Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  But also, this was who she was. She was an animal in her work, and the hormones that she had to summon to hang with the boys upstairs couldn’t just be shut off. He understood that.

  At their three-year anniversary, they decided it was time to have a baby, and she became pregnant the first time they tried, which delighted Toby and sent Rachel into a kind of shock. “I thought it would take longer,” she kept saying. But he knew that they were blessed and golden still, despite her moods and despite the fact that she was more prone to outbursts these days. It was the pressure she was under at work, he told himself. He still believed it was golden and good. All the bad things seemed like such an aberration, even when the tantrums began to outnumber the calm, sane interactions.

  One night, Toby waited for her to come home, staring outside at a summer rainstorm. Rachel was five months pregnant, and running one hour, then two hours, later than when she said she’d be home. He’d made soup for her. She usually let him know when she was running late. He called her, but she didn’t answer. He began to worry.

  She arrived at eight. When she finally got home, her shirt wet and transparent, she stomped into the apartment, where he was waiting with his soup.

  “Where have you been?” he asked. “I tried you a few times. What happened to you?”

  “Can’t I just walk somewhere? Are you the Gestapo?”

  He left the kitchen. This was on Seventy-second Street, in a building called the Wellesley that Toby thought would be the fanciest place he ever lived, in their first apartment after his med school apartment, and it was small by exactly no one’s measure; the place was so nice that when they had Solly, they moved upstairs to the eighteenth floor to a bigger version of it. He got her a towel and a robe. She seemed dazed. He sat her down, right on the brown velvet couch that one of the attendings had given him, practically unmarred. He tried to help her off with her blazer but she shooed him away.

  “What happened?”

  She didn’t look at him. “I was passed over. I didn’t get partner.”

  Toby took a second and leaned back. “What? Who?”

  “Harry, of course.” She stood up and went to the bedroom, where she sat down on the bed and began to take off one of her shoes but just stopped.

  He followed her. “Not of course,” he said. “You deserved it. Did they even say anything to you?” He gently pushed her down until she was on her back, rolled her a little to the side, and took off her wet pants. She was a rag doll by then, and so he continued with her blazer and shirt. He took her robe off the hook on the door. “Here, put this on.”

  Suddenly, she looked down and saw that she was mostly naked. She looked up at him, and in her eyes he saw something that he’d only seen in her when she was angry at others. “What are you doing? I’m not a fucking baby, Toby. I can dress myself.”

  She stood up and stomped off to the bathroom, grabbing her robe out of his hands and slamming the bedroom door.

  He brought her the soup on the tray ten minutes later when she was sitting back on the bed. She ignored it but told him the whole story:

  She hadn’t yet told the partners or Matt that she was pregnant because there was an opening for a junior partnership and she didn’t want to handicap herself. She’d gone through great pains to hide her pregnancy while candidates for the partnership were being evaluated. But she wasn’t worried. There was no partner who had the kind of eye for discovery that she did—all the other candidates’ finds didn’t add up to one Alejandra, and it wasn’t like Alejandra was her only discovery. She had resolved to tell them at the dinner that accompanied the celebration of her promotion. She was being strategic. That was what was so ironic, she would say later: She was being as strategic as she was taught to be by these very people.

  She was in her office and staring through the glass wall (what was the point of an office if it had glass walls?) and saw Harry Sacks getting high fives, and heard the pop of champagne, and her stomach began to sink. A voice inside her head told her to pretend she had to go home early, but that voice didn’t stand a chance, so she went into Matt Klein’s office and confronted him.

  “Rachel!” he said. “Hello!”

  “It’s because I’m pregnant, right?”

  Matt’s face went blank. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Tell me the truth. I won’t sue you. I just want to know.”

  “Are you talking about Harry’s promotion?”

  In their bedroom, she looked at Toby like she was deciding something, then said, “Two years ago, Matt hit on me. Of course, I said no.”

  Toby received this news like a boulder to the testicles. Matt Klein? Her boss?

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He made a pass at you?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “When? How?”

  “We were in L.A. for the Golden Globes.”

  It was when she was still his assistant, after she’d been married for a year (and he’d been married for five). It wasn’t just disgust that stopped her from falling into Matt Klein’s arms, though. She liked being this thing that Matt couldn’t have. She liked to imagine that he was longing for her. This was what Matt himself would call “data” in a negotiation. Your data was the thing you knew that no one else knew. She knew Matt wanted her. She knew that a man’s desire for a particular woman never truly disappeared if the man didn’t get to have the woman; it became a point of contention for the man’s ego in addition to the desire itself.

  (“Uh,” Toby said, in the bedroom.)

  But standing in front of Matt, who was watching her with satisfied, cold eyes, she also knew that he might have played a long game. The truth of her quick advancement had to do less with her skill and with Alejandra and more with his humiliation over having made a pass at her that she rejected, and concern that if he just fired her she’d sue. She’d suspected this, but like the agent she was she also knew that opportunity was opportunity. But now she was being punished.

  “Harry is a hard worker,” Matt told her. “It was his time.”

  “Don’t tell me about hard workers,” she said. She was wearing a white shirt a size too big that, had she not been pregnant, she certainly would have tucked into her pants. She couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger on maternity clothes, at least not yet. Maternity clothes lacked plausible deniability. “Is this because of what happened in L.A.? Because I thought we were over that?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked her over as she stood at his desk. He was too smart to say a word.

  “It’s my pregnancy,” she said.

  “Noooo,” he purred. “It’s not your pregnancy. Well, not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Listen, I’m telling you this as a friend and not as your boss. Don’t try to pull any HR shit on me because it won’t work. I’m telling you this for your own edification. It’s that you didn’t tell us you were pregnant. You just walked around pregnant, visibly and obviously pregnant, and you never said a word to us. When you treat us like idiots—”

  “I’m sorry, is there a mandatory time by which I have to tell you that I’m pregnant? Is a thing happening inside my body company property?”

  “No, no. It’s not that at all. Calm down, Rachel.” Matt’s thin gray eyes sparkled when he was being cruel.

  Like every other woman in the world who has ever been told to calm down, Rachel had no idea how to behave.

  “You didn’t hold us in the same regard as we held you. It goes both ways, Rachel. You’re a great worker. You are valued here. But a partner is not just a worker. A partner is a member of the family.”

  “You didn’t tell me when Virginia was pregnant.” He’d divorced his first wife and married an actress who had previously divorced her husband when things went bad after forgetting to thank him in her Oscar speech.

  “I think you know
why this is different.” Same smile. “Listen, there’s always going to be another opening. We value you. But why are we talking about this? More than anything, we’re so happy for you. We can’t wait to meet your baby. Your baby is a member of our family, too.”

  Toby now began to pace the bedroom. “He’s met me. He knew you were married. We’d been out to dinner with him and his wife.”

  “Yeah, well that’s how scumbags operate, Toby.”

  “Did you remind him that he knew me?”

  “I’m sorry, Toby, no, I didn’t, I really didn’t realize this was about you at the time.”

  But it was a little about him, wasn’t it? This was his wife! It’s one thing to hit on someone whose spouse you don’t know. But he was real. Toby was real. And Matt Klein didn’t even see him as threat enough to stop himself from hitting on her. Matt barely registered Toby’s existence. Matt was not afraid of Toby’s wrath.

  Toby had never liked that guy. At premieres and events that Toby was invited to, Matt would come over to him and lean over to give Toby a strong handshake, mention something about “our girl,” and then ask if he could “just steal Rachel for a minute,” not really asking, and guide her away, touching her waist as he led her. She didn’t recoil or even jump a little—she even seemed like she might be used to it. Toby knew plenty of Matt Kleins, and the Matt Kleins of the world did not see anything like a husband as a reason to not do whatever they wanted. Or maybe, because he did know Toby, he didn’t see him as an obstacle. Maybe if Rachel had married a tall, strapping finance bro, he’d have stood down. The Matt Kleins of the world stand down in the name of finance bros, Toby knew that for sure. He knew this type of guy from growing up in Los Angeles, where there was a certain tier of male whose Matt Klein–ness was sown and watered and given room to grow. There were people out there who thought Matt Klein–ness was the goal.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”

  There were several possible acceptable answers to this for Toby: that she didn’t take it seriously, that she didn’t want to hurt Toby, that she barely registered it the minute it happened, so in love was she with her husband—all these would have been fine. Instead she went with: “I didn’t think to. It was just something that happened at work. Do you tell me everything that happens at your work? Actually, don’t answer that, maybe you do.”

  He didn’t like how not a part of this story he was. He didn’t like that he was only hearing about this because it was mitigating information against something else that had happened that day. He didn’t like that she didn’t seem to think her marriage was relevant to all of this.

  “I just think you should maybe think about the fact that you work for someone who has no respect for your marriage.”

  “But this isn’t about our marriage, Toby. This is about me. They didn’t promote me, because I didn’t tell them I was pregnant.”

  “That’s bullshit. They didn’t make you partner, because you didn’t sleep with Matt Klein and because they don’t fundamentally respect you.”

  Her response came like a boomerang. “Fuck you, Toby.”

  It was hard for Toby to pinpoint exactly when he’d noticed the change in her. Yes, she spoke to her subordinates like they were pieces of shit, but that was the culture at Alfooz & Lichtenstein—that was how they taught their employees to survive, or something. Toby would express surprise when he heard her on the phone talking to an intern or an assistant—it particularly seemed that asst2 couldn’t find his ass from his ass these days. He would hear her on the phone saying, “You forget who you are talking to,” and “I’m sorry, but do you think I’m an idiot?” and “Honestly, I am listening to you and cannot believe what is coming out of your mouth,” and “No offense, but when I hire at a Yale job fair, I expect someone with a little light behind the eyes,” and “I saw those press kits and it looks like a homeless person off the street did them.” He assumed the stress of her work was sending her into overdrive. But then she said things to her clients like “Oh my God, were we the same person in another life?” and “You are too much,” and “That is amazing,” and “You are amazing.” See? She was also capable of that, which made the fact that she didn’t do it at home harder to stomach.

  When he put it all together and applied himself to the situation, he realized that he was being spoken to like the employee, not like the client. And he’d ask, “Do you ever notice that you speak to me like one of your employees that you hate? And that you’re really nice to your clients?” And she would say, “God, Toby, do you really need me to put on a show for you, too?” And then she would do a sickly sweet impression of he wasn’t quite sure what—a 1950s housewife? A version of herself she thought Toby wanted her to be? “I’m so glad my hubby is home! Should I get you a martini?” Her voice would be bouncy and bright and he would think for the first time that maybe he should murder her.

  “I don’t want this soup,” she said now. “I want linguini and clam sauce. I want to go to Tony’s.”

  “Okay, okay.” It was good soup.

  They stood outside their building. It had stopped raining, and Toby suggested they walk to Tony’s.

  “I’m not walking,” Rachel said as she raised her arm in the air. “I’ve walked enough.” It was only nine blocks, but Toby didn’t say that. She was pregnant. It was fine. She turned to him. “I’m saying I’m tired of taking long walks. I don’t like them. I never liked them. It’s a waste of time.”

  He didn’t say anything. She was upset and prone to tantrums when she was upset, and he didn’t want her screaming at him on the sidewalk in front of their doorman. She hailed a cab. They never went on another long walk again. They never went out of their way to move through the city together except as means to getting somewhere if there were no cabs to be found and the train was out of the way. From then on, they would never find themselves side by side, just either facing each other, or back to back.

  That night felt like a quaint memory when, four months later, Rachel was sent to the hospital with high blood pressure, and her obstetrician began an induction. At first it was fine. They played backgammon, and she watched reruns of a teen drama about orphans on a portable DVD player she bought just for this occasion. Toby felt this was a morbid choice, but he had also suspected that there was no real way for her to have children without confronting the fact of her own parentslessness.

  The delivery progressed from boredom into a horror show. They couldn’t locate her obstetrician. She screamed at Toby, “Do you have absolutely no pull here? You work here!” But her complications were vast and unforeseeable: She failed to progress, and her blood pressure climbed, and it was hard to get a consistent read on the baby monitor. Their normal obstetrician was in Hawaii, it turned out.

  Finally, finally, another obstetrician came in, but neither Rachel nor Toby had ever met him; he was a new partner in Rachel’s OB’s practice. He had white hair and a tan and white teeth and glasses and an Italian accent, and he looked at Toby and Rachel through a cold squint. In the delivery room, as she screamed and writhed in the pain of the kind of contractions that Pitocin brings, he said, “Come on, now. Are you planning on being a baby, or delivering a baby?”

  “Hold on a minute,” Toby said. “You don’t talk to a patient that way.”

  Rachel looked at Toby incredulously. “That’s what you’re going to say? You’re going to lecture him?”

  Toby’s fellow residents came downstairs to obstetrics when they heard he and Rachel were there. They walked in, with balloons and flowers, when Rachel was saying, “Are you here to do anything but watch? What is your actual value here?” and she was talking to Toby. Toby walked them out of the room and tried to indicate that she’d actually been talking about the obstetrician, and they nodded sympathetically, but they also looked uncomfortable. He should have gone with a woman-in-labor joke.

  A full day later, with her blood p
ressure stabilized, she was given a narcotic. She began to drift off—or at least she looked like she did. Instead she was plunged into a nightmare hellscape of hallucinations: She was on a swing in her old elementary school, back and forth and back and forth, but every time she swung forward, the school would get even bigger. But Toby didn’t know this yet. Instead, he thought she was finally getting rest, so he kissed her on her pale, cold forehead and whispered, “I’ll be right back.”

  He went to find Donald Bartuck to ask him what to do about this obstetrician. Bartuck, in his office, said, “Is it Romalino?” When Toby said yes, Bartuck said, “I know him. Good surgeon, total asshole. Loves sections.” Toby went downstairs to speak with the chief resident and see how they could get another doctor in there—there had to be someone else, even though it was Thanksgiving. But there wasn’t, and he noticed that while he was talking, the nurse’s call button from Rachel’s room was being rung incessantly and he ran back to the room and found Rachel in there screaming like an animal while Romalino, his hands up like it was a stickup, said, “I think we might need to get psych in here.”

  When Toby could finally understand what Rachel was saying, it was “GET HIM OUT GET HIM OUT,” but no one else was in there and he noticed then that there was blood on Rachel’s sheets and Toby said, “What the hell happened?” Rachel was still screaming and crying and shaking until finally, through her hiccups, she told him.

  While Toby was talking to Bartuck, a nice-seeming nurse had examined Rachel and said that she hadn’t progressed, but that her blood pressure, though still high, seemed stable now. She said, “You didn’t hear it from me, but if I were you, I’d say that it’s clear this induction isn’t working. If you want to avoid a C-section, you should ask Dr. Romalino if you should pull the plug. You can offer to stay on bed rest or in the hospital, whatever he wants, but you don’t want to continue this induction.” Romalino came in a few minutes later, and Rachel asked him to come back when her husband was there, and he said he didn’t know when he’d be able to come back since he had his own patients to deal with as well and he had to examine her. She said what the nurse had told her to say, and Romalino had made it seem like that was a reasonable idea. He said, “Tell you what. I’ll examine you, and if you’re still not progressing, we’ll have a talk about not having this baby today.” Romalino called for a nurse, and the same one who’d given her the advice came back in. “We can’t wait for my husband?” Rachel asked. “He’ll be back soon.” Romalino said, again, “It’s just an exam.” He put on gloves and reached up between her legs into her vagina, and then, instead of just measuring her dilation, he reached past the usual area and began doing—something.