Fleishman Is in Trouble

And yes, if you believe his version, she was a vile kind of ex-wife (all ex-wives are vile, to hear it), but she was also someone who had been driven crazy. Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and so I retreated from it. Rachel, she endured. She tried. And she got the punishment.

You can’t fix this, I realized. Even our crises had to be small and polite. What I did was forgivable; what Rachel did was unacceptable. But ultimately it was the same for us both: The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.

“Marriage always reminds me of that old saying about democracy,” I told him. “It’s the worst form of government, other than all the other forms of government.”

The girls in her class had first names like Clancy and Devon and Atterleigh and Westerleigh and Bonneleigh and Plum and Poppy and Catherine. And Catherine and Catherine and Catherine and Catherine.

A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.

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.

Toby’s fellows were always in their twenties, and there were more than a few times that he realized that the cluelessness and cockiness of their age was the only thing that allowed them to believe they could take a person’s life into their hands and become a doctor. That was why you heard about people in their thirties and forties going to law school but never medical school. It wasn’t just the time it would take to get licensed. It was the realization as you got older about how fallible you were in every aspect of your life.

She was lonely and she didn’t have so many friends because she had grown up with an impatient grandmother who was just trying to get her upbringing over with. Or because she was sensitive and took every bit of noninclusion as rejection. Or because she always wondered what was a little better than the thing she had, which was valuable in business but not really in any other part of your life. Or because she felt like she was always catching up to others because she hadn’t been born wealthy or even into an actual family. Or because people didn’t like it when women were so nakedly ambitious. Or because she couldn’t keep her opinion to herself when she saw someone not meeting a goal or living like she thought they claimed they wanted to because she believed people wanted to know the truth. Or because she was always strangely out of step with pop culture, and would continue to be even after she became one of the top agents in the city. Or because friendship is elusive and being liked works best when you don’t think about it constantly, and she absolutely did think about it constantly.

They went for a drink in the Village and then to hear live jazz. (“Why live jazz?” Seth asked. “Because that’s what you do,” Toby said. “Nobody does that,” Seth said. “People who say they like jazz are lying.”)

There isn’t room in one marriage for two people who are hogging all the oxygen. One of them has to answer the phone when the school calls. One of them has to know where the vaccine record is. One of them has to do the fucking dishes. It was entirely possible that the only version of a story like this you ever heard was from the aggrieved party, the one who made the sacrifices and thought that the sacrifice gave you one up on your spouse, but it didn’t. It only made the spouse feel more entitled to take.