Barbara Hiller looked like she’d been crushed in the trash compactor in Star Wars—a perfectly normal-looking person who had been condensed so that everything about her seemed flattened sideways and stretched upward: She had a face so narrow it was hard to believe it could accommodate both eyes. Her nose protruded so much that she had the countenance of a toucan.
Her office was decorated in soft blushes and taupes, what Rachel’s decorator might have called “eighties-era mortuary,” the whole room designed to calm and soothe. Above her desk was an abstract painting that Toby immediately Rorschached into a portrait of the actress Kristy McNichol sitting at his parents’ dining room table.
“Tell me,” Barbara said, calm behind her desk, holding a pencil over a clean sheet of paper in a leather notebook. So he did. He told her that he had no idea where Rachel was, that he had some inkling that she was okay from her assistant, but that she was literally nowhere and seemed to have opted out of his and the children’s lives. Toby told her about their divorce arrangement and their custody agreement—him every other weekend, but also still every day after school/camp until she got home.
“Wow, she’s got you on a leash,” Barbara said.
“That’s one way to put it, I guess.”
“I’d be angry, too,” Barbara said.
“I’m not angry. I just have to figure this out. It’s been two weeks since she’s answered my calls. She’s sleeping with one of the dads from school.”
“Whoa.”
“She’s home. I went to her apartment…”
“You really shouldn’t do that.”
“…and there is evidence of her, like, shacking up with a guy which makes no sense because his wife clearly doesn’t know anything’s going on.”
“Slow down,” Barbara said, writing on a legal pad. “Okay, are you prepared to assume full custody of the children?”
“I already do. That’s what I’m saying. I already do everything. She is like a non-issue in our lives. Like a special guest star.”
“Remind me of your work again?” She narrowed her eyes. “You work, right?”
“I’m a hepatologist at St. Thaddeus.”
“That’s lungs?”
“Livers.”
“My father was a patient there a few years back, but in the cardiology department.”
Toby nodded, unsure of what he should say or if this discussion applied to her hourly rate. “They’re very good doctors in that department.”
“Yes, he’s home now. He’s fine. Just a scare.”
Toby waited.
“Sorry. So the arrangement?”
“I have them most of the time. She has them when she says she can. I’m the—I’m the main person. But again, she’s just gone. I sent the kids to camp. She doesn’t know it.”
“And that’s going to be finalized as part of the agreement.”
“We have general outlines of who gets them when. I have them for half the vacations, and every other weekend.”
“And has she been keeping up to this agreement?”
“Not really. It’s only been about two months. There’s only been Memorial Day and July Fourth for a holiday. I had them Memorial Day. She was supposed to take them for July Fourth, but she took them for just the Sunday and Monday of it because she wanted to go to Fire Island.”
Barbara Hiller looked up. “But she still took them?”
“Only for half of what was agreed to.”
“You should get more formal times in writing. Some people, it’s usually the dads, they end up being more slippery than you think they’ll be. Especially when everyone puts on such a good show for the mediator. Why did you go to a mediator?”
Toby blinked. “Because you told me to when I came in for advice?”
“Right. Yes. The problem with a mediator is that it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight, you know?” She looked off, considering. “She has all the money, right? She’s a…lawyer?”
“Agent.”
“Agent. She works at one of the big firms.”
“She owns her own firm.”
“Right, right. Now I remember. She reps Alejandra Lopez, right?”
“Right.”
“Right, right. My wife and I and the kids sing the Presidentrix soundtrack, like, day and night. It’s really something spectacular. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I was in tears. I never cry.” She looked out the window, absurdly lost in a wonderful memory while he sat right the fuck in front of her.
“So what can I do?”
Barbara Hiller leaned back in her chair, luxuriously expelling air from her solar plexus. “You know, this is a hard one. You could decide not to sign the final paperwork and ask for full custody, but she might withdraw financial support. She pays for everything, if I remember?”
“Just for the kids.”
“But private school, camp, lessons, tutors, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, she pays.”
“And how do you propose to keep all this stuff up on your salary?”
“Well, I can put them in public school….”
“So you’ll take them out of the school that they’ve been in for years right after their parents get divorced.”
Toby didn’t say anything. He thought of Hannah not being able to attend school with her friends anymore.
Barbara looked down at her paper. Then she looked back up at him. She leaned forward and clasped her hands together and she said the next thing like it was a secret.
“You know what I tell the wives?” she asked.
Toby waited.
“I tell them that there is only so much in your control, and that the system is freighted toward the husbands.”
“I don’t feel like the system is freighted toward me right now.”
Barbara narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “No, you’re the wife.”
* * *
—
TOBY SAT STARING out his bedroom window into the humidity, everyone and everything wavy in the heat. It was too hot. Why was it so hot in his room? He leaned over to the air-conditioning to turn it on, but he saw it already was. He’d have to call the super in the morning. Then he’d have to wait for the super. Or miss work. Or miss something.
How could it be? he wondered. How could it be that you take extremely difficult, extremely healthy steps to get your life in order only to have the person you extracted yourself from more in charge of your happiness and well-being than she ever was?
He lay back on his bed, staring at the ceiling. There was a brown stain on it. How does a ceiling get a stain?
God himself must have sent the three pings to his phone in response. He looked at his phone. Karen Cooper had made it through surgery. She was in the ICU on a ventilator. Toby called Clay, who had stayed overnight.
“I think we’re fine,” Clay said. “Patient will be awake tomorrow.”
“Mrs. Cooper.”
“Mrs. Cooper will be awake tomorrow.”
“You sure you don’t need me?”
“I think we’re fine? ICU has her.”
“Okay. If you think I should come in, just ping me. I’m around.”
He hung up. This was a new low for him, basically begging his fellow to ask him to come in. He called Seth, but Seth didn’t answer, which was for the best. What could Seth do right now except show him how much easier a life he could have had if he’d married the right person or if he’d never gotten married at all? It was an exercise in stupidity to wonder those things. He missed his kids. Hannah had gone to sleepaway camp for two summers by now, but Solly—how could he leave him alone like that? The camp forbade contact for the first week, and all he could wonder was if Solly was begging an apathetic teenager to let him call his dad. The apartment was too empty; it was too quiet. Toby was too alone.
His phone buzzed next to him. He couldn’t bear it. He wanted to throw the thing out the window, just be done with all of it. Just be done with everything. But he turned his head and he saw her name.
Nahid.
Sweet holy Moses in a wicker basket, it was Nahid.
Within minutes, he was sitting in the back of a cab, willing it to beat the lights, but it didn’t. His heart beat in time with the opposing street’s DON’T WALK blinker. What a turn this was. Today! Of all days! Sex! Toby! A sex partner! A beautiful woman with an accent and a glorious body. A woman who was reaching out to him. On the TV in the cab, a late-night talk show host did a lip sync challenge with an elderly British actress. The Chyron beneath announced that the heat wave would continue for some time. “Is it hot enough for ya?” the weatherman asked him. Weathermen! Did he ever consider what a hard job that was? How awful it was to have to evaluate the weather based on other people’s values: a nice day, bad weather, etc.? Here in his cab, the driver was having a screaming fight with someone on the phone. The weatherman, the driver—those guys were prisoners. He, Toby, was free.
At her building, he announced that he was there to see Nahid. The doorman waved him along. He shared a brief look with the doorman, which Toby tried to interpret: Was he one of many who showed up? Did the doorman just know to let panting, horny guys up there? Did it even matter?
When he arrived on her floor, she was waiting for him. Silently, they entered her apartment. She took his hand and pushed it under her skirt and made thrusting motions until he took up her cue. Suddenly he wished for nothing to be different. Rachel, camp, the kids—if they were different he wouldn’t be here, and he wanted to be right where he was right then, alive and with his hand up this woman’s skirt.
They fucked on the floor. Afterward, she rested her head on his chest and he put his cheek into her palace of rough, wild hair. She had a gap in her teeth. It was one of the first physical traits that ever reliably made him weak, dating back to a girl named Alyssa in fourth grade who put her tongue through hers while she was writing. How she broke his heart when she got braces in sixth grade.
They lay on the carpet in her living room, under a top sheet, staring at the ceiling and talking. Her parents had emigrated to Paris from Iran right before she was born. Her family had moved to the U.S. when she was twelve. Then, when she was nineteen, her family moved to Queens. Her father sold vertical blinds in Kew Gardens Hills. She said she felt like she was the only Iranian whose family didn’t escape the shah with a treasure chest of jewels. Just down the road in Forest Hills, there were Persian women laden with riches whose homes were filled with sculptures. Nahid? She had blinds in every room.
She went to Baruch, where she met her now ex-husband in an accounting class. She wanted to go into costume design and run her own business, and so she took a few business classes, and there he was—smart, handsome, ambitious. He was a Christian. It was the one thing he couldn’t get around, marrying someone who wasn’t. Her parents were Jewish, but she didn’t care about religion so she converted. She thought it was romantic, that he cared about her so much that his worries extended beyond her death. She had a baptism. She took communion. Her parents stopped speaking to her, but what was she supposed to do? She was in love. This was a nice thing to do for someone you loved.
They didn’t have children, even though they tried, but she felt like maybe a decision had been made for her. She wasn’t born wanting children. She always thought that the moment would come when she did, but time went on and she attended her friends’ baby showers, and she felt no urge. Then, every month, she’d get her period and she’d feel something awfully similar to relief.
Her husband was different. He thought this was a tragedy. He’d had such a clear picture of himself in his life: a wife, children, public service to the conservative values that he believed would save the world. She tried to explain to him the advantages of not having children: that they could travel, that he could run for office without being an absentee parent. He could think of his constituents as his children—his flock. They could have a good life, absent all the tension in the marriages of their friends, which seemed to be crumbling beneath the weight of their kids.
But he was so sad, and she loved him. So they tried, and then they tried hard, and then they tried harder, pumping poisons into her body and prying her and implanting her and injecting her and stimulating her parts. She thought with some relief that obviously this wasn’t meant to be. She had been told from too young an age about God and how in charge he was. She couldn’t help thinking that this was divine intervention, that God wouldn’t give her children she didn’t absolutely want.
He was bereaved. She would reach for him and try to comfort him, but he didn’t want that. She said she wanted comfort. He said, “Don’t you think it’s weird how much sex you want?” She was taken aback. She’d never thought about it. All she knew was that her friends were constantly complaining about all the sex their husbands still wanted and all the sex they themselves didn’t want. “It’s not nice,” her husband said. “It’s not ladylike.” She kept trying to tell him that wanting to have sex with her husband was normal. He would change the subject. She would leave to go to the bathroom and stare into the mirror at her lovely face and try to figure out what was wrong with it.
At some point, they stopped having sex completely. He wanted to adopt. That was the last thing she wanted. He wanted to hire a surrogate. That was the second-to-last thing she wanted. There was no way to talk about anything without it being about this. An unrelenting sadness crept into their home’s foundation. He began to stay out later and later. He began to come home smelling like musky perfumes. And then, one sad night, she came home from a walk across the High Line and found him on his knees, with his personal assistant’s penis in his mouth, which now replaced adoption as the last thing she ever wanted.
“I guess that explains him not wanting to have sex,” Toby said. “Because I can’t imagine.”
“Tell me about you,” she said.
He looked up at her ceiling. No stains. Did he want to tell her? Did he want her to know that there was an emergency going on? That his story was actually slightly different from the story he’d told her a week ago?
“My wife was an unfit mother,” he said. “But she wanted children. She just couldn’t manage to figure out how to love them, or to love us.”
She waited. He didn’t want to tell her anything else, mostly because he still didn’t understand what he could say that wouldn’t make him seem like all the women who had told him their stories. They’d always seemed like such victims. The way they would talk about the betrayals that led to hurt and the intensity that became apathy—it made him wonder what the men’s side of the story was. Here he thought of Rachel and Sam one more time, lo mein cartons in hand. What could she be telling him about Toby? Surely not: “I changed the terms of who I was and what I wanted with just about no warning.” Instead it was: “He was lazy and punished me for having ambition.”
“Do you think maybe you want to go to dinner sometime?” he asked.
She smiled dirty. “I’d rather order in.”
“No, seriously. I’d like to get to know you. I’d like to take you out.”
“I can’t. I’m still figuring things out with my husband and I don’t want to go out with another man just now.”
“Because it would hurt him too much?” She was quiet. “But you’re not married anymore.”
She laughed at him. “Divorce doesn’t make you any less married.”
* * *
—
IT MUST HAVE been that his dreams were too real, or else that he was never really asleep, because when he woke up that Saturday, it was like he’d been waiting to open his eyes. The whole night he had been stuck in the gloaming where sleep kept threatening, but all he got were hallucinations. He’d forgotten to pull the shades, so the room was too bright. Th
e air-conditioning was working now but making a weird sound. He was still sleeping on one side of the bed, and every morning this made him feel pathetic. He closed his eyes and searched his brain for the thing that was bothering him but couldn’t locate it. The apartment was so quiet that it was hard to think.
Why was all his life about white-knuckling his anxiety? Disgust rose in him and he knew he couldn’t withstand the day like this, talking himself down. He texted Seth, who didn’t answer. He was probably strung out in a post-Ecstasy, post-cocaine stupor from the night before. With a little dread, he texted me.
What are you doing today?
I told him that we were going to our pool club. Come with! We’ll bbq. He looked outside. The trees were not moving. It was seven A.M., and the people below on the street were fanning themselves. The taxi television had been right. It was hot. He wrote back.
Tell me what train to take, I’ll be there.
On the train out of Penn Station, his phone beeped. Seth was returning his text. We’re around.
I’m going to see Libby in NJ. Pool. You should come.
Yeah, gonna skip NJ
She’s bbqing
There is no bbq or body of water that will make me want to go to the suburbs
Fair
Dinner tonight? V wants to meet you.
Sure
He looked out the window of the train into the dark Penn Station tunnel. It was ten A.M. by now and the man across the aisle from him was shirtless and drunk. Toby would make it through the day.
* * *
—
AT MY HOUSE, I watched Toby watch me fight with my eight-year-old daughter, Sasha, who wanted to wear a bikini.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 23