Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  They stayed up most of the night talking in his apartment. Rachel had been raised in Baltimore and didn’t remember her parents, though she had a memory of a black-haired woman lying on a couch and she associated this memory with her mother because who else could it have been. She didn’t have siblings. Her father had left her mother when she was a baby, and then her mother had gotten cancer and died, all by the time she was three. Her mother’s mother raised her instead, but it was out of duty rather than love, and she only went back to Baltimore on Thanksgiving sometimes. She was a junior, and she was sad that she’d missed the opportunity to go away for a semester, but she was thinking she might go to Brazil or Budapest that summer on a work-study program. When she said that, he felt a sad reflux sloshing around in his stomach, that he would have to someday let her out of his bed.

  They had sex that night, which was for the best, since he didn’t think his ego could handle an extended period of time in which he wondered if she thought of him as a friend or an actual romantic contender. He kept thinking, “She’s a real girl.” Not in a sexist way. No, in a Pinocchio way. She was everything he thought a girl should be, even if he’d never known to pray quite so specifically: She wore red lipstick all the time, she listened to Neil Diamond and didn’t give a fuck how weird that was, she could do a handstand for like ten minutes, she knew The Karate Kid by heart, every single piece of dialogue; she couldn’t wait for the twelfth in a mystery series to come out to see if the heroine had really died (of course she hadn’t); she wanted to learn how to play tennis but couldn’t figure out how to find a partner who wouldn’t mind how bad she was. Her septum was a little crooked, though you could only see it if you were peering from underneath, and she corrected it in her sleep by pushing her nose a little to the left so that she could breathe out of both nostrils. She was lonely and she didn’t have so many friends because she had grown up with an impatient grandmother who was just trying to get her upbringing over with. Or because she was sensitive and took every bit of noninclusion as rejection. Or because she always wondered what was a little better than the thing she had, which was valuable in business but not really in any other part of your life. Or because she felt like she was always catching up to others because she hadn’t been born wealthy or even into an actual family. Or because people didn’t like it when women were so nakedly ambitious. Or because she couldn’t keep her opinion to herself when she saw someone not meeting a goal or living like she thought they claimed they wanted to because she believed people wanted to know the truth. Or because she was always strangely out of step with pop culture, and would continue to be even after she became one of the top agents in the city. Or because friendship is elusive and being liked works best when you don’t think about it constantly, and she absolutely did think about it constantly.

  When he woke up in the morning after the three hours of postdawn sleep they’d decided to allow each other, he watched her for a few minutes. She was still so pretty in the daylight, even with smudged mascara and caked saliva in the corner of her mouth. He went out to get breakfast. He stood in line for bagels and coffee, and he had never felt so normal and American in his life. He had a girl waiting for him back at his apartment, and it was Saturday morning, and so he was going to bring her a bagel and some coffee. He was overwhelmed by the simplicity of his emotions: gratitude for whatever moments had worked to make this moment happen for him; happiness, yes, just pure plain happiness. He loved his country! He was going to eat a bagel!

  They ate their bagels, so normal, so normal, and they walked around the Village, then up Fifth Avenue, then west. They walked up through Hell’s Kitchen, then diagonally through Midtown, then diagonally back west through the park, where it began to snow a soft and quiet early-March dust. They held hands and walked even more slowly. Toby loved taking walks. It was his greatest revelation of New York, that it was the largest city in America and you could scale it on your own two legs. Now he had someone to walk with. The white flakes came down on her white hair and she was talking talking talking and she wasn’t prissy about the snow or the weather, and Toby thought how in love he was right then. They walked through the park to the Upper East Side, when the snow stopped, and then he walked her over to her apartment, which was right near Hunter. They were wet and exhausted and their feet hurt, so they ordered dinner, Indian food, and Toby stayed, while her roommate made some kind of annoyed noise about going somewhere else for the night. They slept in her twin bed, and as they arranged themselves, he knew that he had never been happier—that maybe this was a relationship or maybe it was the relationship, but it was finally happening for him and, yes, it had only been twenty-four hours, but it was as good on the inside as it had ever looked from the outside.

  The next morning, he raced home to clean his apartment and remove from it all evidence of sexual congress, and sexual individualism for that matter, and then went out to buy even more bagels for when his parents arrived. He had toyed with asking Rachel if she’d want to come and meet them, but he couldn’t risk scaring her off. He had to play it cool.

  His parents came and inspected his apartment, once again airing their disappointment that he’d chosen NYU instead of UCLA (“And if you’re going to stay in New York, why NYU over Columbia? Who does that?” his mother had asked).

  His mother looked Toby over carefully and said, “You’ve managed to maintain your weight, but your face looks old.”

  “That’s the mark of an eating disorder,” he answered her.

  His mother wailed plaintively at his father. “He’s still punishing me!” Then, at Toby: “You were happier fat? You were happier fat?”

  He didn’t answer, and they went out for lunch in the West Village, where he ordered a chicken breast and a beet salad with no goat cheese or dressing or candied walnuts. (“So just beets on a plate?” the waitress asked. “Yes, with the chicken,” he’d said, his mother’s eyes boring into the side of his face.)

  Later, he took a taxi with his parents to their hotel in Midtown and he dropped them off and took the cab farther uptown, right back to Rachel, who opened the door with a big smile. “I missed you,” she said. He kissed her hard. She was just half an inch taller than he was, though she’d been wearing a short heel the night before and he now saw that they were aligned in a great way, her lower lip to his upper lip and that was really something.

  Nine months later, he was on a plane to Budapest, where she had gone for the fall semester of her senior year, having not gotten it together to go in the summer, which Toby believed and hoped was because she was as delighted as he in the paradise of their new relationship. Over the months, he had taken her to movies at Film Forum and to exhibits at MoMA and the Frick because she told him she never went to museums or movies growing up. They went to Woodstock for the weekend and bought tie-dyed T-shirts. They sat in cafés and restaurants and locked eyes and each pressed the balls of their feet against the other’s under the table.

  He was learning from Rachel, too. They went skiing—he had never been skiing before, but she’d learned because her school had a ski trip every year and finally, when she was a senior, her grandmother handed over the $250 and let her go. She was helping him negotiate the strange, surprising, suddenly political machinations of medical school that were beyond good grades. His residency advisor didn’t like how sarcastic he was; Aaron Schwartz, a sallow-skinned pigeon of a guy he knew not just from Princeton, but who had gone to his high school in Los Angeles, was also in his med school class and kept getting favored for surgeries. Rachel talked to him about how to talk to people. She taught him how the fact that he was naturally funny also meant that he had a side that favored a quick burn, which wasn’t so good. She taught him to slow down and consider people’s faces, that this was the most crucial exercise in all of negotiation, and eventually he did it—he learned to listen to people and to look them in the eyes. And wouldn’t you know, when he finally was able to enact these skills, he became a
better doctor, one who could understand his patients’ suffering more specifically, who could listen more closely for clues. He shot ahead of Aaron Schwartz, earning praise from the doctors in charge and his teachers for his sensitivity and intuition. He would always commend her for teaching him a skill that no one had taught him throughout all his years of med school, and she would respond, “That’s because they don’t want you to get ahead.” When she said that, he’d realize she wasn’t trying to make him a better person; she was trying to get him to advance. That was all she’d ever tried to do for him. But, he reasoned, that was because she thought he was a good enough person as it was.

  He arrived in Budapest for Thanksgiving break, surprising Rachel on her birthday, and in her dorm, which had been converted from a castle, in front of her roommates, he got down on one knee and presented her with his grandmother’s engagement ring.

  They celebrated by all going to a park and ice-skating to an Ace of Base CD on repeat outside another abandoned castle. Rachel didn’t know how to ice-skate and hung on to him. She wore no coat; she kept saying she was too happy to be cold. After ice-skating, they went out and danced all night in the Jewish Quarter, where the storefronts mysteriously turned into clubs at sunset, and it felt exhilarating and dangerous, not just to be a grown-up with a fiancée, but also to be dancing in the Jewish Quarter of a largely anti-Semitic city. That weekend, he took her to Lake Balaton, the closest thing Budapest had to the Hamptons, and with the outstanding strength of the dollar rented a full house and hired caterers for every meal. All his life, he had worried when he should have just trusted that there was a plan for everyone. But the not trusting is part of the plan, too. Praise God! Praise the Lord! Praise him in his infinite wisdom! He felt then the peace of systems. He felt the solidity of a middle-class path. The world finally felt solid beneath him.

  They married in Los Angeles. Toby’s mother was a longtime board member at their synagogue, and Toby’s wedding was a real opportunity for her to show their community the kind of people she hoped they knew they were, especially after Toby’s sister’s Orthodox wedding, which was a social disappointment (“a fiasco”) to say the least, with the separate seating and the pareve dessert and the shitty kosher wine.

  “Her grandmother doesn’t even seem to care that she’s getting married,” Toby’s mother whispered to Toby as they put dishes away from the luncheon they hosted for visitors the day before the wedding. Rachel’s grandmother had sat with her purse on her lap, polite but not at all curious about the family her granddaughter was marrying into.

  “Or maybe she’s being polite about what an idiotic big deal you’re making over this,” Toby told his mother. “Honestly, we should have just eloped.”

  But he only said that to wound her. He couldn’t wait to show Rachel off to everyone. He couldn’t wait for everyone to see what he’d accomplished in his life. Toby Fleishman! Introducing, for the first time as husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Toby and Rachel Fleishman!

  They returned home after their wedding and brief pre-honeymoon in Santa Cruz to Toby’s empty apartment on Ninth Street. They found a coffee table on the street during one of their long walks and they carried it above their heads, twelve blocks back to the apartment. They had sex all the time—they did it when it was raining and they did it when it was sunny. They did it before they went out to dinner, and they did it when they came home from dinner. They did it in the morning before they showered. They did it when they got home from work. They did it after dinner while they were watching TV, sometimes even angling themselves so they wouldn’t miss the thing they were watching. Good! Normal!

  Toby had had his pick of specialties in the end, and he went with hepatology. He heard that Aaron Schwartz became an upper GI guy and he thought what a sucker that guy was, doing endoscopies all day, and what a sucker Toby was to have ever been intimidated by him. He felt big, bigger, biggest of all. He no longer wished for anything to be different or to have been different. He now saw that even that accident with the Volvo created a set of circumstances, even all those years later, that allowed him to be exactly where he was when he met Rachel, and when Rachel, against all odds, fell back in love with him.

  Meanwhile, Rachel had left the mailroom at the agency and was riding the desk of a young guy named Matt Klein, who had Michael Douglas in Wall Street hair and an overbite that made his upper teeth extend over his lower lip and therefore always look like he was sexually harassing you. Matt took her out to lunch almost every day and seemed determined to teach her all he knew. “My protégé,” he’d call her. Toby secretly wondered if Matt was this hands-on with his previous assistants, or with asst2, the young man on his desk.

  But Rachel didn’t mind changing her plans or running late to dinner. She liked the midnight calls; she liked screaming obscenities into the phone when a deal fell through. She liked the performative assholery of it; she called it “my cardio.” She liked waiting for good news, and answering her cellphone “Rachel Fleishman here.” (Toby still felt erectile stirrings hearing his name on the back of hers, which she had taken because she had no allegiance to her maiden name, which came from a man who couldn’t be bothered.) She took Toby to the premiere of a show that Matt had done the director deal on, and then just three years later, she was the one who was doing the deal, with a playwright and actress named Alejandra Lopez, whom she had discovered herself back when she was going to off-off-off-off-off-Broadway shows to scout for talent, and now she had her own desk, with her own asst1 and asst2.

  She had met Alejandra for the first time at the community center of a low-income housing project in a part of Brooklyn that would never gentrify. She had heard that there was a woman performing a one-person show about Woodrow Wilson’s wife, Edith Wilson. Rachel brought Toby that night, making for a grand total of six people in the audience—and four of them were extremely old and maybe had just been looking for a place to sit. Alejandra had been performing her play, which was then called Big Wilson (and then would be called Half-Wilson and then Presidentress and ultimately would become the cultural firestone it became as Presidentrix), for free for a few weeks now. She had been working at a gas station on Pennsylvania Avenue outside Starrett City during the day, and when it was slow, she would work on this play, which was part opera. She had taught herself to sing classically with tapes she’d borrowed from the library literally called Teach Yourself to Sing Opera in Hours a Day. Rachel knew her own success lay in finding a good client to cultivate, one big star to discover and to shine a spotlight on so that it could become clear that you had the eye, the nose, the ear—that you were the real deal. She had been reading community notices and going to obscure plays in faraway, off-the-radar venues. She’d found this listing next to a job-wanted section in the Canarsie Courier.

  The play was about the way a woman could only really have her own story if she did it through a man—in this case, Edith Wilson’s half-dead husband, Woodrow Wilson. Edith ran the country after his stroke and only got credit for it much later. During the big number, Edith Wilson lets a reporter into her husband’s bedroom and he emerges with an interview, ascribing all of Edith’s words to Woodrow. She is so happy her plan worked and everyone was fooled, but she’s left with a hole in her because she’s never seen for what she actually is, which is a genius who could run a country; she is also never even seen as the other thing she is, which is an excellent wife. Toby looked over at Rachel during the song, and her mouth was open and she was shaking her head slowly, tears in her eyes.

  Toby and Rachel sat in the audience behind a man who was asleep across a bench in the front row and spooning with his cane. Afterward, he watched Rachel make her approach. Alejandra had noticed the strange yuppies in the audience. She looked over at Toby for a second while Rachel was talking. Rachel put her hands to her heart, punctuating what she was saying, not wiping away the tears that fell. He watched Alejandra go from confused to moved to happy to oh my God my chance is here.
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  Big Wilson played in a theater down on the Bowery to sold-out crowds, but no one wanted to invest in it because the magic appeared to lie with Alejandra herself and there was skepticism that any other one person could bring to the show what she did—when she moved on, or if she came down with the flu one night. The show was such a singular act, straight from her soul, that it felt like anyone else playing it would be imitating, so there went the touring potential. But the play did well enough to propel Rachel to official agent status. Alejandra then wrote an HBO show about a Latina lesbian in the 1970s trying to get ahead in her homophobic, racist office. It ran two seasons with a small, dedicated audience but only found real numbers after it was canceled. By then, Rachel had left Alfooz.

  (Then it was five years ago when she encouraged Alejandra, who had been in a creative rut after marrying and having children, to revisit Big Wilson and extend it some way. What she came up with was Presidentrix, an extension of the musical, with other actors and dancers, too, and which became the talk of the city while it was still in workshops. Presidentrix won every Tony the year it debuted on Broadway. Its soundtrack became the soundtrack for the political roiling and feminist uprising around them. Tickets were sold out for seven years. Rachel was on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.)

  Toby and Rachel fought sometimes. What couple didn’t fight? Yes, maybe Rachel was a little more vicious than necessary when he’d forgotten that they’d had dinner plans with her boss and he’d already cooked (“It’s okay,” he’d say. “I’ll put it in the fridge. This is not a big deal”), though technically, in that situation, the aggrieved status should have accrued to him. She filed all the ways she was put off under an enormous label called Weren’t You Listening? When she was annoyed and she spoke with him, her face reminded him of the faces of people he’d seen die: The animating force taken away from them, they looked like completely different people. It terrified him.