Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  “But why would Neil agree?” Laura had asked mildly.

  Jenny’s answer had been maddeningly smug. “He will,” she said. “I just know. He’ll recognize the opportunity.”

  And despite the fact that Laura knew Neil too—that, in fact, she almost felt she knew Neil better because, unlike Jenny, she had not dated him—Laura believed her. That was the thing about Jenny: she envisioned the way her life would go, and life cooperated. Never mind that Neil had been lost for years to anyone who had known him in college, had been absolutely no-email-address, no-forwarding-number gone; Laura did not doubt for a moment that Jenny would find him. And drag him out from whatever rock he was hiding under, dazed and bedazzled, into her plan.

  2

  JENNY WAS NOT PLEASED with the way the day was unfolding.

  She had been up long before Colin or Jeremy were awake, checking to be sure the cleaners had polished the silver and dusted the champagne flutes, and that the white Portuguese lace tablecloths she had ordered were in fact the right size for the rented tables. They had, and they were. But the hand towels had not been replaced in the bathroom, and Jeremy had left his sweaty glass of brandy on top of the piano, leaving a whitish ring of condensation on the glossy mahogany that she had no idea how to remove.

  There were forty people expected for lunch after the service: a combination of family and friends and a few prominent members of the St. Bernard’s committee who she had had to schmooze in order to arrange for Colin to be baptized there. She wanted everything sparkling, smooth, and orderly. If there was one thing she had learned in her career, it was that sloppiness and spontaneity breed unease. Organization and foresight, she liked to tell new hires, were the key to making people comfortable. It was like child rearing, actually. She had read Weissbluth and Ferber: to raise a well-adjusted child one must have clear boundaries, consistent routines, and order. And it had paid off! At six weeks Colin had begun sleeping through the night.

  So in the wee hours of the morning Jenny had slaved away picking out platters for the caterers, organizing the coat closet, distributing bowls of roses to prominent locations around the apartment, dispensing with emails. By the time Colin’s first cries bleated out over the monitor she had attached to her hip, everything was under control. And then there was Colin! So sweet and smart and miraculous, lying against the blue and white circles of his baby sheets like a little prince.

  He was a fairly serious baby and not at all chubby, which was, of course, completely logical. She was a rail herself and always had been. But there were moments, for instance looking at Elise and Chrissy’s smiley, roly-poly twins, when she wished Colin was just a little plumper, had a few of those baby fat wrinkles and folds under the chin. Which was silly. It was much healthier for him to be just as he was—a long, lean little man, well on his way toward crawling, with a strong, well-coordinated grasp.

  Singing the “Good Morning” song they had learned in his baby music class, and watching Colin clasp his little hands together in that sophisticated way of his, Jenny had felt the kiss of promise that this would be a really successful day.

  But then things had began to unravel. Colin was cranky, and halfway through his breakfast of pears and rice cereal he began to fart violently and shake his head. By the time Maria had arrived to help dress and ready him for the service, Jenny’s breasts ached with milk he wouldn’t drink and Colin was a fussy mess. Meanwhile, Jeremy emerged from the bedroom looking pale and unhappy, certain he was coming down with the stomach flu. “Not allowed,” Jenny barked. “And not a word to our guests.” Jeremy skulked his long, thin body off to shower looking truly miserable and Jenny had a moment of remorse, but what was she supposed to do? Cancel the whole baptism? Serve the lunch with Jeremy notably (and off-puttingly) upstairs sick in bed? Half the guests had children themselves and would surely flee at the mere mention of a virus. Thank God for Maria, who had such a wonderfully calm, reassuring way about her, and had Colin calmed down, dressed, and bottle-fed in half an hour flat.

  Jenny pumped (what was the big deal women kvetched and moaned about? Jenny didn’t mind the efficient hiss and clutch of milk being expressed from her breasts), dressed, and brought Jeremy a cup of tea and a tablespoon of Pepto-Bismol as a gesture of apology. He continued to make an overblown show of how badly he felt, sighing and resting in between donning articles of clothing as if he were an old man or a rehab patient, but Jenny bit her tongue and straightened his tie with a smile. Men were always babies about being sick—they got sick less often than their wives and children, but when they did succumb to whatever ordinary cold or flu was going around, they acted as though it were the plague. Jenny herself was strong as an ox—Jeremy got sick at least twice as much as she did, much more than your average husband, and it had begun to render him downright wimpy. What had become of the fierce, brilliant, and tireless software genius she had married?

  Despite the crankiness and stomach flu, and the flurry of last-minute phone calls from disorganized friends needing directions, the small Callahan-Sharha family made it out on time. And Colin looked perfect in the sweet white sailor suit she had bought for a small fortune at a little baby boutique on Newbury Street last weekend.

  But then, just before the babies (he was not the only one being christened) and their entourages were called up to the front of the church, there was an enormous rumbling from Colin’s little belly and a greenish, snotty-looking shit, unlike any she had seen before, spread like some sort of evil seaweed up the back of the fancy French muslin. It was a cliché in its predictability. Jenny had of course thought to have a second outfit on hand, but the timing was terrible. In moments, the shit spread rapidly onto the blanket she had under him and the crisp DKNY dress she had picked out for the occasion. And Colin began to wail as they headed forward with his godmother, Elise (thank God it was steady, responsible Elise she had chosen and not Laura, who would have begun to laugh), and Jeremy, whose already long, pale face was now looking almost as green as the shit threatening to envelop Jenny’s entire outfit.

  Jenny was not usually given to self-consciousness, but carrying her little wailing, smelly bundle up the steps to the grand and imposingly proper knave of St. Bernard’s, the church she had just kissed more Brahmin ass to get into than a Beacon Hill debutante, she began to sweat. The lunch, the reception, had all begun to seem like an ordeal. She wanted to kiss her sweet little baby and hand him off to Maria and go for a run—or take a nap.

  Now, standing outside the church, greeting people with a wide smile plastered across her face and a freshly changed Colin perched on her hip concealing the smear of shit along her own waist, her enthusiasm for the day was gone.

  “Beautiful, beautiful baby,” a waspy old crone in a Chanel suit cooed, leaning in to chuck Colin’s chin—a grandmother of one of the other babies, maybe? Or simply a baptism enthusiast? It was enough to start Colin squirming and fussing again, arching his back in protest.

  “Are you giving your mother a hard time, dear?” chimed one of the smug church-board housewives.

  “It’s his mealtime.” Jenny smiled tightly. “And he likes his lunch, don’t you, Colin?”

  “Aha!” the woman raised her eyebrows condescendingly. You almost had to admire these preppy New Englanders; they were so well versed in the ways of making a person feel small. Growing up in the no-man’s-land of Central California, Jenny had never encountered such skillfully veiled sniping and passive-aggressive finesse.

  “See, there she is!” This was Laura now, emerging with Miranda straddled awkwardly on her hip—she was too big to be carried, really, but Laura always obliged her. “That was beautiful! And how is the little man holding up? It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it—and you’ve done such a stand-up job!” This was addressed to Colin, who responded with one of his rare, unreserved, openmouthed smiles. Jenny felt a swell of warmth toward her old friend. Laura could be such a birdbrain, but she was a genuinely sweet person. And Jenny was shrewd enough to recognize there were very few of these
in her life.

  Laura kissed her on the cheek, ignoring Miranda’s cries of protest. Jenny lifted Colin away from her waist for a moment.

  “Shit,” she said. “Everywhere. Total disaster.”

  Laura’s eyes widened comically—she looked especially pretty today, a little flushed and particularly bright somehow. But just as Jenny was beginning to remark on this, she was swooped down upon by one of the coworkers she had invited. Why had she ever invited anyone from her office?

  See you at lunch, Laura mouthed amid the fawnings of the young woman, and faded back into the throng of people, taking with her the first glimmer of good humor Jenny had felt since dawn.

  And naturally Colin began, once again, to wail.

  On the way back to the apartment after the service, Jenny drove, Jeremy sat morosely in the passenger seat, and Maria and Colin snugged into the back, an unlikely and silent foursome speeding along Storrow Drive toward the Back Bay. The new house Jenny and Jeremy had bought in Wellesley was not ready yet. The contractors were behind schedule and because of this, the fledgling family was still holed up in the brownstone duplex on Clarendon Street. No yard and no parking. It was not where Jenny had imagined her first winter with the baby would be. Or, for that matter, where the lunch after the christening was going to be. But there it was. You could only manage your own part of every operation. And the apartment on Clarendon was beautiful, Jenny reminded herself. It was small for hosting forty people, but light and airy, and you couldn’t beat the address.

  “Did you tell Neil about today?” Jeremy asked, cutting through her musing.

  “What?” Jenny nearly swerved out of her lane. She and Jeremy did not talk about Neil.

  “I think I saw him.” Jeremy was staring straight ahead.

  “Neil lives in Los Angeles, if you remember,” she said icily, shooting him a reprimanding glare. Maria was sitting right there in the backseat.

  “I think I saw him,” he repeated.

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” Jenny said forcefully. Was Jeremy losing his mind? “Can we discuss this later?”

  Jeremy continued staring straight ahead through the thin spheres of his rimless glasses. “I just need to know, Jenny: did. you. invite. him?”

  Jenny glanced over at him again. He was enraged. Quietly, burningly furious. She could not remember the last time she had seen him this way. It was easy to forget how hard this was for Jeremy. He was infertile. He was, biologically speaking, raising another man’s child. An unusual swell of sympathy rose in her chest, despite the absurdity of his question.

  “I didn’t,” she said in a kinder, softer voice. “I swear to God, there is no way he would have been there.” This was true. There was honestly no way. No one even saw Neil anymore these days. She had practically had to hire a sleuth to find him.

  Outside the car, cyclists and Rollerbladers sped down the narrow strip of park between the river and the reflecting pool like apparitions of health and well-being walking on water. On a regular Sunday morning she and Jeremy would have been running out there among them.

  She almost reached out to him. “I think you were hallucinating.”

  “Hm.” Jeremy grimaced.

  In the backseat Colin began to wail again, and then there was a choking, sputtering sound, followed by helpless baby coughing.

  “Oh, baby!” Maria exclaimed. “He just throwed up, poor little one.”

  “Shit!” Jenny banged the steering wheel.

  And Jeremy rolled down his window.

  3

  THE ROOM NEIL WOKE UP in was almost offensively flooded with light. Bright, dirty spring light, alive with dust and microorganisms. It illuminated sticky beer stains and a crowded ashtray, the humidity bubbles on album covers strewn around the floor. Neil was in Boston, in his old coworker Johnson’s “wreck room,” sleeping on a futon without a sheet. Johnson was an ass. He lived like an ass. With pretensions to some ridiculous hipsterdom he should have outgrown. The turntable and the vintage record collection. The tiki lamps and P-Funk posters. It was humiliating to be staying here. Because how far removed from all this was Neil, really? It drove that question home.

  Neil sat up gingerly, trying to touch as little of the grubby mattress as possible. There was a bad smell coming from the radiator, which was banging and hissing despite the apparently pleasant weather outside. Neil shook his head and rubbed his face vigorously to bring the blood up to the surface. His cheeks felt scratchy and rough. He knelt to fiddle with the screw top on the radiator valve—it looked ancient. And predictably, it was stuck. In wrestling with it, his arm grazed the metal of the first coil and he jerked backward in surprise. The thing was fucking hot. He settled for opening the window instead, and a rush of cool, refreshing spring air blew in from the improbable cliff behind the place. For a moment it reminded him of California, of San Francisco specifically, where such rugged pieces of geology cropped up with regularity—evidence that the land was bigger than the city. That the quirks and foibles of the earth’s surface were not so easily dismissed.

  This cliff was dirty, though, like the light coming through the window. It was brown with decomposing leaves and twigs and whatever scrappy, unbeautiful vegetation made a home for itself on the steep incline. There were bits of junk caught all along its snarly surface—ballooning plastic shopping bags worn thin and holey by the winter, faded silver candy wrappers, shards of beer bottles, a pair of pants, a toilet seat…East Coast geology for sure—intact on account of human sloppiness rather than some insurmountable metal of its own. Hell, it was probably just a solid wall of poorly designated landfill.

  Neil sighed aloud and rifled through his duffel bag for a clean pair of boxers and a shirt. From the next room there was the sound of music with a pounding electronic beat and the shriek of female laughter, a loud snapping groan that sounded unmistakably like a body—or two?—hitting the bed. It was eight a.m. on a Monday morning. At thirty-five, Neil was too old for this. He might have sold his soul to take over Johnson’s job at ZGames, trading his years of maverick game-review writing (the ridiculous self-importance of the label, even in his own head, made him smile) for the steady pay of being a game company hack, but this didn’t mean he had sold his adulthood, to boot—or did it?

  He pulled a clean T-shirt over his head and tried to block out the sound of the bumping headboard. Forget shaving. He was going to get out, get a cup of coffee, make the most of this morning back in the town he loved to hate—and drive away the blackness he could feel circling around him, waiting for an opportune moment to sink its talons into his head.

  Letting himself out of the triple-decker Johnson lived in—the triple-decker he, Neil Banks, would officially live in if Johnson and his girlfriend Kirstin ever got on with their plans and cleared the hell out—Neil was greeted by the pleasant, greasy smell of dough and plantains frying. There was a Cuban place on the corner that Johnson had described as a good place to get a “cup of joe” (had he always talked like this?) and Neil headed there, resisting the urge to stop in the convenience store across the street for a pack of cigarettes. It was one of his resolutions now that he was thirty-five. He would cut back on smoking, try to avoid the gravelly voice and hacking, phlegmy cough his father and his grandfather had always had.

  The neighborhood was better than he had expected. He had never come here during his time at Harvard, so it was relievingly free of associations—had none of the bookish redbrick Victorian architecture, none of the historic cemeteries and cobbled alleys that now made him feel at once regretful and angry, lucky and failed. It felt almost like New York, with its litter and bodegas and general treelessness. This was good.

  “Coffee?” the round, elderly woman who approached Neil’s booth, once he was seated, asked with a thick, presumably Cuban accent. “Meelk? Shooger?”

  Her un-Boston-ness was good too. The morning was turning around. He could make a life here for himself for a little while. He could survive the return to his homeland. He could, maybe even, make it feel ne
w.

  He ordered eggs and bacon and toast, relishing the freedom to eat bad food. For the last three years he had been macrobiotic, due to living with his now ex-girlfriend Jane, and this morning the act of ordering something full of saturated fats and carbon compounds felt liberating. This was the kind of thing he had to look forward to.

  Out on the street a group of delinquent teenagers slouched past, skipping their morning classes, calling out to each other too loudly, mock-fighting. Their soft rolled vowels and dropped r’s were disturbingly familiar. Shades of New Bedford, the Massachusetts town Neil had grown up in and spent the rest of his life trying to escape. He pulled his laptop out of its case, and despite the ugliness of being The Guy in the Café With His Computer, turned it on.

  The connection was slow: the Yahoo! log-on photo of the girl with her tongue sticking out stared at him for long enough that he had time to notice the faint rise of taste buds on her unnaturally long tongue. It was his least favorite of the surely focus-group-tested snapshots that served as guardians of the entrance to Yahoo! mail. (Was there some subliminal message he was supposed to be picking up from the girl’s squinty expression, or the antics of the pizza-devouring teenagers who sometimes greeted him? Had this girl known that she would become so anonymously, irrelevantly famous when the picture was taken? These were the tedious questions his brain fussed over every time he checked his email.)

  Seventeen new messages. Amid the usual junk and freelance-related back-and-forth, one from Laura. Hey, the subject header read. He opened it. Just wanted you to know I didn’t tell Jenny that you were there. Or anyone else for that matter. It was good to see you though. Are you in town for a while? Want to have coffee with a boring and exhausted mother of two? Or a drink?

  It made him smile. Laura was exactly the same. Jenny had become a nightmare, that was clear, and Elise, well, he had glimpsed nothing of Elise, but Laura was just as he always thought of her. Pretty, spacey, sweet. It was almost tempting to say yes.