Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

My poor regard for my own body couldn’t withstand the kind of hulking that a relationship with Toby would have required. I couldn’t be larger than a man in bed, or at the movies or at a dinner table or, honestly, even on the phone. I didn’t want to feel big and graceless and a thousand pounds of just lumbering; I didn’t want to have to contend with that every time his hand reached under my shirt. I felt too bad about myself already.

It was a scandal, calling out women for changing the rules on men with no warning because of their vapid women’s lib and their stupid sexual awakenings. Sexual awakenings were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men. It was also an undeniably great story. It

Being at the hospital was like being inside the future, but as it was imagined by science fiction films in the last part of the twentieth century, not the actual future we ended up with, where everything just turned out being smaller and flimsier than it used to be.

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.

Or because his biggest fear was to be known and rejected, and the only way he could face the rejection that comes along with being human was to never let himself be known—that way, what was rejected wasn’t him at all, but a projection of him.

I thought of that time now, how I imagined wanting someone else’s life instead of doing the work of imagining my own. God, what a fucking idiot I was. 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.

Here is the problem: You can only desire something you don’t have—that’s how desire works.

“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.”

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.

but Toby didn’t hear anything after that because his blood froze and his inner ear began to bleed and his brain turned to putty and began to leak out his nose and his face melted off his skull and his life would never be the same and he knew right then he’d never understand another thing ever again.

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.

That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you. So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human. They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before, and I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology. The men’s humanity was sexy and complicated; ours (mine) was to be kept in the dark at the bottom of the story and was only interesting in the service of the man’s humanity.

You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little. You thought you could get the good out of it and leave the bad, but there’s so much work involved in that, too. You take your children to a concert and expect them to hear your whisper from the background that it’s not all for them. You can’t expect anything of them.

I looked at her for a dangerous moment. I wanted to touch her all over her body and remember what it was like to feel like that. I would have eaten her heart or drunk her blood if I could have. But it would come for her, too.

But sometime in the last five years, as he thought more and more about things that are alive and things that are dead, he began to think that the fact that death still made him so wobbly was exactly the key to being a great doctor. We aren’t meant to comprehend endings. We aren’t meant to understand death. Death’s whole gig is not being understood. The

and they became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t—in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.

Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was. And

He would divorce her and what these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore.

I remembered thinking that it seemed weird that teachers and parents were just allowed to say that, and that they’d say it in front of the boys and the boys didn’t seem to mind. Even back then I knew that the boys tolerated it because it was so clear that it wasn’t true. It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters. How they march around in broad daylight in shirts like that. But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures, so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.

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.

At some point, I didn’t remember when, I had taken all my freedom and independence, and pushed them across the poker table at Adam and said, “Here, take my jackpot. Take it all. I don’t need it anymore. I won’t miss it ever.”

I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to live anymore. God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life? But he’d never understand that. He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.

What were you going to do? Were you not going to get married when your husband was the person who understood you and loved you and rooted for you forever, no matter what? Were you not going to have your children, whom you loved and who made all the collateral damage (your time, your body, your lightness, your darkness) worth it? Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now. How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen. But Toby was right.

We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?

I did want it. Or I wanted it mostly. Or I wanted it in the background. Or I was bored. Or my personal hierarchy of need had advanced to the point where once you question the necessity of the stable marriage, the only way to go is down. Or I was just destined to be a miserable person, no matter what marital state I was in. Or New Jersey is a place that people choose very often over New York and I should just get over it. Or I just wanted some independence and some time alone to watch whatever I wanted on television without being judged. Or I wanted my abdomen to look less like a topographical map of Sarajevo. Or I wanted to understand how to live a life that I was not the star of, to learn to recede into the background and be what my children needed from me and every time I came close I felt a vast abyss and ran in the opposite direction. Or I wanted to feel relevant again, like I mattered. Or everyone else could hear a U2 song from her youth and smoke a cigarette and not lose her life to nostalgia for a time that probably sucked just as badly as now did. Or all I had was a brief midlife crisis, maybe not so different from Rachel, and even our midlife crises had to be confined—hers in search of one good night’s sleep and a man who wasn’t threatened by her existence, and mine having to outsource my own unhappiness in service of something that looked like helpfulness to an old friend but was actually neglect of the family I’d opted into voluntarily.

You can’t fix this, I realized. Even our crises had to be small and polite. What I did was forgivable; what Rachel did was unacceptable. But ultimately it was the same for us both: The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually availab...

Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and so I retreated from it. Rachel, she endured. She tried. And she got the punishment.

I would maybe learn to cook. Or take a cake decorating class. I would allow myself to become a little more neutered. I would stop fighting it all so much. What would be so wrong with finally mellowing out? What was I clinging to? I would go to the exercise studio down the block, and I would take that dance class the other moms from school took, where we danced to songs that had once, many years ago, broken our hearts and set us on fire. The songs reminded us that we were once young—that once, we didn’t have to pay a twenty-dollar fee to dance—we didn’t even need to be led in it. Once upon a time, we just knew how to do it. Now we channel all the sex and all the hope and all that was left undone into a cha-cha-cha, or a figure eight of the hips that once didn’t have to be told to swivel. The teacher would play a jacked-up version of the cheez-whiz top 40 songs from high school and college and we would all laugh. But those songs would dig at a pathway to our youth, and so at the end, during the cooldown, when the teacher played the Eagle-Eye Cherry song or the Sade song, now our bodies were moving more slowly, lumpen, leaden, and we would see just exactly what they had become: people trying to remember something but not quite able to.

I would never be Archer Sylvan, but I would write my book, and it would have something in it that Archer was incapable of, which is all the sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly—even the ones that made us too angry to want to hear them.

How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.

He saw his reflection, and beyond that, through his reflection, he saw the lit-up windows of the next building, a see-through version of himself filled with the lights of the city, the windows, the people inside the windows. In those windows was everything—hope, sadness, loss, triumph, sex, betrayal. Everywhere was hurt and everywhere was sex. Everywhere was love and everywhere was death. You could die of the loneliness, but you could die of the optimism, too; the optimism was just as crushing in the end. Time would move forward, but he had logged some optimism into his block universe. It would stay there forever. He watched the people move around in his ghost body and he felt that he had room for them all, that they could all stay and he could accommodate them and be their host. He stood staring with this thought for he didn’t know how long until he heard a key in the lock and a hinge creak open and he turned to see Rachel standing in the doorway.