Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  But Archer left that conversation, and what he wrote next would be subject in journalism classes to hours-long conversations whose tenor would vary throughout the years: In the eighties, people praising him over what an honest reporter he truly was and how he said what was on his mind instead of what was politic to say. In the nineties, talking about whether there was ever a way to write without bias. In the new millennium, it became the subject of cris de coeur about misogyny, and one of the reasons that a person like me—a woman—would ever be hired by a men’s magazine in the first place: to prevent it from happening again. By the time Toby sat in the park that day, “Decoupling” was no longer considered appropriate classroom reading. Even as a counterexample, it became the cause of too many strongly worded letters to deans published publicly on feminist websites about trigger warnings and safe spaces. When I went to guest speak at journalism classes after, say, 2007, I was warned not to bring it up in class, lest the conversation turn only to what an outrage it was to even talk about that story.

  What he wrote—and this was the line that came to Toby right then—was this: “I left the restaurant, my hanky wet with her tears, and I thought about how the bitch will try to get you every time.”

  A tan man in a slim suit sat down next to Toby on the park bench. The sun was torturous and it was so hot and the park was filled with people who were enjoying it, and he hated them all. Nobody had problems except for him. The man on the bench lit up a cigarette. Next to them was a large sign that said NO SMOKING. The sign was right there. Green, necrotic rage coursed through Toby, gliding through his lymphatic system, leaking into the musculature beneath it, invading his bones. Toby turned to the man and said, “Hey. You can’t smoke here.”

  The man looked at him, and Toby’s eyes went to the sign to indicate. The man looked past him. He put out his cigarette, and for a moment Toby wondered why he’d been so bothered.

  He was prepared to be contemplative about this when 120 seconds later the fucker took out another cigarette and lit it right there in front of him.

  “Look, man, you can’t smoke here.” The guy barely registered Toby except for a tiny eye roll, which he followed with another deep drag.

  Toby stood up. His voice came out as a vicious holler. “I will call the police, you asshole.”

  The man took a long look at him, both surprised and…amused? Was that fucker amused? “You are a crazy motherfucker,” the man said. Toby began to dial 911 on his phone. The man took one more drag, then flicked his cigarette into the grass and walked away.

  Toby sat on the bench for another minute, pretending to look at his phone but beating with fury instead. When the man was out of sight, he got up and began to walk again vaguely toward the East Side, though why? There was no one waiting for him. It was only five. His heart yearned for Solly, and broke for how he had manipulated him, for how he’d punted the problem of Rachel’s disappearance down the road and didn’t know if it would ever get resolved, how he badly wanted to watch The Goonies with his son and listen to his smart, adorable observations and answer his questions. He headed home because there was nowhere else to go.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT IF. WHAT if he wasn’t taking Rachel’s disappearance as seriously as he should?

  Things did happen to women. They died. They got kidnapped. They were raped. They were held in compounds as sex slaves. They drowned with no one noticing. He almost reached for his phone to call the police but it seemed too crazy and he thought of all the cop shows he watched, and how he’d be the first suspect because he was the ex-husband and there was a trail of hateful text messages to find cause from.

  The sun was still so high. The streets began to crowd with the freneticism of after-work youth in summer. No, not youth. Happiness. No, not happiness. Regularness. People with plans and goals and friends. He thought about going to a yoga class. He thought about calling Seth. He thought about getting back onto his apps and changing one detail about his profile, which would trigger his profile to reflood the system and be seen by an entirely new group of people. Mostly he felt weak. He needed to feel strong again.

  Fruit. He decided that he wanted fruit. He’d eaten his last apple the night before. He was starting to feel the beginnings of scurvy, he was sure of it. He wanted shiny vitamin C. He wanted magnesium, because in the past three days his eyes had started twitching intermittently, and earlier in the day he’d gone to the men’s room to see if the twitch was noticeable to the naked eye and it was. He wanted the optimism of a Whole Foods. Now with direction, he walked to the one on Eighty-seventh Street and through the aisles, letting the artisanal brown packaging fuel some kind of hope for renewal in him. He walked through the moisturizer aisle. Maybe he needed to shake up his skin care routine. Maybe he needed wildflower aromatherapy. Maybe he needed hemp oil. Maybe he needed coconut water. No, but really, what if he started an aromatherapy routine? What if he got a diffuser that let the oils waft around him at night? He would wake up and be filled with renewed cells and hormone rushes and then he would start meditating and his life would—

  “Toby.”

  He turned around. It was Cyndi Leffer and Miriam Rothberg. They were sweaty and frizzy so that their hair was only curly at the roots. Miriam wore a tank top that said RIDE OR DIE. Cyndi’s said LIPSTICK & LUNGES.

  “Two Fleishman sightings in a day,” Miriam said.

  “Oh, hi,” said Toby. “Hello. I’m just buying some fruit.”

  “I thought you might still be in the Hamptons,” Cyndi said.

  “Yeah,” Toby said. “There’s been a lot going on. At the hospital. With my patients. But no, I’m not going to the Hamptons. Rachel got the house in the divorce. I don’t really go there anymore.”

  “That’s not what Roxanne told me.” Cyndi said this in a suggestive singsong vocal fry, like it was sexual, but she was too old and so it came out as a kind of croak.

  “Yes, I brought the kids because Rachel got derailed. Hannah missed Lexi.”

  “Well, last week of July is always Europe for us. Hey, have you gotten any of my texts? Hannah left her pillow at our house.”

  Toby faintly recalled being inundated with unimportant texts from Cyndi.

  “You know,” Miriam said. “You should come over for dinner with the kids. We don’t choose sides, you know. Sam’s parents are divorced, and we’re very sensitive to that. Hey, are you still doing yoga? I thought I saw you with a mat a few weeks ago.”

  Toby couldn’t focus. “What? I am. Sometimes.”

  “You should take Sam with you. He just went on a yoga retreat and he is wild about it.”

  “A yoga retreat?” Toby asked.

  “Yes, the one in Massachusetts. The famous one. Wait. I always forget the name of it.”

  “Kripalu,” Toby said. He realized saying it out loud that “Kripalu” sounded like “cripple you.” How had he never noticed that?

  “Yes! Kripalu! He just spent a weekend there and since then, it’s every morning for him. We’re hiring someone to come to the house. Finally! I couldn’t get that guy off the treadmill for years. I would say, ‘There’s so much else out there,’ and he just wanted to run. He did cross-country in high school.”

  Later, Toby would wonder why it was so important for him to play it cool in front of these people he gave not one fuck about. He would go over and over it in his head, that in this moment, his goal had been to protect Rachel’s social-climbing interests instead of telling them exactly what kind of person she was, and what she’d done.

  His brain tapped on his shoulder. He realized he had totally missed the first thing she said, so solidified in his mind was Rachel’s utter goneness. “Sorry, did you say two Fleishman sightings? You saw Rachel?”

  “It was so weird,” Miriam said. “We saw her. In the park, lying on a blanket, asleep. In the middle of the day. I said, ‘Ah, working hard, are we?’
 ” Miriam laughed.

  “Honestly, that girl works so hard it was nice to see her take a minute,” Cyndi said. “I haven’t seen her in what? Two weeks? And that haircut.”

  Miriam said something and then Cyndi talked for either an hour more or a minute more, but Toby didn’t hear anything after that because his blood froze and his inner ear began to bleed and his brain turned to putty and began to leak out his nose and his face melted off his skull and his life would never be the same and he knew right then he’d never understand another thing ever again.

  The night Toby met Rachel, he had been enduring with wary fortitude and stoic martyrdom the longest dry spell of his post-finally-having-sex adult life. There was his first time, during our year in Israel, a drunken push-and-pull with my bucktoothed roommate, Lori, that he wished never happened except for the fact that it did happen, which at least meant he wouldn’t die a virgin. He had turned twenty that year and the shame that accompanied leaving his teens with “your hymen intact,” as Seth called it, was unbearable. He returned home to his dorm that night the way a soldier returns home from war: proud and a little haunted. His dorm mates crowded the lobby to lift him on their shoulders. It was embarrassing and also the best, just like the sex itself.

  Then there was the first time (which was his second time) inside the confines of an actual relationship, six months into his senior year with a bland, anxious sociology major named Jeanine. Jeanine was the kind of student who took down every word a teacher said, and studied by reading that entire dictation back, memorizing it and never asking a question or applying a critical thought to it. She wasn’t trying to learn anything; she was trying to survive the material she’d been given, squawking about how she was going to fail and then getting high B averages. She called herself “book smart.” Toby thought to himself that “book smart” meant just not very smart at all, and he wanted to reassure her that intelligence was not the most important aspect of a person, and that it was also out of her control, plus she should just be happy with how hardworking she was and how she conducted herself on this planet. But there’s no way to say that to a Princeton student who worked as hard as she did, and who really just said the whole “book smart” thing so all you could say was, “No, no, I am blown away by your natural intelligence.”

  “I am blown away by your natural intelligence,” he said, and sometimes that would net him a hand job.

  He spent nights waiting for her innumerable study groups to disband so that she would arrive home and consider having sex with him. More often than not, though, she would politely beg off because sex kept her up, which destroyed her chances of succeeding at the thing (the test, the paper) that was her priority. In this desert of opportunity, getting laid at least a little became his primary directive in the relationship, never asking himself if this was all there was to companionship, or if he even liked her. That was a dangerous question, and besides, he was in no position to ask it; he had to direct all his energy toward interpretation of whether a sloppily slung arm over the shoulder or a kiss directly on the mouth was a green light.

  Their relationship ended unceremoniously after four months. One morning, after she had allowed him to have sex with her—or on her, or at her, which was probably more accurate—she said her parents weren’t really okay with her dating someone who wasn’t Catholic or Italian, and she’d rather not lose this much sleep if the relationship wasn’t going to go anywhere. He objected to this loudly, not considering whether he actually liked her and wanted the relationship to continue. Out of pity, she offered to fuck him one more time, “goodbye sex,” and he took her up on the option. He had felt humiliation pursuing sex in his life, but he had never felt humiliation during the act of it, watching her wait for it to be over, until now.

  He moved to New York that June. He’d been accepted into NYU for medical school. He’d been accepted to Columbia, too, but he needed a change. He didn’t want to be on a campus. He wanted to be surrounded by more than just jerkoff students like himself. He had a fantasy about meeting a girl, but not a medical student. He would be studying somewhere, and she would be reading a book—maybe a Roth or Bellow book, maybe Virginia Woolf—and he would walk over to her and make a joke and she would laugh and that would be that.

  He wasn’t supposed to attend the party at Columbia where he met Rachel. Seth was a year behind him, having stayed a second year in Israel when, just as they’d been about to leave, he’d met a twenty-one-year-old girl finishing her duty in the Israeli army, gone down to Dahab with her for a pot holiday, and decided to spend the next semester traveling with her to the places that Israelis just out of the army traveled to after they lived through their service: India, Thailand, Greece. He left her in Greece. Four months in, when she started talking too much about wanting to get married. “Women only exist on a trajectory,” he wrote Toby on a postcard from Athens. “They can’t just be. I hope you are getting laid, but I now know that there’s no orgasm that doesn’t come with a price.” Toby wished Seth had sent that in a sealed envelope, but oh well. Seth was now finishing his senior year at Columbia. He and Toby had dinner one night and Seth told him they should go to the annual literary society party at the library afterward. But Toby hated Columbia parties and Columbia people. “You might get laid,” Seth said.

  Toby knew it probably wasn’t true. But his parents were visiting the day after tomorrow from Los Angeles, so he figured that even if he had like a three percent chance at getting laid, it would at least fortify him for Sunday’s work, which was cleansing his shithole apartment of porn and stink by the time they arrived and steeling himself for his mother’s machine-gun fire to his ego and sense of self. At the party, he saw a girl named Mary that he’d had a crush on from Seth’s dorm, and he briefly wondered if this was his shot. He went over to talk to her, and they spoke for a good five minutes. She laughed at everything he said, and yes, this was beginning to look like his shot, but then some chucklehead who apparently was her date came out of the bathroom. His name was Steve, and he was visiting Mary from Wharton, and would Toby even venture to guess the size of the deuce he had just dropped into the toilet. “Man, I hope the plumbing is good here,” Steve said. Mary laughed, and it felt like a betrayal of everything he knew or hoped about her for her to laugh at that. In that moment, Toby was never further away from understanding why he was alone.

  He was about to leave, having reached his nightly quota of humiliation and bewilderment, when he took one last look around the room. Standing next to a window was a girl talking to another girl who was drunk and hanging off a guy. He hadn’t seen her before, which was strange because her looks were so severe: blunt bangs, blond hair that ignited a dangerous, dormant longing for Gentile women, pale skin, red lips. It was Rachel, who was looking down and nodding while she politely allowed the girl to rant, but then looking up, feeling his eyes on her, returning his look right back to him, and then looking away with that smile that girls made when they didn’t want to smile—an aversion of the eyes, but not the face, then a closing of the mouth into something upturned. She was wearing a tight ribbed shirt and leggings like all the girls were wearing lately, with a flannel shirt tied around her waist. Always she had the look of someone who was too sophisticated to be wearing the same clothing that other college students wore—too formal, too pretty in a grown-up way.

  Toby decided to wait this out. She was now speaking to one of Seth’s old roommates, Otto, and the guy that Otto was flirting with. Toby got some punch. He held it, then looked at it and realized that even if he was going to drink the calories of alcohol, he would never drink the added fruit punch, so he poured it down the drain. But then he thought that maybe the punch was his in with the girl? He poured some more and brought it to Otto, and turned to her. Her smile went from coy to self-conscious to real.

  “I notice you are standing here without the fruit punch,” Toby said. “I highly recommend it.”

  She smiled at him. She was
too pretty to be smiling at him. “Are you sure? Because you just poured some down the drain.”

  “It’s a little sugary, actually,” he said. “And I’m concerned about this girl trying to roofie me.” (People made jokes like this back in the 1990s.) “And I’m not so sure about the ingredient in it that makes it that particular shade of purple.”

  “Really? To me that’s the only reason to drink the stuff.”

  “I’ve always wanted children who smelled like purple.”

  She was an English major at Hunter, she said, but she wanted to go into some kind of business. She wanted a career that she could pause while she was raising her children without falling behind. She was practical, she said. She thought maybe she would go into marketing or advertising. But last summer she went to a symposium at Columbia’s business school about negotiating, and she realized that if she could, she’d just negotiate for the rest of her life.

  “All right,” he said. Her eyes were a fishhook. “Negotiate with me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’d like four for the price of two.”

  “I’m sorry, you have to pay for all four.”

  “I’ll only be paying for two.”

  He made his body into a stubborn stance, crossing his arms over his chest and turning his head so that he could see her through side-eye. “No deal. What kind of Middle Eastern open-air market do you think this is?”

  She smiled and shrugged, and she began to walk away, first one step, then two, and then it was clear she was really walking away. She moved to a couch across the room and sat down, her back still to him, and she struck up a conversation with the dude on the couch. Toby was amazed; he was excited. When was the last time he was excited and not just scared? He walked across the room and crouched down behind her and whispered into her ear. “I’ll give you six,” he said. “You don’t have to pay for any of them.”