Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  Later, they visited her room after rounds. 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.”

  * * *

  —

  THAT WAS ALSO the day of our big reunion. I’d arranged for lunch with Toby and invited Seth via Facebook message. His phone number had changed, and my text had bounced. He had lost his original phone number when he moved to Singapore a few years ago, and he had to get a new one with a newbie area code, which embarrassed him. I was so disconnected from my youth that one of its most prominent figures had a new phone number and I didn’t know it. I was so far apart from my life in New York that it was like I’d been sent to another planet to breed and colonize.

  Seth and I arrived ten minutes before Toby did. He’d stayed thin and had a well-executed fake tan and fake ultra-white teeth that played well against his leonine hazel eyes that picked up every shade of light brown in what remained of his hair. On his face he had the kind of two-day stubble growth we used to suggest that cover stars at the magazine nurture before their photo shoot that looks like benign neglect but is actually so evenly shaded that it could only be the work of meticulous planning. Man, all of it, he was still so handsome I could barely look at him.

  Which is not to say he looked the same. He’d lost a good part of his hair, but in the best way possible if you’re going to lose your hair, with sharp-angled power alleys of baldness between his widow’s peak and temple on each side. His eyes felt like lightning to me, and I wanted to look away, but he wouldn’t let go. Finally, we hugged, and I felt the seratonic chemicals of reunion rush through my body as I leaned my cheek against his chest. He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me away and looked at my face. “You are looking good, Ms. Epstein,” he said. He was lying. I looked like I did when he first met me in Israel, before I lost a bunch of weight. It was my second pregnancy, it just got away from me and never came back no matter how I chased.

  We sat down. He told me he subscribed to the magazine, but that he hadn’t seen any of my stories recently. “I had so much pride seeing your name in there. I showed everyone I knew. I said, ‘Boom. That’s my girl right there.’ ”

  I told him I’d left the magazine two years before, that I was trying to work on a coming-of-age novel about my youth. What I didn’t say was that it never held my attention long enough for there to be progress. I kept the document up on my computer, but minimized, and I only turned to it every few weeks before feeling overwhelmed about what it was that I was trying to do with it. A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you. I thought maybe I could do this through a good young-adult novel, but YA novels were all fantastical things these days, with werewolves and sea creatures and half-bloods and hybrids. My story was small and dumb. Nothing even really happened in it.

  “I guess with kids, it’s hard,” he said. His shirt was so crisp and well ironed, like he’d just put it on. I no longer wore clothes that required ironing.

  Toby pulled into the booth next to me just then. “What the hell is going on here?” he asked. Across the aisle from us sat 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. The waitress came to our table. Toby ordered a chicken Caesar salad with no cheese and no dressing.

  “So like a piece of chicken and lettuce?” she asked.

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Do you maybe have any diet lettuce for him?” Seth asked. The waitress looked confused and Seth laughed, which made her even more confused, so she gave up and walked away.

  Seth looked at us both and the blood rose in his face. “God, it’s so good to see you guys,” he said. “I should have brought Vanessa. You guys would really like her.”

  “Is she the one?” Toby asked.

  “She might be the one,” Seth said. “They all might be the one.”

  “You thought Jennifer Alkon was the one,” I said.

  “Who is to say I wouldn’t want to see Jennifer Alkon again?” He looked down at his nails as if he were grooming them and raised his eyebrows. “Who is to say I haven’t?”

  I’d introduced Seth to Jennifer Alkon. She’d lived in my dorm. Seth had spent February crazy about her, flooding her with invitations and flowers and notes. On their last date together, they’d been fooling around in the bathroom downstairs at the Israel Museum—the Israel Museum! With its religious artifacts and the Dead Sea Scrolls! Seth couldn’t quite get to the promised land, though, so Jennifer Alkon had gotten down on her knees and done her best work but to no avail. Seth, in frantic lust—he’d been raised by Orthodox parents and only had one kind of lust, and it was frantic—finished himself off while she watched. Within hours everyone knew this story from Seth. Later that night she went back to the dorm and tried to call to break up with him but he wouldn’t answer, and it seemed clear to the girls who knew the whole story that he wouldn’t answer because he didn’t want to be broken up with, whereas the boys knew that Seth had ejaculated in front of her and could not maintain his interest in territory he’d already conquered.

  “Really?” Toby asked now.

  “Yep. And it was amazing. Fifth base!” He held his hand up for a high five to Toby.

  “What’s fifth base?” I asked.

  “Anal,” Toby said.

  But he was too confused to return the high five. “Wait, when did this happen?” Toby asked. “She’s been married forever.”

  “Marriage is a societal construct, Tobin.”

  “Is that what you told her? Is that what you’re going to tell Vanessa?”

  Seth’s eyes softened when he talked about Vanessa again. “You guys should meet her,” Seth said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Going home to my children,” I said.

  “I have a date and I have the kids,” Toby said. “Rachel dropped them off in the middle of the night. An entire day early. Because that’s how peaceful co-parenting works.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Seth said.

  “Well, that’s how she is,” Toby said. “It’s fine. I actually enjoy my kids.”

  The conversation was starting to get a little grim for Seth, whose great skill was at throwing parties and knowing when the vibe needed adjusting via, say, swapping out different music or bringing out dessert. “I know,” he said. “We should think of a curse for Rachel.”

  Toby laughed. “A curse!”

  A curse. We had met the Beggar Woman in November of our year in Israel, when I’d gone to their dorm to have an American Thanksgiving. After dinner, we took a long, drunk walk and ended up in the Old City. We zigzagged down the streets, and right before the Western Wall became visible, we saw an old woman sitting on a milk crate, her hands and face wrinkled and brown and scaled from the sun. As we walked by her, she bellowed at us in Hebrew for money. Toby felt around in his pocket and found a five-shekel piece; Seth had two agorot, which counted as less than an American penny. I had only a hundred-shekel bill that I’d just had changed from my weekly allowance.

  Toby approached the woman and gave her the money. The woman nodded vigorously and began making a dramatic sobbing sound, lifting her hands to the heavens and beseeching God himself, “Blessed are you who keeps me vital and safe! Blessed are your true believers, who allow me to serve you! Blessed is this small man, who will heal the world with his kindness! May he stand taller than those around him, above his jealousy!”

  Toby gave her a half
bow and moved back toward us again. Seth wanted some of that action, too, so he moved in to give her the agorot. The woman stared with disgust at the nothing coin he placed in her hands. But Seth did not read her disgust, and so he waited to see if she would thank God for his existence, if she would bless him, but instead when she looked up at him, she hissed through a wrinkled nose and aggressively squinted eyes, “May you never marry. May your hair fall out before you find a woman able to tolerate your snoring and farting. May your true self always be a lie.”

  “Yikes,” Seth said.

  Toby and I stepped forward to pull Seth back and keep walking, and the woman, realizing I was never going to give her anything—I couldn’t! I only had a large bill!—said, “May you never dance at your daughter’s wedding, for her name will be so spoiled throughout the town from her promiscuity that when she dares to leave her home to go to the market to buy fresh food for the Sabbath, the spiritual leaders of her community will congregate to throw rotten fruit at her head. May you never know satisfaction. May the Lord who watches over you give you a long life with no contentment. May you drink and drink and always find yourself thirsty.” We broke into a run then, tripping on the cobblestones and getting dirty looks from people who were out late on pilgrimage to pray at the Western Wall.

  Later, we told this story to everyone, but no one else found it funny, so we just kept telling it to each other. Then we began to make up curses for each other. We made up curses for our teachers. We made up curses for our exes and our roommates. We made up curses about the people who didn’t understand us or love us the way we felt we deserved to be loved.

  At the diner, Seth cleared his throat. “Okay, me first,” he said. “May she find in her next routine visit to a toilet that her pubic hair has turned to dust. May the next man to visit her undercarriage sneeze so hard from the dust that an air bubble fills her torso, forcing an embolism.”

  “That’s not how embolisms work,” Toby said.

  “I didn’t ask for fact-checking,” Seth said. He looked at me. “Your turn.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “Okay. May she finally make her way home from work on the subway after a long day only to discover that the pustule she’d dismissed as a simple zit had become infected when she collided with the turnstile she was walking through.”

  “Wait, where was the zit?” Toby asked.

  “Like on her pelvis,” I said.

  “You get zits there?”

  “You can get zits anywhere you have skin!”

  “That’s so gross,” Seth said.

  “Too much,” Toby said. “Also, too convoluted. Were we on the subway or were we at home at the point of impact?” But he was laughing.

  I walked back to the train alone. The last two actors I’d profiled before I left the magazine were in their early fifties. Two of them had had first marriages to actresses when they were younger and had had children with those women before they’d gotten divorced. The actresses’ careers were ruined. Their bodies had changed and they were on the ground for the daily life of child-rearing, and they had to make hard choices about how much they worked, knowing that women in certain professions have expiration dates. The men went off and had wild lives, which resulted in their divorces, and a decade later married their much younger co-star and much younger makeup artist, respectively, and then had two more children. Now they’d be able to do it all over with two entirely new kids, knowing now what it meant to regret how much time you didn’t devote to your children. Another chance. Another chance at life. Another chance at youth. A way to obliterate regret. And here was Seth, who would fuck every single person in every single orifice and only once he got tired of it (if he ever did) would he find someone young and take her life away by finally having children.

  I was never wild. I never stayed out late or got way too extremely drunk more than five or six times in my whole life. I didn’t sleep around. I had such conservative desires. I liked going to the movies late at night—all the movies, even the bad ones, even the ones I’d seen. I liked eating too much. 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. I got to Penn Station and I walked past it, till I found myself downtown at the Angelika, sending a text to my babysitter that I’d be home very late.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, TOBY took the children to synagogue like he’d done every Friday night before the separation. The problem with Rachel taking any Friday nights was that she never took them to synagogue, and so it began to creep into their heads that maybe Friday night services and dinner and family time were optional, a whim of Toby’s that was subject to debate. They had never liked synagogue (no one does), but they especially didn’t like it after camp, where they had to change clothes and go stand with their father under and astride his tallis while he listened and prayed, more out of muscle memory than anything else but still. Hannah now sat reading a book, not in her lap but up against her face, belligerently. Solly just ran up and down the aisles with whatever other nine-year-old he could find.

  When Toby brought Rachel to meet his parents for the first time, their plane landed in Los Angeles in the late afternoon and they arrived at Toby’s house in Sherman Oaks right in time for Friday night dinner. Toby had grown up in a fairly traditional Jewish home, and Friday night, no matter what, everyone was home. Everyone gathered. Everyone sat. His exhausted sister sat down with her two children, her head wrapped in a scarf. His anemic brother-in-law stood and waited for silence while he blessed the wine and the challah that Toby no longer went near. (“Just have some challah,” his mother said. “Everyone has some.” But Toby wouldn’t, in perpetual punishment to her for how often she told him to not eat the challah when he was a chubby kid.) Toby’s aunt and uncle had come, along with the synagogue’s cantor and his wife. Rachel sat in awe of it: The harmony with which they passed chicken to each other, the banter at each other’s expense, the review of the week. How they all gathered, how they sat down, how there was a basic rhythm and ease to it. They had all been gathering like this for so long that they knew how to do it; it was, Rachel later said, almost arrogant the way they all flaunted their comfort and ease.

  “They just knew how to sit there and be,” she said. “Like it was their birthright to be there.”

  “But why does that annoy you?” Toby asked.

  She couldn’t explain it. Only later would he see that when something created annoyance in her as a result of envy, that was how she knew she wanted it. Rachel had grown up barely aware of her religion in a house where her parents were divorced and her father had fled before she could form a cohesive memory of him, and then her mother died when she was three. She was raised by her mother’s mother, who treated her like a houseguest and encouraged her independence. Rachel’s grandmother had no tradition or ceremony in her, just a combination of pity and annoyance that she was stuck with her daughter’s orphan in something that resembled a Dickens novel.

  “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,” he answered. They had been dating for eight months by then. He proposed to her formally four months later, but he always felt like on that night, she had proposed to him first.

  When they first married, Rachel made sure that whenever she got home from work on Fridays, sometimes earlier and sometimes later, they would do the thing Toby had grown up doing: lighting the candles, blessing the wine and challah.
By the time the kids were born, though, she was already on what she called her “trajectory,” and Fridays became the nights that Toby played a game of chicken with Rachel. She’d miraculously become available when the Rothbergs or the Leffers or the Hertzes invited them over for a Friday night dinner. But otherwise, she’d call and say that she “needed” to stay at work because she “needed” to get things done, knowing (she had to know) that she was being outright dishonest in her use of this word—that it was actually her resistance to spending time with her children and to some notion of a traditional role as a mother that made her want to work that much. Rachel knew how to work. She liked working. It made sense to her. It bent to her will and her sense of logic. Motherhood was too hard. The kids were not deferential to her like her employees. They didn’t brook her temper with the desperation and co-dependence that, say, Simone, her assistant, did. That was the big difference between them, Rachel. He didn’t see their children as a burden, Rachel. He didn’t see them as endless pits of need, Rachel. He liked them, Rachel.

  In June, the first Friday night that Rachel had them alone, he’d called her at work to ask if they shouldn’t maybe all have dinner together, just to show the kids how much of a family they still were. She’d told him that she’d had to get Mona, their nanny, to stay with them because her client, the playwright Alejandra Lopez, had some kind of negotiation problem and she had planned an emergency dinner to make sure she was happy. “Please,” she’d said. “Before you persecute me for working again, I am trying to manage. I have more expenses than ever. Do you know how much mediation cost me?” Unspoken: You idiot. Can’t you read? We’re not a family anymore. What do you think all this paperwork is about if not a formal dismantling of our family?

  Outside the synagogue that night it had begun to rain. Toby didn’t have an umbrella, which was fine because the rain wasn’t so bad and certainly it wouldn’t kill him, but then some dipshit with a golf umbrella that took up the sidewalk because what would happen if even a drop of rain got onto his asshole Tom Ford suit nearly knocked him into the street.