Fleishman Is in Trouble Read online

  I had taken a bus down from Tel Aviv with my roommate, Lori, a bucktoothed redhead from a part of Missouri that wasn’t St. Louis—this would be the first and maybe only night we ever spent together recreationally in Israel. We sat down next to Toby on the floor, and while Lori looked around, I watched him watch Seth watch the waitress, a National Geographic Channel circle jerk. The waitress was now sitting on the floor with Seth. I was sitting, too, but with my arms across my midsection. Toby turned to take a drink from his wine and saw me watching him.

  “I thought Israelis learned defense skills in the military,” he said.

  He was from Los Angeles and a bio major at Princeton. He came from a family of doctors and had always wanted to do something in medicine. I was from Brooklyn, from a family full of girls who were expected to transfer from their childhood bedrooms to the bedrooms of their husband’s homes with no pit stops along the way. I was commuting to NYU, and a junior abroad program in a country my mother approved of was the only way I could get out of the house. Toby and I kept talking, watching Seth seduce the waitress, commenting on it like we were sports broadcasters. Within five words of each other, I knew we understood each other. Our defenses were the same: sarcasm, pettiness, a protective well-readness that we hoped conveyed that we were smarter than everyone. I liked him. I could have even like-liked him.

  But: Two hours later, Lori announced that the last bus to Tel Aviv was leaving in fifteen minutes. He said he’d walk me to the bus stop, and I began to stand and then so did he, but when he stopped standing, I kept going, one inch, two inches, three inches. Toby was used to being short; I wasn’t used to being very tall. I was only five-eight, which was tall but not giant—well, depending on who you’re standing next to. My poor regard for my own body couldn’t withstand the kind of hulking that a relationship with Toby would have required. I couldn’t be larger than a man in bed, or at the movies or at a dinner table or, honestly, even on the phone. I didn’t want to feel big and graceless and a thousand pounds of just lumbering; I didn’t want to have to contend with that every time his hand reached under my shirt. I felt too bad about myself already. I immediately said to him, “I feel like you and this girl from my dorm might get along?” I said it to either deflect what I thought might have been his interest, or to make up for how bad I felt for counting him out immediately. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled with just his lips. We walked out the door to the bus, and we saw Seth in a shadow kissing the waitress, and we both ignored it and talked about our classes, lest sex show up between us. Toby wasn’t heartbroken; he didn’t want me, either, except that we both wanted somebody.

  After that night, Toby and I met in Jerusalem on and off, first by going back to the Hous of Elixir the next week and being happy to see each other again, then by making intentional plans on our dorm telephones. Seth would come to town with Toby, where he would chase all the skinny girls who knew how to flirt. Toby and I stood and watched them, reducing them to caricatures, even as we shook our heads in bewilderment over how easy it all seemed to come to them. I found a guy that year eventually—Marc—who loved singing the Les Mis soundtrack on the Tel Aviv beach, spreading his arms wide as he sang, and going moisturizer shopping at Dizengoff Center with me and maybe you can see where this is going. He dumped me suddenly and unceremoniously because I never dumped anyone; I never had faith there would be anyone else. Toby told me he thought Marc was trying to let me down easy because I deserved better than a boyfriend who wasn’t attracted to me, but then I saw Marc spooning with another girl in another dorm, and I came to Jerusalem to see Toby and cry.

  “Why am I such an idiot?” I asked him.

  Toby had never understood what I liked about Marc. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re so special and Marc is so dumb and regular.”

  That was nice, but I still did two shots of Goldschläger, which was one and a half too many shots for me, even in my youth. We sat on a curb of the cobblestoned Ben Yehuda Street, where no cars were permitted. I leaned against his shoulder, which required a full coccyx-to-neck side curl, since his shoulder reached considerably below any part of my head, and so that I had to bend my torso-neck-head into the shape of a C. He patted the top of my head, wondering how ridiculous we looked to passersby.

  Then, amid the too-drunk American students crowding Ben Yehuda came Seth, walking alone. He saw us and sat down on my other side.

  “What’s going on, guys?” he asked.

  “Marc dumped me. He said he was never that into me.”

  “That’s because you don’t have a penis,” Seth answered. “You are too pretty to be limiting your options this young.” I smiled through the snot on my face and switched my lean toward Seth. Seth’s shoulder was higher than mine when we sat and so my new lean had more dignity.

  That was November, right before Thanksgiving, and it marked the time that we became a predictable threesome. We saw each other every Thursday night, then on Saturday night, too, and always on holidays. During Passover break, when half our fellow students went back to the States to visit their families, we instead went on a hiking trip to the Galilee with a group of randoms who organized it through expat bulletin boards. We hiked through waterfalls at sunrise and at sundown we ate pigeon that we were told was chicken. We sat one night on the banks of the sea and listened to a Christian pastor who was converting to Judaism tell the story of his life. It was on that trip that Seth introduced me to cigarettes, and then pot, and boy, it was like I discovered the cure for myself. We spent our last night in Israel together, high and crazy, and took separate flights out the next day. The three of us stayed close even after we returned home, straight through college, after Toby graduated from medical school, after my first published article in a cheerleader magazine, after Seth’s first brush with the SEC. It was only after Toby got married that we all seemed to drift apart.

  About twelve years ago, I married a lawyer and had kids and moved to the suburbs. I had long since faded from Toby’s life—we’d barely spoken since I’d gotten married. I thought of him with sadness sometimes. Sometimes months would go by and I wouldn’t think of him even once.

  * * *

  —

  THEN, THIS PAST June, my phone rang. I was in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. My husband, Adam, was putting the kids into bed. Toby’s number was the same as it had been years ago. His name flashed across the screen like it was nothing, like it was a regular occurrence.

  “Toby Fleishman.” I turned the sink off, dried my hands, and turned around, leaning against the sink.

  “Elizabeth Epstein,” he said.

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir,” I said. “My name has been Elizabeth Slater for quite some time.”

  “Really? In your magazine, it always says Epstein.”

  “I’m afraid you have the wrong number, sir,” I said. “I haven’t been in a magazine in quite some time.”

  “Really?”

  “Toby,” I said. “Toby, what is going on?”

  He told me he was getting a divorce, and that his therapist had said to reconnect with friends that he missed as one of his steps toward “reclaiming his life.” “That’s her phrase, not mine, I swear.” No, it wasn’t a surprise. Yes, it was a long time coming. Yes, he had big gaping wounds in his stomach and his spleen and he was leaking fluids at an untenable rate. Yes, she got the apartment and the car and the house in the Hamptons.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “It turned out she was crazy. I worked so hard to find someone who wasn’t crazy and I ended up with someone crazy. We went to a couples therapist. He told her that she had too much contempt. He said contempt is one of the four horsemen of the marital apocalypse.”

  “What are the other three?” I asked.

  “Maybe one is shutting down? Oh, defensiveness. There’s a fourth. Honestly, I can’t remember.”

  “Is one of t
hem being a total bitch?” From my son’s bedroom, Adam shushed me. What was the point of owning a big fucking house in the suburbs if you couldn’t laugh in your kitchen at night? I whispered, “It has to be that one of them is being a total bitch.”

  The last time I’d seen him was years ago, when Adam and I went over to their place for dinner, and it was a nightmare. Sweet, affable Adam tried to make conversation with Rachel about the agency business, and she answered his questions like she was a Miss America pageant contestant, in full sentences, no room for follow-up, and kept rushing the courses. At the end of the dinner, Adam said goodbye and thank you and I didn’t. I just looked at Toby and left.

  Anyway, the night he called me, Toby had prepared an entire, tearful speech about what he’d been through, meant to dissolve any anger I had—any anger I righteously had—so that he could just have a friend again. “Be angry at me later,” it went. “I deserve it. But I could use a friend.” Maybe his voice would crack when he said “friend” and I would hear that he was for real.

  But something else happened when I saw his name on my phone. I traveled back in time to the last place he left me. I heard the anxiety in his voice and I was filled with love and relief, and I filed my catalog of grievances for a later date.

  I was going through something right then, too. I had left my job as a staff writer for a men’s magazine about two years before. I was now what was called a stay-at-home mother, a temporary occupation with no prospect of promotion that worked so hard to differentiate itself from job-working that it confined me to semantic house arrest, though certainly I was allowed to carpool and go to the store. When I told people what I did, they’d say, “Being a mother is the hardest job there is.” But it wasn’t. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick. Back when I had a job, no one ever said to me, “Having an actual job and being a mother is the hardest job there is.” We had to not say those things so that we could tiptoe around all the feelings of inadequacy that we projected onto the stay-at-home mothers; in fact, you couldn’t even ask a woman you suspected of stay-at-homery what she did because there was no not-awkward way to ask it. (“Do you work?” I once asked a woman back when I had a job. “Of course I work,” she said. “I’m a mom.” But I was a mom, too, so what was what I did called?) But also: No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too. Keeping track of your kids from afar isn’t easier. Entrusting them to a stranger who was available for babysitting by virtue of the fact that she was incapable of doing anything else is not something that fills a person with faith and relaxation. Now that I have worked and stayed at home, I can confirm all of this. Now that I stay at home, I can say it out loud. But now that I don’t work, no one is listening. No one listens to stay-at-home mothers, which, I guess, is why we were so careful about their feelings in the first place.

  Anyway.

  It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff, which was months before you’d even think of enrolling a child in soccer, and then organized their attendant carpools. I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.

  “Why haven’t you been in touch?” I asked Toby.

  “We would fight in public,” he said. “It was too embarrassing. She just didn’t care who she started in front of.”

  “I thought it was me!” I told him. “That whole time, I thought maybe this is a perfectly normal, nice person and that she just couldn’t bear me and turned you against me.” Now, suddenly, I couldn’t believe I ever thought that. “She was a horrible person, truly. I hated her the minute I met her.”

  That first night, on the phone, Toby was so grateful that I wasn’t going to make him pay for his abandonment of me or treat him like an injured kitten that he became giddy, and he laughed more and so I laughed more. And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.

  * * *

  —

  WE MET FOR lunch in the Village after that first conversation, at a restaurant that had replaced a diner we used to eat at when Toby was in medical school. It was hard to look at his face and see the changes on it—in my mind, he’d frozen in time the way Han Solo did at the end of The Empire Strikes Back: the image of his face in a sad, panicked goodbye the last time I’d seen him.

  “She was just angry all the time,” he told me.

  I asked him the questions he hated: So then what happened? It’s so drastic and hard to end a marriage. Something had to have happened. Did she cheat on you? Did you cheat on her? Did you hate her friends? Did the kids kill her libido? But marriage is vast and mysterious and private. You could not scientifically compare two marriages for all of the variance of factors, most particularly what two specific people can tolerate. I made my face placid and curious, the way I did during my old magazine interviews, pretending the stakes were just regular when really everything hung on the answers.

  “But you’re not asking about now,” he said. He pulled out his phone, opened it up, and my God. “Look at all them.” All these women, lined up—literally you could scroll through them—asking for the attention of Toby Fleishman. Toby Fleishman! I stared.

  “This is what it’s like now?” I asked.

  “This is what it’s like. You don’t have to leave your house to be humiliated. You don’t even have to be humiliated. It’s totally opt-in. Everyone who is there is there to participate.”

  The scroll of women who wanted to interact with Toby sexually was nowhere near ending. The pictures, the texts. Toby Fleishman!

  “It’s just like ‘Decoupling,’ right?” he said. “Who knew back then that it was an actual instruction manual?”

  A long time ago, in 1979, the men’s magazine where I used to work had published a famous story about divorce called “Decoupling.” The writer, Archer Sylvan, was our in-house legend, the man who stood for the magazine as much as any logo. I’d been reading Archer since I was young (probably too young), and in Israel, I’d had his books on my nightstand. Toby borrowed one of them, then the next, then the next. I’d grown up not allowed to read the same young-adult novels about babysitters and pretty blond twins that my friends read. My mother thought young-adult books were trash for degenerates and were certainly a red carpet to teen pregnancy and drug use. So I read th
e Archer Sylvan books my studious older sister brought home—Decoupling and Other Stories, City Turned Upside Down, and Everybody into the Pool. The covers of Archer’s books had big Helvetica block letters and seemed important, like literature. Inside, they were the dirtiest, darkest books I could imagine, and maybe sixth grade is young for the commingling of dark and dirty. Stories about nudist colonies, sex parties, Zapatistas, communists, politicians in secret occult clubs, polyamorous scientists. You couldn’t believe what he found. You couldn’t believe what this world we lived in was made of. Once, he was in Chile and a chef who never repeated a dish out of some strange Buddhist philosophy that didn’t track cut the head off a live goat and reached directly into its skull through its broken jaw and ate its brains raw. He offered some to Archer, and without hesitation, Archer ate them, too, right there with his bare hands.

  When I became a professional writer, I tried to write like Archer: that way he had of releasing the valve of his anger slowly, tensely, beautifully so that his vortex of empathy, when sent through the prism of the anger, created a generalized disgust for the state of the world that seemed like the only conclusion a smart, thinking person could come to. I was disgusted, too. I was angry, too. But I never landed on anger—I never ended a story there—and I think maybe that was where I failed. My empathy only created more empathy, which sounds good, yes, but was born of inherent cowardice. I was too scared to finish with anger. I was too scared to be wholly disgusted with my subjects, who were, of course, real people who had given me their time and their trust and also had my phone number. I didn’t care so much whether they hated me; I was never going to see them again. But I was afraid to stay angry, to leave it all hanging out there with no resolution. I was afraid of seeming too hateful, and so I settled on hating myself for caring too much. That’s not to say I was a bad writer. I was good, and I was liked, and people said I was compassionate and that it was nice to read warm things, and only I knew that it was actually a failure of bravery and will to be as compassionate as I was.