He sat down in his desk chair. He wanted to be sitting up for this. He wanted to greet whatever information he found there like a man. It took him two times to log in to his bank account. When he finally didn’t mistype his password, he watched the wheel spin interminably while his account information was being gathered, thank you for your patience. You can do this, he tried to get his brain to inform him. You can do this no matter what. But his brain had told him a lot of things over the years. His brain wasn’t very reliable. He needed that money. He knew that he pretended to hate the money but that he needed the money and he wanted the money.
Or, fuck it, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he should pick up and move. He would leave no forwarding address. He would buy a house in, what, Illinois, Kentucky, South Carolina, maybe somewhere more hospitable to Jews, like Philadelphia. He heard Nashville needed specialists, but he didn’t want to live in the South. Maybe he’d move to New Jersey. No, that was too close. That was close enough so that if she decided to return to the kids’ lives, she could have regular visitation. Nope, not for you, bitch. You made your decision. And if you ever repent for this, you will have to give up this place that you love and decide that you love your children more. Exile will be your lifelong penance.
A message box popped up on the screen: Your request has been timed out. Please try again later. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. Outside his office, a nurse’s aide looked up from her cart.
He typed again. The wheel turned again and again and again. His body hurt. He missed his children so much that his body hurt. All of this was agony. This is what you wanted, Rachel? You wanted no one to wake up to?
Finally, the pinwheel stopped turning and the number came in: $7,500 more than there had been the day before. He couldn’t even feel relief. He hated himself so much he couldn’t bear it. He took a breath and sat down and stared at the number, then looked out the window. There was something about how the light came into his office in the morning, the way he could not evade the sharp assault of the sun, that made him depressed. He’d grown up in Los Angeles, where everyone bragged about the sun like they invented it, and all he could ever think about was how the lack of tall buildings meant the sun was forever rising and setting into his eyes. Now, in his office, it hit the stainless steel of his desk and of the mullions in the glass wall, making him surly.
He had to get out of here. He would take lunch. It was ten-thirty, but who says what time lunch is. He left the hospital and walked, and when he stopped walking, he found himself in front of the Museum of Natural History, almost as if his longing for Solly pulled him there. There was a new exhibit about colors centered on something called Vantablack, which was a lab-created material that was said to be the darkest black that existed. It absorbed 99.6 percent of the light. The article he read in the Times said that people who looked at it felt like they were freaking out. He walked in through the membership line and went right to the exhibit. The sample of the black was surrounded by tin foil so that you could understand what you were looking at. Toby stood in front of the exhibit and stared into the black until he felt like he was falling. He stood there for a full hour.
* * *
—
IT WASN’T THAT he had given up on thinking about Rachel. It was that he could no longer locate himself in this story and the fact of that made him panic. He used to understand the rules, that he was the direct object of her apathy and inconsideration. Now what was he? What were the kids? She was no longer in opposition to them. She was just gone. What do you do with that? How do you think about that?
The panic rose in him regularly. He wasn’t eating (as if he ever had been). He wondered if the children would ever bump into her on the street. He wondered if the children would become pariahs when it became clear to the school moms that Rachel had drifted further away from the port than could ever be forgivable.
The next day, Tuesday, he did a sonogram on a young law student. Her liver showed no signs of scarring, so she could schedule a follow-up in October. Then he realized how soon October was, and that Hannah’s bat mitzvah was coming. The invitations should have gone out last week, but he wasn’t in charge of invitations, Rachel was. She had Simone on all of it: the caterers, the DJ, the motivators, the party favors, the venue. Toby was only in charge of making sure Hannah knew her lines. Should he cancel it now? How could you hold a bat mitzvah for a girl when her mother had just abandoned her? But also: How could you cancel a girl’s bat mitzvah?
When he was out on the street after work, the rest of the day stretched before him. He didn’t want to check his Hr app. He wanted a text from Nahid saying that she’d come around and would have dinner with him. He couldn’t bear another evening alone. He couldn’t explain it and he couldn’t not talk about it. He looked at his phone to see what was playing at the movies but it wouldn’t load. He began walking toward downtown anyway. He’d go to a movie. Normal people go to the movies when their children are away.
He was in the Sixties when he saw a pet superstore that was having adoptions that evening. He walked in, tried to adjust to the smell, and immediately locked eyes with a short-haired miniature dachshund with one eye.
“Can I pet him?” he asked the handler.
The handler gave him the dog, who was trembling. He placed him in Toby’s arms. The dog was the size of an infant, and Toby held him that way, scratching his belly. All the hardness that had calcified over Toby in the last week began to soften. A dog! He should get a dog! The kids had wanted a dog for a long time, but the Golden wouldn’t allow it. He’d forgotten that he’d chosen his new building based on the fact that it would allow small animals. A dog would turn things around. Someone loyal, someone to bring the family together and replace what they’d lost. He looked up at the handler.
“Can I have him?”
He walked out ninety unnecessary minutes later with five pounds of dog food, two leashes, a water bowl, a food bowl, seven chew toys, and the eight-pound dachshund, whom he named on his adoption papers “Bubbles.” Hannah used to say when she was in first grade that she wanted a Chihuahua named Bubbles. Rachel would never allow it. Who had time to walk a dog, she’d ask. And who will clean up? Who will replace the furniture?
He was walking Bubbles home, wondering if the tininess of the dog made Toby look bigger or smaller than he actually was. He walked the dog into his building, where two teenage girls yelped, “Awwwww!” He found himself wondering if he should call Joanie and ask her for dog advice; he remembered her saying that her sister was a veterinarian. He should stop looking for reasons to call Joanie.
He brought Bubbles upstairs, and he opened the apartment and said, “Here it is, little guy. This is your home now.” He could not have told you why, but he spent the next ten minutes hugging the dog and crying into his fur.
* * *
—
HE WAS DREAMING he was swimming in Israel, in an area up north where there were waterfalls. He dreamed that he could stand beneath the waterfall and allow it to pummel him but that it wouldn’t drown him in its force. But then he woke up and realized his new dog was peeing on his head.
“No, Bubbles, no!” he shouted, and rushed him out and down the elevator and outside. Bubbles took a dump but Toby had forgotten to bring a plastic bag and a woman in her thirties on her way to work sneered, “Pig!” at Toby, who was covered in urine, and who looked around frantically for something he could use to pick up the shit. This was not what he’d imagined. He’d imagined walking the dog through the streets of the Upper East Side and it would be like he was emitting some kind of irresistible pheromone, like chemtrails, the way women would stop him to pet the dog and coo up at him.
He’d just gotten back into the apartment and turned on the shower when the phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. It was an upstate number. It was the camp. His mouth dried out immediately.
“Yes, hello?”
“Mr. Fleishman, we’re very sorry t
o bother you this early.”
He felt cold. “Is everything okay?”
“Your kids are safe. But there’s been an incident. I’m going to need you to come here and pick up Hannah.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’d rather we spoke in person.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, just tell me what it is.”
The director paused for a minute. “There’s been some sexual misconduct. I’ll tell you more when you get to camp.”
Sexual misconduct. “Is Hannah okay? Did something happen to her?”
“She’s fine. She’s here in the office with me. She isn’t hurt.”
He turned on the shower and stared at Bubbles for a minute, realizing why not all people get dogs. He called up Seth.
“Yo, dude,” Seth said. “It’s like sunrise.”
“It’s eight. I need a favor.”
He told him something had happened with Hannah and that there was a new dog that needed sitting. He was sorry, he didn’t know who else to ask.
“It just so happens that Vanessa and I have decided to take a vacation day.”
“I’ll leave a key with the doorman. Thanks, man. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Don’t worry. Children are resilient.”
“They’re not that resilient. Why do people always say that?”
“I mean, my parents are divorced and I’m fine.”
Why did he let them go to camp? They needed him now. Instead, he was fucking all of Manhattan, really just humping a him-sized map of the place, and he was sending his own beloved children off to the lowest bidder. He felt like such a loser. What he thought as he pulled the rental car (no more of Rachel’s stuff, that’s it, it’s over) onto the FDR Drive was this: that anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view. If he were to be a real scientist about this, would he be able to find empirical evidence that Rachel had a point in rejecting him? That Rachel was right to hate him this much? Yes, right then, for the first time, he could see it. He could make his way across the abyss, and just for a minute, he could see that he was the same vile, fat, needy piece of shit he always was.
Oh my God, he hated himself. He couldn’t be alone with himself for another minute. He couldn’t figure out how to get the Bluetooth in the car to work, so instead of listening to his neuroscience podcast, he blasted pop music, which made way for country music as he went deeper upstate, which then made way for Christian rock, anything so long as he couldn’t hear his own thoughts.
He picked up his phone and gave it an order: “Call Rachel at work.” It rang five times. He hung up. What the fuck was he doing.
Two hours later, he drove through the camp gates and up the dirt hill to where the administrative building was. He hadn’t been there since last year, when he and Rachel went together to see Hannah on visiting day. They’d fought the entire way up, but he couldn’t remember about what, just that when they exited the car she said, “I expect you to put on a face.”
The camp director, an aging Ken doll in a polo shirt, jogged out to Toby when he saw him pull up. He had his empathy-dread face on.
“What happened?”
The director solemnly took out a phone—Hannah’s phone. The camp director pressed his lips together and squinted, trying to find words. Then: “A few hours ago, we discovered that a personal and confidential picture that Hannah sent to a young man was widely distributed through the camp.”
“Let me see it.”
“I’m not sure you want to see it.”
“Let me see it.”
He handed Toby the phone. Toby turned it on and saw what looked like a picture of Hannah (but it couldn’t be) in just her bra, with one of her tiny breasts exposed to the nipple. She had a lascivious, come-hither look about her, like a look her mother used to give him at the beginning of their marriage. Like every picture he’d seen on a dating app in the last two months. She’d taken the picture herself. He wanted to vomit.
A few years ago, Rachel had found “sex” as a search term on her computer (these kids never pass down their wisdom to each other is the thing) and Rachel had screamed at Hannah and told her she was going to call the school psychologist since there was obviously something wrong with her. Hannah’s eyes exploded with how scared she was, which Toby knew because he came home from work just then, and that night he put Hannah to bed and he soothed her by promising that it was normal to be curious and that he would never call the school psychologist. Later, in what was supposed to be a hushed conversation behind closed doors that came to shouts and slammed doors, Toby said, “What were you thinking? You’re yelling at a girl for being curious about sex? You will fuck her up for life.” Rachel wouldn’t lower herself to answer.
“I know this is hard, Mr. Fleishman,” the director was saying.
Toby looked up. “So she sent this to someone?”
“She sent it to a young man, and he sent it to a few of his friends, and they sent it around. It’s camp policy that sending inappropriate materials requires immediate action. We have a zero-tolerance policy for that, and I’m afraid Hannah has to go home.”
He felt weak picturing the Breck commercial–ization of his daughter’s nipple. He couldn’t get the image of her face out of his head, the priapic glare, the amateur lust. Did she even know what this meant? Was she imitating something? What had he missed? Wasn’t she a baby? He had just checked her phone. A week in camp cannot make a person into someone new. (Can it?)
“Take me to her.”
“She’s in the infirmary, this way.”
They passed through an antechamber that had chairs, and in it was a boy about Hannah’s age who looked familiar—maybe he was from the school? No, no, something else. It hit him: It was the boy from the street that day, when Hannah was too embarrassed to look at him, then again in the Hamptons, when he dropped her off with her friends.
He stopped.
“Is this the boy?”
“Mr. Fleishman, we can’t tell you which boy it is. We’ve called the boy’s—”
“And is he going to have to go home now, too? Is he going to be humiliated in front of everyone?”
“We’ve called his parents.”
“Does he have to go home?”
“You really should come see—”
“I want to know if he’s going to have to go home.”
The director looked defeated. “He’s not. His parents are in Switzerland and he is not the person who sent the picture.”
“But he distributed it.” He crouched down and looked the kid in the eyes. “Am I right that the distribution of child pornography carries with it a heavy prison sentence no matter what age you are?” The boy looked away. Toby leaned over and put his face very close. “One day, you will have the full and certain realization of what a dipshit you are. One day you will realize you are dirt. I hope it hurts.”
The director said, “Mr. Fleishman—” and Toby pulled himself back, but he knew if he looked hard, yes, there it was, it was the smirk of the entitled. What had he been thinking, raising his children among these people? He’d forgotten something essential about life, which was to make sure his children understood his values. No matter how many times you whispered your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources. You could hate the Upper East Side. You could hate the five-million-dollar apartment. You could hate the private school, which cost nearly $40,000 per kid per year in elementary school, but the kids would never know it because you consented to it. You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just
a little. You thought you could get the good out of it and leave the bad, but there’s so much work involved in that, too. You take your children to a concert and expect them to hear your whisper from the background that it’s not all for them. You can’t expect anything of them. You can’t expect them to not use the phone they’ve had for a week—a week—and take and share pornographic shots of their flat chests, covered by the bra their mother only bought them because it was getting embarrassing to be the only girl in sixth grade not wearing one.
Toby pulled himself together and walked into the nurse’s office. Hannah sat in a folding chair, her arms around her stomach, her face puffy from crying.
“Can you give us a minute?” Toby asked the director. “And does she need to have him sitting right out there in the hallway?”
The director backed out and closed the door. Toby crouched beside her. Hannah wouldn’t look at him.
“Hannah, Hannah.” She was his mess.
Nothing.
“I told you that these phones made you make very adult decisions. I told you you didn’t have to make those decisions.”
Hannah wouldn’t look at him. “He asked me to send it. It wasn’t my idea.”
Toby put his hands on her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter right now.”
She pulled away from him. “I want Mommy. Where is Mommy?”
Toby shrugged. “I’m the one who’s here. I’m sorry.”
She cried for a while, and when she began to let up, he stood and told her he’d be right back, that he had to go get Solly.
Outside the infirmary door, the director paced. “Where’s my son?” Toby asked.
The director led him through the camp, which was made of new buildings designed to look old. The bunks were in the shape of log cabins, though they absolutely were not log cabins. The generation of people who thought you should send your children to camp for survival and to be slightly less comfortable than they already were all year was dead and gone.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 27
