The Instant When Everything is Perfect (20 page)

“We haven’t done anything, Mia. We’re having lunch.”

“You’re smarter than that, Robert. We’ve done more than that.” Mia sips her wine, her pale face now flushed.

“I know. But not technically. It depends on how you define adultery.” He picks up his glass and holds it up, looking at Mia through the pale yellow of the Rambauer Chardonnay. “Is it words or thoughts or deeds?”

“You sound like Clinton.”

“I’m starting to understand him now.”

“You didn’t before? You’re not a Republican, are you?”

Robert laughs and puts down his wine glass. “Never. East Coast Jew. Democrat to the core.”

They look at each other. Mia’s eyes are dark in the restaurant’s hushed light. He tries not to, but he lets his eyes slide along her neck. For a second, he wonders if she’s thinking about his body. He sighs.

“What else?”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Mia brings a hand to her cheek and breathes in, her breasts rising as she does. “Okay. Why me? Does this happen a lot? Do you find yourself attracted to many patients or daughters or sisters or mothers of patients?”

For a second, Robert is angry and wishes he’d never asked her to say what she needed to. What does she think he is? A Casanova? A total grease ball, smarmy doctor, waiting in his office for someone with the perfect body? But as his anger and his thoughts die down, he knows he wants to ask her the same thing, only backwards.

He sips his wine, licks his lips. Sits back again. “No, this hasn’t happened before. I’ve never dated a patient or a family member of a patient. You were . . . .” He tries to find the words, but there aren’t words because what Mia was that day when he walked into the room was a feeling. “I felt—this sounds so sophomoric—like we were talking with our skins. I had a reaction to you.”

“Like the hives?” Mia laughs at her own words. “Nausea? Gastro-intestinal upset? Eczema?”

Robert almost asks her about her own skin, wondering where it bothers her, where she has an itch. But he knows that she wouldn’t appreciate his spying on her records. Not now, maybe not ever.

“It affected my brain,” he says. “I could barely concentrate on your mother.”

The restaurant is filling and emptying in waves, the maitre’d passing by their table as he leads people to their tables. A wave of smells--cooked onions, garlic, and olive oil--flows into the dining area. Robert looks up and sees that Mia is watching him.

“Well, that’s what happened to me, too,” she says. “But I blushed. I think I blushed everywhere, all over. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t even look at you for a while because I was scared that you’d notice and think I was ridiculous.”

“I noticed that you weren’t looking at me. I thought I was boring you.”

“It’s kind of hard to be bored when your mother has cancer.” She looks down at her bread plate.

“You seemed to handle her illness all right,” he says.

“Clearly. And now here I am at a restaurant with you,” she says, looking at him, smiling. “Maybe that’s an indication. I’m flipped out by death and now I’m embarking on a wild adventure.” Mia stops talking for a moment, tilts her head and looks at him. “But no. I wasn’t bored. I was trying to act the way I should have been acting. Concerned for my mother. Normal.”

“I know I wasn’t thinking straight.” Robert takes a piece of bread from the basket and then drops it on his bread plate. He knows he can’t eat but he wants to be doing something.

“Once I could look at you, I thought you were handsome,” Mia says. She doesn’t turn from him when he catches her gaze. “I liked your ponytail. Your cowboy boots. I thought you were sexy. I wondered what it would be like to be next to your body. And then I thought how stupid I was for thinking that way, when I’m, well, me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Please,” she begins, but then the waiter comes over with their meals, placing the plates carefully in front of them. Robert and Mia turn down the offer of freshly ground pepper, and then look at each other again.

“What do you mean?” he asks again.

“I’m not exactly perfect,” she says, shrugging. “You make people perfect. That’s your job. All those breasts and butts you see every day. Unlined faces.”

Robert bites down on his back teeth, his jaw hard. This is what he always hears. He thought better of Mia. Thought she knew more. He picks up his fork and knife, slices a piece of his chicken.

“That’s not my job.”

“What?”

“It’s not my job to make people perfect. Sometimes I’m just trying to help them feel okay.”

And when he says this, Mia gets it. He can tell by the way her face stills, her eyes focus. Jack always told him there were two kinds of people on the planet. “It’s like this, Robert. There’s those who get it and those who don’t. For everything.”

Mia is one who gets it, quickly, just like that.

She takes a bite of her chicken and then puts down her fork. “I’m sorry. What you were going to do for my mom. That was to make her feel normal. The rest, well, that’s just my inherent low self-esteem talking. Comes from being raised amongst thin women.”

“I think,” Robert says, hoping he can manage these words without sounding like an ass. “I think you are beautiful.”

Mia laughs, the sound deep and throaty and real. She shakes her head. “I will go as far as attractive. But I’ll balk at pretty. I can’t even go to beautiful.”

“But it doesn’t matter what you think about yourself. I’m looking at you,” Robert says. “I’m the one seeing you.”

“Fine,” she says, pushing a green bean with her fork. “What else? What other big stuff is there?”

At first, Robert thinks his pager is buzzing against his waist, but then he realizes the vibrations in his body are nerves. He pushes his hair back, looking at Mia. “Your marriage?”

She looks up and then back at her plate, the green beans arranged in a geometrical design. The busboy refills Robert’s glass and walks away. Mia breathes in through her nose, her whole chest lifting at the inhale. She seems to swallow the air before she speaks.

“I’ve known Ford for twenty-two years. We married early. Had kids. Made money as we were going along.” She stops. “But that’s not the story, is it?”

Robert pushes a bread crumb with his thumb. “I don’t know what the story is. It sounds like Susan and Rafael’s a little, though.”

“It is,” she says. “You know what they say, ‘Write what you know.’”

“So?”

“So the truth is—I mean, that’s what we’re doing here, right?” When she looks at him, he knows that she wants him to tell her to lie, to make up another story, one that won’t hurt to say. But he can’t.

“Yes. The truth.”

“The truth is we’ve grown apart. Or we were never really connected in a way I wanted to be connected.”

“What way is that, exactly?” he asks.

“I don’t really know. Maybe I’m just making it all up, what I want.” She shrugs, her eyes watering. She looks away from him, flicks at her eyes with her hand. He wants to reach out and touch under her eyes with his fingertips, wipe away her sadness. But he just waits.

“I’m sorry,” she says after a moment. “I just don’t talk about this except with my friend Kenzie. I must need a great deal of therapy.”

“We all need therapy,” he says. “And don’t be sorry. I’m sorry. Go on. Tell me.”

She nods. “Well, we had the kids so early, though, that there wasn’t time to worry about what I wanted, to realize that we didn’t have anything keeping us together but the past. The past and the kids.”

Mia scratches her hand absently, little red lines blooming on her skin.

“And I’ve never been attracted to him. In that way you’re supposed to be. Or in the way I wanted to be attracted to him. Something that pushes from the inside out. And it’s not just about sex, though of course that’s part of it. It’s about a feeling of wanting that is deeper than that.” She flushes and sits back. Robert leans closer and then stops. He pushes his plate away from him.

“You weren’t even attracted to him when you first met?”

“No.”

“Why did you marry him then?”

“Good reasons. Safety. Trust. Hope. And a basic, real love.”

Robert nods, knowing that that’s why he stayed with some of his girlfriends after the fires burned out. Sometimes comfort is more important than passion. He can see Mia staying for that alone. The children would have made it even harder for her to leave.

“Have you,” he begins, not wanting to ask this question at all. “Have you worked on it? Counseling?”

“Ford—it’s not his way. We went to counseling years ago, but when it got to the part, well, the sex and how I feel. He didn’t want to go any more. Sad we could work on it ourselves. But, the thing is, if that core attraction isn’t there, I don’t know if it can be worked on.”

Robert feels the question coming out of him before he can stop it. “Are you attracted to me that way?”

Mia has teared up again, a smudge of mascara at the corner of her right eye. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

They walk out of the restaurant together, Robert holding open the door, Mia passing by him, the smell of her in his nose. He needs to be back at the hospital at 3, and it’s 2.42 and thirty seconds. He can take five minutes to walk her to her car, jump into his, and get back before his next patient. Five minutes. Five more Mia minutes.

“I’m sorry about that back there,” Mia says. “I didn’t mean to cry.”

Slowly, Robert puts his hand on the small of her back, and he feels her flesh start, surge, heat under his palm. She doesn’t pull away.

“That’s okay. It’s not a topic I bet you want to talk about all the time.”

She shakes her head. “Only with Kenzie.”

“You can trust her?”

Mia pauses and then nods. “Yes.”

“What about your sister Katherine?” he says, smiling. “I bet she’d understand. She seemed like the kind of woman who appreciates the subtleties of marriage.”

Mia turns to him, the sun striking her eyes so that they look liquid. “Oh, she’d love to hear me tell it. She’d tell me I should be with a woman.”

“She’s a lesbian?”

“Only half of the time,” Mia says. “Bisexual. She says that it gives her better odds for finding a Friday night date.”

“She’s probably right,” Robert says.

They turn the corner and then stop in front of a Volvo station wagon. Seeing it, Robert remembers Mia’s two children, her life as a mother, as a wife. He can still feel her boy’s gaze on him as he stood outside Sally Tillier’s hospital room door.

Robert’s throat tightens, and he takes his hand from her back. “When can I see you again?”

“When
can
you see me again?” she says. “I’m the one on sabbatical.”

“Thursday?” he asks. “Same time?”

Mia pulls her keys out of her purse. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

He knows where he wants to take her, but he’s not sure that she’s ready. But before he can say anything, she nods and says, “Your house. After what you told me, I want to see it.”

He closes his eyes, swallows, and nods back. He forces himself to open his eyes and look at her. “My house.” Then without knowing how to stop himself, he leans over and kisses her. She smells like Altoids—but then he doesn’t know if he’s smelling his own breath because she gave him a mint, too. But when she opens her lips to him, he tastes not only the peppermint but sliced oranges drizzled with balsamic vinegar, a background of dark coffee. Her lips make him want to sink against her; her tongue makes him want to pull something out of her that he can take home with him. Her voice; her thoughts; her laugh. For a moment, her breasts are pressed against him and her hand smoothes up behind his neck, her fingers touching his ponytail. But then she pulls her chest from his, her mouth from his. Slowly, her tongue leaves his, her lips leaves his, her breath leaves his.

Her eyes are still closed, and he can see how fast her chest goes up and down. As fast as his.

“Email me,” she says finally, opening her eyes. “Tell me how to get to your house.”

Robert nods. “I will.”

Mia clicks her door open and then turns to him. “We did it again.”

“What?” he asks, putting his hands in his pockets, hoping she can’t see his erection.

“We didn’t talk about you. We didn’t talk about—“

“I know,” Robert says. “We will.”

Mia stares at him and then bites her lip. “Okay, Robert Groszmann, M.D. I’ll see you Thursday.”

He forces himself to stay put. He needs to be back in the hospital in 12 minutes. If he moves forward, he will kiss her again, despite all his patients who might be roaming the streets, despite all her students or fans spying out of the linen shop behind them. Despite the patient who is probably already sitting in his exam room, freezing in her gown.