The Instant When Everything is Perfect (28 page)

“Join our group,” Jack would say. “You’ll be happier here.”

“Quit working at Inland,” his mother would have said. “Do volunteer work. Help the people who need it the most.”

“Get married,” his father would have said. “You’re alone too much. Settle down for God’s sake.”

“Make us beautiful,” some of his patients would say.

“Make us normal,” others would say. “Fix what has made me broken.”

“What do you want?” Mia would ask, always thoughtful, always going back to the source. “What do you really want, Robert?”

He doesn’t hear the door open, but then there is her hand is on his shoulder, sliding around to his chest. “I’m hungry,” she says, and Robert nods. He’s hungry, too.

On Monday before going to the hospital, Robert calls Operation Grin. Two years ago, he and two of his Inland colleagues traveled to Norfolk, Virginia and trained there for two weeks. They went over the procedures to repair cleft lip and palate. They studied cases of children born without noses, of women with facial tumors that impaired vision, of men slowly starving because they couldn’t swallow, their palates gaping holes.

It had felt like camp, learning to operate without the machines and medicines and assistance that he’d come to expect in the United States, that most people in the western world took for granted. But he’d never made the commitment to go anywhere, though his two colleagues had, coming home with pictures of Na and Felipe and Sofia from Vietnam and Honduras and Bulgaria. Robert looked at the photos, listened to the stories, but he had never made the call to go, never felt, what? That he was ready? That he could do it? That he was good enough?

But today, Robert talks with Anna in Virginia, who puts him on the list for Honduras; he picks Honduras because he likes the way the capitol’s name—Tegucigalpa—sounds on his tongue. Robert hangs up the phone and stares at his email, seeing MAlden. He clicks on her name, feeling the slight flurry of thrill her emails give him.

Dear Robert,

I loved seeing you at Buck Owens’s Palace, standing next to that orange leather suit with fringe. In fact, I’m going out today to buy you a CD of Buck’s best music. I want you to play it all the time.

Thank you for coming to see me in Bakersfield. Thank you for sleeping all night with me. Thank you for telling me the story.

Love, Mia.

Love, Mia
, Robert thinks. He does love Mia, but he’s not sure how he knows this. He always thought love would take a long time, months and years to develop, and even then, it would be more of a habit than an emotion. For so long he waited for something to happen, something that clichés defined so well: bells to ring, the sun to break free of the clouds, his heart to swell. Robert imagined, though, that he’d recognize love, remember the connection somehow, turn and suddenly see it. He would awake in the morning next to Leslie or whoever he had been with at the time and expect that the feeling would be there, like magic, suffusing his entire body. He’d blink a couple times, hoping that when he was truly conscious, he’d feel it, know it, want the woman next to him more than anything.

But until yesterday morning in the motel in Bakersfield, he’d never found his body suffused with more than affection, comfort, and then relief that it wasn’t love. The woman wouldn’t have to stay. He was free to let her leave.

Yesterday, though, he’d turned to see Mia next to him, her hair messy, her face slightly flattened by the pillow and he wanted to weep because there it finally was, a feeling in every part of him, possessive and needy and wanting and hopeful and desirous and joyful. And he saw then more clearly than ever that she belonged to someone else.

Dear Mia
, Robert writes back

I would really like to have the orange suit, too. Can you arrange that? I’ll wear it while I listen to the CD. A total experience. Like you. I can’t wait for Thursday.

Love,
he writes, feeling the L and O and V and E under his fingertips,
Robert



Monday night after work, Robert has just enough time after work to make it to the brand new Barnes and Noble in Emeryville, swiftly heading up the stairs to the second floor. He isn’t even close to the reading area when he hears the laughter and then her voice. He’s not going to let her see him because he doesn’t want to startle her, see her face flash red, have her lose her train of thought, shift uncomfortably, maybe even glare at him. What he wants is to see her without her knowing he’s there, Mia in the wild, Mia natural, Mia as she is to everyone else.

Getting as close to the reading area as he can without entering her view, he leans against the self-help books and watches her. A crowd of about twenty-five people surround Mia, her books fanned out on a table that she stands in front of. She’s wearing a longish black dress, and he imagines the smooth curves of her breasts and waist and hips under his hands as he stares at her. She’s jangling with sterling silver bracelets and earrings, the same necklace she had on in Bakersfield hanging between her breasts.

Robert closes his eyes and imagines he can smell her, her skin, her hair, her soap.

“That’s a great question,” she says to someone in the audience, and then she begins to talk about creating characters.

Everyone in the audience listens to her, except for a little girl, who has been dragged to the lecture by what looks to be her mother, a woman who writes down everything Mia says. The girl sits on her chair, swinging her legs and reading from a children’s book. But the rest of the crowd is focused on Mia, who moves her hands, tells stories about her characters, describes how her character Susan ended up doing things Mia wasn’t prepared for.

“The next thing I knew,” Mia says, “Susan’s off in a cabin in Tahoe with another woman. It was like I had to write to catch up to her. I told her, ‘No, Susan. Don’t do that!’ But it wasn’t in my control. Susan had a life of her own and she wanted to live it.”

The audience laughs a little, surprised, like Robert is, by the idea of a character jumping out of an author’s head to do what the character wants.

After the talk is over, Mia sits at the table, and some of the audience members stand in a line to have her sign books. Robert is about to walk up to the table when he notices the man in the back. The dark haired man from Sally Tillier’s hospital room. Ford. Or Rafael. Both. Ford, with whom Robert has been conversing for weeks.

Ford doesn’t see Robert because he’s watching Mia. He leans against the wall, his arms crossed. Robert looks back at Mia and sees her glance up at Ford and smile. Ford raises his eyebrows, mouths something Robert doesn’t pick up, and then smiles back at her. Mia shakes her head a little and then goes back to the book she’s signing.

Robert eyes burn. Mia smiles at Ford. They talk the invisible language of marriage.

Of course she smiles at him
, he thinks.
She’s known him for over twenty years.

His heart leaps in a kind of neurotic arrhythmia. He thinks,
But she’s sleeping with me.

Robert looks again at Ford, who is now talking to the book store manager. By the way Ford’s hands gesture toward Mia, by both the manager’s and Ford’s enthusiastic nodding, Robert can tell the manager is extolling Mia’s virtues, giving Ford—the person closest to her in the world—what he can’t say to Mia because she is busy. After all, doesn’t the husband know more than anyone else? Of course the manager knows this, asking questions, listening attentively, nodding and smiling.

Ford’s the Mia expert, not Robert. Ford belongs here, not Robert.

Moving backward, Robert almost trips over the little girl, who is holding the children’s book.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, turning away, walking quickly to the stairs and then out the big book store doors, needing air, needing to leave.

Dear Mia
, he writes later that night

I don’t think Thursday is going to work out after all. I’ll let you know what day will.

Robert.

Thirteen

Mia

The only one who calls her is an automated Cheryl Carr, the president of the California Teachers Association, who wants her donation in preparation for the big election in the fall. Teachers and their unions are fighting for money, the state in financial shambles, the elementary, middle, and high schools barely functioning, colleges turning away thousands of applicants. Mia hangs up without listening to more, even though she knows what Cheryl says is true and even though she cares about all the students. She wants to keep the line free, but she knows Robert won’t call her at home. He doesn’t even know her number here or at work. He hasn’t called her cell phone, and he hasn’t emailed since Monday night, telling her that Thursday afternoon wouldn’t work out. She wrote him back, telling him about the reading in Emeryville and how she could barely talk to the crowd because he was in her mind the whole time. Mia suggested the following Tuesday, knowing that was his day without surgery, but he hasn’t written back since then, and now it’s Friday. Almost a week without seeing him.

She doesn’t know why, but Robert is breaking up with her.

Mia decides she can’t work on her current novel any more, so she saves the sad three hundred words she’s managed to compose and turns off her computer. She knows if she leaves it on, she will check and re-check her email, wanting more than anything to see his address pop up on her screen. All the terrible behaviors she had while dating those millions of years ago before Ford are coming back: her obsessiveness, her need for constant reassurance, her desire for the body of her beloved. Maybe she was wrong to let loose all this terrible need. Maybe she would have been better served if she let herself go into middle age and beyond with only what she has. She could have made it, she thinks, as she begins to clean the kitchen, scrubbing the sink and counters with the soft scrub cleanser. She could have been happy with Ford and the kids and her life. Eventually, she would be a grandmother, a grandmother who writes, Ford her lifelong partner, a man who knows more about her than anyone.

At the retirement home, they can sit on their patio overlooking the golf course and know that the life they now see is shared, understood by both of them. By then, he will have known her for three-fourths of her life, so much more of her experience with him than without.

Mia rinses the sink, watching the yellow swirling water slip down the drain. But it’s too late now. She opened the box, let all her lust and desire and hope and need fly out, closing the lid just in time to keep love safe in the small darkness. Love. Whatever love is, she thinks she is in love with Robert. From that very first moment, the door of the room opening. His ponytail, his slightly frayed sweater under his crisp white lab coat, the wild blush on his cheeks.

“Shit,” she says, turning off the water and breathing in, the air catching on tears.

Mia shakes her head, wipes her hands on a dish towel, and wonders what to do. Go to his house and camp out until he comes home. Make an appointment with him. Forget about him.

Call Sally, Kenzie, even Katherine. Go visit Dahlia, traveling from her sister’s house in Phoenix to her readings in Los Angeles. Ask Sally if there is room for one more on the Celtic trip. Call her department chair and beg for a summer class. She’d take any class, anything, even English 1A. Go to New York and find a job as an editor, rent a Manhattan apartment, date no one because there are no available men there. Hide in the hills, sleep in a tent. Jump off the deck. Forget everything.

But then there is the
pound pound
of someone walking up the front steps. No, it’s a
pound pound
and a second
pound pound
. Looking out the kitchen window, she sees it’s Lucien and Harper, both of them now at the front door.

Mia puts down the towel and runs to the door, pulling it open. “What? What is it?”

Lucien smiles, his eyes caught in sunlight, a tumble of brown and green. “Hi, Mom.”

Mia shakes her head. “Why are you here? What’s happened?” Then she turns to Harper. “And why aren’t you in school?”

“Jeez, Mom.” Harper walks in the door, passing her but putting a hand on her shoulder. “Let us in, okay?”

Lucien comes in, kisses her cheek, and carries his bags down the hall. Mia closes the door and turns to Harper, who leans against the kitchen doorway.

“What’s going on, Harp?” she asks.

Then Harper stills. “Wait till Lucien is with us.”

Now more than ever, Mia is afraid. They know what she’s done, and they are going to confront her. An adultery intervention. She’ll have no choice but to jump off the front deck to the driveway below, her death the only possible solution to the mess she’s created in all their lives. For the first time since reading Robert’s email, Mia begins to cry, a quiet, calm stream of tears coming from the corners of her eyes.