The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

  “I know. But in the long run, did any of those women work out?”

  “You were lucky to get away with your life after what’s-her-name. Maryann,” Robert says. “And anyway, who’s talking about a long run?”

  Jack opens his car door and laughs again. “Oh, yeah. I forgot I was talking to you. See you later, man.”

  The sound of the Porsche is guttural, thick, the sound of power, and Jack looks out from behind the windshield and winks. Accelerating, he roars off down the road, the engine vibrating, echoing off the buildings.

  “Sweet ride,” the valet says.

  Robert shrugs and walks away, saying “Mia Alden” under his breath.

  There is still over an hour before closing, but Robert is the only one in Bonanza Books save the young man behind the counter, who looks up when Robert walks in, nods, and goes back to his magazine, one of those with the strange, large-eyed cartoon characters on the cover.

  Robert used to like to read, but in recent years, he’s been so busy with his work that the only thing he reads for pleasure is JAMA and Lancet. Even when he’s on vacation, he’s reading papers on efficacy of radiosurgery on skin lesions or the new breakthroughs in rhytidoplasty. But back in college and on his summer breaks when he worked in the lab at UCSF tending the mice on hormone therapies, he would read whatever he could get his hands on. Home decorating magazines, Reader’s Digest, poetry journals. Once he even read a romance novel a doctor had hidden under her lab coat, something about a woman in a castle and her vampire lover. It didn’t matter. Words were words. Words were entertainment. Words kept him from living alone in his brain.

  He still doesn’t know what he was trying to avoid.

  “Do ya need some help?” the young man suddenly asks.

  Robert realizes that he’s been standing still in front of the sign that reads “New Fiction.”

  He turns to the young man, whose frizzy hair is a wildflower of dark curls around his face. One giant pimple beats on his chin.

  “I’m looking for the books by a particular author. Mia Alden.”

  The young man points to shelves that run along the back of the store. “In literature. Under A.”

  Robert wants to roll his eyes, to tell the young man that he’s known how to alphabetize since before kindergarten, but he sees the young man is used to questions like this. Where is the fiction? In the fiction section. Where are the children’s books? Over there, in the children’s section. Where are the magazines? In the magazine rack.

  “Thanks,” Robert says, walking toward the far left of the shelf, where a large, black handwritten A is taped to the wood.

  Abbot, Addonizio, and then Alden, Mia, right before Browne, Susan. Robert cocks his head before he reaches for the books, seeing the smooth spines, the titles in the same font. He reaches for one and pulls it off the shelf, the slick cover sliding in his hands. Flipping it up, he looks at the cover and reads the title. The Daisy Plate Incident. Already he hates the story because the title is ridiculous. The Daisy Plate Incident? But then he remembers the romance novel, turning the book over. Maybe the title is weird, but there are all sorts of accolades on the back, “Riveting,” “A thoughtful take on the excruciating joy of childhood,” “A must read,” and “An author to watch.” Famous authors and reviewers have said these things about Mia and her work, and when he looks at the bottom of the back cover, he sees her picture.

  She’s done something to her hair since this photo was taken, chopped it off because here, it’s long and flowing over her shoulders. She’s leaning over, her chin in her hand, and she looks happy, pretty, sexy in her recline.

  Mia Alden, the bio reads, is the author of Sacramento by Train and Beat. A professor of literature at the University of California, Berkeley, she lives in Northern California with her family.

  He can’t help it, but his body tingles at the thought of her academic job. He’s a snob, and he’s always known it, sometimes unable to understand how anyone can live being a pizza delivery person or a ticket taker or a cashier. He wants to feel that they—just like him—take pride in what they do, wake up knowing that it’s possible they will make a difference in something or for someone. But he doesn’t believe they do. No matter how he thinks about it, he can feel their despair as they mop floors and collect bedpans and take his two dollars as he crosses the Bay Bridge. Like the poor kid behind the counter, who works here at night and dreams of what? Being a rock star? A famous poet? An astronaut? Robert can feel the kid’s impatience and irritation all the way across the bookstore.

  But here is what he knows so far: Mia Alden is a professor and a novelist. She’s also married and has a drug addict child. Her mother has cancer. Her sister is a pathologist. Her breasts are hers, natural, large, pushing up out of her sweater. Somewhere on her body, her skin itches. Her eyes make him taste caramel. And there was something in her words and ferocious blush that makes him feel weak now, in the knees, just like the clichés he read in that long-ago romance novel.

  Robert pulls Mia’s two other novels off the shelf and stacks them in his hands, walking toward the young man at the desk. He’s going to read tonight, even though he has surgery in the morning. He’s going to start with her first novel, the better-titled Sacramento by Train. He’s going to find out about Mia Alden the only way he honestly can.

  Because his parents died in successive years when Robert was in college, he was well off early, long before he’d finished his residency and begun his practice. In fact, unlike Jack and most of Robert’s other colleagues, Robert was able to complete his course work and extra training without worrying about repaying student loans. He had no loans. He was free and clear from the start.

  So when he was hired by Inland, he bought this house in Walnut Creek, an old adobe rancher on the historical registry with a ceramic tile roof. Built in the traditional Mexican style, the house has an expansive courtyard in the middle, filled with ferns and hibiscus, a fountain, and Spanish tile. The adobe bricks are so thick and dense that in the dead heat of summer, his house stays cool—when the winter fog pulses over the hills and fills in the valleys with chill, his house stays warm. He knows that at least four of his former girlfriends didn’t want to break up with him because of the house, staying with him despite silent evenings and separate beds.

  He’d come home from work to see Margaret smoothing her hand over the granite counters in the kitchen or Joy sitting in the overstuffed leather chair, reading in the warm yellow light of his Tiffany lamps. Dara would be in the courtyard, planting a princess flower bush, and Leslie—just last week—would be at his large oak desk, surfing the internet.

  “You’re late,” Leslie said, her hands on the keyboard, eyes on the screen. “Where were you?”

  “I . . . .” he began, but then he didn’t want to explain anything to her, not any more. And really, now he’s not sure she really wanted him to.

  Robert sees that he was no more than a means to comfort and stability, an okay man with a great place to hang out. All of them, even Leslie, might not have noticed if he disappeared.

  And it was possible Robert didn’t take other jobs because of the house. Despite tantalizing calls from heads of departments from (Boston, Macon, Phoenix, Chicago) other hospitals, he said no. But he said no to Jack’s practice, too. He said no to just about everything.

  Now, he sits up in bed, Sacramento by Train open, his cat Phyllis curled at his feet. Every page or two, he flips the book in his hands to look at Mia’s photo and read her bio, as if either might have changed since the time before. Then he goes back to the first chapter, which turns into the second, and then third. Phyllis uncurls, stands, stretches, and jumps off the bed. The night slides on. Robert keeps reading.

  

  In the morning as Robert stands over Dee Swayze inserting the breast extender under her skin (amply saved by Cindy Jacobs), he thinks about what you can find out about someone from reading what the person wrote. Oh, he knows about literary criticism, and how you can’t assume the w
riter and the narrator are the same. But a writer leaves clues.

  “Done here,” he says, handing the nurse the scalpel.

  The nurse, Rachel, rolls her eyes and puts the scalpel down. “I can see.” But then she hands him the suture line, and Robert begins to close the incision.

  Here’s what he knows. Because Marla, one of the main characters in Sacramento by Train, is a lesbian and a good person and almost a hero, Robert knows that Mia is liberal. Open. Most likely she votes Democrat or Independent or Green Party.

  Mia also approves of public transportation. Marla meets the other main characters, Rafael and Susan, on a commuter train to Sacramento, the three of their lives twisting together after they share a table and a cup of coffee. There are paragraphs about the freeway, the clog of carbon in the air, the sadness of our isolated lives behind the wheel.

  He was sure that he caught of whiff of mother-anger, the pain of not being approved of. Susan isn’t beautiful enough for her mother’s taste, often being told to cut, tint, streak, dye her hair or pluck her eyebrows or lose fifteen pounds. Robert can envision Sally Tillier saying all those things, though for a novel, he assumes that a lifetime of criticism has been condensed for the story’s sake. But he’s not sure what will happen next with Susan and her mother—on the last pages he read, Susan finally gets mad, says what she’s been trying to say for years, the mother weeping in her bedroom. He doesn’t know how Mia will tie up these loose ends before the novel ends.

  The next is sex. Marla and Rafael and Susan have a lot of it. Susan even has sex with Marla once, sort of by accident, during a drunken, snowy night in a ski lodge. But Susan isn’t upset or concerned about it. When she goes home, she makes love with Rafael, and considers the differences of the two bodies she’d just licked and kissed and slid next to, the way both are equally interesting, the parts that rise and fall, the tastes, the textures. Rafael and Susan love each other, but it’s a kind of love based on friendship and the past. And their sex is married sex, the kind that has not been tended to. Susan, as far as he can tell, wants to leave her husband not because he can’t bring her to orgasm, but because she can’t explain to him how big the world feels, how she wants to touch everyone, everything. How she can almost imagine her life arcing wide and out, away from everything she has known before. Rafael is having an affair with his secretary, a secret he imagines he’s kept from Susan, but she digs through his dirty laundry, smells his briefs, finds long red hairs on the inside of his button-down shirts.

  In one terrible scene where Susan clutches the hair and the shirt, she begs Rafael to go to counseling and he refuses, slams the bedroom door, drives off to his mistress, though only the reader and not Susan knows this.

  Robert can’t go this far, but he wonders, hopes really, that Susan is Mia. Mia has just all right married sex and wants more.

  “Okay. She’s done.” He takes off his gloves and mask.

  He’s not finished with the novel yet, but he feels Mia’s themes in his head, even if he doesn’t understand them completely. Love cannot be sliced up into tidy pieces or be contained by rules or god or culture. It flows over the lines, drenches everything. Love is more important than anything, and once you have love, everything is better. The worst mistake a person can make is to deny love, to push it away, to let the feelings float into the air like so much carbon dioxide.

  “Amazing work,” a new resident says, and Robert shrugs, rinses his hands, thinking of how all his girlfriends finally left his house, one by one, their backs to him as they walked down the front path toward their cars. He never followed them, not one, not ever. He wouldn’t know how. He doesn’t know how to get what he wants. He’s always stayed inside the lines. For everything. Except once.

  Four

  Mia

  Mia, her sisters Katherine and Dahlia, and Ford sit in the Inland waiting room reserved for friends and families of surgical patients. Sally’s neighbor Nydia Nuñez has come and gone, leaving a basket of chocolate chip cookies. Kenzie has just left as well, promising to call later in the day. Before she stood up, she turned and whispered in Mia’s ear,

  “I’ve found a source for some pot. For, when your mother does chemo. It makes the nausea go away. Just let me know.”

  Mia laughs, thinking how strange it will be to welcome that resiny plant back into her life, when just a short time ago, she spent all her energy trying to keep it away. Where are all those boys that used to come home with Lucien, slightly dazed and clearly—at least in hindsight—high? She could just call one of them, say, “It’s Lucien’s mom. And look, don’t bother lying to me now. I need some smoke.”

  No, Kenzie is right. Someone else should supply them now.

  Her mother will need it, sick as a dog from chemo, probably happy to take anything that will make her feel better. Mia can’t believe it’s come to this, sitting in another hospital waiting room, stuck in a chair until someone comes to give them all news. Mia knows what she wants to hear, that the surgery has been a complete success, the cancer is small, contained, a breeze to handle. “I am certain she won’t need chemo,” Cindy Jacobs says in this fantasy. “It’s a miracle.”

  Mia knows that doctors never say things like this, don’t wander around shouting, “She’s been cured!”

  But Sally has to be okay. Mia knows that. She looks at Katherine and Dahlia and sees from their faces that they feel the same way, too.

  Ford stands up and walks to the water fountain, and Mia watches his tight slim form under his wool work pants, the muscles in his back under his cotton shirt. From the moment she met him, Mia always appreciated Ford’s body, his smooth, tight muscles, his flat stomach. But in the past two years, he’d seemed to work harder at it, going to the gym every morning before work or sometimes, coming home late, smelling like shampoo. Why was he working out more lately? For her? To stave off middle age? To find himself in muscles that he was beginning to forget? A basic fear of death?

  “Had to get in a workout,” he’d say, dropping his duffel bag in the hallway. “Time stops for no man.”

  Katherine catches Mia’s gaze on Ford’s backside, shakes her head, and stands up.

  “I’m going to go check at the desk,” Katherine plops the basket of cookies in Mia’s lap. “I knew I should have scrubbed in.”

  “Could you really have done that?” Dahlia asks. She puts down her Elle magazine and takes a cookie from Mia’s lap.

  Katherine shrugs. “I don’t have privileges. But I’m sure I could have forced the issue. I’ll be right back.”

  Katherine stalks out, and Mia looks at Dahlia. “She can force just about anything she wants.”

  Dahlia laughs and then takes a big bite of cookie, the crumbs falling on her magazine.

  The scent of the cookies wavers up from the basket, a buttery, sugar waft. Mia shoves them off her lap and onto the chair next to Dahlia. Ever since she began her internet search about breast cancer, she’s learned that overweight women have a higher incidence of breast cancer. Of all cancers. Of just about any disease. In the days prior to Sally’s surgery, she’s read about the tests and studies and reports, and knows, clearly, that she’s at risk. For one, her own mother has cancer. And Mia has a good twenty-five pounds too many on her body. And too much fat equals too much estrogen, which heightens the risk. Mia is a cancer bulls-eye. Even now, something could be growing in her, a mad cell replicating out of control, spinning into a tumor fueled by fat.

  Mia’s lost two pounds, but as she looks at Ford’s rear as he bends over the water fountain, she realizes that’s how much her shoes weigh. She forgot to take them off the first time she got on the scale.

  Ford stands and turns around. He’s left work and has to go back to San Francisco to tie up some last minute deal with people from the Pay Rite account. Often, Mia has asked him to explain exactly what he does. As he carefully goes over his job that he’s had for the past ten years, Mia thinks she understands it on a basic level. He and his partner Karen work with companies to manage employe
es’ stock options. But how they deal with the stock options (she knows what stocks are, but the options part is still a question) is what Mia doesn’t understand.

  “So we work with the employees to set up accounts so that they can buy and sell when they need to. Invest, divest,” he said, and as he went on explaining to her the services he and Karen offer, Mia felt her mind wander, nodding when she had to, and smiling when he was done.

  One day, she thinks, she will really listen. She’ll take notes. She’ll totally understand.

  Katherine stomps back in, her black hair a cape behind her. “She’s almost through.”

  “She’s okay?” Ford asks, rolling down his sleeves and buttoning them.

  “Seems so. The news from the operating room is good.”

  Ford looks at Mia, and she can see what he’s saying with his eyes. He wants to go because it’s good news. Mia wants him to stay because she’s not sure it will be. But he’s adjusting his tie, fixing his collar. He’s going to leave, unless she throws herself down on the floor and begs him not to, and she won’t do that here, not in front of Katherine.