* * *
—
THE HOUSE IN East Hampton was no longer Toby’s, as if it ever was, but that wasn’t official yet. Same with the car, though of course when he went to his old garage he was sweating and terrified that the car was either not there and he’d have to play dumb, or that the garage attendant knew about his divorce and he’d have to skulk out like a known criminal. But all he said was “Going somewhere fun?” and Toby loaded the car and pulled out. The evening was clear and the sky was turning dark and the children looked out their windows. Toby’s hands gripped the steering wheel. For a long time there was silence, and his interactions with the garage attendant festered.
Suddenly, from the backseat: “Where’s Mom?” Solly asked. It had taken four days for him to ask.
“I told you, she had a work thing,” Toby said.
“Can we FaceTime her?”
Toby looked at him in the rearview. “Probably not with the time difference, bud. She’s probably asleep.” His sentence created an image in his mind—her in a hotel somewhere in Europe, asleep, was the thing he conjured—and for a minute he felt panicked.
He put on the radio because casually putting on the radio felt like the best way to convince them that this was all normal, which it was not. His eyes settled back on the road and the bottom of his stomach began to burn and he imagined for a moment that the rock inside his gut was Rachel and that he could perform surgery on himself right there in the car without even pulling over and surgically extract the rock, find her in it—that’s where she went!—and throw the whole thing out the window, where the acid of her toxicity would burrow a sinkhole into the highway pavement and then farther down into the Earth’s core and out the other side to China and then, with renewed velocity, propel out into the space over Asia and through all kinds of dark matter and parallel universes that didn’t get cellphone reception and made it so that he never had to hear her fucking voice ever again.
He pulled off at exit 70, bracing himself for the Hamptonian excess that was the stuff of Rachel’s dreams and of his waking dread. Slowly, slowly, the houses took on a more polished, regal quality, integrated with special lighting and a thing that could be called a lawn but could also, the farther away from the highway he drove, be called a field.
It was all such an insult, the Hamptons. It was an insult to economic disparity. It was an insult to leading a good life and asking hard questions about what one should sacrifice in the name of decency. It was an insult to having enough—to knowing that there was such a thing as enough. Inside those houses weren’t altruistic, good people whom fortune had smiled down on in exchange for their kind acts and good works. No, inside those columned, great-lawned homes were pirates for whom there was never enough. There was never enough money, goods, clothing, safety, security, club memberships, bottles of old wine. There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.” These were criminals—yes, most of them were real, live criminals. Not always with jailable offenses, but certainly morally abhorrent ones: They had offshore accounts or they underpaid their assistants or they didn’t pay taxes on their housekeepers or they were NRA members.
And the worst of it all, the biggest insult there was, was where this all was situated. It was at the tip of Long Island, which itself was a bunion on Manhattan. This luxury tip was so precariously placed and so prone to terrible weather, surrounded on most sides by water as the Hamptons was, that the most offensive part of it all was that such wealth was planted in such tenuousness. One bad storm and all of these houses were blown away. And you know how these pirates felt about that? They didn’t give a shit. Go ahead, let God blow the wrath of shame and destruction down on us. Not to worry, we’ll make a killing on the insurance, and also we have a place in Aspen!
Toby pulled into the driveway of their home. Rachel had convinced him that she had earned a house in the Hamptons, and he had convinced Rachel that it should be a more humble one than they could afford. She acquiesced somewhat. It was still enormous. Five bedrooms and a three-car garage and a living room and a den and a sitting room and a solarium and a deck that overlooked the ocean. It had belonged to an old Vanity Fair editor, back when magazine editors could be rich. He was a dinosaur, and he died and was now extinct, and now the only time journalists went to the Hamptons was when we were invited because of the noble oddities we were sometimes perceived to be or because of how interesting and powerful we used to be or because a publicist rented a beach house on behalf of a luxury watch company and wanted to full-court pummel us with information about an exciting new opportunity for our December gift guide. The Vanity Fair editor’s son took over the house when his father died, but then the son was sent away on an insider trading charge, and so there was a fire sale and Rachel bid and bought the house. She didn’t like to tell people the fire-sale part.
He parked in the driveway and the kids ran into the house. A seagull flew over the car. He hadn’t been there since the night she’d agreed to the divorce, in January. They’d gone out for a weekend, even though it was off-season, because they were touring camps for Hannah, who was considering a theater day camp in Dix Hills that was having an open house, and then there was a snowstorm and they decided to just stay through Monday. They’d fucked that night—one of the joyless, mechanical fucks of their last years together. It had been a year since Toby had first asked for a divorce. His request had come not from anger but from the irritation of the hole it bored in you when you were lying to yourself. Each time he brought the topic up he had only been met with hysterical threats. She screamed at him that he would never see the children again if he tried to leave her, and that he would be left penniless.
“But why?” he asked. “You can’t be happy like this.”
She didn’t have an answer. She just kept threatening. He relented, terrified and even sadder. But somehow, as it snowed onto the skylight into their bedroom, and it was quiet in a way that it was never quiet there during the summer, a peace seemed to settle on her. They lay in silence, the air cold but the bed full of heat, and she said to the ceiling, “I think we should get divorced.” He turned over on his side to face her and he was filled with an aching love for the thing they had destroyed and tears were coming down her face and he wiped them away with his thumbs. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.
The weeks and months that followed that night were some of the happiest of their marriage. They laughed. They were light together. They rewatched an episode of a sitcom that had made them laugh years before. They shared raised eyebrows and deep inhales over Hannah’s tantrums. They found each other’s eyes again when Solly spent a day trying to say the word sarcophagus, both of them trying not to laugh. It had been a long time since they’d had intimacy in love. In recent years, only their hatred had true intimacy, meaning that when they fought, they were able to say the most specifically cruel things they’d mined from years of experience with each other. He trod hard on her extraordinary maternal inconsistency; she went for his masculinity like it was an artery. But when they weren’t fighting, the intimacy was gone. Their conversations were so cold and distant that if you’d overheard them in a restaurant on one of their forced date nights, you would have wondered if they’d known each other for more than a few weeks. Now the intimacy was back again. Rachel picked up dinner on the way home when she knew he’d been running late to relieve the babysitter, even though dinner was his responsibility. He ran downstairs to get her Chinese food when she mentioned that she hadn’t had a good chicken dumpling in years. They held hands sometimes, which they hadn’t done in years, and which he realized was a completely counterproductive, backward thing for them to do. There was calm, and with the calm came relief, and the relief felt in his body the way endorphins did, and he became worried that he would mistake that for love. He couldn’t understand why, if they could be happy in each other’s presence while they were in the
last days of their marriage, why couldn’t they have been happy for real?
They decided to wait out the school year for him to move out, but he began looking for an apartment in April, and eventually found one five blocks north, on Ninety-fourth Street and Lex. He bought furniture online. With every lease-related document he signed and every Confirm Order button he clicked, he felt like he was falling into a terrible hole. And every confirmation email he received found him at the bottom of that hole, panicked and unsure, until eventually he ordered a set of bright blue enamel pots from Sur La Table and he clicked Confirm Order and it wasn’t so bad, and then the shipping confirmation email came and suddenly he was so excited about these pots. Rachel had only wanted stainless steel pots, as if she had ever even once prepared a meal herself, saying that the bright blue enamel ones he liked were too flamboyant and made the place look like a circus. “We’re not farmhouse chic, Toby,” she’d said. “We’re going for mid-cench here.” He remembered that specific day, when she’d hired a decorator (“I’m actually called an interior designer”), a thick-ankled penguin of a woman named Luc, to come in and assess their design situation in the apartment in the city. She went through binders with Toby and Rachel and soon determined that (a) Toby had no interest or authority and was only there to prevent the kids from interrupting; and (b) after a series of flash card questions, Rachel’s preferred style was midcentury modern. “You’re mid-cench!” the designer had said, and Rachel had clapped her hands together at the revelation, as if she had just learned where her ancestors came from, like maybe she’d been wondering this since she had become sentient and it was the mystery of her life and now she finally knew. Now everything else in her life could fall into place.
“And yet she wants everything to be new,” Toby had said at the time, thinking this was funny. Rachel and Luc blinked at him.
All this to say he never thought he’d darken this particular doorstep again. All this to say he thought he’d never again have to lay eyes on an Eames chair that looked like it could crack your coccyx after an hour of polite conversation. All this to say that when he got the email that his new Le Creusets were shipping, he nearly evaporated from the joy he felt. He would feel this feeling every day when he left Rachel’s apartment for good, he thought. This was what it was going to be like all the time—life on his terms, a home and a day erected out of his choices. As he walked toward the door of the Hamptons place now, down the gravel driveway, he put his hands on his children’s heads, which were immediately sticky from the proximity of the salt water. He realized that some part of him had been at least somewhat attached to the idea that she’d be there—that he would open the door and they would find her, waiting. He didn’t know why she’d be there: Maybe she’d be on a bender, maybe fucking some guy, maybe fucking some girl, maybe crying in the bathtub, maybe dead on the patio. Just there.
But he turned on the lights and he felt the humanlessness in the house and knew she wasn’t there. He hadn’t really thought she’d be there, he guessed. So why did he feel empty and betrayed all over again?
That night, he lay in that bed alone for the first time and he felt his waking-up feeling: Something is wrong. You are in trouble. Fleishman is in trouble. The bed, which had cost $26,000, and the mattress, which had cost $7,500, cradled his body like it was his mother. He lay on his right side, looking at the vast empty space where another person is supposed to be. A California king was excessive. They hadn’t needed this much space. He looked up through the skylight at the stars and he thought about what was beyond the atmosphere and beyond the stars in the vast and infinite space which made him even smaller than he was on Earth.
His phone made a choo-choo train noise from incoming text messages, and he reached over to see who it was. It was Nahid, whose body parts he was becoming so intimate with through his phone that he couldn’t reconcile that they hadn’t yet fucked, or even met for that matter. He felt his dick begin to get hard. He could think of no better idea than to jerk off on Rachel’s bed to photos of another woman—women who wanted to please him, women who wanted to delight him. He fell asleep with his phone in his left hand.
* * *
—
IN THE MORNING, he made the kids pancakes with mix left over from last summer, but Hannah didn’t want to eat. She just wanted to see her friends.
“But none of your friends are even up yet,” he said.
She walked off to her room.
Toby went into the library room, or what was sold to them as the library room, though Rachel had never put a book inside it, just an ugly green leather couch and a TV, and he sat down to call Rachel’s assistant, Simone, on her cell. The phone rang once, then went to voicemail. He stared at the phone for a minute. He was nervous. God, what was he scared of? Fuck you, you fucking pussy, he said to himself. He called again. Again it rang and went to voicemail. He decided to text.
It’s an emergency, pick up.
He stared at the phone. Nothing. He was about to walk out of the library room when the phone rang.
“Hi, Toby,” Simone said. She sounded defeated.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“You said there was an emergency?”
“Is she there?” He began to consider the possibilities. “Can you have her call me back? She’s days late and I have a hard case at the hospital and—and it’s her turn. It’s her agreed-upon turn. She can fuck with me, but she can’t fuck with the kids.”
“If there’s no emergency, then—”
“Simone. My kids are waiting for her. Where is she?”
“I’ll leave word.”
Simone hung up. How Rachel abused her. She’d been on Rachel’s desk for four years. Usually it was just two, but Rachel told him Simone was a good assistant but too timid and nice to be set loose and made into a junior agent.
“So you’re just going to let her believe she’s going to get promoted someday?” Toby had asked.
“It’s not like I’ve lied to her,” Rachel had answered.
Hannah had arranged to meet up with Lexi Leffer, mousy little Beckett Hayes, and Skylar something or other, whose mother used to audition her for commercials. They pulled up in front of the café. Hannah informed him that he would. not. be. walking. her. in. and she would need sixty dollars (not his sad twenty dollars) and that other kids got a hundred dollars and sure she would let him know when it was time to pick her up but how could she do that when she was the only person on the planet with no phone. Hannah had not yet opened the door to the café when a group of boys the same age as Hannah called her name. Hannah turned around, and her face became pretty and light. Rachel could do that, too.
“I didn’t know there were gonna be boys there,” Toby said to no one.
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Solly said. He was reading his facts about the universe book.
Toby sat in the car for a minute, just staring ahead.
“Dad, Dad, are you okay?”
Toby looked in the rearview mirror at Solly for a few long seconds before hearing the question. He put the car into gear and began driving. “Yes, no, sure I am. Just figuring out dinner.”
“Dad, what’s the block universe?”
“Block universe theory? Where did you hear about the block universe theory?”
“It’s in my book.”
“Gosh, it’s pretty complicated. Okay, you ready? It’s a physics theory. It’s the theory that there are infinite universes in infinite dimensions, all going on at once. Like no matter what’s going on, that moment still exists forever. Time isn’t forward. It’s all happening at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it doesn’t, but does it?”
“So that means that right now whatever happened on this spot in the past is still happening?”
“Yes. And in the future. Or what we think of as the future.”
“Then how come we can’t se
e it?”
“Well, we can only see our own dimensions. Our brain can barely even grasp it.”
“How do we know which dimension we’re in?”
“We’re in all of them, according to the theory.”
Solly leaned back and closed his eyes, his bottom teeth biting his upper lip.
“You okay, buddy?”
“It’s stressing me out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s all happening all the time. It’s so busy.”
“I know. But you’re only responsible for right now.”
“But it’s all right now!”
“But you can’t control it except for right now.”
“But all the me’s need to control their right now.”
“But they can all handle it.” He turned around. “It’s just a theory. It’s probably not true.”
Toby couldn’t bear to talk about the block universe anymore. He didn’t want to talk about any theory of life in which the thing you were dealing with wasn’t absolute reality. He couldn’t bear the scope of regret and other chances and other choices that might verily crush him if he considered them. He’d chosen to live without regret. He’d chosen to believe he had nothing to regret. He’d had opportunities, but he also had values. His whole marriage, he was repeatedly punished for honoring his values, for not getting sucked into the vortex of want with the people around him. He didn’t want to think about possibility anymore. Possibility was a trap.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 12
