Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  After dinner, Toby was winning his fourth consecutive Uno game against Solly when he got a call from the hospital. It was Clay. Karen Cooper had become unresponsive—she had been talking to her children and suddenly went unconscious. She was headed into a CT scan now.

  “Stroke,” he said. “Minimal brain activity.”

  Toby rubbed his eyes. “Has Mr. Cooper been told?”

  “Dr. Lintz told him.”

  Toby pulled on his earlobes. He shouldn’t have taken another day off. He was a few days away from a promotion and he didn’t want to give anyone any reason not to offer it to him. But also, he was Karen Cooper’s doctor, and it was his duty to inform the family. He had problems, but he had to be responsible. He had given them hope. Now it was time to take it away.

  He asked Hannah and Solly if they wouldn’t mind him running to the hospital for an hour. “I have a patient who is dying. I have to talk to her family.”

  “Why didn’t you stop her from dying?” Solly asked.

  “It’s not always up to me.”

  Toby combed his hair and left the apartment, but while he waited for the elevator—it was a building with 150 apartments and only had two elevators—Solly came out calling his name.

  “What is it?” Toby asked.

  “We want to go with you.”

  The elevator door opened. He let it close. “Okay, just get ready fast. And bring books.”

  When he got to the hospital, Karen’s bed was still empty, but David Cooper was in her room. “What does this mean?” he asked, his hands in his hair. “I thought the surgery worked.”

  Toby asked Clay to get Mr. Cooper some water, but he flung his arm to the side to dismiss it and said, “How could this have happened? I thought she was fine.”

  Toby told him the surgery had been successful. The encephalopathy was resolved when the liver was removed. The organ had taken. But they suspected that Karen had had a hemorrhagic stroke—a bad one—and that was always a possibility after any surgery. She bled into her brain. It was random. It was one of the many things in medicine that couldn’t be foreseen. She was being taken for a CT scan to confirm. But they didn’t really need to. She hadn’t responded to any of the reflex tests that the resident had administered.

  “I’m sorry,” Toby said. “We don’t know a lot yet. But this isn’t looking good.”

  “When will we know?”

  “In a few hours. Why don’t you go home and have dinner with your children. I’ll call you as soon as we know.”

  David looked at the empty bed. “I can’t leave her alone here.”

  “You’re not. You’re leaving her with us.”

  David needed some time to absorb the things he couldn’t believe. Toby had heard from other doctors who worked with a poorer clientele that less fortunate people are more accepting of these things. Not the rich ones. Rich patients couldn’t believe that money couldn’t help, that their positions and club memberships and status couldn’t help. They couldn’t believe that nobody was coming to save them. But nobody was coming to save them.

  David left the room, like Toby suggested, and Toby went to check with radiology. They were right; it was a hemorrhagic stroke. Surgery came in and said there was nothing they could do. The poor woman. She had just come to. She had started talking. It felt like she might have made it through this. They’d watched everything so carefully. Surviving a rare illness only to buy it with something as banal as a surgical stroke—it was like a bad joke. He headed down the hall, but when he turned the corner to the door to the stairwell, he saw David in the hallway, talking to Karen’s friend Amy. He watched as David told her the news and hugged her. David left in the elevator, and Amy just stared at her phone, unsure what to do. She looked up and spotted Toby.

  “Dr. Fleishman, is it true?”

  “I’m sorry. This is just very bad luck.”

  “Is she going to die?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know. She’s having tests done now. It’s not looking great.”

  Amy began to cry. Toby steered her toward the family lounge, but before they could get there, she turned to him.

  “She was really unhappy,” Amy said. “She had been unhappy for such a long time, but the kids, blah blah blah, you know how it is.”

  “I do.”

  “She was going to leave David.”

  Toby shook his head. “What?”

  “He cheats on her. He doesn’t give her access to the money. He gives her an allowance. Can you imagine? She gets to raise the kids and keep the house nice and entertain his asshole friends on poker night. She was a lawyer.”

  Toby sat, stunned, and realizing that his entire problem in life was that he could still be stunned by information that revealed what seemed to be true most of the time, which was that things weren’t what they seemed.

  Toby almost said, “But they seem fine,” and then remembered that he had never known Karen Cooper to be conscious. Instead he said, “Mr. Cooper seemed very devoted.”

  “Of course he did. Have you ever been married?”

  “I— Yes.” She waited. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”

  She laughed, incredulous. “Now she’s going to die. I can’t believe that now she’s going to fucking die. You know, anyone who sees this will think it’s a great tragedy that this happened to such a young woman. But they won’t realize that the actual tragedy is that she was just about to get away from him.”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS SO fucking hot. Toby opened all the windows while the super awaited some magical part for his air-conditioner that had to be ordered and couldn’t be found in all of Manhattan. He lay on his bed in just his boxer shorts, on top of the blanket, and he thought about opening his app. Hannah walked in and complained that Solly had been in the bathroom for an hour. Toby went to investigate only to find Solly lying on the floor because the tiles were cold.

  At nine at night, the doorbell rang. He opened it, thinking it might be the super, but it was a man wearing a bike helmet.

  “Tobin Fleishman?”

  The man handed him a manila envelope with the return address of a law office, which he opened to find that New York State had sent him a writ of divorce and two yellow Post-it tabs to indicate where his signature was required to end his marriage forever. He let out a laugh. How could his marriage be any more over than it was?

  If Carla were around, he would have told her about his revenge fantasies. They included refusing to sign the papers at all and returning the papers back to Rachel, care of Sam Rothberg at the home of Miriam Rothberg. He couldn’t think of anything else. It was so hot even his revenge fantasies had no juice. The world had become vile.

  “Let’s be the kind of people who have lunch after their divorce papers are signed,” Rachel had said as they left the lawyer’s office after presenting their list of divided assets two months before. “Let’s be people who can elevate out of this.”

  “You taking a new yoga class?” he’d asked.

  “Your hostility and your sarcasm are always so small-minded, Toby,” she’d said. “You can’t pull off this anger. It doesn’t look good on you.” He began to walk away, but she caught up with him. “One day, and I hope it’s very soon for your sake, and especially for the children’s sake, you’ll have a revelation about how angry you are. Once you stop being so angry, your world will get better. Your problems will be solved.”

  “No, once I’m done with you my problems will be solved.”

  “See?”

  “The real problem is that I’ll never be done with you,” Toby had said. “You will be the lesser parent to my children for as long as we’re all alive. I will never get to see the day where my children had the adequate mother they deserved.”

  “How can you say that to me? How can you keep punishing me for doing what I had to do?”<
br />
  “You didn’t have to do any of it. You wanted it.”

  “You know, if I were a man—”

  “Oh, fuck you with the ‘if I were a man’ stuff. Seriously. If you were a man then I’d say you were a shitty father.”

  He fell asleep with the papers on the pillow next to him. He dreamed he was fucking Rachel. He couldn’t identify the era—if it was the miraculous early days, or the perfunctory postpartum years, or the rage-sex later ones.

  “Why are we doing this?” he kept asking in the dream.

  She didn’t answer.

  “I defended you!” he yelled at her. “I defended you!”

  She just looked at him curiously until she finally closed her eyes and screamed.

  * * *

  —

  HE WOKE UP feeling certain excitement, and he stayed on his back in bed, a light sweat covering his body as he stared at the ceiling beneath the weight of his big, sweaty boner. The dream felt like a memory, though he was absolutely sure that he’d never screamed at her during sex and he was just as sure she never screamed that way either. The best he could trace the surroundings in the dream was to a vacation they took in Santa Cruz, right after their wedding. It wasn’t their honeymoon. Their honeymoon was in Hawaii, a year later, when Rachel could get off from work and Toby had a break in his rotation schedule. But right after their wedding, the next morning, so as not to have to spend even more time with Toby’s miserable family, they drove north out of L.A. to a motel in Santa Cruz, back when she was okay staying at motels.

  The place was right on the water, their patio a slab of concrete that dangled off a gigantic cliff to the beach below. Their room smelled musty and old, and the sheets smelled like they’d been in a closet that had the kind of moth repellent that was absolutely not cedar.

  They walked through town each day, making fun of the hippies. They went to the Mystery Spot, Toby dazzling her with tales that could not possibly be true about the magnets in the Earth. (“They say,” he whispered as he passed by one of the magnetic rocks, “that the magnet only works for people who lost their virginity before they were fourteen.” She made a show of her entire body flailing over to the rock as if she couldn’t stop it. They were asked to leave after ten minutes.)

  At night, as the sun went down, they watched the surfers below, maybe a hundred of them every day, while the motel tried to pretend it was a hotel and served vinegary wine and shitty cheese for a twilight cocktail hour. What did the Toby Fleishmans know to be cynical? They loved it.

  “It seems so clear to me,” she’d said, “that the ocean would rather you didn’t surf on it. If it wanted you, it would give you a more sustained wave.”

  “I think that’s the point,” he’d said. They were sitting on the bench on their balcony, she upright and he lying down, his legs crossed over her lap.

  “And what do you have to show for it? Look at them. They climb onto their boards, and they fall right down. It’s so sad. Even the ones that make it a few feet, where does it get them?”

  “They’re doing it for the pleasure of doing it.”

  “I can’t imagine ever doing something just for the pleasure of doing it.”

  “Uh, last night seemed to be an exception to this rule.”

  “Even that. Even that, you’re having sex with your husband to solidify something. Even sex isn’t something you do just to do. You do it to prove something, or to build closeness.”

  “I don’t. I do it because I love you.”

  She thought about this, her fingers lightly brushing his leg hair back and forth. “You have really great calves,” she’d said.

  “Don’t objectify me,” he’d said.

  “They’re really, I don’t know, manly. They turn me on.”

  “Think you might find a purpose to reenter the bed chamber over there with me?”

  “I’ll come up with something.”

  For a few minutes, lying in his bed, still in the vapor of his dream, he’d forgotten what had happened to them. For a few minutes, he’d forgotten that they were a mess. He didn’t like remembering the bad moments, but he didn’t like remembering those moments, either. He liked to find the point in every single memory, even the good ones, where she was telling him who she really was. If he could do that, this could never happen to him again. He whacked off quickly, too quickly, then got out of bed and spent the next hour hating himself for letting his guard down so egregiously as to dream of her.

  * * *

  —

  TOBY’S COUSIN CHERRY, who was his favorite cousin growing up, lived in New York, unlike all his other cousins. The two or three times they visited before his father stopped speaking with her mother, Toby would tell her that when he grew up he wanted to live her life. He wanted to ride trains and eat pretzels from carts and see people kissing on the street late at night. Cherry was seven years older than him, and, by the time Toby moved to New York for college, a schoolteacher. She was the first family member he introduced Rachel to. Rachel was nice to her, or maybe he didn’t notice that she wasn’t. When Toby called Cherry this year to tell her about his divorce, Cherry did him the kindness of at least pretending to be sad for him.

  Now Cherry called to see if he maybe needed a night off from the kids. Toby thought for a minute. My college roommate, Sonia, was having her annual party the next night, Saturday, and I’d invited him and Seth, who hadn’t been to one of Sonia’s parties since her twenty-third birthday. “Do you think you can come tomorrow instead? I had a party I was supposed to go to and I didn’t really want to leave the kids with a babysitter….”

  The next night, Cherry came in to the city with her two daughters, who were teenagers, to take the kids to dinner. “We’ll bring them home in one piece,” Cherry said. “I promise.”

  “What time should I be home by?” Toby asked.

  “Where are you going, Dad?” Solly looked alarmed.

  “Just to a birthday party. I’ll be home tonight.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cherry said. “You take the night off. We’re going to go to dinner and then come back and watch TV until you get home. Have fun. Really. Promise me.”

  They left, and Toby adjourned to his closet to consider two nearly identical shirts. The doorbell rang. It was Seth.

  “Pregame!” Seth said. He held up a six-pack of beer.

  “The carbs, man. I think I have vodka in the freezer. And a bottle of sparkling rosé in the fridge.”

  “Sparkling rosé? Dude.”

  “It was from a date I had a month ago.” Toby thought for a second. “Oh, wait, this is not a good story.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I met her on Hr, and we did the usual sexting thing before, and then we decided to meet. Anyway, so we go out to that bro bar on Second, we have a bunch of drinks, we have a hilarious time, then on the way back she insists on buying two bottles of sparkling rosé. And who am I to stop her?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we get back here, and she does this insane striptease, laughing the whole time.”

  “That’s pretty hot.”

  “We get to the bedroom and I’m too drunk. I can’t get it up. And I’m so stressed out about this, and she’s giving me the speech about how this is okay and it happens to everyone.”

  “Did you have any Vitamin V?”

  “Viagra? No! I’m forty-one.”

  “Oh, I always carry one around.”

  “It happens to you?”

  “Nah. You carry it like Dumbo’s feather. Then nothing ever happens.”

  “Now I know.”

  “You should have stuck with her,” Seth said. “Only the real caretaker archetypes pull that speech out.”

  “Maybe it was the Beggar Woman’s curse coming true.”

  “I don’t remember that one. May you find yourself being lap-danced upon by
a filthy-minded lawyer burping on sparkling rosé bubbles when your dick stops working.”

  Toby looked in the mirror, straightened his collar, and followed Seth out the door.

  * * *

  —

  AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.

  Adam and I arrived at Sonia’s party, which was at a new bar uptown, close to eleven P.M. We’d just gotten off the plane from Disney World, where we’d spent the last three days, brought the kids home to the babysitter, then driven back to the city. Our flight had been delayed for four hours. Adam was annoyed the whole car ride.

  “This party is never good,” he said. “I’m exhausted. Why can’t we just skip this?”

  But I was twenty again, and I couldn’t bear that my friends were all gathered in one place and I wasn’t there. The first person I saw when I arrived was Jennifer Alkon—she of Seth’s Israeli yearnings and recent fifth base—in deep conversation with Danielle. The second person I saw was Seth, who was advancing on us.

  “Is this the man who thawed Libby Epstein’s heart?” Seth asked. “Seth Morris.” Adam showed no recognition. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Adam nodded, unsure why it was nice to finally meet him. I hadn’t told Adam about Seth ever, I think. I hardly ever told him about any of these people.

  Toby found us. “How was Disney?” he asked. “We took the kids a few years ago.”

  Adam shook his head. “I loved it. It’s such a nice place. People greet you, they call the kids by name. It’s clean. It’s safe. Libby found it soul-crushing. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she hates joy.” He was still smiling, but it was his worn-out smile. He walked away.

  “He really gets you,” Toby said to me.