Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  Neil got out of the car determined to be easy and kind. His mother was a disappointed woman. She had been young and hopeful once. (Hadn’t she? He couldn’t remember this, but at some point it must have been true.) In the form of John Banks, a sick father, and thwarted aspirations, life had served her a meager and gristly meal. This was where her meanness came from. It was important to remember this if he wanted to make it through the visit unscathed.

  He had not even raised his hand to knock on the door when it opened to reveal his mother in one of her classic nubbly beige cardigan and gray skirt getups that evoked a sense of wartime privation, her gray hair pulled back into a bun.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t my own Hollywood star,” she said, smirking and nodding her head slightly.

  “Hi, Ma,” he said. In the largeness of his resolution to be easy and bring happiness and put aside his own gripes, he considered, for a moment, the possibility of kissing her on the cheek. But it was too outlandish an idea—was sure to freak them both out. So instead he nodded too, and ducked into the hall with its dank, cigarette-smoke smell and hideous brown-carpeted stairway.

  “I would have put the champagne on ice, but then I remembered I don’t have any,” Lucinda cracked, leading him into the living room.

  “Oh!” Neil said, remembering the fancy lemon and strawberry layer cake probably melting away on the front seat of his car. “I brought a cake for you. Hang on—I’ll just run out and get it.”

  “A cake!” Lucinda sank into her armchair and lit a cigarette. But Neil could tell she was pleased.

  Entering the house for the second time, cake box in hand, Neil had the chance to consider more completely what a museum it was. Nothing had changed. Not out of some desire of his mother’s to preserve but out of utter indifference. Only the television was new. And the towering pile of crossword puzzle books on top of it—this was the preoccupation into which she now channeled her genuine and thoroughly wasted love of books and language. She was, after all, the source of Neil’s own obsessive relationship with words.

  “Jim and Sally coming over too?” Neil asked. Jim was his brother—the living, look-alike reminder of what Neil himself would have been if it had not been for the boarding school he had escaped to on scholarship.

  Lucinda made a disparaging grunt. “I hope not.”

  “You didn’t invite them?”

  “I wanted you all to myself, my pretty. And”—she drew on the cigarette—“Sally would have insisted on cooking and I can’t stand that garbage she passes off as food. Those kids are headed for fat city on the fast train.”

  “That bad?”

  Lucinda rolled her eyes. “She doesn’t like to come over here anyway.” She sighed in what might have been her first expression of genuine emotion.

  “Well, you gotta stop smoking.”

  Lucinda shot him a baleful gaze. “You’re one to talk.”

  “How do you know I haven’t given it up?”

  “Ha! You don’t think I can smell a smoker’s sweat?”

  Neil smiled weakly, leaning back on the sofa. “So how are you? What’s going on here, Ma?”

  “Well.” She tucked her legs up under her in what struck him as a girlish movement. “What’s ‘going on’ with me is that I’m teaching three classes now—how fabulous, right?” This was a reference to the after-school crafts program she had so disdainfully taught for the last fifteen years. “My blood pressure’s down, and I’m seeing someone.”

  Neil’s mind wobbled under the weight of this novel idea. His mother, Lucinda Banks, renowned bitter pill, seeing someone. For a moment he could only sit in wonderment, unable to think of anything to follow this with.

  “My brilliant son, at a loss for words?” Lucinda said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”

  “Who is he?” Neil asked. “How did you meet him?”

  “No one you know. I met him at temple.”

  “Temple…?” Neil blanched. The idea that his mother had gone truly crazy or joined a cult presented itself forcefully.

  “Temple Beth Avraham—it’s not right in town, I have to take the bus, but now—”

  “A synagogue?”

  “Yes, a synagogue.”

  “But you’re not Jewish.”

  “Well, I should have been. I’ve always liked Jewish people.”

  Neil did not take this on.

  “Bob says I’ve got a naturally Hebrew outlook on life.”

  “Wow.” Neil nodded.

  From outside there was the frightening rumble of one of New Bedford’s Paleolithic-era buses. “Bob is the guy?”

  “Bob is ‘the guy.’” Lucinda glared at Neil. “Anyway”—she drew on her cigarette—“I just wanted you to know because I invited him for lunch.”

  “Wow,” Neil repeated stupidly. “Has he met Jim?”

  “I haven’t had the chance to organize it.”

  “Oh.” Neil felt a ghost of the old satisfaction mixed with guilt—that detestable, gloating competitiveness that his mother had always inspired. Without a husband to badger and manipulate, she had turned to her sons and played them with guilt and aloofness, with meager rewards and inconsistent punishments and the fickle sense of allegiance that passed for affection in their odd little family. One year, she had given Neil a dirt bike for Christmas and given Jim a winter hat. And after Neil had gone off to boarding school he had always been favored son. There was shame inherent in her approval, a flip side to any of the insufficient gestures of her love.

  “But what about you?” she asked with sarcastic vigor. “Isn’t it about time for you to start tying yourself down with a wife and kids?” She blew a stream of smoke out of her nose.

  When Bob arrived, he proved to be surprisingly genial. Neil had pictured someone defective—a mute or a social misfit. But in fact he was simply older: seventy-five or so, Neil guessed. He wore a madras shirt and khakis pulled up high around his waist and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses nearly as large and square as Lucinda’s. But he was sharper than he looked. His air of surprised, almost boyish innocence was belied by a kind of amused appreciation of absurdity that was downright likable. He was not, after all, as oblivious to Lucinda’s jumpy crankiness as Neil had imagined he must be, but seemed instead to be entertained by it. And in his presence Lucinda seemed, in fact, to be able to smile, if not actually laugh, at herself.

  She had taken pains with the meal—two tins of tiny hot dogs, a macaroni and mayonnaise salad, sliced ham with mustard, and two bowls of frozen vegetables: succotash and French-cut green beans.

  I know how you love succotash, she said to Bob, who agreed heartily.

  “So your mother tells me you’re a screenwriter,” Bob said, tucking into his favorite dish.

  “Really?” Neil said in surprise, planning at first to call his mother on the fabrication. But then, looking at her sitting there, fork paused in the middle of her macaroni and lips parted in earnest expectation, he realized this was not necessarily a conscious error on her part. She looked, not sheepish or apologetic, but interested—and proud. As if she had been too shy somehow to ask him about this aspect of his life herself. Where had she gotten the idea? Had he, somehow, led her to believe it?

  In the face of all this expectation, Neil couldn’t bring himself to set things straight.

  “Oh, sort of,” he said. “Here and there.”

  Bob seemed to buy this ridiculous response. “You get to meet a lot of famous people? Actors?” he asked.

  “No—I mean, LA isn’t—” he began.

  “Tell him about the time you met Sharon Stone,” his mother interjected.

  He stared at her. Had he really told her about this? One of those meaningless Hollywood celebrity encounters, in this case involving lost car keys and an angry valet? The vision of his life—or the way he had represented it to her—was becoming frighteningly pathetic. But he felt captive to his mother’s odd state of thrall; she was, it occurred to him for the first time possibly ever, proud. Or
proud of what she imagined him to be.

  “Well, there’s this place in Beverly Hills…” he heard himself begin to recount obligingly. And he hated himself for playing this role—it was a role, wasn’t it? Doubt crept into his mind, accompanied by a real panic. It was just a son serving up what his mother wanted, he tried to reassure himself as he spoke. He was aware the story was losing something in the distractedness of his telling.

  His mother nodded along as if it were the most interesting thing she had ever heard. And Bob tilted his good ear toward him and gave an unconvincing chuckle at the end.

  “Now, which one is Sharon Stone again?” he asked, and Lucinda’s face fell.

  It was later, after Bob had left, after the fancy cake had been picked at and the leftover succotash scraped into the trash, that Lucinda turned. She always did—it had been naïve of Neil to think that somehow maybe this time he had escaped a direct hit.

  “Bob says if a man isn’t married by the time he’s thirty-five he’s not meant to settle down,” she said from the doorway of the kitchen, where she had stood for some time, leaning against the doorjamb, smoking and watching Neil do dishes.

  “Oh? Based on some kind of data he’s collected?”

  “Based on his experience.”

  Neil decided not to question this and waited warily for what would follow.

  “I’ve always known you wouldn’t settle down. You were never meant to have a family.”

  Neil kept his eyes trained on the dishes in the sink and said nothing.

  “You’re so—” she paused, possibly for emphasis—“critical. You’re always thinking about what’s wrong and how everyone else is screwed up—but what do you do? That’s no way to make anything.”

  “Where’s this coming from?” Neil asked, smarting under the blow of her words despite himself. “What did I say?”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I see the way you look. I see what you’re up to. And it hasn’t got you very far, has it?”

  Neil froze, hands submerged in the dirty water of the brown rubber tub. And for a moment he was again the boy mocked for putting on airs, and a kind of desolation swept through him.

  The kitchen was silent but for the sound of the water running.

  Lucinda pushed herself off the doorjamb and came over to the sink, where she picked up a plate and began drying it. “That’s all right,” she said. “Not everyone has to be positive.”

  Neil shut the water off and turned to her finally, an unexpected rage making his voice shake. “Unlike you, I guess,” he said. “You were always so…encouraging.”

  Lucinda shrugged, and finished wiping off the plate she had picked up. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” she said almost cheerfully.

  But when she turned to face him finally, her face was not actually cheerful at all. “I’m just saying I know you, Neil Banks,” she said looking him straight in the eyes.

  And Neil looked back at her, wanting to challenge this, or something more complex—wanting, somehow, to undo it, but he could not.

  All the way home those words resounded in Neil’s head. She was his mother. She had brought him into this world. She knew him.

  13

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING when Laura spotted Neil sitting in his car outside her house. She and Genevieve and Miranda were taking Cocoa for a walk. The sight of Neil’s face looking long, pale, and wretched (did he always look this way?) gave her an electric jolt of fear. He had not called all week, and now here he was, right in front of her. What on earth was he doing? Mac would be home in a few hours. Kaaren was cooking up “health burgers” in the kitchen. For Christ’s sake—Genevieve and Miranda were at Laura’s side!

  “Neil,” she exclaimed before she could master her surprise. Genevieve looked up at her, startled—she had been mid-description of her friend Morgan’s new doll.

  Neil himself looked startled, as if despite the fact that he had driven here and parked outside Laura’s house he was actually surprised to see her. He raised one hand in a sheepish gesture of greeting.

  “What? Who is it, Mom?” Genevieve asked, tightening her grip on Laura’s hand.

  “Just someone I know.” Laura tried to affect a breezy tone. “I’ll go say hi—why don’t you see what Miranda is doing?”

  Genevieve glanced at Miranda, who was noisily pushing her giant toy dump truck. “I want to come with you.”

  “Well—” Laura began to protest, but then realized this would seem, to Genevieve, unusual. “Okay.” She started across the lawn, Genevieve beside her.

  Neil rolled down the passenger-side window.

  “Hey,” he said sheepishly.

  “What brings you here?” Laura asked with a tight-lipped smile.

  “Me? Oh, just…” he glanced at Genevieve. “I was just in the neighborhood and I thought I’d say hi.”

  “Oh.” Laura nodded robotically. Miranda, sensing some sort of disturbance, chose this moment to race over, sweaty hair flying, dump truck upended on the sidewalk.

  “This is my daughter Miranda,” Laura said, aware that a tone of slightly icy formality had entered her voice. “And my daughter Genevieve.”

  “Who he?” Miranda demanded.

  “This is Neil,” Laura answered before Neil had the chance to speak. “He went to school with Mommy.”

  Neil smiled and bobbed his head foolishly.

  “Well, we’re just walking the dog,” Laura said. Sweet, sensitive Genevieve shifted her gaze down to her feet, and with a pang of regret Laura sensed that her daughter had grasped the implicit insult. It was just the sort of thing that would keep Genevieve coming back to the encounter: Why was he there? Did Laura not like him? Who was he again? She would hopefully unburden herself of her questions before Mac came home.

  “He coming?” Miranda asked, looking nonplussed.

  “Oh, no,” Neil said. “No—I was just driving by. But it was nice to meet you.”

  Laura felt a wave of relief, and a slight pang of apology.

  “I like your car,” Genevieve startled her by saying.

  “You do?” Neil grinned. “Thanks.” He patted the dashboard. “It’s a good car.”

  “Well.” Laura raised her eyebrows. “You know,” she added impulsively, “I have to pick up some dinner after this if you want to meet me for a quick cup of coffee.”

  “Yeah?” Neil said hesitantly.

  “There’s a place around the corner—Patrick’s—”

  Her eyes met his for a split second and in that he became again the man who made her insides turn to water.

  “Really?” he said.

  Laura looked at her watch. It was five. She had two hours before she could realistically expect Mac. She nodded.

  “All right, then. Half an hour?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  He turned the key in the ignition and Laura clapped her hands to call Cocoa, who all this time had been busy digging a hole in one of the neighbors’ flower beds. “C’mon,” she said, tapping the girls’ heads gently to pull them away from the spot where they stood staring like some sort of mummer’s chorus. “Let’s walk.”

  Sitting across from Neil half an hour later, Laura was all nerves and anxious glances. It was, after all, her neighborhood watering hole—a pretentious little wine bar with plate-glass windows and tall, spindly metal stools that made the people sitting on them seem bulky and awkward. Someone she knew was bound to walk in at any moment. It was not the place one would ideally come with the person one was having an affair with. But right now, right here, Laura told herself, Neil was simply an old college friend. There was nothing odd about this.

  The truth was that she had pined for him over the last week, though. She had not called him because she was trying to practice restraint and maintain dignity. But it was incredible how physically she had wanted him. Craved him, really. The touch of his hand on her bare arm. The way he looked at her. The way he seemed to really see her. And to see something beautiful and interesting. Almost
marvelous. It gave her an unusual, heady rush of self-regard.

  Suddenly she noticed the men who glanced at her as she ordered her coffee at the bakery, or whose eyes she met walking down the street, or even at her daughter’s school.

  For the first time in ages she felt aware of herself as a woman—half of a basic, primal equation. It ran like a stream of constant background static through every interaction with the opposite sex. It was like having swallowed barium or whatever it was they gave people during those body scans—suddenly the markings of sex stood out on everyone around her, a bright electric blue that had been, until now, completely obscured. Here were all these people going about their complicated lives, organizing, planning, carrying out the details of their hyper-evolved upper-middle-class jobs, when really they were just animals, with bodies: fat, thin, clean, or dirty, needing oxygen and food.

  She tried to sip her Pinot Grigio slowly and look unintimate as Neil explained the events that had brought him to her doorstep. A visit to his mother’s, her new boyfriend, the depressing town of New Bedford…Laura tried to balance his slightly crazy intensity with her appearance of composure. “Right,” she would say from time to time. Or, “Wow.” And she both heard and didn’t hear him through her own self-consciousness.

  Neil had clearly been rattled by his visit to his mother. She had said something that had unnerved him—about children, or his children…It had made him think of Jenny. And of Colin. How was Jenny going to raise him? Wasn’t she just going to be one of those mothers who—