They arrived at a bunkhouse whose door said CHIPMUNKS and walked in. Twelve nine-year-old boys were lounging on their bunkbeds, reading and talking. It smelled absolutely disgusting in there, like twelve different kinds of dirty sock smells and twelve different tween boy emissions.
“Dad!” Solly saw Toby before Toby saw Solly. He ran into his arms and knocked him backward.
Toby put his nose into Solly’s hair. It smelled scalpy and felt sticky, but there was an undercurrent of something his nose read as his own biology.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m taking your sister home. Why don’t you come with me?”
Solly was confused. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, no. I think we should all be together as a family right now.”
“Dad, I’m having so much fun. It is really super here. You were right. Mom was right.”
“Next summer you’ll come again. I promise.”
“Is Mom home?”
Toby looked around for Solly’s suitcase. “Let’s pack you up.”
The director saw him pulling both kids’ suitcases. “Solly was having a really great summer,” he said. “He doesn’t have to leave. In fact, Mr. Fleishman, I really do recommend—”
Toby opened the trunk and loaded the car, and only when he closed the trunk did he turn to the director again.
“Actually,” he said, “it’s Dr. Fleishman.”
* * *
—
HANNAH DIDN’T WANT to sit in the front seat for the ride home. She wanted to sit in the back with Solly, and eventually she put her head in Solly’s lap and Toby could see him shouldering the responsibility of his sister like a little adult, patting her hair and staring solemnly out the window. Fuck you, Rachel.
The heat was not nearly so bad up here as it had been in the city. The trees were so green and full. He thought that maybe for Labor Day weekend he’d take them back upstate to Lake Placid or Saratoga. There was a rest stop an hour into the drive, and they all got out to go to the bathroom, slouching and haggard like they’d just been through a war.
“Let’s sit outside for a minute before we get back into the car,” Toby said. There was a picnic table nearby. They took the seat. “I have to talk to you both about something.”
Hannah froze. “What?”
“It’s about your mother.”
Solly’s features dissolved into a smear and his voice reached an untenable pitch. “She’s dead, right? I knew it. I knew she was dead.”
“Shut up, Solly!” Hannah screamed.
“Both of you, stop,” Toby said. “She’s not dead. She’s fine. But I’m afraid she’s been having some problems with her feelings. I should have told you sooner.”
Hannah’s eyes went wide. “Is she in a mental hospital?”
“No,” Toby said. “But I think she’s realized that everything’s a little too much and it’s getting to her. Her work, her obligations. She’s…I don’t know how to put this. She’s taking a break from things.”
“Why does she need a break from us?” Hannah asked.
His head began to ring with heat and alarm. He should have consulted a therapist. He should have called the school psychologist. He should have called Carla, his therapist. Here he was, winging it, damaging his children for life even worse than they already were.
“Sometimes,” he said, “people just have bigger problems than a divorce can fix. Your mother loves you more than anything.” When he said the words he thought he was saying it to make them feel better, but the minute he said it he felt like it was true. It had to be true. How could it not be true? How could you not love these kids? How could you not feel lucky every day that they were yours? “It was hard for your mother to have you. She had problems in the hospital both times she gave birth. That made her a little nuts, and I don’t know if she ever got over it. I don’t know if she ever learned how to figure out her business and her family life together. But also, she didn’t explain herself to me, so anything I tell you after this is just a guess.”
Solly spoke first. “Is she ever going to come back? Where did she go?”
“I have to be honest with you. I just don’t know where she is. I just know that she’s safe. She’s safe and healthy. I don’t know what she’s going to do, but I’ve asked and she hasn’t answered me. I don’t want to lie to you anymore. I know this hurts, but I had to tell you.”
He remembered the day in May when he and Rachel told the kids about the divorce. This was going pretty much the same way.
“Where are we going to live?” Hannah asked, like she did then.
“With me, like you have been. Just now you’ll have one house.”
“It’s because she hates you,” Hannah said. “She can’t stand being near you.”
“Maybe,” Toby said. Better this than the other thing. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have just a regular plain divorce like other people. But we are the Fleishmans. We are not like other people.”
They cried for a long time. At one point, Solly sat on Toby’s lap and cried into his neck while Hannah stood up and walked around. They asked logistical questions, following their hierarchy of need: Who will come to parent-teacher conferences and concerts and the orchestra recital? He reminded them that he’d never missed one so far. What will they do on Mother’s Day? That’s a long way off. They asked questions that there were no answers to. He tried not to flood them with information or lies. He felt like his skin was being ripped off. He hoped that wherever she was, she was suffering. He hoped she never had another moment of peace.
“I want to tell you something, though. No matter what happens, I will never ever leave you. Not even for a day. Not even for an hour.”
“So you’re never going to go on one of your playdates again?” Hannah asked.
“I’ll go on them sometimes. But I’ll always come home. You’ll go to school and you’ll come home. We will always sleep under the same roof. How’s that?”
After an hour, they all got into the car again. The minute they were belted in and Toby was on the road, they both started crying again, then stopped, then started, then Hannah asked if he was lying about Rachel and if she was actually dead and that made Solly cry more until eventually they were all cried out and just stared out the window.
An hour later they were home. It was already seven, time for dinner. They boarded the elevator, each of them leaning against a wall of it wearily.
Hannah had a thought. “Will I be able to get my stuff from the other house?”
“Yes. You tell me what you need and I’ll go get it.”
“Good,” Hannah said. “I don’t want to go.”
Outside the elevator, they heard a bark. As they came closer to the door, the bark got louder. Solly and Hannah looked at each other, and for a minute, the foreboding and sadness of Hannah’s face made way for something like light and happiness. How could she be these two people, he wondered? The thing he’d marveled at since becoming a father was the simplicity of the children. The simplicity faded as they got older. It was not simple to be someone who just a few hours ago had a global humiliation, then learned that her mother had abandoned her, and then, in a minute, to be down on her knees, unmoored by her new puppy. For a few years Hannah would straddle being both people, and that was just the worst. Both for her, to endure innocence and maturity in the same body, and for him, to watch the innocence vanish in drips until it was gone.
Seth and Vanessa stood back. Toby beckoned them over.
“Kids, this is my old friend Seth and my new friend Vanessa,” he said. Vanessa got down on her knees to pet the dog with them.
“You are very cute, like your dad said,” Vanessa told Solly. “And you—” She looked at Hannah. “You are just as pretty as your pictures. I always wanted straight hair.”
Hannah was enthralled imme
diately. “Yours is straight.”
“Oh no,” Vanessa said. “I have to blow this dry for like an hour every morning.”
“It’s true,” Seth said. “She wakes up looking like Medusa.” Vanessa hit him playfully.
Hannah scratched behind the dog’s ears. “You named him Bubbles, didn’t you?” she asked Toby.
“You know me too well.”
“I thought that was a good idea in like first grade.”
“Well, I haven’t heard better ones since, so.” Bubbles licked Hannah’s red face.
“Does he have one eye?” Solly asked.
“Ew,” Hannah said.
Solly began to cry. “It makes me love him more.”
“Let’s curse the camp,” Seth said. “May a pox break out at this camp that will only ever be outdone by a concurrent plague of termites, so that when the buildings there finally collapse, no one but the people inside will ever know what a blessing it was.”
Toby couldn’t smile.
Seth went on, “May the camp director’s children die from salmonella from the eggs you accidentally left out in the sun to make their birthday cakes.”
Toby’s mother had told him years ago that everything bad in life was eventually a blessing. We just didn’t understand God’s plan. He had been crying over his height or his weight—no, it was his height. He was in fifth grade, and he found out that the three meanest girls in his class had voted him least likely to ever get a girlfriend. It was stupid, he knew that. But knowing that didn’t help. His mother told him that one day they’d eat their words, when he was a rich and successful doctor, and that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. Toby wasn’t comforted. He never would be comforted by the adage “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle” after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself? Toby had the sudden urge to run out of the apartment, to enter the elevator, to frantically press the lobby button, to run out the door and across the park and into Nahid’s building and bury his face between her tremendous breasts and get swallowed up in the sensory-deprivation camp of her body. He looked at his children. It would be a while before he could do that.
Vanessa and Seth stayed for dinner, which was spaghetti that Vanessa made while Toby unpacked the kids and did loads of laundry and tried in vain to contact the child psychologist they’d consulted in May when they were preparing to tell the kids about the divorce. He put the kids to bed early, then took Hannah’s phone out of his pocket. He went through her Facebook and Instagram. He deleted the pictures she’d taken of herself. He found an app on her phone that was a mirroring program that allowed her to have two accounts within the same interface, so that she could have one outward-facing and very chaste Instagram account, and one where she posted pictures of herself with too much makeup, or made fun of another kid at school, or asked which outfit of hers was “hotter.”
He deleted texts from that boy, whose name was Zach, that were the infant cousin (and yet too alike) to the kind of texts he traded with the women on Hr. A few of them took his breath away. He didn’t know how Hannah had ever figured out how to talk that way. She didn’t even get her period yet.
Growing up was so fucking ugly, he thought. Growing up took prisoners and casualties and collateral damage. Yes, growing up was disgusting: It gave him a sense of revulsion so deep inside him that a surgeon couldn’t pull it out.
* * *
—
“I’M NOT GOING back to the Y,” Hannah announced the next morning when she came out of her bedroom. Solly was still sleeping. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut, and Toby felt like he’d run a marathon. He took another personal day, sending an email to Bartuck because he lacked the fortitude for a phone call. He hadn’t finished arranging camp for Solly and now he had to figure out what he was going to do with Hannah.
“I can stay here alone,” she said.
“Ha,” said Toby.
“Can I go to Bubby in L.A.?”
“I’d like to keep you closer to home. And Bubbles needs you.”
“How about Braverman’s? I know people going there.”
“You’re not going away again.”
“You can’t send me to the Y again!”
“I think I have to.”
“He should have gotten kicked out, not me.”
“You have to understand that boys do stupid things to show off to each other. They don’t think. But also, you have to be careful about who you pick to trust in this world. You can’t give away your heart or your friendship or your body to someone who isn’t going to take care of it.”
“Please stop.”
“Hey, I would have loved to not have this conversation with you for another three years, but here we are.” He sat down at the table with them.
* * *
—
TOBY DRAGGED THE kids to the Y, letting them take turns holding Bubbles’s leash.
“I hate you,” Hannah said when they were a block away from the camp.
“So hate me. You could always come with me to work.”
“No, thank you. I don’t even have a phone anymore.”
“You could, I don’t know, read a book? Remember those? Remember your bat mitzvah that you have to study for?”
“I’m not having a bat mitzvah if Mom isn’t there.”
“You sure are.”
At the Y, Toby spoke to the camp director, a much kinder version of the guy upstate, who nodded emphatically as Toby spilled the whole story of his children’s abandonment.
“This can’t be easy for any of you,” he said. “What a nightmare.”
Toby made a brave face. It felt good to finally tell people what a fucking monster he’d been married to. He no longer had to worry about her reputation, about whether he was conveying her side of the story accurately. He no longer had to ask himself hard questions about his role in things. Just the facts: She hasn’t contacted her children in almost three weeks. She’s a fucking maniac. No embellishments needed.
He sat on the steps of a brownstone on Ninety-first Street. It wasn’t too hot yet, and he wanted to keep the dog outside for as long as possible. He called me.
“You sound tired,” he said.
“I’m just lying on my hammock.”
He told me about the kids.
“I never liked Rachel,” I told him. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“You’ve mentioned it.”
He wrote another email to Bartuck saying he was sorry, the personal day was unavoidable. It was. He hadn’t hired a dog-sitter yet. And he needed to deal with his window shades and his air-conditioning. He called his parents. He called his sister. He called his cousin Cherry, in Queens, who cried when she heard what was going on and told him she wanted to take the kids for the weekend.
“I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think they should stay with me.”
“Well, then, can we visit? Can we take you guys out to dinner in the city?”
“We would love that.”
He made snow angels in their sympathy and their validation, which was also the validation of the unspoken question of every single divorce, no matter what kind of co-written Facebook announcement you read about it, which is: Whose fault was it? Well, fuckers, now you know.
His phone choo-chooed. It wasn’t the hospital. It was a text from Nahid:
Would you settle for dinner here?
What do you say to that? He had been determined to let her go. He had been determined to assert his need for self-respect and say, “No, sorry, I really need a woman who would consider being seen in public with me. I’ve been through a lot, you see, and I’m pretty fragile.”
But what if this was all for the best? Maybe this would be fine. Maybe this was all he could handle. He couldn’t be a boyfriend right now. He had a missing wife and childre
n he needed to watch closely and a fellow that he was slowly becoming sure was a romantic prospect. He needed something, and he didn’t want to go back to the app. The app now seemed to him like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Before they all turned to salt, before they were all destroyed, they were doing exactly what he was doing. So no, no more app for right now. Don’t let’s go to the app tonight. A sexual, quasi-romantic relationship with a woman stuck in a tower wasn’t conventional, but what had convention wrought him so far? He was fragile, but so was she. She needed a friend, too. And he could still smell parts of her on him in ghostly flashes, though it had been a few showers.
He wrote back: Ok, dinner
You need lunch first
I’m meeting a friend for lunch
My place tonight
* * *
—
SETH WAS WEARING a suit. He’d been interviewing for a new job, but the job was a start-up and it was owned by women, and by the time he got to lunch, he was going on about all the PC crap he couldn’t bear.
“They wanted to know how I could help make the company intersectional,” he said when Toby sat down. “What does that even mean? Intersection of what? Money and money? That I can do.”
“Maybe it’s not the place for you.”
Seth stared off into the middle distance for a second, then changed the subject. “I’m going to propose,” Seth said. He said it with his eyes closed, like he was practicing lines in a play. He opened them. “I have this guy in the Yakutia who owns a diamond mine and he gets these diamonds, they’re blood diamonds, but they’re the best. They’re not even legal to sell here.” He made boom hands. “What did you think of her?”
Toby didn’t know what to say. “She’s lovely. She’s young. How can you stand it?”
“That’s the word for her. Lovely.” Seth’s hands were on the table now. His nails were bitten down way below the distal edge into the body of the nail. Had they always been like that? Toby couldn’t remember.
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 28
