It was all such an insult, the Hamptons. It was an insult to economic disparity. It was an insult to leading a good life and asking hard questions about what one should sacrifice in the name of decency. It was an insult to having enough—to knowing that there was such a thing as enough. Inside those houses weren’t altruistic, good people whom fortune had smiled down on in exchange for their kind acts and good works. No, inside those columned, great-lawned homes were pirates for whom there was never enough. There was never enough money, goods, clothing, safety, security, club memberships, bottles of old wine. There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.” These were criminals—yes, most of them were real, live criminals. Not always with jailable offenses, but certainly morally abhorrent ones: They had offshore accounts or they underpaid their assistants or they didn’t pay taxes on their housekeepers or they were NRA members.

[...] It had been a year since Toby had first asked for a divorce. His request had come not from anger but from the irritation of the hole it bored in you when you were lying to yourself. Each time he brought the topic up he had only been met with hysterical threats. She screamed at him that he would never see the children again if he tried to leave her, and that he would be left penniless.

“But why?” he asked. “You can’t be happy like this.”

She didn’t have an answer. She just kept threatening. He relented, terrified and even sadder. But somehow, as it snowed onto the skylight into their bedroom, and it was quiet in a way that it was never quiet there during the summer, a peace seemed to settle on her. They lay in silence, the air cold but the bed full of heat, and she said to the ceiling, “I think we should get divorced.” He turned over on his side to face her and he was filled with an aching love for the thing they had destroyed and tears were coming down her face and he wiped them away with his thumbs. “It’s going to be okay,” he said.

[...] They held hands sometimes, which they hadn’t done in years, and which he realized was a completely counterproductive, backward thing for them to do. There was calm, and with the calm came relief, and the relief felt in his body the way endorphins did, and he became worried that he would mistake that for love. He couldn’t understand why, if they could be happy in each other’s presence while they were in the last days of their marriage, why couldn’t they have been happy for real?

The only way he had survived in his marriage, with a wife who not only made about fifteen times his really quite good doctor salary but who, the moment she surpassed him on the earn-o-meter, found herself completely disgusted by his earning ability, was that he made a big show of only barely tolerating the perks of the money. He allowed Rachel to buy the Hamptons house, he allowed her to buy the monstrous new-money/fake-old-money apartment at the Golden, he allowed her to buy the convertible. He never allowed himself to realize that Rachel’s things had become his things, even as he partook in their thingness. He didn’t buy them, but they were also his. And now he hated mediation because it felt like wanting any of it, claiming any right to it, would have been admitting that he derived pleasure from it, too. Fine, he said with every tiny acquiescence. Take it all, take it all.

He could grapple with the loss of stuff. The car and the Hamptons house and the club would disappear from his life overnight and he would adjust since he was never really meant to be a rich person in the first place. But now he was being treated like a housewife who had taken care of the children, and Frank was telling him to fight for what was his, the way he probably had to tell the housewives to fight for what was theirs. And Frank was right. He was owed something. He was owed something for allowing her to kneecap his career with her insistence that she be allowed to work late, that she had one more phone call to make. He was owed something for being diminished and counted out. He was owed something for having to shiver in her shadow all these years, for being made miserable, for being forced to fight to the death every night. Did he sound angry? He wasn’t angry. He was just explaining things.

He told David Cooper that Karen was third on the transplant list. But Toby’s reserves were depleted, of both rest and fluids. In his weakened state, he was susceptible and primed for the acute jealousy of the thing he saw before him, which was an utterly normal marriage, a thing he had tried so hard at and had wanted so badly. It was an enormous privilege to take your spouse for granted until something bad happened; that was life, and that was beautiful, this idea that you’d just be trudging along and remember each other’s birthdays once a year and fall into bed exhausted and wonder if you had enough sex and then one day BAM! you become awakened to just how much you needed that person—some crisis like this, and that was all you’d need to remember how much you loved your spouse. That was all Toby had ever wanted. Sometimes you saw couples who seemed wild about each other, always holding hands, sitting on the same side of the table when they ate out, even when they were together alone. Rachel would say that those people were putting on a show, that they were covering up a real poison in their relationship, and that was the only time Toby ever felt like she was on his side: when she was working as hard as he was to make their misery seem normal.

Bartuck had taken an interest in Toby. Not in Phillipa London—in him. Toby would go home and share news of the day with Rachel. “You have to ride this mentorship to the sky,” she would say, which was the kind of imbecile power-talk they used in the mailroom at Alfooz & Lichtenstein. [...]

He spent nights waiting for her innumerable study groups to disband so that she would arrive home and consider having sex with him. More often than not, though, she would politely beg off because sex kept her up, which destroyed her chances of succeeding at the thing (the test, the paper) that was her priority. In this desert of opportunity, getting laid at least a little became his primary directive in the relationship, never asking himself if this was all there was to companionship, or if he even liked her. That was a dangerous question, and besides, he was in no position to ask it; he had to direct all his energy toward interpretation of whether a sloppily slung arm over the shoulder or a kiss directly on the mouth was a green light.

Their relationship ended unceremoniously after four months. One morning, after she had allowed him to have sex with her—or on her, or at her, which was probably more accurate—she said her parents weren’t really okay with her dating someone who wasn’t Catholic or Italian, and she’d rather not lose this much sleep if the relationship wasn’t going to go anywhere. He objected to this loudly, not considering whether he actually liked her and wanted the relationship to continue. Out of pity, she offered to fuck him one more time, “goodbye sex,” and he took her up on the option. He had felt humiliation pursuing sex in his life, but he had never felt humiliation during the act of it, watching her wait for it to be over, until now.

“All right,” he said. Her eyes were a fishhook. “Negotiate with me.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’d like four for the price of two.”

“I’m sorry, you have to pay for all four.”

“I’ll only be paying for two.”

He made his body into a stubborn stance, crossing his arms over his chest and turning his head so that he could see her through side-eye. “No deal. What kind of Middle Eastern open-air market do you think this is?”

She smiled and shrugged, and she began to walk away, first one step, then two, and then it was clear she was really walking away. She moved to a couch across the room and sat down, her back still to him, and she struck up a conversation with the dude on the couch. Toby was amazed; he was excited. When was the last time he was excited and not just scared? He walked across the room and crouched down behind her and whispered into her ear. “I’ll give you six,” he said. “You don’t have to pay for any of them.”

They had sex that night, which was for the best, since he didn’t think his ego could handle an extended period of time in which he wondered if she thought of him as a friend or an actual romantic contender. He kept thinking, “She’s a real girl.” Not in a sexist way. No, in a Pinocchio way. She was everything he thought a girl should be, even if he’d never known to pray quite so specifically: She wore red lipstick all the time, she listened to Neil Diamond and didn’t give a fuck how weird that was, she could do a handstand for like ten minutes, [...]