The Instant When Everything is Perfect (7 page)

“But patients don’t seem to know where to stop,” Robert says. “And some of us don’t either. The line is so blurred between what is necessary and what is almost a crime. If we aren’t working with people who are sick, who truly need us, how can we call ourselves doctors? How can we even talk about what we do when there are those ultimate makeover shows?”

“The outer and inner are the same,” Jack says, smiling broadly, the old conversation having arrived at his favorite curve. “To work on the average or ugly or annoying outer is the help the inner made sick because of it.”

Robert’s stomach churns. He’s heard this argument his whole career, even believed it himself for long stretches before something or someone would rip an enormous hole in it. For months and often years, he would be lulled by the idea that he was helping people, perfecting them, giving them the lives they really wanted. Then, in an instant, as he stood over a patient sucking out micro bits of fat from her face, he would see that he was perpetuating the shallow, superficial view the entire world seemed to be embracing these days, giving false hope, covering up reality, pandering to an impossible view of beauty.

And then? And then something really awful happened.

“Do we,” Robert says, putting down his glass, “always have to talk about work?”

Jack raises his eyebrows, and Robert knows that he shouldn’t have tried to change the subject.

“What else is there?” Jacks says. But he’s smiling.

“Oh, I don’t know. Your family. Tina. The state of the economy. Our new governor. Anything.” Anything but Leslie, Robert thinks.

Jack sighs. “God, I wish we could smoke in here.”

“A cigar might start a riot.”

“You’re right.”

“About what? The riot or the conversation?”

“Both. Listen, what’s going on with Leslie? You haven’t said a word about her.”

Robert shakes his head. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

Jack rolls his eyes. “What? You think that you can avoid this conversation? I know we’ve had it before a few times, but Rob. Shit. Tell me what happened this time.”

“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you? You want me dead. You want all my patients.”

“I don’t need your patients. I want your house. And if you don’t ever hook up with another woman, I’ll be your next of kin. Don’t forget to tell your lawyer.”

Robert takes his last sip and pushes the glass away. “Leslie and I didn’t work out.”

“She was a great girl. I see her sometimes at the gym.”

For a second, Robert looks around for the waiter, needing another drink. The waiter sees him and pretends not to, turning his back, too close to closing time offer up another drink. Robert sighs.

“She wanted different things. She—“

Jack snorts. “Don’t tell me. She wanted a commitment. You know, a relationship. God forbid, marriage?”

“Not everyone is as lucky as you are. Not every woman can be Tina.”

“Even Tina isn’t Tina sometimes. No one is perfect, Rob.”

“Haven’t you said you are?”

Jack thrums the table with his fingers and glares in mock anger at Robert. The waiter walks up and clears away the empty glasses, a spoon, mumbles something, and leaves the check. Jack takes it, and Robert lets him because it’s his turn.

“Well, you could give a woman longer than a year. Or give yourself longer. You might actually get used to her.”

“I . . .” Robert starts and then stops. Jack stares at him, and Robert looks at the table cloth flaked with bread crumbs. He wants to finish the sentence, but he knows it will sound corny, especially to Jack.

“You could try to get over this strange year thing you’ve got going. Push through to thirteen months or so and see what happens, you might just grow accustomed—“

“Don’t you dare start singing that song from
My Fair Lady
,” Robert says, holding up his hand. During procedures, Jack listens to musicals—
Oklahoma, South Pacific, Camelot
—and belts out the tunes he loves best.

“I’ve grown accustomed . . .” Jack begins.

Robert tosses a sugar cube at Jack. “Knock it off.”

“I’ll stop when you have someone to grow accustomed to.” Jack throws the cube in the middle of the table and then hands the check back to the waiter.

Robert pushes his hair back and spreads a hand on the table top, noticing pepper in between his fingers. “I did meet someone interesting this week.”

Jack’s eyes widen. “Really? Where?”

“A patient’s daughter. She even sent me a thank you card. But—“

“But what? It’s not like you’d be dating a patient. She’s a patient once-removed. No infringement on the Hippocratic Oath. No sexual harassment policy broken. No code of conduct infraction.”

Robert rubs her forehead. “It won’t work. It can’t, and I did something not great. I plugged her into Inland’s database and looked her up. She’s a member. Married. Two kids. A husband. She must have eczema, too. Scripts for Elidal and Valisone.”

“You are a little twisted,” Jack says, taking the check back from the waiter, signing the slip, and putting his credit card back in his wallet. “Good to see. I didn’t know you had it in you. You usually wait for a woman to find you and bang you over the head with a club and drag you back to your cave.”

“Funny.” Robert stands, taking his jacket off the chair and tucking in his shirt.

“So what else did you find out? What other confidential info did you expose?” Jack gets up too, and puts his wallet in his pocket. He and Jack put on their coats and walk through the dining area to the door, pushing out into the evening. They stand side by side, facing the street. A valet takes Jack’s ticket and disappears.

“So?” Jack asks.

“One of her kids was in the rehab program.”

“I hope it worked,” Jack says. “Are you sure it wasn’t her?”

“It said adolescent program in her file.”

“I hope she’s older than that. Otherwise, we’ll have to have dinner on visiting days at Santa Rita.”

The valet drives up with Jack’s Porsche Carerra, and Jack hands him a five dollar bill. “Come on, I’ll drive you to your car. I can’t believe you still won’t pay for a valet.”

Robert shakes his head and holds out his hand to shake Jack’s. “No, I’m going to walk up to Bonanza Books. I need something to read.”

Jack takes Robert’s hand and then pulls him to him, giving him a hug. Jack laughs, the familiar, comforting sound in Robert’s ear.

“Try to avoid spying on anyone else this month. And stay away from married women.”

“Like you ever did.” Robert pulls back, pats his friend’s arm.

“I know. But in the long run, did any of those women work out?”

“You were lucky to get away with your life after what’s-her-name. Maryann,” Robert says. “And anyway, who’s talking about a long run?”

Jack opens his car door and laughs again. “Oh, yeah. I forgot I was talking to you. See you later, man.”

The sound of the Porsche is guttural, thick, the sound of power, and Jack looks out from behind the windshield and winks. Accelerating, he roars off down the road, the engine vibrating, echoing off the buildings.

“Sweet ride,” the valet says.

Robert shrugs and walks away, saying “Mia Alden” under his breath.

There is still over an hour before closing, but Robert is the only one in Bonanza Books save the young man behind the counter, who looks up when Robert walks in, nods, and goes back to his magazine, one of those with the strange, large-eyed cartoon characters on the cover.

Robert used to like to read, but in recent years, he’s been so busy with his work that the only thing he reads for pleasure is
JAMA
and
Lancet
. Even when he’s on vacation, he’s reading papers on efficacy of radiosurgery on skin lesions or the new breakthroughs in rhytidoplasty. But back in college and on his summer breaks when he worked in the lab at UCSF tending the mice on hormone therapies, he would read whatever he could get his hands on. Home decorating magazines,
Reader’s Digest
, poetry journals. Once he even read a romance novel a doctor had hidden under her lab coat, something about a woman in a castle and her vampire lover. It didn’t matter. Words were words. Words were entertainment. Words kept him from living alone in his brain.

He still doesn’t know what he was trying to avoid.

“Do ya need some help?” the young man suddenly asks.

Robert realizes that he’s been standing still in front of the sign that reads “New Fiction.”

He turns to the young man, whose frizzy hair is a wildflower of dark curls around his face. One giant pimple beats on his chin.

“I’m looking for the books by a particular author. Mia Alden.”

The young man points to shelves that run along the back of the store. “In literature. Under A.”

Robert wants to roll his eyes, to tell the young man that he’s known how to alphabetize since before kindergarten, but he sees the young man is used to questions like this.
Where is the fiction?
In the fiction section.
Where are the children’s books?
Over there, in the children’s section.
Where are the magazines?
In the magazine rack.

“Thanks,” Robert says, walking toward the far left of the shelf, where a large, black handwritten A is taped to the wood.

Abbot, Addonizio, and then Alden, Mia, right before Browne, Susan. Robert cocks his head before he reaches for the books, seeing the smooth spines, the titles in the same font. He reaches for one and pulls it off the shelf, the slick cover sliding in his hands. Flipping it up, he looks at the cover and reads the title.
The Daisy Plate Incident.
Already he hates the story because the title is ridiculous.
The Daisy Plate Incident?
But then he remembers the romance novel, turning the book over. Maybe the title is weird, but there are all sorts of accolades on the back, “Riveting,” “A thoughtful take on the excruciating joy of childhood,” “A must read,” and “An author to watch.” Famous authors and reviewers have said these things about Mia and her work, and when he looks at the bottom of the back cover, he sees her picture.

She’s done something to her hair since this photo was taken, chopped it off because here, it’s long and flowing over her shoulders. She’s leaning over, her chin in her hand, and sh
e looks
happy, pretty, sexy in her recline.

Mia Alden
, the bio reads,
is the author of
Sacramento by Train
and
Beat
. A professor of literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she lives in Northern California with her family.

He can’t help it, but his body tingles at the thought of her academic job. He’s a snob, and he’s always known it, sometimes unable to understand how anyone can live being a pizza delivery person or a ticket taker or a cashier. He wants to feel that they—just like him—take pride in what they do, wake up knowing that it’s possible they will make a difference in something or for someone. But he doesn’t believe they do. No matter how he thinks about it, he can feel their despair as they mop floors and collect bedpans and take his two dollars as he crosses the Bay Bridge. Like the poor kid behind the counter, who works here at night and dreams of what? Being a rock star? A famous poet? An astronaut? Robert can feel the kid’s impatience and irritation all the way across the bookstore.

But here is what he knows so far: Mia Alden is a professor and a novelist. She’s also married and has a drug addict child. Her mother has cancer. Her sister is a pathologist. Her breasts are hers, natural, large, pushing up out of her sweater. Somewhere on her body, her skin itches. Her eyes make him taste caramel. And there was something in her words and ferocious blush that makes him feel weak now, in the knees, just like the clichés he read in that long-ago romance novel.

Robert pulls Mia’s two other novels off the shelf and stacks them in his hands, walking toward the young man at the desk. He’s going to read tonight, even though he has surgery in the morning. He’s going to start with her first novel, the better-titled
Sacramento by Train
. He’s going to find out about Mia Alden the only way he honestly can.

Because his parents died in successive years when Robert was in college, he was well off early, long before he’d finished his residency and begun his practice. In fact, unlike Jack and most of Robert’s other colleagues, Robert was able to complete his course work and extra training without worrying about repaying student loans. He had no loans. He was free and clear from the start.

So when he was hired by Inland, he bought this house in Walnut Creek, an old adobe rancher on the historical registry with a ceramic tile roof. Built in the traditional Mexican style, the house has an expansive courtyard in the middle, filled with ferns and hibiscus, a fountain, and Spanish tile. The adobe bricks are so thick and dense that in the dead heat of summer, his house stays cool—when the winter fog pulses over the hills and fills in the valleys with chill, his house stays warm. He knows that at least four of his former girlfriends didn’t want to break up with him because of the house, staying with him despite silent evenings and separate beds.