Read an excerpt from taffyakner’s novel, “Fleishman Is in Trouble”
Photo-Illustration: by Preeti Kinha; Photos: Getty Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he’d lived in all his adult life and which was suddenly somehow now crawling with women who wanted him. Not just any women, but women who were self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted. Women who weren’t needy or insecure or self- doubting, like the long-ago prospects of his long-gone youth—meaning the women he thought of as prospects but who never gave him even a first glance.
But now there was no one to be faithful to. Rachel wasn’t there. She was not in his bed. She was not in the bathroom, applying liquid eyeliner to the area where her eyelid met her eyelashes with the precision of an arthroscopy robot. She was not at the gym, or coming back from the gym in a less black mood than usual, not by much but a little. She was not up in the middle of the night, complaining about the infinite abyss of her endless insomnia.
“I dropped them off at four. I had been trying to get in for the weekend. There was a cancellation. The program starts at nine. Give me a break here, Toby. I’m having a hard time. I really need some me-time.” As if all her time weren’t completely and totally her-time. “This hasn’t been easy on me, Toby,” she said now. “I get that I’m early. But all you have to do is drop them at camp. If you have plans, ask Mona to come. Why are we even still talking about this?”
Hannah was his, too, yes, except that she had Rachel’s straight blond hair and narrow blue eyes and sharp nose—her whole face an accusation, just like her mother’s. She had a specific kind of sarcasm that was a characteristic of the Fleishman side. At least she once did.
“Why did you have to pay to learn how to be a doctor while they used you as an actual doctor?” she’d answered. It was a good point. Toby thought then how sharp she was, and how he wished she didn’t deploy this sharpness exclusively against him. She was becoming, it seemed to him, the kind of girl that it was completely exhausting to be.
Her hair was dyed in that new way where the top was purposefully dark and it progressively faded until the ends were blond. But the dark part of the roots was too dark—it was the darkness of a younger woman—and against the border of her forehead all it did was accentuate the relative raggedness of her skin.
He had spent the early summer in a haze, trying to find footing in this strange world where every aspect of his life was just slightly different than it used to be and yet immensely so: He was sleeping, just alone and in a different bed. He was eating with the kids just like always—Rachel hadn’t come home before eight or nine on weeknights in years—but after dinner he dropped them off at the old apartment and walked the five blocks home to his new one.
Cyndi took a step closer. He was only five-five, and she was a full head taller than him and skinnier than any woman needed to be. Her face was large-featured and pumped full of hyaluronic acid and botulinum toxin. Her concern, which was mostly transmitted via a slow back-and-forth shaking of the head and an exaggerated protrusion of her mouth, was mitigated by the fact that her browline was completely ossified, and had been since he’d known her.
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