Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  “Fuck!” he yelled.

  Solly yelled back, “Bad word!”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be with Mom?” she asked.

  “You are.” He ran his finger under cold water. “She’s delayed.”

  “By what?” Hannah’s voice was panicked. “We’re supposed to go to the Hamptons. Everyone is going to the Hamptons this week.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Call her and tell her that.”

  “I would, but I don’t have a phone.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TESTS WERE conclusive: It was Wilson’s disease.

  “It’s the liver’s inability to process copper,” Toby told David Cooper while his fellows stood behind him. “Her liver doesn’t work, that’s why it can’t process it. Have you noticed a change in eye color?”

  Toby lifted her eyelid and showed David. He stared at it. “No. What?”

  “See that ring around her iris?” She’d had symptoms for a while, Toby said. “But they’re symptoms that are easy to dismiss.” Her clumsiness and her daffiness might have seemed like something wacky coming on in middle age, or like she was acting out, but she was concerned about it and went to the doctor. Her internist had missed the signs. Then she went to Las Vegas, where she drank a lot, which exacerbated the situation. She would need a liver transplant.

  “Will she wake up?”

  “She will, right after her surgery, which we’ll need to do very quickly.”

  “And whose liver will it be?”

  “The first viable one we get as soon as she’s put on the list.”

  He stood quietly with David, giving him a chance to think of other questions. I once asked him if the worst part of his job was telling people that their loved ones were dead. Yes, that was bad, of course, he told me. But it was nowhere near as awful as telling them that they or their family were sick. Dead was a diagnosis, and it was definitive. People knew about it. Its reputation preceded it. But illness—illness was a vast chasm of maybe. The patient and anyone who loved and needed the patient felt desperate, and there was a temptation to use your power as a doctor to make everything okay, or to allude to a future okayness of everything (in a malpractice-insurance-clad way) that would be totally acceptable and get you off the hook from a true confrontation of emotion until further down the line when things got too bad to ignore. That was ethically okay, to provide hope, but it was not the right thing to do. The right thing to do was to consider how much hope you allowed the people involved. You knew that having hope might help. It would help in their stress levels, it would help them function throughout treatment. But you had to titrate it right, because how much hope should a person have in a situation that was somewhat hopeless?

  David began to hyperventilate. He searched the room with wild eyes and Toby put his hand on his shoulder and guided him back to his chair. He looked over at his fellows. All three were looking down at their clipboards, busying themselves with note-making.

  Toby knew guys like David, with close shaves and nice suits and soft leather shoes and cars waiting for them downstairs the minute they were ready to leave. David Cooper was scared, like anyone would be, but he also had the particular surprise that belonged to those who had been insulated from bad things. He had been born under a lucky star—a wealthy star, a healthy star. There were so many layers of protection between him and the things that could hurt you in this world. But this was nothing he could have prevented. All those safeguards against the outside; this was coming from the inside.

  “Is there someone we can call for you?”

  David looked up. “No, I have to call work. This is a thing you take off for, right?”

  “Right,” Toby said. “You take off from work and make arrangements for the kids. Call your friends and your family and tell them what’s going on. You’re going to need some help, no matter how this goes. We’ll get all the paperwork started and get her on that list.”

  “Can I spend the night here?”

  “Anytime.” 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.

  Toby left the room and found his fellows right outside the door, waiting for him. “What is wrong with you all?” he asked. They looked surprised.

  “Dr. Fleishman?” Logan asked. Joanie and Clay looked at each other.

  “You were making notes while that man was crying.” Toby began walking and they followed, but then he stopped and turned to face them. “You have to look these people in the eye. This isn’t organs. This is people.” He kept walking and arrived at his office. “The people who come to you—they’re not here for checkups. By the time they get to you, they know something is wrong. They’re sick. They’re afraid. 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? Can you just close your eyes and try to think what that might feel like?” He was filled with disgust for the three of them and the way they looked bewildered. “Maybe you should all go into surgery if you hate people who are awake so much.” He walked into his office and before he closed his glass door, he said, “I’m very disappointed.”

  Guilt wasn’t enough. He wanted self-flagellation. He wanted chest beating. You can’t shut down this early. God, these idiot children. What did they know about life? What did they know about suffering?

  * * *

  —

  TOBY SAT IN his office, with his back to the glass wall, staring out the window. His fellows were milling about in the hall, waiting for instructions. He looked at his phone. Still nothing from Rachel. He dialed her cellphone. It rang and rang and finally went to voicemail. He decided to call Kripalu.

  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. “My wife is there and I need to speak with her. Or she was there. She was supposed to be home by now and she isn’t. I’ve tried texting her but I imagine you don’t get a great signal up there.”

  “May I have your wife’s name?”

  “Rachel Fleishman.”

  Silence.

  “So can I speak with her? Can I speak with my wife?”

  “Would you mind holding?”

  “No,” but he was already on hold with chanting monk music.

  Seven whole minutes passed and Sage was back at the phone with her full-sentences greeting.

  Toby cut her off at “divine.” “That was a really long wait,” he said.

  “I was…” But Sage was flustered.

  “Well, is she there?”

  “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.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just not at liberty to give out that information.” He noticed the quiet surety in her voice. She had gotten calls like this. Her job was to tell them nothing.

  He closed his eyes and joined the two ends of his stethoscope around his neck with one hand, pulling it down like a reverse noose. He changed his approach. “Look, it’s okay. She wouldn’t be cheating on
me. We’re separated. All but the paperwork, you know? If she’s there with someone, it’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t—”

  “Fine, it’s fine.” He hung up.

  He paced in his office for another minute. The walls were glass and they faced right out onto the nurses’ station. One of the surgical nurses was looking at him. He took a deep breath and looked down at his phone again. He sent another text to Rachel:

  Hey, I’m worried now. Can you just tell me you’re alive and when you’ll be home?

  He waited for the three dots that showed something—receipt, engagement, proof of life, something. But they never came and his fellows were waiting.

  * * *

  —

  DEEP DOWN, HE’D believed that Rachel would show up while he was at work. He would never have kept poor Mona there for so long if he hadn’t. It would have been just like her to pick them up during the day to avoid a confrontation. She would have loved the fuck you of him having sent all those texts, only to come home and find that she’d picked the kids up hours before. But no, here they were.

  He unpacked the groceries he’d picked up on the way home. He went to the computer in the living room to look up a meatloaf recipe that Solly had liked, but the Internet was running slow. He restarted the router and still it was slow. He went to check the history—sometimes Solly went on some of the kids’ sites to play games that loaded the computer with viruses. He checked the cache. He unchecked the cookies box. He checked the history and—whoa boy, he stopped there.

  The last ten sites visited in the last three hours were hardcore porn sites: circle jerks, MILFs, cougars, barely legals. “Sweet Jesus,” Toby whispered. The Google search that set this off was “girl bagina,” and when Toby saw that, he practically fell over in his chair. He went to the last site visited. It was a kaleidoscope of gifs and pulsating figures, a penis squirting ejaculate into a gleeful woman’s face over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, a woman taking it brutally from behind with delight. Before he himself could get aroused, he forced himself to remember exactly what he was supposed to be doing here, and he ran a virus check and erased the day’s search history. He was sad to realize that his first reaction was to hope that Mona had done it, that she’d sent the kids to his bedroom to watch TV and then sat down at the computer and treated herself to a big old afternoon full of porn—Mona, the meek Ecuadoran woman who had helped raise their children from the time they were born; Mona, the pious Christian who was the most consistent presence in their day sometimes.

  Of course, his theory fell apart when he realized that probably she knew how to spell vagina. There had to be an explanation.

  He phoned her. She answered flatly on the third ring: “Yes.”

  “Hey, Mona, I was just looking at the computer and it looks like someone has been looking at some really inappropriate websites for the last few hours.”

  “No, I was there.”

  “Okay…”

  “Hannah was on the phone with her friends before she watched TV. Solly was playing games.”

  Maybe it was a virus after all. Please, God, let it have been a virus.

  “I’m not so crazy about the fact that they were just in front of screens for hours,” he told her.

  Mona was quiet.

  “What kind of games was Solly playing?” he asked.

  “Computer games.”

  “You really need to be taking them outside.”

  “He was outside all day.”

  “Well, you need to be watching him, Mona. Are you really arguing with me that you should be watching him? I’m telling you he watched pornography in the middle of the living room for hours.”

  Mona hung up, maybe thinking that the fact that Toby had stopped talking was the end of the rebuke, and that this was an appropriate sign-off, the acknowledged receipt of the request, acquiescence with a soldier’s silence.

  “Hannah, Solly, would you come out here?”

  They came eventually.

  “Who was using the computer today?”

  “I was just on the iPad,” Hannah said. Toby looked over at Solly and saw his eyes wide and his jaw gripped in a terrified trembling.

  “Hannah, you can go back to watching TV.”

  Solly closed his eyes. Toby sat on the couch and said, “Come here. It’s okay.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Solly said.

  “Solly.”

  He began to cry and wheeze. “I didn’t do it. I don’t know how those things came up. They just came up.”

  “Is it because—here, Solly, sit, there’s nothing to be afraid of—is it because you were curious about girls?”

  “I just wanted to know what it looked like underneath.”

  Toby nodded. “I understand. Should I get you a book with drawings that’s made for kids your age?”

  Solly’s eyes opened wide. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t want to see it again.”

  Toby pulled Solly by his shoulders so that his head was in Toby’s lap and let him cry while he patted his hair. Solly was nine. 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. As it was, he couldn’t look his aunt again in the eye for years. And for years he worried that he was incomprehensibly fucked up from his first exposure to porn being about incest. There was a large sliver of revulsion in him, but it sat alongside a small sliver of priapic excitement, and he worried about this smaller sliver. He worried he conflated these things; 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.

  This was what he thought about as he patted Solly’s hair. He thought of how the kid was probably traumatized and almost mortally revolted by an encounter with adulthood that came too early for his little brain to synthesize. He thought that for a long time Solly would wonder if it was normal to e
jaculate onto a woman’s face, and if she would cry out with pleasure and delight if he did. He thought about how hard growing up was. There was no way to avoid youth. His father used to say these were the best years of life. He’d think, Are you fucking kidding me? Then kill me now. Yes, he thought of how disgusting growing up was—like literally, the disgust response that comes with so much of it, the horrible revulsion at another small acre of your innocence being incinerated.

  His phone buzzed. It was Rachel, he was sure of it. Some beam of nuclear energy had radiated from the apartment to her mountaintop and activated the remaining shreds of her maternal instincts. She was besieged with wanting to know how her family was. She had probably gotten the message at the desk from Sage and was rushing to reassure him. She had been in a meditative trance for three days and had just woken up and was sorry. She was rushing to tell him that a couple of days of enlightenment had done her good, that she had been wrong to behave as she had and she would like for Toby to come home. “I’m the Rachel you met at the library party,” she’d say. “I’m her again.” He would give her a hard time; she’d hurt him so much over the years. But he would say yes. Of course he would say yes. Not because he missed her, but because he would have given anything for all that had happened—all of it—to have been a great big misunderstanding. He wriggled around trying not to disturb Solly while he retrieved his phone from his pocket, saying, “Sorry, buddy, it might be the hospital.”

  He looked at the screen and saw the lace-sheathed nipple of Nahid, the Parisian woman he had been texting back and forth with on his walk home from work. The nipple was erect.

  He put his phone down and resumed patting Solly’s hair, which he did without stopping for the next two hours.

  * * *

  —

  “I HAVE SOME BAD news,” Toby said when Hannah came out of her room on Tuesday with her bag packed. She thought she was going to the Hamptons, even a day late, and that absent her mother picking her up, she could will herself there by packing for the trip.