Ford made love to her again, the second time this week. Again, as he held her body, his hands and arms seemed to be filled with an explanation of some kind. He was slower, tentative, just plain different, needing to tell her something important. But even as they moved together, she didn’t ask what we needed to say, and now Mia wonders if like Harper, Ford knows about Robert, too. It’s as if she is giving off radio waves or signals or pheromones that relay a message of betrayal that everyone can hear or see or smell.
But after all the kissing and sucking and penetration, the rocking and Ford’s moans, the caresses and sighs, he’s said nothing, and now he is asleep and Mia holds him and her guilt.
Mia moves her hand on his chest, her fingers traveling through the scant hair. When they met, he had exactly three hairs growing in the bone valley between his pectorals, and now, with time and age, his chest is full of the black, springy hair. She feels she knows every hair follicle; she knows everything about his body: the feel of his skin, his smooth shoulders, his strong arms, his wonderfully long fingers. She knows his smells, the way hard alcohol comes out of his pores at night, the tang of his morning breath, the whiff of his underarms and crotch. She’s held him while he’s thrown up—she’s comforted him in fever and through cold. She’s cut his toenails; she’s bathed him and washed his hair after his bunion surgery. Every single thing she’s done for her children, she’s done for Ford, except, really, to wipe him after he’s gone to the bathroom. But she would, if he needed her to. She would without flinching.
And he’s known her in this exact way, through all the growing and then aging of their flesh, through childbirth, through illness, through the sex they’ve had for years, all kinds, the experimental and the comforting. He’s watched her gain and lose and gain weight. He doesn’t leave the bed when she passes gas at night; he laughs, makes a joke, keeps watching the news. He stays in the bathroom when she changes a tampon. They know each other in a way Mia realizes she doesn’t literally have the time or strength to get to know another human being. She will never know Robert’s body in this way, and then she wonders why if she’s been graced to know another person the way she knows Ford, why does she want something else? Isn’t this enough? She can hear Sally’s voice in her head, saying words Sally hasn’t really uttered.
“You shouldn’t give up something so many people will never have. Someone who loves you. Someone who takes care of you. Don’t you realize that on this planet there are millions of lonely people? Be grateful for what’s in front of you. You’re imagining a kind of love that doesn’t really exist. That doesn’t last for long. For heaven’s sake, Mia, be a good girl. Snap out of this!”
Mia sighs, moves in closer to Ford’s strong body. Sally’s right. There is something terribly wrong with her if Ford and his solid love aren’t enough.
And she wants Robert so much, even though she would be cheating. Cheating. What a terrible word. Is what she’s doing with Robert cheating? Or is she cheating herself by staying with Ford when she doesn’t feel connected, attracted, engaged? Is she cheating Ford out of a love he might find with someone else? Is she cheating Harper out of his family by not insisting on counseling? She should wake Ford up right now and demand it. Not let him go back to sleep until he cries out, “Yes.”
Mia traces Ford’s shoulder, stares at his skin, dark in the night bedroom. She doesn’t wake him; doesn’t shake him out of dream. She can’t. She doesn’t suddenly have the language to tell him what she hasn’t before. Would she use the word cheating? Why do they use the word cheating at all? Why not just call it living? All of them are trying to find something, right?
She presses her face to Ford’s neck, breathing him in. He stirs, presses back against her, brings a hand to her hip, squeezes, sighs, goes back asleep.
Falling to her back, she looks up at the ceiling. They know each other like animals, like cave people, creatures who sniff and scratch at each other, the body of a loved one the same as their own. But she knows that Ford doesn’t understand all of her, and if that is true, she must not understand all of him. His body, like hers, must be missing that same elemental connection. There are thoughts she’s withheld, ideas, wishes, hopes. Desires. He doesn’t read much of her writing these days, though he is proud. And what about her? She doesn’t ask enough questions about his work, his meetings, his business trips. She doesn’t know the specificities of his days or the fine details of his trade, though she spends his money as well as her own. Mia doesn’t know his business partner Karen very well at all—having nothing more than having a few, brief conversations with her when she calls Ford at the office—and she doesn’t really feel the need to.
Mia and Ford have parented two children, but those children are older now, far past the age where she and Ford traded off diaper changes, traded off reading the boys to bed, traded off doing dishes. They no longer fight about who gets to go away for a weekend trip alone with friends because they both can go anywhere without any child coming to harm.
Mia wipes her eyes. Aside from this physical connection of known flesh, there isn’t anything else but history, the past that is half of her entire life, holding them together. Just that. Just half her life.
Mia looks over at Kenzie, who pumps furiously on the elliptical machine, her curly red hair, breasts, and ass bobbing in a nice way, nice enough for the men walking past their two machines to smile. But Kenzie doesn’t notice the men because she is looking at Mia, who is moving much more slowly than her friend.
“So it was good?” Kenzie says in an unaccustomed whisper. “You’re going to see him when? Tomorrow?”
“It was good.” Mia picks up her water bottle and takes a sip. “And I’m going over to his house.”
“Where does he live?” Kenzie sounds normal, trying to ask her normal kinds of questions, but her eyes roam Mia’s face, as if she expects Mia’s hiding something behind her eyes or ears or in her mouth.
“Walnut Creek. He has an adobe. It’s a historical preservation house. With a plaque, even.” Mia puts down her water bottle and tries to move faster. She should do this every single day, not just the three or four times a week when Kenzie has time to work out with her.
“Oh,” Kenzie says. She turns to look at the television, so Mia does, too. On the screen, Meredith Vieira is asking the question: A glossectomy is an operation that removes which body part? The answers are: nose, tongue, kneecap, navel.
“Tongue,” Mia whispers.
“What?”
“Tongue.” Mia shrugs, points at the television, and then drops her hand when Kenzie continues to stare at her. “Listen, are you mad at me?”
Kenzie shakes her head, but then she stops moving. “No. I’m not mad at you. I just don’t understand. I mean—“
Kenzie lowers her voice, rubs sweat off her cheek. “Adultery is only okay—it’s only okay if you end up together.”
Mia snorts, rears back, stops the movement of the machine, the whir of the motor wheezing silent. “What planet are you from, Kenz? Where is this coming from? What about all your--” She stops, whispers, “Adventures.”
Mia stands still, confused. All the stories, the married men, the single men, the men in relationships. She’s listened to all that Kenzie has told her, and now, when she finally has something to say, Kenzie won’t hear her out?
“I don’t understand what you are saying,” Mia says.
Kenzie doesn’t say anything as the two men walk by again, and this time, she sees their glances. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. But I just don’t get it. I just don’t know why you are. . . . No, that’s not true. I do know why.”
Mia starts moving again slowly, her heart pounding not from exercise but from the look on Kenzie’s face. “What don’t you know?”
“You’re not going to leave Ford, are you?” Kenzie whispers. Mia breathes in, and they both start to move again, treading miles to no where.
“I’m going over to Robert’s house. That’s not leaving Ford.”
“A
re you going to sleep with Robert?”
Mia’s body knows the answer before she does, a plumb line of heat moving from her throat to groin. “Yes.”
“And what else?”
“What else is there?” Mia whispers, her voice so low Kenzie leans toward her.
“Living with him. Actually loving him. And then leaving Ford and Harper and Lucien.”
“Kenzie,” Mia says, stopping again. “Lucien is grown. Harper is in high school. And sleeping with someone else is not living and loving and leaving.”
“You need to tell Ford first.” Kenzie moves faster, her legs pushing hard on the machine. “At the very least, you need to tell him and then offer to go to therapy. You owe him that, Mia. That’s the very least that you owe him.”
Mia feels stuck, something hard pressing against her throat. She turns and looks in front of her, her legs moving faster. “You know what happened when I asked him to go to therapy before. You know how upset he got when I brought up the sex stuff.”
Kenzie turns toward Mia, but Mia keeps staring ahead.
“That was before—before you were going to do something like this. Like maybe leave him. I think he might feel differently now.”
“Maybe,” she says, knowing that of course Kenzie is right. “I’ve wanted to tell him.”
“Christ, Mia. You’ve got know choice. This is coming out of left field!”
Mia swallows finally, instant tears in her eyes. “It’s not like this should surprise you, Kenzie. I’ve told you how I feel a hundred times.”
Kenzie stops and almost jumps off her machine. “But this is real. This is . . . let’s go outside. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Before Mia can even slow down her machine, Kenzie is walking toward the doors that lead to the pool. Mia watches her throw her towel down on the wooden table and then slump into a chair. Slowly, Mia steps off the pedals, finds her balance, and follows Kenzie, pushing out into the air.
“Tell me what is going on with you,” Mia says, sitting down and pulling her chair close. “If I can’t talk about it with you, who can I tell?”
Kenzie shakes her head and then looks at Mia. “I don’t like it.”
Mia shakes her head. What was to like? And why, suddenly, was Kenzie putting a restriction on what they talked about? Why was she judging Mia on what she’d known about Mia all along?
“I’m not asking you to like it.” Mia sniffs, wipes her eyes, wonders who she’ll be able to talk with now that Kenzie won’t help her.
Three small children run by, their towels wrapped around their cold bodies. In the pool, a submerged swim instructor waves them toward the pool.
Kenzie rubs her cheek, sighs. “It scares me. And pisses me off.”
“It scares me, too,” Mia says. “I know I’m doing something incredibly stupid. I could be ruining everything. But—it’s like I’ve come to a point where I either jump or head back and forget about it.”
“What’s it?” Kenzie says.
“Love.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mia!” Kenzie raises her hands as she speaks and then lets them hand in the air. A swimmer in the pool stares up at them and then adjusts his goggles and pushes off the wall for another lap. “Love. It doesn’t always last. Don’t you know what it’s like out there? What if Robert doesn’t work out? Where will you be then?”
Mia is silent, shame and heat and tears everywhere in her body at once. “You don’t think Robert really wants to be with me?”
“No!” Kenzie says just as loud. “No, I don’t mean that.”
She shakes her hands as if they show what that is. “What I mean is Ford is a good man. A solid, wonderful, fucking sexy man. Wait.” As Mia shakes her head, Kenzie raises her hands, palms out. “Let me talk. Just wait. And you’ve had your problems, and I know he doesn’t seem to really understand you all the time or do it for you in bed. But Mia, like I said, you need to go to counseling first. You owe it to Ford to tell him how you’re feeling. You don’t just decide one day that you’re ready and then find another man who turns you on.”
Mia sits back and crosses her arms. “I didn’t find him. He opened the door and was there. I didn’t want to find him, Kenzie. You know that.”
Leaning forward, Kenzie looks at Mia, her green eyes slit against the light reflected off the pool and deck. Then her shoulders sag, her tense face relaxes. “I know you didn’t, Mia.”
“Then why are you so angry? Why can’t you feel the way you did when you said, ‘No one person can meet all our needs’? Right now, you sound just like my mother.”
Kenzie rolls her eyes and then closes them. “Because no matter what I ever said, I want to believe in you and Ford. I want to believe that there’s a man for me. Like Ford. Like Robert. I want to believe that Robert and Ford are the same person. That all that time and commitment and desire come in one person. And . . . .” She stops and rubs her forehead. “And it’s my turn I’ve been like this for years. You don’t know what it’s like, and if you do this, you might end up just like me. Picking men from their photos on date.com.”
Kenzie wipes her eyes with her towel and then scrunches up her face, pretending to carefully study the swimmer thrashing across the pool. After an early marriage in her twenties, Kenzie has been single, dating, having her adventures, once living with a man—Liam—for a year. That year was filled with dinners at the Alden’s, Mia and Ford and Kenzie and Liam sitting out on the deck eating and drinking wine; the four of them going to plays in the city; all of them flying down to LA to visit the Getty Museum when it opened. But then Liam was transferred back to Dublin, and Kenzie stayed home. Since then, there have been dates and month long relationships, but no Ford or no Robert for her.
As Mia watches her best friend, she is hit with waves of sorrow and regret that rip up her chest and flow into her throat. She shakes her head, unable to believe that this is Kenzie’s reaction, unable to believe how much it hurts. If Kenzie—the person who truly knows Mia the best—thinks her plans with Robert are unwise, how can Mia go forward? How can she want what must be ridiculous and stupid? How can this biggest thing, what she wants most, be wrong?
Kenzie wipes her eyes again, shakes her head. Mia nods, pretending to understand the silence between them, but inside, her bones ache. Why did she think Kenzie would really understand? All along, Mia’s whining and moaning about married love was tolerable when it was only theoretical. When it didn’t hurt Kenzie. When it was safe. But now Kenzie must think Mia is throwing away the very thing Kenzie has always wanted.
“I’m sorry,” Mia says, not knowing what she is sorry for. For telling Kenzie at all? For loving Robert? For not appreciating Ford the way Kenzie wants her to? For Kenzie and her love life—for Liam and all the wrong men she ever dated?
But Kenzie seems to understand, all the sorry's the right sorry. “I know.”
“I’m not leaving Ford,” Mia says quietly.
“I know.”
“I’m just—“
“I know,” Kenzie says, putting her hand on Mia’s arm. “I’m sorry, too. I am. I want to know what you are feeling. I want to be there for you. Really.”
Mia puts her hand on top of Kenzie’s and sits back. She wants to believe Kenzie, but Mia knows she has to stop talking about Robert. For the first time in two decades, Mia sees a subject that Kenzie can’t relate to, won’t relate to. Refuses to. Mia knows she can’t tell Kenzie anything else about Ford or Robert or sex or meetings in adobe houses. She is going to have to do this alone.
“Hel-lo?” Lucien says, the way he always says it, as if he’s an unknown son calling a strange family. He uses his low voice, a kidding voice, the voice he’s borrowed from Ford, one of the voices Ford used when he read to the boys: the voice of monsters and gremlins and trolls and dwarves from all the fairytales.
Mia is in the kitchen, holding a hot pad and a meat thermometer. The chicken seems to still be frozen in the middle, the temperature inside barely 140, whi
ch means pink. Outside, the fowl looks like a burn victim, a tragedy, a horror. They’ll have to go for Chinese food downtown.
“Hmm.” Mia begins, looking at the chicken through the oven door. “Hi, Lucien.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m killing dinner. What’s up with you?” Mia puts down the thermometer and hot pad and leans against the counter. In the living room, Harper watches The History of the Gun, a show Mia describes as the program about the evolution of death.
“I forgot about the utilities,” Lucien begins. “My roommates are hounding me, and I spent what I had already.”
“Yes,” she says, waiting. Every month since he moved into a rental house with three other guys, he’s been unable to budget a thing.
“I forgot. Really.”
The Instant When Everything is Perfect Page 17