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Having an unconscious patient was like talking to someone on the phone for hours before ever seeing them: It was hard to reconcile that they hadn’t been what you pictured, and your brain, having never seen the person, corrected for them to be more of what you wished they were. Toby had pictured someone smart and complicated, though he didn’t know why. He had not pictured someone who posed for pictures lasciviously, with her tongue hanging out. But there she was, on Amy’s screen: alive, with thoughts and opinions and preferences and animating forces, like a breath was blown into her and she was made sentient. The exact opposite of what actually had happened, which was that a breath was blown out of her and she was made into just the sum of her biological parts. He looked at a picture of her holding up a shot of something at a bar. She looked into the camera with defiance. It was awfully sexy. The picture could easily be one of the supplementary pics from a Hr profile, not the main one but a third or fourth. He had to look away from the phone in order to restore her to personhood and patienthood, and only briefly did he think to wonder if he was doing a bad job of thinking of the women he dated as people.
They lay on the carpet in her living room, under a top sheet, staring at the ceiling and talking. Her parents had emigrated to Paris from Iran right before she was born. Her family had moved to the U.S. when she was twelve. Then, when she was nineteen, her family moved to Queens. Her father sold vertical blinds in Kew Gardens Hills. She said she felt like she was the only Iranian whose family didn’t escape the shah with a treasure chest of jewels. Just down the road in Forest Hills, there were Persian women laden with riches whose homes were filled with sculptures. Nahid? She had blinds in every room.
lol
She waited. He didn’t want to tell her anything else, mostly because he still didn’t understand what he could say that wouldn’t make him seem like all the women who had told him their stories. They’d always seemed like such victims. The way they would talk about the betrayals that led to hurt and the intensity that became apathy—it made him wonder what the men’s side of the story was. Here he thought of Rachel and Sam one more time, lo mein cartons in hand. What could she be telling him about Toby? Surely not: “I changed the terms of who I was and what I wanted with just about no warning.” Instead it was: “He was lazy and punished me for having ambition.”
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Through Toby’s eyes, it was unsettling just how much all the other women really did look like me. It was what I resented about where I lived, that after a lifetime of feeling lesser than the skinny blondes with straight hair and noses in Manhattan, I most hated that everyone here looked exactly like me. Or did I hate looking exactly like everyone else? Or did seeing them en masse like this allow me to finally see myself clearly and the view was no bueno? Our navy tankinis were reinforced with steel paneling so that our bodies were all mashed and wrung into hourglass figures, while our limbs told the true stories of our discipline and metabolic limitations.
I caught Adam staring at me. He stared at me a lot lately, but he never asked questions. I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me. He’d go back in and put the kids to bed and I would look up at the sky. You could see some stars where I lived. You could never see them in Manhattan. That was one advantage of this place, I guess.
I thought about that. I wrote mostly about men. I hadn’t interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed—the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn’t important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.
The men hadn’t had any external troubles. They didn’t have a fear that they didn’t belong. They hadn’t had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they’d forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren’t real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls—of all our souls—the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance.
[...] I’d send two or ten or forty pages to my agent, and he’d say the same thing, that none of my characters were likable. I thought of Archer. His characters weren’t likable. He wasn’t likable. I thought of how hard I worked in my stories to be likable to the reader. I remembered a creative writing class I took in college, where the professor, a cynical screenwriter who’d written exactly one movie that got made, told us that when our characters weren’t likable, you could fix it by giving them a clubfoot or a dog. I gave one of the gang members a clubfoot, and my agent wrote in the margin: “WTF?” He told me I had to write something closer to the truth. So I began writing this YA novel a few months ago, the one about my youth, the one that was going nowhere, and I sent him the first tet pages about four months ago but I never heard back. I read the pages again and I saw the problem. My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.
lol
When he was fourteen, he told his mother that he was ashamed of being fat and short and so she took him with her to a Weight Watchers meeting, where he listened to a room full of sad women talk about how unlovable they were and how temporary they felt in their bodies.
“Your life is now,” said Sandy, the leader. She wore denim skirts and brightly colored shirts with matching tights and big, costumey earrings. “You have to live as if your life is already in progress.”
Young Toby didn’t understand what this was about. Of course life was now—at least it was for the grown-ups. He didn’t understand why they had emotional barriers to the diet beyond the major one, which was that food was comforting and delicious and good. It all made perfect sense to him now: Food is comforting and delicious, but it is not good, and one shouldn’t be seduced into thinking it might be.
Fine. He followed the plan, and he lost five pounds the first week. Then more, then more. The women would grumble at his weight loss: He was a boy and he was a teenager—his metabolism was ideal. His mother would drive him home and say, “See? They’re jealous because you’re successful.” She loved that. She loved him, more than she had before. He never went off the plan until he was twenty-four and stopped eating carbohydrates completely. He was never going to end up like one of those women.
this does explain the no carbs thing pretty well
The yoga studio was in the eighteenth-floor penthouse of a residential building, a perk to its residents and an à la carte offering to anyone else. The windows were big and high up enough so that on a clear day, you could see the park. The sun was going down. He loved the dusk—the blue twilight, especially in summer, when the streets crowded with people who had knowledge of winter, who had seen endless days where the streets were inhospitable. The sky was a glowing purple-blue. Had he ever really taken a moment to appreciate the dusk? He loved it. He loved everything right then. He looked out onto the world and was so excited about the number of dusks that lay ahead of him. He wanted to use every single one of them well. He wanted to spend each one of them with only people he loved. He wanted to run to the camp upstate right this instant and take his children outside their bunks and apologize for all the wasted twilights. He wanted to pick each child up and spin them around. He wanted to tell them that if they miss a twilight, not to worry, it will always come again. He wanted to show them that this was how he was naturally, not the mopey jerk they’d seen lately, not the person who stopped believing in potential and excitement and surprise. He would remember this moment and he would become himself again. Poor Toby in all those other block universes. Poor Toby who was still just figuring it out. This Toby knew. This Toby couldn’t believe his incredible fortune, to have this many twilights lying in front of him, and all the bad ones behind him.
[...] anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view. If he were to be a real scientist about this, would he be able to find empirical evidence that Rachel had a point in rejecting him? That Rachel was right to hate him this much? Yes, right then, for the first time, he could see it. He could make his way across the abyss, and just for a minute, he could see that he was the same vile, fat, needy piece of shit he always was.