The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  He doesn’t really know how not to want her in this way. He wants her like he wants food. Like he wants sleep. How he needs her is nothing like how he wants his house or job or car or even his friends. Mia, all of her, seems elemental, necessary for his life. Robert knows that he has to have her, not just her body, but her thoughts and ideas and her voice. This has never been true before, not once.

  Robert shakes out his arms as he starts heading down the hill. He can’t ask anyone for Mia but Mia, and he can’t ask for her yet. He can’t say the words. Not now, not for a long time. Not until she wants him as much as he wants her. But what Robert tried not to think about is what he would do with Mia once she has left Ford. After all, what has he done with all his girlfriends? One year tops, and then each relationship was over, the women walking down his front path, either because they were exasperated by him or he asked them to leave. Yes, he wants Mia, but for how long? He feels so differently about Mia, but has he really changed? Do people actually change?

  The ground is hard and cold under his shoes and he feels his long strides resonate in his thigh bones. The sky begins to widen into gray, the lightest of blues. Robert makes it to the short flat stretch before the next hill. Here’s what he knows. A woman like Mia deserves forever. And Robert doesn’t know if he can offer forever to anyone.

  What do you say, Ford? Will you take her back? If it doesn’t work out, will you not let me ruin her entire life?

  He begins to climb the second hill, and the sun slips golden along the horizon, spreading light over the mountains in the distance. Maybe, he thinks, he should stop obsessing about more and later and forever. Maybe he should think about yesterday—Mia warm in his arms—and maybe today, which is all about his job. By tonight, he can allow himself to think about tomorrow, just a bit. He won’t think about Bakersfield because that’s thinking about Mia in the future.

  It’s possible that all this time with his various girlfriends, he’s been living so far in the future that he’s broken up with them or they’ve left before they’d even had a chance to be together. A year couldn’t even measure the amount of time they’d spent together in Robert’s head, whole lifetimes, so that by the time they left, he’d already grown old and died.

  So as he runs, he makes a deal with himself, a promise. He will not think about Mia except for the real details of time they spend together. But he can have all that he wants of that, lolling in the memories of her in his bed. He will not imagine the future with her, thinking about how she will visit her children or how she will handle the effects of her divorce. He will not mentally place her in his house, watching her move from room to room. He will stop imagining her writing in the courtyard, her laptop on the wooden table, her fingers determined on the keyboard. He will stay in the present and not in some kind of contrived future, made up of hopes and desire. No more. And most of all, he thinks—exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, his feet moving on the dirt path, the air cool on his shoulders—he will stop talking to Ford.

  On Saturday evening at five, Robert pulls into the parking lot of La Quinta Inn, just off of Highway 99. As he turns into the hotel, he notices the sign for the Buck Owen’s Crystal Palace just a bit down the street, and as he turns off the car engine, he wonders if he and Mia will really take a look inside. All he can remember about Buck Owens is the show Hee Haw, watching the show with his parents when he was a kid. Buck played the guitar and the other guy—sort of round and friendly-faced—played the banjo. There was the lady with the hat with a price tag still on it, but that’s all the memory Robert has.

  Robert gets out of the car and looks around the motel. Mia called him as he was driving down, and told him what room she was in. So now Robert walks to the stairs and heads up to the third floor.

  “It’s not a fancy place,” Mia said. “But the group put me up. What can I say?”

  Robert knows he wouldn’t care if they were at a Motel 6 or worse. He wouldn’t care if they were camping, sleeping outside under a dark, rainy sky. Tonight he’ll get to sleep all night with her. And, thinking only hours into the future, tomorrow he will wake up with her.

  He starts to knock on room 313, but after only one quick rap, Mia pulls open the door. Robert stares at her. She’s wearing a long, tight black skirt and a dark red low-cut blouse that hugs her waist and clings to her body. Her hair is bigger somehow, perfect, and she wears makeup, lipstick, blush, eyeliner that somehow makes her brown eyes green. Curving along her neck and down to the valley of her cleavage is a long silver necklace. He blinks, seeing the writer Mia. The professor Mia. The professional Mia. Instead of daughter Mia or lover Mia.

  “Robert!” she says, grabbing his wrist and leading him in. “I was getting worried.”

  He swallows. “They slowed traffic because of some wind thing. Dust.”

  She closes the door and kisses him. She smells different, like perfume and paper and a big airless meeting room. He lets his hands slide along her waist, his flesh moving slickly against her silk blouse. He kisses her back and her mouth is the same, filled with peppermint. He pulls away and looks at her again.

  “This might not be a fancy place, but you’re all fancy,” he says.

  “I have to look the part periodically,” she says, kissing him on the cheek, the nose, the ear.

  “I like the way you look,” he says, pressing her to him.

  “I know. It’s a miracle.” Mia laughs, her sound rumbling into him.

  “Stop it,” he says, and he pulls away from her, looking at her from her high heels to her hair. “You are a queen.”

  “If you don’t stop, I’m going to take a shower and wash it all off. The clock will strike midnight and I’ll become the girl covered in cinders.”

  “Deep down she was always a queen.”

  “Robert, I’m serious.”

  He smiles. “A shower sounds like a great idea. Can I join you?”

  Later, they are in bed. The motel room hums with noise from the air conditioner and something under the desk. A modem? Below in the parking lot, large trucks are rumbling through, deep base welts of music throbbing against the asphalt. Robert stands up and pushes back the curtains, watching the shiny, buffed red and blue and silver pick-ups pull into spaces, the drivers getting out and slapping each other on the back as the freed music curls up and into the darkening sky.

  “A convention,” he says. “A Ya-hoo festival.”

  “Robert,” Mia says from under the blankets, “they’re probably doctors.”

  He shrugs, closes the curtain, and turns to face Mia. Her nice clothes and his own are on the floor, her hair wild from the way he ran his hands through it as he made love to her. In this second, his heart feels empty and full at the same time, as if he can’t decide if loss or love is the truth.

  “Come back to bed,” she says.

  He knows he should leave before it happens. All he needs to do is dress, walk out of the room, pass by the pickups in the parking lot, and get in his car. In minutes, he could be back on Highway 99. In four hours, he could be back in his house, flicking on the lights, watching Phyllis wind her way toward the kitchen and her cat bowl.

  Robert watches Mia watch him.

  “I need to tell you,” he says.

  “I know,” she says.

  “I wasn’t paying attention to the signs.” Robert has slipped on his boxers and is sitting in the chair next to the bed. Mia wears his shirt and is cross-legged, leaning against the headboard. She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes never leave his.

  “The first one wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t even in the room. I was still scrubbing, but I saw it happen. She’d come to me for microsuction on her face—just taking off a little fat under her chin. It wasn’t going to be a big deal, but when the anesthesiologist gave her the anesthetic, she went into arrest. Everyone did everything right. She wasn’t given too much, and the anesthesiologist had her monitored. She just reacted. She. Her name was Melinda.”

  Robert shakes his head, bites down on his cheek
. “They shocked her back into a rhythm, but it was too late. She never woke up and died five days later.”

  He stops talking and in his silence, Mia asks, “You said signs. Why was Melinda a sign?”

  “She was trying to tell me something. Not actually, but in what happened. She was trying to tell me to be careful. To pay attention.”

  Mia leans over and touches his thigh. She blinks, and he can tell she’s trying to find something to say. But after a moment, she squeezes him and then sits back.

  “Go on,” she says.

  “A few months later, I had a patient named Joyce Studin. She came for an eyelid tuck. And it wasn’t just cosmetic. Her vision was being impacted. I had done this procedure a hundred times, on patients with more visual impaction than Joyce. And she was in great shape.”

  Robert doesn’t want them, not now, but tears heat his eyes. He rubs his face, wiping them away before they show. “But something happened. During the surgery, her heart stopped. Just like Melinda’s. And when she went into arrest, I accidentally nicked a cranial nerve. I didn’t know it then because we were in such a focus to keep her alive, but when she was in the coma, her whole eyelid sagged, hung there in her unconscious face. Every time I checked on her, her family asked me about it, more worried about her eye than the fact that her EEG showed there was little brain activity.”

  “’Will you be able to fix it?’ her husband asked me every single day for three days, even in the hour just before the family decided she was going to come off life support. ‘Will she look all right?’ her mother asked. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t have the courage to stay with them as she died.”

  Mia gets out of bed and crouches down next to his knees, leaning her face on his thighs. Robert strokes her hair and lets his tears come. “I decided then that what I did was wrong. That I was in some carnival branch of medicine. I wanted to get out, but I didn’t know what else I could do, so I decided to only work with cancer or emergency patients from then on. No one got it. Jack kept telling me to let it go, but I couldn’t.”

  He wipes his eyes. “I hate it.”

  Mia looks up. “What?”

  “Everything.”

  “Tell me.”

  Robert thinks, wondering how to say it. There’s so much. Not just about being a doctor but about being human. He pushes his hair back, swallows. “I hate being in the position to make such big mistakes.”

  She stands and then straddles his legs, sitting down and facing him. The shirt she wears is open and he can see the curve of her breasts. He never wants to hold them in an exam room, telling her where he will cut and how he will insert expanders. He never wants to reconstruct her nipples, trying to play god with needle and ink. He pulls her close, knowing she has to go in immediately and get a mammogram soon. Right away. The moment she gets home from Bakersfield.

  As he holds her thinking how he will save her from cells he has no control over, he knows he is stuck in the future and the past. Melinda and Joyce are sitting on his shoulders, as they always are every day, but he’s also giving Mia a cancer she doesn’t have. Because he is scared. He’s scared of everything. Everything frightens him. His parents’ death, his own life, loving anyone because they can go away, just like that, dying in front of his face on an operating table.

  He can barely feel the alive, warm woman on his lap, the woman who is stroking him and murmuring a sound she must have made up for her children. He can barely feel her hot thighs clenching his, her warm, still-wet center against his belly. Maybe he’s never known how to just be, not even when he’s running, not even when he’s making love.

  “Oh,” he sobs against Mia’s throat, grabbing her back. “Please.”

  “Yes,” Mia says. “Yes.”

  Later, he leans against her as they sit in bed, her back against the headboard. They watch the local news, stories flitting past as they do—war, disease, robbery, murder—the day’s events in second tidbits. Mia has undone his hair and is combing it with her fingers, starting at his scalp and then letting her hand pull through the entire length.

  “If I only had a curling iron,” she said, laughing against his shoulder.

  “You want me in drag?”

  “I never had a girl, you know. You’re my last hope, here. I can practice my braiding and ponytails. When I have grandchildren—not for years, god willing—I’ll be ready for a granddaughter.”

  He closes his eyes and lets himself feel her touch, tuning out the noise from the television, forgetting what he told her a half hour before. Mia begins to hum lightly, a feeling more than a sound from her chest.

  Robert closes his eyes just as the motel phone rings. Behind him, Mia tenses, and then she pushes him away gently, leaning over to the phone. Before she answers, she looks at him, her face pale. Robert stands up and watches her answer.

  “Hello? . . . Oh, hi. What’s up? . . . . It went fine . . . .”

  He wants to stand and listen to her conversation, scrutinizing each word for the affection he wants for himself. But he doesn’t, putting on his jeans and t-shirt instead and stepping out onto the walkway outside the door.

  The Bakersfield air hits him soft, like the cotton that grows along the highway. The pickup drivers have gone into their rooms and now the parking lot lights reflect brilliantly off the truck paint. From this vantage, he can see the bright lights of the Buck Owens’s Crystal Palace, the quick flashing bulbs trying to draw in business. And, in fact, he can hear the country music, the twang and slow beat of a song that usually would make him laugh. But tonight, it seems to be the exact rhythm of his heart, slow and wistful and full of regret.

  What does he want? he wonders. Does he want Mia?

  He closes his eyes, smelling her on his entire skin. Yes, he wants Mia. He wants her off the phone and away from her family and with him all the time. But he also doesn’t want that, knowing that having her will bring pain to other people. What is all this longing? All this feeling inside him? He knows it must have a name beyond a mid-life crisis, and it has to do with his career, his life’s work, his life in general.

  “Join our group,” Jack would say. “You’ll be happier here.”

  “Quit working at Inland,” his mother would have said. “Do volunteer work. Help the people who need it the most.”

  “Get married,” his father would have said. “You’re alone too much. Settle down for God’s sake.”

  “Make us beautiful,” some of his patients would say.

  “Make us normal,” others would say. “Fix what has made me broken.”

  “What do you want?” Mia would ask, always thoughtful, always going back to the source. “What do you really want, Robert?”

  He doesn’t hear the door open, but then there is her hand is on his shoulder, sliding around to his chest. “I’m hungry,” she says, and Robert nods. He’s hungry, too.

  On Monday before going to the hospital, Robert calls Operation Grin. Two years ago, he and two of his Inland colleagues traveled to Norfolk, Virginia and trained there for two weeks. They went over the procedures to repair cleft lip and palate. They studied cases of children born without noses, of women with facial tumors that impaired vision, of men slowly starving because they couldn’t swallow, their palates gaping holes.

  It had felt like camp, learning to operate without the machines and medicines and assistance that he’d come to expect in the United States, that most people in the western world took for granted. But he’d never made the commitment to go anywhere, though his two colleagues had, coming home with pictures of Na and Felipe and Sofia from Vietnam and Honduras and Bulgaria. Robert looked at the photos, listened to the stories, but he had never made the call to go, never felt, what? That he was ready? That he could do it? That he was good enough?

  But today, Robert talks with Anna in Virginia, who puts him on the list for Honduras; he picks Honduras because he likes the way the capitol’s name—Tegucigalpa—sounds on his tongue. Robert hangs up the phone and stares at his email, seeing MAlden. He clicks
on her name, feeling the slight flurry of thrill her emails give him.

  Dear Robert,

  I loved seeing you at Buck Owens’s Palace, standing next to that orange leather suit with fringe. In fact, I’m going out today to buy you a CD of Buck’s best music. I want you to play it all the time.

  Thank you for coming to see me in Bakersfield. Thank you for sleeping all night with me. Thank you for telling me the story.

  Love, Mia.

  Love, Mia, Robert thinks. He does love Mia, but he’s not sure how he knows this. He always thought love would take a long time, months and years to develop, and even then, it would be more of a habit than an emotion. For so long he waited for something to happen, something that clichés defined so well: bells to ring, the sun to break free of the clouds, his heart to swell. Robert imagined, though, that he’d recognize love, remember the connection somehow, turn and suddenly see it. He would awake in the morning next to Leslie or whoever he had been with at the time and expect that the feeling would be there, like magic, suffusing his entire body. He’d blink a couple times, hoping that when he was truly conscious, he’d feel it, know it, want the woman next to him more than anything.