved Friends in reruns in my twenties and now if I hear the sound of the opening music I want to die.”

“Marriage is like the board in that old Othello game,” he said as he ate a chicken breast baked dry, no added oil, please. “The board is overwhelmingly full of white discs until someone places enough black discs in enough of the right places to flip all the discs to black. Marriage starts out full of white discs. Even when there are a few black ones on the board, it’s still a white board. You get into a fight? Ultimately fine and something to laugh at in the end, because the Othello board is still white. But when it finally happens and the black discs take over—the affair, the financial impropriety, the boredom, the midlife crisis, whatever it is that ends the marriage—the board becomes black. Now you look at the marriage, even the things that were formerly characterized as good memories, as tainted and rotted from the start: That adorable argument on the honeymoon was actually foreshadowing;

“She’s on Zoloft, as of a year ago. Guys, a woman comes in complaining about anything, she gets sent away with a script for antidepressants.

Joanie lifted Karen’s eyelids. She looked up, surprised and thrilled. “Wilson’s!” Clay and Logan followed her, each of them taking a moment to look into her eyes. Joanie looked at Toby like she’d just seen the stars for the first time. Toby went over to look. Wilson’s disease was the body’s inability to process copper through the liver. The copper acted as a toxin in the brain. The easiest and most visible sign of it was a copper-colored ring surrounding the irises.

He gave a sonogram to an MTA worker whom he had diagnosed with hemochromatosis a year ago. Now the man’s liver was a little scarred, but it was better. It was regenerating. It was almost new again. Toby pushed the wand over and around the man’s liver. He loved this part; every sonogram, every biopsy, was always like the first time. You couldn’t believe what the liver was capable of. This never got old for Toby, not since the first time he saw it in medical school, in a textbook of time-lapse pictures of a healing liver. 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. On the darkest days of his marriage, Toby attended to his hospital business, and out of the corner of his eyes was always the liver, whispering to him that one day, there would be not much sign of all of this damage. He would regenerate, too.

Joanie went over to Karen and lifted her eyelids again. “I can’t believe we got a Wilson’s case,” she said. “I’ve only seen it once before,” Toby said. “It’s awfully rare.” “The ring makes her eyes so pretty,” Joanie said. “Yes,” Toby said. He looked over her shoulder into Karen Cooper’s unresponsive eyes. “As far as life-threatening diseases go, it’s a pretty one.”

two women wearing yoga pants. One was enthusiastically feeding a baby in a stroller, making big eyes and mouth and noises with every bite in a desperate bid to drown out the noises in her head about her life choices.

I liked smoking pot and cigarettes alone in my apartment. That was maybe the worst insult of adulthood, that even your silly, non-life-threatening, nonbase desires got swallowed up by routine and maturity and edged out of your life for good.

“So this happens every week?” she asked Toby. “Without fail,” he said. “What if you were away?” “Where would we be?” “What if your father was at work? What if he had a patient emergency?” “He’d let someone else take care of it.” Rachel could barely get her head around this. “I want to do this.” “Me, too,”

At first, he told the kids he was on “appointments” when he had a date that was coinciding with their night with him. But Hannah began asking questions about what kind of appointments kept happening on Saturday nights, and why he had to change his clothes for them. “Are you going to get married again?” “I don’t think so,” he said. “Once might have been enough for me.” He always told Solly and her the same thing: “I go on playdates sometimes, just like you do. I will tell you when there is someone you should know. That person will be someone you like. I am lonely and I am making new friends, and not all of them will be my girlfriends, but some may be girls who are friends.” “Your mom will eventually have playdates, too,” he told them. “Will they be with doctors?” Solly asked. “No, they’ll be with people who are different from me. They’ll be with a man named Brad who has a Porsche and wears boat shoes and really wants to come to your soccer game.” The kids laughed. “Now: Who am I going to date?” And they responded in unison, as he’d trained them to over the course of the many times this question came up: “Someone we will like!” “And who will Mom date?” he asked. Again, in unison: “A man named Brad who has a Porsche and wears boat shoes and really wants to come to my soccer game.” Solly could never finish that last part because he was always laughing too hard by then. It even got a smile out of Hannah. “You’ll like him, too, when it happens,” Toby said, though he didn’t think...

occurred to him for the millionth time, but the first time on this date, that it was strange that they were making introductory talk when he had already seen her crotch. It was not that he was advocating for an immediate rush to bed. It was just that he thought it would make more sense, now that he’d seen her in her see-through underwear, to start in the middle somehow. Though maybe this—the stories and the confessions and the could you believe what he did to me—was the middle.

the themes: This thing I thought was just a whim was actually an important part of my spouse’s identity, and still I’m surprised. This thing they had always been doing they kept doing and still I’m surprised. Here is how innocent I was and here is how cruel my spouse was. He wondered if he sounded like this from his parallax view. He wondered if there was a version of this story in which he was the villain. He wondered if Rachel was sitting in some ashram somewhere telling anyone who would listen what a victim she was. A victim. Yes, of a husband who put his own career aside and raised the children and gave them consistency—the children they’d both wanted! A husband who rooted for her at her every milestone of success. What could she possibly say about him? That he was “unambitious”? He was as ambitious as he was allowed to be. There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen. One of them has to answer the phone when the school calls. One of them has to know where the vaccine record is. One of them has to do the fucking dishes. It was entirely possible that the only version of a story like this you ever heard was from the aggrieved party, the one who made the sacrifices and thought that the sacrifice gave you one up on your spouse, but it didn’t. It only made the spouse feel more entitled to take. Trust me, Tess’s husband was somewhere right now, one woman sitting on his face while another sucked him off, and he was certainly not talking about...

After dinner he walked her through a park to her car and he got every signal in the world that it would be okay to kiss her: She was standing close, she was waiting, she wasn’t busying herself with keys or anything. And so he kissed her and for the first time since 1998, not even this century, not even this millennium, he put his lips on another woman and she kissed him back. Kissing another mouth, wow. He and Rachel had stopped kissing long ago. Even in the best of their times, Rachel was all business when it came to sex; she didn’t have time for extras. She barely had time for foreplay. This was different, and not just because it wasn’t sex. It was the strange feeling of taking ice skates off after wearing them for hours and walking on plain ground—you know how to do it but it’s different. Just wow. He and Laurette made out for five gooey minutes, Toby devouring her face, unaware of its corners and limits. Afterward, Toby skipped back to the train. Holy moly, he thought. You could opt out for fifteen years, and you could be beaten down to within an inch of personhood, but this was waiting on the other end, like a reward for all you had withstood.

a revelation came to him, that he was under no real moral obligation to marry a woman he kissed. He felt like he might combust from the freedom he felt. All this new opportunity! There weren’t enough hours in the day!

she told him she liked some light pressure around her neck, maybe to make things cloudy. He declined and said he felt like maybe that was a violation of the Hippocratic oath, and she was either immediately embarrassed or immediately disgusted and sent him home, where he masturbated furiously in his self-loathing.

There was Barbara, who he realized ten minutes into a story she was telling was actually related to him through her father’s great-uncle.

There were women who had no pubic hair but did have armpit hair. There were women who said unspeakably filthy things right to his face. There were women who cried after sex. There were women who wanted to be pinched or hit or spanked or slapped, which made him very uncomfortable. There were women who wanted him on the top, on the bottom, on all fours. They wanted him to go faster and slower with his mouth on their crotches. They wanted to know if he wanted to be spanked. (“No, thank you,” he said.) They wanted to know if he was gonna come hard. (“I’m coming! I’m coming!” he yelled.) They wanted him to come to Mommy. They wanted to call him Daddy.

Toby told him the sad story of his marriage, but Seth didn’t have any questions. Seth didn’t give him a hard time. There was no penance to be made. Seth was just excited to see his friend again. “Dude, the world is your oyster now,” Seth said. “Lick it up.” It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult. An idea came to Seth. “Go back to your apartment and put on shorts.” “Why?” “Yoga.” “It’s Saturday night.” “It’s actually late afternoon. Just do it, Tobe.” “I just had a drink.” “Trust me, dude. I go to a place right near my apartment owned by a guy who trained under Bikram and started a splinter group that nearly brought the political system of India to its knees.” When Seth was single, he said, this was where the majority of his dating life came from. You could be generous and like Seth and still think of what he called his “dating life” as a series of auditions, mostly successful, for sex partners. He explained to Toby that presence in a yoga class, no matter your ability, was a shortcut to showing a woman how evolved you were, how you were strong, how you were not set on maintaining the patriarchy that she so loathed and feared.

he didn’t want to have to answer to anyone when he got home at night and put on a headset to pretend he was a fighter pilot conscripted to kill aliens in a game box he kept in a closet when friends came over not because he was ashamed of it but because he couldn’t concentrate on anything else when it was in the room.

I feel like in a month I have already become someone who considers every woman from eighteen to sixty-two a potential sex partner, so it’s a failing if I take the kids to the doctor and the receptionist doesn’t want to have sex with me.”

Toby allowed himself a brief moment of smugness when he heard stories like this. Even during their worst times, he and Rachel fucked all the time, three times a week at the very least. It allowed him to think, Hey, maybe we’re normal. Maybe we’re better than normal. Three times a week! By this metric their relationship was good. By this metric, their relationship was aspirational. If you looked at it in that light, well, who doesn’t have some tension in their lives from time to time? Of course, people who are trying to be good parents and also good at their jobs fight. Maybe even every day. Maybe even more than once a day. Maybe even just about every time they were together, and viciously and cruelly. Right?

the twenty-ninth floor, which was the top floor. They were in the elevator long enough for Toby to break out in a light, panicked sweat over being in a small box that was probably mechanically compromised from age and use. Elevators had never bothered him before, but lately, his faith in systems was wobbly. Why had he put so much trust in elevators in the first place? Why did everyone?