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[...] What had he been thinking, raising his children among these people? He’d forgotten something essential about life, which was to make sure his children understood his values. No matter how many times you whispered your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources. You could hate the Upper East Side. You could hate the five-million-dollar apartment. You could hate the private school, which cost nearly $40,000 per kid per year in elementary school, but the kids would never know it because you consented to it. You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little. You thought you could get the good out of it and leave the bad, but there’s so much work involved in that, too. You take your children to a concert and expect them to hear your whisper from the background that it’s not all for them. You can’t expect anything of them. [...]
[...] That was a time when he was still sure that if Rachel could just see her anger and her nastiness through a neutral screen, she could get help and they could move beyond it. But he was also already thinking that maybe this was a last-ditch effort before realizing that this was not something that could be fixed.
It was the same bullshit. She said: “I feel like I’m being punished for earning a living.” And “I feel like I have to tiptoe around my success, that he loves what the money brings and hates me for bringing it.” And “I talk to him plenty nicely. He screams and throws things when he’s angry and I do my best to stay neutral. I do it for the children. I wish he would, too.” He was made physically weak from her accusations and her lies. Were they lies? Or did she actually believe all of this? As much as Toby tried, it became clear that the advantage in couples therapy accrued to the person who could hold their shit together. He wanted to cry, he wanted to hold his fists up at her and make her hear him. As they went back and forth, Toby trying to refute every half sentence, even knowing that that was the wrong thing to do, he could feel himself losing the room. Dr. Joe took his glasses off and used the heel of the same hand to wipe his eye in what appeared to be poorly veiled exhaustion.
toby!! ask yourself why she's so angry!!
“She was really unhappy,” Amy said. “She had been unhappy for such a long time, but the kids, blah blah blah, you know how it is.”
“I do.”
“She was going to leave David.”
Toby shook his head. “What?”
“He cheats on her. He doesn’t give her access to the money. He gives her an allowance. Can you imagine? She gets to raise the kids and keep the house nice and entertain his asshole friends on poker night. She was a lawyer.”
Toby sat, stunned, and realizing that his entire problem in life was that he could still be stunned by information that revealed what seemed to be true most of the time, which was that things weren’t what they seemed.
Toby almost said, “But they seem fine,” and then remembered that he had never known Karen Cooper to be conscious. Instead he said, “Mr. Cooper seemed very devoted.”
“Of course he did. Have you ever been married?”
“I— Yes.” She waited. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”
She laughed, incredulous. “Now she’s going to die. I can’t believe that now she’s going to fucking die. You know, anyone who sees this will think it’s a great tragedy that this happened to such a young woman. But they won’t realize that the actual tragedy is that she was just about to get away from him.”
For a few minutes, lying in his bed, still in the vapor of his dream, he’d forgotten what had happened to them. For a few minutes, he’d forgotten that they were a mess. He didn’t like remembering the bad moments, but he didn’t like remembering those moments, either. He liked to find the point in every single memory, even the good ones, where she was telling him who she really was. If he could do that, this could never happen to him again. He whacked off quickly, too quickly, then got out of bed and spent the next hour hating himself for letting his guard down so egregiously as to dream of her.
“Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? You have an imperative to seek out food and shelter. But once you know food is widespread and available, once you really know it, you can wonder what you like to eat and how much you want to eat. Once you have access to shelter, you can begin to ask yourself where you want to live and how you want to decorate it. What if one of the imperatives we never understood was about love and therefore marriage? Meaning, what if we search to make sure we are lovable and worthy of someone who commits to us absolutely and exclusively, and the only way we can truly confirm we are worth these things is if someone wants to marry us; someone says, ‘Yes, you are the one I will love exclusively. You are worthy of this.’ And then, only when you’re actually married, once this need is fulfilled, you can for the first time wonder if you even wanted to be married or not. The only problem with that is that by the time you realize you have access to love, you’re already married, and it is an awful lot of cruelty and paperwork to undo that just because you didn’t know you wouldn’t want it once you had it.”
He went to Karen Cooper’s room. His fellows were there. He kept his eyes on his patient to avoid looking at Joanie or, more specifically, seeing how she was looking at him. He didn’t know if he should apologize, or just wait for a call from HR. David Cooper was holding Karen’s hand, staring at her lifeless face. He was never going to see his wife open her eyes again. Toby watched him, unable to reconcile any of this. Was he a piece of shit or did he love his wife? Was he having an affair with her friend, who helped break up the marriage? Were we all everything?
[...] This was fair? That he would smile and take it up the ass during mediation so that they could present their children with a peaceful and amicable thing, and then the minute it was almost done, she would do the worst thing she could possibly do—a thing so bad that it wasn’t even close on a list of horrible things she had done prior to this? That was fair? If it were fair, and you weighed Toby’s sins against his punishments, you would find that he’d gotten some real kind of raw deal. What did he do so wrong but be devoted? What did he do so wrong but try? But love? But come home on time? But figure that his wife would be a partner to him the way he was to her? But maybe throw a few glasses and maybe say the wrong things?
God, he was so tired of trying to figure out how it had been wrong, what the micromaneuver that set Rachel free from him was. She had abandoned him. She’d been cruel to him. She had denied him love and respect and self-esteem. She had diminished him to become someone who nearly disintegrated into suspicion and then sorrow at the mere affectionate touch of someone. She’d been cruel to their children—their children! She’d left them! She knew what it was to be without parents and still she’d left them!
"abandoned" really gets me. also "denied"
But Rachel was miserable. She lived in Mount Washington, where all the middle-class Jews lived, but all her classmates were rich Gentiles and lived in Ruxton or Green Spring Valley or on no-kidding a private island near Annapolis. They were picked up in black and dark silver cars driven by chauffeurs who’d been working for them since they were babies. There were layers of wealth she overheard that unlocked for her new dimensions of possibility of privilege and access and what was possible. 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. They went skiing in Aspen a week before Christmas break started. They went on safari to Africa. They visited a private island in Fiji or boarded a private cruise down the Nile or attended a private tour of the Galápagos or stayed at a private hotel in Venice or a private forest in Brazil. They went to concerts and the opera and took French lessons outside of school and then went to actual France and they became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t—in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.
The other women in her prenatal yoga class had kept up an email chain, and in their messages, she tried to discern that they, too, were terrified and violated and sad and broken, but they weren’t. Trust her, they just weren’t. They made jokes about how they were tired and it was a tragedy that one of them had had an epidural and it was a tragedy that one of them couldn’t produce enough milk for her baby and had to supplement with formula. She wanted to write back to tell them she couldn’t look in the mirror at herself. She wanted someone to understand how small she was now. She wanted to ask one of them if this was the real her—if the real her had been revealed to her suddenly that day in the hospital, or if she would somehow bounce back. Bouncing back was a language they understood: their vaginas needed to bounce back, their breasts needed to bounce back, would their abdomens ever bounce back. With a few small adjustments, these women would acclimate to life. They would recognize themselves. But would Rachel? Would Rachel bounce back? The entire phrase “bouncing back” seemed to her like it existed to make fun of her. There was no bouncing. There was no back.
And there was also a small tinge of this other thing, which was that she couldn’t ever quite think about these women without wondering what else she had in common with them. They also didn’t know if they’d been born targets, or if this just happened to them because they existed. There were so many ways of being a woman in the world, but all of them still rendered her just a woman, which is to say: a target. What had made Romalino think she was the kind of person who would stand for this? Was it the same thing that had made her not punch Matt Klein in the face when he’d put his hands on her? (“Wait, he put his hands on you? I thought it was just a verbal thing?” “I’m not talking about that now.”)
She had to figure out what that thing was and eliminate it from herself, and spending more time with these women would make her more like them, not less. Because she wasn’t a victim like all these women. She was the power. She was the thing that traumatized. She wouldn’t ever be mistaken for the other again.