Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  Four years earlier, the Fleishmans had been invited to a New Year’s party at the second home of Miriam and Sam Rothberg (though how do you decide which is your second home when you have four homes?). Solly was friendly with Jack Rothberg, and Rachel went to Pilates with Miriam, who was the object of all of Rachel’s social-climbing ambitions. Miriam was a Rothberg, which made her rich and influential, but she was born a Sachsen, which made her someone with access to the wealth of two or three small European countries. Sachsen was the family that donated the most money to the school’s building fund, which was why their name appeared on it in at least five places and also on the school stationery, and also on the new annex at MoMA, which would be named for them.

  The house was upstate, in Saratoga Springs, near the racetrack. How could Toby describe this house? It looked like Monticello—sprawling and colonial with two redundant staircases in the entry hall. Outside it was endless; inside it was endless. There were nine bedrooms, Rachel told him. Each invited family got their own bedroom, which turned out to be a suite of bedrooms—one for the parents, one smaller inset of a bedroom for the kids to share, one bathroom per family. There were more than twenty families invited, though, and the ones that didn’t fit in the house Sam Rothberg himself put up at a charming historic hotel down the road.

  “Why are we at the house and not at the hotel?” Toby wanted to know while they were driving up.

  Rachel, at the wheel, shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “I feel like it’s strange that we merited house status.”

  “Probably so the kids could play? And, uh, some people like me, Toby.”

  Toby stared straight ahead. At least at a hotel he would get a break from these people. He could take Solly on a nature walk, or skip a meal with the crowd. Instead, they were put in a room with a canopy bed and cloth walls, all done up in a bland Queen Anne style. Toby put their bags down and thought how this weekend was going to be unrelenting.

  The next morning, at breakfast, Sam asked Toby if he wanted to take the kids bowling in town. Toby briefly searched his mind for a way to say no, but he looked over at Rachel, whose eyebrows were pleading.

  “Sure,” he said.

  At the bowling alley, Sam’s giant hands selected a marbled red ball and flung it through the air so that it could land on the oiled alley like a swan and score him, yes, his third strike. Sam was tall even by regular standards and it looked like he had all his hair, but with blond guys you can’t ever know for sure. He had what looked like a strong chin but he also had an underbite, which meant that his chin wasn’t so strong and maybe even was weak. When he laughed, it was just his jaw making a parallel clapping motion, like a marionette. He sat down next to Toby while Jack got up to bowl his second strike. He said, “You still at the hospital? We’re looking for someone to head up our marijuana program.”

  “Fendant is going into marijuana?”

  Sam laughed loud. “Lord, no. We’re looking for someone who could help lead up a new, important division. It would be dedicated to debunking myths about alternative therapies, reminding the world that medicine is best. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. As I’m sure you know.”

  “I don’t know,” Toby said. “I see a lot of cancer patients benefit from pot and acupuncture—”

  “Don’t get me started on acupuncture,” Sam said.

  “—I mean, not cured. But relief, yes.”

  “Be that as it may. Isn’t the best relief a cure?” Toby thought of Bartuck, whose face was [dollar sign eye emoji] and who was aggressive about grants and fundraising. It disgusted Toby, but what was he going to do? That kind of greed was essential to allowing Toby to do his job—there was no job without it. So there was something for everyone in medicine. He understood that. But this was new. Bartuck at least had to pretend he was interested in healing patients; Bartuck at least at one time had actually done the healing work! What was new was to be in a room with someone who was so nakedly disinterested in healing people, and so nakedly interested in thwarting progress.

  “I’m a doctor,” Toby said. “I do best with patients.” He hoped this would end the conversation before Sam mentioned a number, but hope is for idiots. Toby got up to bowl. He took one pin off the edge in a glorified gutter ball.

  “It’s the head of a big division, Toby. You’d be bringing in a mil before bonuses. You’d manage an entire team. Great hours. The works.”

  Toby tried to imagine what it would be like to be on such intimate terms with money that you could abbreviate it into nicknames. “That’s really nice, but it’s just not what I do.”

  “Rachel said you would resist this. Did I mention the bonuses? The hours? We have a chalet in Zermatt you could use for skiing. Every director-level gets a key. I’m serious.”

  “When did you and Rachel talk about this?”

  It was Sam’s turn to bowl. He banged out another strike, and when he came back, Toby wanted to ask the question again but couldn’t think of a way of repeating himself without sounding panicked and paranoid.

  Toby vowed to not address this with Rachel until they returned to the city. There was no private place to argue, and he knew he’d have a hard time pretending things were fine at dinner once she began saying awful things to him about his career.

  But Rachel had other plans. That night was New Year’s, and waiters in black and white passed hors d’oeuvres and champagne and Toby sat on a couch alone until about eleven, when Solly came to sit with him for a minute and fell asleep on his lap. He carried Solly up to bed, wondering if he could get away with falling asleep in bed with him, but Rachel followed them upstairs.

  “Well?” she whispered. “I’ve been waiting to hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  “What did you and Sam talk about?”

  “You know what we talked about. You colluded and orchestrated it behind my back.”

  “Collusion! That’s a big word for this. He mentioned it a few weeks ago. I thought you might like the opportunity!”

  “It’s actually the opposite of an opportunity. It is the antithesis of what I do. He wants me to head up a division that encourages the deprivation of legitimate avenues of healing to sick patients.”

  She sat on the bed, looking up at him. “I know. But you’re so good at your job. You should be rewarded. You should have a break from the grind.”

  “I don’t need a break from my job. My job is not a grind.”

  “You are screaming,” she said through her teeth. “Do not embarrass me.”

  “How about you embarrassing me? By implying that I have so little integrity—”

  “Integrity? You think insisting on keeping your job when you have an opportunity to literally what—quadruple your salary and make our lives better is integrity? Me working myself into an early grave so that you can do what you want to do instead of what you have to do is integrity?”

  “What is the problem here? I’m perfectly—”

  “You’re still an attending.”

  “I’m an attending because I like working with patients.”

  “You totally pissed away that grant—”

  “Jesus Christ. The grant again.”

  Her lipstick, her always-red lipstick, had somehow gotten onto her teeth. It made her look like a lunatic on the subway. “You are so wedded to this narrative that you are good and everyone else is bad. It’s not bad to want money. It’s not bad to have a teaspoon of ambition. It’s not bad to work hard to make your family happy.”

  Solly appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes.

  “Why are you fighting?”

  Rachel stood up. “Go back to bed, baby, it’s okay.”

  “What are you fighting about?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  Toby stood up and without a word took Solly by the hand and led him back to his bed, where he lay down next t
o him, facing him. He put his hand on Solly’s cheek, and Solly responded by putting his hand on Toby’s cheek.

  “I want to be a doctor when I grow up, Dad.”

  “You do?”

  “I want to have patients and make them better.”

  “You will be great at doing that. Go to sleep.”

  Some time later, the door opened, and Toby could feel Rachel seething at the threshold. He kept his eyes closed and pretended he was asleep.

  A week later, out of nowhere, or maybe not, Rachel decided she could no longer live on Seventy-second Street in their perfectly good three-bedroom with a doorman and what Solly thought was the fanciest elevator in all of New York City. She began looking, on her own, for a new apartment. She would take Hannah with her, and Hannah would report back over dinner that there was no anteroom or the kitchen door opened straight into the living room or there was no additional storage or there was no parking or there was just a living room and no den.

  There was a new building being built on Seventy-fifth Street at the time, at the corner of Third. There were new buildings being built on Eighty-sixth and Seventy-ninth, too—all glass and metal with advertisements over their scaffoldings about the amenities and tennis courts and Jacuzzis and community rooms and how easy and glamorous life could be. They were exactly what Rachel wanted, but she didn’t want them. Rachel was more interested in the building on Seventy-fifth Street that would not have amenities. It was being built new to look like one of the old art deco buildings—one of the old-money buildings their richer friends lived in. It had bronze arches and high ceilings and metal doors, and it was to be called the Golden. The Fleishmans went to see it one night after dinner.

  “They’re not even officially showing it yet, but Sam Rothberg knows the developer and got us in early,” Rachel said.

  “I don’t know why we need something so big,” he said.

  “This isn’t big. This is a regular size for a family of four.”

  “Those modern buildings are so much nicer. They have swimming pools.”

  “We have the club for that. And I don’t want to live in all that glass. It’s so old-school and romantic here.”

  “Maybe there’s a gym here,” Hannah said.

  “There isn’t,” Rachel answered, looking at the crown molding in the apartment.

  “How do you know?” Toby asked. The agent hadn’t yet met them in the model apartment.

  Rachel stopped for a minute. “I asked Sam.”

  “Have you looked at this before?”

  “Of course not. How would I?” He was pretty sure she was lying.

  They closed on the apartment three weeks later. He wasn’t asked. He was told. It was his punishment for not taking the Fendant job. Fine, he thought, as he helped label boxes for moving. As long as this means we’re even.

  Now Toby found himself back at their house, Rachel’s house, with the car running in the driveway.

  “Dad?” Solly asked.

  Toby blinked. He had no recollection as to how he’d gotten here. He had thought they were even, but they weren’t. They never would be. When he was seventeen, he got into a car accident with his parents’ Volvo. The next three days, all he could think was: What if I’d left exactly one minute earlier? What if I hadn’t stopped for gas? It drove him crazy, and more than that, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t the reality he was living. What if he had taken that job? Or what if he’d even been open to talking about it? What if his lab had flourished and his grant had been renewed? What if he’d never gone to the party where he met Rachel? What was the point in even asking? Do you see why he didn’t want to talk about the block universe anymore? Because somewhere, in one of them, he was still a hopeless idiot who didn’t see this all coming.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY they spent in the Hamptons breaststroked by in excruciating slowness, with Hannah rushing him to different places for a drop-off, then bargaining via the text message function of a friend’s phone that she be allowed to stay longer and do more. He drove Hannah to playdates. He took Solly down to the beach to collect rocks. He called the hospital. He took calls from the hospital.

  Toby and Solly sat by the pool on too-expensive chaise lounges while Solly played Minecraft on his iPad. Toby stared out at the sunshine water until he realized he’d had it. He took out his laptop and looked up the name of the lawyer he’d seen two years before, when he realized he wanted a divorce and knew that everything they owned was supported by Rachel’s income. The lawyer, a woman in her late fifties who had handled the divorce of another doctor at the hospital, told him that he could file, but she said that at the point where Toby’s money ran out, he would have no choice but to acquiesce to everything she demanded, if the stress of knowing that his “resources” were more finite than hers didn’t force him to acquiesce much sooner.

  “Even people we see as awful tend to be reasonable,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m not so sure about that,” Toby answered.

  She charged him $750 for the forty-five-minute conversation. “Mediation is much more humane on all of you. If she’s offering it, I’d take it. You’ll need your money for your new house, unless you can get some alimony out of her.”

  If the months of a peaceful marriage-like existence made Toby worried that the inertia of these nearly fifteen years would make him want to try again, their twice-weekly mediation meetings cured him. In those meetings Rachel would make stone-hearted demands. She wanted the houses and she wanted the BMW and she wanted the stock and the Knicks tickets—why on earth would she want the Knicks tickets?—and the club membership, which, fine, he hated that place but still. She had so much and wanted to keep it all. She wanted to leave the father of her children without any relic of the last fifteen years. But that wasn’t the worst part about this. The worst part about this, other than all the other worst parts about this, was that it put Toby into a position where he had to actually think about what he wanted.

  The only way he had survived in his marriage, with a wife who not only made about fifteen times his really quite good doctor salary but who, the moment she surpassed him on the earn-o-meter, found herself completely disgusted by his earning ability, was that he made a big show of only barely tolerating the perks of the money. He allowed Rachel to buy the Hamptons house, he allowed her to buy the monstrous new-money/fake-old-money apartment at the Golden, he allowed her to buy the convertible. He never allowed himself to realize that Rachel’s things had become his things, even as he partook in their thingness. He didn’t buy them, but they were also his. And now he hated mediation because it felt like wanting any of it, claiming any right to it, would have been admitting that he derived pleasure from it, too. Fine, he said with every tiny acquiescence. Take it all, take it all.

  When he became overwhelmed like that, Frank, the mediator, who only had hair above his ears and wore shawl collars, would say, “Let’s take a breath, Toby.”

  He could grapple with the loss of stuff. The car and the Hamptons house and the club would disappear from his life overnight and he would adjust since he was never really meant to be a rich person in the first place. But now he was being treated like a housewife who had taken care of the children, and Frank was telling him to fight for what was his, the way he probably had to tell the housewives to fight for what was theirs. And Frank was right. He was owed something. He was owed something for allowing her to kneecap his career with her insistence that she be allowed to work late, that she had one more phone call to make. He was owed something for being diminished and counted out. He was owed something for having to shiver in her shadow all these years, for being made miserable, for being forced to fight to the death every night. Did he sound angry? He wasn’t angry. He was just explaining things.

  What Frank was trying to say was that there was no way to get what he had wanted in the first place,
which was a happy marriage. He was certainly never going to receive any apology or understanding for the way their relationship had gone awry. In cases like this, material compensation was the only hope. Frank knew this. He’d seen this so many times. You have to take the stuff because it’s the only thing that will comfort you when you realize that everything else is gone. But Toby couldn’t bring himself to fight. It was all too humiliating to beg for things he never wanted in the first place. Getting used to things and enjoying things wasn’t the same as wanting things. Was it?

  Mediation ended, and then the lawyers were involved again, but not the divorce lawyers. This time it was document pushers and notaries, signing name-removals from deeds, as if he’d come back with a claim, which was only even further degrading, that after all this they couldn’t part as people who trusted each other—that he might be someone so desperate for money that he’d squat in her apartment or sue her for her car. He was just a poor doctor, after all. A poor doctor who, by the way, made more than a quarter of a million dollars, thank you very much.

  He pushed air out of his mouth like a motorboat. He couldn’t bring himself to contact any of Rachel’s friends and ask if they’d heard from her. There was something about this that was so deeply embarrassing that he couldn’t handle anyone knowing it. Yes, divorce was ugly and people understood that, but getting abandoned by the wife you’re already separated from seemed even too humiliating for him, even after the public fighting and the tense entrances to parties and the times she mocked him openly for his lack of sophistication. His lack of sophistication. Him. Not sophisticated. Him. He who read Pulitzer finalists and had four-count-them-four museum memberships; he who checked the Time Out every week for new cultural events, who donated to the Central Park Conservancy and suggested opera and cello concerts and Mummenschanz?