Hannah’s face tightened. “No.” She said it like she was chiding a dog.
“Your mom called. She had to take a sudden trip for work. She’s really sorry.”
Hannah started shaking her limbs out about how unfair it was. “You don’t understand,” she bellowed as she folded into a position that his yoga teacher called a Standing Forward Bend, clutching her stomach like it hurt. “I’m meeting up with everyone there. They’re waiting for me. They’re all already there.”
He tried to approach her, but she was vicious and snarling and her nostrils were flaring. She was beautiful like her mother and she was ridiculous like her mother.
Late the night before, he made three unanswered calls to Rachel, plus a series of texts:
Come on, Rachel. This isn’t cool.
You know I have a life, too.
Then, in the morning, pleading:
I’m getting worried. Please call me.
Then, one rabid-feeling hour after that, he sent another. It made him sick to send this one:
I won’t ask you any questions. Please just call.
Then he’d messaged Nahid, who kept texting him body parts and who now wanted to schedule a date. This one hurt. 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. Anyway, he thanked Nahid for understanding, and then a wave of nausea came over him and he wondered if he would still be in the same position on Thursday as he was today, on Tuesday. It couldn’t be. Rachel owned a successful business. People relied on her. People relied on her, she always said. Yeah, well, people relied on him, too, Rachel. For their lives, Rachel.
He had looked at his phone as the hour struck midnight. What could he take away from her? How could he hurt her? He didn’t know. How could he inconvenience her? He didn’t know. He swore what he did next wasn’t related to these thoughts, but, well. Crazed, vicious, he texted Mona:
My 9-year-old watched porn on the computer for hours in front of you today. We will no longer be requiring your services. Good luck to you.
Rachel would have feelings about that, but, well, if Rachel wants input, Rachel has to be there to give it, right? Toby was never allowed to give instruction to Mona. Rachel said it was bad management to have two bosses. Mona would ask, “Should I take Hannah for new shoes for the first day of school?” and Toby wouldn’t know the answer—he wouldn’t know if Rachel had already ordered some or planned to take her herself and he didn’t dare risk the dressing-down that would come with him showing any initiative. “Mona is the only person who accepts me on my own terms,” Rachel once told him. “All I have to do is pay her. I never have to explain myself. I never have to put up with any bullshit.”
Now, he deposited the kids in the conference room at the hospital, and Hannah seethed. Solly was fine. He couldn’t believe how much screen time he was getting as a result of this windfall, but Hannah. Hannah was angry at him somehow. How could he tell her that her mother had ditched them all without a thought? How could he tell her that her mother seemed to be in the midst of doing something he couldn’t begin to put words to?
* * *
—
HE HEADED TO the chief’s office.
“Can I see him?” Toby asked the secretary, and the secretary gestured that he could.
He entered the chief’s chambers, which was wood paneled like a law library and had shelves filled with Plexiglas awards dating back to the 1980s—awards for research and community contributions and bedside manner. Donald Bartuck was the chief of hepatology, MD, FACP, etc., etc. He was a good doctor, but he came out of the womb destined for an administration job, all handshakes and winks and remembering wives’ names. Back when he was Toby’s attending, he had taught Toby and his fellow fellows the same kind of care Toby taught his fellows, which was why his move toward admin upset Toby so much. If you get it, if you love the work so much, why would you want to do this thing that was the opposite of the work? If you like fundraising and paperwork so much, why not just go into finance like Seth, and make a ton of money doing what you do instead of just extremely good money that’s tied to high-stakes medical decisions?
Bartuck was looking over his thick black glasses at something in a manila folder when Toby walked in. He looked like a stretched-out Ted Kennedy: six-seven, muscular and lean with a big gray wave of too much hair and walrus jowls on a hangdog face. When Toby walked down the halls alongside him, he could only think about what different species they were—Gulliver and a Lilliputian. On his desk was a picture of him with his second wife, Maggie, and their three children, all in tennis whites. On the other side of the desk was a picture of Bartuck with a former president. Toby sat down in a leather chair that emitted air at impact.
“Toby.”
“Do you have a minute?”
Bartuck put down the paper he was looking at.
Toby sat down and took a second before he said it out loud. “I need to take a day or two off. Personal days.”
Bartuck folded his hands and leaned into the desk. “It’s not ideal. Karen Cooper’s husband works for the hedge fund that hosts our bone marrow drive every year.” Hedge funds hosting bone marrow drives reminded Toby of fraternity houses doing bake sales. Anything to clean up the conscience.
“I know. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need to.”
Bartuck was silent as he waited for an explanation. Everyone wanted a show.
“Rachel got stuck on a business trip,” Toby said. “She was supposed to be back and take the kids for the week but she can’t, and the babysitter is off.”
Holy shit. He’d fired Mona. He thought he might have diarrhea. Bartuck was silent: Keep going. “She let my son watch porn yesterday.” Mona. He’d fired Mona.
“Hooboy. So you’ll just stay home with them?” Bartuck asked.
“It’s better than the conference room. I’ll be around for any phone calls. Phillipa is here, and so are my fellows.” He didn’t mention the Hamptons because a guy as self-conscious as Toby couldn’t fathom saying “the Hamptons” in front of a guy who knew what he made—which, yes, was a very decent amount of money by American standards but it wasn’t Hamptons money. Bartuck had a house in the Hamptons. Bartuck had parties and donors to entertain. He had people to emphatically agree with no matter what the fuck came out of their mouths. He had to parade his degrees to people who were impressed with them while bragging about how he oversaw the people who were still actually being doctors.
“Hoo,” Bartuck said. “Okay, then. Take two days, but make sure your people are on top of Karen Cooper. I’ll check in on her, too. I told David Cooper that you were the best we had.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Toby left his office and went into the conference room. Hannah and Solly looked up from their iPads.
“Who wants to go to Long Island?” Toby asked. Solly cheered and the misery on Hannah’s face evacuated itself as if it had never been there.
* * *
—
I HAD JUST GOTTEN through Penn Station when Toby texted me that he couldn’t meet for lunch. Rachel unilaterally decided to stay at her stupid fucking yoga retreat for a few extra days, he wrote.
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Still? I asked.
She does this. Don’t ask.
A man with half of one leg missing limped by on crutches. A fourteen-year-old dressed like a clown cried into her phone. A woman from Long Island with five nine-year-old girls dressed the same in dance recital costumes screamed at one of them, “I didn’t say that to her!” Penn Station is the fucking worst. I looked up at the War Games tracking board. The next train back to New Jersey was leaving in fourteen minutes, but I couldn’t bear to get on. I didn’t want to—I couldn’t—sit next to some dipshit drinking a sixteen-ounce Bud Light Lime twice in one hour.
I decided to walk downtown instead, just for a little while. Rachel was where? At a yoga retreat? Somewhere punishing Toby? Somewhere just not considering Toby? My mother always used to tell me that you can steal hours, not days. But Rachel was stealing days, just like I used to. The magazine used to send me on trips to nice hotels in foreign cities that I was probably never going to visit on my own, and once, in London, I stayed two extra days just because I couldn’t bear to get back on a plane after my two-hour interview. I changed my ticket (never once did I book the trip for longer, I merely extended the stay) so that I could stay two days extra. My daughter was eight months old at the time. But it wasn’t just that I was tired, and it wasn’t just that it was unreasonable to ask me to go to Europe from New York for two days. It was because I felt like the hotel, the city, the aloneness, these were times where I could feel my skin again; I could feel my body again. I existed again without context—without a stroller, without a man holding my hand. I wouldn’t wear my ring on these trips. It wasn’t because I wanted to fuck around. It was because when I was on airplanes my fingers got cold and skinny and so my ring would drop off and I couldn’t take the panic of worrying that I’d lost it. But also maybe it was the other thing, the context thing, I don’t know. Put it this way: You can feel your body for the first time in a long time, you can feel your skin, then suddenly you can also feel this ring around your finger and the weight of it is suddenly unbearable.
Adam would have been okay with it; that’s the truth. Instead I told him the interview was delayed. I walked around the castles and museums and along the Thames. I suddenly liked Impressionism, like the feline idiot that I had become. I suddenly liked sitting at a bar instead of a table for dinner. I suddenly liked espresso but without milk! Who drinks coffee without milk! Once, I sat next to a businessman on a plane to Lisbon who paid me close attention, even though I was wearing dirty clothes and glasses and talking about my kids. He wanted to know if we could have dinner when we got there. We did, at a café at night in the heat down an alley, and inside my body I felt something tapping on the window of consciousness—not hard, just a muffled knock. It made no sense. The guy was just like Adam—responsible, kind, a little oblivious. And all I wanted was for him to try to kiss me. Adam wanted to kiss me. Why wasn’t that good enough? I left the café abruptly. I don’t want to talk about it. Just to say these tiny rebellions were so laughable. I was such a joke. I don’t want to talk about it.
I was in the Village before I knew it, on the little stretch of Sixth that leads to Carmine Street. I passed the basketball playground and the old movie theater, which was now the new movie theater. My parents had gone to NYU, like I had, and when my father visited me at school he’d talk about what stores used to be what stores and I thought it was the most tedious thing in the world, except that it was nuts to me that the student union was now a center for religious studies.
I walked up and down Carmine for a little bit, just that tiny street, trying to feel the jolt of something nostalgic or beautiful. I lived there after college, in my first own apartment. It was everything my mother was afraid of, a Looking for Mr. Goodbar fuck den of iniquity (which meant having sex with like one person I wasn’t married to) filled with takeout containers. Once, I met a man at the Angelika during a screening of Laurel Canyon, which led to actual intercourse in my apartment—I just took him home. I only did that once.
I was still living on Carmine Street when I fell in love with my first editor, Glenn, back at the first magazine I worked at out of college, TV Tonight. Glenn was married, with three children. He wasn’t the most handsome guy in our office, but he was the one who telegraphed a kind of stability that I was boring enough to find sexy. On the nights he came back to the apartment with me after work we would have sex and he would get up to leave and go back to Westchester and I would cry every time. 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.
Glenn was not really a predator. It was more like he was powerless against the attention I, a young person, was giving him. The first time I met him, he was standing in a doorway, backlit, holding a magazine proof that I had to read for an edit test. Something happened in that innocent exchange—the simple placing down of a piece of paper on my desk with a kind word. Something electric, something addicting. I sought him out at every turn. I asked for help where I didn’t need it. I swiveled around his desk, obvious to everyone around me, unable to stop myself. He walked past me and my breath caught. He was not that handsome or interesting. I’m telling you, it made no sense.
But then, too, I could feel my body. I could feel it opening to him, and I saw just how it all worked: evolution, attraction, procreative imperatives. I saw for the first time that I was powerless to these forces. I’d had crushes—I’d even been in love. But nothing as, I don’t know, full-body as this. This was why people wrote poetry. This was why all the songs were about love. I get it now, I thought. I get it. One night, in an elevator, he told me he found me distracting. I told him we should talk about it over dinner. He called his wife in front of me from a pay phone to say he was stuck in the city for a few hours. And that was that.
I thought about that time now, about how eager I was to please him in bed. I can’t think of that without thinking about poor Adam, about how the gift he gave me was a lack of volatility, and as a result he gets a less volatile me—a less eager me, a less humid me.
Anyway.
When Glenn was in my bed, I would light up a cigarette and blow it toward him so that he would smell like cigarettes when he got home, hoping it would tip off his wife and move some sort of needle. I’d spend my days imagining that something happened to her or them—usually it was a tragedy, not just a divorce—that would necessitate me moving into his house and taking care of his kids. 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.
It occurred to me walking on Carmine Street that I’d gotten the kind of life I wanted. I’d become like Glenn’s wife—married, suburban, tame, waiting for a man to come home. I’d met Adam through work, too. I’d been on a story about a lawsuit against a Christian-only dating service and he was the young associate assigned to be my minder at the litigation firm. He was tall, with kind eyes and thick black glasses. He wore undershirts and Weejuns; he had knit ties and regular ones. He occupied a world where you knew how to dress for what, and it was always with a Brooks Brothers blazer. He came from a wealthy family who expected him to be wealthy, too, and because the perpetuation of wealth among the wealthy
was expected, it came naturally to him.
While I was on the story—I was at the men’s magazine by now— we’d have lunch, and I’d try to squeeze information out of him, and he wouldn’t give me any, but he remained steady and cheerful, never annoyed. What a strange thing, a lack of darkness. What a strange thing, for your job to not stress you out, for good things to make you happy and bad things to make you sad. Simplicity is a cool shower after a hot bath. My emotions never tracked quite so logically. 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.
We had a great sex life, and then we had a regular one, and then (as in now) we were in the wilderness. We had sex once a week, then not once a week, then every other week, but then twice in that next week so it must be okay, right? Here is the problem: You can only desire something you don’t have—that’s how desire works. And we had each other. Resolutely. Neither of us with a stray glance at another. 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? Forget it, there’s no use talking about this. Talking about this doesn’t make it better.
My phone rang and I sat down on the bench in front of the church on the corner. It was my babysitter, wanting to know what she was supposed to feed the kids for dinner. I looked at the time. It was five already. I’d been wandering for six hours.
When I got off the phone, my earbuds were still in from the call and my phone started playing a song, which it sometimes does, without my explicit instruction. The song it played was a U2 song from an album that was released when I was finishing high school, an album I played on a CD boom box, lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about how I was at the end of some beginning, which made what came next the beginning of the end. I walked over to the bodega on a corner at Sixth and bought a pack of cigarettes. The man who sold them to me didn’t look at me funny; he didn’t tell me I was too old to be playing games like this. I went back to the bench and lit a cigarette and inhaled, the smoke entering my body and filling it with poison, with something.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 11