Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  * * *

  —

  SETH AND HIS co-workers were born imperialists, and so would pillage the city for tiny, cash-only ramen places or Thai restaurants that had a secret, ultra-authentic room behind the kitchen where the staff also ate and where they would insist on eating, too. They were the best and the only and the highest and the chef was trained in Beirut as a prisoner of war and the waitstaff had to get scuba training so that they could understand what it meant to touch pleasure and the restaurant itself used to be a church or a secret meeting place for the Illuminati or a Tibetan monastery that only the hottest, most favored Tibetans were invited to. It was not just about owning the city. It was about owning everything beneath and above and behind the city, too. Finance guys were the fucking worst.

  Seth told Toby to meet him at a rooftop bar that was located through an attic door whose ladder you had to climb inside a shitty Korean bodega. It was only six P.M. Seth and Vanessa were the only people at a table. Vanessa stood to meet Toby, rising above him four or five inches. She opened her arms to give him a soft, blond hug. “I am so glad to finally meet you,” she said. She held on. Her warmth made Toby a little dizzy. “I’ve only met Seth’s co-workers. I was beginning to wonder why there weren’t more old friends!”

  “I’ve heard great things about you,” Toby told her. “This is the first time in many years Seth’s dated someone long enough for us to make plans.”

  “That’s not true,” Seth said. To Vanessa, “We’ve been out of touch for a while.”

  Her face suddenly melted into concern. “Because of your divorce,” Vanessa said.

  “Well, because of my marriage,” Toby said. She was nice. She was engaging. She was hot. She was golden and tan, like an Oscar with hair. She was really fucking hot.

  She was a publicist for a restaurant group. Her work required her to be out nearly every night.

  “That’s how I met Seth,” she said.

  “How? He was eating?”

  She laughed too hard. “Seth said you were so funny! No, we were having a tasting at one of my restaurants, LuPont down on West Third.” She turned to Seth with a look on her face like she’d discovered gravity. “I know! We should all go there sometime!”

  “Vanessa can get us in everywhere,” Seth said. “Even places she doesn’t rep. She has like a dog whistle with hostesses. It’s amazing. Her shop was on a Forbes list.”

  Vanessa’s dress was mostly opaque but not completely. She was wearing one of those bras that a lot of the women who sent him pictures wore that only hit midbreast, above the nipple but with plenty left out in the open air. It was called a demicup, he thought he remembered from his hours masturbating to his sister’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs when he was a teenager. Rachel didn’t wear bras like that. She wore utilitarian bras with a three-inch strap that used four hooks to clasp. Nursing, she’d said, had ruined her breasts. Stop thinking about breasts, Toby.

  “Do you like your work?” Toby asked.

  “I do,” she said. “Chefs are definitely the artists of our moment.”

  “Huh.” Toby didn’t know what to say to that. Tweens were tedious. He knew this from all his time with Hannah. But something he’d learned from his relatively recent introduction to dating apps and his brief, initial foray into a younger age range was that women in their twenties were tedious, too. They weren’t tedious to other people in their twenties. They were fine. Maybe people in their fifties thought people in their forties were tedious? He’d find out in ten years. Toby’s fellows were always in their twenties, and there were more than a few times that he realized that the cluelessness and cockiness of their age was the only thing that allowed them to believe they could take a person’s life into their hands and become a doctor. That was why you heard about people in their thirties and forties going to law school but never medical school. It wasn’t just the time it would take to get licensed. It was the realization as you got older about how fallible you were in every aspect of your life.

  Now Toby looked at Seth and Vanessa. They were revolting. Her hotness was revolting.

  Vanessa’s phone pinged. She picked it up and began to answer a text. She put her phone down and stood up. “I’ll be right back.” She headed toward the ladies’ room.

  “She’s nice,” Toby said.

  Seth looked off for a minute, then closed his eyes. “I got fired.”

  “What? Oh, man, I’m sorry.”

  “I haven’t told Vanessa yet. My boss, Mitch, went on this fucking coke binge at work in the middle of the day—it was totally epic—but then was fired by his boss when the guy’s secretary complained to HR because he wouldn’t stop calling her ‘sweet tits,’ and then all of us who were hired by him were fired. We’re all going out tonight, late, like eleven. Please pray to your God that I don’t meet a hooker that I temporarily fall in love with. Mitch does that. He gets hotel rooms and hookers.”

  “Yeah, well, Rachel has been fucking a guy from school.”

  “Jesus, what grade?”

  “No, no. A dad.”

  “He’s divorced?”

  “No! He’s married to like her best friend there!”

  “Are you kidding? Is that who she’s with? Is that guy leaving his wife?”

  “He hasn’t yet! I’m telling you, dude. You did the right thing. Not getting married.”

  Vanessa appeared out of nowhere. “Everything okay here?”

  “Yeah,” Seth said, sitting up straight. “I was just giving Toby here a hard time.”

  Vanessa was talking about their future—a weekend in Aspen they were expected at next month, her old roommate’s destination wedding in Rio. Seth draped his arm around Vanessa like she was a banister. But Toby couldn’t hear it anymore. Instead, he heard his phone: The hospital called, and his entire body felt relieved for it. He did not want to be around to watch Seth pretend that he wasn’t unemployed. He did not want to keep staring at this poor, beautiful girl making plans with Seth, who was hoping that he wouldn’t fuck a prostitute that night but wasn’t a thousand percent sure.

  “A patient needs me, guys. I have to go uptown. I’m really sorry.”

  Vanessa looked at Seth, alarmed. Toby looked between them.

  “We had someone we wanted you to meet,” Seth said.

  “Tamara, my friend from work,” Vanessa said. “She is so smart and funny. Seth thought you would hit it off.”

  Toby stood up and put his phone into his pocket.

  “Your money is no good here,” Seth said.

  “I wasn’t going to give you any. I didn’t order anything.”

  Vanessa stood up and pressed her breasts against his body. “You sure you can’t stay just a sec—”

  Just then, Vanessa began waving at the door. “She’s here! Just stay and meet her for a second!” The object of her greeting, a tiny teacup of a woman in a summer dress and sandals, walked in. She wasn’t just short, though. She looked like a child: maybe four-eleven, skinny, with no shape to her body. She had a face that could be either fourteen or twenty-five, but not more than that.

  Toby shook her hand. “I’m really sorry about this.” He was annoyed that he had to apologize when he hadn’t done anything wrong. He wasn’t married anymore. He didn’t have to constantly apologize when he didn’t mean it. If he’d known this was a date, well, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He didn’t want to be set up with people. He didn’t want to know what his friends thought he was worthy of. All of this was still so new that the only thing he could tolerate was the ice-cold democracy of a dating app. Look at this Tamara. Was that not confirmation enough? She was a tiny child-woman. His friends didn’t think he deserved a full-grown woman. They didn’t think he deserved the full swimming pool of breasts that Vanessa had. Seth, his friend, didn’t think Toby had the right to all he had.

  Toby walked out without saying real goodbyes. The
text from Logan said it was time to wake Karen Cooper up. Toby liked to be there for that. He wanted to go meet his patient. He wanted to be there for the good part.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS TIME to take Karen Cooper off the ventilator.

  Joanie, Logan, and Clay headed down the hall toward him. Joanie looked different somehow—older, or more relaxed. Confident, maybe? But why so suddenly? He couldn’t explain it. Something about how familiar she seemed right then was jarring, how she was wearing her hair in a braid and he knew that if she turned to the side just a little, the braid would have thinned at the bottom because of all the layering of her hair.

  He wondered for a minute what meeting Seth and Vanessa would have been like if Joanie had been with him. They would have had lunch and then the two of them would have left and spent the rest of the night maybe in Chelsea, or walking around the Meatpacking District, making fun of Vanessa. Joanie was at least Vanessa’s age. But she had self-awareness and intelligence. And she was person-sized, not like Tamara. Plus, she was smart and not ostentatious about it. She had eccentricities that were her own, that she’d earned. He would be proud to have someone like Joanie by his side. She would show Seth who Toby really was in the world.

  “Come on,” Toby said. “Let’s do it.”

  Toby and Marco and their collected fellows watched the anesthesiologist extubate Karen Cooper. Toby involuntarily held his breath along with his patient, and only exhaled when he saw that she could.

  Karen’s eyes opened and she blinked. Toby put himself over her in her line of vision. “Mrs. Cooper,” he said. “I’m Dr. Fleishman. You’re in the hospital. You’ve just had surgery.” She searched his eyes, trying to focus. The copper rings were luminous, her blue irises rising up and out of copper earth—it really was a beautiful disease. “There are a lot of people who will be happy to see you.”

  An hour later, Joanie brought David up to see his wife. David scrubbed his hands and put on a surgical gown and cap and face mask. Toby stood at the foot of her bed, making notes in her chart while his fellows stood near the monitors. Karen Cooper shook her head in muted delirium, her eyes opening and shutting. Her husband dropped to the chair next to her bed and cried into her hand. Yes, this was the good part. Toby felt eyes on him and looked up to see Joanie looking directly at him, her face overcome.

  * * *

  —

  THAT DAY, WHEN I left Toby, I checked out the movie times, but nothing was playing that I even registered as a movie, just midsummer comic books come to life, so I ambled over to Central Park. I had my wallet and my vape and that was all I needed. I found a green space in the Sheep Meadow and lay on my back, untethered and light. The green in the trees against the blue of the sky. The smells of the season. A wireless speaker playing the Beastie Boys somewhere nearby. When is the last time I did this, I thought. I had a sudden longing for Adam, or at least for a theory of Adam: a man who knew me and loved me and wanted me and wanted to hear from me. I was no longer capable of conversations with him.

  I took out a cigarette and smoked it all the way to the edge. In Israel, I smoked an Israeli brand called Time. Seth told me one night that it was an acronym. It stood for This Is My Enjoyment. That came back to me now. I inhaled and exhaled and thought: Yes, this is my enjoyment.

  Two years ago, I was visiting my editor at the magazine when word that Archer Sylvan died came in. We had been talking about a story I was assigned about an actor who people thought was gay and how I was going to “handle” the controversy. It was one of those stories they sent me on because they knew that you needed one oppressed minority to handle another. The editor in chief’s assistant came into my editor’s office and told him they’d just heard from Archer’s first wife. He was found dead earlier that morning. He died as he lived: in a hotel room in Las Vegas, practicing autoerotic asphyxiation. There were two young women with him at the time, both sex workers.

  Anyway, the day he died, our editor announced we were ending the day early. We all went to the Grill, where Archer was known to have a Manhattan on Friday night at five each week he was in town, a hangover from the magazine’s previous editor’s era. He and his old writer friends who also hunted bears and lived gigantically would meet that editor in chief for rounds of Scotch until they all blacked out. Our editor in chief, who took over after Archer’s original editor, ordered a round of Manhattans in his honor. I drank three, even though vermouth makes me sick. We toasted him and talked about what a lion he was, how he hung in the background of all of our stories as a specter of what was wanted and expected of us.

  The editor talked about a few of our stories, saying he could really see Archer’s influence in them. None of mine made it into his speech. I smiled and pretended not to notice. I nodded thoughtfully and squinted in understanding. But all the while, all I could think was: What was I doing there, drinking Manhattans and trying to fit in with people I no longer had anything in common with? I had children now. I lived in New Jersey. Maybe I never had anything in common with them, but I was still trying and then suddenly, quite suddenly, I wasn’t.

  To be a woman at a men’s magazine is to have a very specific task: It’s either to be compliant or noisy, to be the category: other person asking the questions that a man wasn’t allowed to ask in a time of burgeoning political correctness, or to be the wide-eyed kitten that maybe had sex with her subject. After I had Sasha, I wasn’t sure which one I was anymore, though I had been both at a certain time. Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.

  All the papers wrote big stories about Archer and his legacy after his death. I read every single one. A day later, there was an Internet backlash, a small battalion of young twenty-something women asking why everyone worshipped this man who was so clearly a misogynist. Archer’s very young third ex-wife had written a memoir about the physical and emotional abuse she endured, though she was largely dismissed for her claims because she had then alleged the same things about her second husband. He hated women, they said, even as I could count a hundred examples in his writing of the way he worshipped them. Yes, the young women said, it looked like worship but it was actually something uglier. It was an obsession with sex and a wholesale contempt for what he saw as the condition of the sex, or its barrier, or its delivery device: the actual women. The actual women weren’t really people. They were just a theory. He wrote about them the way he’d written about Vietnam—ugly, romantic, poignant, unwinnable.

  I thought about that. I wrote mostly about men. I hadn’t interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed—the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn’t important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.

  The men hadn’t had any external troubles. They didn’t have a fear that they didn’t belong. They hadn’t had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they’d forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren’t real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls—of all our souls—the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance.

  I could listen to them for hours. If you don’t ask too many questions and just let people talk, they’ll tell you what’s on their mind. In those monologues, I found my own gripes. They felt counted out, the way I felt counted out. They felt ignored, the way I felt ignored. They felt like they’d failed. They had regret. They we
re insecure. They worried about their legacies. They said all the things I wasn’t allowed to say aloud without fear of appearing grandiose or self-centered or conceited or narcissistic. I imposed my narrative onto theirs, like in one of those biology textbooks where you can place the musculature picture over the bone picture of the human body. I wrote about my problems through them.

  That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you. So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human. They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before, and I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology. The mens’ humanity was sexy and complicated; ours (mine) was to be kept in the dark at the bottom of the story and was only interesting in the service of the man’s humanity.

  But sitting there, I realized my problems were now different. They could no longer be grafted onto a man because they were so unique to the problem of being a woman. It was time for me to leave the magazine.

  I reread a few of Archer’s pieces that night. I cried a little because it hurt to be ending my career there before I was ever sent to Chile to eat the brain of a goat with my bare hands, but right then, maybe for the first time, I also realized I was never going to be sent to Chile to eat the brain of a goat with my bare hands. People could love my stories, they could go far and wide, I could do everything, but I could never be a man. But also, given the chance, I don’t think I would have taken the goat’s head and broken its jaw and done what needed to be done. Who could do that to even a dead goat? Maybe, in that way, the system worked.

  I told Adam that I thought I should stop working. I said it was because I wanted to be with Sasha more, which was sort of true, but really I was humiliated and just wanted out and couldn’t figure out where else to go. I went back into the office and gave my editor notice. My agent said I should have been smarter. I should have asked for a contract that allowed me to do one story a year, so I could “stay in the game.” He didn’t understand that actually I had never been in the game. I told him I wanted to write novels. I tried one, a YA novel about sisters who found out their parents were spies. Another, an adult novel about three sons who lose their inheritance. Another, a woman who moves to the suburbs and starts a violent gang among the other moms at school. I’d send two or ten or forty pages to my agent, and he’d say the same thing, that none of my characters were likable. I thought of Archer. His characters weren’t likable. He wasn’t likable. I thought of how hard I worked in my stories to be likable to the reader. I remembered a creative writing class I took in college, where the professor, a cynical screenwriter who’d written exactly one movie that got made, told us that when our characters weren’t likable, you could fix it by giving them a clubfoot or a dog. I gave one of the gang members a clubfoot, and my agent wrote in the margin: “WTF?” He told me I had to write something closer to the truth. So I began writing this YA novel a few months ago, the one about my youth, the one that was going nowhere, and I sent him the first ten pages about four months ago but I never heard back. I read the pages again and I saw the problem. My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.