Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  Neil pointed to the hour of birth: 11:40 a.m. And weight: six pounds, ten ounces.

  Laura gave him a quizzical look.

  He handed her the grubby square of thick blue card stock, printed at the top with a gold baby rattle. Colin’s birth announcement. It had come to him, as promised, but with no note, no picture attached, nothing personal at all. Colin Callahan-Sharha. Six pounds ten ounces. October 8, 11:04 a.m.

  Laura did not look up for a moment. Then she handed him back the papers. It seemed possible that she would say nothing—would shame him with silence, as if his possession of this document were unspeakable.

  “Life is weird, isn’t it?” she said, looking straight at him. And her eyes were large and kind—not critical or pitying. A sudden fierce impulse came over him: he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to be gathered up into the sweetness of her upturned face. There was a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that seemed suddenly beautiful. Had he ever noticed these before? Had he ever thought of her this way?

  “What?” she said, concern crossing her face.

  The sound of her voice startled him.

  “Oh, nothing. Just that you’re right.”

  Back at Johnson’s apartment, Neil dove into the research project that had been so burningly consuming to him for the last several years. It had begun as a spin-off of his dropped dissertation—a study of resistance to King Leopold’s reign of slaughter in Africa. In the course of his thesis investigation, Neil had come across the mid-nineteenth-century American explorer Albert Sorenson Jones, self-proclaimed American hero turned detractor, seminary student turned adventurer, idealist turned…middle-class everyman. Jones had gone into deepest Zaire with his moral hackles up, a blustery drinker with a penchant for self-promotion, a self-made man from a poor farm in southern Vermont, renowned for his riflery and poker skills, with ambitions to make a name for himself and American rectitude around the world, to map undocumented swaths of the continent and change the appalling colonial treatment of “Negroes.” And then, after his five years there, about which relatively little was known, he had resurfaced in, of all places, Mobile, Alabama, a different person. Thinner, milder, and by all measures reduced. He had opened a blacksmith shop and begun publishing maudlin poems about flowers and teapots.

  What had happened to the man? What had eaten his idealism and his swagger? It was not hard to imagine. The sheer horror of Africa had certainly broken even stronger, better-prepared men and sent them running, or worse, made them accomplice to its evil. God knows Neil had read enough André Gide and Joseph Conrad. But this man—Albert Sorenson Jones—was, to Neil, different. He was, for one thing, boldly and unabashedly American. He had wanted to build a hospital, which seemed to express a very particular American kind of ambition and idealism. And when the project had failed—the circumstances of which were largely unknown—he had come out diminished rather than broken. His fate was mawkish rather than tragic. The day-to-day of Jones’s travels was documented minimally and contradictingly in the journals of two members of his exploring party and in his own hotheaded missives, sent from the road and published in his hometown newspaper. The mystery of this fascinated Neil.

  He had discovered Jones only after his own exploration of the “dark continent,” where he had gone ostensibly to research his dissertation but had instead ended up teaching English and hitchhiking like some college-year-abroad student. It had been the end of his dissertation. The end of any academic ambitions. And his return to California had been the beginning of a new Neil. So in this way, he felt a kinship to Jones. Two ugly Americans, full of pride and lofty ideals, inexplicably changed by Africa, rendered weirdly mediocre, small, and insignificant upon return. What had happened to Neil was that he had seen real poverty and desperation. In the scheme of all-things-Africa it was very little. He had not seen the bodies of macheted victims of the Rwandan genocide. He had not seen the raping and maiming of Congolese women. But he had been hit over the head with the infinite sorrow, injustice, and sheer brutality of human life. And moreover—by his own cowardice and privilege. He was an American, traveling through the world wrapped in a bubble of impenetrable luck and affluence. And some fundamental flaw in his character had prevented him from breaking out of this, or pulling anyone else in. He had written a few impassioned editorials, which went nowhere, and he had tried to keep in touch with a few African friends. But he had joined no noble NGO, had signed up for no Red Cross relief work, had lobbied no one for aid. So this burning sense of his own privilege sat holed up inside him like a cancer.

  Was this what had happened to Jones?

  Neil had toiled away for the last few years on this as if the answer would free him. He hunted up ancient census documents and grocers’ tabs, read and analyzed the unimpressive poetry Jones had written upon his return. And he pored over the spotty and often contradictory journals of Jones’s teammates and the literature on other, more prominent explorers of the time.

  Sitting in Johnson’s kitchen, though, reviewing his own copious notes, Neil had trouble concentrating. In the transition from his subterranean office studio beneath Jane’s house in Silver Lake to his new home on the opposite coast, something had been lost. He could feel the spark of relevance slipping from his grasp. Better to close up the work, in that case, cap his pen, and give it a break. Because without it—without Jones—Neil would be lost.

  4

  SUNDAY MORNINGS WERE A “THING” in the Elias household. This was what Laura would hear Mac say when asked, for instance, to play golf by one of his friends. “I’d love to, buddy, but I’ve got this family thing.” At moments like that Laura could not, honestly, remember why she had married him.

  In any event, the “thing” was to be together as a family. To cook pancakes or go out for brunch or take a walk or do some sort of activity that would keep them all entertained. Which was a challenge. A walk, for instance, was out of the question at this point. Genevieve hated walks. And brunch was impossible with Miranda. But they made do—the “thing” served its purpose. Without it there would be almost no time the Eliases were all together.

  This morning the “thing” was a trip to Drumlin Farm at Genevieve’s request. She had developed an obsession with horses and somehow gotten wind of the fact that the mare at Drumlin Farm had just given birth. Laura did her best to quash this interest of her daughter’s. Please don’t become one of those horsey girls, she prayed silently at night while tucking her in next to the giant stuffed pony Mac had given her for Christmas. Possibly it was already too late. Possibly her sensitive, intelligent little girl was bound to be sucked into the stolid, humorless world of scraping hooves, braiding tails, and thumping up and down on a horse’s back in a pair of sweaty nylon pants. But Laura hoped there was time to turn this around—to impress upon her, for instance, that horses sometimes kicked people and nipped fingers, and were not always as smart as they were cracked up to be.

  Mac pulled the car into the parking lot and ferreted out a space in the shade. He was weirdly particular about this sort of thing. Keeping the car cool and clean (no snacks!) was an imperative, no matter the cost.

  “Piggies, piggies, piggies,” Miranda chanted. “Are we going to see the piggies, Dada?” It was maybe the four hundredth time she had asked.

  “What piggies? You think they have piggies here?” Mac asked, feigning bemusement.

  “Yes! Yes, they do! They do, they do!” Miranda shrieked, as he hoisted her up out of her car seat and over his shoulder. She adored her father.

  Behind Laura, Genevieve was fiddling with something in the little purple bag she carried like a talisman, her head bent in earnest concentration.

  “You brought your camera?” Laura asked, dismayed.

  “I want to take a picture of the foal to show to Morgan.”

  “Mmmm. Does Morgan like horses?”

  “Oh, she loves them,” Genevieve said breathlessly. Another strike against Morgan, the sullen, large-headed girl who seemed to be Genevieve’s new bes
t friend.

  Genevieve looked so earnest standing there, head bent, small feet planted squarely on the ground. Laura felt a swell of love for her, and contrition at her own controlling impulses. Of course Genevieve should be interested in whatever she wanted, be friends with whoever made her happy, and take pictures of baby horses to share with them.

  “C’mon,” Laura said, tilting her head toward the barns. “Let’s go before your sister scares the animals to death.”

  And so the Eliases made their way around from sheep to goats to chickens (Laura’s least favorite, those dirty squawky creatures she preferred not to associate with anything she ate) to geese to pigs, and finally to the long-awaited horses. The weather was heavy—the sky white and still and the air cool but humid. The stench of animal shit rose pungently from the earth. “I smell somebody’s dinner cooking,” Miranda announced generously. She sat on Mac’s shoulders, in heaven, her tiny pair of jeans hanging off of her, baring half her bum.

  Mac checked his BlackBerry as they walked. It was a subject of contention between them, an obvious metaphor for something larger and less concrete. Not just his constant distraction, but also his inattention—to his wife, to his family, to his home. He was out at least four nights a week traveling or finessing deals over filet mignon at Locke-Ober. Once a week, no matter what, he drove to Worcester to have dinner with his mother, a proud inscrutable woman who had never forgiven Laura for being an American and refused to speak English in her presence. Even when Mac was home in the evening, he crawled into bed after Laura was asleep, having watched some college basketball tournament or football game until the bitter end. She could barely remember the last time they had made love. All the mothers Laura knew talked about being taken for granted, unappreciated, and frequently left holding the bag. But these criticisms did not begin to cover Laura’s status in her marriage. It felt often as though she were invisible to Mac. As though she were completely looked through. What went on in his mind? Did he have any idea what went on in hers? She had tried to draw this out—to have at least some sort of discussion about what was missing—but initially Mac had put an end to such forays with a bear hug and good-natured nuzzle: C’mere, Henny Penny, no more worrying. And now any vague gesture in the direction of reflection or inquiry was met with a stony-faced, beleaguered blankness: Not this again. He traveled so often and worked so late, the questions had occurred to her: Had he…? Would he ever…? And no intuitive answer presented itself to her. Oddly, the uncertainty seemed to change very little for her. It was part of what they were.

  She walked into the stable behind Genevieve and her eyes fell upon it immediately: a dead chicken, lying in the corner of the stall Mac and the girls were stopped in front of.

  “Mac,” she said. “Mac!” more loudly. It was imperative that Genevieve be shielded from this or there would surely be some torrent of upset, and, knowing Miranda, she would probably run over and start sticking her fingers in the dead chicken’s eyes. The thought made Laura’s skin crawl. She had the childish sensation of wanting to tiptoe, to connect her body to as little of this dead chicken’s final resting ground as possible.

  “Mac!”

  He turned toward her, Miranda’s fingers twined in his hair.

  “D-e-a-d-c-h-i-c-k-e-n,” she spelled. “I think we should keep moving.”

  “D-e-c—what?”

  Dead, Laura mouthed, and angled her head toward it with a grimace.

  “Oh, yeah?” he raised his eyebrows and took a step toward it as if in fact she were pointing out an attraction.

  “No—I mean—” Laura began in exasperation, but why was she surprised?

  Miranda saw it first, of course. “Chicken!” She bounced on his shoulders. “Lie down chicken!”

  “Where?” Genevieve spun around from the big black horse she had been holding her hand out to. “Oh, no! Is it dead? What’s it doing here—oh, no, it’s all twisted—” her voice began to take on a panicked edge as she shrank backward against Mac’s legs.

  “Looks like someone got in horsey’s way,” he said cheerfully.

  Genevieve looked at her father aghast. “You think the horse—”

  “No, no it probably just got old and…” Laura tried to backtrack, but tears were welling up in Genevieve’s eyes.

  “Should I pluck you a feather, Vievee? for a souvenir?” Mac taunted.

  “No! no!” Genevieve shrieked.

  “Oh, it’s so—it’s so yucky, Mom—I don’t want—I want to get out—”

  And so it began, the sobbing and dismay, Genevieve’s battle with her own disgust over whether to walk past and on to the stall of the much-anticipated foal. The final, tearful decision to let Laura carry her, hands over her eyes, past the chicken’s remains and to the foal, who, it turned out, could no longer be concentrated on let alone photographed on account of his proximity to the body, and then the glum walk back up the hill, toward the lot, throughout which Mac was oblivious, first playing tag with Miranda and ultimately talking on his cell phone (“Just a minute, ladies…”), while Genevieve plodded forward, eyes downcast.

  Laura had met Mac through Jenny, who had been in his class at business school and had painted an almost messianic picture of his business prowess. He was seven years older than Laura and had sent her flowers after their first date, a gesture so old-fashioned and paternalistic that Laura would have been creeped out by it if she hadn’t, in her own paternalistic way, chalked it up to his background. He had come up through the Worcester public schools, a star football player who worked nights at his father’s restaurant, and had a grandmother still living in a village on the Peloponnesus. He had taken her to fancy restaurants and Broadway shows, and told her how beautiful she was with such straightforward fervor that she felt herself to be some sort of Aphrodite. Unlike her own aristocratic family members or the various witty and jaded New Englanders Laura had dated throughout college, Mac was not self-conscious or ironic or conflicted about his feelings, and this was compelling to her in its novelty.

  Their courtship had been fast. Based on some indecipherable criteria that became less rather than more clear to Laura as time went by, Mac had made his mind up right away that she was the woman he wanted to marry. His certainty was appealing. And something of the motherless daughter in Laura had leapt toward his uncomplicated, almost sexist air of protection. They had been married in her home turf of Boston, but in his Greek Orthodox church. They had spent their honeymoon on Santorini. When Laura tried to account for her happiness during this adventure she could think primarily of one thing: luxury. As a self-made man with new access to money, Mac was much more generous, and much more comfortable splurging, for instance, on a private cruise of the harbor at sunset or a fifty-dollar bottle of champagne, than anyone in Laura’s old New England family or circle of acquaintance ever had been. It felt exciting, transgressive even, and had, for a while, manufactured the necessary thrill.

  The drive back to Cambridge from Drumlin Farm was silent. Genevieve looked moonily out of the window and Miranda whined about the lack of snacks. Mac made arrangements for the meeting he was flying to that night. The Wee Sing Silly Songs CD chirped out a torrent of inanity it was nearly impossible to think over.

  “Are you going to have time to put together the climbing thing this afternoon before you leave?”

  “The climbing thing?” Mac asked as if the modular, “simple assembly” jungle gym his mother had given Miranda for her birthday were not something Laura had asked him about practically every night that week.

  She shot him a look.

  “Oh, right—the climbing thing. Sure. Sure I will, babe.”

  “It’ll take a while. An hour at least.”

  “No problem.” Mac patted her knee.

  Laura could hear the anxious needling in her own voice. The wife, the nag, the worrier—it was a boring story. Why play it out, then? her shrink had asked her. Find a new narrative. But the new narrative—a local handyman who could take care of the various sundry chores she se
emed always to be waiting on Mac to get to—was apparently galling to Mac. His all-American pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps upbringing made no accommodation for a man who hired someone else to replace window boxes, clean gutters, build swing sets. So the projects piled up, irritating Laura daily and diminishing the general quality of life in the Elias household.

  Laura was about to bring up Duane, the handyman, and plunge headlong back into the same conversation they had had a thousand times before when her phone rang. It was a 310 number. Her heart gave a quick lurch in her chest.

  “Hey—do you have a ladder I could borrow?” Neil asked, almost before she had said hello.

  “What do you mean—what for?”

  “It’s a long story. But I need it sort of soon.”

  “The ladder?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I climb,” Miranda began to say from the backseat.

  “I don’t know—Mac, do we have a ladder? What kind of ladder?” she said back into the phone.

  “Regular. Stepladder,” Neil supplied.

  “Of course,” Mac said as if it were insulting to imagine they might not. “Why?”

  “Yes,” Laura said into the phone.

  “Can you possibly bring it over here? Or could I come get it?”

  “I’ll bring it,” Laura said hastily.

  “Soon? I don’t mean to be a pain, but there’s this dog, you see, I have to get into the yard, and the fence—”

  “An hour?” Laura felt the blood rising to her cheeks. Here was her escape from the day. To Neil. Her heart skittered a little. She did not even pause to wonder why he needed it.

  “Perfect. Thanks, Lo. I knew you’d hook me up.”

  She hung up the phone and tried to affect a nonchalant expression. They were just entering Cambridge, the three blunt red high-rises of the Rindge Avenue projects lording a particular dreariness over the return.