Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  She let Sam Rothberg make the approach to Toby over the weekend, and he went crazy. They tried therapy after, but he wouldn’t listen. There was nothing but his point of view—that all she did was work and neglect him and the children—that he could talk about. He couldn’t even hear what she was saying, which was that she loved her work. That yes, maybe she should slow down, but she didn’t quite know how. She didn’t know how to trust the people she hired. If he’d listen, he could hear her. She needed help figuring this out.

  If she were a man, she thought, her spouse would receive the spoils of her hard work with gratitude. He would allow her to come home from work and put her feet up for a minute before he pummeled her with the ways his life was terrible and nobody respected him and the way Aaron Schwartz was the teachers’ favorite and the way Phillipa London was mean to him.

  Toby liked his work so much. At least he said he did. But at some point, he forgot that what she did allowed him to do what he wanted to do. He forgot that their careers were symbiotic and he instead made their misery symbiotic: Her success was the reason for his failure. Not that he was an actual failure, but he certainly hadn’t gotten as far in life as he could have. Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.

  And still: “You’re always angry,” he’d say to her. And then finally she could admit that she was, particularly after those therapy sessions where she saw just how disgusted both Toby and the therapist were by her annoyance at even having to be there. As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it. Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.

  When she turned forty, she decided to stop pretending she wasn’t angry about all of this. She didn’t want to make life hard for the kids, but she also saw how much energy it was sapping from her to pretend that she still liked Toby as much as she used to. She had liked him! She’d loved him. God, she had loved him. He was the first person who delighted her, who warmed her, who assured her, who adhered her to something. He was smart and his bitterness was sweet and manageable and very funny. He was honest—with her and with himself. At least she thought he was. He’d smelled so good, like soap and America. Now all he wanted was to go to therapy. But she’d been to therapy with him. He wanted to scream and throw things outside of therapy, and then he wanted to go to therapy and sit and be reasonable. She wanted to know, if you could be reasonable in the first place, why wouldn’t you always be reasonable so you didn’t have to go to couples therapy?

  Then one day, Toby brought up divorce. This shocked her. She knew that they were different in their approach: She was just trying to survive and he was trying to have this great marriage. But divorce? Then he brought it up again. Rachel begged him to listen and to try to work things out. She asked him to consider that their problems were very much a result of the fact that it was a hard time in their lives with small children and a business that still needed attention and she knew he was sad that his grant didn’t work out but they’d survive. “You don’t even want to go to therapy,” he’d say. “And stop bringing up my grant.”

  She refused to consider divorce. She’d refused it last summer, when Hannah left a table at a restaurant in Bridgehampton because she was sick of their fighting. She refused it when he got too drunk at dinner with a director she was trying to poach and they fought all the way home in the cab. And she refused it when he threw a tantrum at the Rothbergs’ for being offered a job. She never once thought she deserved happiness. She never once wondered if there was something better out there. This was their marriage; this was their family. It was theirs, they owned it, they made it. If there was one thing she’d learned from her grandmother, it was an understanding that life isn’t always what you want it to be, and obligations are obligations and nothing less.

  “I don’t want to live my life like this,” he’d say.

  “Toby,” she’d say, rubbing her temples. “Do you understand that I don’t even have time to get divorced?”

  But he didn’t. He only understood that she wasn’t giving him what he wanted, and that once again the world had turned on him, either because he was used to her acquiescing or because he’d been sold some bullshit about how wives should be in the traditional home that he couldn’t admit he wished she would replicate for him. Or because he’d gone into his field at a time when doctors could still be respected. Or because he had some sense that other people had it better. Or because he thought taller people got more laid. Or because his friends were too bohemian, and that allowed him to believe he was more responsible and upstanding and therefore more righteous than he was. Or because he was secretly heartbroken that his lab grant wasn’t renewed and his research was largely deemed a waste of money and time and a disaster and he knew that to show regret instead of rage over the circumstances around the grant’s nonrenewal was to have real questions about his abilities and core competencies.

  Sometime in January, soon after the kids were back in school and everyone was back at work, Sam Rothberg showed up at her office with flowers. She hadn’t been expecting him. He wanted to thank her for her help with his nephew and apologize for causing tension between her and Toby that weekend in Saratoga. When he gave her the flowers, she broke down crying. Sam Rothberg asked if he could take her out for dinner, that it looked like she could use a friend. She could. Rachel told him all the things Miriam had never seen her closely enough to ask about—that Toby hated her for her drive and success, that every night was a new fight that was also the same fight.

  “Come on,” Sam Rothberg said, coy. “You’re lying to me.”

  “What? What would I be lying about?”

  “Drive is sexy,” he said. “If I had one complaint…” He looked off. “I shouldn’t.” He looked back at her. “Well, I would not mind if Miriam had a little more going on.”

  “What do you mean?” Rachel was loving this. “She’s so busy!”

  “Being busy spending money is not the same as really creating something in the world, you know?” He leaned forward and raised his eyebrows like his face was asking a question. “I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t find all that you’ve accomplished a real turn-on.”

  Sam Rothberg told her that Rachel’s drive and success made him want her more. He was married to a lazy heiress. He loved Rachel’s ingenuity and her forward motion. Before she knew it, they were eating at a small, candlelit place in Brooklyn, where no one they knew would find them.

  Well, Rachel was flabbergasted. The part of her stomach that registered wins felt a deep convulsion of triumph. Not that she ever wanted to cheat on Toby; not that she ever wanted to betray poor Miriam. But not wanting to win doesn’t make the win any less real.

  Over dinner, he gave her that look—too close, too melty, too intimate—the one that meant a man wanted you. She was rusty, but she wasn’t blind. It took her breath away.

  But she was married. What was she doing here? Then again, she had a husband who was asking her for a divorce. Suddenly, she could see herself from outside her body. She looked down and she saw herself at dinner with Sam. She was still young. She was in good shape. She was still pretty. She saw that she, this pretty, young woman in good shape, was being desired, and the desire he had for h
er turned her on. It made her every move poignant, like she was being watched, which she was. When was the last time?

  One of the many reasons she didn’t want to get divorced was that she felt like the world was a vast chasm of nothing for a woman who was over forty and single. Toby would be desired and get laid and she would be this matron who maybe once in a while got set up with a divorced cousin with no hair and fungal toenails. It wasn’t even age. It was how dating was now. Her assistant, Simone, was twenty-nine, and she dated on apps and through computers and phones. The expectation now was for a woman to show up, panting with horniness, on all fours, just begging for it. Then, once it was over, wink and giggle and recede into some background and pretend that this was all okay, that the intimacy was a physical need she had and feel free to never call her again. Rachel would not have been able to bear that.

  But here Sam Rothberg was, and she felt the heat of his stare, and the power of his aggression—like he had decided on her and now there was nothing she could do about it. Her toes curled in her shoes. Her breath was shallow and her swallows were audible. It had been so long since she wanted to fuck someone this badly. It had been so long since she had wanted to fuck someone at all.

  His car brought them back to her building. She pushed him through the door of her office, past Simone’s desk, against her own desk. Super Duper Creative was on the thirty-third floor, and her office had floor-to-ceiling windows, and she turned to the window and couldn’t believe the unfathomable sexiness of the city and all the lights—the reflections and…look at her! Look at him! Him, on his knees, kneeling in front of her. Him, pushing her up against the window. Him, pulling her on top of him. Them, as they came together, the sound of Ah: revelation! Ah! This is what I should have been doing this whole time! This is who I should have been doing this whole time!

  Afterward, they lay on the leather couch, her on top of him.

  “So this is your office,” he said.

  “It sure is,” she answered him into his chest hair.

  “No one’s going to come in?”

  She laughed. “Are you expecting someone?”

  She put her skirt back on but not her stockings or her underwear. She threw those away outside in a trash can. Sam Rothberg wanted his driver to drop her off. She said no, she’d rather walk.

  They saw each other weeknights at hotels. They ordered food and fucked on the floor and on the bed and in the shower. They fell into a relationship that was supposed to be temporary, until finally one day, Sam said that he wished Rachel could be with him forever.

  “I’m only happy when I’m with you,” he said, naked, over sushi. “I wish we could figure that part out.”

  Rachel thought about this for a long time. Here was a guy who really wanted her. Here was someone who was strong and smart and driven and successful and wouldn’t see her similar traits as a referendum on him. The more time they spent together, the more she realized that Toby’s criticism of her had slowly seeped into her pores and become her own criticism of herself. What if she didn’t have to live like that anymore?

  “How would it work?” she’d ask, pretending it was just a fantasy when really she was incapable of anything that wasn’t planning.

  “We would just do it,” he’d say. “We’d say fuck ’em all, this is how life goes sometimes.”

  She kept trying to picture it. It would be a scandal at the school. They’d have to take their kids out and put them in different schools for high school. Or maybe they wouldn’t have to and the kids would survive. This happened! Right? She didn’t know anyone it had actually happened to, but it happened. It had to have happened. She pictured walking into school, seeing Miriam and Roxanne and Cyndi all in a huddle, staring venom at her, and she shuddered.

  Just at that moment, Alejandra’s movie, which had been through eight scripts and three directors, got the green light and began filming, and she was suddenly the happy recipient of another load of cash. She thought she would use it to take over another floor of the building, but she stopped. She’d been going out to Los Angeles once a week these days. A year ago, it was once a month. Her clients were more interested in Hollywood, and it seemed like every single writer and actor was up for hire because the new streaming market was endless. She loved L.A. She never slept as well as she did when she was there. There was so much health available there: anything you liked made into a juice, yoga classes around the clock. There was so little rushing. Time seemed to expand there. What if she opened an L.A. office? What if she opened an L.A. office and became someone who believed in her staff and didn’t rush?

  “What if I opened an L.A. office?” she’d ask Sam either at the Waldorf or at his company’s corporate apartments or even once at his upstate house in Miriam’s bed just one floor away from where she’d once pretended that Miriam saying that all mothers worked was a good point.

  “What if I did?” Sam would ask back. His pharma company was in New Jersey and the commute was depressing. The labs where they formulated the cancer drugs were in Manhattan Beach and there was talk of a need for supervision.

  Rachel thought about completely extracting herself from the world she occupied. Fuck Cyndi Leffer. Fuck Roxanne Hertz. Fuck Miriam Rothberg extra hard. Toby could move, too, if he wanted to. He hated New York, anyway, and he was from L.A. and he always said it would be nice for the kids to have more interaction with his family.

  She could picture it all. She could see herself boarding a plane with her children. She could see herself taking yoga and having a meditation coach who would teach her how to trust the people who worked for her. She would come home on time. She would pay attention to her children. She would run a victory lap for the life she’d built and she’d let it support her. She’d pass her smaller clients on to some of the agents beneath her. She’d keep her big ones. She’d create time.

  One winter night, at their home in East Hampton, she finally turned to Toby and granted him his divorce. They told the kids just before Toby moved out. Once he did, she was alone in her apartment. She stayed home with the kids for the first two weeks to help them transition. Solly slept with her every night that week. She took Hannah to yoga with her after camp.

  And at night, once the kids were asleep, she was free. She no longer answered to anyone. She wore just underwear and a bra and watched reality shows and put pore strips across her chin and picked her nose and didn’t finish the dishes, which could no longer be seen as de facto asking someone else to finish the dishes. You’re supposed to be depressed and miserable after a divorce. Not Rachel. Rachel put the entire failure of it aside. She’d done her time. She had someone in her life who loved her for who she was, not who he had hoped she was. She had someone who understood her. She felt so bad for anyone who remained allegiant to a life they’d built just because they’d built it. She had two children—warm, witty, spunky Hannah and sincere, smart, curious Solly. She could finally give attention to them without worrying about her husband’s ego.

  Then, after she heard from Todd Leffer that he’d seen Toby out at night with a woman, she realized it was time to tell him. She was at the office, but everyone had gone home. She called Toby and said she wanted to talk about something.

  “What is it now?” he’d asked.

  She told him she wanted to open an office in Los Angeles.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he’d said.

  He went silent as she tried to tell him all the ways this was good news without having to humiliate herself and tell him that she could no longer withstand the pressure of the school and its demands on her. She couldn’t tell him she was finally ready to live on her own terms and teach her children confidence and wasn’t that good news? He could finally stop being on the treadmill at work. He could live near his family and the kids would get to know—

  “Don’t agent me,” he’d said. She realized for the first time that he might have been drunk. There were
noises in the background. He was out. Shit.

  “If this isn’t a good time,” she’d said.

  “Do you have to ruin every fucking part of my life, even now?” he’d asked her.

  She apologized. She said she didn’t realize that he was out. She felt sad to think of him with someone else. Part of her still couldn’t bear that her marriage hadn’t worked out. Part of her still couldn’t bear that she no longer had Toby. Yes, she liked her freedom. Yes, divorce was the right move. She always thought divorce would come from hate, but her anger was never based in hate. It was based in disappointment that someone she loved misunderstood her so deeply. They were so different, but they had grown up together. He was her first great love.

  “You’re always apologizing,” he said. “It was too much to ask of me to raise the kids and teach you how to be a person. Go to California. But you’re not taking the kids. Go. Seriously. They wouldn’t even notice if you were gone.”

  He hung up on her.

  That night, Sam texted her that he’d gotten two last-minute spots at Kripalu and they could go for the weekend if they left early the next day. She couldn’t shake off how cruel Toby had become. She couldn’t sleep at all. There was too much going on, and she’d been getting very little sleep lately with all her excitement. First it was her enjoyment of staying up and watching bad TV without anyone to impugn her. But then, slowly, she realized she didn’t want to go to sleep. Or rather she couldn’t. She couldn’t remember how to fall asleep. It seemed right there, but just out of reach, like the mechanical rabbit they use for dog races.