The Instant When Everything is Perfect

by Jessica Barksdale Inclan

  But until yesterday morning in the motel in Bakersfield, he’d never found his body suffused with more than affection, comfort, and then relief that it wasn’t love. The woman wouldn’t have to stay. He was free to let her leave.

  Yesterday, though, he’d turned to see Mia next to him, her hair messy, her face slightly flattened by the pillow and he wanted to weep because there it finally was, a feeling in every part of him, possessive and needy and wanting and hopeful and desirous and joyful. And he saw then more clearly than ever that she belonged to someone else.

  Dear Mia, Robert writes back

  I would really like to have the orange suit, too. Can you arrange that? I’ll wear it while I listen to the CD. A total experience. Like you. I can’t wait for Thursday.

  Love, he writes, feeling the L and O and V and E under his fingertips, Robert

  

  Monday night after work, Robert has just enough time after work to make it to the brand new Barnes and Noble in Emeryville, swiftly heading up the stairs to the second floor. He isn’t even close to the reading area when he hears the laughter and then her voice. He’s not going to let her see him because he doesn’t want to startle her, see her face flash red, have her lose her train of thought, shift uncomfortably, maybe even glare at him. What he wants is to see her without her knowing he’s there, Mia in the wild, Mia natural, Mia as she is to everyone else.

  Getting as close to the reading area as he can without entering her view, he leans against the self-help books and watches her. A crowd of about twenty-five people surround Mia, her books fanned out on a table that she stands in front of. She’s wearing a longish black dress, and he imagines the smooth curves of her breasts and waist and hips under his hands as he stares at her. She’s jangling with sterling silver bracelets and earrings, the same necklace she had on in Bakersfield hanging between her breasts.

  Robert closes his eyes and imagines he can smell her, her skin, her hair, her soap.

  “That’s a great question,” she says to someone in the audience, and then she begins to talk about creating characters.

  Everyone in the audience listens to her, except for a little girl, who has been dragged to the lecture by what looks to be her mother, a woman who writes down everything Mia says. The girl sits on her chair, swinging her legs and reading from a children’s book. But the rest of the crowd is focused on Mia, who moves her hands, tells stories about her characters, describes how her character Susan ended up doing things Mia wasn’t prepared for.

  “The next thing I knew,” Mia says, “Susan’s off in a cabin in Tahoe with another woman. It was like I had to write to catch up to her. I told her, ‘No, Susan. Don’t do that!’ But it wasn’t in my control. Susan had a life of her own and she wanted to live it.”

  The audience laughs a little, surprised, like Robert is, by the idea of a character jumping out of an author’s head to do what the character wants.

  After the talk is over, Mia sits at the table, and some of the audience members stand in a line to have her sign books. Robert is about to walk up to the table when he notices the man in the back. The dark haired man from Sally Tillier’s hospital room. Ford. Or Rafael. Both. Ford, with whom Robert has been conversing for weeks.

  Ford doesn’t see Robert because he’s watching Mia. He leans against the wall, his arms crossed. Robert looks back at Mia and sees her glance up at Ford and smile. Ford raises his eyebrows, mouths something Robert doesn’t pick up, and then smiles back at her. Mia shakes her head a little and then goes back to the book she’s signing.

  Robert eyes burn. Mia smiles at Ford. They talk the invisible language of marriage.

  Of course she smiles at him, he thinks. She’s known him for over twenty years.

  His heart leaps in a kind of neurotic arrhythmia. He thinks, But she’s sleeping with me.

  Robert looks again at Ford, who is now talking to the book store manager. By the way Ford’s hands gesture toward Mia, by both the manager’s and Ford’s enthusiastic nodding, Robert can tell the manager is extolling Mia’s virtues, giving Ford—the person closest to her in the world—what he can’t say to Mia because she is busy. After all, doesn’t the husband know more than anyone else? Of course the manager knows this, asking questions, listening attentively, nodding and smiling.

  Ford’s the Mia expert, not Robert. Ford belongs here, not Robert.

  Moving backward, Robert almost trips over the little girl, who is holding the children’s book.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles, turning away, walking quickly to the stairs and then out the big book store doors, needing air, needing to leave.

  Dear Mia, he writes later that night

  I don’t think Thursday is going to work out after all. I’ll let you know what day will.

  Robert.

  Thirteen

  Mia

  The only one who calls her is an automated Cheryl Carr, the president of the California Teachers Association, who wants her donation in preparation for the big election in the fall. Teachers and their unions are fighting for money, the state in financial shambles, the elementary, middle, and high schools barely functioning, colleges turning away thousands of applicants. Mia hangs up without listening to more, even though she knows what Cheryl says is true and even though she cares about all the students. She wants to keep the line free, but she knows Robert won’t call her at home. He doesn’t even know her number here or at work. He hasn’t called her cell phone, and he hasn’t emailed since Monday night, telling her that Thursday afternoon wouldn’t work out. She wrote him back, telling him about the reading in Emeryville and how she could barely talk to the crowd because he was in her mind the whole time. Mia suggested the following Tuesday, knowing that was his day without surgery, but he hasn’t written back since then, and now it’s Friday. Almost a week without seeing him.

  She doesn’t know why, but Robert is breaking up with her.

  Mia decides she can’t work on her current novel any more, so she saves the sad three hundred words she’s managed to compose and turns off her computer. She knows if she leaves it on, she will check and re-check her email, wanting more than anything to see his address pop up on her screen. All the terrible behaviors she had while dating those millions of years ago before Ford are coming back: her obsessiveness, her need for constant reassurance, her desire for the body of her beloved. Maybe she was wrong to let loose all this terrible need. Maybe she would have been better served if she let herself go into middle age and beyond with only what she has. She could have made it, she thinks, as she begins to clean the kitchen, scrubbing the sink and counters with the soft scrub cleanser. She could have been happy with Ford and the kids and her life. Eventually, she would be a grandmother, a grandmother who writes, Ford her lifelong partner, a man who knows more about her than anyone.

  At the retirement home, they can sit on their patio overlooking the golf course and know that the life they now see is shared, understood by both of them. By then, he will have known her for three-fourths of her life, so much more of her experience with him than without.

  Mia rinses the sink, watching the yellow swirling water slip down the drain. But it’s too late now. She opened the box, let all her lust and desire and hope and need fly out, closing the lid just in time to keep love safe in the small darkness. Love. Whatever love is, she thinks she is in love with Robert. From that very first moment, the door of the room opening. His ponytail, his slightly frayed sweater under his crisp white lab coat, the wild blush on his cheeks.

  “Shit,” she says, turning off the water and breathing in, the air catching on tears.

  Mia shakes her head, wipes her hands on a dish towel, and wonders what to do. Go to his house and camp out until he comes home. Make an appointment with him. Forget about him.

  Call Sally, Kenzie, even Katherine. Go visit Dahlia, traveling from her sister’s house in Phoenix to her readings in Los Angeles. Ask Sally if there is room for one more on the Celtic trip. Call her department chair and beg for a summer class. S
he’d take any class, anything, even English 1A. Go to New York and find a job as an editor, rent a Manhattan apartment, date no one because there are no available men there. Hide in the hills, sleep in a tent. Jump off the deck. Forget everything.

  But then there is the pound pound of someone walking up the front steps. No, it’s a pound pound and a second pound pound. Looking out the kitchen window, she sees it’s Lucien and Harper, both of them now at the front door.

  Mia puts down the towel and runs to the door, pulling it open. “What? What is it?”

  Lucien smiles, his eyes caught in sunlight, a tumble of brown and green. “Hi, Mom.”

  Mia shakes her head. “Why are you here? What’s happened?” Then she turns to Harper. “And why aren’t you in school?”

  “Jeez, Mom.” Harper walks in the door, passing her but putting a hand on her shoulder. “Let us in, okay?”

  Lucien comes in, kisses her cheek, and carries his bags down the hall. Mia closes the door and turns to Harper, who leans against the kitchen doorway.

  “What’s going on, Harp?” she asks.

  Then Harper stills. “Wait till Lucien is with us.”

  Now more than ever, Mia is afraid. They know what she’s done, and they are going to confront her. An adultery intervention. She’ll have no choice but to jump off the front deck to the driveway below, her death the only possible solution to the mess she’s created in all their lives. For the first time since reading Robert’s email, Mia begins to cry, a quiet, calm stream of tears coming from the corners of her eyes.

  Harper reaches out a hand, and she leans into his shoulder. Does he know why she’s crying? And if so, why is he being so kind? How does a sixteen-year-old learn this type of kindness?

  “What did you say?” Lucien says to Harper when he sees them.

  “Nothing.” Harper pats her shoulder again.

  “Mom.” Lucien pulls her away from Harper. “Let’s go sit in the living room.”

  Mia feels like her brain has been carved out of her head and replaced with air and light. She’s become one of those zombies in the movies the boys used to watch, mindless and evil. An evil adulteress mother zombie.

  “Keep walking,” Harper says, and she does, the rhythm of her feet making her solid, the lightness leaving her.

  They walk into the living room and sit down. Mia knows she should take control because she is, after all, the mother, however inept. But she doesn’t know where to start. She doesn’t know what words will take away the pain of what she has to tell them.

  Lucien looks at Harper and then starts. “Harp called me at school a couple of weeks ago. He heard some conversations. He didn’t know what to do. Or who to talk to.”

  Mia wipes her face and looks at Harper, who meets her gaze. “What stuff? Talk about what stuff? About what conversations?”

  She asks the questions but already knows the answers. He must have gotten into her email. He managed to find the folder she’d hidden Robert’s messages in, discovering her secret. It must have been something at the hospital. Or he saw her in Walnut Creek. Maybe that day at the restaurant. Maybe that instant by the Volvo when Robert kissed her.

  “I can explain,” she begins. “Listen—“

  Harper looks confused. “You know? I thought you must. How could you not have noticed? It’s been so obvious.”

  Lucien sits back. “When did you find out? Did he tell you?”

  Mia blinks, her head light again. “What are we talking about?”

  The boys pause and then look at each other.

  “Dad,” Lucien says finally. “His affair. With that woman he works with. Karen.”

  Mia swallows, tries to look at both Harper and Lucien, but sees nothing except the little lights that keep swirling in front of her. Something inside her body—a muscle, an organ--clenches and unclenches. Finally, she closes her eyes, and the lights slowly fade. Her breath finds a rhythm. Her body stops pulsing.

  Of course. Of course. Karen. All Ford’s late nights and sudden business trips. Of course.

  Mia bites down on her lip and opens her eyes. Ford, her husband of twenty-two years, is with another woman. Ford. Her husband. So much betrayal.

  She struggles to find the appropriate feeling. These words should burn and twist and scratch. She should feel the deep, keening pain. But the pain is not there. It’s not there because for so long, she’s lived in the tunnel of her own secret, a separate place in her brain, the place where she’s admitted that she’s no longer in love with her husband. the place she goes to when they make love and her body does not respond. This tunnel is the place of fantasies of other men, of hopes for another life. The tunnel is where she meets up with Robert, again and again and again.

  At Harper’s and Lucien’s words, the wall between where she kept her “real” life and her secret tunnel collapses, and she knows, more than anything, she’s relieved. Free.

  Her sons watch her carefully, and she knows she owes them the truth about her own life. But how to tell it?

  “This is a family problem,” Lucien says, the exact words the counselors always told them during his drug rehab.

  “A family disease. The denial. The excuses. The problems,” the counselors said, righteous eyes on all the parents who had somehow missed the signs: the drop in grades, the listlessness, the weight changes, the new friends. “Don’t blame the children solely. You all have to take responsibility for this.”

  But how could Ford’s and her own adultery have anything to do with anything the children have done?

  “Yes,” Mia says finally. “And no. None of this is your fault, either of you. It’s about your father and me.”

  Lucien shrugs, turns his head away. “I didn’t help.”

  “No, Luc,” Mia says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not about you.”

  “But it effects us, Mom,” Lucien says. He crosses his legs, and for a second she imagines he will take out a notepad and pencil.

  “I know.”

  “You didn’t notice?” Harper looks like he’s about to cry, his eight-year-old boy face slipping through the new solid bones of his sixteen-year-old one.

  “I think I did,” Mia says, finally feeling the pain she needs to feel. The pain she should feel. Harper is the person who will be torn up by what is happening, the last boy, the person who will need to jump from the sinking ship. He is the innocent, the unknowing, the one who will wish it could be fixed. For a second, she imagines that she feels her breasts let-down, the prickly tingle of milk flowing to the ducts. When the boys were nursing, their cries, whines, upset would cause her milk to flow, drenching her blouses and shirts.

  “His diaper is just wet,” Ford would say. “He’s not hungry. He just ate.”

  But it didn’t matter; Mia’s body responded to any discomfort, any pain. Like now, but Harper is almost a man, and somehow, he is going to have to survive this on his own.

  “Did you notice, Mom?” Lucien asks into her pause.

  Mia nods. She did notice. His refusal of counseling; his urgent lovemaking; his attempts to tell her something. His appearance at the reading in Emeryville, such a shock after a couple of years of no-shows. She felt responsible for him as he leaned against the far wall, needing to make him feel at home as he listened to her, watched her, waited for her. And she had to admit that it felt good to see him there, his dark eyes—the eyes that had always seen her—taking in her show, her talent, her shtick.

  But all of the lovemaking and attention were a smoke screen for the understory, the true narrative of his desires. And her own.

  “Are you okay?” Harper almost whines. “Should we have told you? Is it going to be all right?”

  Mia reaches out and strokes his face, his skin smooth despite a whisk of stubble. “I don’t know if it’s going to be all right, sweetie. I don’t know what all right is now.”

  Lucien leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “There’s something I never told you.”

  She shakes her head, wondering if she can
bear another truth, especially one from her own child. But Lucien, his gaze on his shoes, doesn’t see her indecision.

  “That last LSD trip? You know, the one with the musical notes?”