Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  “So what do you think?” Jenny asked. “Another week?”

  “Two days.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.” Victor looked offended.

  “Great!” Jenny was delighted. There would be ample time for the housecleaners to do their job, and the phone company and computer consultant to come in and set everything up. They would not need to lose even a day of access with the move. And then they would be settled! Residents of pastoral Wellesley! Colin would have the whole giant backyard to learn to walk in. She and Jeremy could entertain without worrying about how people would park and whether the kitchen would be roomy enough.

  She followed Victor up through the house to inspect the finished product of his work. The walls were an unobtrusive and refreshing white: cool, calm, and unlikely to interfere with any decorating she might do. Only in Colin’s room and the bathrooms had she allowed herself the gamble of choosing a color. Colin’s room was a pretty, muted blue and the bathrooms were dark red, dark green, and a kind of rich, eggplanty purple that Victor assured her he had just painted the president of Harvard’s bathroom.

  Walking through the house with its high ceilings and state-of-the-art fixtures and appliances, Jenny did not explicitly consider how far she had come from the peach-colored ranch house of her childhood with its cheap, accordion-style sliding doors and dingy shag carpeting, its unreliable stove and exposed laundry line. She did not congratulate herself on the personal success that had brought her to this place—the triumph of her own unlikely ambition that had led her to apply to Harvard to begin with, and strategically climb the corporate ladder. But she did feel suffused with a kind of peaceful satisfaction. For once her brain was not cataloguing improvements that could be made and angles that could be played. She was simply, truly happy with the fruit of all her planning, money, and labor.

  It was, maybe fittingly, in the would-be sanctuary of the master bedroom that she got the phone call that burst this unusual contentment. It was Elise, and her presentation of the fact was typically straightforward.

  “He’s what?” Jenny barked, walking quickly across the cavernous room to the bay window. Victor had already discreetly disappeared.

  “Living in Boston for the year. In Jamaica Plain. But right now, at the moment, he’s—”

  “What is he doing here?”

  “Designing computer games. But what I wanted to tell you…”

  “Designing computer games!”

  “…is that he’s staying with me while they fix his apartment because there was—”

  “With you?”

  “Jenny. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Oh, really,” Jenny said acidly.

  “It’s a free country! Did you really expect that you would never, ever see him again? And why does it even matter? It’s not like he’s going to go around telling everyone—”

  “He isn’t?”

  “Well, he agreed to the conditions. He knows the deal. It’s not like—”

  “You’ve talked to him about it?” Jenny could feel her rage mounting.

  “No! I’m just saying he agreed. Right? I mean, that was your whole thing—personally, I don’t know why—”

  “Elise,” Jenny said. “I don’t really think we need to get back into this. I’m just surprised. I’m surprised that you would put him up, quite frankly, knowing—”

  “He had nowhere to stay! Christ.”

  They were both silent for a moment. Jenny stared out the window. There was nothing to look at, really. Just trees and grass. A squirrel dropped from one branch to another. Whoopee. The still-ness of the view would take some getting used to. She cursed Elise for bursting her bubble of satisfaction, making her see the negative for the first time that morning.

  “Look,” Elise said finally, “I know this pisses you off. But I really think it’s unreasonable to expect Neil to be permanently lost in the cosmos. And I also think his being here is honestly not a big deal.”

  “Well, thanks for that thought,” Jenny said coldly. “Can I call you later? I’m in the middle of going through some things with our painter.”

  “Okay,” Elise said huffily. “I’m sorry to upset you. I just wanted you to know.”

  After this there was no more blissful enjoyment of her house. Jenny went through the last few rooms with Victor and got back into her car.

  The worst part, of course, was that she knew Elise was right—had been right all along. The arrangement she had struck with Neil was a stupid one. She had wanted to have her cake and eat it too. That was how Elise had put it at the time—the expression was vivid in her mind. She had wanted to know the baby’s father, but keep him unknown to the rest of the world. It had not seemed too much at the time, or too greedy. It had seemed merely fortuitous: knowing the perfect, and willing, candidate.

  Why not go to a sperm bank? Elise had asked, and for all Jenny’s straightforwardness she was aware the answer had to be carefully put so as not to step on Elise and Chrissy’s decision. She just liked knowing the person, she explained. Having a picture and a voice and a general sense—she just felt in her gut that Neil was right. The baby could realize all Neil’s squandered potential.

  Now, however, in the bright light of this Wellesley morning, with Neil having slipped back into her world—and so suspiciously silently!—the situation she had created did seem far-fetched. And worse, ridiculously fragile. The truth will out. This phrase occurred—loudly—to her. And made her feel duplicitous. She had not intended the circumstances of Colin’s birth to feel so secretive. She had meant only for her little family to be normal, in the DeSoto, California, sense of the word. Throughout the whole struggle to get pregnant, the months of of peeing on ovulation sticks and taking her temperature and ultimately submitting herself to tests involving every sort of uncomfortable poking and prodding (there had been so many before they had even thought to test Jeremy!), she had wanted, simply, a child of her own. A family unit like the one she had grown up in.

  Driving back to the office, she did her best to tamp down the irrational unease her conversation with Elise had inspired. But her mind kept going to Colin, sweet Colin, at home with Maria right now, probably napping, his little diapered bottom jutting up in that funny fetal position he slept in—she could almost feel the velvety fringe of dark hair at the base of his head. He was hers—the love of her life and her greatest responsibility. There was nothing to suggest that Neil’s presence here in Boston was a threat to this, but somehow, all the same, she felt gripped by a kind of cold and primal fear. In her bullheaded creation of the perfect situation, the perfect familial construct, had she overreached? Had she left a crack that would allow disorder in?

  Jenny arrived at her office just in time for her first meeting of the day. She had not even finished checking her voice mails when Galena Ibanesku, the hungry young project manager Jenny had assigned to the launch, knocked on her office door.

  “Ready for the project meeting?” Galena asked with her signature breed of determined cheer.

  “Isn’t it a little early?” Jenny glanced at her watch irritably. It was now 10:27, which, by Jenny’s American standards, she considered early. Galena had not caught on to this yet. She was steadfastly punctual, and the incorrectness of total punctuality seemed awkward to explain.

  “It’s ten-thirty,” Galena said.

  “Why don’t you go ahead?” Jenny said. “I’ll be right there.”

  “That’s all right,” Galena shrugged. “I can wait.”

  Jenny gave her a tight smile. Galena was exasperating—terribly intelligent, ambitious, and blatantly self-serving in a way that Jenny recognized as promising. But she had no social graces—absolutely no emotional IQ. And this morning Jenny felt particularly disinclined to deal with her.

  Galena plopped herself down in one of the two faux-Eames chairs across from Jenny’s desk, while Jenny finished listening to her voice mails. From outside the door there was the tinkle of female laughter as Beth, Jenny’s secretary, flirted w
ith the FedEx man.

  “I met someone who knows you,” Galena said smirkily, when Jenny hung up the phone.

  Jenny raised her eyebrows.

  “Neil Banks.” Galena pronounced it with satisfaction, and Jenny almost gasped out loud.

  “Where?” she said, before she could rein in her lack of composure.

  “He works at ZGames,” Galena said. “One of the companies on our promo list,” she added in response to what must have been an obviously blank look.

  “Ha!” Jenny tried to strike an amused note. “Well, isn’t it a small world. Shall we go?” She rose and walked quickly to the door to conceal the color rising to her cheeks. Was this some sort of a cruel joke, that in one morning Neil would suddenly have surrounded her?

  “He said he went to college with you,” Galena said.

  “He did.” Jenny held the door for Galena and involuntarily her eyes sought out the framed eight-by-ten portrait of Colin looking serious, and, in the light of this conversation, seriously like Neil. Was it possible—the thought accosted her with violence—that he would tell people he was the father of her son?

  “He said you dated,” Galena continued.

  Jenny stiffened. “For about five minutes,” she said. It came out sounding almost indignant.

  “He’s cute,” Galena said, and Jenny saw suddenly—good grief—that the girl had a crush on Neil.

  “Oh, he’s too old for you,” she said in genuine alarm. “And too—” confused, she had been about to say before she realized the danger of name-calling. Better to be utterly uninterested, unopinionated, and, most importantly, uninvolved.

  “Too what?” Galena pressed.

  They had almost reached the conference room and Jenny slowed her steps. “Nothing,” she said, affecting a breezy tone. “Just too old; thirty-five-year-olds are dinosaurs.”

  “Ah, but men just get sexier as they get older,” Galena chirped. And at that moment, Jenny felt a genuine rip of hatred for the girl.

  “After you.” She smiled, opening the conference room door.

  At lunchtime, Jenny drove over to Mass General to go to Jeremy’s doctor’s appointment. He was getting the results of a CT scan. She did not really feel worried about what these results might be—but all the same, she was not looking forward to the appointment.

  Once in Dr. Frager’s office, though, it was clear immediately that the results were not good. She knew this immediately from the doctor’s solemn face, the manner in which he touched the pen in the breast pocket of his shirt—like a child fingering the edge of a beloved blankie for reassurance—as he began to speak. There was a tumor on Jeremy’s left kidney and another on his chest wall. A broader scan was in order—soon—as well as surgery to remove the tumors, which had the characteristics of renal cancer that had metastasized.

  Jenny felt the blood rush from her head. She would have fainted if she had not been sitting down. She looked over at Jeremy with panic. He looked, actually, remarkably calm. The fear she had detected from him in the waiting room seemed, with the introduction of facts and information, to have given way to something both determined and resigned. His face was pale, but his jaw was set forcefully. “What…?” Jenny blurted out. “But you don’t know this is cancer, right?”

  Both Jeremy and the doctor looked at her with, it seemed, a kind of apology.

  “Until we have the pathology before us it is technically unknown, but I’m afraid research and experience suggest that a tumor on the kidney with these dimensions and characteristics is almost certainly some form of cancer, most likely renal, and the tumor on the lungs…” The doctor’s voice continued, gently but not reassuringly. Jenny could not really hear him for the rushing in her ears.

  At some point in the midst of this, Jeremy reached over and put a hand at the back of her neck, lightly, smoothing his knuckles over the small bones of her spine. And the delicate intimacy of the gesture, the implicit reassurance, almost broke her. She was the one who should be reaching over to him, taking his cold hand in hers, pressing it comfortingly. How had she let it come to this? She could feel a ball of tears in the back of her throat that she had to swallow down, had to focus all her energy to repress, because if they came out she knew they would be ugly, horrible, primitive sounds—not so much tears as bellows and screams.

  Jeremy’s odd composure continued. He asked questions. Jenny had no idea what they were. He talked about biopsies and metastases and stages—clearly there had been anticipation here. How else to explain his understanding of the exact difference between stage three and stage four renal cancer and the inutility of radiation treatment under these circumstances? Jenny was silent—dumbfounded by her own complete ignorance.

  She stared at her husband—his thin, angular face and the shock of blond hair falling forward. He looked thin. How had she missed this?

  “Jen,” Jeremy said, when they had left the muted corridors of the hospital and were out in the brightness of the evening. He turned to her fully for the first time. There was the movement of people in and out of the revolving doors, wheelchairs, hospital scrubs, the whistle of the valets parking cars. Sunlight glinted fiercely off of windshields and mirrors and traffic signs like the shards of some giant glass bottle that had exploded. “I need you to just keep on being normal. That is what I’m going to need,” he said.

  “How long have you been thinking of this—I mean, all those questions you had…?” she asked, when finally they were seated in the car.

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy answered, turning to face her. “I did some research.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  And the look on his face was quizzical—searching, even.

  “I have told you, Jenny,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” she said, almost pleadingly, because of course she knew. It was a pointless question. There was no one here to fool.

  Jeremy was wise enough to leave it unanswered, and he navigated the car out onto the street and then to Storrow Drive.

  “Where are we going?” Jenny asked blankly. “I can’t—you can’t go back to work.”

  “Home,” Jeremy said. Outside, the Charles River flew past, making Jenny wince with the memory of her lack of sympathy. Already the christening felt like ages ago. “I want to see Colin.”

  Jenny looked over at her husband in surprise.

  “I just want to hear his laugh,” Jeremy said, almost sheepishly. “It’s so…” He seemed to search for the word. “Funny.”

  And Jenny felt a swell of love sweep over her. “You know—” she burst out. “You know how much I love you?” she asked. It was intended rhetorically. But as she sat, watching his profile, both hands on the wheel and hunching slightly forward, driving in that way she had always made fun of, she realized it was a more real question than she had imagined.

  “Sure,” Jeremy said, darting a glance at her. “I think so. I think I do.”

  And the gentle rebuke of his answer filled Jenny with a cold panic. This was not something that could be changed by protest, though.

  12

  NEIL HAD PUT OFF going to see his mother until it was absolutely inescapable. In fact, he had put off even calling to tell her that he was here—not only back East, but in Boston, in the state of Massachusetts—until last week. This was the beauty of having a cell phone. And, for that matter, a mother who never called.

  Today was her birthday, though. It was something even the most callous, self-involved son could not ignore. To look at Lucinda Banks you might think she was turning seventy, but in fact she was only fifty-seven. The extra thirteen odd years on her face were not the product of hard living but a negative attitude, which was exactly what Neil wanted to avoid.

  To Neil, the drive down to New Bedford from Boston was like being lowered down into a well. The elevated expressway sped over the warehouses of South Boston and touched down in Quincy, passing Corita’s famous painted water towers, Ho Chi Minh’s profile embedded subversively (or so it had seemed to him as
a teenager, newly armed with the concept of subversion) in a long splash of blue, and as he sped past, Neil felt the rough texture of his childhood chafe at him—the walls narrowing, the world darkening, the deep black water at the bottom looming large. He was entering his own personal ground zero. The metaphor occurred to him with a wave of self-conscious irony. What a self-pitying asshole he was! So he had eaten TV dinners and Pop-Tarts and not joined the Kids Hockey League because he couldn’t afford the uniform. So his father was an alcoholic and his mother was depressed and his fourth-grade teacher had never heard of the Holocaust. This was hardly the stuff of tragedy.

  This flurry of self-disgust did little to actually make him feel better, but he tried harder to see the beauty of Route 24. There were a lot of trees. It was green. So much greener than Southern California. And the road signs loomed large and cheerful, advertising every convenience a person could want. The bright pink and brown Dunkin’ Donuts logo, McDonald’s, Tiger Mart, Sunoco, and the smaller, more specific blue signs: Blue Notes Dry Cleaners, Amos’ Pizza, Stop & Shop, Canton Primary Care…There was no excuse for hunger (figurative or literal) here.

  Once he was actually on Main Street in New Bedford the green disappeared. The houses took on that particular working-class New England drabness—green siding, white siding, blue shingles, brown shingles, whatever the color, they were weathered to a dirty, equalizing gray. Two teenage boys with baseball hats pulled low made their way down the street, shoulders hunched as if facing a stiff wind. On the corner, a sassy-looking, feathered-haired woman leaned against a car, smoking, glaring at the passing cars like someone projected forward from 1983. A team of scrappy kids came whooping and hollering to the corner. New Bedford was a mean town. There was no way around it. No one looked healthy. No one looked glad.

  Lucinda Banks still lived in the house that Neil and his brother had grown up in. It had been the primary windfall of the divorce, which had sent Neil’s father off into a transient life of serial marriages and shabby, featureless apartments along the eastern seaboard. Alone in the house, Lucinda seemed determined to play anchor to John Banks’s shiftlessness, becoming more and more a rooted fixture of the place, existing within a shrinking radius of her home. The house itself was changeless—brown sandpaper shingles and dark green, peeling trim. There was a covered front porch, which had sagged for as long as Neil could remember, and had always let very little light into the house. And in the small strip of grass behind the house there was a rusty white gas tank that Neil and his brother had pretended was a rocket when they were young.