I’d fallen asleep in the park and spent either minutes or hours in the delusionscape between asleep and awake. When I sat up, my vaping pen was nowhere to be found.
* * *
—
HOW WAS IT still August? How many more days until the winter? How many more days till Toby’s kids came back? How many more nights would he be alone? Still no word from Rachel, who did not know her children were at sleepaway camp—whose children could have been dead and she wouldn’t know it.
It was intolerable to be at home. The heat hadn’t dissipated with the afternoon. There were women in his phone and they just annoyed him. He thought about calling Joanie, but under what guise? What did he want from her? He watched a few videos of soldiers being reunited with their children. Nothing made him feel better. This fucking day wouldn’t end.
He looked up the schedule at the yoga studio. There were no yoga classes, just something called YogaD the Method, which was strength training that combined yoga and dancing and “spiritual inner work.” What the hell, he decided, and changed into shorts and a T-shirt.
He walked in, the only man there, and tried to figure out if he’d missed something on the description. Nobody seemed shocked to see him, though, so he pulled out a bolster, like they were all sitting on, and walked across the room.
“Toby.”
He turned around. There, on the floor, in a one-piece purple spandex jumpsuit, was Nahid.
“Is this where you come to pick up women?” she asked.
He laughed. “No, it’s where I come to see the women I’m intent on picking up.” Maybe not as smooth as it could have been, but consider his week. “Is this seat taken?”
“Are you stalking me?”
“This is where I take yoga.”
“You’re very evolved. You might be the first man I’ve ever seen in this class.”
“What are you doing here? You’re a long way from home.”
“I was meeting a friend who comes here but she canceled.”
“Only someone very secure in his masculinity could come here. You know that, right?”
The class began. The teacher sounded a gong and began her speech. She wanted to talk about a new word she’d learned in Sanskrit: spanda. “It’s the inhalation and exhalation of the world, the world’s expansion and contraction. If you look around, there’s a rhythm of it everywhere. You don’t see it till you do, and then poof, you realize that your breath is just in harmony: in, out, in, out.”
Toby leaned toward Nahid. “Actually the universe only expands. It’s physics.”
Nahid looked at two women looking at her and put her finger to her mouth sternly to shush him.
Toby got a hint of Nahid’s smell just then—a plumeria shampoo, and was that a cucumber deodorant? He had a Pavlovian sense of longing, not just for those scents but for the ones underneath them, and he sought out a virtual slideshow of infected surgical wounds in order to stave off the erection that was bubbling in him like lava.
It turned out that YogaD the Method was a high-energy movement done quietly and mindfully with the eyes closed, a class that, mercifully, didn’t include any dancing that required hip action or corkscrewing or swiveling. It was more of a calisthenics class with extended stretching at the end. He watched out of his peripheral vision: Nahid’s beautiful, round body stretching like a cat in Downward Dog, her lovely ass pointed skyward.
When he was fourteen, he told his mother that he was ashamed of being fat and short and so she took him with her to a Weight Watchers meeting, where he listened to a room full of sad women talk about how unlovable they were and how temporary they felt in their bodies.
“Your life is now,” said Sandy, the leader. She wore denim skirts and brightly colored shirts with matching tights and big, costumey earrings. “You have to live as if your life is already in progress.”
Young Toby didn’t understand what this was about. Of course life was now—at least it was for the grown-ups. He didn’t understand why they had emotional barriers to the diet beyond the major one, which was that food was comforting and delicious and good. It all made perfect sense to him now: Food is comforting and delicious, but it is not good, and one shouldn’t be seduced into thinking it might be.
Fine. He followed the plan, and he lost five pounds the first week. Then more, then more. The women would grumble at his weight loss: He was a boy and he was a teenager—his metabolism was ideal. His mother would drive him home and say, “See? They’re jealous because you’re successful.” She loved that. She loved him, more than she had before. He never went off the plan until he was twenty-four and stopped eating carbohydrates completely. He was never going to end up like one of those women.
He told his mother he wanted to exercise, and this thrilled her, too. She did some research and took him to a step aerobics class in a loft space in West Hollywood. He was the only boy in that class, too, but he was so dazzled by all the long-legged blond girls in the class—girls designed to be superior, with straight, skinny legs and casual boredom about their beauty—that he was able to distract himself from the exertion. They were much nicer to be around than the sad sacks at Weight Watchers. Those girls never complained. Those girls knew that the world was better for them being in it. He watched them in the mirror during the class and imagined he wasn’t with them but watching them from the other side of the TV. Yes, if they were in an aerobics video, and he was watching it, he could ignore how he looked beside them: fat, Jewish, clumsy, short, so short, when the hell would the growth spurt come, he was promised there would be a growth spurt.
At the end of class, the teacher would dim the lights and they would lie, belly down, on their elevated platforms and stretch to a slow song as twilight settled over the Hollywood Hills and came through the studio’s long windows. Facedown on his step platform, he’d do as instructed: Reach one arm out, then the second. If one of the girls was on her step platform, belly down, but turned in his direction instead of away from it, meaning head to head with Toby and not foot to head, the result would be that it looked like she and Toby were on rafts, reaching for each other in a beautiful ballet of survival. A slow song played from the CD player: Sometimes the snow comes down in June, sometimes the sun goes ’round the moon. “Stretch left,” the teacher would say. Just when I thought our chance had passed, you go and save the best for last. “Now stretch right.”
And that was how he felt as he exercised silently, strangely, next to Nahid, this woman he didn’t know and whose spandex-covered body was exactly as tempting as her naked one. Now they lay down on mats that had appeared out of nowhere and he stretched toward her and she stretched toward him, and on the iPod now there was a song that was the slowed-down version of a song that Hannah liked from the radio—I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh oh—how he loved a pop song made into a ballad.
Rachel was gone from his life. He had been looking at this like it was a bad thing. It was—it would destroy his children when they finally found out. But also, absent any choice he made that created the situation, which was not any choice, it was still true that he was young and could have a new life. Rachel had been right about that.
The yoga studio was in the eighteenth-floor penthouse of a residential building, a perk to its residents and an à la carte offering to anyone else. The windows were big and high up enough so that on a clear day, you could see the park. The sun was going down. He loved the dusk—the blue twilight, especially in summer, when the streets crowded with people who had knowledge of winter, who had seen endless days where the streets were inhospitable. The sky was a glowing purple-blue. Had he ever really taken a moment to appreciate the dusk? He loved it. He loved everything right then. He looked out onto the world and was so excited about the number of dusks that lay ahead of him. He wanted to use every single one of them well. He wanted to spend each one of them with only people he loved. He wanted to run to the ca
mp upstate right this instant and take his children outside their bunks and apologize for all the wasted twilights. He wanted to pick each child up and spin them around. He wanted to tell them that if they miss a twilight, not to worry, it will always come again. He wanted to show them that this was how he was naturally, not the mopey jerk they’d seen lately, not the person who stopped believing in potential and excitement and surprise. He would remember this moment and he would become himself again. Poor Toby in all those other block universes. Poor Toby who was still just figuring it out. This Toby knew. This Toby couldn’t believe his incredible fortune, to have this many twilights lying in front of him, and all the bad ones behind him.
* * *
—
HE AWOKE WITH a panic in his stomach the next morning. Part of it was the strangeness of waking up in Nahid’s bed, which he’d never slept in or on before last night—their sex had so far been confined to the floor and part of the living room coffee table. Part of it was that this was the first time he’d ever slept at a woman’s house overnight. But his panic was also parental, the haunted realization that happened over and over that he was now his children’s only parent and they were nowhere near him. He smelled coffee.
The night came back to him.
“I have a surprise for you,” she’d said.
She had straddled his body and gone to work pouring different scented oils on his back and making circular motions and ticklish motions and spelling out words and making him guess them, leaning over, kissing his neck when he got them right, biting his ear when he got them wrong. This went on for an hour, and when it was over, he realized that he had never truly relaxed into it. He never stopped wondering what she was getting out of it. He did not know if there had ever been a time when someone had done something just to make him feel good, so when it happened, when it was finally happening, he could barely understand what was going on.
Now, Toby came out to see Nahid reading the Daily News at her table while she drank coffee out of a china cup. In the morning light, without makeup, he could see Nahid’s face for the first time.
“How old are you?” he asked her.
“That’s a rude question.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay, how much do you weigh?”
She laughed.
“Let’s go out for breakfast,” he said.
“I can make you breakfast here.”
“I want to take you out.”
She turned her face and raised her left eyebrow and looked at him from the side, as if she were trying to decide something. “I can’t go out with you,” she said. “I’ll explain.”
Her husband didn’t want to get divorced. He loved her; they had been through so much together. He said he wanted to keep their arrangement as it was. She told him she didn’t realize their marriage was an “arrangement.” He was so handsome and kind-looking and soft-spoken that she still didn’t feel hatred for him. She just still felt rejected. It didn’t matter that she now knew why he’d rejected her; the feeling that something was off-putting about her to him didn’t go away.
But it wasn’t that he still wanted her because part of him still loved her. No, it was that he was a lawyer for a conservative news network, and his contract was under review, and his boss had sent out a memo about the company’s employees respecting the “positive, godly values” of the organization. His divorce would be a problem. He asked her if she could stay married to him until his contract negotiation was up; if so, he would make sure she was financially taken care of for life. Then he would tell them that she was converting back to Judaism, and he couldn’t stay married to her. She couldn’t understand how he could erase their life together like that, but he didn’t care that she didn’t understand. He was always controlling and persuasive. Remember, he had been the one pushing her to shove hormones through her system so that he could have babies that he never asked if she wanted, too.
She became angry. She said no. She said they would just go their separate ways. He said he wouldn’t pay any alimony unless she obeyed. She said her lawyer would get it out of him anyway, but it wasn’t true. Her lawyer pointed out that she had a profession, an accounting degree, and that just because she had never worked didn’t mean she couldn’t. It wasn’t like there were kids to take care of. She’d have to move. She’d have to start her life over somewhere in a city that wasn’t this expensive. She was forty-five, and she’d have to live like a recent college graduate, and hope for a job in a gig economy.
He had her. He agreed to pay rent if she remained in the apartment, if she didn’t tell anyone they were separated, if she forestalled the divorce until January, if she promised not to be seen out with men or doing anything that a company executive might see and deem unchristian. There was the “liberal media,” always looking to delight in something like this. Worst of all—yes, worst of all—she still had to attend functions and dinners with him. She had to hold his hand. She had to be told where to go by the very same personal assistant she’d walked in on that day getting fellated by her husband.
Toby listened. He liked how she looked down at her hands when she talked. He liked how her mouth opened slightly and her eyebrows knitted together when she was listening. Someone else might think this was ideal, a beautiful woman you could just come over and fuck and who didn’t even want to have breakfast. But him? He wanted a person. He didn’t want to just hook up and leave. He wasn’t Seth.
“I don’t know,” Toby said. “This is very fun, but I like you. I want to get to know you.”
“I like you, too. But if I were seen around—” She stood up and took her coffee cup to the kitchen. She was wearing a satin robe. “Honestly, it’s humiliating enough just telling you this. I haven’t told this to anyone.”
She’d slept with a few men by now, she explained. She’d never been with another man, before all this. Her parents hadn’t talked to her about sex. Now they didn’t talk to her at all. Her sister thought she was a heathen for converting. She was embarrassed to talk about sex with their friends, and besides, she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone what was going on, and as a result, her friendships had all dwindled. So she went to men’s apartments and had sex with them once, and then blocked them on the app and in her phone. She couldn’t bear their touch. It was too intimate; it was too tender. Men who desired you touched you all over your body, not just in your erogenous zones, by number, hoping to pass for someone who actually wanted you. They touched your waist and your face. They touched your knees and the arches of your feet. They felt for the downy small of your back. The touches lingered. They took your breath away. Your softness was no longer a liability. The softness was now the point. The intimacy overwhelmed her.
But she was getting used to it now with Toby. They were in her space, and her body didn’t recoil in spasms when it was touched anymore. She was going through the necessary phases of learning how to exist in her body with a man who desired her. She was catching up.
“Something happened and now I’m stuck,” she said, “I accept it. I am no longer trying to change things. I go to yoga. I come home and I sleep with you. That will have to be enough for me. It’s hard for men to understand.”
After a while, Toby left and showered at his own house. It must have been a thousand degrees, and his air-conditioning had the equivalent cooling power of a cat yawning. He listened to a podcast about neuroscience on his way to work but couldn’t concentrate on it. His inbox contained coerced emails from each of his children, which popped up simultaneously as he entered his office. Solly’s was fairly substantial. It said he liked his counselor and that he hadn’t lost S.B. (Stealth Bunny, abbreviated just in case anyone was reading over his shoulder) and that Max had found new friends but he guessed he understood, and there was a guy named Akiva he liked hanging out with and Hannah ignored him when she saw him. Hannah’s email simply read, “C-YA on visitor’s day.” He stared at that email as if it migh
t grow under his watch until his phone switched to its locked-screen time/date function.
That was when it hit him. Today was the day that child support was supposed to be directly deposited into his bank account. He had been so focused on managing the children, then so focused on figuring out where Rachel was, that he’d allowed himself to not turn directly toward a major question that had hovered over all of this: Was the money gone, too? Holy Christ, what if the money was gone?
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 26
