Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  But Sam was married. That’s right. Sam was married. Miriam was not talking about her ex-husband at the Whole Foods. Miriam was setting up a fucking yoga playdate with Toby for her very current husband. What kind of idiot monster fucks a married man? The apps work for women, too, Rachel. You can find someone who is available and not wreck a marriage over this, Rachel. There were finance bros carpeting this city like Astroturf on a college football field and she was still pretty and thin and could have any single one of them.

  “Listen to the patient, you fucking asshole,” he said to himself, right there, aloud, in the living room, the twilight descending through the unshaded windows. She is giving you the fucking diagnosis. His brain had always tried to make her behavior excusable. It didn’t have to do that anymore. They were over. And also, there were no excuses, no possible reasons for this behavior. Christ, why couldn’t he just face it? What had he done? What had he done aligning his life with this kind of person? Shut up, shut up, he told his brain.

  It was now almost two weeks since Rachel had dropped off the kids. She was ten days late to pick them up. Rachel was gone. Toby had been replaced. She’d upgraded. Now she was free and relaxed. Now she was sleeping in the fucking park, finally calm and at ease enough to become one of those people she’d stared at with derision and longing back when the princess was still willing to grace the park with a walk-through. Now she was free.

  * * *

  —

  THE PEANUT BUTTER he bought was useless. It had sugar added to it. He would never eat that. He would never feed it to his children. He was his children’s only chance in the world now. Everything and everyone was fucked forever.

  He put the peanut butter down and left the apartment. He didn’t know what time it was, but it had been light when he went in and now the sky was a violet dusk. Outside, he broke into a run. He headed toward Seventy-fifth Street. At a stoplight, he paused and saw a familiar woman crossing Third Avenue. She was pretty and young, and he looked hard at her face, breathless, and she, feeling she was being looked at, looked back at him. They remembered each other at the exact same moment. She was from Hr, he realized—a crazy night early on where they’d gotten on the FaceTime functions of their phones and watched each other’s faces as they’d masturbated—her suggestion. Nothing else, no body parts, no talking, just watching each other’s faces. She hung up the minute they both came, as if she couldn’t bear being connected any longer with a person who would do these things. Yes, now he remembered. She was staring at him, but he kept going. Lauren. Her name was Lauren. He took off into a run again. He could not bear the Internet. He could not bear that it was treated like it was not real and yet it was filled with real people who could just walk the same streets as he did. He hated himself so much right then he wanted to die. Well, Lauren, this is what you can expect from the mutual masturbation community on your online dating app. You can expect your former jerk-off partner to be found running wild-eyed through the streets looking for his ex-wife; that’s the caliber of person you are dealing with when you are someone who stares into a phone while whacking off.

  He arrived at the Golden—Rachel’s home. His former home. His children’s home. His children’s former home. Toby slowed his jog as he passed George, who had been his favorite doorman, and raised his hand in his rushed greeting. Toby ran into an open elevator and frantically pushed the close-door button. He arrived at the ninth floor, overcome with fear combined with rage combined with anxiety. He felt his heart beating in his face. Maybe he would die and it would seem like a terrible tragedy and only he would know that he was saved from whatever it was that lay behind her front door.

  Maybe he was weak. Maybe he was weak like she said. He put the key in the door. It still worked. He walked in. He knew on an animal level the sounds and feelings of that place, both when it was occupied and when it wasn’t. He felt the emptiness of it. No one was home. He was relieved. Why are you such a pussy? he asked himself.

  He’d been inside less than a month ago, picking up Hannah’s haftorah worksheet, since her lesson was being moved to Toby’s house at the last minute. That day, the place still felt like where he’d once lived. He’d stopped and had a moment, like Emily in the last scene of Our Town: Had he ever realized what a nice apartment it was, when he was so busy registering his scorn for the materialism of all of it? Now he saw it compared to his new apartment, the outstanding feature of which was no longer his Le Creusets but the metal shades and the wobbly air-conditioning and the popcorn ceiling. He’d left that day angry at himself for allowing his brain to do the thing that his brain always did, which was to assume that things weren’t as bad as they were when they definitely had been.

  And yet, beneath the veneer of order was their history. This was where his life took place for the last four years. This was where his marriage fell apart, yes, but this was also where he did homework with his kids and showed them the Star Wars movies and fucked his wife. This was where they fought, yes, but this was also where they made up and laughed and listened to Hannah practice her flute or watched Solly rehearse lines for scenes during his brief foray into acting lessons—he was to play the oldest Von Trapp son in the Y’s all-kid version of The Sound of Music and it was a disaster. This was where he built a fingerprint crime scene set for Hannah’s third-grade science fair and where he built a solar system model that actually had a motorized rotator with Solly for his. He couldn’t hate it here. Ascribing blackness to this place felt like a betrayal of his children, who had been through enough.

  He walked through the silence. The small things that appeared changed since he’d lived here—the definitively mid-cench easy chair on the other side of the room, a new lamp to replace one that Hannah had knocked over a year ago—it all had a discombobulating effect on him. The chandelier was down two lights, even though he’d bought a dozen replacements before he left. In the kitchen, there was an almost soundless leak coming from the sink faucet, still there after he’d warned her about it a month ago. Why had Toby assumed that when he was gone, she would become a person who knew how to take care of things?

  He opened the refrigerator. There were six Chinese food containers all lined up. He opened one. Beef lo mein. She didn’t eat lo mein. She ate shrimp in lobster sauce. Solly ate lo mein, but Solly didn’t like beef. He smelled inside the box, but it didn’t smell especially pungent. Maybe it was someone else’s lo mein, or maybe Rachel had just bought the wrong lo mein, not remembering her children’s particularities. Or. Or Rachel could be either eating lo mein or fucking a guy who liked lo mein. Both options seemed fairly impossible and extremely likely.

  He opened the second box. It was also beef lo mein, though half of it was eaten. He opened the next two boxes, dread and eeriness mounting like in a horror movie: They were all beef lo mein. It didn’t make any fucking sense.

  For a moment, in his mind’s eye, he could see it. Rachel and Sam on the couch. Her lying down since now she was a relaxed type, now she was someone who slept in Central Park, her legs carelessly draped over Sam’s sitting-up legs. Both of them with beef lo mein containers, eating out of the carton like fucking pigs. She was typing on her phone because her phone was actually the love of her life—don’t kid yourself, Rothberg—while Sam read one of a pile of National Reviews. She looked up and said, “I’m so happy to be trying new things again. Toby would never think to order me beef lo mein, and it’s delicious.”

  What was he doing there? What was he imagining? It wasn’t helpful. He knew that. He walked into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. He tried to discern if both pillows had head indentations. They did, but who knows? Maybe she was spreading out on the bed now that he was gone. He stood very still and tried to feel the energy of the place. Had sex been had here? He missed that bed; it was so comfortable. He looked at it longingly. What the fuck, he decided. He lay down like Goldilocks on his side of the bed and turned, staring at what had been hers. Toby moved his body to the m
iddle, still with his shoes on, and made himself into a starfish shape, an elegy for this amazing fucking bed that he loved and maybe also to spread his scent and remind any new visitor to this bed that he was not the first—no, Toby was. He leaned his head into a pillow. It still smelled like her. Or maybe not her. Maybe it smelled like her and Sam Rothberg.

  Maybe this was where they ate their lo mein and plotted their affair. Now he could see them, post-coital, propped up on their elbows on their sides, facing each other, still sweaty and panting while they voraciously housed the lo mein.

  “God, all this time I was eating shrimp and lobster sauce like a complete asshole,” she said to Sam.

  “You just didn’t know better, baby,” he said back.

  “I have so much to learn from you.”

  This was a bad experiment. Toby stood up.

  The master bathroom door was open. Maybe he could discern a male pubic hair, or any pubic hair; she sure as hell hadn’t had pubic hair in years. Her toothbrush was dry. There was another toothbrush next to it. It could have been one of the kids’. It could have been his old one. He didn’t remember. He opened the medicine cabinet. There was a bottle of Ambien. There was a bottle of Ambien prescribed to Sam Fucking Rothberg.

  “Ah!” Toby said out loud. He was momentarily triumphant for putting all of this together; then he remembered that the loser points in this scenario actually accrued to him. But now he was remembering Tiger Woods, how he’d eat like twelve Ambien and go on a twilight sleep-sex binge. People did crazy shit on Ambien: killing people and making five-course dinners they couldn’t remember making and jumping out of windows. The mother of his children, high and crazy.

  Oh Jesus, now he could see that, too, Rachel on all fours on top of the dining room table, totally naked, supporting herself with one hand while stuffing beef lo mein into her face with her other hand, Sam banging her from behind—on his knees on a Swedish modern table Toby had been allowed to help pick out but had never had sex on himself—while also holding a carton of beef lo mein and eating it with his hands.

  He went back into the kitchen. Now he saw, lined up on the counter, six different boxes of specialty teas that were brands he didn’t recognize: Dr. Albert’s Lemon Balm Fizz tea. Heavenscape Lavender tea. Serenity Valerian tea. Serenity Passionflower tea. Rachel hated tea. She drank coffee. Tea, she said, was a too-complicated way of drinking water. It was useless and she had no patience for it. So Sam was an insomniac. It was nice that even sociopaths could be haunted by their decisions.

  He looked down on the floor. It was her workout tank top, his least favorite one: ANY YOGA I DO IS HOT YOGA, it said in hot-pink letters against a blue background. Beneath it were her leggings, which were patterned in multicolor lightning bolts. He picked up the tank top. He smelled it. It was her. It was Rachel, right there. He wanted to eat the tank top, to consume it and make it go away. Was it warm? Was he imagining that it was warm?

  A voice came into his head that put an end to all the questioning: She’s been here recently. She’s been here because she lives here. She’s been here recently with someone else. Someone who drinks tea. Someone who eats lo mein. She’d been exercising while he’d worked hard to allow their children to imagine for a few more weeks that their mother loved them. She’d had sex on his bed with a married dickfuck. She’s been here. You’re the last person to know, Toby. Fuck you, Toby.

  If he wanted to bring the kids here at night and drop them off when they got back from camp, he could. He could just leave them here and let her deal with it. But the kids didn’t deserve a mother who was at the very least ambivalent about them. And she certainly didn’t deserve the kids. It didn’t even matter that she didn’t want them; she didn’t deserve them, either.

  He picked up the phone. This was how to do it. He called her cell. It went right to voicemail. He called her office.

  “Rachel Fleishman’s office.” Simone picked up on the first ring, but her voice was tentative. “Rachel?!”

  “It’s Toby. Is she not there?”

  “Oh! Hi, Toby!” She sounded sweaty and terrified. “You’re calling from Rachel’s house. Are you there with her?”

  “She’s not here. I’m here to pick up some stuff for the kids.”

  “Did you see her? Was she there when you got there?”

  “Tell her I said that I know everything and she can just go fuck herself and she will never see these children again if I have anything to do with it. We do not need her. We don’t need any of it.”

  On his way out of the apartment, he noticed that the rug was now gone, replaced probably by the penguin with the kind of million-dollar custom Turkish rug he’d read about in the Style section. He left without locking the door. Let her wonder, he thought. He got into the elevator, which still smelled like home to him. It was about all he could take. Could a place have a soul? Could a woman who was alive be a ghost?

  “Goodbye, Dr. Fleishman,” George said cheerfully. Toby gave him a salute, nothing wrong here, and walked right out.

  * * *

  —

  HE COULDN’T REMEMBER when last he’d eaten and some force of self-preservation allowed him to find himself, soon after leaving the Golden, standing on gelatinous legs at the salad place on Eighty-fifth Street in an interminable line of young women who had just worked out. He looked at his phone, the way they all looked at their phones, but he didn’t know where to start. He was barely a man anymore. Within minutes he received a text that Karen Cooper’s liver was ready before his salad was.

  At the hospital, David Cooper was being informed over his wife’s now-empty bed by Marco Lintz, the surgeon, while Toby’s fellows and Marco’s surgical fellows were there. And one person extra: Phillipa London. Now, what the fuck was Phillipa doing there? Reporting on him and his not having been there to Bartuck, he bet. Well, he was here now.

  “Dr. Fleishman,” Phillipa said. “I was just attending until you got here.” Was that an accusation? Was he supposed to just be waiting around for a liver to come in? Phillipa was too serious and too punishing. She lived the doctor’s version of a monk’s life: racquetball three days a week, swimming two, work by seven, no aberration. There was no universe in which she could understand a crisis like the one Toby was enduring. Toby admired that, and he resented it, and he was snide about it: Look at this person in total control of her life, look at how much she gets to control her life, look at that control freak and her sad life.

  They all took notes while that pretty boy Lintz lectured David Cooper. He once heard Joanie describe Lintz’s eyes to Clay as being “like melted coffee beans.” He didn’t know why this stuck with him or why she didn’t just say chocolate. And by the way, he wasn’t that handsome. He just wasn’t.

  “Does she even know what’s going on?” This question came from the corner, from a woman Toby hadn’t seen before. She was about Karen’s age and had the same processed uptownness to her: stripy blond hair that was ironed straight, a fraying at the ends.

  “She doesn’t,” Marco said. This made the woman’s face ball up into a crying fist.

  Toby walked David to the family lounge with the woman, whose name was Amy. In the lounge, the Cooper twins were on the Xbox, Jasper still crying while he played. David went to talk to them about ordering dinner.

  “I was in Vegas with her the weekend before she came here,” Amy was saying.

  “Really?” Toby asked. “What was she like? I mean, how was she?”

  Amy thought for a second, then smiled. “Free.” Then, “Oh my God, did we drink.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Usually a disease like this is in the works in the background, and then after a bout of drinking, it comes to the fore.”

  Amy looked stricken. “Do you mean that the drinking did this? It was just a weekend. It was a Vegas weekend. What are you supposed to do?”

  “Nah, it was coming anyway.”


  Amy took out her phone and pulled up some pictures. It was Karen Cooper. Karen Cooper with Amy at Madame Tussauds, her leg wrapped around a waxen leg attached to a member of Mötley Crüe. Karen Cooper pretending to lick the face of waxen Prince Harry, of all people.

  Having an unconscious patient was like talking to someone on the phone for hours before ever seeing them: It was hard to reconcile that they hadn’t been what you pictured, and your brain, having never seen the person, corrected for them to be more of what you wished they were. Toby had pictured someone smart and complicated, though he didn’t know why. He had not pictured someone who posed for pictures lasciviously, with her tongue hanging out. But there she was, on Amy’s screen: alive, with thoughts and opinions and preferences and animating forces, like a breath was blown into her and she was made sentient. The exact opposite of what actually had happened, which was that a breath was blown out of her and she was made into just the sum of her biological parts. He looked at a picture of her holding up a shot of something at a bar. She looked into the camera with defiance. It was awfully sexy. The picture could easily be one of the supplementary pics from a Hr profile, not the main one but a third or fourth. He had to look away from the phone in order to restore her to personhood and patienthood, and only briefly did he think to wonder if he was doing a bad job of thinking of the women he dated as people.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Toby found himself too awake at five A.M., and so he went for a meandering walk. By six, he had made a decision. He called the law office of Barbara Hiller, telling her he had a custodial emergency. Her secretary called back at eight to tell him she could squeeze him in before a morning deposition. Toby was waiting in front of Barbara’s locked office by the time she showed up in a tennis skirt and a weathered navy polo shirt that was turned up at the sleeve hems and at the collar.