Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Todd was there to meet him in a polo shirt and mid-thigh shorts. He was probably five-ten. Yes, Todd, Toby thought, but when was the last time you were blown in a stairwell?

“Basketball really put my back out in high school. You a point guard?” Fuck you, Todd.

His therapist, Carla, would say that buying new shades was practicing self-care. He would respond by telling her that actually being solvent was self-care, saving up for a better place was self-care, not wasting his time measuring and buying and returning when he inevitably fucked it up was self-care. She would look at him patiently because therapists got to decide what self-care was.

David took Karen’s hand and held his mouth on it for a minute, looking at her. He began to cry into her hand. Toby watched them, and a dagger of jealousy struck his weary heart. This was the spectrum: one man begging God for his wife to be healed; another wondering where the fuck his wife was and why she couldn’t be bothered to return a text.

Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that?

The hippie who answered the phone gave a full two-sentence greeting about what a beautiful day it was here at Kripalu and how the divine in her was inspired and “in-graciousness” to hear the divine in the voice of the caller and her name was Sage and how could she help facilitate— Toby took the phone from his ear and stared at it and put it back to his ear to find that she was still talking.

“I’m so sorry, but I am not at liberty to discuss our guests’ check-in status. It’s a privacy issue.” “I’m not asking because I’m curious,” he said. “I’m asking because I’m her husband and I haven’t heard from her since Friday. I’m worried about her.” Twice he said he was her husband. Both times he hated himself for it, but it was also true; he was still her husband.

Toby supposed he was nine when he started wondering, but there was no Internet yet, so he had to go to libraries to see the art books. Other kids he knew went for the biology books, but those were so clinical. He knew from his museum visits with his parents that art was far dirtier than science. One day, he sneaked his first volume of Picasso, which was probably the wrong move there in terms of establishing a uniform understanding of anatomy. He went from there on to the Courbets and then the O’Keeffes and was very, very confused for a long time until ultimately he looked at one of the anatomy books just to rejigger it all back to reality.

Finally, at ten, he found porn. His parents had taken him to his older cousin Matthew’s house in the San Fernando Valley one night. After dinner, he followed Matthew to his bedroom, where Matthew, who was fifteen, had dirty magazines and a VHS tape of a young man who wakes up from his sleep in a big suburban house and comes downstairs to find his mother participating in an orgy that she was hosting. It seemed he had awakened because orgies are not silent events, all that gasping and moaning. He came down the stairs groggy-eyed. The mother saw him. She was wearing a halter dress, not naked yet, probably because of hosting duties, and she guided him back upstairs—nothing to see here, sonny—and she got him to bed but he’d seen enough to be turned on as hell and so he kept reaching underneath her halter for her breast. Well, now she was turned on, too, but she knew this was wrong, and so she kept pulling his hand away and then putting her breast back inside the dress. This went on three or four times before she relented and they started really going for it and suddenly Matthew’s mother busted in screaming, “AGAIN? AGAIN?” and little Toby, who was only ten, scurried out and pretended nothing had happened and that the weird new stirring in his pants wasn’t there. He was terrified for months that his aunt would tell his mother and that his mother would hate him.

he worried he’d be a sexual misfit or that if he ever once had a sexual thought in the same week as a thought about his mother (his dreidel-shaped mother), he was a pervert. This manifested itself by the fact that the first few times he had sex he immediately thought of his mother upon ejaculation, so anxious was he that he actually would think of his mother upon ejaculation.

He said that his ex-wife was tied up and he needed to watch the kids and could they maybe do later this week? Nahid texted him back a [purple devil emoji] and then an [angel emoji]—maybe meaning she was angry but ultimately a trouper? Or he was in hell and she was the heaven? He didn’t know. That stupid [purple devil emoji] was everywhere. What did it mean? What was being communicated? Was it the digital manifestation of women’s pent-up lust from their suffrage days? There was a woman he was sending dirty messages to a few days back who would make an allusion to oral sex and then when he responded with [panting tongue emoji], she wrote back with [mouthless emoji]. What did that mean? Was she offended? Was she literally withholding the thing she’d just offered? Was she shocked? He always took that one to mean speechless, or shocked. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know.

I smoked then. I had started smoking in Israel. My mother smoked my whole life; I was never going to do it. But when I was twenty, I figured it was okay to finally try one, since I was clearly out of the danger zone of addiction. Well, who could have predicted that they would be so delicious and gratifying? (Yes, I know.) Who would have seen so clearly that my fidgeting all these years was just me waiting to discover cigarettes? Cigarettes really got me. Cigarettes were the thing my fingers and mouth had been looking for since maybe birth.

My dreams were so small. My desires were so basic and showed such a lack of imagination. In my life, I’d go to weddings where the bride wore a red dress. I’d meet people in open relationships. I’d wonder why I was so unoriginal. I had been so creative in every other aspect of my life; how I’d turned out so conventional and so very establishment was bewildering.

Maybe that was what I was drawn to in the first place with him, that his peacefulness was a necessary correction for me. It did not occur to me how I would have to spend my life explaining my darkness and dissatisfaction to someone who didn’t even understand the concept of it.

After Adam and I were married, when I’d go out into the world, I’d see that the men I found myself drawn to were almost replicas of Adam, just like that guy in Lisbon. I wanted nothing different. I just missed the longing. We are not supposed to want the longing, but there it is. So what do you do with that?

It had been a year since Toby had first asked for a divorce. His request had come not from anger but from the irritation of the hole it bored in you when you were lying to yourself.

she said to the ceiling, “I think we should get divorced.” He turned over on his side to face her and he was filled with an aching love for the thing they had destroyed and tears were coming down her face and he wiped them away with his thumbs. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

The weeks and months that followed that night were some of the happiest of their marriage. They laughed. They were light together. They rewatched an episode of a sitcom that had made them laugh years before. They shared raised eyebrows and deep inhales over Hannah’s tantrums. They found each other’s eyes again when Solly spent a day trying to say the word sarcophagus, both of them trying not to laugh. It had been a long time since they’d had intimacy in love.

“We’re not farmhouse chic, Toby,” she’d said. “We’re going for mid-cench here.” He remembered that specific day, when she’d hired a decorator (“I’m actually called an interior designer”), a thick-ankled penguin of a woman named Luc, to come in and assess their design situation in the apartment in the city. She went through binders with Toby and Rachel and soon determined that (a) Toby had no interest or authority and was only there to prevent the kids from interrupting; and (b) after a series of flash card questions, Rachel’s preferred style was midcentury modern. “You’re mid-cench!” the designer had said, and Rachel had clapped her hands together at the revelation, as if she had just learned where her ancestors came from, like maybe she’d been wondering this since she had become sentient and it was the mystery of her life and now she finally knew. Now everything else in her life could fall into place. “And yet she wants everything to be new,” Toby had said at the time, thinking this was funny. Rachel and Luc blinked at him.

“Dad, what’s the block universe?” “Block universe theory? Where did you hear about the block universe theory?” “It’s in my book.” “Gosh, it’s pretty complicated. Okay, you ready? It’s a physics theory. It’s the theory that there are infinite universes in infinite dimensions, all going on at once. Like no matter what’s going on, that moment still exists forever. Time isn’t forward. It’s all happening at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it doesn’t, but does it?” “So that means that right now whatever happened on this spot in the past is still happening?” “Yes. And in the future. Or what we think of as the future.” “Then how come we can’t see it?” “Well, we can only see our own dimensions. Our brain can barely even grasp it.” “How do we know which dimension we’re in?” “We’re in all of them, according to the theory.” Solly leaned back and closed his eyes, his bottom teeth biting his upper lip. “You okay, buddy?” “It’s stressing me out.” “Why?” “I don’t know. It’s all happening all the time. It’s so busy.” “I know. But you’re only responsible for right now.” “But it’s all right now!” “But you can’t control it except for right now.” “But all the me’s need to control their right now.” “But they can all handle it.” He turned around. “It’s just a theory. It’s probably not true.”

the Fleishmans had been invited to a New Year’s party at the second home of Miriam and Sam Rothberg (though how do you decide which is your second home when you have four homes?).

You’d be bringing in a mil before bonuses. You’d manage an entire team. Great hours. The works.” Toby tried to imagine what it would be like to be on such intimate terms with money that you could abbreviate it into nicknames.

When he was seventeen, he got into a car accident with his parents’ Volvo. The next three days, all he could think was: What if I’d left exactly one minute earlier? What if I hadn’t stopped for gas? It drove him crazy, and more than that, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t the reality he was living. What if he had taken that job? Or what if he’d even been open to talking about it? What if his lab had flourished and his grant had been renewed? What if he’d never gone to the party where he met Rachel? What was the point in even asking? Do you see why he didn’t want to talk about the block universe anymore? Because somewhere, in one of them, he was still a hopeless idiot who didn’t see this all coming.

the times she mocked him openly for his lack of sophistication. His lack of sophistication. Him. Not sophisticated. Him. He who read Pulitzer finalists and had four-count-them-four museum memberships; he who checked the Time Out every week for new cultural events, who donated to the Central Park Conservancy and suggested opera and cello concerts and Mummenschanz?

he thought of those Syd Hoff books he used to read to the kids, the one about Sammy the Seal. Sammy the Seal leaves the zoo to go explore the world, and he goes to school and he goes to restaurants and it’s all fine, nothing great, until finally he happens upon a bathtub and he says, “Ah, here is a place!”

HER: How about just at your place? And in his head, in rapid fire: Holy shit oh my God yes Is she going to rob me Fuck you, Rachel There is no such thing as sex that is this easy

Hannah broke in. “Has anyone considered the amount of anxiety I have knowing that everyone is hanging out without me? Have you considered that?”

she wasn’t going to let the kids do it, either, and then she read that the anxiety of everyone else having it was worse than the anxiety that the thing actually gives you.”

Seth’s rules of sexting entry, which were as follows: Resolved: Women are in absolute control of themselves one hundred percent of the time. If, therefore, a woman says anything that a seventh-grade boy could interpret as sexual or respond to with “That’s what she said,” that is the woman’s outstretched invitation to sex talk.

TOBY WOKE UP to Solly standing over him and shaking his shoulders. “Dad,” he said. Toby jumped out of bed, bleary and panicked. “What is it?” It was still dark out. “We have to go to the bus for camp. We’re gonna miss the bus.” Toby looked around for a minute, then sat down on his bed. “Okay, let me get some coffee.” Solly was jumping in place. “It’s okay if you’re nervous.” Toby looked at his phone for the time and saw that Nahid had sent a text. The night came rushing back to him. It was only four-thirty. “Bud, we have two hours before the bus leaves. Should we go back to sleep for a while?” But Solly wasn’t having it. He was dragging Toby by the hand to the coffee maker and talking like he’d just done ten lines of cocaine. “I’m bringing all of my Green Lantern comics on the bus because they’re light but also because when people see me reading one they’ll want to read one and then I’ll have one for everyone.”

HE WALKED INTO his office and pretended to look at his phone because he needed a second to think. You couldn’t be alone in this hospital. There was nowhere to just sit and be. Even when you just wanted to zone out in the middle of your own office, everyone could see. Nobody told you how important it would be to constantly appear stable while you were getting a divorce, because everything you said and did would be more meaningful and poignant than you’d intended. Standing alone in the middle of your office, staring into the middle distance, was not a sign of stability.

He watched her love pears, then hate them, then love them, then become specifically human by loving pears only sometimes.

It was embarrassing and also the best, just like the sex itself.

In this desert of opportunity, getting laid at least a little became his primary directive in the relationship, never asking himself if this was all there was to companionship, or if he even liked her. That was a dangerous question, and besides, he was in no position to ask it; he had to direct all his energy toward interpretation of whether a sloppily slung arm over the shoulder or a kiss directly on the mouth was a green light.

after she had allowed him to have sex with her—or on her, or at her, which was probably more accurate—she

she started talking too much about wanting to get married. “Women only exist on a trajectory,” he wrote Toby on a postcard from Athens. “They can’t just be.

He kept thinking, “She’s a real girl.” Not in a sexist way. No, in a Pinocchio way. She was everything he thought a girl should be, even if he’d never known to pray quite so specifically:

They played backgammon, and she watched reruns of a teen drama about orphans on a portable DVD player she bought just for this occasion. Toby felt this was a morbid choice, but he had also suspected that there was no real way for her to have children without confronting the fact of her own parentslessness.

How could it be that you take extremely difficult, extremely healthy steps to get your life in order only to have the person you extracted yourself from more in charge of your happiness and well-being than she ever was?

She had a gap in her teeth. It was one of the first physical traits that ever reliably made him weak, dating back to a girl named Alyssa in fourth grade who put her tongue through hers while she was writing. How she broke his heart when she got braces in sixth grade.

“Divorce doesn’t make you any less married.”

I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me.

“It’s not New Jersey,” Adam said. “It’s life. It’s being in your forties. We’re parents now. We’ve said all we needed to say.” I began to cry. He patted my head and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s the order of things. Now we focus on the kids. We mellow with age. It’s how it goes. It’s not our turn anymore.” I tried to respond but instead sob-hiccuped. He said, “Why don’t we get you home?”

Adam and I left the party, and we got into bed and tried to get through another episode of the drug cartel show we were watching that everyone said got really good at the end of the third season, but we were only up to the second, and we had existential angst about whether we should be watching something that only promised to be good but wasn’t yet. We agreed the answer was yes, that hope was good, and in those moments—the ones when we endured, the ones where we agreed, the ones where we disagreed and found the other person’s point dumb enough to laugh out loud, the ones where he still agreed to do our fully choreographed wedding dance in the kitchen for no reason at all and to no music, the ones where he showed me a window into how much smarter he was than I was and how even though he was that smart he never needed to flaunt it, the ones where we rolled our eyes at how dumb everyone else was, the ones where he evacuated me from my misery and made me a cheese omelet because I was stoned and wanted something warm and milky, that was when I remembered the most essential thing about Adam and me, which was that I never once doubted if I should be with him.

Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me, it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.

But no one was watching. People didn’t look at me anymore. I’m allowed to go into bathrooms that are only for customers now anywhere in the city. I could shoplift if I wanted to, is how ignored I am. The week I turned forty I’d been sent to profile one of the New York Giants. I wasn’t given access to the locker room, and my lanyard said RESTRICTED PRESS: NO LOCKER ACCESS in bright yellow and it covered half my torso. I walked into the locker room anyway and stood right there among all their penises, and the very people who had issued me the lanyard walked by me as if I were there to set up for the bake sale.

She was hot. She was golden and tan, like an Oscar with hair.

Toby’s fellows were always in their twenties, and there were more than a few times that he realized that the cluelessness and cockiness of their age was the only thing that allowed them to believe they could take a person’s life into their hands and become a doctor. That was why you heard about people in their thirties and forties going to law school but never medical school. It wasn’t just the time it would take to get licensed. It was the realization as you got older about how fallible you were in every aspect of your life.

He did not want to keep staring at this poor, beautiful girl making plans with Seth, who was hoping that he wouldn’t fuck a prostitute that night but wasn’t a thousand percent sure.

He didn’t want to be set up with people. He didn’t want to know what his friends thought he was worthy of. All of this was still so new that the only thing he could tolerate was the ice-cold democracy of a dating app. Look at this Tamara. Was that not confirmation enough? She was a tiny child-woman. His friends didn’t think he deserved a full-grown woman. They didn’t think he deserved the full swimming pool of breasts that Vanessa had. Seth, his friend, didn’t think Toby had the right to all he had.