Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  The last night Toby lived at home, Solly cried himself to sleep, wondering what would happen if he was in his apartment alone and had a heart attack or a stroke and nobody was there to help him. Toby reassured him, and only when Solly was finally asleep was Toby left to realize that now that he’d finally gotten what he wanted, he was going to have to actually do it: He was going to have to be alone. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to think of how much he liked their sheets and their bed and their apartment and being around the kids and making them breakfast every morning. He didn’t want to think about how he was not repulsed by her yet and wished he were. And so he leaned over and reached for her, thinking that of course this would be the last time.

  But it wasn’t. It never stopped. He’d drop off the kids late and she would get angry that they were late but once the kids were in bed she’d ask if he wanted to see something in the bedroom, and in the dark, she would shut the door and apply herself to him and they would have their soundless, scrappy sex that felt both familiar and strange and forbidden and wonderful. These nights were detrimental to his healing. On those nights, after they were done, they would lie side by side, not touching, staring at the ceiling. He would make a move to get up, and she would not react to the move, instead turning over and closing her eyes. He would dress and walk to the door. On those nights Rachel stayed in bed, pretending she had fallen asleep.

  * * *

  —

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, Hannah and Solly ate pancakes he made while they watched a cartoon in the living room about a banana and a leek that were friends.

  He texted Rachel:

  What time will you be picking them up tomorrow? I have plans.

  He didn’t have plans. He waited for an answer. Nothing. He felt the beginnings of an explosion build in him, and he hoped she wouldn’t call just then and hear his voice. She loved when he sounded angry, because it allowed her to sound peaceful and say with pity, “Toby, Toby, you are so angry. When did you get this angry?”

  But he wasn’t angry. “I’m not angry,” he would say. “I’m frustrated.” He was just frustrated. She had screwed him yet again. He wasn’t diabolical like she was. He didn’t have the energy for an endurance race of wills. Her capacity for fighting was endless. She was a fucking talent agent. She went into the fighting arts as a career. She could do the back-and-forth of one of those conversations forever. Just because he kept expressing surprise that she kept screwing him didn’t mean he was angry. It meant he was an idiot. Toby stared at his phone for another minute. Nothing. He walked into the living room and his children didn’t look up. “This is not what we’re doing all day,” Toby announced, and turned off the TV. They left the building and went to the bagel place and then headed west to the park. Solly rolled along on his scooter. Hannah hadn’t wanted to take hers because everything was too embarrassing.

  “What if I hold it for you until we get to the park?”

  “Let it go, Dad,” Hannah said. If only she knew how her dismissals cut him. “Can we get my phone today at least?” She’d been promised a phone for her twelfth birthday, but her birthday wasn’t for three weeks.

  “No,” Toby said for the fourth time that week. “You get to be my baby for another three weeks. I am taking up the option on that.” Hannah rolled her eyes.

  “Should we go to the movies?” he asked.

  But Hannah didn’t answer. He looked over at her but she had stopped cold and turned toward a building.

  “What’s going on?” Toby asked. He called to Solly. “Solly, hold up.”

  “Nothing,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything.”

  He saw a boy around Hannah’s age coming down the street dribbling a basketball. He looked over at Hannah to tell her that he thought she knew this kid, but she had already seen him and her face was flushed. He had the white-toothed glow of an athlete and a rich kid. He said to Toby’s daughter, “Hey, Hannah.”

  Hannah smiled and said, “Hey.”

  And the boy dribbled on.

  “Who was that?” Toby asked.

  Hannah turned to him, angry. Her eyes were wet. “Why can’t we take cabs like regular people?”

  “What is it? What happened?”

  “I just don’t know why we have to do this walking to the park all the time like we’re babies. I don’t want to go to the park. I want to go home.”

  “What is the matter with you? We always go to the park.”

  She sounded a great big aspirated grunt of frustration and continued walking ahead of them, her arms stiff and fisted and her legs marching. Toby jogged and caught up with Solly, who had stayed obediently until Toby got to him. “Why’s she so angry?” Solly asked as he remounted his scooter.

  “I don’t know, kid.” More and more, Toby never knew.

  * * *

  —

  HANNAH WAS INVITED to a sleepover that night. Sleepovers, as far as Toby could tell, consisted of the girls in her class getting together and forming alliances and lobbing microaggressions at each other in an all-night cold war, and they did this voluntarily. It had begun when Hannah was in fourth grade, or maybe before that, wherein the alpha girls set to work on a reliable and unyielding establishment of a food chain system—jockeying for position, submitting to a higher position. Licking your wounds when you learn you are not the absolute top; rejoicing to know you are not the absolute bottom. In November, there had been a sleepover at the Fleishmans’ apartment. Rachel sat in bed on her laptop, ignoring the girls, but Toby sat at the small desk area in the hallway, paying bills and listening to what was going on in Hannah’s bedroom. They were playing a game called Drather, as in, Who would you rather, this guy or that guy? The object of the rather was nebulous—rather what, Toby wanted to know. Was it marriage or dating or, oh God, was it sex? Was it sex already?

  Lexi Leffer, the lion king of the group, went first. Little Beckett Hayes, whom Toby had known since she was four, named two TV stars. Lexi chose the obvious one, the star of a teen sitcom with the swoop of hair that fell over his eyes. Toby was disappointed but not surprised. He could have told you that Lexi Leffer’s soul was made of plastic.

  It was Hannah’s turn next. He knew he should walk away and give her privacy, but he couldn’t move. Lexi had to ask her. It was between two boys whose names weren’t familiar to Toby. When Lexi said them, Beckett said, “Ooooooh!” and Hannah screeched, “That’s impossible!”

  “You have to answer, upon penalty of…”

  “Of what?” Hannah asked.

  “On penalty of…” She thought. “…having to call each boy and ask him how his day was.”

  “That’s so evil!” Beckett whispered with apparent awe.

  Hannah took a long time answering. Toby sat frozen at his hallway desk, inside this living nightmare, unable to discern what the stakes were, not knowing how to root for her. Hannah picked the second boy, and Lexi said, “Great. Pick my boyfriend, why don’t you.” There was a pause, and he could feel Hannah not knowing what she’d done wrong. Toby stood up and tried to think of a reason to interrupt them, but it would only make Hannah angry. He left and went to find Solly and watch TV with him. Lexi Leffer was a killer.

  Toby walked the kids through the hot night over to Seventy-ninth and Park, where Cyndi and Todd Leffer lived. On the way, with Hannah still ignoring him, he listened to Solly make a case for watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom again, and they passed a building where he had a clear memory of getting blown by a woman in a stairwell just three weeks ago.

  The Leffers’ doorman, who wore epaulets and never took off his coat, had been told that a group of girls with sleeping bags would be coming, and so he waved the Fleishmans across the marble lobby floor to the mirrored elevator bank. They took the brass elevator up to the twenty-ninth floor, which was the top floor. They were in the elevator long enough for T
oby to break out in a light, panicked sweat over being in a small box that was probably mechanically compromised from age and use. Elevators had never bothered him before, but lately, his faith in systems was wobbly. Why had he put so much trust in elevators in the first place? Why did everyone? This entire vertical city functioned because of its elevator systems—ten million suckers in this city, not even thinking of the likelihood (and it felt likely) that one of the cables would snap or that they’d get stuck in the elevator for hours and run out of oxygen before anyone noticed. By the time they got to twenty-nine, Solly said, “Dad, you’re hurting my shoulder.”

  The elevator opened up to the apartment’s lobby—the apartment had its own lobby—and Todd was there to meet him in a polo shirt and mid-thigh shorts. He was probably five-ten. Yes, Todd, Toby thought, but when was the last time you were blown in a stairwell?

  “How is the good doctor?” he said, putting his hand out and grabbing Toby’s and pumping it so that his body moved like a tide he was fighting against.

  “I’m doing okay.” This was the kind of soft, pampered bro that Rachel wished he were. This was what Rachel would have preferred. It never even began to make sense to him.

  Solly stood beside him, holding his hand, and Lexi Leffer came out of the kitchen with her mom, who was wearing capri pants and a tight, ribbed tank top that said ANGEL across it in script rhinestones.

  “Toby,” she said, all concern once again.

  “Hey, Cyndi.” The confusing thing about how much Rachel aspired to be like them was that Rachel also agreed with him that Cyndi was cheap-looking and that Todd was a jerk. Despite this, they represented all that she aspired to in school culture, and everything that Toby, and therefore she, wasn’t and could never be because of Toby’s embarrassing disability, which was that he was a successful doctor at a top-ranked New York hospital. She’d say “The Leffers go to Maine for Christmas” and “The Leffers have two cars, just in case” and “The Leffers make sure to do two international trips a year.” Each December, the Leffers’ Christmas card would arrive, a collage of scenes from their year and the parties that the Fleishmans hadn’t been invited to, and it would send Rachel to bed in despair. “Why don’t we have dress-up parties?” she would moan. Once, the Leffers had told them, at a dinner, that they had a German tutor, and that both they and the kids were learning German and that they were going to spend all of Christmas vacation next year in Germany, celebrating their new knowledge until they sounded like soldiers in the Third fucking Reich. Cyndi had dropped her voice down low and said, “You cannot compete with that kind of immersion,” and Rachel had nodded emphatically and said, “So true, I never thought of it like that,” like no one had ever said that practice was important for reinforcing information, as if the entire education and athletic supercomplexes weren’t built on that notion.

  “We were thinking of inviting you over next week to lunch at the club,” Cyndi said. “But then Todd reminded me that you don’t play golf.”

  “I play basketball.”

  Todd put his hands behind his head and did an elaborate and luxurious twist to the right, then the left. “Basketball really put my back out in high school. You a point guard?” Fuck you, Todd.

  “Todd is so stressed by his job,” Cyndi said, putting her gigantic, black-painted claws on his shoulders. “His back goes out because he works too hard. It’s too much pressure for one person.” She smiled at him. “Anyway, we’d love for you to come. We’re still your friend, too, Toby.”

  “I appreciate it,” he said, giving a little nod toward Solly that maybe now wasn’t the time to talk about his new social status.

  He and Solly stopped at the bookstore afterward to get a book called 4000 Facts About the Universe. Solly walked back home reading it, letting Toby stop him when he got to street crossings. At a light, while Solly read about kinetic energy, Toby texted Rachel:

  I dropped Hannah off at her sleepover. She has her last lesson with Nathan tomorrow. Don’t let her be late. Will you pick her up from Leffers’ or here?

  Two hours later, he texted her again:

  ???

  * * *

  —

  HAD HE NOT stayed up late trading pornographic texts with a voiceover actress who lived in Brooklyn, had those texts not led to him wondering what her special, monetizable voice sounded like, had that question not led to her calling him up and whispering into his ear for a full hour of the most erotic phone sex he’d ever imagined, he probably would not have been in such a bad mood when he picked up Hannah from the Leffers’ the next morning.

  It did not help that the shades the apartment had come with were cheap and translucent and seemed to telescope the light instead of shielding him from it, and therefore deprived him of at least two hours of extra weekend sleep. How much did you invest in a rental, though? You wanted to feel at home, but it really wasn’t your home. And yet you’d only feel at home if you made it your home. He shouldn’t be cheap with himself. His therapist, Carla, would say that buying new shades was practicing self-care. He would respond by telling her that actually being solvent was self-care, saving up for a better place was self-care, not wasting his time measuring and buying and returning when he inevitably fucked it up was self-care. She would look at him patiently because therapists got to decide what self-care was.

  “I need to get new shades for the apartment,” Toby said as they crossed Lexington Avenue.

  “But I’m so tiiiiiiiired,” Hannah moaned. “Can’t we just go hoooooome?”

  He didn’t want to fight. They might as well go home. The rabbinic student from the synagogue was coming over to give Hannah her final haftorah lesson before she left for the Hamptons with Rachel on Monday. Toby, realizing that Rachel would probably run late on her way back and create even more chaos, texted him to come to his apartment instead of Rachel’s. When he arrived—twenty-three, awkward, studious—Hannah came out of her bedroom in a new outfit, smiling and with her hair brushed. Jesus, Toby thought.

  Solly watched The Wizard of Oz in Toby’s bedroom while Toby sneaked looks at his phone. The voiceover actress had sent him a text that was just two butterfly emojis and a picture of her shoulder, which itself had two tattoos of the exact butterfly emojis—not butterflies, but butterfly emojis. The tattoos sat astride a bright blue lacy bra strap. And we’re off, he thought.

  Tess had texted, too. She wanted to know when they were going out again, and sent a picture of herself that was confusing because it was taken at very close range. Some of those pictures that women sent him reminded him of the back page of the Current Science magazines he used to get in fifth grade, the ones that featured pictures of everyday items taken so close up that it was disorienting to the eye: a Band-Aid, a tomato, the half moon of a fingernail, all familiar but inscrutable for a few seconds until the obviousness of the object overwhelmed him with a strange kind of relief and the neural restoration of order kicked in. You couldn’t discern anything recognizable in them—you needed real tools of inference to figure it out, like: That is lace and that is bulging and so it must be a bra and a breast, or that is shadow and fabric and so must be a butt crack and the outer edge of a thong. He softened the focus of his eyes at Tess’s picture, which had bumps and satin and was therefore her areola. His head sank farther into his pillow.

  Hannah poked her head into his room after her lesson. “I’m going to pack now,” she said. “I don’t have my bathing suit. It’s at Mom’s.”

  Where the fuck are you? he texted her.

  Then: How does it feel to never be where you say you’re going to be?

  He wrote to her again as Sunday dinner came and went. They don’t have camp this week. You have them. You’re taking them to the Hamptons tomorrow. You promised them.

  She often allowed the weekends when he had the kids to extend to Monday mornings, and who was he to ask her to keep to the schedule they’d agree
d to? Just the father! Just the only other person in this arrangement! Sometimes she’d send a last-minute text from a business trip: I’m trying to get some stuff done, mind taking them to school tomorrow? Thx. Hell, when they were married, she’d sometimes stay an entire day or two on a business trip “just to finish things up.” Usually she at least asked him, or let him know under the guise of pretending to ask.

  But nothing.

  Then again, she was at a yoga retreat. Maybe they confiscated phones there? Maybe the whole point was to not use a phone. He would love that luxury, too, you know. He would love a weekend without his phone. Or rather, he would love a weekend with only his phone and its dirty messages and pictures.

  When Hannah and Solly went to bed, he messaged Mona and asked her to come the next day. She texted back that she thought she had the week off, that her son was visiting from Ecuador. He told her he really needed the help. She told him she had confirmed with Rachel months ago that she really wanted to take off to be with her son, whom she hadn’t seen in three years. Toby said he was very sorry and he understood that, but he had some sick patients and would it be possible for her to come for a few hours? He would make it up to her. He told her that Rachel had disappeared again, and if there was one person who would understand what he meant by the soft and gross negligence that Rachel was capable of, it was Mona. Finally, Mona acquiesced and said she could come until three but not after that. He sent her a thousand emojis of thanks.

  The next morning, he was making toast with cream cheese for the kids. Hannah came out of her room and closed the door heavily, which startled him and made him burn his finger.