Libby’s narration gets right to the point here at the top of “God, What an Idiot He Was!†You’re probably familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s most famous work, On Death and Dying, which introduced the world to the five stages of grief. You may not be acquainted with her lesser-known work, The Stages of Realizing Your Missing Wife Is in the Park Napping and Fucking Sam Rothberg. This lesser work is more wide-ranging and featured 12 stages. We are not going to address each of them in equal depth, but unlike how I approach writing most of these recaps, we are going to address them in order.
Stage 1: Shock. Toby is sitting in the dark, face illuminated by the glow of his laptop screen as he stares at two Facebook location check-ins — noting how close they are and putting two and two nauseously together.
Even a talented diagnostician can miss symptoms from time to time, but that is no comfort at all. Toby is far more ferocious in his self-criticism — “Listen to the patient, you asshole!†— than he was with his fellows in episode one. Toby scrolls back through his memories and photos on Rachel’s profile and finally comprehends what had seemed insignificant before: She and Sam don’t just get along. They’re not simply mutually admiring friends. They are into each other. Ugh!
Stage 2: Attempted Indifference. This is a wild leap from shock, and it might be effective if it were in any way possible, but even if he could attempt a quick slide into being totally cool with his insights, the heat wave gripping the city is unrelenting and his air-conditioning barely works. Reading? No. Doing the crossword? No. Sticking his head in the freezer? No, no, no. Retrospectively, it’s all so clear. Rachel was probably sleeping with Sam Rothberg months ago — maybe even before her separation from Toby.
Stage 3: Masturbation. Oh dear. When an activity that should be purely pleasurable and fun is only joyless and grim, it’s probably not going to be an effective coping mechanism.
Stage 4: Confrontation. The intense satisfaction of putting one’s righteous fury to work! The opportunity to shout “J’accuse!†to those who’ve done one so very wrong, so so dirty. Is there any felicity comparable to this? The answer to that question must be delayed for Toby to dash from Rachel’s apartment door to the hospital, where Karen Cooper’s blood work shows that she needs a liver transplant ASAP. Once again, Toby is exactly the kind of doctor you’d want to have in a literal life-or-death situation: He’s competent, calm, reassuring without overpromising. The Coopers are lucky to have him.
The rush of feelings and memories that smack Toby in the face as he walks through Rachel’s apartment nearly knocks him down. These small moments, all tinged with the softening glow of golden-hour light, flood his memory simultaneously, block-universe style. Pushing through them into sleuth mode, Toby flips through unopened mail, paws through Rachel’s purse (If Rachel isn’t home, why is her purse there?), assesses the contents of the kitchen, and can’t make sense of any of it. A small tin of weed? Rachel would never smoke anything! A health-food-store aisle’s worth of teas? Rachel hates tea! Three full takeout containers of beef lo mein? Rachel is a dyed-in-the-wool “shrimp in lobster sauce†gal! None of this makes sense. The Rachel he knows wouldn’t have or consume any of these things! This must be Sam’s pernicious influence!
Perhaps these aren’t the belongings of the Rachel he knows. Perhaps, despite their 15-year marriage, Toby doesn’t really know her at all. Perhaps the real Rachel, whoever she may be, was there all the time and simply illegible to him. Or perhaps, wanting to maintain the innocence of ignorance, he only skimmed the most important paragraphs of the Book of Rachel.
Now the vignettes swirling around him are of an imagined, mysterious Real Rachel and her carefree life without him. Rachel enthusiastically accepting a nice cup of tea from Sam. Rachel and Sam’s Toby-mocking pillow talk — especially Josh Stamberg’s elite-level delivery of “walking is for losers, babe†while taking a huge drag off of a joint, then blowing the smoke into Rachel’s mouth. Sam bending Rachel over the dining table as each of them shovels beef lo mein into their mouths in ecstasy. An Emmy for Claire Danes’s borderline-orgasmic delivery of “Beef! Lo! Meiiiiin!!†(Her performance throughout has been captivating and complex, but she shines particularly bright in the little moments when Rachel is allowed to be funny. At this point, I was laughing so hard that I had to hit pause to wipe the mirth-tears off of my face.) As imagined scenes of Rachel and Sam whirl around him in a horrifying inverse of the personalized sex buffet he enjoyed in episode one, Toby takes decisive action to regain his shattered sense of self. He does what any (presumed) cuckolded husband would do in such circumstances: He steals Rachel’s toaster.
Honestly, why does any of this even matter? Is Rachel cutting loose with Sam the real problem? Is it more important than her continued non-presence in Hannah and Solly’s lives? I’m just curious as to the mental gymnastics required for Toby to maintain this degree of fury about Rachel’s sexual exploits, particularly as they are not his business at all anymore and Toby himself is sleeping with half of Manhattan’s single ladies.
Stages 5 and 6: Reclamation and Distraction. The former is Toby pleading with his divorce lawyer’s assistant to squeeze him in for an emergency appointment and feeling very put out that he has to wait for two hours on a Saturday. The latter results in an unencouraging trip down literary memory lane. Toby had hoped to draw righteousness and mental strength from rereading a bit of his and Libby’s favorite novel of all time, Decoupling, by their contemporary journalism hero, Archer Sylvan. Published in 1979, Decoupling (in the world of the show) was the first American novel to engage with the effects of feminism and women’s liberation on the marriages of unsuspecting, entitled white man-babies of the time. What agonies they endured! My heart pumps peanut butter for them!
Pacing in front of his lawyer’s office, still clutching the toaster as if he’s Baby Houseman with her watermelon, Toby’s wait finally pays off. Attorney Barbara arrives fresh from tennis (or maybe squash?), notes the toaster, and whisks Toby up to her very graceful and soothing office. Even Barbara (the great J. Smith-Cameron in a bizarro-world version of her role as in-house counsel Gerri from Succession) only has tough love to dispense: Toby must accept that divorce is hell and that, due to Rachel’s significantly greater earning power, he is functionally the “wife†in this situation.
Stages 7 and 8: Humiliation and Fornication. Humiliation brings Toby to Nahid’s door for fornication, but to this observer, a Venn diagram of these stages is a circle that is also an ouroboros. Toby’s response to humiliation is to follow Peaches’s guidance to, ahem, fornicate the pain away. Toby’s attempt at fornication is worse than grim, joyless, and boring. It’s humiliating. Round and round it goes — humiliation leading to fornication leading to humiliation ad infinitum, ad (probably) nauseam.
Stage 9: Misdirected Aggression. In which Toby’s attempts to impose his will on others are not going well. Nobody and nothing Toby has interacted with in the last 24 hours has given him what he wants. Whom can he turn to for a dose of the sincere sympathy he craves? One guess!
Libby talks Toby into joining her, Adam, and the kids at the pool for the afternoon. This’ll be just the ticket: fun, relaxing, catching up with both Libby and Adam as they stretch out on lounge chairs. Instead, Adam and Libby are frazzled. While Adam is zipping around getting everything together so they can leave the house already, Libby is just kibitzing in the kitchen — her full attention on Toby. Hm. Once at the swim club, Adam warms up a bit, joining in Toby’s indignation that Rachel’s new guy is a school dad and noting that he’s happy to see Libby being “interested in something again†since they renewed their friendship.
Let’s talk about Libby’s complicated relationship with swimwear. The problematic item in question is the Lands’ End tankini — a utilitarian, long-wearing, sensible two-piece that can be mixed and matched in seemingly infinite permutations of cut, color, and pattern. It may not be immediately recognizable as such, but it is the de rigueur suburban-mom summer uniform, the bridge-and-tunnel analogue of all the yoga pants and slogan tops favored by moms of the Upper East Side.
The problem isn’t the tankini itself. It’s that the tankini reveals Libby has made certain sensible and desirable life choices, which have yielded certain consequences, and unexpectedly, they chafe. Not pausing to wonder why he has not previously noticed that his best friend, Epstein, might also be in trouble, Toby is flooded with resentment. All he wanted was a normal life with a normal, happy-enough marriage. Libby has that! Toby is envious! Why is she such a low-key miserable mess? Given just how messed-up Libby is, why is Toby only starting to notice it now?
There’s no time to interrogate that further! Toby begs off staying for the snack-bar extravaganza Libby just brought to the table, saying he has plans with Seth, and no, Libby may not join them — this is for the boys only. In a show full of scenes that are hard to watch, this one feels like taking six lashes to the heart. It’s something we shouldn’t be seeing, and the fact that it plays out in a venue designed for the performance of suburban contentment only amplifies that discomfort.
No number for this stage, but it gets a title card anyway: Being a Dick. When experiencing despair, Toby can be heart-shrivelingly mean, and it’s shameful. He tries to shake off the crummy day by having dinner with Seth and his girlfriend, Vanessa, but even that is no comfort. Seth has been fired from whatever finance-type job he has along with his entire team and can’t bear to tell Vanessa. Just as Toby notices that the restaurant is full of Sam Rothberg types, he’s summoned to the hospital — Karen Cooper’s liver has arrived!
Stages 10 and 11: Constant Motion and Exhaustion. Back at the hospital, Toby can slip back into the soothing mantle of a competent and caring physician. Along with the transplant surgeon, he reassures Karen Cooper’s husband and best friend. The glow of doing good for worthy people comes to a grinding halt as he realizes he’d been projecting the qualities of an ideal liver-transplant patient — smart, complex, loving — on the unconscious Karen. If he’d projected all of this on Karen Cooper, what had he done to Rachel all these years? Sleep provides only a brief respite, as the idealized, sexy, soft-focus Karen haunts his dreams until his fellow Joanie wakes him up to witness her awakened after surgery.
The comedown from the adrenaline rush of the transplant process lands Toby in Stage 12: Acceptance. All other stages having proved either totally unhelpful or only somewhat successful, no option remains but to collapse into his office chair and allow the full wave of despair and grief to wash over him as he sobs his eyes out.
Tchotchkes & Things
• I’m interested in seeing how the show addresses Nahid’s refusal to be seen in public with Toby and her declaration that she doesn’t date. Agoraphobia? Extremely strict compartmentalization of different areas of her life? Other?
• From the first frame of the first episode, the camera has been a conspicuous presence — a very deliberate visual narrator working in tandem (and sometimes in tension) with Libby’s voiceover. It’s giving us another reminder to think about perspective. Who sees what and when? Which details do we notice? Which ones do we allow to slide past our eyes? How does seeing a thing contribute to and distort our memories of it?