The Instant When Everything is Perfect (33 page)

“You’re married, Mia. You have a life that I can’t really be in, except on schedule.”

For a second, Robert imagines that the room has been sucked dry of air and sound. Mia opens her mouth, but says nothing, her mouth a small O. Finally she says, “Is that it? Me being married? It didn’t stop you in the beginning. Is that the only reason you stopped writing? Calling?”

Robert looks at the tile floor. “I don’t think that it’s right.”

“Right? Like moral? Or good between us?”

He can’t say anything because whatever he says would be a lie. And he can’t tell her the truth. He doesn’t know how.

“Robert, isn’t this about you? About you not being able to—to love me? Don’t hide behind my marriage. Just tell me the truth.”

He should just say yes to it all. It would be easiest, wouldn’t it? How can he articulate to her the feeling of being on the outside, removed, not understanding, not knowing how to really move into someone else? She knows it’s really not about her or her marriage or Ford. She can see through him because he’s shown her how during their afternoons together. He gave her a map in Bakersfield. He rubs his forehead quickly, hiding his eyes from her gaze.

“I don’t know.”

Mia picks up Phyllis and puts her on the couch and then stands up. She walks back to the window and looks outside, brings her hand to the wood on the French door.
A portrait
, Robert thinks.
Mia thinking.

“You’re scared,” she says so lightly that he almost misses it. He wonders who she’s talking to, him or her.

But she doesn’t know the half of it. She doesn’t know anything. Yet she does. That’s the problem. She knows it all.

“I’m going to Honduras,” he blurts out before she can say anything else.

She turns to him, surprised. “Honduras? For how long?”

He wishes he could say six months, a year, something that would make it easier for them to never see each other again, something that would keep her from seeing him as he really was.

“Two weeks.”

She sighs, shakes her head, turns back to the courtyard, and mumbles something.

“What?”

Mia walks back to the couch and stands by it, her hand touching the armrest, the pillows, her fingernails scratching the soft fabric. In the afternoon light that fills the room, her hair seems golden, her eyes almost yellow. He can’t help himself and lets his gaze move down her neck to her breasts, waist, thighs. He closes his eyes. For a second he’s with her in his bedroom, the sunlight on the bed, her arms around him.

“I think you’re wrong. For a lot of reasons, Robert,” she says. “And things have changed for me. In my life. You don’t even know what’s been going on.”

Looking up at him, she wants him to ask her what things she’s talking about. For a quick second, he imagines that she’s going to tell him that she’s left Ford. That she has all her possessions in the back of her car. That’s she moving in with him now.

Robert wants to know what she means, but then he sees Ford in the back of the bookstore, smiling, mouthing incomprehensible words to Mia that she understands. What can change the fact of the
knowingness
in that marriage even if it is over? How can he, Robert, ever be as close to someone as that?

What would Ford say to Robert now?

Mia sees his confusion, and she shakes her head again, turning to look out the window into the light. She begins to cry, and she doesn’t hide it, letting her sadness show on her lips and in her eyes, letting her tears fall.

Stand up,
he thinks.
Go to her, hold her tight.

But he doesn’t move.

“I know I can’t expect—I want to . . . never mind,” Mia says when she finds her breath. She looks up at him, holds his gaze for a moment as she says, “I thought you were someone else.”

“I wish I were,” he says, and he means it.

“Have a good time in Honduras,” she says, and then she’s walking away, out of the living room, down the hall. The front door opens—a wide swath of light fluming into the house—and then it closes.

Because he can do nothing else, Robert sits in his living room, numb and still. The sun moves a little, settles behind a tree, the living room shaded and full of shadows.

When he was finishing second grade, his teacher wrote on his report card, “Robert needs to engage more with the class. Learn to share what he knows.”

His teachers and attending doctors in medical school said the same thing. “God damn it, Rob,” Jack said. “If you’d just talk, you’d have it all. Show them what you can do. Show them what you know.”

What does he know? He’s failed on so many fronts, let so many people he’s liked and loved leave, as if too much connection could kill.

But he wants to share something with Mia. He’s told her more than he’s ever told any woman, never discussing the story of Joyce with anyone except for Jack. He’s moved into her body—her body took him in. He’s looked into her eyes and seen some part of himself come back—reflected, refracted—through her gaze. And he liked what he saw. He didn’t cringe or run away or pull back. Until that day in Emeryville, all he wanted was more.

When the door bell rings again—the sound jarring in Robert’s head, his heart pounding—he jumps up, adrenaline pumping into his legs and he runs down the hall. She’s so brave, his Mia. She’s the one who can come back, start over, give him a second chance. He’s going to tell her he finally understands. He knows what it means to love. She’s taught him. She’ll walk in the house, and he’ll hold her, press her against him. This will be it, the instant when everything is perfect.

Robert pulls open the door, wanting to say it all to her. But it’s not Mia. It’s Monique, the teenaged cat sitter from down the street, smiling, her pants low cut, a turquoise jewel glinting in her belly button.

“Sorry I’m like late,” she says, and moves into the house.

Robert lets her in, blinks into the brightness of the empty street. And then he shakes his head, looks back at Monique, who is already in the living room, and closes the door behind them.



If Robert thought he was going to have time to sightsee outside of Tegucigalpa, he was mistaken. After landing at Tegucigalpa Toncontin Airport at seven in the morning, he went immediately to San Felipe Hospital, where he met the staff—doctors, nurses, dentists, med students, college and even high school students—in an overwhelming, long, intense two hour meeting that detailed the entire two week process. Then they were broken up into teams—students and nurses and translators to screen the patients; doctors and dentists paired with nurses and translators to examine the patients to determine the types of procedures necessary.

After each screening, the patients went to classes the students had prepared—lectures on proper dental hygiene and the importance of fresh vegetables and fruits in a country where eating—for many—was a daily miracle.

And now, dressed in one of the lab coats he brought with him, Robert stands by an exam table with a nurse and a translator. The line to reach him and the other doctors is enormous, whole families slumped together against the hospital corridor walls, seeming to have walked for miles to get here, carrying almost all their household goods.

“They
have
walked that far,” the translator Manuela said when Robert made a comment earlier. “Sometimes, the families, they walk for sixty miles to bring their children here. One man tried for three years to get here on time, traveling by foot and by cart with his three year old boy, and each year he made it too late. Someone heard about it, and flew him to the States. But most . . . ” She moved her arm to indicate the line. “They leave early and they stay until it’s finished.”

Ramon wiggles on the table, his mouth and palate open, yawning, glistening red. His mother watches Robert with serious, steady black eyes, flicking her gaze away only briefly when Manuela translates.

“Next week,” Manuela says in Spanish. “Surgery to the lip, here. And inside the mouth, here. Maybe more than one procedure, Señora. Maybe you will have to come back next year for more.”

The woman nods, doesn’t smile, even though Ramon tries to. In all his time as a plastic surgeon, Robert has never seen a cleft lip and palate this horrible, and as he looks quickly down the hall he sees one after the other, open mouths leading wide into the body.

“Surgery,” he agrees, writing down Ramon’s age and weight and his mother’s name: Elena Maria Garcia de Torrez.

Manuela tells Señora Torrez where to sign the forms and how to schedule the appointment, and then there is another patient and another. Dasha, the nurse, takes vitals and then Robert exams them all. Most are like Ramon, cleft lip, cleft palate, or both. But one woman’s mouth is twisted and melted from a cooking fire; a little girl with a nasofrontal enceophalocele—a bony defect that allows brain material to push out from the skull—has to be referred to the surgery team back in the states; two little identical twin girls hide identical facial hemangiomas—benign facial tumors—behind their small brown hands.

Mostly, the stream of children has cleft lips and palates, operations that in the states are done when the child is ten weeks old. During his internship and residency, Robert performed a number of these procedures on infants, their clefts smooth, seemingly small. How different those American babies looked in comparison to these children, who grew from infancy to childhood with these holes in their faces. These clefts are developed and deep, Robert imagining he can look forever into the welling darkness.

At first he grits his back teeth, trying not to see how the defect has twisted the face, turned the smile into a sneer, the mouth into a sieve. But then, as he studies his patients, he focuses on how the cleft in the lip flows into a nostril, the skin red and full and slightly glistening. Almost ripe, welling thickly around exposed, white front teeth. With gloved fingers, he presses gently on the full flesh, and imagines the lips like flowers, the folds of lip like puffy petals.

Even with the congenital defects, these patients smile, their eyes hopeful, their need so great, so desperate. Just like his.

Despite the six teams that are evaluating patients, the line in the hall stays long. And even though he stops for lunch and takes a short break late in the afternoon, Robert is exhausted by six, his feet sore, his back stiff. Manuela looks at him, her eyebrows raised, when he asks at what time they stop for the day.

“When you can’t go on any more,” she says flatly.

And so they work together with Dasha until eight, when Robert’s eyes start to blur and all the patients seem to have the exact same problem, without variation.

Manuela clicks her tongue and straightens the pages on her clipboard. “Tomorrow, then,” she says, walking toward the people who still slump against the wall.

Back at the hotel, Robert unpacks, orders up some room service, and then showers. Under the water, his body feels weightless, his consciousness seeming to float above him in the tiled shower stall. Afterward, he isn’t sleepy, but wired, anxious, nervous, and he keeps having to flick away at memory. Mia under him, Mia loosening his ponytail, Mia laughing with him. Mia all the time.

So he puts his key and wallet in his pocket and leaves the room, heading downstairs to the bar that is filled with mostly international people, businessmen, foreign officials, and probably hidden CIA folk amongst the tables. He nods and waves to a few of the doctors he met at the early morning meeting, and then sits at the bar and tries to think of a drink that doesn’t require added water. Finally, he looks at the bartender and says, “
Bourbon solamente, por favor. No quiero hielo
.”

The bartender nods, pours Robert’s drink, doesn’t add ice, and then Robert stares at the brown liquid, wondering if it will help.

“Did you know drinking is the worst thing of all for travel fatigue?” Manuela says, taking a seat next to him.

Robert puts down his glass and looks at her. She has become another woman, her long brown hair loose on her shoulders, her face relaxed. She wears a pair of pants and a soft blouse, and now, without her white lab coat on, he can see the smooth column of her neck.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” he says, taking another sip, letting the sting of alcohol fill his mouth. “I thought I would fall into bed, but I’m so wired.”

“It’s exciting work, in a strange way,” she says, nodding as the bartender hands her a drink.

“You don’t even have to order,” Robert says. “You must not be on your first tour of duty.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I first came down about five years ago, and I can’t stay away. I come twice or three times a year.”

“So you know all the sites to see,” he says. “Your way about town.”

She shrugs, sips her drink, something clear and thick in a small glass. “There are only so many times you can go to the
Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores
or the
Comayagüela
market. Even the jungle has lost its charms. Mostly I know this hotel and the hospital.”