Perfect Life

by Jessica Shattuck

  “Right there—just right-click,” Joe was saying when there was a rapid, aggressive series of taps on the side of his cube.

  It was Rod Emerus, in his signature CEO getup of dark shirt tucked snugly into dark jeans.

  “Oh! Hi!” Joe seemed nearly to swallow his own tongue.

  It was rare that Emerus made the trek downstairs and into the wretched cube world his creative team lived and breathed in.

  “Can I have a word with you, Banks? In the conference room?” Emerus said.

  “Sure.” Neil nodded and then realized, as Emerus remained standing there, that the man meant immediately. “Now?”

  “I understand there are some problems between you and Closter,” Emerus said as soon as the conference room door was shut behind them.

  “Oh,” Neil said, feeling his heart sink. Feeling, really, everything sink. It was so incredibly stupid. How had he come to be involved in this?

  “Oh’?” Emerus repeated. “Well, are there?”

  “I don’t have any problem with him,” Neil said flatly.

  Emerus dropped into a chair and regarded Neil frankly.

  “I didn’t think so,” he said finally. “Well. He has a problem with you, I’m sure you are aware.”

  Neil nodded.

  “Look.” Emerus leaned forward. “Closter is an asswipe. We know that. I can’t get rid of him, though, because he’s been here too long. Too many stock options. You just go about your work and I’ll handle him. You pick a new right-hand man—someone who knows his way around gameplay—and I’ll find a new assignment for Steven.”

  “That’s all right—” Neil began, but Emerus waved this aside.

  “No. It’s better that way. Consider it done. Is there anyone you want to work with?”

  Neil tried to remember the other senior staff. Hal Offert, a nervous guy with thick glasses. Sung Ho, who liked to race ATVs on the weekend. And—he literally couldn’t think of anyone else. He had been living in a bubble here, head in his work and then a fast exit at the end of the day. He could only vaguely conjure up faces.

  “Joe?” he said finally.

  “Joe?” Emerus frowned. “Joe Turnblum?”

  Neil nodded.

  “Joe is an intern.”

  “Oh.”

  Emerus was silent. A long, craggy vein on his forehead began to pulse with the working of his jaw. For a moment Neil thought he had been enraged by the ignorance of the suggestion.

  “You think he can do it?” Emerus asked instead, though.

  “I don’t know—I mean, he’s been teaching me MotionBuilder.”

  “All right.” Emerus tapped his pen on the table. “I’ll put him on it. With Sung Ho as backup.” He shot Neil a hard look. “He owes you. Big time.”

  Neil nodded. “All right, then.” He began to back toward the door.

  “Wait,” Emerus said. He tilted his long pale head to the side. “I understand you spent some time in Africa.”

  The question startled Neil. “How did you—”

  Emerus waved this away. “I know everything. Don’t bother asking how. Where were you?”

  “The Congo,” Neil said. “Mostly.”

  “Mmmm.” Emerus nodded thoughtfully.

  It was an unlikely line of conversation. Neil waited with interest to see what was coming next. Maybe the man had some philanthropic interest in the region? He had to do something with his money, after all.

  “They had a civil war there, right? Militias and child soldiers and all that? Macheteing people’s hands off? Rape?”

  The line of questioning took Neil aback. He nodded warily.

  “You see any of that?”

  “Well, not right before my eyes. I mean, I wasn’t in the villages when—”

  “But the idea. You got the idea of it. The victims and stuff. The chaos.”

  Neil’s discomfort was growing. “I guess so.” He frowned. “I guess I ‘got’ it.’”

  Emerus did not acknowledge the sarcasm in Neil’s voice. He leaned forward on the table. “So I think you’ve got to work that into the gameplay. An Africa planet or something. That climate of vicious anarchy. Colored aliens, tribes, war crimes. Gamers love that stuff. Some little pocket of Africa-flavored hell in the galaxy. Level five, maybe.”

  Neil stared at him.

  “Hey, I’m not saying anything racist. I mean, these people—these aliens can be pink, for all I care. Purple. Its just the idea of it—this primitive, twisted place you have to fight your way out of.”

  If Neil had had any pride left, any grain of idealism or hope or self-respect, he would have quit. Right then and there. The thought registered with a wild, internal shriek of defeat.

  “Right,” he said, and started for the door.

  “Banks,” Emerus said. “Don’t look so glum. There’s money in it—I promise you.”

  Neil had jotted the address Galena had supplied him with on the palm of his hand. Old school, he could hear Johnson’s imagined voice taunting in his ear.

  He had actually forgotten about it until that night, eating his microwaved pizza and leafing through a tome of collected essays on nineteenth-century missions in Central Africa. It was his first night back at Johnson’s. The work on the kitchen ceiling was nearly done and it had become clear that it would be better for him to clear out of Elise’s house. But sitting here under the fluorescent light of Johnson’s kitchen, he missed the warmth of their household—missed James’s cackle and Nigel’s intent, observant stare. He had really formed a bond with them, hadn’t he?

  With his book open before him and greasy napkins strewn across the Formica tabletop, Neil was reminded of the address when he lifted his hand from the spot where it had been resting. There it was, backward, in smudged blue ink like some sort of secret code. Belleview Road. It had a saccharine sound to it. Was he really planning to write Jenny a card? He had been so focused on obtaining the information, he had not really formulated a plan. What would he say? Why don’t you see a lawyer and see if you can get visitation rights? Laura had suggested. But this wasn’t the point. He didn’t want visitation rights. He wanted something both more obscure and more profound: he wanted respect. He wanted not to feel like some dirty secret.

  And he wanted—if he was really honest with himself—Jenny to be thwarted in her plans. There was something almost supernatural about the way she always got what she wanted. How docilely he had submitted himself to her agenda, as if he were still the screwed-up twenty-one-year-old boyfriend who had let himself be persuaded to drive all the way to New York to bring her to a job interview, only to be kept waiting for four hours in the car. Who had gone out and spent his hard-earned cash on a rented tux(!) so he could accompany her to the Radcliffe Ball. She was the only person who’d had this effect on him. And it was dangerous—a threat to the very core of his own sense of who he was: unmalleable, strong-willed, eccentric. Not someone who just went along with other people’s ideas.

  He picked up the notebook Kirstin had left, in a naïvely hopeful gesture, for him to write down any calls that came for her or Johnson, and shoved it into his back pocket. He grabbed a pen and his car keys and wallet. He would just go. Just check it out. He could think of something to write when he was there. If he even wanted to write anything at all. And he could see the backdrop against which his son’s childhood was to unfold.

  Route 128 was reasonably empty; it was nearly ten and a weeknight, and Neil drove along with the windows open and the fresh, cool spring air battering his ears. At the Wellesley exit he turned onto Route 16, with its array of suburban conveniences—the ubiquitous roadside Chinese restaurant, the appliance showroom, the posh “free library,” and, as he neared the center, the increasingly high-end boutiques and precious bakeries.

  Finally he reached the corner of Pond Road and from there turned onto Belleview. At the end of the driveway to number 27, he edged the car to the side and idled for a few minutes, staring, before cutting the ignition.

  The house was atrocious. Big, u
gly, and showy. The kind of bland and squeaky new that characterized the homes of the B-list celebrities profiled on MTV Cribs. The clearing it stood in was cut into the wooded hillside like a brand.

  Quietly, quietly, he climbed out of the car and shut the door behind him. He felt exhilaratingly vulnerable, standing so suspiciously at the side of this pedestrian-free suburban road. But no car passed and there was nothing but the sound of wind in the heads of the tall pines that lined the property. After a few minutes he started up the drive toward the house, his heart pounding. What would he say if Jenny or Jeremy or whoever came out and found him there, making his way up the drive? Would they call the police? He was in violation of the donor contract, to be sure. And of basic trespassing laws, for that matter. He registered these thoughts but didn’t act on them—the thrill of transgression pulsed through him.

  Neil kept to the trees and proceeded past the garage and up the hill behind the house instead of risking a walk across the front lawn. Someone was home for certain. There was a Land Rover parked at the garage door and there were lights on all along the backside of the downstairs.

  At the highest point of the lawn behind the house, Neil stopped and crouched down on the newly turned earth at the edge of the woods. There was a fancy-looking swing set and jungle gym and on the flagstone terrace a forgotten baby contraption: something garish and elaborate-looking.

  From here he could see inside the house clearly. There were no curtains and the only shaded windows were upstairs. The kitchen was fancy—granite countertops, Sub-Zero fridge, etc. The room beside it looked as of yet unassembled: a sofa still wrapped in plastic, two chairs, some heavy dark wooden furniture. On the roof there was a discreetly positioned satellite dish.

  As he watched, he saw a form cut across the kitchen—a dark-skinned, Latina-looking woman in a red oversized T-shirt. The housekeeper, or babysitter. Of course. She looked tired—they probably made her work crazy hours—it was nearly eleven, after all. What was she doing in the kitchen, for Christ’s sake? Neil watched as she rinsed a glass and filled it up with something from the refrigerator. She lived with them, maybe.

  As he watched, Neil began to form a narrative. His son would be raised in this empty, materialistic environment by a hired nanny who was too tired and too pissed off to give him love. He would probably go to some provincial rich-kids day school and learn how to play tennis and lacrosse. He’d have a giant TV and game system in his room and never be encouraged to read books—Jenny had never been a reader, had she? And all this would be just as Jenny wanted it, just as Jenny had planned from the start: the privileged childhood that she hadn’t had herself. The kind of soulless, unreflective reward that lay at the end of her consumer-driven version of the American Dream.

  In the kitchen, the woman moved out of his line of vision and a few moments later he saw the blue shadows of a television flash out the windows of one of the downstairs rooms. Maybe this meant Jenny and Jeremy were out. The woman was babysitting. Which meant they would be coming back. At any moment. There would be a crunch of wheels up the drive and already they would have seen his parked car, be on alert for intruders or disaster. Considered in this light, his position here at the edge of the woods, peering down into the unprotected windows of the house, seemed truly creepy. After the first chill of repulsion, it struck him as funny. He was making a habit of lurking outside sleeping houses in the dark.

  With some combination of panic and exhilaration, he began to make his way back down the hill, the loose earth skittering and sinking unevenly beneath his feet. Once back in the relative safety of the ditch along the side of the lower part of the driveway, he did not stop and look back. Twice he thought he could hear a car coming up the deserted road, imagined the sweep of headlights that would illuminate him there against the trees, the looks of fear and horror that would cross Jenny’s face, and his mind leapt ahead to the patrol car, the police station, and then the inevitable drift of information back to Elise and Chrissy, back to Laura…And this sobered him. Made him pray in earnest, actually, that he could get to his car and get out before he was discovered.

  And miraculously, because by this point he had imagined discovery so clearly it seemed inevitable, he made it back to his car without incident. He managed, even, to turn over the ignition, pull away, and drive to the end of Belleview Road undiscovered. By the time he reached the highway he was almost disappointed. There was no culminating drama to this bold lapse of judgment. And he had spotted neither mother nor child. But he had learned more. This was true. He had learned more about what he already knew.

  15

  CHRISSY WAS OFFICIALLY PISSED. Elise had pushed her over the edge: first with the endless wheedling over the donor sibling thing (she could admit it—she had been snivelly) and then with the regressive pot-smoking incidents. It was juvenile, really. Elise had turned herself into a sulky, rebellious teenager and Chrissy into a harried, aggravated mother figure. But now they were stuck. Elise could not find a way out.

  She should have listened to Neil (it was a sign of the general ridiculousness of her actions that Neil occupied any kind of wise role) when he had suggested last week that maybe she should not toke up again, considering how mad Chrissy had been the first time. But Elise had wanted to. She hadn’t bargained for the fact that the smoke alarm would go off, waking up the boys and disturbing the neighbors. It had elevated what would have been simply an immature act to an act of endangerment. Just remembering it made Elise blush. She was thirty-six, for Christ’s sake, an established genetic scientist! And she felt badly about Neil, who had gotten the brunt of Chrissy’s anger.

  It was on the heels of this that Elise called Jenny.

  Their snippy conversation had been weighing on her: not because she felt she had done anything wrong, but because in general, in life, she didn’t like to leave that sort of loose end. And with Chrissy angry at her, the silence that had fallen between her and Jenny felt particularly sad.

  So, Elise had sucked up her pride and called to apologize. She had expected a wound-up, hyper-organized Jenny, who would whisk past her apologies with a litany of things to be done. But instead, Jenny had sounded tired and unusually distracted. “Oh, whatever,” she had said in response to Elise’s contrition. “I don’t care.” Which was totally unlike Jenny.

  “Did you get your basement cleared out?” Elise asked.

  “No.” Jenny sighed.

  “Did you figure out the piano thing?” Elise asked.

  “What? Oh, I don’t know. We’ll just see if it fits.”

  Jenny had been obsessing over this for weeks. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Elise pressed. “You sound…different.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes!”

  There was a silence and then the sound of Jenny crying. Elise did not believe her ears. “Are you laughing?” she asked.

  And that was how she found out about the cancer. She was not supposed to tell anyone. Not even Laura. Not until Jenny and Jeremy had more information. And had made more decisions. Such as…? Elise wondered, but she didn’t ask. It was so incredibly terrible. And unlucky. It was terribly, terribly unlucky, just as Jenny had said. It was odd, Elise didn’t really know Jeremy; even after his four years of marriage to Jenny he remained shadowy in her mind: thin, serious, brilliant…she had no sense of what he was really like. But weirdly—horribly, really—it was not as shocking to her that he would get sick as it was that this would be happening to Jenny. This seemed incredible, impossible even. Everything always went right for Jenny. It was like a central tenet of her person.

  “What should I do?” Elise had turned immediately to Chrissy, of course, despite their current frostiness. As Angela Noyes’s daughter, Chrissy always knew intuitively the right thing to say and the right way to be helpful. For the moment, it dissolved the ice between them.

  “Bring her lunch,” Chrissy had said. “Bring her something healthy and delicious to eat while she’s unpacking. And then just listen.”

  And so on t
he day of Jenny’s move, Elise checked the two columns her lab assistant, Prakash, was running, and left to pick up and deliver Jenny lunch.

  At the fanciest food shop in Framingham, she picked up Diet Cokes and grilled chicken and spinach salad (Jenny would never eat something as bready and carb-filled as a sandwich) and headed off to Wellesley.

  Jenny’s house was bustling with movers and unpackers and a crew of gardeners putting the finishing touches on a terraced flower bed. A short, muscled man in a “Jesus Lives!” T-shirt was carrying a wing chair on his head, and two more workers grappled with the long part of a sectional sofa, sweat pouring off their foreheads despite the moderate temperature of the day.

  The house itself looked even bigger and more gleamingly new than Elise had imagined. She had seen it once before, when it was not yet finished, and the unpainted shell had not indicated how formal it would look.

  “Oh, that was sweet of you—you really didn’t have to bring lunch,” Jenny said, taking the bag from Elise and seeming more like her usual self. She was dressed in stylish workout clothes and had on lip gloss and her usual air of brisk efficiency.

  “It’s the least I could do,” Elise said, which Jenny did not acknowledge.

  “Give me five more minutes to direct these guys and then we’ll break,” she said. “Look around, if you like.”

  Elise did as told, and wandered while Jenny delivered calm, direct, but not particularly friendly instructions to the crew. The house was full of ostentatious nouveau touches like an upstairs gallery with a balustrade. The master bedroom had two giant walk-in closets that were each the size of the twins’ bedroom. Yet, for all the space, there was no one room that seemed to promise a comfortable or logical place to hang out.

  “What do you think?” Jenny asked breathlessly from behind her, startling Elise.