The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  “I’ve known Ford for twenty-two years. We married early. Had kids. Made money as we were going along.” She stops. “But that’s not the story, is it?”

  Robert pushes a bread crumb with his thumb. “I don’t know what the story is. It sounds like Susan and Rafael’s a little, though.”

  “It is,” she says. “You know what they say, ‘Write what you know.’”

  “So?”

  “So the truth is—I mean, that’s what we’re doing here, right?” When she looks at him, he knows that she wants him to tell her to lie, to make up another story, one that won’t hurt to say. But he can’t.

  “Yes. The truth.”

  “The truth is we’ve grown apart. Or we were never really connected in a way I wanted to be connected.”

  “What way is that, exactly?” he asks.

  “I don’t really know. Maybe I’m just making it all up, what I want.” She shrugs, her eyes watering. She looks away from him, flicks at her eyes with her hand. He wants to reach out and touch under her eyes with his fingertips, wipe away her sadness. But he just waits.

  “I’m sorry,” she says after a moment. “I just don’t talk about this except with my friend Kenzie. I must need a great deal of therapy.”

  “We all need therapy,” he says. “And don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. Go on. Tell me.”

  She nods. “Well, we had the kids so early, though, that there wasn’t time to worry about what I wanted, to realize that we didn’t have anything keeping us together but the past. The past and the kids.”

  Mia scratches her hand absently, little red lines blooming on her skin.

  “And I’ve never been attracted to him. In that way you’re supposed to be. Or in the way I wanted to be attracted to him. Something that pushes from the inside out. And it’s not just about sex, though of course that’s part of it. It’s about a feeling of wanting that is deeper than that.” She flushes and sits back. Robert leans closer and then stops. He pushes his plate away from him.

  “You weren’t even attracted to him when you first met?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you marry him then?”

  “Good reasons. Safety. Trust. Hope. And a basic, real love.”

  Robert nods, knowing that that’s why he stayed with some of his girlfriends after the fires burned out. Sometimes comfort is more important than passion. He can see Mia staying for that alone. The children would have made it even harder for her to leave.

  “Have you,” he begins, not wanting to ask this question at all. “Have you worked on it? Counseling?”

  “Ford—it’s not his way. We went to counseling years ago, but when it got to the part, well, the sex and how I feel. He didn’t want to go any more. Sad we could work on it ourselves. But, the thing is, if that core attraction isn’t there, I don’t know if it can be worked on.”

  Robert feels the question coming out of him before he can stop it. “Are you attracted to me that way?”

  Mia has teared up again, a smudge of mascara at the corner of her right eye. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  They walk out of the restaurant together, Robert holding open the door, Mia passing by him, the smell of her in his nose. He needs to be back at the hospital at 3, and it’s 2.42 and thirty seconds. He can take five minutes to walk her to her car, jump into his, and get back before his next patient. Five minutes. Five more Mia minutes.

  “I’m sorry about that back there,” Mia says. “I didn’t mean to cry.”

  Slowly, Robert puts his hand on the small of her back, and he feels her flesh start, surge, heat under his palm. She doesn’t pull away.

  “That’s okay. It’s not a topic I bet you want to talk about all the time.”

  She shakes her head. “Only with Kenzie.”

  “You can trust her?”

  Mia pauses and then nods. “Yes.”

  “What about your sister Katherine?” he says, smiling. “I bet she’d understand. She seemed like the kind of woman who appreciates the subtleties of marriage.”

  Mia turns to him, the sun striking her eyes so that they look liquid. “Oh, she’d love to hear me tell it. She’d tell me I should be with a woman.”

  “She’s a lesbian?”

  “Only half of the time,” Mia says. “Bisexual. She says that it gives her better odds for finding a Friday night date.”

  “She’s probably right,” Robert says.

  They turn the corner and then stop in front of a Volvo station wagon. Seeing it, Robert remembers Mia’s two children, her life as a mother, as a wife. He can still feel her boy’s gaze on him as he stood outside Sally Tillier’s hospital room door.

  Robert’s throat tightens, and he takes his hand from her back. “When can I see you again?”

  “When can you see me again?” she says. “I’m the one on sabbatical.”

  “Thursday?” he asks. “Same time?”

  Mia pulls her keys out of her purse. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  He knows where he wants to take her, but he’s not sure that she’s ready. But before he can say anything, she nods and says, “Your house. After what you told me, I want to see it.”

  He closes his eyes, swallows, and nods back. He forces himself to open his eyes and look at her. “My house.” Then without knowing how to stop himself, he leans over and kisses her. She smells like Altoids—but then he doesn’t know if he’s smelling his own breath because she gave him a mint, too. But when she opens her lips to him, he tastes not only the peppermint but sliced oranges drizzled with balsamic vinegar, a background of dark coffee. Her lips make him want to sink against her; her tongue makes him want to pull something out of her that he can take home with him. Her voice; her thoughts; her laugh. For a moment, her breasts are pressed against him and her hand smoothes up behind his neck, her fingers touching his ponytail. But then she pulls her chest from his, her mouth from his. Slowly, her tongue leaves his, her lips leaves his, her breath leaves his.

  Her eyes are still closed, and he can see how fast her chest goes up and down. As fast as his.

  “Email me,” she says finally, opening her eyes. “Tell me how to get to your house.”

  Robert nods. “I will.”

  Mia clicks her door open and then turns to him. “We did it again.”

  “What?” he asks, putting his hands in his pockets, hoping she can’t see his erection.

  “We didn’t talk about you. We didn’t talk about—“

  “I know,” Robert says. “We will.”

  Mia stares at him and then bites her lip. “Okay, Robert Groszmann, M.D. I’ll see you Thursday.”

  He forces himself to stay put. He needs to be back in the hospital in 12 minutes. If he moves forward, he will kiss her again, despite all his patients who might be roaming the streets, despite all her students or fans spying out of the linen shop behind them. Despite the patient who is probably already sitting in his exam room, freezing in her gown.

  Mia gets in her car, starts the engine, and then waves, pulling out into the street. He turns, follows the Volvo until she makes a left hand turn and is gone.

  

  Once Jack said, “You know, people forget how many mistakes they make a day. Running a red light. Pushing the wine stopper in instead of pulling it out. Slicing a finger while cutting an onion. Typos. Spilling paint. Tripping over the dog. And why then does anyone think we don’t make mistakes? Why are doctors supposed to be above that? Like we know something everyone else doesn’t?”

  Jack had been drunk at the time, but even so, Robert agreed with him. If the average person could follow a doctor—maybe a surgeon like him—around for a day and if the doctor was honest, it would be clear in about an hour that doctors weren’t better than anyone else. But instead of spilled paint, it was a sloppily written prescription that resulted in the wrong drug in the right bottle. It was a misread of a slide that sent a sick man home with a cancer that would have time to multiply even further. Or it was just boredom or fatigue or anger or an incessant pager t
hat kept the doctor from paying attention, missing a key point, the telling symptom, the worry in a patient’s face.

  Now, after his lunch with Mia, Robert forces himself out of the memory of her, of their kiss. He pushes himself into the moment with Mrs. Millar, his gloved hand under her armpit feeling her lymph nodes. As he always does with patients, he does not look at her face while he does this exam, even though they are just inches apart. He keeps this distance so he can help Mrs. Millar forget they are so close, and he does this because he doesn’t want anything on his face to show if he feels something he doesn’t like. And at this moment, he doesn’t like the way her nodes feel; they are hard and swollen under her armpit, and he is certain that the surgery will not reveal the best news.

  As he moves his fingers slowly, Robert realizes he will not perform the delayed reconstruction on Mrs. Millar for a long time, maybe never. She will come out of her surgery with a stage three or four diagnosis, and spend the next months of her life trying to live. Certainly, they will talk further about all her options after he finishes this exam, peeling off his gloves, and washing his hands. He will make another appointment with her, to confirm that she does indeed want a delayed reconstruction. But sometime—either before her surgery or after—she will decide she needs to focus on living. Mrs. Millar is only 56, and the chemo will be long and painful. Maybe later, maybe after the drugs and the hats and wigs and weight loss and despair, she will decide to come back to him, her body scoured and purged by chemo, her immune system regrown cell by cell. But Robert doesn’t think so. He thinks Mrs. Millar will have had enough.

  Robert slides back in his chair and looks at her. He takes off his gloves and throws them away. She nods, sighs, and begins to cry.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it,” she says, rather than asks.

  He wants to lie, to tell Mrs. Millar it will be all right. Maybe before, he would have extolled the virtues of chemo and radiation and brought up the wonders of Tamoxifin and Herceptin, new, improved weapons for the war on cancer. He might have told her what a wonderful surgeon Cindy Jacobs is, accurate, steady, clever, thorough. But now, Robert just takes her hand, lets her cry, and later, when Mrs. Millar has left his office clutching the slip noting her second appointment, does he realize that he’d managed to forgot Mia and her lunch time tears.

  At home, Phyllis is ignoring him, as usual, her tail whooshing back and forth behind her as she faces her empty dish. The floorboards creak under him as he walks to the kitchen to find, again, that he’s forgotten to go shopping. There is so much he can’t seem to supply himself with, food being the most obvious.

  “Shit,” he says, putting down his briefcase. Now he wishes he’d taken home the chicken that neither he nor Mia could really finish. He thinks it was good, but he’s not sure, as all his senses were focused on Mia, her words, her face, her body.

  Robert is about to pick up the phone and call DiGrassi’s pizza for a delivery when the phone rings.

  “I’m down here by myself,” Jack says before Robert can say anything more than hello, “imagining what my best friend is doing without me. I’m hoping, he’s got a girlfriend, a replacement for the beautiful Leslie. Finally, I think, he’s found someone to settle down with.”

  “Shit,” Robert says again. He’s not only forgotten to shop, he’s forgotten his standing date with Jack.

  “Rob, get your ass over here or we’re finished.”

  He knows he has to go meet Jack, but his body is weary, all his appointments and his lunch with Mia heavy inside him. But there’s food at Basso’s, and maybe he can talk to Jack about Mia.

  “All right. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Make it seven, or I’m finding a new boyfriend.”

  Robert hangs up the phone. He wants to go in and check his email, but if he does that, he knows he’ll never make it to the restaurant. So he fills Phyllis’ dish, turns off the kitchen lights, and leaves.

  Jack is on his second beer, an empty bread basket in front of him. He has a tan from a weekend trip to Palm Springs, his tie in a loose pile on the table top.

  “I’m crushed,” he says as Robert sits down. “I’m mortally wounded. Stood up.”

  “I’ve redeemed myself, haven’t I?” Robert waves the waiter over and orders a beer, taking the menu, feeling the repetitive motions from his lunch today. Maybe, he thinks, he should only eat in restaurants, never shopping, never cooking. All he has to do is sit and order and wait and then eat. But then, it wouldn’t be much different from the way he eats at home.

  “Not yet. You need to tell me a good story.”

  “What about you tell me about Palm Springs? How was the golfing?”

  Jack holds up a hand. “I’m the one who’s been waiting.”

  Robert nods, reading the menu. The waiter comes back, takes their orders, and then he sits back, his hand on the beer the waiter brought him. Robert knows he’s already told Jack about Mia and how he read her medical file. But as he opens his mouth to talk about Mia, he suddenly feels protective of her, of them. Or is he scared? As if by breathing the words into the air, he’ll jinx the whole thing. And he can’t do that before Thursday, before she comes to his house.

  “What are you thinking?” Jack stares at him, no longer ready to joke. “Something at with a patient?”

  Robert rubs his forehead, closes his eyes.

  “Man, what is going on? Nothing happened like . . . .”

  Robert shakes his head. “No. Nothing at work.” He doesn’t know how to say what he has to, but if he can’t talk with Jack, who can he talk with? Jack is his best, oldest friend. The one person who knows everything. “It’s the patient’s daughter.”

  Jack sips his beer, sits back, thinks. Then he says, “The one with the medical file? With the kid in rehab?”

  “Yeah. We went out to lunch today.”

  “One lunch did this to you? That’s it? Nothing more than a meal?”

  Putting the beer on the table, Jack folds his arms, staring across at Robert. Finally, he laughs. “You’re gone.”

  “What?”

  “You’re gone, Rob. I haven’t seen you like this since—since, Christ, I don’t know. You’ve got that weird, spacey thing going on, kind of like you used have during finals.”

  The waiter brings over their salads, and Robert stares at the arrangement of greens and vegetables. He does feel like it’s finals, needing to learn all the important things before the big test, the one that could make or break him. All these days, all the emails, the meeting in the cafeteria, their lunch today, Mia’s swift kiss in the hospital corridor, the deeper kiss by the car—all of this is leading to something he can’t really see but knows is crucial.

  He picks up his fork, spears a tomato. “Yeah, I’m gone.”

  “What’s she like?

  “She’s. I don’t know. Smart. Talented. Pretty.”

  “Sounds like most of the women you’ve dated. And this one’s married. Kind of a drawback.”

  Robert sighs. “Yeah. But I feel—I feel something different when I’m with her. I can’t really explain.”

  “Well,” Jack says. “Be careful. This one is complicated.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not perfect, Rob. It’s not easy. But it’s good.” Jack laughs, sits back, wipes his hands on his napkin. “It’s about fucking time.”

  This time when Robert comes home, he doesn’t go into the kitchen. Instead, he walks into the living room and turns on the lights. He stands in the middle of the room and turns around slowly, looking at his leather furniture, his full bookshelves, the potted dracaena and palm, dark wool rugs. He pretends he’s Mia, seeing his house for the first time. He imagines he’s Mia trying to figure him out by looking at what’s here in this room. He’s pulling clues from objects, from the ceiling beams, from the oak plank floor, from the windows looking out to the courtyard.

  After a few minutes, he knows he wants Mia to see him as she sees his house. Attractive. Good looking. Comfortable. Sturdy and s
olid and clear.

  Turning off the lights, he leaves the living room and walks to his study. He clicks on the email program, his hands shaking. He wishes she were here now. Right now. And before he reads any of his email from friends and colleagues, he writes to Mia. He writes to her and tells her how to get to his house.

  Ten

  Mia

  In the long night after her lunch with Robert, Mia lies awake in her bed, Ford next to her, snoring softly. Her body is pressed up to his, her breast against his back, her stomach against his naked ass, her arm holding him, her hand on his chest. Harper is still awake, his music in the hallway, and outside, an owl trills a spring song over the bay laurels and oaks.