Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“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;