The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  “Uh-huh. So, what are you reading?” Mia asks, ignoring the fact that her oldest son is again asking for more money, his addictions gone but his impulsiveness not. On whims, he’s driven home from Olympia without telling anyone, barreling straight down Highway Five for ten hours, getting two tickets and busting the radiator of his used Infiniti G20. He’s decided to hitchhike across the country, calling Mia and Ford from South Falls, the home of Mia’s uncle Ralph, her father’s older brother. He and one of his roommates Jay decided to explore homelessness, and slept on the streets of Seattle one night, finding an old mattress in an alley, huddling next to each other. But unlike the other homeless people they met that weekend, they stopped for a big breakfast at Pig N’Pancake on the way home.

  Lucien began writing short stories when he was ten, finding Mia’s old portable typewriter in the garage and arranging a writing station for himself. Somehow, he learned to type, avoiding the typing manuals and all those lines of j ; j ; j ; and a f a f a f that Mia labored through in high school.

  Now, he stays up all night and writes. He eats Froot Loops in mixing bowls. She knows he will be a better writer than she is. He amazes her.

  “The Story of O,” he says. “Pretty tame.”

  “Not back then.”

  “A simultaneous orgasm was revolutionary in the 20’s. Now, it’s in those romance books at Safeway . . .” and Lucien is off, comparing D.H. Lawrence to Erica Jong to Pauline Reage to Henry Miller to MTV to daytime soaps. His class this semester is: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: The Multi-Media Mirror.

  “How much?” Mia asks after their discussion.

  “Fifty.”

  “Are you okay?” Okay is the key word, the easy word, the word that conveys everything.

  “Great. Okay.”

  “I’ll put it in the bank tomorrow on my way to—when I do some errands.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Try to stop smoking so much. What do they cost a pack now?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “I mean it, Luc.”

  “How’s everything there?” Lucien asks, and she wishes he were older, that he’d already finished his class, that he was married. That he had arced far enough out of childhood and away from her so that she could tell him the story. Because she can really talk to Lucien, and he would understand. But he’s her son, will always be her son, and he would never understand this thing that has to do with his father.

  “Okay,” she says. She tells Lucien she loves him, and they hang up.

  

  Just as Ford, Harper, and Mia are leaving for the Chinese restaurant downtown, Dick Brantley pulls up in his giant Lincoln and the passenger’s side window rolls down. Sally puts her arm out and waves. Mia stops on the walkway, staring at her mother, who is smiling, her face full of light and heat, her eyes wide. Dick leans down and waves, too.

  “Where are you going?” Sally asks. Ford walks up to the car and puts his hand on the door.

  “Chinese downtown. There was a massacre in the kitchen,” Ford says, looking back at Mia, who crosses her arms.

  “Oh, we’ll join you, okay? I love their Mongolian Beef. That sounds good, doesn’t it, Dick?”

  Dick nods, and Ford pats the door. “Okay, we’ll see you down there.”

  The Lincoln slides away, and Mia, Harper, and Ford get into Ford’s BMW.

  “Grandma looked high,” Harper said. Mia is about to argue with him, but then she knows that Harper saw Lucien high enough times to know what high looks like. And he’s right. Her eyes were bright and glossy and full of pleasure, and that’s not a look Mia has ever seen on her mother’s face before. Not that she can remember. And Dick looked a bit goofy, too, smiling, almost stunned.

  Everything in Mia stills, and she knows that her mother has gained something from losing her breasts. But what? What’s taken their place? Is it the Zoloft that Mia had Dr. Jacobs prescribed? Or is it being with this man, Dick Brantley? Or is it something else, some kind of strange freedom that the surgery has given her? Some way of connecting with the world in a way Sally’s never done before? There’s more of Sally than ever.

  “She’s just feeling better,” Ford says. “She’s free of the cancer. The pain from the surgery is gone. Anyone would look like that.”

  Mia nods and looks out the window. Fog is rolling over the hills, the last of the sunlight glinting gold off the waves of white. She keeps nodding and then stops because it’s not just that her mother has lost something or that she is free of pain. There’s something else, something in Sally’s eyes that reminds Mia of escape. Of freedom. Of release.

  Somehow, Sally has found what Mia wants.

  “Don’t you adore this place?” Sally says once they are all seated at the restaurant at a large round table. In the middle, a lazy susan rumbles in a circle as everyone takes a tea cup.

  Sally whispers, “They try to be chic, but there’s all those little ceramic creatures on the window sill. See?”

  She points, but only Harper and Dick look. Ford studies the menu, and Mia watches her mother. As she does, Mia finds herself pulled toward Ford, her thigh against his, their knees touching. If she were on the couch in the living room with him, she’d slip her hand around his back and rub his side. Suddenly, she wants to take him home and make love with him, though nothing in her body is telling her to do this. Not her vagina. Not her breasts. Not her stomach, the pulse she found there when she first saw Robert. It’s her mind that wants to, and she wonders why the two aren’t connected.

  Maybe she’s just afraid of being without Ford. Like Kenzie says, she doesn’t know what it’s like out there.

  “Well?” Sally looks at Mia. “Honey, where are you?”

  “Oh, sorry. What?” Mia sees the waitress is looking at her, so she closes her menu. “What about kung pao chicken?”

  “Love that dish,” Dick says, and they all hand the waitress their menus.

  “Once when I was here,” Sally says, “a man got angry because there was no butter for his rice. Can you imagine? Butter on rice in a Chinese restaurant!”

  Ford presses his knee hard against hers, their recognition of silly Sally talk. Mia presses back, and something opens in her chest. She swallows, hoping it will fill up before she starts to think about tomorrow.

  Mia sips her water and then puts the glass down. She wipes her mouth and sees that Harper is staring at Ford, watching his father talk to Dick Brantley about the workman’s compensation crisis in California. Harper’s eyes have the veil of boredom he uses when he wants to hear something but not be detected, the look his fourth grade teacher said he wore just to make her angry. He’s always received good grades, though, despite it.

  “How was school today?” Mia asks, and Harper flicks his eyes at her, the veil gone.

  “Fine,” he says, and then the workman’s compensation discussion is over, and Sally and Dick are asking Harper questions about high school. What classes is he taking? Does he have a new girlfriend? What does he want to study in college? Who is his favorite teacher?

  Harper sits back, slightly flushed, and answers each question until the soup comes.

  “There,” Sally says, looking into the bowl the waitress places in front of her. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Mia stares at the spinach and rice and chicken floating in the steaming broth. Is it wonderful? Is soup wonderful when there are hacked off breasts and adultery and drug addiction and loss and pain and need and suffering everywhere?

  “Yes,” Dick says. “It’s all absolutely wonderful.”

  Mia holds the directions to Robert’s house in one hand as she drives, looking at the street signs, the paper, the road. She could kill someone right now, run over a jogger, a toddler, an old person on one of those three-wheeled bicycles and not even realize it. She shouldn’t be driving anyway, her stomach is somewhere in her head, her brain in her crotch. She feels like she weighs nothing and she feels stuck to the steering wheel, her hands lead.

  Finally, having managed to not hit
person or object, Mia pulls up in front of an adobe house. A Jeep is parked in the driveway. Turning off the Volvo’s engine, she notices the way the house looks solid, sitting firmly on its large plot. The roof is tiled, the bright spring light making it glow like a terracotta sun. The window frames are wood; the windows are paned with old glass, the reflections warbley. Robert has landscaped from front door to street, wild, bunchy grasses and dark stones and perennials Mia could never plant under all her oak trees. In the back yard, a huge madrone branches up and over the house.

  As she takes her hands from the wheel, Mia looks at her hands, all her fingers trembling. She clenches them together, staring out the window. What will she do? How can she get out of the car? Maybe Robert will find her here hours later, stuck in this position.

  For a moment, she just sits still, unable to breathe right, unable to swallow. But somehow Mia manages to fold up the directions and grab her purse. Then she stops, opens her purse and finds her Altoids, popping one in her mouth. She sucks on it for a moment, and then spits it into a Kleenex.

  She gets out of the car, and little lights spread in her vision, translucent white orbs that flutter at the edges of her sight like moths. She isn’t breathing, so she closes her eyes and finds a way to pull air into her lungs, one breath, two breaths, three, and then she opens her eyes and the lights are gone.

  Smoothing her hair, she walks up the steps, her eyes focused on the small doorbell, but before she can stick her finger out to push it or before she can turn and run back to her car and drive off, Robert opens the front door. He smiles, pushes back his hair, opens the door wide. And Mia knows it’s too late. For everything. Her stomach pulses, her eyes prick with tears. Ford’s face opens and then closes in her mind. She sees him sitting in the living room, laughing at something on the television; she feels him sitting next to her at a meeting at Lucien’s rehab; she hears him whisper to her at night, saying, “Turn over.”

  Mia stares at Robert. How can she do this? What is going to happen is horrifying and terrible. It’s cruel and wrong and bad. But it’s other things, too. It’s absolutely wonderful.

  “I love it,” she says, turning around in the middle of the living room. “It’s just amazing. I wouldn’t leave the house. I’d stay here all day long.”

  “Thank you,” he says, and as she watches him, she knows he wants to say something else. So does she. But this is what they must do first. She must tour the house. She must see everything.

  “I love that pond. Do you spend a lot of time out in the courtyard?” She walks to the doors that lead to the open middle of the house. Light pours onto the wide leaves of exotic looking plants that Mia has no names for.

  “If I didn’t work so much, I would.”

  “Too bad you don’t work at home. I would park myself out there and wri—“ She stops, feeling like she’s jumped into the end of a story before working out the middle. The end of a story that she might never finish.

  Robert walks to her, takes her hand. The house tour is over.

  He leans to her, kisses her cheek, her nose, her mouth. Mia puts her arms around him, pressing his tight body to hers. This kiss starts like the one they had on the sidewalk, but then it turns into more, their mouths unable to get as close as they need, even their tongues not long enough to make it real. Even though she can feel his thighs on hers, his erection against her stomach, it’s not enough. Robert slowly brings his hands up her sides and moves them toward her middle, up, onto her breasts. Mia pulls her mouth away from his because she can’t handle all this feeling.

  “Come with me,” Robert says, and he takes her hand.

  “Is this the end of the tour?” Mia asks.

  “No. I hope it’s just the beginning.”

  She wants to laugh, but it’s not funny. They head down a long, Spanish-tiled hall. A cat sits in the corner, its tail wrapped carefully around its legs.

  Robert pushes open a door, and they walk into a bedroom, his bedroom. He turns and kisses her again, this time his hands pulling her blouse free from her pants. Mia brings her hands to her buttons, but her fingers don’t seem to be working right, the small pieces of plastic almost slippery and much too thin to push through material. Robert moves away and unbuttons his shirt. They watch each other, the yellow room light hugging them. Mia wants to close her eyes and feel the strong current in her body, electricity she feels everywhere. But she can’t take her eyes off of him, his slim, muscled chest, his long, lean arms.

  Here is the body of a man, a new body Mia has never touched, the first body in over twenty years she won’t recognize by touch. She wonders if all the things she knows about sex will transfer to what she does with Robert.

  Mia feels like a person coming back to a country she left long ago, wondering if the language is still the same.

  Pulling off her blouse, Mia stands in front of him in the bra she bought the day before at Nordstrom.

  “Oh,” he says, stepping back, watching her. “Oh.”

  If she blushed when she first saw Robert that day in the exam room, she’s on fire now, her face pulsing with feeling. He isn’t looking at her face, though, his eyes on her throat, neck, breasts. He reaches out and takes her arm and pulls her to him. When their skins touch, she closes her eyes, leans against his shoulder as he gently unhooks her bra.

  The bra falls to the ground, and then her nipples are against him. She can’t bear how good he feels. She should leave before she feels one more millimeter of his lovely body. But he’s kissing her again, moving his lips down her face, her neck, his hands under her breasts. He has a breast in each hand, his mouth on one nipple, sucking so deeply, she moans.

  She opens her eyes, and looks down at his head moving at her chest. Seeing the black band that holds his hair in a ponytail, Mia reaches up, pulls his hair free of the elastic, and watches it flow dark over his shoulders. She moves her fingers through it, so fine and soft, and he stands straight. She looks down, his erection a bulge against his jeans.

  He breathes in deeply and smiles. “Can we take off the rest of our clothes?”

  Mia nods, and he unbuttons his pants. She unbuttons hers and then slides down the zipper, wishing she could present him with her younger body. Even though he’s already told her he doesn’t believe in perfection, she knows she still does, she can’t help it. And as he undresses, she watches him, and he is perfect. His thighs and legs are firm and strong, and his penis juts dark and thick through the opening in his boxers.

  Her mother’s voice sails forth into Mia’s mind. If you weren’t so wide in the beam. What about the grapefruit diet? If you lost just fifteen pounds . . . Mia cuts Sally off because she knows it doesn’t matter now. Robert wants her. At least it’s very clear his body does. Her body wants his, too; the underwear she is taking off is wet where it hugged her tight.

  “You’re beautiful, Mia,” Robert says, kicking away the clothes on the floor between them.

  “I am?” she blurts, almost moaning again when she feels his penis on her bare skin. She reaches down to put her hand around him and closes her eyes.

  Before he can answer, she says, “So are you.”

  They are kissing again, his skin on hers, his hands on her body. She feels a slight slick of wetness on the head of his penis, and she almost sinks to the floor, knowing that she wants him, needs the passion that Sally and Kenzie says doesn’t exist. But here it is, here in the form of this beautiful, erect man who is holding her, whom she holds back.

  “Come here,” Robert murmurs, and then they are on his bed, on top of the covers, and Mia stops thinking, stops hearing Sally or Kenzie or even her own mind, stops her own guilt, and she is body and mind all at once, together.

  Though Mia has written about adultery in all her novels, it has been a lifetime since she herself lay in a bed with a man other than Ford after sex. Or before sex. Or just lay in a bed with another man at all, clothed or unclothed. The very idea of where she is at this moment is completely unbelievable. Yet it’s true. She is naked in
Robert’s bed, on her side, his chest against hers, his arm wrapped around her waist, his leg holding her close. Her heart is beating so slowly, Mia wonders if the orgasm she had with him has so surprised her system, it’s deciding to shut down, quit while it’s ahead. She doesn’t know if her mind can handle the overload either. Poor Robert will be left with a comatose woman and a lot of explaining to do.

  “What are you thinking?” he says, and then laughs. “That’s a cliché, right?”

  His breath smells like green tea, and she lifts her lips to kiss him softly, just his top lip. His hand presses on her upper back, pulling her closer. Between them, his penis is slick and soft on her belly.

  “Well,” she says, “maybe. A cigarette is worse. Overdone.”

  “Did you ever smoke?” he asks.