The Instant When Everything is Perfect (24 page)

Mia feels like a person coming back to a country she left long ago, wondering if the language is still the same.

Pulling off her blouse, Mia stands in front of him in the bra she bought the day before at Nordstrom.

“Oh,” he says, stepping back, watching her. “Oh.”

If she blushed when she first saw Robert that day in the exam room, she’s on fire now, her face pulsing with feeling. He isn’t looking at her face, though, his eyes on her throat, neck, breasts. He reaches out and takes her arm and pulls her to him. When their skins touch, she closes her eyes, leans against his shoulder as he gently unhooks her bra.

The bra falls to the ground, and then her nipples are against him. She can’t bear how good he feels. She should leave before she feels one more millimeter of his lovely body. But he’s kissing her again, moving his lips down her face, her neck, his hands under her breasts. He has a breast in each hand, his mouth on one nipple, sucking so deeply, she moans.

She opens her eyes, and looks down at his head moving at her chest. Seeing the black band that holds his hair in a ponytail, Mia reaches up, pulls his hair free of the elastic, and watches it flow dark over his shoulders. She moves her fingers through it, so fine and soft, and he stands straight. She looks down, his erection a bulge against his jeans.

He breathes in deeply and smiles. “Can we take off the rest of our clothes?”

Mia nods, and he unbuttons his pants. She unbuttons hers and then slides down the zipper, wishing she could present him with her younger body. Even though he’s already told her he doesn’t believe in perfection, she knows
she
still does, she can’t help it. And as he undresses, she watches him, and he is perfect. His thighs and legs are firm and strong, and his penis juts dark and thick through the opening in his boxers.

Her mother’s voice sails forth into Mia’s mind
. If you weren’t so wide in the beam. What about the grapefruit diet? If you lost just fifteen pounds
. . . Mia cuts Sally off because she knows it doesn’t matter now. Robert wants her. At least it’s very clear his body does. Her body wants his, too; the underwear she is taking off is wet where it hugged her tight.

“You’re beautiful, Mia,” Robert says, kicking away the clothes on the floor between them.

“I am?” she blurts, almost moaning again when she feels his penis on her bare skin. She reaches down to put her hand around him and closes her eyes.

Before he can answer, she says, “So are you.”

They are kissing again, his skin on hers, his hands on her body. She feels a slight slick of wetness on the head of his penis, and she almost sinks to the floor, knowing that she wants him, needs the passion that Sally and Kenzie says doesn’t exist. But here it is, here in the form of this beautiful, erect man who is holding her, whom she holds back.

“Come here,” Robert murmurs, and then they are on his bed, on top of the covers, and Mia stops thinking, stops hearing Sally or Kenzie or even her own mind, stops her own guilt, and she is body and mind all at once, together.

Though Mia has written about adultery in all her novels, it has been a lifetime since she herself lay in a bed with a man other than Ford after sex. Or before sex. Or just lay in a bed with another man at all, clothed or unclothed. The very idea of where she is at this moment is completely unbelievable. Yet it’s true. She is naked in Robert’s bed, on her side, his chest against hers, his arm wrapped around her waist, his leg holding her close. Her heart is beating so slowly, Mia wonders if the orgasm she had with him has so surprised her system, it’s deciding to shut down, quit while it’s ahead. She doesn’t know if her mind can handle the overload either. Poor Robert will be left with a comatose woman and a lot of explaining to do.

“What are you thinking?” he says, and then laughs. “That’s a cliché, right?”

His breath smells like green tea, and she lifts her lips to kiss him softly, just his top lip. His hand presses on her upper back, pulling her closer. Between them, his penis is slick and soft on her belly.

“Well,” she says, “maybe. A cigarette is worse. Overdone.”

“Did you ever smoke?” he asks.

“A little bit in college. Ford—“ she stops, sighs, continues on. “Ford shamed me out of it. I used to have a little hidey spot where I’d go behind a classroom building, and he’d find me. So I quit. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant with Lucien. I guess my body gave the all clear.”

Robert is silent, but she can feel his pulse, his heart, against her body.

“What about you?”

“No,” he says. “But I smoked a lot of pot my senior year of college once I was accepted to UCSF medical school. That was the year my father died. The first year of med school, though, convinced me to stop smoking pot. Actually, I thought I had every disease I studied. Lung cancer was my biggest fear. So since then, I just drink a little bit. Nothing else.”

Mia rubs her face on his neck, strokes his sides, reaches a hand to his ass, which is small, tight, and rounded.

“Robert,” she says.

“Hmm.” He kisses her temple, and his penis stirs.

Mia moves on top of him, looking down into his pale blue eyes. His hair fans out on the pillow, and she reaches down to stroke a lock against the smooth cotton. Her body is coming out of its lethargy, her mind spinning with desire and fear.

“This was so nice,” she says.

“And?” His face stills, waiting.

Here is the spot, the place. Now. She could do it now. She could tell him that she has to go home and she has to stay home, for good, forever. She needs to say she can’t do this to Ford, who deserves her trust or to Harper, who still needs her full attention. Mia could insist that there should be no more emails or meetings or lunches. What she’s done wasn’t so bad, right? Only once. She won’t tell Kenzie. She’ll never write a sex scene like this in any of her novels—no afternoon trysts, warm adobe bedrooms, beautiful doctors with long lunch breaks. She’ll just drive home, shower, and then make her family a big dinner. She’ll convince Ford that once and for all—no matter what he says—that they need to go to a therapist. In a month, a half a year, a year, this afternoon will be like a movie she watched, a whirl of flickering, transient images. She won’t even ever write about adultery any more period, keeping her characters faithful and happy, committed ‘til death do them part, each novel with complete with a tidy, uplifting resolution.

Then, when she’s eighty, Mia will sit in her rocker and think,
That was a lovely dream. How nice.

And if she leaves now, if she throws on her clothes and drives home fast, Robert can never break her heart, as she imagines he might. After all, she’s married, overweight, confused. She’s no prize catch, and eventually, he’ll figure that out. Or maybe he already has. He hasn’t even told her very much about himself; she’s not yet heard the story about how he killed someone. He’s let her into his house, that’s all.

But he’s looking up at her, his eyes wide, his mouth set. This is the man who made her blush so deeply the first time she met him, she can still feel the cell memory of it, the way everything inside her seemed to expand. This is the man who excites her so much, her body and her mind have finally found each other, as she always imagined they could.

As she looks at this man underneath her, she knows she could get sucked down into wanting. Of wanting what she’s always wanted. Mia knows she’s greedy. To want more is selfish. To want more is to test fate, pulling one final, gaudy thing on board simply to lose the rest of the load she’s collected for years. Hasn’t she been gifted with her children and her husband and her writing? What about her teaching and her mother and sisters and her friends? But the need for this thing in her body, this loving with Robert, has always been there. For years, she’s been saying goodbye to her want, watching it float away on a life raft to the middle of an uncharted ocean.
Goodbye
, she thought, waving as she sailed on.
Maybe next life.

She touches Robert’s face, kisses his mouth, looks at him and then the clock. “How long is your lunch hour?”

“I don’t have to be back until three,” he says, almost laughing. He flips her down and brings his mouth to her chest, sliding his face along her body until he reaches a nipple.

Mia opens her legs to him, his penis hard against her thigh.
So there will be more
, she thinks.
I don’t have to wave goodbye just yet.

He lifts her head from her breast and reaches for another condom on his bedside table. His hair falls onto her face, the room streaks of light and dark, the rest just Robert, his smells, his skin, his voice. She presses her lips on his throat and listens to the crinkle of the little foil package.

“Mia,” he says, pushing inside her, his body hot for hers, at least for now.

“More,” she says. She moves with him, toward him, against him, around him. Mia closes her eyes.

Eleven

Sally

Sally sits in the white vinyl recliner in the treatment room at Inland. Unlike many patients on chemo, she has decided against the port-o-cath, the catheter inserted on her chest for an ultimately less painful course of chemo. Instead, she told Dr. Gupta she’d had enough tragedy to her chest, and she didn’t care if her arm was poked and pulled every three weeks.

“The last thing I need is another damn tube in there,” she said.

“Hmm,” Dr. Gupta said, scratching his cheek with his pen. “May I see your right arm then, Mrs. Tillier?”

She held out her arm, and he examined her skin, her body, laying his slim brown fingers on the soft, thin flesh between her fore- and upper arm. Then he ran his hand down to her hand, peering at the weave of blue at her wrist.

“Your veins look good, Mrs. Tiller, so I will acquiesce. However, if there is trouble at a later date, I will insist on the port-o-cath.”

So now her right arm is held out on a little platform on the side of the chair, the Cytoxin hanging above her on an IV stand. Mia sits in a metal chair next to the recliner, her lap top resting on her knees, the electrical cord winding behind Mia’s chair and plugged into the wall.

“I thought the point of laptops was being able to bring them anywhere without . . .” Sally waves her left arm. “Attachments.”

Mia stops typing, holding back, Sally knows, a sigh. “The batteries only keep it going for about a half an hour. Maybe a little more. It’s no big deal to plug it in. The nurse said it was fine—wouldn’t interrupt any special machines or anything.”

Without warning, Mia smiles at Sally, and Sally pauses. Her whole body pauses. There, in this instant, here is baby Mia looking up at Sally as Sally dries her on her lap after a shallow bath in the big porcelain tub. Mia with her dark brown eyes, joyful, happy, giggling in her baby roundness. Mia, the baby who when on Sally’s shoulder, patted Sally’s back in the same rhythm that Sally patted Mia’s.

This same baby, child, girl, woman looks at Sally as the drug feeds into Sally’s body, winding into her bloodstream.

“Are you excited about the book?” Sally asks, thinking that this is the reason for Mia’s happiness.

“Uh?” Mia looks up from her computer screen. “Oh, yes. Of course. I’ve got all those trips coming up. You’ve talked to Nydia and Dick, right? About coming here with you while I’m gone?”

“Dick has special plans for me. He said I’ll be the only chemo patient in the world who’s had so much fun.”

Mia shakes her head. “He really likes you.”

“Are you surprised?” Sally asks, knowing that in a way, she herself is.

“Of course not, Mom. It’s just that you haven’t, well. It’s not like you’ve really wanted a . . . “

“Boyfriend.”

Mia’s eyes widen. “He’s your boyfriend.”

Sally waves her hand. “I don’t know. Let’s call him my genteleman caller. A good, vague term.”

“Wow.” Mia turns back to her screen but doesn’t type.

“But Nydia will help out too,” Sally says. “Dick can’t do it all.”

Mia nods but does’t turn to look at Sally, and Sally wonders what Mia is really thinking about.

Finally, Mia closes the computer and puts it on the table next to the bed. “Listen, Mom, Katherine could come out. For a week.”

“No, no. It’s all covered. Never mind it. It will all work out. But tell me about the book.”

“Good reviews so far.” Mia bites her lip.

“Then what is it?”

Mia pushes her hair back, her bangs sticking straight up from her forehead. Sally read somewhere that parents are in love with their children, but children aren’t in love with their parents. Would this theory explain why Sally’s heart feels heavy now with love for her child? Mia is here--not in love with Sally but here anyway, out of duty or obligation or need or fear. But here anyway.

“Mom,” Mia says. “It’s nothing. Do you want me to read to you?”

“Do you have your book? With all this going on, I haven’t had time to read the copy you gave me.”