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, [...]

When he woke up in the morning after the three hours of postdawn sleep they’d decided to allow each other, he watched her for a few minutes. She was still so pretty in the daylight, even with smudged mascara and caked saliva in the corner of her mouth. He went out to get breakfast. He stood in line for bagels and coffee, and he had never felt so normal and American in his life. He had a girl waiting for him back at his apartment, and it was Saturday morning, and so he was going to bring her a bagel and some coffee. He was overwhelmed by the simplicity of his emotions: gratitude for whatever moments had worked to make this moment happen for him; happiness, yes, just pure plain happiness. He loved his country! He was going to eat a bagel!

He was learning from Rachel, too. They went skiing—he had never been skiing before, but she’d learned because her school had a ski trip every year and finally, when she was a senior, her grandmother handed over the $250 and let her go. She was helping him negotiate the strange, surprising, suddenly political machinations of medical school that were beyond good grades. His residency advisor didn’t like how sarcastic he was; Aaron Schwartz, a sallow-skinned pigeon of a guy he knew not just from Princeton, but who had gone to his high school in Los Angeles, was also in his med school class and kept getting favored for surgeries. Rachel talked to him about how to talk to people. She taught him how the fact that he was naturally funny also meant that he had a side that favored a quick burn, which wasn’t so good. She taught him to slow down and consider people’s faces, that this was the most crucial exercise in all of negotiation, and eventually he did it—he learned to listen to people and to look them in the eyes. And wouldn’t you know, when he finally was able to enact these skills, he became a better doctor, one who could understand his patients’ suffering more specifically, who could listen more closely for clues. He shot ahead of Aaron Schwartz, earning praise from the doctors in charge and his teachers for his sensitivity and intuition. He would always commend her for teaching him a skill that no one had taught him throughout all his years of med school, and she would respond, “That’s because they don’t want you to get ahead.” When she said that, he’d realize she wasn’t trying to make him a better person; she was trying to get him to advance. That was all she’d ever tried to do for him. But, he reasoned, that was because she thought he was a good enough person as it was.

Toby now began to pace the bedroom. “He’s met me. He knew you were married. We’d been out to dinner with him and his wife.”

“Yeah, well that’s how scumbags operate, Toby.”

“Did you remind him that he knew me?”

“I’m sorry, Toby, no, I didn’t, I really didn’t realize this was about you at the time.”

But it was a little about him, wasn’t it? This was his wife! It’s one thing to hit on someone whose spouse you don’t know. But he was real. Toby was real. And Matt Klein didn’t even see him as threat enough to stop himself from hitting on her. Matt barely registered Toby’s existence. Matt was not afraid of Toby’s wrath.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened?”

There were several possible acceptable answers to this for Toby: that she didn’t take it seriously, that she didn’t want to hurt Toby, that she barely registered it the minute it happened, so in love was she with her husband—all these would have been fine. Instead she went with: “I didn’t think to. It was just something that happened at work. Do you tell me everything that happens at your work? Actually, don’t answer that, maybe you do.”

He didn’t like how not a part of this story he was. He didn’t like that he was only hearing about this because it was mitigating information against something else that had happened that day. He didn’t like that she didn’t seem to think her marriage was relevant to all of this.

It was hard for Toby to pinpoint exactly when he’d noticed the change in her. Yes, she spoke to her subordinates like they were pieces of shit, but that was the culture at Alfooz & Lichtenstein—that was how they taught their employees to survive, or something. Toby would express surprise when he heard her on the phone talking to an intern or an assistant—it particularly seemed that asst2 couldn’t find his ass from his ass these days. He would hear her on the phone saying, “You forget who you are talking to,” and “I’m sorry, but do you think I’m an idiot?” and “Honestly, I am listening to you and cannot believe what is coming out of your mouth,” and “No offense, but when I hire at a Yale job fair, I expect someone with a little light behind the eyes,” and “I saw those press kits and it looks like a homeless person off the street did them.” He assumed the stress of her work was sending her into overdrive. But then she said things to her clients like “Oh my God, were we the same person in another life?” and “You are too much,” and “That is amazing,” and “You are amazing.” See? She was also capable of that, which made the fact that she didn’t do it at home harder to stomach.

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.

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.”

The whole night he had been stuck in the gloaming where sleep kept threatening, but all he got were hallucinations.

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.

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.

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.

[...] 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.

“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.”