Perfection

by Julie Metz

  “Anna, I think you have to just march right down to the barn and tell him to leave now. And just get his shit out of the house if it’s making you upset. He can’t have it both ways. Either he’s married to you or he’s seeing the girl. He has to choose. I think you should go tell him right now. If you need me to, I’ll drive up there and do it myself. But I think you can do it.”

  Later that day I called her back. She told me she’d dumped John’s clothes into some black garbage bags and left them on the snowy lawn. Within days, he cleared out of the barn and rented an apartment in town. She felt better, more in charge, but new battles were just beginning. She was looking for a divorce lawyer. No point waiting any longer now.

  Sara came to visit from England for a week in March. A friend from my college days, she had promised to help me sort through Henry’s things.

  “This will be my gift to you,” she told me. I knew she could get this job done. She was a librarian both by profession and by temperament; I could trust her to be ruthless yet compassionate. We had the love of over twenty years behind us. She was so like a sister that I forgot we’d chosen each other as friends.

  “Maybe you’ll find Henry’s wedding ring,” I said hopefully as she surveyed his office files. “I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”

  Sara and I were brought together by a powerful force—a torrential downpour the first night of freshman year—as we stood on the portico of a stately academic building at Smith College, following the first meeting of the future class of 1981. I peered out into the storm. This rain was not a late summer gardener’s gentle tip of a watering can but more like a plumbing disaster, a bottomless bucket endlessly dumping its contents. The road to my faraway dorm room was already flooded past my ankles. Just as I was preparing to roll up my pants, take off my shoes, and walk home barefoot, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was a young woman with bobbed light brown hair and bee-stung lips wearing a jingly silver ankle bracelet.

  “You look just like someone I know from home,” she told me, perhaps a bit homesick. Despite my initial irritation at not being noticed for my uniqueness, ultimately I did feel chosen by her. I switched dorms to be her roommate. After a junior year abroad, I returned to campus to her co-op house, where Sara had picked a beautiful, sunny room for me.

  Our late seventies and early eighties campus was a hothouse of radical feminist political disputation. Dinner conversations at our co-op house devolved into noisy arguments over our school’s divestment policy in South Africa, vegetarianism, lesbianism, and literary criticism. The debates often carried on upstairs; we weren’t always the best housemates, though we were inventive cooking partners.

  Sara and I discovered our friendship’s perfect medium after college, when we moved away from campus and began writing letters. Two decades of snail mail and now e-mail later, through her Peace Corps service in Africa, marriage, and children, I knew that if I needed her she would come, and now she was here with me.

  For a week she spent the workday hours in Henry’s office, periodically calling me upstairs to assess piles of papers and periodicals.

  “You should throw these out,” she announced quietly and firmly, pointing to a pile of Henry’s cherished but moldering magazine clippings. I was ready and relieved to let those piles go.

  “You should really consider this situation with Tomas,” she said to me one afternoon during pile assessment. “This seems impulsive and too rushed. You aren’t ready for anything serious with anyone.” I couldn’t argue with that, but I knew that as soon as she left for home I would call Tomas.

  During her last day with me, Sara found Henry’s missing wedding ring in one of his many travel bags, hidden in an interior pocket. He had told me that he didn’t want to wear his ring anymore. I’d tried to be open-minded. Rings had never been that important to me, though I continued to wear my wedding band. But I wondered why he went to the trouble to take the ring with him on his travels.

  Emily and I were at a party at Tomas’s house. I had recently told Emily about my relationship with Tomas. While not offering criticism, she had made it clear that she didn’t want too much information. She’d been happy to come with me to this party, as we were all friends with Tomas. She loved parties, and nights out without our kids were few.

  I watched Tomas laugh with his friends. I knew I would never be part of this world. It would be too jarring to spend too much time with people in their twenties—I’d start feeling ancient. And Tomas wouldn’t want to be part of my routine-bound life with a child—this would be too much responsibility for a young guy who liked to make few plans and change those at will. Eventually, soon, he would want to be with a young woman again.

  He was beautiful, but I often found our intimate encounters rushed, as if the moments together were being squeezed between the heavier metal plates of our other obligations—my child and my work, his art. I loved talking to Tomas about our artistic lives, and our goals for the future. When we spoke about these topics, I felt hopeful, with all my life still ahead of me, full of possibilities. I didn’t want to be with him long enough to endure heartbreak or jealousy. What was left of my rational mind understood that nothing about our relationship made sense in any long-term way.

  Emily and I, the oldest people at the party, sat together. We lingered for a while; but we had children who needed us to make breakfast in the morning. Near midnight, Tomas’s friends set up instruments and began playing music, and people gathered to listen and dance. Emily and I walked to my car, the sounds of laughter, guitars, the smack of the drum set gradually muffled by the rush of the river outside the house.

  We sat in my warm car in her driveway.

  “I miss Henry,” Emily said. “I miss the excitement of his dinner parties, the repartee, the flirting.”

  I looked at her; she was crying.

  I missed so many things about Henry, but not those things.

  Tomas and I drove out on slushy roads in his pickup truck, tunes blasting, to a nearby Mexican restaurant. He spoke Spanish to the proprietors, and I was charmed and melted even before the warm soup arrived. His hands were more expressive when he spoke his mother’s language. I found that I could enjoy food again in this setting, away from the associations of home, and Henry’s kitchen. Between courses, Tomas held my hand and I felt briefly cherished. On other nights we went to restaurants, discreetly out of town, that I knew he could never afford on his own. I felt awkward as I took out my credit card to pay. What were other diners thinking? Did they think I was his older sister? His mother? Or what I was—his too much older lover? I was quite sure that Tomas felt like a “kept man” in those moments. And I felt a discomfort as well. I didn’t want him to be burdened by any sense of obligation. I did not want pity. I got plenty of that from my well-meaning friends and neighbors.

  One evening, after returning home from dinner, we lay next to each other on our stomachs across the big bed in his tiny bedroom. While we talked, I enjoyed looking at the pieced-together rectangles of moonlit night through his old-fashioned, small-paned window. Tomas gently caressed my back as he spoke. His housemate, Nick, stopped by our open door with his girlfriend to say good night on their way upstairs. Tomas continued to stroke my back, and for a moment everything felt quite normal. Being with this man, in his house, getting ready for bed.

  In the morning, he cooked eggs for me, and that felt good. Simple food, jelly-jar glasses, hot tea in eclectic ceramic mugs, mismatched flatware. We were equals then.

  I called Tomas on Mondays to arrange a time to get together for the weekend. I needed to make child-care arrangements for our interludes.

  “Well, Julie,” he often began. “I don’t know yet what I want to do. Let me think about it. I’ll let you know.” It was useless then to remind him that I had a child and that my life was all about organizing, planning, and marking things in my calendar. The irritation I felt would have been justified had I been in a more defined relationship with a man my own age. In that situation, I would have
expected some understanding. From Tomas, I expected nothing at all. After these conversations, I hung up, feeling rejected, wishing I could disappear.

  Now that our relationship was sexual, I noticed that Tomas spent less time at my house when Liza was around. Perhaps we both felt that some artifice would be required to hide the nature of our connection from Liza, an exceptionally perceptive child. I regretted this change; I felt like I was taking something valuable from her. She began asking for Tomas after several weeks of absence. When he finally came for dinner, she was delighted to see him again, and they returned to their comfortable ways. In one e-mail to me, Tomas wrote that being with Liza and me tempted him to consider being part of a more domestic life. I was thrilled to read this but didn’t dare hope for more than what we had. Within days of this e-mail, his mood again changed, and he seemed cautious and distant.

  We continued seeing each other in this back-and-forth, frequently confusing way. I had told a few close friends, he had told a few close friends. But in a small town, where everyone knows what car you drive, it is hard to keep a secret.

  One morning, Tomas’s truck was spotted parked in my driveway. The night before I had remarked to myself that he had chosen to park smack in the middle of the driveway, which faced a main town road. I thought about asking him to be more discreet but then checked myself. He was free to do as he pleased.

  Now the news spread quickly beyond the small group of friends who had known of our whatever-it-was these last months. The reaction was not always kind. Some people, who didn’t understand that Tomas and I had been friends long before our affair, felt that he was taking advantage of my widowhood to have an adventure with an older woman. Some speculated that our affair had begun before Henry’s death. Though Tomas and I knew differently, it was still painful to be the subject of gossip.

  In some ways, though, being more in the open was a relief. Perhaps we all want our secrets to be found out at last.

  My brother, David, had helped me wade through the piles of legal paperwork. Henry had a four-page will, leaving everything to me, yet the matter was crawling along, with his assets still frozen and bills unpaid. The final hurdle was imminent. Probate court required that a court-appointed lawyer, a guardian ad litem, interview Liza, alone in a room at the county seat. This was supposed to determine that Liza was being well cared for by me, her sole parent.

  For the weeks before the appointment, I descended into a vortex of anxiety, convinced that somehow, inadvertently, Liza or I would say something wrong and she would be taken from me. I called my brother in tears. David calmly reminded me that, while I had no choice in the matter, he was sure all would go well. Nevertheless, I lay awake at night, worrying. I tried to prepare Liza for the event without frightening her, but I could tell she didn’t like the idea that I couldn’t be in the interview room with her.

  The appointment date arrived in early April, and with it a freak snowstorm. As I prepared to drive to school to pick up Liza for the interview, Emily called me from her cell phone, asking if I could pick up her daughter, Zoe, as well—her train from the city was delayed by the weather. At this point, I was always happy to offer Emily help—anything to chip away at the mountain of emotional debt. Zoe was one of Liza’s more recent friends, a slightly older child who was easy to have around. Zoe’s companionship seemed like a windfall as we headed off for the forty-minute drive to the county courthouse through whirls of sometimes blinding snow.

  The attorney was late. We waited in the chilly hallway. Zoe helpfully kept up a friendly conversation, resorting to I Spy and Twenty Questions to pass the time, while I sat silently, willing the ordeal to be over. At last the lawyer arrived—a woman about fifty, only slightly severe in a trim navy suit and a tight, dark chignon. She escorted us upstairs to a long corridor with many office doors. Outside her door, the attorney directed Zoe and me to a wooden bench and kindly guided Liza into her office. The door closed.

  I sat nervously on the bench, trying to listen, but the door was too thick to make out anything. Zoe, who seemed to sense my anxiety, tried her best to make up for my silence by telling me a story about something that had happened at school that day. None of her words penetrated, but I was grateful for her effort.

  A few minutes later, I realized a miracle was in progress. I heard laughter, a grown woman’s laughter, and I knew that Liza had understood what was required. A frequently reserved child, she had nevertheless pulled off a grand performance.

  “What was that lady laughing about?” I asked Liza as we returned to our car.

  “Oh, I was just telling her about Daddy, you know, just funny stuff he did.”

  For this I would receive a bill for twelve hundred bucks. But finally it was over, the will resolved, and the bills paid. And I relaxed a tiny bit, with the knowledge that Liza and I were a solid team. I knew Henry would have been proud.

  One evening in late April, as we lay in his bed, Tomas told me he would prefer that we not make love anymore.

  “I feel like I am doing something wrong with you.”

  “You aren’t doing anything wrong, but if it’s easier for you, yes, let’s do that. That will be better.” I knew it would be easier for many reasons.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he murmured, kissing me all over my chest with a heartfelt warmth and intimacy I could trust. Oddly enough, this would remain for me the most erotic experience I shared with him.

  So we tried holding each other in bed.

  It was better for me too. I wondered if asking him to be Henry’s body had been such a smart idea after all. Maybe this transposition had never really happened. Being close to Tomas, even in our tentative way, had helped me reinhabit my own body. I wasn’t floating anymore, as I had been after Henry’s death. My feet felt more firmly settled on the ground.

  Just when I was getting used our new arrangement, Tomas arrived unexpectedly at my house one afternoon. I was always pleased to see him. I stood on the stone steps, and he kissed me with enthusiasm.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he said. I was confused but thrilled. Men had always confused me; it was only Henry I had ever felt I understood. In bed I felt present with Tomas, happy to enjoy what was, instead of thinking about whatever it all might mean. As we lay in bed, the neighbor’s son arrived to mow my lawn. Because it was spring now, a spectacular green and sparkly spring, and the grass was growing an inch a week. From downstairs the young man’s voice called out, “Hey, where do you want me to dump the grass clippings?” Like two teenagers caught by a parent who has arrived home earlier than expected, Tomas and I muffled our giggles under the covers.

  After that day, I didn’t see Tomas for a week or so. I called him with some uneasiness one afternoon, after dropping Liza off for a playdate at Anna’s house. I had a few hours to spare, during which I was supposedly running errands. Tomas was working in his studio but invited me over.

  I’d dawdled for an extra half hour at his house, and now I was going to pay. I hadn’t meant to linger. I was just going to stop by, hang out on the porch with him, and drink a soda, but he’d looked so lovely sitting next to me and I knew Liza was safe at Anna’s house. What would another half hour matter if we ducked inside for a quickie? I just wanted to feel like a stupid twenty-year-old girl, who wasn’t a mother and didn’t always have to be responsible.

  Worst of all, I had kind of lied. “Um, I’ll be right there,” I’d told Anna on the phone while zipping up my skirt. “I’m so sorry, Anna, I’m just five minutes away, I just lost track of the time.” She was pissed. And not fooled, I was sure. I knew I couldn’t do this again.

  Irena visited me from the city in early May. We’d planned a visit to a local museum. She wore her strand of ruby boa feathers in her dark Botticelli curls and jingly gold earrings. She rummaged in her gorgeously impractical handbag for her BlackBerry.

  Tomas arrived in his pickup truck. Irena studied him thoughtfully.

  “He’s very young, isn’t he?” There was no judgment in her voice. Her statement
was merely an observation.

  “Yes,” I answered, “too young.”

  “You know, it’s not that he’s young that I have a problem with. I just don’t want to see you getting involved with another self-absorbed artist.”

  I admired her honesty. It was true that my married life with Henry had been organized to further his artistic ambitions, not mine. We had agreed that Henry would stop taking the commercial scriptwriting jobs that had been his bread and butter for many years so that he could write his first book, and then his umami book. Meanwhile, I took on as much work as I could manage and the big-ticket financial burdens. It had seemed like a good gamble at the time, and I knew many marriages like ours—wife as support staff.

  Spending time with a committed artist like Tomas had reawakened my own urges. He had been enthusiastic about my work, always encouraging me to pursue my painting. He was a man who truly lived for his art and made few compromises. But I knew from experience that, with two such persons in a relationship, the more accommodating partner was bound to make choices to support the other’s chances for success. Now, perhaps, was my opportunity to be the self-absorbed artist in the new family that was just Liza and me.

  four

  Late May–July 2003

  Once my affair with Tomas was fully out in the open, the town started to feel even smaller. I longed for some kind of escape from my closed world.

  Of the many condolence letters I’d received following Henry’s death, one e-mail had inspired hope for just such a way out. It was from a Frenchman who organizes a “food happening” in Paris called The White Dinner. One night a year, several thousand people descend with tables, chairs, and loaded picnic baskets upon a location in Paris, kept secret by the organizers till the final hours before the event, when cell phones spring into action. The participants converge, folding tables are set up, food laid out, and a meal takes place, with all participants dressed in white. The gathering is illegal—no permits are secured—but the spirit of camaraderie and joie de vivre overwhelms the halfhearted complaints of les flics (the famously much-maligned Parisian policemen). The photos on the website showed glamorous Parisian women in floaty dresses and flamboyant hats, men in white linen trousers and jackets, everyone waving white napkins exuberantly, laughing and cheering. Henry had planned to attend The White Dinner in June and had mentioned it to me as something we could do together—an excuse to go to Europe, a deductible trip that would provide material for his book. The White Dinner seemed to have umami written all over it.