Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  Now she took one more step. She was wearing a plaid skirt that reached her knee and a flimsy, short-sleeve oxford shirt and saddle shoes. She reached to touch his hand, just really a finger brushing his hand, but in the glass wall behind her, the head nurse on the floor, Gilda, passed by with her lips pursed together in disapproval —not curiosity, not surprise, just lightning disappointment, as if this were something she’d always expected of Toby.

  Let’s just say, for a second, that he took one step toward her instead of one back. Let’s say he and Joanie met eyes soulfully and what could he say, it was love? He would not have invented this. Maggie Bartuck had been a nurse when Donald Bartuck was still with his first wife. Everyone had known what was going on at the time. His first wife would occasionally come to the floor with her dour face and hair dyed one shade too black for her age. And Maggie wore scrubs that weren’t just like a pillowcase. She had sewn a waist into them so that they showed off her figure. Marco Lintz, back when they were both fellows, told Toby that he’d heard that Bartuck’s secretary had seen Bartuck at the X-ray screen one day, looking at an actual film, and Maggie was in front of him, also looking, and Bartuck was sticking his pantsed erection into Nurse Maggie’s scrub’ed rear end. A month later, Bartuck announced his divorce, and just two weeks after that his engagement to Maggie, who never wore scrubs again.

  “What a cliché,” Toby had said to Rachel at the wedding, which was at the Waldorf. They were eating chocolate-covered strawberries. Bartuck’s fraternity brothers sang a Greek song to him. Someone told Toby they’d done the same thing at his first wedding.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “People should be with who makes them happy. There has to be someone for everyone, right?”

  “Yeah, but not two someones for everyone.”

  “How do you know?” she said. “Do I have anything in my teeth?”

  Joanie was young, but she wasn’t a child. Twenty-five is—Wait. No. He stopped himself from completing his next thought. No, Fleishman, no, he thought. This was how you became frog soup: You go in the same moment from thinking of Joanie as a student, then not really a child, and before you know it you’re meeting her for drinks, then fucking her in her dirty, shared apartment in Queens. Or no: They’d start with a real date, like an old-fashioned one. They’d do it privately, then wait a few months after she’d completed her fellowship to get engaged, then married. If they announced their relationship via an engagement, versus just maintaining a nebulous, quasi-legitimate state of boyfriend-girlfriend-dom, nobody would dare to impugn—

  His phone made a sound. Purpose! He looked down. A message from Bartuck’s secretary, asking him to stop by the office as soon as he can. More purpose!

  “I have a meeting with Dr. Bartuck,” he said.

  “It’s okay. We can catch up later. I…Logan and I broke up.”

  He stopped. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “I hope you have people you can talk to about that.”

  “I thought, I don’t know. I know you just got divorced and I know it’s not the same thing, but I’m sad and you’re sad and I don’t know.”

  “Human relationships aren’t easy.”

  She leaned forward. “Love isn’t easy.”

  Her voice and half smile were teasing. Women astounded him. They thought they weren’t the ruling sex, but he was sitting there, watching her face in the light coming through the window behind him. Her skin was so flush and thick. Her youth was so staggering it was offensive.

  “I have to see Dr. Bartuck,” Toby said.

  * * *

  —

  DONALD BARTUCK SQUINTED and jutted his lips out and did a small nod that made his mighty jowl quiver.

  “Toby, come in,” Bartuck said. “I hope everything worked its way out at home?”

  “Yes, thank you, it was a rough few days. The kids went off to sleepaway camp this morning.”

  “I wanted you to know that we’re meeting about you tomorrow. I expect Phillipa to accept my recommendation.”

  “Well, what news,” Toby said, and stood to shake his hand.

  “I know it’s been a hard time for you. I’m hoping this one washes off soon. Phillipa’s job is not a small deal. Don’t make me look bad here.”

  Bartuck had started at the hospital as an intern in the seventies, slick and bombastic and secure. His own father was the legendary head of the department at the time. Bartuck’s career was handed to him—not just because of his lineage, but because of his confidence, the way you just wanted to hand responsibility over to Bartuck—and all he had to do was not screw it up. He hadn’t.

  He was a good doctor; he was even great. That was the worst part of Bartuck. He had been such a good mentor to Toby that it had been impossible to foresee that he’d become the oily money guy that he had become. Or maybe what was hard was accepting that you could be both a good doctor and a money guy and still choose to be the money guy? Either way it was sad. When Toby was one of his fellows, Bartuck told him war stories and gave him whiskey in his office at the end of their hard days. Toby remembered when Martin Loo, a subdivision head in gastroenterology, died from pancreatic cancer in a fast, sad sequence of hospital poetry that reaffirmed to Toby that what he did was good and worthy. Toby and Bartuck sat in Martin Loo’s room for hours during his final weeks, and Toby listened to them talk about their good old days at the hospital, and stories from before medical records were digital and nobody knew anything. They laughed together until Dr. Loo was too exhausted and needed to rest.

  Toby and Bartuck were in the room with Dr. Loo when he died. As his breaths began coming further and further apart, they’d stood up to leave him with his wife and children. But Martin’s wife had stopped them and said she believed that Martin, three days unconscious by then, would have wanted them to stay. “You were as big a part of his life as we were.” When finally his last breath was drawn, his wife put her forehead to his and said, “Goodbye, my love,” and Toby had felt then that despite his early death, Martin Loo was a lucky man. So was Toby. Right then, he couldn’t help but think what a privilege all of this was: to know these people, to try with them.

  Afterward, Bartuck took Toby into his office and poured him a Scotch. Toby was still so dreamy from Martin Loo, and he would for so long associate the beauty of that terrible moment with Bartuck. It would only be much later that Toby realized what a too-slick fuck Bartuck was—how his compassion and camaraderie had been a display designed to advance him to the next level.

  Bartuck had taken an interest in Toby. Not in Phillipa London—in him. Toby would go home and share news of the day with Rachel. “You have to ride this mentorship to the sky,” she would say, which was the kind of imbecile power-talk they used in the mailroom at Alfooz & Lichtenstein. Until Bartuck had shown interest in Toby, Rachel had thought he should go into dermatology because of the money those doctors made, and how they took August off and made their own hours and never had emergencies. But Toby wanted to be a doctor to cure illness, and he didn’t know any dermatologist who made his money on true illness and not plastics.

  “But you could go to Africa or Asia or wherever over the summer and fix cleft palates,” she said.

  “I don’t want to live a month of my life in apology for the thing I do the rest of the year,” he said. “I want to live a good life every day.”

  “We all do,” she said, exasperated. “Who has that luxury? I’d like to eventually own an apartment, you know?”

  Toby’s father was a doctor, and his uncle was a doctor, and his sister at the time was considering becoming a psychologist before she hung it up and decided to just marry and pray and breed. The Fleishmans had raised their children on the model of a person in a white coat giving solace and peace and healing to someone who needed it. On weekends, the kids of the neighborhood would hurt their knees or come down with high fevers, and the parents of the neighborhood would knock
on the Fleishmans’ door, even if Sid Lapis, another internist, might have lived closer to them. This was a good life, according to Toby. There was worth and valor in it. There used to be money in it. There was still money in it. There just wasn’t money in it.

  Fine, Rachel said. Be a hepatologist. But then do it at the highest possible level. “I know you’re going to be the most successful hepatologist in New York. In the world.” She had no way of talking about a life’s work without a quantifiable, athletic competition about it.

  And now he was up for it. He was up for it, Rachel. You didn’t have to be some slick motherfucker to get promoted. You could just be good at your job. He would advance to subdivision head, and then when Phillipa got another offer, which she would, he’d be offered department head. He’d turn it down because he knew that there were diminishing returns when it came to this stuff. He wasn’t like them. He didn’t want to join the right club and golf with the right people (or golf at all) and be on the right boards and committees. Donald Bartuck had Maggie Bartuck, his champion wife, inviting people to dinners and socializing and running fundraisers. That wasn’t who Toby had married. That wasn’t the kind of person he even wanted to marry.

  Toby’s mother had always told him, “There’s only room for one star in every relationship.” And even though Toby made jokes about having hooked his wagon to the right star, and Rachel would look at him out of the side of her eyes and say, “Damn straight,” it never occurred to Toby that if what his mother said was true, it was Rachel who was the star of their relationship. Meaning that he was so in love with what he did that it didn’t occur to him that the person on track to become someone with a big impact in the world (versus his smallish impact) was the star. By the time Bartuck was promoted, Rachel had left Alfooz & Lichtenstein, raiding the agency that made her a success and taking her clients with her to start her own shop. The clients followed her without a question; they knew relentless when they saw it.

  Within weeks she had an income. Within months, she had solvency. It made Toby so proud—it would have made any husband proud. But her hours were long, and they both knew it would be years before she had a reasonable schedule if the agency was really going to work. Hannah had just been born, and neither of them wanted the kids raised entirely by nannies, so Toby began to schedule his work at the hospital so that he could be home at five-thirty every night no matter what. Same twelve-hour shifts, but starting earlier, never lingering, never staying for drinks in Bartuck’s office anymore.

  He complained that he missed her. He complained that money wasn’t as important as what she should be providing to Hannah and, yes, fine, he admitted it: him. He watched old episodes of sitcoms at night alone. He took Hannah to the playground at Seventy-second Street and pushed her in the swing, saying “Go away” when he pushed, and “Come back here” when she pendulum-returned. He watched her love pears, then hate them, then love them, then become specifically human by loving pears only sometimes. He read the new Archer Sylvan collection and took walks and listened to the Rolling Stones and the White Stripes on his new iPod, then on his new iPhone, and he loved spending time with Hannah, but he was lonely for conversation and the company of someone who had chosen him. The sun rose and the sun set and the calendar pages flew off the wall. Hannah rolled over. Hannah sat up. Hannah crawled. Hannah walked. Hannah laughed. Hannah cried. Hannah wanted to do “this little piggy.” Hannah fed herself. Hannah sat cross-legged in her stroller like a little woman. Hannah imitated her mother by taking Toby’s phone and walking around with it and gabbing gibberish into it. Hannah hated “this little piggy.” Hannah spoke. Hannah learned to count. Hannah started school. Toby loved her so much his heart was permanently on its knees.

  His income was the expendable one, but Toby was not going to not work. That was ridiculous. And to Rachel’s credit, she never dared to suggest it. But he continued to be the main parent. He was the one who got the first call when Hannah was running a fever at school, or when Solly had a diaper rash that defied traditional recourse. He was the one who researched music classes and sometimes sneaked out of work to attend them, even though they were called Mommy and Me (truthfully they should have been called Nanny and Me). He signed Hannah up for enrichment programs, and eventually sports programs and after-school classes, and nurseries and schools and camps and Mandarin lessons and tennis lessons and orthodontists. He was the book fair volunteer and the brownie-baker for the Hebrew school fundraiser. He went on search engines and typed “bored of making dinner” and found websites that gave him recipe schedules to “mix things up” and “keep it fresh.” The other women would say, “Look at Mr. Mom!” when he asked a question, and he’d find that offensive and feel the need to say, no, he was not the mom, he was the dad and these were his duties, but soon he realized that those women’s impetus for making those comments was their own husbands’ disinterest in their children or in contributing to the home, and so he just made a [smiley face emoji]. He’d have to stay home when the babysitter was sick, and ask his colleagues to sub a class or attend to a patient. He was no match for the upwardly mobile attendings like Marco who were all, yes, riding their mentorships to the sky.

  What choice did he have? Rachel had to be somewhere, and then she had to take a yoga class because of the stress and a Pilates class with Miriam Rothberg for the social currency and then she had to do a quick email and “follow up” and “circle back” and talk sweetly to people who weren’t owed it and lash out at Toby and the kids when she was overwhelmed by things that had nothing to do with them.

  But he liked it all, that was his secret. He saw how fleeting it would all be, how quickly the kids went through the different phases, and how once those small things were gone, they never returned. A walking child never crawled again. So secretly, it was okay with him. Rachel loved her children, he was sure of that, but she was never natural around them. She was afraid to be alone with them most of the time. She grew impatient if they hung on her or talked too long, always feeling the pull of being elsewhere. Toby could have either or both of them on his lap for hours before even realizing it. At work, he was able to sit with his patients, knowing that this was not a stepping-stone for his life but life itself. Can you imagine what it’s like to have arrived where you want to be at such a young age? That was what she never understood: that ambition didn’t always run uphill. Sometimes, when you were happy, it jogged in place.

  “We’ll have good news next week,” said Bartuck. “Go. See your patients.”

  * * *

  —

  BUT TOBY DIDN’T go to his patients.

  He couldn’t. There was no place in there to hide and put his head in his hands, or take a nap. His anguish at Rachel, which was now a roiling tornado that was picking up both winds of hatred and winds of concern, wouldn’t allow him to concentrate on anything else. He’d done his rounds. It was four o’clock anyway. He’d been there since early. It was fine.

  He walked through the park, and halfway through he began to meander on the pathways until he realized how tired and hot he was and took a seat on a park bench. He looked at his phone, pulling at his chest hair. He wanted—he needed—to check his apps. He needed a spike of that hot oxytocin-testosterone cocktail that would wash away these terrible feelings.

  There hadn’t been much action on Hr for him that day. He scrolled through old dirty messages, feeling nothing. He would never marry again. Marriage was for idiots. It was a bygone solution to a property problem he didn’t have. It was a social construct invented by religious people (whose other values he mostly rejected) whose participants lived not past age thirty at the time it was implemented. So, no. He was not going to be falling into that particular trap again. He would have relationships and excitement and he would never put his emotional health into somebody’s hands like that ever again.

  In the second half of “Decoupling,” Archer Sylvan finally meets with the woman that Mark was divorcing. She had
heard there was a big magazine story being written about her divorce and she felt like she wanted to have her say, as well. “If you’re going to write about this,” she said to Archer in a letter, “you should have both sides of the story.” She didn’t have a name in the story. She was alternately referred to as “Mark’s woman” (in flashbacks to better days) and “the woman” (after things went bad). In the story, she and Archer meet at one of the fancy tea places on Madison Avenue, where men dressed as butlers stand silently to the side. She tells him about Mark’s affair with his secretary, which he had apologized for but then didn’t fire the secretary. She tells him how she felt crazy all those months he was denying it but had ultimately decided to believe him until he actually went to a work event that she didn’t know about with the secretary, for everyone to see. Archer sits with her for an hour and listens to what was a reasonable call to consider nuance—that all marriages are complicated and private, and by the time a marriage is over, maybe everyone can claim a totally justified grievance. When the Othello board turns to black (if you are playing the way Toby plays the game, which, again, is not actually how you play the game), it turns to black for both participants, after all.