The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  And then he’s gone, the door closing behind him.

  Mia turns forward, leans against the table, liking the hard press against her stomach. She was right in the first place. She should have never opened her email, never answered Robert. Her boy already knows the entire story and it hasn’t even happened yet.

  On the deck out front, a blue jay hops onto the bird bath, dipping his black soot bill into the water and then raising his head, his throat vibrating as he swallows. On the stove, the chili bubbles, tomato and garlic steam filling the kitchen.

  Mia stands up and lowers the heat on the range, staring at the stove dials.

  Her boy knows. He can see that she wants something else, needs it. He’s read into her words, her complacent smiles, her acceptance that this is her life. Maybe he’s read an email. Maybe he somehow saw her with Robert in the hospital. But how?

  She picks up the spoon, hits it against the counter gently. She making things up, she knows that. But even Harper’s seeing inside her doesn’t make her stop craving Robert. Even now, she’s thinking about him.

  The chili rumbles into a simmer. Mia breathes in and then turns away, walks down the hall into her office, and sits at her desk.

  

  Instead of looking at her email, though, she calls Kenzie, who is on BART headed to her acupuncture appointment in San Francisco.

  “I can barely hear you,” Kenzie says. “Wait.”

  Some loud noise in the background slowly disappears, and then Kenzie is back on the line.

  “Kids and music. Christ. What’s up? How’s your mom?”

  “I have to tell you something,” Mia says. “It’s—it’s not good. It’s not about my mom, or anything. But it’s—“

  Kenzie laughs, interrupting Mia. “You sound like you’ve betrayed me. Did you use some of my life in your latest story? Did you promise some other boring professor a date with your best friend?”

  “No. I’ll never set you up again. I promise. It’s not that.”

  “Are you calling me to tell me I need to lose weight? My ass is finally an embarrassment?”

  “Right. If your ass is an embarrassment, then mine is a scandal.”

  “Well, then, just get over it. What is it?”

  Mia rubs her nose and sits back in her desk chair. “I think . . .” she begins and then stops, listening for the sounds of Harper running up the stairs, desperate to find his math book. But the house is silent except for the occasional slight ting of the chili pot. “I think I’m going—I think I’m getting involved with another man.”

  Kenzie doesn’t say anything for a second, the muted roar of the BART train constant in the background. “Rockridge. Rockridge station,” the train operator says over the loudspeaker.

  “Who?” Kenzie asks finally.

  “The plastic surgeon. The one my mom went to see.” With the truth in the air, Mia expects to feel worse, her transgressions validated by sound. But she actually feels—she feels better. She finds a breath deep in her lungs and sucks in air.

  “Has anything happened yet?”

  “Not really. We’ve talked. Emailed. I didn’t write to him for a week or so, thinking I would forget about it. As if my attraction for him was really all about being scared about my mom’s surgery or something. As if I could make it go away. But I can’t. It’s just that Harper said something weird. I wonder if he—”

  “Are you—Have you?” Kenzie stops talking. The train operator mumbles something, doors open and close, the BART train roars. “Look, we’re about to go underground. I’ll call you after my appointment. Don’t—don’t do anything yet, okay? I mean, anything real. Just wait—”

  The conversation cuts off, Kenzie somewhere underneath Oakland. Mia hangs up her phone and turns to her computer.

  Dear Mia Robert has written.

  Mia forces her eyes to stay on his words. Dear. Mia. She doesn’t want to read any further, know anything more. All she knows is that he’s written back. He’s forgiven her enough to do that. He’s calling her dear.

  Mia looks at her clock. It’s four. It’s a Tuesday. A month ago, she didn’t know Robert Groszmann. A month ago she wasn’t really able to look at her marriage. A month from now. A month from now. She breathes in and reads on.

  I’m glad you wrote back. Yes, we can meet. Let’s meet. When? I can get away for lunches on the days I’m not in surgery. Nights are good for me, but I imagine they aren’t for you. Give me a date. Let’s figure it out.

  Robert

  She reads his email over and then stands up and grabs her calendar off the wall. Mia brings it back to her desk and looks at the March and then April dates. Toward the middle of April, her days are full of black ink, a reading, a conference, a trip to LA, a trip to New York. A book signing. A lecture.

  Flipping back to March, she sees all the empty space. Some, she knows will be taken up with Sally.

  Clicking on reply, she writes,

  Robert,

  I can meet for lunch most of next week and the next, depending on my mother’s appointments. In April

  Mia stops writing, and stares at the screen. Los Angeles. New York. Bakersfield. Minneapolis. She’s going all these places and she’s going alone, Ford staying in Monte Veda with Harper. During her first book tour, Ford and Harper and Lucien, who was still at home then and still in rehab, went with her on some of her trips, finding movies to go to during her discussions or lectures or workshops. But lately, Ford talks about all the work he has to do, tells her that Harper can’t afford to miss any more school. Mia assumes it’s because one more novel isn’t such a big deal. They all celebrated her first novel as if it were a new baby, but now she’s like the mother who has had children too close together, no one wanting to give her another baby shower.

  So now when she has to go to a workshop or lecture, Ford and Harper beg off, eat pizza or go to Chinese food night after night, and rent movies at Blockbuster that Mia would never want in the house. Horror. Murder. Vengeance. Slapstick.

  She’ll be alone. She puts her fingers on the keyboard.

  In April, I have a number of trips I’m taking for my new novel. A couple of days down south. Overnight in the valley. Four days in Manhattan. A weekend of freezing to death in the northeast.

  She doesn’t know what she’s writing or saying. But she doesn’t erase it. She wants him to know.

  So let’s meet for lunch. Give me a day. I’ll come to Walnut Creek.

  Mia

  Mia sends the email and then pushes her chair back, ready to go into the kitchen and check the chili. But before she can, her computer makes the sound it makes when mail comes, a trill of electronic bells. She clicks on the icon, and it’s Robert.

  What about Tuesday. One pm. Kenitos. I’ll make reservations.

  Without thinking, she answers.

  Yes. See you there.

  And then she sends it. The computer makes its whirs and sounds and clicks. Mia pushes back, shaking her head. Even though she’s done nothing more than make herself open, vulnerable, exposed, she’s amazed. Email makes adultery so convenient. As she thinks this, she bends over and jots it down. A good thought. For a character. But now she’s this character, and she stands up, her thighs bumping against her desk, and moves fast out of the room, as if she’s trying to pretend she wasn’t the one who wrote the email or made a date. Made a date.

  

  Ford is happy tonight, relaxed, pleased, as if he’s just gotten a load of good news. She stares at him when he walks in the door and puts his wallet and watch in the bowl on the sideboard. He’s humming to himself, his movements happy beats to his song. Mia wants to ask him what has happened, but then she thinks about Harper’s question. Because of her betrayal, Mia knows that she doesn’t deserve to hear what Ford isn’t telling her.

  But at least he’s in a good mood. She will ask him about the therapy. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe they can fix what’s wrong before she does something completely crazy.

  Ford came home just as Harper
returned from his tutor and even accompanied Mia to Sally’s, talking with Sally as Mia reheated the chili and made cornbread for her mother.

  Now, back at home, he sits on the front deck talking with Harper about a movie that’s coming out, something Harper read about in Premier magazine.

  “We’ll go when your mother’s out of town.” He looks back into the kitchen, where Mia loads the dishwasher. “You know how she hates anything with chainsaws and hatchets.”

  “I heard that,” she calls out to them. “Stop making fun of me.”

  She hears her voice saying the words, but it’s as if she’s plastered on the kitchen wall, stretched from oven to table. Her chest hurts with a truth she will not tell Ford. She bites down on her teeth, her jaw sore from holding back the words. I’m going to lunch with another man.

  “But it’s true. You jump up and run out of the room when anything scary happens.”

  Mia laughs, but thinks, I’m still here. And it’s scary now. It’s getting worse by the minute.

  She starts the dishwasher, and rubs her arms, willing herself to stay in her body. But with any sound—Harper pushing back his chair, opening the screen door, slamming it shut—she tingles, soars out of her cells. She can’t swallow, and she wonders how she will explain this to Kenzie. To Ford, when she’s caught. To Harper, who seems to already know.

  Ford comes inside now, the March breeze pulling fog from the coast. He was home early enough to change into jeans and a t-shirt, and it’s not hard for Mia to see him as he was in college, the same lean body, tight, muscular arms, round ass. The man she agreed to stay with her entire life.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Kenzie said when she first met Ford. “Even if he’s named for a car.”

  “He’s not named for a car. For a town in Texas where his grandmother was born,” Mia said.

  “Oh, forget that. It’s the gorgeous part that’s important.”

  “I know,” Mia said, wondering even then how long she’d have to know Kenzie before she told her that his long, sexy body and beautiful skin, and wet, warm mouth weren’t enough.

  Harper is in his room, his door closed, the muffled sound of ear phone music slipping slightly under his door. Ford is asleep on the couch, the television on. In the kitchen, the dishwasher is fuming steam, the air sticky and sweet with the smell of soap.

  Mia stands in the hallway, looking out toward the living room, the phone in her hand. It doesn’t look like she’s going to be able to talk with Ford about counseling. If she wakes him, he’ll be groggy and then grumpy, waving her off and walking into the bedroom. And she can’t talk right now anyway. Her heart has changed rhythms since this afternoon, the usual thump thump turned into a thump, thumpity-thump, thump. She tries not to imagine this is a sign, a detail provided her from her own body, a warning to go back to normal. Now. Before it’s too late. Before stroke or cardiac arrest. Before death.

  As she watches Ford sleep, she presses two, Kenzie’s number on the speed dial. Kenzie answers, and without saying hello, she starts talking. She’s knows it’s Mia because she has Caller ID.

  “I didn’t know if I should call you.”

  Mia walks into her room and shuts the door, enough to keep sound in and enough to let her hear any movement coming down the hallway. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “You didn’t do anything, did you?”

  Sitting on the bed, Mia crosses her legs. She watches the slit of light coming from under Harper’ door. “Tuesday at one.”

  Kenzie doesn’t say anything, and Mia can hear her friend’s breathing. “Well, I knew it would happen one day.”

  “Nothing’s happened yet.”

  “No, that’s true.” Kenzie pauses. “But, you know, that’s not true, either. It has happened. Something’s happened. You’re on your way to making a terrible mistake.”

  For a second, Mia flumes with a sudden anger. After all she’s told Kenzie over the years, after all the lunches and dinners and drinks where marriage and love and happiness and sex have been the main components of their conversation, she wants Kenzie to wish her well. To laugh, throw her head back as she does, and then say, “You go, girl.”

  But none of this is happening. Mia wants to hang up, and almost begins to say something, when Kenzie sighs.

  “Listen, I know why you’re doing this, Mia. I know things haven’t been, well, what you’ve wanted with Ford. I know I’ve told you that you can find what you want out there. But it scares me. I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you to lose what you have. It’s too important. Too hard to find. Sounds stupid and old-fashioned, but that’s how I feel.”

  Mia can’t move her mouth for a second, unable to speak. This isn’t Kenzie. Mia looks at the floor, touches her lower lip with a finger.

  “Look, wait,” Kenzie says. “It’s what I feel, at least in part. My other part wants you to go and then tell me all about it.”

  Mia smiles, relived. And then she thinks again of the line she heard so long ago. “And he didn’t ask me to marry him. It’s just lunch.”

  Now Kenzie laughs. “Fine. Okay. You’re right. I have you married and living in another state already. You might be disgusted by the way he eats. He might belch or fart or ask you to pay.”

  “He might have dentures he puts in his water glass.”

  “He might be addicted to Viagra.”

  “Then I can send him over to you.”

  “Don’t you dare.” Kenzie laughs again. “One man on Viagra in this life time is enough.”

  Mia rubs her cheek and changes the phone to her other ear. Kenzie dated a lawyer in his late fifties whose doctor didn’t seem to tend how often the lawyer renewed his prescription. “The man has a perpetual hard on,” Kenzie said. “I know, I know. You’d think I’d be appreciative. But after a while, I told him to turn on the television just so I would have something to do while he finished.”

  Then there is the silence that Mia likes best, both of them there on the line but not needing to speak.

  Then Kenzie says, “Let me know. Call me afterward.”

  “I will.”

  “Be careful,” Kenzie says, and Mia knows as she hangs up the phone, that Kenzie is talking about her heart.

  Later that night, after the house is shut down and even Harper is finally asleep, Ford starts with his hips, pushing then against her leg, her ass, his hand finding her breast. His hand rubs and rubs, soft moving circles of palm, and then he brings his head up and latches on to a nipple. Sometimes, he looks at her as he sucks, but tonight the room is dark, and she can’t tell if he’s staring. What does he think he’ll see? Does he want her eyes to be closed, her chin up, her mouth open? Should she be panting with desire? After all these years, does he imagine the sex could change?

  Does she? What does she want from him? What does she want from herself and her own body?

  Mia watches the wisp of light and shadow on the ceiling, the wind moving branches into the outside light, ghost trees on the plaster.

  Then he moves his hand to her stomach and then slides it down, touching her so suddenly she wants to flinch. She doesn’t know why she is surprised because this is his move, his fingers casting about for wetness. Tonight, there is some, juice from her emails with Robert, her fear turning into heat in her center. As he finds her soft, slick wetness, he stops, unlatches from her nipple, says, “Are you a little turned on tonight?”

  “Yes,” she says, and she’s not lying. Because in between them is Robert’s body. He’s there just outside of her, watching her naked flesh, seeing her erect nipple, feeling her sluice of desire.

  “Mia,” he says, not a question but a statement, as if he’s reminding himself of who he’s with, where he is.

  “Yes?” she whispers. He breathes in, almost says a word, something slight and mostly incoherent. What is it? Is there something he needs to tell her? Is there someone else in the bed with them besides Robert’s ghost? But then Ford is silent, and instead of speaking, he moves on top of her, and she spreads h
er legs, letting his so-known penis find its way into her. Then he is moving, sliding over and on top of her, kissing her, touching her breast, pushing, pushing until she feels something like pleasure.

  Eight

  Sally

  “I see,” Sally says into the phone, but her eyes are closed. She shut them the minute she heard Dr. Gupta’s voice on the phone. No matter what people have told her about the changes and advances in chemotherapy, she’s scared of her oncologist, scared of the word oncology itself. She wishes she could just hand up.