Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  “Toby,” called a low, breathy woman’s voice.

  Toby turned around to see Cyndi Leffer, a good friend of Rachel’s who had a daughter in Hannah’s grade. She took a moment to survey him. Ah, this. He knew what was coming: the head tilted twenty degrees, the exaggerated pout, the eyebrows simultaneously raised and furrowed.

  “Toby. I keep meaning to reach out to you,” Cyndi said. “We haven’t seen an inkling of you.” She was wearing turquoise spandex leggings that had purple clawprints on the upper thighs, like a streak of purple tigers was climbing toward her crotch, trying to get to it. She wore a tank top that said SPIRITUAL GANGSTER. Toby remembered Rachel telling him that parents who sub out y’s for i’s in the middle of their girls’ names, and vice versa at the end, are not giving their daughters much of a chance in the world. “How are you doing? How are the kids doing?”

  “We’re okay,” he said. He tried to not adjust the angle of his head to match hers, but his mirror neurons were too well developed and he failed. “We’re plugging along. It’s a change, for sure.”

  Her hair was dyed in that new way where the top was purposefully dark and it progressively faded until the ends were blond. But the dark part of the roots was too dark—it was the darkness of a younger woman—and against the border of her forehead all it did was accentuate the relative raggedness of her skin. He thought about a physical therapist he’d slept with a few weeks ago, about how she had the same hairstyle but that the dark part had a warmer cast to it and wasn’t so stark against her same-age-as-Cyndi skin.

  “Had things been hard for long?” she asked. Jenny. The physical therapist’s name was Jenny.

  “It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Toby and Rachel had separated at the very beginning of June, just after school ended, the culmination of an almost yearlong process, or maybe a process that began shortly after their wedding fourteen years before; it depends whom you ask or how you look at a thing. Is a marriage that ends doomed from the start? Was the marriage over when the problems that would never get solved started or when they finally agreed that the problems couldn’t be solved or when other people finally learned about it?

  Of course Cyndi Leffer wanted information. Everyone did. The conversations were always artless, and they were always the same. 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. Toby’s cousin Cherry, who was prone to long, disappointed stares at her husband, Ron: “Had you tried therapy?” His boss, Donald Bartuck, whose second wife had been a nurse on the hepatology floor: “Were you unfaithful?” The camp director at the Y, when Toby was explaining that his kids might be a little shaky since when camp started, they’d just separated: “Did you guys have a regular date night?”

  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 had spent the early summer in a haze, trying to find footing in this strange world where every aspect of his life was just slightly different than it used to be and yet immensely so: He was sleeping, just alone and in a different bed. He was eating with the kids just like always—Rachel hadn’t come home before eight or nine on weeknights in years—but after dinner he dropped them off at the old apartment and walked the nineteen blocks home to his new one. That slippery fuck Donald Bartuck told him he, Bartuck, was being promoted to head of internal medicine and that he was putting Toby up as his only candidate for subdivision head of hepatology in the gastroenterology division once the current one, Phillipa London, evacuated the post to take Bartuck’s job. He didn’t have the natural first person to tell. He thought about calling me or Seth, but it seemed too pathetic to not have an actual family member to tell. He almost called his parents in Los Angeles, but the time difference put them at five A.M. when he learned; then he debated if this was news that Rachel should hear or know. (He did tell her, later when he dropped the kids off, and she smiled with her mouth but not her eyes. She did not have to pretend to care about his career anymore.)

  But now, in late July, as summer was rounding second base, he felt steady again, like at least he had a routine. He was coming along nicely. He was adjusting. He was cooking for one less person. He was learning to use the I instead of we to indicate availability for barbecues and cocktail parties, when he was invited, which wasn’t often. He was taking long walks again and learning to bat away the feeling that he should let someone know where he was. Yes, he was coming along nicely, except for conversations like this one, with Cyndi. He had been wallpaper to the Cyndi Leffers of the world before this; he’d been a condition that came co-morbid with his family. Successful Rachel’s husband, or social Hannah’s father or cute Solly’s father, or, hey, you’re a doctor, right, will you just look at this bump I’ve had for a week? Now he was someone people wanted to talk to. His divorce had somehow given him a soul.

  Cyndi was waiting for an answer. Her eyes were searching his face the way soap opera actors looked at each other in the seconds before commercial breaks. He knew what was expected of him. He was working on trying to not fill in this pause; he was working on letting the discomfort of the silence be the property of the person who was mining him for dirt. His therapist, Carla, was trying to get him to learn how to sit with uncomfortable feelings. He, in turn, was trying to get the people who were pumping him for information to learn to sit with uncomfortable feelings.

  But also: There was no way to talk about a divorce without implying terrible things about the other person in the marriage, and he didn’t want to do that. He felt a strange call for diplomacy now. School was a battleground state, and it would be so easy to get people over to his side, he knew that. 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, for he was still not legally done with her, for she still haunted him.

  Cyndi took a step closer. He was only five-five, and she was a full head taller than him and skinnier than any woman needed to be. Her face was large-featured and pumped full of hyaluronic acid and botulinum toxin. Her concern, which was mostly transmitted via a slow back-and-forth shaking of the head and an exaggerated protrusion of her mouth, was mitigated by the fact that her browline was completely ossified, and had been since he’d known her. This was what she looked like when she was happy, too. “Todd and I were so sad to hear,” she said. “If there’s anything we can do. We’re your friends, too.”

&n
bsp; Then she took another step closer, which was two too many steps close for a camp lobby encounter with a married woman who was friends with his wife. His phone buzzed. He looked down. It was Tess, a woman he had plans to meet for the first time later that night. He squinted at his phone to see a close-up photograph of the fertile crescent where her thighs and her black, netted panties formed a delta.

  “That’s work,” Toby said to Cyndi. “I have a biopsy to get to.”

  “You still at the hospital?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. “As long as people still get sick. Supply and demand.”

  Cyndi gave a one-syllable laugh but looked at him with, what? Sympathy? All the school parents did. A doctor wasn’t a thing to be anymore. Just last year Cyndi’s husband, Todd, had looked at him earnestly at parent-teacher conference night, while they waited outside classrooms for their names to be called (no Rachel in sight, because she was at a client dinner and would not arrive in time) and said, “If your kids told you they wanted to be doctors, how would you advise them?” Toby hadn’t quite understood the question until his walk home from school, at which point he’d realized it was a guy in finance feeling sorry for a guy in medicine. A doctor! He had been raised to think that a doctor was a respectable thing to be. It was a respectable thing to be! When Rachel got home that night, he told her what that douche Todd had asked him, and she said, “Well, what would you say?” They had all turned on him.

  “You better get going, then,” Cyndi said now. “We’ll see Hannah tomorrow night, right?” She leaned over to give him a full frontal three-point hug with connection at the head, chest, and pelvis. The hug lingered for a millisecond longer than any previous physical contact he’d ever had with Cyndi Leffer, which was zero.

  He walked away from the Y, wondering if the vibe he got off Cyndi—that she wanted to comfort him, yes, but, also, to fuck him as well—was real. It couldn’t be. And yet. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet she was clearly wondering what it might be like to fuck him.

  No, it couldn’t be. He thought about the way her nipples lined up so evenly and soldier-like under her stupid tank top. He was getting carried away, which is an easy thing to do when your phone is literally dripping with the lust of women who did definitely and assuredly claim to want to fuck you, fuck you bad, fuck you bad all night long.

  Each little holler he got—each little [winky emoji] or [purple devil emoji] or bra selfie or actual photographed upper-region ass crack—made him revisit the essential questions of his youth: Could it be that he wasn’t as repulsive as he’d been led to believe by the myriad rejections of just about every single girl he’d ever made eye contact with? Could it be that he was maybe attractive? Was it not his looks or his physique but the desperation inherent in his attempts at a rigorous sex life in those days, or any sex life really, that rendered him something less attractive than he actually was? Or maybe now there was something about his current situation, being newly divorced and a little wounded, that had somehow made him that way. Or maybe absent mirror neurons and pheromones and other things that could not penetrate phone screens, all you had was a reflection of the intersection of your own horniness and your own availability, and the minute someone else’s horniness and availability matched up with yours, voilà and kaboom. He didn’t like to think that, that sex was no longer about attraction, but he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a possibility; he was a scientist, after all.

  He’d met Rachel when he was a first-year in med school. He thought about that time nearly constantly now. He thought of the decisions he’d made and whether he could have seen the warning signs. Her at that library party, her eyes flashing sex, her hair the same blond Cleopatra shape it would continue to be forever. How his eyes filled at the sight of the gleam of her geometry hair. How the blue of her eyes was both cold and hot. How the Cupid’s bow beneath her nose was a dewdrop mountain to be climbed; how it mirrored the cleft in her chin with the kind of symmetry that science said initiated male sexual imperative and created visual gratification and hormonal feelings of well-being. How the sharpness of her face seemed like a correction to the Semitic girls he was bred to want—her father hadn’t been Jewish, and by the account of her grandmother and the few pictures that existed of him, she looked just like him, and that, too, felt dangerous—that someone raised as traditionally as Toby would love a woman who looked like her absent Gentile father. How he was made dizzy, how he utterly dissolved in lust, by the way she stuck a hip out when she was trying to decide something. How, after knowing him just four weeks, she came with him to California for his grandmother’s funeral; how she sat in the back and looked sad for him and came to the house afterward and helped put all the catered food on trays. The way she undressed him—no, he shouldn’t think about that now. Thinking about that would be detrimental to his healing.

  The point was that she had wanted him. The point was that someone wanted Toby Fleishman. We’d watched him watch the world pass him by; we’d watched him bewilder at his inability to attract someone. He’d only had one real girlfriend before, and other than that, just some drunk girls he had rolled around on the floor with at parties; he’d had sex with just two women before Rachel. But then college was over and the girls in med school were almost all attached to some guy from before. 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.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS TRUE that Toby had a biopsy in forty-five minutes, but really he wanted to spend a little more time with his app, so as he walked out onto the street he opened it up and headed west. It was already too warm, just about at the forecasted ninety-four degrees with storm clouds, but nothing quite so dangerous or threatening yet.

  In the park, the beautiful young people—they were all beautiful, even if they weren’t—would be lying out on blankets even this early, their heads tilted up toward the sun. Some of them were sleeping. Back when Rachel consented to go on long walks with him, they would make fun of the sleeping people in the park. Not the homeless people, or the strung-out ones. Just the ones who’d made their way over to the park in their sweatpants, laid out their blankets, and pretended that the world was a safe place that only wanted you to be well rested. Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan; the anxiety was a thing they had in common to the end. “I can’t even imagine wearing sweatpants in public,” Rachel would say. 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 about her T6 vertebrae (right in the middle of her thoracic spine), the camera poised up and over, the valley between her maybe-saline-filled breasts like a canyon road.

  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 barely able to stop themselves from humping a stranger’s legs as they walked down the street to the drugstore or a meeting or a yoga class. It was nice to know that energy was still out there, even at what felt like a very late date in his life. This gave him peace and hope, that anything he’d missed out on when he married Rachel so young was still there, waiting. That other people had screwed up and were starting over, too. That he was still young enough to participate in what he had assigned as a purely youthful endeavor, which was spending a lot of time finding someone to fuck. Yes, there was joy and peace and comfort to learn of this layer of New York that existed under the layer of New York he knew before, that he could now only see with his separation glasses, with his freedom glasses, and which amounted to a zombie apocalypse for pussy.