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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
She apologized. She said she didn’t realize that he was out. She felt sad to think of him with someone else. Part of her still couldn’t bear that her marriage hadn’t worked out. Part of her still couldn’t bear that she no longer had Toby. Yes, she liked her freedom. Yes, divorce was the right move. She always thought divorce would come from hate, but her anger was never based in hate. It was based in disappointment that someone she loved misunderstood her so deeply. They were so different, but they had grown up together. He was her first great love.
She tried to tell him what the sessions were like, how cathartic it all was, how different she felt afterward. “I’ve never been loved,” she said. “I realized everything that’s wrong with me is because I’ve never been loved.”
He didn’t look up from his phone; he couldn’t be less interested. When she talked about business, he would say it turned him on. But now she saw in his eyes something like contempt. It scared her. She got up from the table and went back to the room.
Her crystal understanding of all of this came in layers. Yes, for sure, Sam was hoping she’d stay some kind of alpha fantasy for him—a fun power fuck with not an emotion in sight. Yes, for sure, he was never going to stay with her because where does a woman this ambitious leave a man? And yes, for sure, her marriage couldn’t have survived because what kind of woman is like this? And yes, for sure, the people were treating her in these ways to let her know who she was in the world: just a woman. And women—they are vile. Those men’s varying degrees of politeness shielded the world from their real feelings, but politeness is ultimately unsustainable. And so that doctor abused her. And those men raped those women. And Sam here couldn’t bear for her to do anything except bend over and take it.
They went back to the room and he started to pack. He said, “This was a mistake. You get that, right?”
Of course she did. What had she ever been thinking? She couldn’t take Miriam Rothberg’s place. She couldn’t fade into that kind of existence. She was herself. And the kind of woman she was was unacceptable: Unacceptable to a man like Toby, who couldn’t forgive her for her success. Unacceptable to Sam, because he might pretend he liked her bigness, but he couldn’t actually accommodate it into his life—he couldn’t bear what it took to be around someone whose obligations were as important and as nonnegotiable as his.
He couldn’t think of a follow-up question that didn’t sound completely patronizing, because honestly, that was how he felt. He felt patronizing.
[...]
She reached across the table to take his hand. He squeezed hers back. He never realized her arms were so hairy. It was a dark, thick hair that grew somewhat wiry toward the wrist, like a man’s.
He tried to look back at her in the eye, but he suddenly couldn’t bear her. What was he doing here? What had he thought he liked about her so much? She talked, a vapid prattle of superficial nonsense: Paris, the dance lessons she was thinking of taking. He nodded and ate, but he was quiet for the rest of the meal, and so was she. She was newly shy, and newly confused, sensing an annoyance from him. He felt bad about it, but that’s what sunlight does sometimes. It shows you what you couldn’t quite see in the dark.
oh wow this is unpleasant