There was Haley, a PhD student, who put his hand on her upper leg and then, later, as they started to make out, she told him she liked some light pressure around her neck, maybe to make things cloudy. He declined and said he felt like maybe that was a violation of the Hippocratic oath, and she was either immediately embarrassed or immediately disgusted and sent him home, where he masturbated furiously in his self-loathing.
There was Constance, a personal shopper, who told him she’d always wanted to get fingered underneath a table in a restaurant. He declined and said he felt too nervous, like maybe he was a father and shouldn’t risk a public indecency charge, but later, at home, regretted it and masturbated furiously in his self-loathing.
There was Shivonne, who cried from the minute they sat down. “It’s my first date,” she said. And Toby sat and held her hand and said he was only a few in himself and he felt as scared and ambivalent as she did. “Why don’t we not drink tonight?” he asked her, and they ordered iced teas and ate pasta. He went home and felt too fat to masturbate but did it anyway.
There was Robyn, who was twenty-eight, and the last person in her twenties he went out with before sealing up the age-range matter on his search criteria. She was a nursing student at Columbia who liked older guys. They went for a drink in the Village and then to hear live jazz. (“Why live jazz?” Seth asked. “Because that’s what you do,” Toby said. “Nobody does that,” Seth said. “People who say they like jazz are lying.”) At the club, Toby felt like he was everyone’s father, and the only older guys in the club were people who had a whiff of desperation. He had to keep reminding himself that he was not old enough to be the father of anyone here. Maybe technically, but not truly. Meaning something crazy and awful would have had to have happened in his life for him to have fathered a child that young. Anyway. Robyn didn’t understand why they were there. She didn’t understand the two-partness to the date: Why would you arrange a second part of a date? Didn’t they know where this ended up? She started kissing him then, her hand immediately on his knee, then higher, and he hated his penis for jumping toward her hand, but it did. Before she could notice how aroused he was, he made an excuse, saying he wasn’t feeling well, and went home and watched Serpico until he fell asleep, trying to imagine a universe in which he felt like jerking off.
There was Jenny, who was a lawyer. While he gelled his hair before heading out, he had made a solemn vow to heed Seth’s advice and this time allow the date to go where she leads it. “Assume you will get the best and you will get the best,” Seth told him. Then dinner was over, and he asked if he could walk her home, and two blocks in she took his hand and three blocks in she started caressing his wrist and by the time they made it to her elevator she was giving him long, tonguey kisses. He went inside and she pulled him into the bedroom and she made car-motor noises—vroom, vroom—during foreplay and meow noises when they fucked. His life had begun.
There was Sara from Oregon who wanted to be a painter and had a death grip when she gave hand jobs. There was Bette, who had once been in a porno, or maybe just a homemade video that an ex-boyfriend then distributed, and who said, “That’s what she said” four times over the course of two Cape Cods. There was Emily, who was done with the ratfuck of dating women. There was another Rachel, and he couldn’t say her name. There was Larissa, who had grown up in a cult that operated out of an apartment building in a Queens project and told him that she was totally open to anal, and he had to figure out a way to say that he was not accustomed to that item being on the sexual menu and he didn’t have an automatic want to put it in there and could he please think about it? (He pretended the babysitter called and went home early.) There was Sharon, who had been raised ultra-Orthodox. There was Barbara, who he realized ten minutes into a story she was telling was actually related to him through her father’s great-uncle. There was Samantha, who was tall and more than a little chubby but leaned into it, with a round butt and tight jeans and red lips. Her resting face communicated lust via half-lidded eyes and a slightly parted mouth. He brought her to her door after they ate chicken wings at the forties-themed bar she’d chosen, and she yanked him inward, and in the dark she took him—yes, it was she who took him—and he didn’t have to make decisions. No, he only had to not say no, and so he didn’t.
There were women who had no pubic hair but did have armpit hair. There were women who said unspeakably filthy things right to his face. There were women who cried after sex. There were women who wanted to be pinched or hit or spanked or slapped, which made him very uncomfortable. There were women who wanted him on the top, on the bottom, on all fours. They wanted him to go faster and slower with his mouth on their crotches. They wanted to know if he wanted to be spanked. (“No, thank you,” he said.) They wanted to know if he was gonna come hard. (“I’m coming! I’m coming!” he yelled.) They wanted him to come to Mommy. They wanted to call him Daddy. Each of these nights, he fell further in love.
* * *
—
HE TOLD THIS all to Seth the first time they got together after all these years. He’d called him the way he’d called me, to tell him he was getting divorced. Seth said he was with his girlfriend but that she had dinner plans with her friends and could Toby meet for a drink after five-thirty. At a sports bar near Toby’s apartment, Toby told him the sad story of his marriage, but Seth didn’t have any questions. Seth didn’t give him a hard time. There was no penance to be made. Seth was just excited to see his friend again.
“Dude, the world is your oyster now,” Seth said. “Lick it up.” It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult. An idea came to Seth. “Go back to your apartment and put on shorts.”
“Why?”
“Yoga.”
“It’s Saturday night.”
“It’s actually late afternoon. Just do it, Tobe.”
“I just had a drink.”
“Trust me, dude. I go to a place right near my apartment owned by a guy who trained under Bikram and started a splinter group that nearly brought the political system of India to its knees.” When Seth was single, he said, this was where the majority of his dating life came from. You could be generous and like Seth and still think of what he called his “dating life” as a series of auditions, mostly successful, for sex partners. He explained to Toby that presence in a yoga class, no matter your ability, was a shortcut to showing a woman how evolved you were, how you were strong, how you were not set on maintaining the patriarchy that she so loathed and feared.
“Does Vanessa go to yoga with you?”
Seth shooed this away. “Yoga isn’t for us. It’s for me.” Meaning he still liked to go to yoga and see if there were better prospects.
But Seth wasn’t just a lecher. And he wasn’t stupid. He had stayed out in the world long after all his friends got married for a reason. “Marriage is for young people who don’t have a concept of time,” he’d told Toby. “It’s for people whose lives will be made measurably better by it.” He told Toby that he was confused by the guys at work and their complaints: their haranguing wives, their underachieving kids, their vacations that were now just miserable trips, their looks dwindling and their schedules unrecognizable and their paunches becoming more and more pronounced. Seth told Toby how he’d go to their homes for Thanksgiving or setups or whatever, and he’d see their wedding photos on the dining room wall and wonder if it was tragic or fortunate that these guys thought that this was what they still looked like, that this was what they still felt like, that this was who they still were.
“This is the goal?” he asked Toby. “How could all these guys look at the history of the world and want this for themselves?”
Toby didn’t know how to answer it. He didn’t regret getting married. He didn’t even regret marrying Rachel. His children were perfect. He’d been happy for a period. At least he thought he remembered
being happy for a period. There may have actually been a time when he looked at the Seths of the world with pity for the happiness that he had that they didn’t even seem to know to want.
Seth had been engaged once, in his early twenties. He’d asked a girl he’d met in college named Nicole to marry him about four months before Toby asked Rachel the same question, and she’d said yes, and then one day he’d been asked to dinner with Nicole’s parents. He’d shown up, and Nicole hadn’t come, and the father had said that he hadn’t invited her, that they had something to talk over with Seth. They told Seth they would buy Nicole and him the house of their choice, but it had to be on Long Island, and they’d have to attend the same synagogue as the parents and their children would have to go to an Orthodox day school, which they assumed would be fine, right, because Seth had. They were also hoping Seth would go into the family business, which was real estate, and Seth would be set for life if he acquiesced to these simple requests. Who could not want these things?
Well, once Seth gathered his wits about him, meaning once he understood he had been invited to an ambush, he waited for the guy to finish talking, stared at him for a full ten seconds, then stood and walked out. He took a cab directly to Nicole’s apartment, walked right past her when she opened the door, and asked for his ring back. Toby never understood this. At the time, in their young twenties, the whole dream was to end up on Long Island with your mortgage paid and a good private school for your kids and a stable job. “Yes,” Seth had said. “Just let it be my idea.”
But he never grew to want it; it never became his idea. Who really knew why Seth was perennially, diagnostically, terminally afraid to marry? It was just because his parents seemed miserable. Or because he hated organized religion but was too fearful and ambivalent to decide to marry someone who would not allow him to change his level of observance once he got old and sentimental. Or because he didn’t want to have to answer to anyone when he got home at night and put on a headset to pretend he was a fighter pilot conscripted to kill aliens in a game box he kept in a closet when friends came over not because he was ashamed of it but because he couldn’t concentrate on anything else when it was in the room. Or because it was still so fun to see where a night out with his Wall Street friends could take him. Or because he saw the looks on those very friends’ faces the next morning—the shame, the bereavement—because those guys had definitely gotten hand jobs from women who weren’t their wives and why should you ever feel guilty about a hand job? Or because his mother had whispered into his ear when he was very young that he was perfect and there would never be a woman good enough for him. Or because everyone expected him to get married, and if he did this one big expected thing his life would sink into all the other expected things, the very things that Nicole’s father had tried to fast-forward him into. Or because it was so rare to be able to fuck two women at once when you were married, and Seth could see giving up a lot of his vices in middle age but not that one. Or because he had not yet met a woman who was down with him watching porn on Sunday mornings the way other men watched football. Or because there was a point at which sending horny text messages to a woman became less dangerous and/or arousing the minute those text messages were also peppered with the logistical questions of life: When will you be home? Did you pick up milk? Or because he had found too often that a woman who was willing to let you lick her anus and vice versa when you were at the beginning of a relationship so quickly became someone who acted like she’d never even considered the idea once you moved in together. Or because sometimes, maybe every six months or so, he liked to order a pizza from Angelo’s all for himself and eat it and afterward spend the entire night doing sit-ups and workout videos on YouTube that had the word SHRED in them, and also some eighties aerobics videos. Or because his biggest fear was to be known and rejected, and the only way he could face the rejection that comes along with being human was to never let himself be known—that way, what was rejected wasn’t him at all, but a projection of him.
Toby joined him at yoga that night. He didn’t meet any women—they were young and didn’t make eye contact with him and their KALE and YOUR WORKOUT IS MY WARMUP tank tops reminded him too much of Rachel. They weren’t interested in him anyway. (Maybe he didn’t emit the pheromones that Seth did, or his theory that a woman needed to be prepared for his height via a dating app profile was correct, or his theory that the over-forty version of Seth was a star only in his own estimation was correct, or his theory that women weren’t as simple as Seth made them out to be was correct.) But Toby kept returning to class after that day, because it made him feel good to move and not go anywhere, to rely on nothing but his own body weight for resistance, to learn that the ground beneath his feet was firmer than he had presumed. What he liked about yoga was that sometimes they spent a full minute on something called Mountain Pose, which was just standing. An entire pose just for standing! Yes, yoga really seemed to get his situation.
“How high is your closing rate?” Seth said that night, almost a month into Toby’s new dating life.
“I think I’m at like sixty percent? Thirty percent? It’s hard to know. I feel like in a month I have already become someone who considers every woman from eighteen to sixty-two a potential sex partner, so it’s a failing if I take the kids to the doctor and the receptionist doesn’t want to have sex with me.”
“You should be at a hundred percent, dude. You should only be closing. You are prime time now. You are golden.”
“It’s not as easy as all that.”
“You’re too picky.”
“Picky?” Toby asked. “I’d put my penis into a he-donkey right now is how picky I am.”
“Then what’s going on?”
“I’m coming out of a fifteen-year relationship with a woman who wouldn’t let me pee standing up. I have some healing to do.”
Seth shook his head, and then leaned across the table and put his hands on Toby’s forearms and shook them so that Toby’s whole body convulsed. He said, “I really missed you, man.”
* * *
—
RACHEL STILL WANTED to fuck was the thing. This was Toby’s secret. He’d had sex with nine women in the last month and a half, not including Rachel, which was a full six more than he previously had had sex with in his life. And yet on certain nights of the week, Rachel would text him after ten, wondering what he was doing, and this was his signal to say “Nothing,” and for her to ask if maybe he wanted to stop by, and for him to find that any hatred and resolve he had against her melted away instantly and made room for enough self-loathing and neediness for him to grab his keys and walk over. Their sex was silent now, which it hadn’t always been. There were sounds of friction and tossing, but there were no sighs anymore, nor any moans. There were certainly no words. The sex existed outside any interpersonal tension, the way it always had. They got the job done. He knew what she wanted—a little nipple action as she did some kind of deep intentional meditative thing with her breath, then flipped over so that she was flat on her stomach and he lay on top of her.
Throughout the years, he’d heard jokes and complaints from some of the other married doctors at the hospital about how little sex they were having. Allen Keller, one of the attendings, just thirty-six, told him that he and his wife had last had sex four months before. Poor Allen kept waiting for his wife to notice, but it didn’t seem to bother her. When he brought it up, she said she was tired at night and why didn’t he think he should accommodate her schedule instead of the other way around. “ ‘Uh, because you don’t work?’ ” Allen Keller said. His wife told him that if she had sex too close to bedtime it would make her anxious and keep her up all night. “What the fuck is that?” Allen asked Toby. “That’s not a real thing, is it?”
Toby allowed himself a brief moment of smugness when he heard stories like this. Even during their worst times, he and Rachel fucked all the time, three times a week at the very least. It all
owed him to think, Hey, maybe we’re normal. Maybe we’re better than normal. Three times a week! By this metric their relationship was good. By this metric, their relationship was aspirational. If you looked at it in that light, well, who doesn’t have some tension in their lives from time to time? Of course, people who are trying to be good parents and also good at their jobs fight. Maybe even every day. Maybe even more than once a day. Maybe even just about every time they were together, and viciously and cruelly. Right?
During their marriage, Rachel was demanding about sex in a way that wasn’t always kind or relenting. If he wasn’t in the mood, it would move her to rage. He had been too tired the night they got home from their vacation to Mexico, and she accused him of having an affair. He’d been too turned off by her the first time he saw her yell at a subordinate at a company Christmas thing where she got drunk and she told Toby he was a chickenshit. He’d been too drunk after the annual hospital gala and she laughed at him cruelly and called him an old man. Once, she woke him up in the middle of the night after she came home from some event, and began poking around in the blanket for his boxers like she was looking for batteries in the junk drawer, and when she saw nothing was going on down there, she said, “I guess this is it, then.” He had no idea what she meant. She began crying and screaming at him, telling him how miserable she was. “Whatever you’re doing now, it’s not helping,” Toby pleaded. “It’s making it worse.” He realized she was drunk, and eventually was able to pat her down to sleep the way he was able to get their kids to bed when they were hysterical in the middle of the night. The next day, she didn’t say a word about it. No apology. Nothing.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 8
