She packed for Kripalu. She waited until it felt like a decent enough hour to bring the kids over to Toby’s, but early enough that he would still be asleep because she didn’t want to see him. Sam picked her up an hour later. They drove to Massachusetts in silence. She tried not to cry, but she was so tired, and she cried when she was tired. Sam told her, “You’re being a drag.” She looked over at him. He’d said it in good humor, right? She was too tired to know.
When they got there, they had sex, but she barely registered it. Then they did it twice more, all in the same twenty minutes. Toby was still like a little boy in this department, but even he needed some recovery time. They signed up for massages and classes and Rachel signed up for a one-on-one meditation breathing class. A man with long red hair and no eyebrows coached her through her breathing, saying that when her breath caught in her lungs or in her trachea, she should monitor where it was and scream through it.
“Scream?” she asked.
“Trust me,” the man said.
She breathed up and down her body, and her breath caught practically everywhere. At first, she just yelped, but then she screamed. And then she screamed more. At first her screams were high-pitched and thin, but then, as the guy moved his hands around to indicate that her screams should originate beyond her throat in her sternum and solar plexus, she reached deeper and began making big, disgusting, guttural sounds. One of the screams was for Toby. One of them was for Hannah, who had caught her disease of desire for love and acceptance. One for Solly, who thought he was allowed to be himself in the world. One, the biggest one, was for herself, for all that she had been made to endure in her life—how she’d never stood a chance, how she’d never even really been loved. Yes, that was it. She’d never really been loved. Not by her parents, not by her grandmother, not by Toby, not really.
The session was only halfway done. She was hiccuping from her sobs now. When it was over, she booked the screaming therapist’s remaining slots for the next day.
She found Sam for dinner. She couldn’t wait to tell him about her weird afternoon, but he was annoyed with her and stayed on his phone.
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“My problem is that I thought you were going to be a little more fun,” he said. “I thought you’d be more available. I didn’t realize you’d opt for a three-hour screaming session over, I don’t know, hanging out?”
She tried to tell him what the sessions were like, how cathartic it all was, how different she felt afterward. “I’ve never been loved,” she said. “I realized everything that’s wrong with me is because I’ve never been loved.”
He didn’t look up from his phone; he couldn’t be less interested. When she talked about business, he would say it turned him on. But now she saw in his eyes something like contempt. It scared her. She got up from the table and went back to the room.
Sam came in and put his hands around her waist. He started humping on her, then bent her over the bed and pulled down her leggings. She was tired from the screaming but too worried about letting him down. Afterward, he lay splayed out on the bed asleep and she sat at its edge. She couldn’t sleep. She looked back at him and something about his snore seemed very foreboding to her. She tried to shake him awake, but she couldn’t, and that was when she remembered that he took sleeping pills.
She stood up and tiptoed through the room to his Dopp kit. She found a bottle of Viagra (oh) and a bottle of Ambien. She took it to the bathroom and sat on the toilet staring at it. It felt so serious in her hands. A prescription. She felt like if she took it, it would drown her. What if she was one of the people who killed someone while she was on Ambien? She put it down on the sink and went to go lie down.
At some point, she might have fallen asleep, though she would have sworn that she hadn’t. But Sam woke up at six, like he always did, his dick already hard and his hands already poking around her thighs. She told him she couldn’t sleep. He said, “You know, I don’t get a lot of vacations.” (But it wasn’t true. He and Miriam had been to Madrid, Lisbon, and Africa in the last eighteen months alone. He meant he just didn’t get a lot of vacations from Miriam.)
If there was one thing she was always good at, it was inference. It was self-awareness. It was taking other people’s behavior and allowing herself to consider that it all added up to something. She learned this from watching the world not interact with her for so many years. She thought of what Toby had said the night before. She thought about Sam now.
And she thought of her kids.
Not Solly, because Solly loved her. He traced her face and burrowed into her neck and held on to her pants while she walked. He asked her if she liked his outfit and what it was like to be a grown-up. He had no judgment against her yet, but he was young. No, it was Hannah she saw as she considered a full-scale evaluation of her life. Hannah used to beg her to be a class mom or a lunchtime volunteer server, and how could she do things like that? Even for a day? She couldn’t chaperone the overnight trip to Washington. Even for a night? She couldn’t even pack a lunch for trip days. “I don’t do it,” she would tell Hannah. “But I make sure it gets done.” “I wish you did it,” Hannah would say. Rachel didn’t ask what the difference was because she knew what it was. You have to remember that Rachel didn’t have a mother.
She thought of something Toby said to her once, as a way of trying to comfort her. She’d said it was sad to her that she was considered this oddity at the school for being a woman who worked. And Toby, meaning well (maybe), had said: “They would if they could. They just can’t rationalize it because they have so much money.” She glared at him but he didn’t realize what he’d said, that yes, for sure, working was the unkind thing to do to your children.
Her crystal understanding of all of this came in layers. Yes, for sure, Sam was hoping she’d stay some kind of alpha fantasy for him—a fun power fuck with not an emotion in sight. Yes, for sure, he was never going to stay with her because where does a woman this ambitious leave a man? And yes, for sure, her marriage couldn’t have survived because what kind of woman is like this? And yes, for sure, the people were treating her in these ways to let her know who she was in the world: just a woman. And women—they are vile. Those men’s varying degrees of politeness shielded the world from their real feelings, but politeness is ultimately unsustainable. And so that doctor abused her. And those men raped those women. And Sam here couldn’t bear for her to do anything except bend over and take it.
Maybe she was worthless. That was what they were telling her. Maybe that was the whole point. Like I said, she was good at inference.
She found Sam, who had done a reflexology session, pounding away at his phone under a tree. He looked up to see her and was annoyed at the interruption, but then more annoyed when he saw that she was crying.
“What is it this time?” he said.
She couldn’t answer because she was crying too hard and ashamed of her tears.
They went back to the room and he started to pack. He said, “This was a mistake. You get that, right?”
Of course she did. What had she ever been thinking? She couldn’t take Miriam Rothberg’s place. She couldn’t fade into that kind of existence. She was herself. And the kind of woman she was was unacceptable: Unacceptable to a man like Toby, who couldn’t forgive her for her success. Unacceptable to Sam, because he might pretend he liked her bigness, but he couldn’t actually accommodate it into his life—he couldn’t bear what it took to be around someone whose obligations were as important and as nonnegotiable as his.
It was official. She was unacceptable; an illegitimate kind of person. Her success made her poison. Her weakness made her poison. There was no one for her. Her husband had rejected her. Now her boyfriend had, too. Maybe Toby was right. They would never notice if she was gone. But now she had nowhere to go.
And so she stayed at Kripalu. She found that she still couldn’t
sleep, but thought that this—these feelings, this insomnia—must be part of the process unleashed by her new breathwork. She lay in bed, her body humming every night, and at one point she decided to stop caring that she couldn’t sleep. She went back to the screaming coach. She screamed more. She did yoga. She called Simone and said she was staying a few more days, but please don’t contact her and please defer client emergencies for a few days to Ben or Hal or Rhonda, and she was not to answer any of Toby’s questions. Simone called with a question, and she screamed at her that no—NO!—she really didn’t want to hear from her.
“Toby said it’s your turn with the kids.”
“Say one more word and you will not have a job,” Rachel said. Then, more softly, “I’m having a little bit of a time, Simone. I haven’t had a vacation in years. Not a real one. Do you think you can cover for me and I will come back just as soon as I can, good as new?”
“Okay, but Rhonda was a little worried because one of the producers—”
“I think you’re not really hearing me, Simone. You’ve been on my desk how long?”
“Four years.”
“This is where we learn if you’re someone who will go beyond my desk.”
But the emails still came in. The texts still came in. Where was she? Could she ask a client to chair this event? Could she take a look at this script? This contract? This email? Could she circle back? Circle back circle back circle back. Time was a flat circle back. The entire world wanted to circle back until it ate itself.
She saw a flyer for a silent retreat program and she signed up for it. In the silence, she allowed all her fights with Toby to play out in her head. She lay in bed more nights, not sleeping, sometimes making a hum in the back of her throat to make sure her voice was still available for when she went back to using it. Sam’s Ambien stayed on the bathroom counter, but she didn’t dare touch it.
She was so tired, though. She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. She was alternatively panicked that the time was going by and angry it didn’t go by faster. At least in the morning it would be normal to be up. She sat up in the middle of the night and realized something: that it was her phone that made it so that she couldn’t sleep. She had turned it off. It had been off for a couple of days, but perhaps she had adapted to the phone so much that she could feel the phone when it wanted her. The phone filled and filled and didn’t get full. It was like the burning bush, on fire but not consumed but still on fire.
She had to kill the phone. That was the only way she’d ever get to sleep again. And so in the middle of the night she walked a mile down a trail and buried her phone alive. She walked back to her room knowing for sure that she would sleep but of course couldn’t.
Then the silent retreat was over, but still she didn’t leave. She went back to screaming classes again, and she screamed out the remaining fights with Toby. She screamed out the ways she felt diminished. She was empty. She was a rag. She was ready to go home. She was a few days late, but she’d explain everything to Toby. She would apologize. She understood now that she was destined to be alone. She would tell him that she understood now that she was unacceptable.
She went out into the woods and looked for her phone, but she couldn’t find it. It had been night when she buried it, and there was no marking; only dirt. Had it been a mile? A half mile? A hundred yards? She didn’t know. It was gone.
She used the phone at the front desk to call Simone and ask her to call a driver.
“Toby is trying to get—”
“I don’t want my messages!” Rachel screamed. “I don’t want to hear about him, and I don’t want to hear that you told him anything about me.”
A car came and brought her the several hours home. She sat in the backseat, staring out the window. How long had she been gone? A day? A week? She arrived at her apartment and stood in the middle of it and didn’t know how to proceed. She had only eaten vegetarian bullshit for the last few days. She needed something with meat. She called the Chinese place. She was about to order her usual, her shrimp in lobster sauce, when she was struck by the memory of her roommate from when she was at Hunter with the eating disorder who could find a reason to eat pasta at any hour. When they ordered Chinese, the roommate would try her hardest to order steamed chicken and vegetables, but sometimes she would say, “I give up,” and she’d order beef lo mein. Rachel never would. She hadn’t given up. She would never give up. But the lo mein always smelled so good, and it seemed to fill the roommate with this extraordinary sense of well-being. “Ahhhh,” she would say as whatever seratonic hormone it was that made pasta a miracle food flooded her system.
So Rachel ordered lo mein because fuck it. Fuck everything. Fuck her body and fuck her soul. She gave up! She was going to eat beef lo mein. Then she could get to sleep. She looked around the apartment. It felt like a green screen, like she was a motion-capture object inside her one special-effects movie. She turned her head and she heard a whooshing sound. She took steps and she heard an echo. She sat down and she heard a crash. It was all happening near her. Nothing was happening to her.
The doorbell rang and she was still trying to figure out how to be in this apartment. She gave the deliveryman a tip and began to eat, sitting on the floor under a beige painting that the art consultant had picked out for her. Why did she like this painting? What was this painting? Did it just move?
She spat the lo mein back into the carton. It was disgusting. Why would you eat spaghetti from a Chinese place? Maybe she was just tired. She put it in the fridge and decided to lie down. But when she got to her bed the stakes felt too high. She knew if she couldn’t sleep there right then, she would never be able to sleep again.
She felt like she should call the kids, but she was worried. How could she call the kids when she hadn’t slept? It seemed dangerous somehow. She left the apartment. She went out to the health food store on Third, and an old hippie told her about all the teas that would help her sleep. There were six different kinds, so she bought all of them. She brought them back to the apartment and drank all of them, but all she could do then was go to the bathroom.
This wouldn’t do. She began to panic. The apartment walls seemed to be breathing, in and out, in and out. She had to get out of there. She had to actively change her emotions. Nobody had ever done anything for Rachel Fleishman. She had to do it all herself. So she walked over to Bergdorf’s and shoplifted a pair of chandelier earrings made from gold and jade—tried them on and walked right out, but even the adrenaline didn’t make a dent. When she returned, the doorman said, “Ms. Fleishman! It’s been a minute!” She froze like she was a criminal. But she wasn’t the criminal. This was her house.
She tried to watch TV in the den. There was a thirtysomething marathon on Lifetime. She sat trying to figure out how these marriages were all doing fine, how everyone was so bland and earnest and good. Where had she gone wrong? What was so bad about her?
Then it was somehow morning again, without her ever realizing it had been night. She stood up fast and hard from the couch, an involuntary impulse that her own nervous system had somehow orchestrated. She had to get out of here. Good God, she had to get out of here.
She called Simone from the home line and asked her to order a car to Baltimore. She had to go somewhere where she knew she could sleep. She never once had a sleepless night in Baltimore. She would just go check on her grandmother, whom she hadn’t seen in more than six months. It would be fine. It was totally normal to do this.
Five hours later, she pulled up to her old house. Her grandmother was old now, but time hadn’t made her sentimental. Nothing made that bitch sentimental. She opened the door and looked beyond Rachel to see who had brought her here.
“It’s just a car service,” Rachel said. The skin beneath her eyes was purple, she was so tired.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.
“Surprise!” Rachel said, and brushed pas
t her.
She told her grandmother she was in town on business and didn’t want to stay at a hotel. She wanted to get some sleep, would that be okay?
Her grandmother looked toward the door, as if getting Rachel to also look at the door would help lead her to the other side of it. “I didn’t prepare anything. I don’t have food for you.”
“That’s okay, I just want to sleep. It’s been a long day. Tons of meetings.”
She went upstairs, past the chintz sofa and the old wooden country furniture, and lay on her old bed, but it was worse this time. The house was so fucking flimsy. Her grandmother’s life was so small. But there was her bed, the one that had given her nights of delighted sleep. She could taste it. She took off her clothes and got under the covers.
At one point, she found herself in the quiet of a dream. In the dream, she was trying to figure out what day it was. She wasn’t really asleep, she realized. You can’t plan your days in your sleep. She sat up and looked at her old mirror, which had a mirror behind it and therefore looked like a hundred mirrors. Her grandmother had removed any remnant of her that there was—the Bon Jovi poster, the class pictures. Her grandmother didn’t love her, either. This was a bad place. Her grandmother was bad. This bed was a piece of shit when you were used to sleeping on a mattress that was sourced from Sri Lankan unicorn feathers.
She called Simone from the Princess phone in her old bedroom and asked her to order her another car, this time to the airport, and a ticket to Los Angeles. On the plane, every time she blinked, she accessed a level of nauseous almost-sleep that was not quite sleep. The man next to her fell asleep immediately and was snoring, making it so she couldn’t sleep at all, which was probably for the best since she wanted to be extra tired when she got there.
The hotel building itself was nestled in a wooded area right off Sunset. “Ms. Fleishman,” said the special VIP concierge at the hotel. “No luggage today?” She was taken to her villa. Ah, she thought. Here is the place. There were a thousand pillows. The smell was having a Pavlovian effect. When she came to L.A. for a work trip, she was not supposed to enjoy it because she was supposed to miss her children too much. She did, she did. But this place, man. Outside her villa was a pool. In the morning she would go swimming when she felt normal again.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 36