Fleishman Is in Trouble
Page 40
And Adam—he’d be at home waiting for me. Even after all of this, he would be waiting for me. He would watch carefully to see if I was still in upheaval, and I would watch him watching me and a boulder of guilt and sadness would overtake me for what I’d put him through—what I always put him through. He would examine me at night while I slept and pray that I was no longer in chaos. And I would make this up to him in small ways: an excess of sexual availability, kindness toward his bitch sister, acquiescence to a science fiction show he’d been wanting to watch. But tonight, I would crawl into my dark bed with my husband, and I would make myself into his shape like I was a new layer of skin for him. I would whisper to his back, “I’m sorry I’m late.” And he, either awake or awoken, would whisper, “You always come back.” I would love him so much right then that I would cry for hours while he patted me, mystified as ever.
I didn’t belong anywhere, either, Rachel. I had tried to beat the odds. I had worked at a men’s magazine, trying to do work I could be proud of, only to learn that a woman at a men’s magazine is like a woman in the world—unwelcome, auxiliary at best, there to fill in the rough spots that men don’t want to. I would never be Archer Sylvan, but I would write my book, and it would have something in it that Archer was incapable of, which is all the sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly—even the ones that made us too angry to want to hear them.
I stamped out my cigarette before I was done with it. It was making me nauseous. I shouldn’t be smoking anymore. I shouldn’t be smoking and I shouldn’t be here. This was no longer my enjoyment. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me back to New Jersey, which was where I lived.
* * *
—
SITTING ON THE floor with me, Toby had listened to my plans and waited for the panic to rise in him again, the same panic that washed him in sweat every time these last few weeks that he contemplated the future. But this time it didn’t. Was he getting used to his new situation? Was he healing?
What if he was? What if he could think of Rachel in a new way? What if he could figure out a way to extract himself from the idea that he lived in contrast to her? What if he met someone nice and he got married again? What if Rachel was one day just his first wife? One day, the gloaming of this marriage would be over and the fumes of their sadness would dissipate. Maybe they already had.
After he left the bathroom, Toby got sidetracked looking for Seth, who was standing in a hidden corner of the apartment, getting eviscerated by Vanessa for smoking pot at their engagement party. He watched them, Vanessa trying to save face with her frozen smile and hushed whispers, Seth just totally baffled. By the time Toby got outside, I was gone, and so he walked home through the heat of the night. By the time he got to Union Square, though, it was raining and so he got on the train.
He paid the babysitter, and once she was gone, he stood in his living room, where he pet Bubbles for a minute. He took off his wet clothes to take a shower so that he wouldn’t smell like weed when the kids woke up. How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.
And also in that moment he thought about the fact that things crept along incrementally, which was why change was hard to see. His divorce was going to be final. In fact, he would sign his divorce papers tonight. He was born without Rachel and he’d lived. He’d married Rachel and he’d survived. And now Rachel was gone—maybe she was gone forever. If he could imagine that, that she’d just sort of ascended into the heavens and would remain a ghost that some people sometimes saw, he could proceed. He would move on. Not everybody follows rules. Not everything was fair. Hadn’t he learned that yet? His children would understand one day; his children would have grown up with that lesson, and the losses they endured in their lives after this would never hurt quite so much again. That was not nothing. He would be a good father. He would protect them forever. This was spanda, he realized. This was what that dumb yoga teacher was talking about. The universe did contract in both ways. See? He didn’t know everything. He breathed in, and he breathed out. It was happy, and it was sad. It was good, and it was bad.
The heat wave in Manhattan was finally broken. The rain came down hard for ten good minutes. Toby would start looking for a new apartment tomorrow, one where everything worked. He deserved an apartment where everything worked. He looked out his window. He saw his reflection, and beyond that, through his reflection, he saw the lit-up windows of the next building, a see-through version of himself filled with the lights of the city, the windows, the people inside the windows. In those windows was everything—hope, sadness, loss, triumph, sex, betrayal. Everywhere was hurt and everywhere was sex. Everywhere was love and everywhere was death. You could die of the loneliness, but you could die of the optimism, too; the optimism was just as crushing in the end. Time would move forward, but he had logged some optimism into his block universe. It would stay there forever. He watched the people move around in his ghost body and he felt that he had room for them all, that they could all stay and he could accommodate them and be their host. He stood staring with this thought for he didn’t know how long until he heard a key in the lock and a hinge creak open and he turned to see Rachel standing in the doorway.
For Claude
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has also written for GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and many other publications. Fleishman Is in Trouble is her first novel.
taffyakner.com
Twitter: @taffyakner
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.