The Instant When Everything is Perfect (34 page)

“What do you do in the real world?” Robert asks. He feels the bourbon already, the reaching, electric hand of potential intoxication.

“You and I don’t live in the real world.” She shakes her head, her gold necklace glinting on her chest.

“How do you know that?” he asks. “Why is what I do at home or how I live there not the real world?”

“The real world? With all that we saw today, how can you even imagine that anything in the States is real?” She licks her lips, runs a finger on the slick side of her glass.

“Because of Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.”

“Do expound,” Manuela says, crossing her legs.

Robert breathes in, glad to talk about steps and stages and levels, anything to take himself away from the lightness in his body and the memory of Mia. “All humans are motivated by unsatisfied needs. Basic needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be satisfied. I want to eat and sleep before I’d worry about what I was eating and where I was sleeping. But once I was full and rested, I’d move to a safer place with better food and cleaner water. Then I’d want someone to live with me at the safe place. Next I’d want to feel really good about this place where I was living. Finally, I’d want to understand my choices for living there so I could understand who I was.”

“Interesting.”

“This is real and home is real. I’d want my cleft lip repaired so I can eat before I’d want to buy a new house in a better school district. But it’s all the same thing. The same need.”

The bartender drops a glass, whispers a string of curses that make Manuela smile wide, her teeth luminous in the darkened bar. She reminds Robert of something that has been warmed all day in the sun.

“So,” she says. “When you are home, the nips and tucks and tweaks you do on people’s noses and necks and breasts are the same need as having one’s mouth whole.”

Robert shakes his head. “I don’t perform elective surgeries. Mostly breast reconstructions.”

“Why?”

For an instant, he’s on the bed in the Bakersfield hotel room, Mia watching him. The words come out then, the whole story. Robert bites his lip, turns to Manuela.

“I lost a couple of patients. I only want to work where there’s physical need.”

“So,” she says, ignoring, it seems, what he said about all the death. “Your work doesn’t always fit in with Maslow?”

He wants to ask her if she heard him, but from the bright look in her eyes, he knows she did. “Touché.” Robert raises his glass. “So, back in the States where some things are not as important as here, what do you do?”

“That’s better.” She smiles again, her lips lightly coated with a soft red color and the liquor. “I’m a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Texas at Austin,” she says.

A professor,
Robert thinks.
Like Mia.

He nods. “So this work fills the . . . “

Manuela laughs, pushes her thick hair back with her hand. “The blank. The void. The gap.”

“Married? Kids?” He turns to really look at her. She can’t be more than thirty-five.

“Once. Divorced. No kids. You?” He can see a faint blush on her cheeks, and his heart pounds, feeling Mia’s hot skin under his palm.

“Never for both.”

She raises her eyebrows, smiles. “You plastic surgeons. What is it? Are you all perfectionists?”

“I guess you’ve made a study of us,” he says. “You’re on a mission to save us from our own profession.”

Manuela doesn’t say a word, waiting for the answer to her other question.

Robert takes another sip and pushes away his empty glass. The bartender refills it. “No. Not a perfectionist. An idiot.”

Manuela nods. “What’s your void?”

Now Robert laughs, imagining a game show, contestants full of a special, secret emptiness they slowly reveal during the half-hour contest. The one who catharts the most wins whatever is behind door number two. A washing machine. A stove. A brand new car!

“Mia.”

She sits back. “What?”

“My girlfriend. My—“ There is no word for what Mia is to him because there just isn’t. Lover? Paramour? Friend? Soul mate? All of the above? Or none of the above because he let her go? Because he was a coward who watched her close the door?

“It means mine,” Manuela says. The blush has paled on her cheek, and her face is closed to him now, the easy bar openness folding back into the tough translator stance of earlier in the day.

“What does?”

“
Mia.
Spanish for mine.”

Robert tries to hold back, but the liquor and the jet lag and his exhaustion since the reading in Emeryville slip over him. His eyes start to water, and he rubs his eyebrows.

“Of course it does,” he says finally. He said Mia’s name so often without remembering his seventh grade Spanish, the few small sentences he’d learned from
Señora
Bernal. Or he just never thought in the feminine, his nouns, everything that was his,
mio
.

“So is she?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is she yours?” Manuela asks, her dark eyes on him. Her pulse beats in the sweet brown hollow of her neck.

“Not yet.” And there Mia is, walking away from him. There is his front path, empty, again, just like always.

Manuela leans forward. “If you have a way to fill your gap, you
are
an idiot if you don’t. I’m sure Maslow would agree.”

She finishes her drink, puts a couple of bills on the smooth wood, and stands up. “You should get to sleep. We’ll be doing what we did today for another six days. And then you’ll start to operate. It doesn’t really get any easier.”

Robert nods, hands her the
lempiras
she put on the bar. “My treat.”

She shakes her head but takes the bills, and he can see that if he were the person he’d been before Mia, he would want to be with Manuela, feel her body under him, let her run her hands through his hair. But now, in Tegucigalpa, he knows he has changed. He’s found something, someone, he wants for his own, someone he can love even though he knows that one day he will lose her, in the way that everyone loses everything in life.

He doesn’t care about loss now. He wants her. Someone he can say is mine. He just didn’t know he was saying it before. He’d ignored the word that long.

“Goodnight, Robert,” Manuela says.

“Goodnight,” he says back, and she walks away, but not from him. She’s not angry or upset or disgusted with anything he’s done. In fact, he knows that Manuela was looking for something to fill the void. His body, his attention for two weeks. And even though he’s rejected her, he hasn’t hurt her, hasn’t said anything wrong. He hasn’t ignored her. So this walking away from him seems true, real, just a walk away from him in general.

Robert follows her with his eyes until she disappears into the lobby. He’s going to have to learn a walk—but another kind, the kind that moves toward, near, closer, in. The kind that will lead him to what he needs and wants. To what is his.

Sixteen

Mia

“Did they get to the airport okay?” Dahlia asks on the phone, a slight crackle of static between them. “Did Mom make you take her there about four hours in advance?”

All their lives and long before extra security requirements at airports, Sally has believed in being at the terminal at least three hours in advance. For days and then hours before her flight, she would call the airline, double checking on the time of departure and the gate. Earlier this week when Mia told her she can confirm any flight on the internet, Sally didn’t care, wanting to dial up British Airways herself, over and over again.

“I like to speak to a human,” Sally said. “Humans are better than machines.”

“Maybe in some ways,” Mia said, knowing that at least machines were predictable.

Now Mia smiles at Dahlia’s question and then sneezes, holding the phone away from her mouth as she does.

“Bless you,” Dahlia says. “Your immune system must be damaged from all the excitement of getting them there.”

“Probably. I dropped them both off about three hours before their flight. Mom brought three suitcases, making Dick claim one of hers as his own.”

“What are they like together? Does she ride right over him?”

“Not really. Actually, no. She wanted to get there four hours in advance, but Dick put his foot down.”

“Really?” Dahlia says. “And she let him?”

“Barely. But I checked their flight status online, and they’ve departed. Sally and Dick are somewhere over the Continental United States.”

In the background behind Dahlia, Mia can hear the kids splashing in the pool. During the long blazing Phoenix summer (which coincides with the slow tax season), Dahlia and her children are either in the pool or inside, the heat outside oppressive, flat, white with unrelenting sunshine.

“So how are you?” Dahlia asks softly, as if the question won’t hurt in a quiet tone. “How are the boys? Harper?”

Mia stands up and walks out onto her deck. Spring turned into summer all at once, the green of March, April, and early May morphing all of the sudden into a blond June. In a week, Mia will start teaching a summer school class, “Introduction to Fiction Writing,” which filled the first week it was offered on the schedule.

Mia sighs, thinking about all the incomplete, half-written stories she will be reading. About the hours of time where she will have to push Robert out of her head as she tries to concentrate on words. “I’m okay, Dahls. I start teaching soon. It’ll keep my mind off it. Well, a bit. Lucien is fine, but Harper’s still kind of a mess. He pretends he’s fine, but I know he’s really upset. He even agreed to go see someone to talk about it. When he gets back from backpacking in Europe.”

“When does he leave? And Lucien’s off for somewhere too, right?”

The phone clutched between her jaw and shoulder, Mia leans down to deadhead a bushy lavender plant, crunching the dried flower heads in her palm. “Harper leaves in about three weeks. And Lucien is working for a couple of months and then is going to hitchhike across the country to the Republican convention. He wants to protest there and then head up to Maine to see a friend. Both of them will really be gone.”

As she says the words, Mia realizes that when the boys leave, she will be here alone. For the first time in over twenty years, she will be living by herself.

“Look, come visit me after your class,” Dahlia says. “Bring Kenzie. You two would have a blast. You could drive to Sedona. Have a ‘mystical’ retreat. Talk with aliens or spirits.”

Mia rubs her nose, trying to keep back another sneeze. Her eyes are watering and her throat feels full of needles. “I don’t know. I’ve got a lot to do here. Things to fill in. Replace the furniture that Ford took.”

“That asshole,” Dahlia says.

“Then there are two of us,” Mia reminds her. “I’m an asshole, too.”

“No, you’re not. You haven’t been having an affair for years.” Dahlia sounds to Mia like she did when she was five, belligerent and close to tears at the same time.

“But I may as well have been.” Mia knows this is the truth. She hadn’t been fooling around, but her characters had been, cheating and betraying for years and years, longer even than Ford. Both of them felt their marriage shred and rip, and neither of them could say the words, manage the truth. Both of them hid behind the bodies of others.

“Look, I’ve got to go,” she says before Dahlia can argue with her. “I think I’m going to call Inland. I haven’t been feeling very good, and I don’t want to start teaching sounding like a frog.”

“Okay,” Dahlia says. “But—but take care, okay? And say hi to the boys for me.”

“You, too. Say hi to everyone. Bye,” Mia says, hanging up the phone and staring out into the valley spread before her in grass and oak and pine and finding her breath, which seems to get lost these days, hiding under and between her ribs. Sometimes air itself seems like a gift. So does food, or at least her enjoyment of it. And sleep, too. It is as if divorce or betrayal or loss—and she isn’t exactly sure what she is mourning: Ford or Robert or both—came with its own specific symptoms. Nothing any doctor at Inland could give her could cure them. Not even Robert at this point.

But this cold! Inside the house, Mia grabs tissues out of the box on the kitchen table, blows and wipes her nose, and begins to rummage through the spice cabinet, looking for the cold medicine she bought last year when Harper was sick. But it seems to be gone. Maybe it was something else Ford wanted.

Mia shakes her head and closes the cabinet door. What Ford wanted. What hadn’t he wanted? Not unexpectedly, he’d grown attached to all the things Mia had—plates and cups and pillows and paintings and silverware. Furniture and beds and books. Just as she had predicted, they’d sniped at and argued with each other, both of them holding back words when Harper walked in the room they were hunkered down in, grabbing silver or picture frames or vases from each another.