The Instant When Everything is Perfect (11 page)

Five

Robert

The night after he sits in the cafeteria with Mia, he finishes
Sacramento by Train
. After reading the last paragraph, he wants to throw the book on the floor. His stomach roils. Susan doesn’t leave Rafael. No, not even after she sleeps with Marla and then falls in love with John, a colleague. Not after she finds out about Rafael and his secretary. Not even after Rafael finds out about Marla and the drunken escapade at the cabin. There they sit on the deck outside their back door, the sunset a dull orange slice on the horizon. They drink wine; Rafael reaches over and touches Susan’s arm. The novel ends.

“Fuck,” he says, tossing the book off the bed. He looks up at his ceiling and then reaches down to grab the novel, turning it in his hands to the back cover so he can look at Mia again.

“Why?” he says to her. But she keeps smiling at him, as if she hadn’t been in front of him today, exhausted, sad, excited. He loved looking at her face because she hid nothing. Color washed over her cheeks when she was embarrassed, lines formed at the corner of her eyes when she smiled, her mouth hung open when she was surprised. Unlike so many women he knew, she didn’t cover herself with makeup or turn away from him to hide a feeling.

Robert pushes away his blankets, still holding the book, and gets out of bed. He leaves his bedroom and walks to his office, turning on the light and then the computer. As the computer boots up, he sits down on his chair and puts the novel on the desk.
But
, he thinks,
but
. All these words are hers. Things maybe she hasn’t said in the context of her real life. He knows if she didn’t believe them in some way, she wouldn’t have written them. Robert knows that Rafael and Susan sitting together on the deck was a thought, a desire for wholeness, peace, love, even when it seems impossible, a moment of hope even when it seems wrong.

With a few clicks, Robert is connected to his DSL, and he signs onto his email server. He opens his top desk drawer and takes out her card. Mia Alden. As he rubs his thumb on the thick, solid paper, he wonders what her middle name is. He wants to know what shampoo she uses and what she smells like under her clothes. Is it soap or perfume? Or just her skin? He wonders what she would look like sitting before him naked. He’s held so many breasts in his life, felt the weight women carry around with them every day. He wants to hold Mia that way, but differently, not to find disease or recommend augmentation or reduction or reconstruction. Robert wants to take both her breasts—large, lovely breasts, he can tell—in his hands and lean toward her, kissing the skin above her aureole, then letting his tongue find her nipple, large and erect.

Robert shakes his head, trying to ignore the pulse of blood in his groin, his own erection. He taps the card on his desk and then types in her email address to a new email message. For a second he stops typing, wondering if anyone else will read this email. Her husband. One of her sons. He looks at the card and realizes that this must be her work email, the one at the university.

He can write her there. It’s safe. He wouldn’t otherwise. She’s a woman who believes in wholeness, peace, and love, and he doesn’t want to break her heart before he even has a chance to understand it.

He begins typing again.

Dear Mia
, he begins, and then he backspaces through to the beginning of the line.

Mia. Dear Mia.
He erases the last two words and goes on.

It was so nice to see you today. I talked with Cindy Jacobs later in the afternoon, and she was very pleased with the outcome of the surgery. She was able to save quite a bit of skin, and your mother’s reconstruction should go just as well.

Robert stops typing and sighs, pushing back his hair. He sounds like a doctor. A slightly intrusive doctor, but a doctor all the same. He thinks to erase everything he’s typed, but then he doesn’t. What he’s said won’t scare her. She won’t see his erection in these words.

I finished
Sacramento by Train
, and I want to know why it ended the way it did. Why did you leave us hanging there, forced

He erases
forced
and changes it to
sitting

sitting on the deck with Susan and Rafael? What happens to their marriage? Who compromises? Who feels okay? If you know, I wish you’d tell me. It was a good book. A good story. Despite the title, I’ll start
The Daisy Plate Incident
tomorrow.

Robert

He sits back in his chair and then hits Send. In a flash, the email is gone. It’s too late to take it back.



When he wakes up, Robert pushes out of bed and walks to his office. It is five am, dark still, cold, and he has a 7.30 am surgery. A reconstruction, just like he will do for Sally Tillier. He’s left his computer on, and
Sacramento by Train
lays open and upside down on his desk, a book butterfly.

He sits down, rubs his face, stares at the screen. He has nine messages, most of which, he knows, are spam. Robert clicks on his email and scans for what he wants. For a second, his lungs seem to flatten, pressing the air he needs from his body, his heart beating fast to try to bring him oxygen. But wait. There she is. MAlden. He stares at her email address, noting that she wrote this email at two in the morning. His finger hovers over the touch pad, wanting and not wanting to read the email, knowing he should savor the seconds of her that he has. This message may be the last, telling him that she has changed her mind. Or this email might be the first, the beginning of a relationship. He often forgets to pay attention to beginnings, focusing on the ends, the outcomes, which with relationships have usually been bad. But what is he thinking? A relationship! Robert closes his eyes. When he opens them, he clicks on her message and her words open to him.

Hi, Robert. I managed to plug my computer into the hospital room phone. I’m hiding it from the nurses though because I know it must be breaking some kind of rule. My mom’s sleeping, and the sleeper chair they brought in for me doesn’t look too inviting. My sisters went back to the condo, so I thought I’d check my email, and here you are.

About the book. Well, I don’t like stories that end up all pretty and tidy. It doesn’t seem real to me. Nothing in my life has ever just folded itself into a neat package. So with Susan and Rafael—well, they are going to have to figure it out for themselves. I think they both learned a lot. Figured out what they need, and maybe it isn’t each other. But that’s not my story. I just wanted them to know.

Have you ever been married? Are you married?

I didn’t ask you a thing about yourself today in the cafeteria. I felt selfish when I realized that. You have my books and asked me all the questions, and I have no information about you at all. Except that you’re a plastic surgeon. You graduated from UCSF. I saw that on the office wall, and you have all the right credentials, it looks like. But tell me something, Robert. Tell me a story.

Mia

He reads the email again and then again and then again, starving for her, greedy, as if he’s eating an orange, pulling the last sweet juice from the sour rind. Mia’s a river, awash with words and voice, the beginning of her message pulling him to the end. He felt that when he began to read her book, and then now, with her real self turned into real words for him alone, he knows that she moves. She rocks him with her questions.

Leaning back, he wonders if this short-breathed, adrenaline high is always there for him in the beginning. Is this what he’s always felt? Was he this excited when he met Leslie? He closes his eyes, brings Leslie forth, her short summer skirt even in autumn, her soft laugh, the way she tucked her brown hair behind her ear when she spoke. Yes, he thinks. Yes. He’s felt this excitement before.

Robert sits up, stares again at her message. He doesn’t need this. He should delete her message and log off. He’ll promise himself to never write to her again. How can he do this with a woman who is married when it’s no different than with Leslie. That’s it. He has to call it all off. When he sees her after her mother’s surgery, he will be sincere and distant, concerned but stiff. He’ll walk away from her just like Margaret, Joy, Dara, and Leslie have walked away from him.

The potential mess he has started with Mia Alden can be avoided. Now. She’s so busy with her mother, her writing, her family, she might not even notice if he doesn’t write back.

Robert pushes his hair away from his face and then looks at his watch. Five fifteen. In a few minutes, he needs to put on his sweats so he can get a run in before the surgery. He needs to stop at Starbucks for a latte. He has to go over his patient’s chart and confer with Kathy Fuji about anesthesia. But there’s time to delete or time to write back.

He stares at his hands. He wanted to touch Mia. He knows that. And he wants to know her. He can’t promise himself more than that. He couldn’t promise Mia more if she asked. But this want is real. It may not be more than that, but something in his body tells him that it is. That maybe this time, it’s different.

The pulse and glow of the computer screen fills the room with grayish light. He blinks, looks at her message and then breathes in deeply.

Dear Mia,

I have no story.

He erases the first sentence because he knows that every life has a story or at least a narrative. A beginning, middle, and, at least for him, a not-yet end.

I’m not married. I have never been married. I’ve lived with women, though. And I have no children. Do you know that commercial where the man gets such a great rate on a mortgage that he’s inspired to always tell the truth? So he ends up on a date and says, “I live with my mother and have never had a relationship longer than three months.” I’m not that bad off, but I’m telling you what is true. My relationships have lasted a year or two. And sadly, my mother is dead.

Robert stops and reads what he’s written and begins to laugh. Phyllis, who has followed him into the office, stares at him with her copper eyes and then yawns her cat yawn. What woman in the world could read this email and still want to know him? But he feels like the man in the commercial. He wants to tell the truth. He’s caught in Mia’s current.

Here’s one story. When I was a resident at UCSF, I actually forgot to go home and sleep. I was on call for 36 hours, and when it was over, I went back into another day of work without realizing that my shift was over. It wasn’t until 12 hours later that the head resident looked at the board and thought to tell me to go home. But the weird part was that I had a memory of driving home, eating some food, and sleeping. I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes somewhere along the line and dreamed it all.

The good news is that I didn’t kill anyone that day.

I have to go to work. I’m glad that your mother is recovering well. Maybe I’ll have time to come check in on her—-you—-today.

Robert



The morning and then afternoon pass in a blur. He performs his first surgery, and then his next, everything so clear in the moment. His life, as it often is, is reduced to his hands, the way they move under someone’s skin, the angle of his scalpel, the tension in his suture line. All his world seems to be in the moment of his vision and only that vision. He used to go days like that in school and his residency. That’s why he could work for two shifts and not realize that he’d forgotten to go home.

His mother used to say, “You’re driving at night with tiny headlights,” when he’d trip over a large piece of furniture or forget to take a shower or stay up all night studying for a trigonometry exam.

Maybe it’s why he’s never thought too much about his relationships ending so soon because for the time they lasted, the relationship he was in was all he saw, time compounded by focus.

“Peripheral vision!” Jack says, when Robert doesn’t notice a good looking woman or get excited about a job opportunity at another hospital. “Look around, man!”

But usually Robert has been so monofocused on whatever is before him, by the time he turns to look around, the woman and the job are gone.

One day as he was driving home, he passed a man and a woman, the man pushing a stroller. The man was about thirty, maybe thirty-two, East Indian, his wife Asian, a little younger. Robert couldn’t see the baby, but he saw how the father looked down into the stroller, smiling, his teeth white against his dark skin.