The Instant When Everything is Perfect Read online

  He sits down, rubs his face, stares at the screen. He has nine messages, most of which, he knows, are spam. Robert clicks on his email and scans for what he wants. For a second, his lungs seem to flatten, pressing the air he needs from his body, his heart beating fast to try to bring him oxygen. But wait. There she is. MAlden. He stares at her email address, noting that she wrote this email at two in the morning. His finger hovers over the touch pad, wanting and not wanting to read the email, knowing he should savor the seconds of her that he has. This message may be the last, telling him that she has changed her mind. Or this email might be the first, the beginning of a relationship. He often forgets to pay attention to beginnings, focusing on the ends, the outcomes, which with relationships have usually been bad. But what is he thinking? A relationship! Robert closes his eyes. When he opens them, he clicks on her message and her words open to him.

  Hi, Robert. I managed to plug my computer into the hospital room phone. I’m hiding it from the nurses though because I know it must be breaking some kind of rule. My mom’s sleeping, and the sleeper chair they brought in for me doesn’t look too inviting. My sisters went back to the condo, so I thought I’d check my email, and here you are.

  About the book. Well, I don’t like stories that end up all pretty and tidy. It doesn’t seem real to me. Nothing in my life has ever just folded itself into a neat package. So with Susan and Rafael—well, they are going to have to figure it out for themselves. I think they both learned a lot. Figured out what they need, and maybe it isn’t each other. But that’s not my story. I just wanted them to know.

  Have you ever been married? Are you married?

  I didn’t ask you a thing about yourself today in the cafeteria. I felt selfish when I realized that. You have my books and asked me all the questions, and I have no information about you at all. Except that you’re a plastic surgeon. You graduated from UCSF. I saw that on the office wall, and you have all the right credentials, it looks like. But tell me something, Robert. Tell me a story.

  Mia

  He reads the email again and then again and then again, starving for her, greedy, as if he’s eating an orange, pulling the last sweet juice from the sour rind. Mia’s a river, awash with words and voice, the beginning of her message pulling him to the end. He felt that when he began to read her book, and then now, with her real self turned into real words for him alone, he knows that she moves. She rocks him with her questions.

  Leaning back, he wonders if this short-breathed, adrenaline high is always there for him in the beginning. Is this what he’s always felt? Was he this excited when he met Leslie? He closes his eyes, brings Leslie forth, her short summer skirt even in autumn, her soft laugh, the way she tucked her brown hair behind her ear when she spoke. Yes, he thinks. Yes. He’s felt this excitement before.

  Robert sits up, stares again at her message. He doesn’t need this. He should delete her message and log off. He’ll promise himself to never write to her again. How can he do this with a woman who is married when it’s no different than with Leslie. That’s it. He has to call it all off. When he sees her after her mother’s surgery, he will be sincere and distant, concerned but stiff. He’ll walk away from her just like Margaret, Joy, Dara, and Leslie have walked away from him.

  The potential mess he has started with Mia Alden can be avoided. Now. She’s so busy with her mother, her writing, her family, she might not even notice if he doesn’t write back.

  Robert pushes his hair away from his face and then looks at his watch. Five fifteen. In a few minutes, he needs to put on his sweats so he can get a run in before the surgery. He needs to stop at Starbucks for a latte. He has to go over his patient’s chart and confer with Kathy Fuji about anesthesia. But there’s time to delete or time to write back.

  He stares at his hands. He wanted to touch Mia. He knows that. And he wants to know her. He can’t promise himself more than that. He couldn’t promise Mia more if she asked. But this want is real. It may not be more than that, but something in his body tells him that it is. That maybe this time, it’s different.

  The pulse and glow of the computer screen fills the room with grayish light. He blinks, looks at her message and then breathes in deeply.

  Dear Mia,

  I have no story.

  He erases the first sentence because he knows that every life has a story or at least a narrative. A beginning, middle, and, at least for him, a not-yet end.

  I’m not married. I have never been married. I’ve lived with women, though. And I have no children. Do you know that commercial where the man gets such a great rate on a mortgage that he’s inspired to always tell the truth? So he ends up on a date and says, “I live with my mother and have never had a relationship longer than three months.” I’m not that bad off, but I’m telling you what is true. My relationships have lasted a year or two. And sadly, my mother is dead.

  Robert stops and reads what he’s written and begins to laugh. Phyllis, who has followed him into the office, stares at him with her copper eyes and then yawns her cat yawn. What woman in the world could read this email and still want to know him? But he feels like the man in the commercial. He wants to tell the truth. He’s caught in Mia’s current.

  Here’s one story. When I was a resident at UCSF, I actually forgot to go home and sleep. I was on call for 36 hours, and when it was over, I went back into another day of work without realizing that my shift was over. It wasn’t until 12 hours later that the head resident looked at the board and thought to tell me to go home. But the weird part was that I had a memory of driving home, eating some food, and sleeping. I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes somewhere along the line and dreamed it all.

  The good news is that I didn’t kill anyone that day.

  I have to go to work. I’m glad that your mother is recovering well. Maybe I’ll have time to come check in on her—-you—-today.

  Robert

  

  The morning and then afternoon pass in a blur. He performs his first surgery, and then his next, everything so clear in the moment. His life, as it often is, is reduced to his hands, the way they move under someone’s skin, the angle of his scalpel, the tension in his suture line. All his world seems to be in the moment of his vision and only that vision. He used to go days like that in school and his residency. That’s why he could work for two shifts and not realize that he’d forgotten to go home.

  His mother used to say, “You’re driving at night with tiny headlights,” when he’d trip over a large piece of furniture or forget to take a shower or stay up all night studying for a trigonometry exam.

  Maybe it’s why he’s never thought too much about his relationships ending so soon because for the time they lasted, the relationship he was in was all he saw, time compounded by focus.

  “Peripheral vision!” Jack says, when Robert doesn’t notice a good looking woman or get excited about a job opportunity at another hospital. “Look around, man!”

  But usually Robert has been so monofocused on whatever is before him, by the time he turns to look around, the woman and the job are gone.

  One day as he was driving home, he passed a man and a woman, the man pushing a stroller. The man was about thirty, maybe thirty-two, East Indian, his wife Asian, a little younger. Robert couldn’t see the baby, but he saw how the father looked down into the stroller, smiling, his teeth white against his dark skin.

  Something deep inside that man made him find a wife, and something in both the man and woman needed that baby, made them make it. It’s what people did, driven by an ancient clock that biology set for them, ideas of romance and true love getting mucked up in there in the need to procreate. As he watched them in the crosswalk, laughing, talking gibberish to the baby, Robert wonders what has been broken inside him. He’s never had those same urges. The nesting. The reproducing. He was missing not only peripheral vision but something very basic, very human.

  

  It’s not until after a staff meeting with his colleagues and tw
o patient appointments that Robert remembers Mia. He’s remembered her in tiny bits throughout the day, of course. Little bits of dialogue from Sacramento by Train have riffed through his mind. Like when Susan cries out, “What do you want?” to Rafael.

  And he answers, “Does anyone ever know how to answer that question?”

  Robert agrees with Rafael because he’s never known the answer himself, at least in the big, existential way. He’s wanted food and love and sex and a home and a job, but the bigger want? The ultimate want? Peace? Health? Satisfaction? Joy? He doesn’t know. He hasn’t bothered to find out.

  It’s not until four in the afternoon—after the meeting and the appointments—that Robert has time to go up to Sally Tillier’s room. He doesn’t want to run into Cindy Jacobs, knowing she’ll wonder why he’s checking up on Sally when she’s really Cindy’s patient. Not his. Not yet.

  So he’s glad when he sees Cindy walking down a hall and going through the door to the surgery clinic. He buttons his white coat and heads down the long connecting hall to the hospital building and then takes the elevator to the third floor.

  Pushing his hair back, he walks down the middle of the hallway, nodding at a resident, a nurse, a respitory therapist. Then he slows, angles toward Sally’s door but then stops before walking into the room. There is a man sitting on the edge of Sally’s bed, holding her hand. In the second that Robert hovers at the door, he hears the man’s low, deep voice, can feel the reassurance in his words. The man is muscled and darkly handsome, his hair black, thick, and full. He must be Mia’s husband, Ford. In a fictional universe, he’s Rafael.

  Robert moves closer.

  “You look wonderful,” Ford says to Sally, his voice low and deep.

  Sally murmurs something back, her voice sounding a little girlish, a bit flirty.

  “Now don’t you start. I’m sure your girls will spoil you. You’ll be the queen of the manor for weeks.” Ford laughs.

  Robert moves closer, his hand on the door, and looks into the room.

  A similarly dark, handsome boy—a teenager—sits at the back of the room in a chair, slumped over a comic book. For a quick second, he looks up and sees Robert, blinking as Robert watches the scene on the bed.

  Mia has done what he has been unable to do—create a family. Here is the product, a flesh and blood boy, a boy who looks exactly like his father.

  Robert can suddenly feel all his bones, the slightness of his own body, the worthlessness of everything he’s ever done. Backing away from the room and the boy’s gaze, he almost falls over a clerk wheeling a stack of charts down the hall. Apologizing, he turns away from Sally, Mia’s husband, and Mia’s son, and walks back to the elevators, pushing his hair away from his face, trying to find his breath in the thinness of his lungs.

  Back in his office, he dictates a chart entry, his face full of heat and blood. He erases what he’s said and tries again, knowing he must get everything right. Slowly, he details the outcome of the TRAM flap procedure he performed on Valerie O’Connor. At her final follow-up appointment, there was no evidence of abdominal weakness or hernia. Her lab tests show no recurrence of the cancer, her sonogram clear. He recommends that she continue the exercises shown to her by the physical therapist and come in for all scheduled follow-up exams.

  Robert clicks off the recorder and then turns to his computer, clicking on to his email server. He’s going to write to Mia now and tell her he’s sorry. He can’t do this. Won’t. Jack would be amazed because for the first time in a long month of Sundays, he’s suddenly had peripheral vision. He can finally see what was to the left and right as well as in front and back. He saw what he didn’t want to—Mia’s husband. Mia’s husband and Sally’s reaction to him. A kind man, a good man.

  The email program makes the sound that alerts him to mail, and there she is again, MAlden.

  Dear Robert,

  Have you ever killed anyone?

  Mia

  Robert stares at her words and then bends down over his keyboard, wanting to hug his desk, press his heart back into his body.

  She’s asked the right question, the one he’s always wanted an answer to.

  

  He’s had one last, late appointment, consulted with an ER doc over a long, jagged wound on a little girl’s cheek, and finished his charts. Mia Alden’s email is still on his screen, and since he’s been in his office, more email has arrived that he doesn’t dare look at. Maybe they are all from Mia; Mia with more questions. Have you ever been in love? Can you be in love? What is your main, true problem? If you could list your top ten faults, what would they be?

  Robert stares at the screen, his desk clock clicking quietly, the noise in the hall only an echo. It’s seven-thirty, and his medical assistant Carla and most of the doctors have gone home.

  Robert pushes his hair back and stares at her eight words on the screen and then closes the email. He looks at the list of other email—some from colleagues, a few spam messages that have slipped through the firewall, and then MAlden again.

  Dear Robert,

  I’m sorry I asked that question. That was really inappropriate. I know that people die in hospitals all the time. No one can make all the right decisions at just the right moment. I can think of all my teaching blunders where I’m sure I forced someone on the wrong path or said an incredibly wrong thing that destroyed the student’s confidence or joy or hope. Doctors work with lives, and there’s no metaphor there. It’s literal, and of course people make mistakes. And then, of course, people die because they die.

  So I just wanted to say that. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I wrote that after having had only two hours of sleep last night. Please forgive me.

  Mia

  Robert rubs his forehead but keeps his eyes on her words. The fluorescent lights hum above him. Outside, the crowded Walnut Creek street roars past his window, the beep of the crosswalk, the pulse of engines and wail of sirens headed toward the ER.

  But it’s so quiet inside his body, he can feel his pulse, his blood, his hip bones slick in their sockets. He doesn’t blink for a long time, and then he does, forcing his eyes away from the screen. Then Robert turns off the program, the computer, and leaves his office, flicking off the overhead light as he goes.

  Robert has always loved a hospital at night. The tension and drama are usually reserved for the ICU and the ER; orderlies and senior volunteers aren’t wheeling patients to and from radiology or x-ray; visitors who aren’t staying over have gone home; lab techs don’t whisk open curtains and knock on doors, their vials and syringes and tubes clattering in their baskets. The nurses seem more subdued, quieted by the darkness outside, safe under the lights, calmed by the lack of doctors wanting things. Doctors are reading charts, tiding up, ready to hand over information to attendings, who will drink dark, bitter coffee and wait until morning.

  He slips down the hall and then looks into Sally’s room again, relieved when he sees that Mia’s husband is gone. In fact, no one is in the room but Sally.

  The television is on, and Sally is awake, blinking at the screen. Robert knocks on the door and then steps in.

  “Hi, Mrs. Tillier,” he says in his doctor voice, the one that is smooth and calm and slightly detached.

  She licks her lips and looks at him as she tries to find her words, the morphine in her blood slowing her reactions.

  “Dr. Groszmann,” she says. “Hello.”

  “I thought I’d come by to check on you. See how you’re feeling.”

  Sally shakes her head. “Thank god I didn’t have immediate reconstruction. This is bad enough.”

  Robert walks slowly to a chair, touches the back with his hand and then pulls it toward him, sitting down. “You’re going home tomorrow?”

  She nods. “I should have gone home today. But I ran a little fever. It’s gone now. Like everything.”

  Breasts aren’t everything, he wants to say to her. He always wants to say this, but he never does. Long ago, he realized he’ll never understand how wome
n feel about their breasts. Not in the way society expects them to have them, firm and ripe and on display. His breasts never determined a thing about him. But Sally? She may have known who she was by just looking down at them each day, her nipples pointing her forward, always, since puberty. First, they meant she was a woman; then a lover; then a mother.

  “Dr. Jacobs was confident she removed it all,” he says instead. “And she was able to save a nice amount of skin for your reconstruction.”

  “She’s a good girl,” Sally says, her eyes closing briefly.

  There is a noise at the door, and Robert turns to see three women standing there, one of them Mia. He stands up, forces his blush down, and smiles. Mia moves past the other two women, and for a second, he imagines she will hug him. But she doesn’t.