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!

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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“SO WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Toby on the phone. I’d loved the Nahid story—this prisoner trying to gain freedom for herself through the random secret fucking of men in her apartment. It was like a dirty fairy tale.

“She just wasn’t who I thought she was,” he said.

“What was she?”

“She was just regular.”

I was heading into the city. My train was about to go into the tunnel. “I have to go,” I told him.

“Okay, talk later.”

“Have you ever considered that you’re kind of an asshole?”

I watched a couple go by, burrowing into each other so that they were nearly facing each other but still walking forward, like on the cover of that Bob Dylan album. I pitied them. I saw the girl in the couple, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I knew now that in a few years, that girl would be just some guy’s wife. She would be someone her husband referred to as angry—as angry and dour and a nag. He would wonder where her worship went; he would wonder where her smiles were. He would wonder why she never broke out in laughter; why she never wore lingerie; why her underwear, once lacy and dangerous, was now cotton and white; why she didn’t like it from behind anymore; why she never got on top. The sacred organism of the marriage—the thing that prevented him from opening up to his friends about his marital woes—would be the last thing to go. The fortress where they kept their secrets would begin to crack, and he would push water through those cracks when he would begin to confide in his friends. He would get enough empathy and nods of understanding so that he would begin to wonder exactly what he had to gain from remaining with someone so bitter, someone who no longer appreciated him for who he was, and life’s too short, man, life’s too short. He would divorce her and what these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore. But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it. This guy would sit with his friends and he would not be able to figure out how all this went so wrong. But she would know; I would know.

Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.

That summer, I treated poor Adam like a roommate. I came home late. I ordered Chinese food for dinner again and again. He mentioned once that I was ordering Chinese a lot and so I ordered Thai. I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to live anymore. God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life? But he’d never understand that. He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.

What were you going to do? Were you not going to get married when your husband was the person who understood you and loved you and rooted for you forever, no matter what? Were you not going to have your children, whom you loved and who made all the collateral damage (your time, your body, your lightness, your darkness) worth it? Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.

[...] I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve.