Fleishman Is in Trouble Read online

  Hr, which was what his preferred dating app was called, was now his first-thing-in-the-morning check. It had replaced Facebook, since when he looked at Facebook, he became despondent and overwhelmed by the number of people he hadn’t yet told about his divorce. But Facebook was also a landscape of roads not taken and moments of bliss, real or staged, that he couldn’t bear. The marriages that seemed plain and the posts that seemed incidental and not pointed, because they telegraphed not an aggressively great status in life but a just-fine one, those were the ones that left him clutching his heart. Toby hadn’t dreamed of great and transcendent things for his marriage. He had parents. He wasn’t an idiot. He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn’t he just have regular, silly things? His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She’d apparently gotten three strikes. “What a night,” she’d written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write “Enjoy this for now” or “All desire is death.” It was best to stay off Facebook.

  Less Facebook left him more time for dating apps, of which he had four: Hr; Choose, which was supposed to be for Jews, though he found some Asian women and a few Catholics there, too; Forage, which was an old website that had been updated for smartphone use but was still used almost exclusively by Luddites, of which he was one, maybe; and Reach, through which only women could initiate contact, and that was just as well with him at first, since he was still trying to gauge exactly how appealing he was in his current state: still just five-five, still with his hair, some creases around the mouth, some bags beneath his eyes, but still thin, and don’t forget, still with his hair.

  It was Hr that emerged as his clear favorite. It greeted him with an inspirational quote while it loaded, something sunny like “Eye of the tiger!” or “Go get ’em, boss!” One of his hepatology fellows, Joanie, had downloaded it for him one day. Toby had been upset by a text that Rachel had sent about child support (she’d called it “alimony”—accidentally, she said, but who was she kidding?). It had put Toby in a bad mood and he had snapped when Logan, another fellow, had misread an MRI in a way that could happen to anyone—in a way that was a teaching opportunity for Toby, not a snapping one. Logan looked surprised, and Toby felt he had no recourse but to tell them: He and Rachel had separated and would be divorcing. He was sorry, but he was on edge. There were about ten seconds of silence before Logan said, “Are you doing okay?” Toby said, “Yes, I’ve had a lot of time to process this.” And Joanie, with a let’s-call-it-nontraditional nose and colorless hair that she arranged as much over her face as possible, smiled with half her mouth and said, “Well, then. This will be fun.”

  He tried not to smile while she spoke. He tried to squint seriously like he was consulting on a patient, but he couldn’t help it. It hadn’t occurred to him that his news could ever be received as anything but tragic. He thought he’d have to look at his shoes in sadness every time it came up, out of some kind of respect or decorum. But he had suffered enough. He had suffered for years in the limbo of failure and self-immolation that was the end of his marriage—that was the end of any marriage. Yes! This will be fun! He looked out the window just then and saw that it was summer. It was summer!

  He looked back at his phone where Joanie was pointing. She showed him a number in the corner that allowed the woman to rate her own “availability” at any particular moment.

  “Like if she’s free right now?” Toby asked, his face scrunched at his phone.

  “Like how ready to go she is!” Logan said.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  The fellows all laughed. “How horny they are!” Logan said. Toby looked at Logan’s handsome, large-jawed face. A guy saying that back in Toby’s day was a lascivious creep. He looked over at Joanie to see if she was offended or uncomfortable, but she was laughing. The sexual conversation was now out in the open, as accessible as this free app he was now somehow downloading. How horny they are, Toby’s mind repeated for him, and Toby, still aware that he was a professional in a professional setting, treated this as medical data and nodded and thought about autopsies in order to forestall an erection.

  Later, in the doctors’ lounge, he pretended to be casually checking email but he was actually exploring his new app. It quickly proved too much for him. He was immediately paralyzed by the amount of information that needed to be input into his member profile: The questions were inane, and the truth was either too banal or too ugly to put out into the world, and so he sat and stared at the questions, knowing the truth wouldn’t quite work. What would he be if he weren’t what he was (a book critic is somewhat true and a good choice, right?), what his spirit animal was (what? What did that mean?), his favorite food (hummus? It was true, but is there a food that’s less sexy than hummus? There is not), his favorite movie (he wanted to put down Annie Hall but wasn’t sure that was still okay), how he liked to spend a rainy afternoon (reading and watching porn and masturbating).

  He was stymied. It wasn’t that he couldn’t fill out the forms; it wasn’t that he wasn’t ready to date—truly, by the time a marriage is over and the leaving is done, a person is more than ready for something new. But the paperwork. As if the prospect of combing through New Yorkers looking for love weren’t its own existential nightmare. He had done this when he was younger, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he resolved it? Hadn’t he ended this bullshit by getting married?

  * * *

  —

  THEN ONE SATURDAY morning, two weeks after he moved out of Rachel’s place, Toby woke up and realized he was alone. His new apartment seemed like a set in a depressing play, bare and filled so sparsely with objects that had been purchased not from need or desire but simply to fill the space. Nothing was strewn anywhere, like in his old apartment, which had been alive with a family rushing to the flute concert and the dance recital and the playdate and the birthday party. Now there was a brown microfiber couch and a gray chair that turned into a futon and a stupid swirly orange rug that was going mudwater brown at its edges already and a TV whose wires were unruly and unhideable and a shitty particleboard bookshelf and everything stayed the same every day. Nothing moved. The kids came in and out but they were guests now, and nothing moved. The light coming in every morning was blue, then yellow, then white, then blue again, but nothing moved. The kids came after school and ate dinner and did homework, but he walked them home and came back and it was as if they hadn’t just been there. It felt like a fake life.

  And it was so, so quiet. He used to like the quiet, when it was intermittent. “Can you hear that?” he would ask Rachel when the kids were gone to school or camp or they both had playdates. The nothing was almost its own sound. Now the nothing wasn’t the exception; it was the condition. Now the nothing was his roommate.

  And so he sat down on the beanbag chair he had bought for Solly and pulled on his chest hair with his right hand as he filled out with his left hand the Hr form finally with scientifically titrated answers (job: book critic; spirit animal: schnauzer; food: chicken Caesar salad; movie: Rocky II; rainy afternoon: a crossword puzzle, a museum, a walk—“Why should rain keep you inside?”). It wasn’t not true, except for the Caesar salad. Toby’s dedication to never once using an added fat was held like a patriotic or religious principle.

  He clicked Send Form and watched his profile do its loading action, and within what felt like a millisecond, women were pummeling him with messages:

  Hey you.

  Hi there.

  Whazzup?

  [tongue emoji]

  [purple devil emoji]

  This is my ironic poke.

  [eyes looking emoji]

  [jokey face emoji]

  [eggplant emoji]

  [double purple devil emoji]

  [investigator emoji]

  [woman dancing possib
le samba in evening gown emoji]

  Let’s fuck?

  Well, friends, he lost a full day of his life that weekend. Or maybe it was more? Maybe it was a day and a half? Two days? Our friend Seth called him twice during that time and it didn’t go straight to voicemail, but it went after-seeing-Seth-was-calling straight to voicemail. The sun went up, the sun went down, he realized he’d had to pee for an hour, and at some point he thought to order Chinese food (steamed chicken and vegetables, no water chestnuts, please), but mostly he remained aloft on the wind of the messages he was getting—women who wanted to LOL at his every joke, and send winkies, and pictures, and set his weary heart afire with double entendre. Some sent emojis like [smiley face] or [winky face]. Some sent absolute operas with their emojis, like: [woman raising her hand emoji] plus [male construction worker emoji] plus [man and woman emoji] plus [bathtub emoji], which he cannot begin to describe how this turned him on. He swiped and swiped, gobsmacked at the sheer volume. Face, face, face, face, full body, face, face, just collarbone, face, face, face, just ass crack, face, tongue, just sideboob, oh man just lips, face. It was dark on the second day when it occurred to him that he had to take action on some of these conversations. He realized it because a woman he was messaging with wrote, So will I see that cute face anytime soon or not? He realized that what was happening on his phone, which was now streaked and hot to the touch, was also happening in real life. He looked up briefly and felt the strain of his eyes refocusing on the room around him. He hadn’t stopped smiling for hours now, but he looked around and the room was dark, which made him panic a little, and suddenly he remembered that very little in the world stands still like this, that forward momentum will always pluck you out of your fugue-jelly state.

  He’d initially been democratic in his search parameters on the subject of age. Anyone over twenty-five who wasn’t yet dead was fair game, he’d figured, though he quickly began to tire of looking at the young ones. It wasn’t how it ached to see their youth, how their skin still showed glow and bounce, how they delighted in the seam of their buttock folding over the top of their thigh like it was on springs—though it absolutely did ache to see those things. It wasn’t how they so clearly believed it would always be like this, or perhaps how they knew it wouldn’t and so decided to enjoy it; that would be worse, if they were enjoying their youth because they knew it wouldn’t last, because who had the sense to do that? It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.

  Toby knew about consequences. He was living them. Before and after his hookups, there was something like a conversation. He quickly learned that that conversation had the potential to make him feel like he wanted to die. People under forty had optimism. They had optimism for the future; they didn’t accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity. They had velocity. He couldn’t bear velocity just at that moment.

  And, practically, they mostly still wanted children—even the ones who pretended they didn’t out of some silly imperative to seem cool or wild or other or invulnerable or more like a man, as if that’s what men wanted. These young women could be easily led astray by kindness, and Toby didn’t want to have to worry that treating a woman well would result in some sort of expectation of an upward, forward-pointing trajectory. He could not imagine himself on any trajectory right now, much less an upward, forward-pointing one. He knew that was an unpopular point of view for a man in his position—our friend Seth would barely believe him if he confessed this; his own Hr search parameters had begun at twenty and expired at twenty-seven despite the fact that he, like us, was forty-one.

  “Why not nineteen?” Toby asked. “Or eighteen even? That’s legal.”

  “I’m not a perv,” Seth said, even though there were literally hundreds of women who would absolutely have classified Seth as a perv.

  So Toby changed his search parameters to thirty-eight to forty-one, then forty to fifty, what the hell, and it was there that he found his gold mine: endlessly horny, sexually curious women who knew their value, who were feeling out something new, and whose faces didn’t force him to have existential questions about youth and responsibility. There he found women, most of whom were divorced, and most of whom had been discharged of their marital duties with a great second wind of energy, with the wonder of new chance flowing through their lymph, which he could smell through his phone like a pheromone.

  There were other benefits to dating women his age. They weren’t porny in their avatar poses, the way the younger ones were. It was only this strange millennial generation that thought that a bitten lip or open mouth or half-closed eyes or totally leaned-back posture (where were her hands?) was alluring—that only giddy, half-dead submission could turn a man on. And maybe it was true for some—maybe it was true for the young men whose first primary sexual relationships were with porn—but not for him. The women who took a nice photo with a smile, who looked directly into the camera without artifice—those were the women who were interesting to him. They were the ones who were starting all over, like him, and waking up like newborn birds in a nest, eyes just opening, also just like him. Slowly, slowly, he began to see through their pictures and profiles a way to move on. “It’s like they’re showing me the way,” he’d tell me. “It’s like they’re leading me to the next version of myself.” He had begun, through these women and their confidence, to see a way to reenter the world.

  The lesson? Fill out the form, even when it fills you with dread. The other lesson? Go with what you want instead of what you are supposed to want. All around him were instruction manuals on middle age: the car you should want to drive, the cocktail waitress you should want to fuck. More and more he found that he had to block these things out and ask himself what his particular condition required. It was never a sports car; it was rarely a cocktail waitress.

  So as he was entering the park that morning, his need for confirmation of his fellow New Yorkers as a rabid bunch of writhing hornballs who could not make it to lunchtime without an orgasm validated, his phone began to ring and it disconcerted him for a minute. It was Joanie, her blushing ID photo picture coming up through the hospital’s internal caller app. Her picture overtook the picture of a personal trainer in a bikini, confusing the superhighway in his brain that had been prepping itself for lust.

  “We have a consult in the ER, nonresponsive woman,” Joanie said.

  “Okay, I’ll be there in twenty,” Toby told her. “I had the kids this morning unexpectedly.”

  He hung up and saw a text message. It was from Tess.

  We still on for tonight?

  He hated to leave the kids, particularly on a Friday night. But more than that, he hated Rachel. His weekend wasn’t supposed to start till tomorrow. Fuck all of it, he thought.

  Of course. Looking forward to it.

  * * *

  —

  TRULY, NONE OF us could have predicted that this was how it would end up for Toby. We were twenty when we met on our junior years abroad in Israel. We didn’t know yet that there were variations on insecurity; we thought we were all maximally insecure, and, sure, those insecurities took different shapes, but we were all suffering. We all had faith we’d eventually get over it, though. We didn’t know that a happy future wasn’t guaranteed to us, that it wasn’t our right. But about Toby specifically, we didn’t know that being short and fat as a child had made him unacceptable in his own eyes—first in his mother’s eyes, and then in his own, and then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, everyone else’s. We didn’t know yet that he wasn’t going to grow anymore—he’d read somewhere that people sometimes sprout up a few inches in their early twenties. Most of all, we didn’t know how severe the damage had been to him for bein
g someone who had desires and wanted to be desired back and hadn’t been.

  The night we met, twenty years ago, he was sitting on the floor of a tourist trap called the Hous [sic] of Elixir, where they served warm wine with a sugared rim, which is disgusting to think about now but was exotic-seeming at the time. Bob Marley was playing—Bob Marley was the only CD the place owned, and so it was always playing, though we didn’t know this yet. Toby was sitting against a wall, looking to his left, watching Seth move in on one of the waitresses. Seth was tall and athletic and had a floppy, prep school haircut. Toby’s hair would never hang down if he grew it out; it would just grow upward and outward. He and Seth were new roommates. They’d met three days earlier and had been out together every night, and every night, Toby watched a scene like this. By the second night, he no longer wondered if having Seth as his roommate was a great twist of luck or the worst thing to happen to his already tattered self-image.

  The waitress had spent the previous hour ignoring Seth, probably used to the hypnotic effect she had on recently arrived American students. But she had never encountered Seth before. He kept asking her how to say different words on the English menu in Hebrew, and these were just factual questions so why shouldn’t she answer them? “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, “just tell me. I’m new in this country. Please, we are compadres, we are comrades, we are countrymen.” Toby watched as her tide rose toward him like he was the moon. She grew warmer and began leaning her body closer while she was reading what he was pointing at, and then watching his face as he repeated it back to her. It was amazing, the way people melted onto Seth—the way women melted onto the Seths of the world. Toby had been in college for two years by then, long enough to learn that high school had not been an anomaly. He had learned that he was permanently relegated to support staff status for guys like Seth. It was either his height, or his feelings about his height, or maybe he just truly lacked charm and good looks and charisma. Whatever it was, he watched those Seths of the world perform an animal mating dance in public in a way he would never dare to.