Perfection

by Julie Metz

  “Oh, he has a guest room. He’s got a big house.” I felt like a conniving teenager, my regression depressingly complete. No wonder Daniel had grown fed up with me.

  My father shrugged as I continued to arrange Liza’s meal. I was grateful for his concern and the way he knew me well enough to just let some things go, without asking too many questions. As I set Liza’s plate before her, I figured this might be a good skill to cultivate in time for her adolescence.

  Eliot’s house was larger than I had expected. He took care of the garden himself, he told me with pride. Even in late winter the borders were carefully tended, the perennials clipped and mulched. I had entirely abandoned my own garden. But seeing his effort sparked an urge to take advantage of the coming spring’s spirit of renewal. I would make an attempt to reclaim my flowers, if they hadn’t already been overwhelmed by my neglect and winter’s frosts.

  While Eliot prepared an elegant first course of grilled shrimp, I hopped up onto his counter so as not to feel completely dwarfed by his height. After dinner and several glasses of wine, consumed while lounging and snogging on his couch (on a couch, everyone is the same size), he persuaded me—it wasn’t that hard—not to stay in the guest room.

  Eliot was an affectionate lover, showering me with attention and compliments that felt genuine. But after he fell asleep, with his arm around me, I lay awake in the unfamiliar setting, listening to the dripping of the bathroom faucet, fretting about Liza and my fate.

  In the morning, however, I woke exhilarated, as if purged and absolved. I twirled a few pirouettes in his expansive living room, while Eliot made me coffee and chuckled. I didn’t care if he thought I was a loon. He fed me an ample breakfast, and I warmed under a delicious shower. As I walked toward my mud-splashed station wagon, I took a last, fond look at his adorable silver BMW M roadster parked in the driveway. A nice life he had, but it was not going to be my life. Every day I was edging further toward the idea of moving back to Brooklyn.

  We’d stay friends, I thought, I hoped. Mindful of my recent failures, I didn’t trust myself not to mess up a real relationship. And he was still too tall.

  Soon afterward he met another woman—also tall. They seemed to hit it off right away. She wanted to get married. He wanted to get married. And I felt lucky still to have Eliot for a pal, someone who wished me well, whom I could count on to make me laugh at my weaknesses, who would tell me I was pretty even when I felt like a cranky crone. It was my first date that qualified as a resounding success. We had some fun, and no one got hurt.

  My foray into dating had been instructive, but I often felt depressed and lonely. I cried at night and punched pillows. Liza watched me with concern that in turn made me worried for her. I continued to flee with her to the city on weekends. While we stayed with my brother and his wife, life was comfortable for at least a few days.

  Liza and I roamed around my old neighborhood. One day I took her to see the brownstone where Henry and I had lived when she was born. The owners had painted it a shade of salmon pink that pleased her. I was too afraid to ask her directly how she would feel about a move, so I tried to fill our weekends with the kind of fun we couldn’t find in our small town. We went to movies, strolled in the botanic garden, ate lunch in cafés on Seventh Avenue. Sometimes I wandered over to the store run by The Crush. I managed to create a conversation that allowed me to leave behind a business card. But I’d heard that he had a girlfriend, or at any rate was dating someone. Dating. Whatever that was.

  I had a short affair with a friend.

  I’d called him up, and we met in Brooklyn for a drink on one of my city weekends. Perhaps the margarita was to blame. Because I didn’t drink them often, they induced immediate euphoria.

  I looked up at him, enjoying his familiar, handsome face and said, “Sometimes I wish we could be together,” because I liked him and I knew he liked me.

  He looked at me with surprise. I felt myself flush immediately like a royal idiot. What had I said? He was ten years younger than I was. For as long as I had known this man, he’d told me that he was earnestly interested in marrying and having his own children, two things that he was entitled to want but that I did not think I would ever be doing again.

  It was late after the drink, so I asked him to walk me to my brother’s house. I fumbled in the dark with the keys at the brownstone gate while he stood a few steps back, waiting. He said that he wanted to kiss me. Without thinking enough about the consequences, I watched him approach me. We kissed in the doorway.

  I had forgotten how kissing could make me feel completely cherished, but he reminded me. I pulled him into the little area just inside the gate and we kissed some more and there was some urgent groping.

  We saw each other a few times after that. He came to visit (with Liza safely away), and one weekend I went to his apartment, where he fed me a good chicken dinner and we watched a movie. Later, we had blissful sex and then slept close in his bed. I tried hard—very hard—to imagine any universe in which this thing might work for all of us. And failed.

  On a warm Sunday in late March 2004, I left Liza with my brother and sister-in-law to take a yoga class in Manhattan before heading back to the train that evening. We’d spent the weekend together eating meals, playing Connect Four, and endless games of Crazy Eights and rummy. When she was small, I used to let Liza win games, until I noticed that she was beating me easily. By now I was used to losing despite my best efforts.

  After the yoga class, I felt good changing back into my street clothes in the small curtained dressing room. The air outside was warm and fresh, the sky blue and unsmogged. I was happy to be in the city, to hear the sounds of cars and snorting buses, the snippets of cell phone chatter. I loved feeling part of this strange urban organism, which allowed me to belong to something while still experiencing anonymity. In spite of the noise all around, I felt quiet inside. I took out my phone and dialed Anna’s home number.

  “I’ll do it, Anna. Let’s move back to the city. I think we can do it.”

  “Oooh,” she yelped. “I’m so glad!”

  “Let’s promise to help each other through this. It’ll take a lot of planning.” I considered the ordeal waiting for both of us—dismantling our lives in large houses to move back to the city, where inevitably we would each live in something like a shoe box by comparison.

  “We’ll have to keep this to ourselves for a while,” Anna said.

  I thought about Emily, who would not be happy to find out that I was leaving town. She might even feel betrayed if I kept my plans secret. “I think you’re right about that. But we’ll be okay, right?” I had a vision of my house full of moving boxes, and a sudden realization that at least half my furniture needed to disappear. Not to mention finding a school for Liza.

  “Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Anna said, perhaps imagining her own moving ordeal. “I feel like we need wives, though, not husbands.”

  “You might be right about that.”

  “Hey,” Anna proposed with mock coyness, “will you be my wife?”

  “Of course”—I laughed—“if you’ll be mine.”

  I continued walking up Lafayette Street, over to University, where, filled with sudden optimism, I impulsively allowed myself to enter my favorite (and expensive) dress shop. I left half an hour later wearing a newly purchased frilly black and patterned dress, urban and flattering, just right for the city girl I wanted to re-be-come.

  part four

  daylight

  fourteen

  April–September 2004

  My storehouse having

  Burnt down

  Nothing obscures the view

  Of the bright moon

  —MASAHIDE

  After much internal preparation, I went to see Emily one afternoon after school let out. I thought that I had planned for the worst possible outcome and that choosing an everyday moment would help me deliver the news. In retrospect, I see that I chose a terrible time to tell her I was moving. We were both tired after a long
day, and we were alone in her kitchen, without Justin, her husband, who would have provided some levity and comfort during a difficult moment.

  I took a deep breath, began unfolding my news, and realized quickly, as her eyes filled up with tears, that I had completely miscalculated. She told me she was devastated, took my hand, and began to weep. I felt wretched and resentful at the same time. I wasn’t doing this to her on purpose, it was just that I couldn’t stand my life and had to get out. I couldn’t live so close to Cathy, who had caused me so much harm. Thinking about her still sent me into waves of misery and fury. But now Emily felt abandoned in a way that could not be fixed.

  The fallout from this event came swiftly. What had always separated Emily and me was the difference between my working life and her life as a mostly stay-at-home mother and artist. Occasionally we had clashed over this issue—when I cautiously suggested possible work opportunities, when she wanted to have a leisurely lunch during a deadline week. Within a month, what began as a momentary squabble, which at any other time might have been resolved with a few days of phone silence, escalated into a larger conflict, from which we couldn’t engineer a gracious recovery.

  Now, like spiteful middle school girls, we were no longer speaking. The catastrophe of Henry’s death had dogged us since she had taken me to the hospital after his collapse. From that day, she had been waiting for her former friend to return, but the woman I’d been then, who now felt like someone I’d once known but could no longer visualize, was long gone. I had no idea to where and still no clear idea of who I would become. I wanted to feel like something I could genuinely call myself. Now I was lost en route—temporarily, I hoped—desperate to get to somewhere. The first step was getting out of town. The second step was accepting that this long rebuilding process would be all about what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called the “art of losing”—people as well as objects—and that much of it would not be pretty. By this point, I had already lost many people and judged (correctly, as it turned out), that I was not done yet.

  After the fiasco with Emily, I felt I had to tell Liza about the plans to move, before she heard about it from others. It was difficult to explain my reasons for relocating, without telling her about Cathy. I tried to frame the move as my need to start over, but she had no wish to start over, and I felt selfish, taking her away from a school she loved, her friends, and the house. She hated the idea, and we spent many tearful evenings together. Always she asked, “But why?”

  By late May, after a few more springtime dating mismatches, I was thoroughly exhausted by men. This was worse than high school, the feeling that as a forty-four-year-old woman I knew no more than an overeager teenage girl. I decided to take a break. Perhaps after the summer, I’d have better luck.

  Then, on the day I decided to shut down my online profile, a new man appeared. Will’s wry letters made me laugh again, and he had a cool-sounding job. He lived in the city. Better yet, he lived in Brooklyn, just a few streets from my brother’s house.

  After a half dozen e-mails back and forth, Will called me one evening. He had a friendly voice, with an accent I couldn’t place, Canadian perhaps? Nope, he was from Wisconsin. He’d grown up in a big family in a rural area, number six of seven kids. He sent me a photo of all the children squashed into a group, everyone looking like they’d been playing in the woods five minutes earlier. Though he had never been married, he seemed to welcome the idea of a seven-year-old.

  “I can’t wait to meet her,” he said. “It’ll be a blast.”

  Liza walked by and asked who I was talking to. “I want to say hi to him,” she insisted when I offered the vague answer that I was talking to “a friend.”

  I passed Liza the phone, and to my surprise she and Will talked for twenty minutes about her school and friends while I passed in and out of the room, taking advantage of their conversation to ferry laundry upstairs and garbage to the curb. I wondered what he’d done right to engage for so long a child he’d never met. Whatever that thing was seemed like just what we needed.

  And then The Crush called me. The crush feeling had never passed. I still felt the unnamable physical yearning for something about him, a something that was all kinds of trouble. But of course when I heard his voice on the phone, I was thrilled.

  “I wanted to see if you’d go out with me this Saturday,” he began a bit hesitantly. “Have dinner, see a movie?”

  “I have to say,” I remarked, noting, a moment too late, that my tone was a bit harsher that I would have wished, “the timing here seems kind of weird. Why’re you calling me now? And aren’t you dating someone?”

  “Well.”

  “So that’s over now?” I wanted to smack myself. I was starting to sound like an inquisitor or a stern high school principal, though another little devil was whispering in my ear, Go, go, go out with him. It’s only dinner.

  “Come on,” The Crush said warmly, “just go out with me. It’s only dinner.”

  “Let me think about it. I’ll call you back.”

  The next day I called The Crush back. “Okay, I’ll have dinner with you. But let’s not bother with the movie this time.” I had visions of him taking advantage of the darkened theater and of me happily letting him take advantage of the darkened theater.

  I wanted to go out with him, but I had my doubts about this guy. When I’d jokingly mentioned my crush to one female acquaintance in the neighborhood, she’d bluntly remarked that she thought The Crush was “bad news.” I didn’t need more bad news.

  The crush part was a force I could rely on to mess me up completely. I’d go out with him, we’d kiss, we’d have sex. I’d be a goner. I’d try to figure this guy out for months or maybe a year, till he got tired of my frequently unexciting, schedule-bound life with child and took up with someone else. I would begin to make this guy a priority, the way I had done with Tomas, even Daniel for a short time. But unlike Tomas, who had been happy to draw pictures with Liza at the kitchen table and play Attack, I couldn’t quite imagine The Crush outside his shop, engaging in my domestic life. I needed someone who could do that, who wanted to do that, who wanted nothing more than to do that.

  But one dinner wouldn’t be so terrible. Maybe I can just get it all out of my system and then get on with life.

  I called Will that evening. “Look. There’s this man. I’ve had a big crush on him. And now he’s asked me out to dinner. I think maybe I should just go do that. You know, get it out of my system.” I felt like a moron, hearing and then actually believing the words I was saying.

  After a pause, Will said, “Um, I don’t want you to go out to dinner with this guy. Please don’t do that.”

  Here was a choice. Will was telling me how he felt in clear, straightforward language. There was something savory, as in protein-based, nourishing, and healthful, about what he was offering and asking. Things might not work out between us for ten thousand reasons, but they might just work out as delightfully as a carefully simmered stew, one that tastes better the next day, full of rich and complicated flavors, one that would embody that idea of umami Henry had been struggling to understand.

  The Crush, on the other hand, would likely—no, about this I could be entirely certain—turn out to be like the bag of peanut M&M’s that I always buy at a movie theater concession stand, rip open, enjoy completely, and regret later, when the sugar rush and nausea kick in. After a bag of peanut M&M’s, nothing else tastes any good. Not even homemade raspberry pie.

  Savory or sweet? Sweet or savory?

  “Okay, I won’t. I’ll have dinner with you instead.”

  Our first date was not very promising. A week earlier, Will had suffered a minor fall from his bicycle and ignored the resulting scrape on his elbow. It’s difficult to see one’s own elbow, so he also ignored the soreness that persisted for a few days. By the time he realized it was infected, he had to go to an emergency room, then ended up staying in the hospital for a few days hooked up to an IV antibiotic drip. As Will and I sat across from each other a
day after his hospital discharge, I thought he didn’t look too healthy; in fact, I worried that he might fall face-first into his dinner plate. All the talk of hospital visits made me nervous. Nevertheless, I decided that our weeks of writing and phone conversations merited a second meeting.

  This time I met him in the city. We ate sushi; I got a bit tipsy on sake. I was so terrified, because he was kind, funny, and attentive without being pushy, that I practically ran away from him on the street after our meal, under the pretense that I had to catch a cab, quickly, immediately, so I wouldn’t miss my train back home.

  A week later, Will came up on the train and I picked him up at the station for a picnic by the river. I’d made a roast chicken with a fresh salad, bread, and cheese. He’d brought a bottle of wine. After some of the wine, we kissed, sitting on the picnic blanket under the trees. Having made a choice, I felt like a fifties girl, a bit shy and cautious, nervous and uncomfortable, wishing I’d brought Liza along for support instead of leaving her behind with her excellent babysitter. But this time I was really going to listen to Eliot’s advice.

  Will said, “We shouldn’t rush things. Let’s just talk and get to know each other.” This guy seemed to have read my mind. Or maybe he just wasn’t that into me. But we continued to talk and exchange e-mails every day. We called our decision to get to know each other slowly The Plan.

  A few weeks later, I traveled down to Brooklyn again. I arrived at his apartment and peered cautiously through the doorway into his tidy and modern bachelor pad. Milky aqua walls, comb glazed, a large trophy fish hanging on one wall, a gorgeous curved blood red sofa positioned on an entirely impractical but inviting rug fashioned in long noodles of cream-colored wool. Small white boxes arranged on a wall in evenly spaced rows of three held tiny glass vases, each with one brightly colored gerbera daisy. I stood enjoying the view, thinking that the last guy I’d known with such cool taste in home decor had been gay. But as I crossed the threshold, Will scooped me up, carried me into his bedroom, and threw me onto the bed.