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[...] Toby was the friend she wanted. Toby was the friend she had for life. Toby was who she could be alone with. When you are someone who is rejected her entire childhood for reasons that feel impossible to discern, there is little that could happen to you in your future that doesn’t feel like further rejection. Miriam likes you, but why weren’t you invited to massages on Great Jones Street with her? Roxanne wants to know if you want to come for dinner before the kids have their sleepover, but then she mentions that she and Cyndi had been shopping all day and it’s not that she wants to go shopping with those two, it’s just that she wants to be invited. She wants to think she is integral to their lives. She wants them to look at her and her children like they’re not optional. Toby didn’t understand why she cared or why it mattered. How could he? He had a sister that he totally took for granted. He had parents—a mother whom he blamed for his terrible self-image, never once taking into consideration that the person he was talking to about this would have killed to have a mother to blame for anything. He had all those friends who wanted to be in his life from his youth. He had Seth. He had me. He had all the people who had ever seen him needy and pathetic and never once did that make it so that they didn’t still love him.
“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say.
That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.
At some point, she accepted it. It was up to her to make the kind of living that would allow them to participate in the life they’d signed up for. He accepted it, too. He pretended to be apathetic to the money, but you should have seen how he liked the car. You should have seen how he liked the club—the pool on the rooftop, way above the city, both metaphorically and actually. So Toby adjusted his schedule to be home a little early to relieve Mona, the babysitter. He stood back and allowed her to try for this big thing she wanted to do. She did it, not out of bravery, but out of two parts no choice and three parts because to see Matt Klein again would have been to commit a failure she couldn’t have come back from.
So she did her work and Toby made the noises of someone who was stepping back, but he didn’t really do it. He came home on time, sure. He made dinner when Mona didn’t. But he didn’t adjust his expectations of her, or leave room for how tired she could get or how harried or busy. He loved taking those long walks. No matter how late they were, he wanted to walk. Across the park, across the city. She kept trying to explain to him that time functioned in units. For all his love of physics, he never quite grasped that one: If you use this time to walk to dinner that is thirty-five blocks away instead of letting me finish this email in a cab on the way there, I will be finishing the email at the table. The email isn’t optional. The email is the entire thing.
She came home each night—not at the same time, but mostly when the kids were awake—even though the work wasn’t done and she finished her work in the kitchen even though it was nearly impossible. Hannah wanted to talk about why she didn’t have a phone and Solly wanted to play Uno and Toby wanted her to stare at him adoringly and listen to endless, endless stories about liver diagnoses. She knew so much about that disgusting organ, she could have diagnosed at least four or five major and rare diseases. Here’s how it would go every night:
HER: I’m home!
HIM: You’ll never believe what happened today and how screwed/ignored/underestimated I was.
HER: Let’s talk about it! Let me just say hi to the kids and answer these texts, because I have a premiere tonight….
HIM: You never care about me.
HER: What? How can you say that?
HIM: Listen to you. You’re barely here. You’re barely a mother.
HER: Did you hear the part where I have a premiere? Did you not hear the part where I want to say hi to the kids?
HIM: I can’t bear your anger anymore.
aaahhh
[...] They tried therapy after, but he wouldn’t listen. There was nothing but his point of view—that all she did was work and neglect him and the children—that he could talk about. He couldn’t even hear what she was saying, which was that she loved her work. That yes, maybe she should slow down, but she didn’t quite know how. She didn’t know how to trust the people she hired. If he’d listen, he could hear her. She needed help figuring this out.
[...] Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.
And still: “You’re always angry,” he’d say to her. And then finally she could admit that she was, particularly after those therapy sessions where she saw just how disgusted both Toby and the therapist were by her annoyance at even having to be there. As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it. Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.
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When she turned forty, she decided to stop pretending she wasn’t angry about all of this. She didn’t want to make life hard for the kids, but she also saw how much energy it was sapping from her to pretend that she still liked Toby as much as she used to. She had liked him! She’d loved him. God, she had loved him. He was the first person who delighted her, who warmed her, who assured her, who adhered her to something. He was smart and his bitterness was sweet and manageable and very funny. He was honest—with her and with himself. At least she thought he was. He’d smelled so good, like soap and America. Now all he wanted was to go to therapy. But she’d been to therapy with him. He wanted to scream and throw things outside of therapy, and then he wanted to go to therapy and sit and be reasonable. She wanted to know, if you could be reasonable in the first place, why wouldn’t you always be reasonable so you didn’t have to go to couples therapy?
She refused to consider divorce. She’d refused it last summer, when Hannah left a table at a restaurant in Bridgehampton because she was sick of their fighting. She refused it when he got too drunk at dinner with a director she was trying to poach and they fought all the way home in the cab. And she refused it when he threw a tantrum at the Rothbergs’ for being offered a job. She never once thought she deserved happiness. She never once wondered if there was something better out there. This was their marriage; this was their family. It was theirs, they owned it, they made it. If there was one thing she’d learned from her grandmother, it was an understanding that life isn’t always what you want it to be, and obligations are obligations and nothing less.
Sam Rothberg told her that Rachel’s drive and success made him want her more. He was married to a lazy heiress. He loved Rachel’s ingenuity and her forward motion. Before she knew it, they were eating at a small, candlelit place in Brooklyn, where no one they knew would find them.
Well, Rachel was flabbergasted. The part of her stomach that registered wins felt a deep convulsion of triumph. Not that she ever wanted to cheat on Toby; not that she ever wanted to betray poor Miriam. But not wanting to win doesn’t make the win any less real.
Over dinner, he gave her that look—too close, too melty, too intimate—the one that meant a man wanted you. She was rusty, but she wasn’t blind. It took her breath away.
“I’m only happy when I’m with you,” he said, naked, over sushi. “I wish we could figure that part out.”
Rachel thought about this for a long time. Here was a guy who really wanted her. Here was someone who was strong and smart and driven and successful and wouldn’t see her similar traits as a referendum on him. The more time they spent together, the more she realized that Toby’s criticism of her had slowly seeped into her pores and become her own criticism of herself. What if she didn’t have to live like that anymore?
obviously not going to last but still feels nice while you have it
And at night, once the kids were asleep, she was free. She no longer answered to anyone. She wore just underwear and a bra and watched reality shows and put pore strips across her chin and picked her nose and didn’t finish the dishes, which could no longer be seen as de facto asking someone else to finish the dishes. You’re supposed to be depressed and miserable after a divorce. Not Rachel. Rachel put the entire failure of it aside. She’d done her time. She had someone in her life who loved her for who she was, not who he had hoped she was. She had someone who understood her. She felt so bad for anyone who remained allegiant to a life they’d built just because they’d built it. She had two children—warm, witty, spunky Hannah and sincere, smart, curious Solly. She could finally give attention to them without worrying about her husband’s ego.
lol