A Perfect Life (7 page)

“Okay, so why not throw me
in.
”

He narrowed his eyes. Then he grabbed the wheelchair, spun it roughly backward, and bumped it down the steps as if Maureen were a load of beer.

“You creep!” I yelled, wishing I'd had more practice cursing. I ran down and yanked his vest.

He turned and raised his fist. “Fuck you
and
your ugly friend,” he said. He plucked his vest from my hand and lumbered back up the steps.

“Don't you want a kiss?” Maureen shouted up to him.

He shot us both the finger.

“That does it,” I told Maureen.

Never mind, she said. She had gotten us in, hadn't she? She tried to straighten her stockings, but her hands were shaking.

“He shouldn't be able to get away with that,” I said.

“Jane,” she said, “if I stopped to report everyone who was a jerk to me in the course of a day, I would never have any fun. Let's go in. I'd rather spend my time dancing.”

Reluctantly, I held the door while she wheeled through.
The club was more crowded than usual, probably because spring had finally come. No matter how many times Maureen said “Excuse me,” the people in front of her wouldn't clear a path. Her only view was of crotches and rears.
I
could barely see, even when I stood on my toes.

A bearded man in a flowered shirt stopped beside Maureen. “Need a drink?” he said. “I'm on my way to the bar.”

She had met many such men at clubs, just as she had met them at record stores and shoe shops. Often, she dated the same man for six months or a year. But most of these men tended to vanish at the critical point, perhaps for the reasons most men don't ask the women they date to marry them. Or they didn't have the courage to ask Maureen.

“Hi.” A boy tapped my arm, then jerked his thumb toward the band. “Want to dance?” His hair was shaved short. He had a delicate skull, light brown skin, and a goatee.

“Sure,” I said. We found an empty space. The music was so loud that all I had to do was move my body with the beat. I hadn't danced much in high school. Dancing was something my sister did, not me. But now it seemed the perfect way to exorcise the temptation I felt to twitch or drop things or move in unpredictable ways. Since I had started coming to these clubs, I had found that I looked forward to dancing all week. I felt blissfully limp. From the corner of my eye, I saw the bearded man steering Maureen's wheelchair toward the door.

“Bye,” she mouthed. “Good luck,” as if, despite knowing me, she assumed I was hoping to go home with this boy.

He opened his eyes and smiled. He had a pleasant face and a lithe body. “Want to leave?” he asked.

I suddenly felt so alone, abandoned not only by Maureen but also, strangely, Willie, that I smiled and said,
Why not
. The cold air made me shiver. “I'm Ché,” he said. “And you're—?”

“Jane,” I said. He asked where I went to school. I'm a biologist, I said. I'm older than I look.

“Biology?” he said. “That's cool. I studied anatomy once. And a semester of botany. To help me, you know, paint.” He asked if I wanted to get coffee and a doughnut.

“I can't,” I said. “I'm sorry.” A trolley clattered past. “My sister is coming tomorrow.”

“Your sister,” he said. “That's cool. You can hang out with me tonight. Then I'll go to my studio and you can hang out with your sister.”

“No,” I said. “She's coming very early. I need to get some sleep.”

“You make her sound like a test.” The boy snapped his fingers. “Never mind the doughnuts. I have this really amazing almond cake my mom sent. And there's a pint of Steve's mint chip in my freezer.”

Ice cream and cake. He seemed so harmless, so young. The light changed, and the trolley rattled up the hill. I said I guessed some ice cream and cake couldn't hurt.

His apartment was only a few blocks away. He lived in one room, with a hot plate on the floor, a single bed, and a refrigerator the size of a safe. Most of his artwork was at his studio, but a dozen frameless paintings hung on the walls. Each painting showed a fragment of a body. One painting
showed a hand—I could almost make out each of the nineteen bones beneath the skin. Another showed a shoulder blade and a knee. Another, a woman's ear. Each image was composed of a few brushstrokes, as evanescent as the cross sections of tissue that Achiro mounted on his slides.

“I like these,” I said, and Ché leaned over and kissed me. I stroked his boyish cheek. He got down on his knees and slid a foil-wrapped box from under the bed, then went to the sink and rinsed two plates. The freezer was just large enough to hold the ice cream. He sliced the cake with a palette knife and served out two portions. Ché talked about the teachers he liked at art school, and those other teachers, the ones who seemed to find pleasure in destroying kids' souls. Another trolley rattled past. I felt I had gotten off a train in some city whose name I didn't know and the train had continued on without me.

“Guess I'm kind of sleepy,” Ché said. “Afternoons, I work this shit job at a furniture store out in Newton.” He stripped off his shirt. I was welcome to stay, he said. His body, the color of tea, looked beautiful against the sheets. The pulse in his scalp throbbed. I pressed my lips to the spot.

“You're nice,” he said. “Jane.” He closed his eyes, and I propped my head on one hand and studied him as though I might need to paint him later. He was finely made and hairless. I brushed some cake crumbs from the mattress and curled up beside him. But it was Willie I was thinking of. Those big hands and big teeth. The way he had tipped back his head and stretched his tongue to catch the last drop of chocolate milk.

The next morning, when I arrived at the Ritz, my father was waiting with a mangled
Wall Street Journal
beneath his arm and a pile of crushed cigarettes blotting the marble floor by his heel. Even on a Sunday morning, he was doing his job, giving his two unreliable daughters a glowing Lucky Strike at which to aim their arrival, safe and on time.

Honey towered above him, stiff and straight as a hat pin. She took my father's arm and, for a moment, I thought I saw my mother hovering behind them, looking the way she used to look when she was young, her face alert, her hair neatly cut and styled. It occurred to me that for the rest of my life, I would need to try not to hate my stepmother, which was so unfair to Honey that I already loved her.

Willie had dressed up for the occasion—he wore a decent pair of khakis and a pink-and-white-striped shirt. The day was so warm he had pushed the sleeves above his elbows; the muscles in his arms seemed incongruous on a man with such a soft face. He was grinning down at Laurel with a soppy expression I took to be love, or at least infatuation. She was smiling up at him and tossing her hair in
that flirtatious way she'd always had, even as a kid. But then I thought no, they could never be a couple. They looked too much alike. If you had seen them walking down the street, you would have thought they were
too much
. All that hair, his and hers. The way they smiled so broadly, with those wide, full-lipped mouths. Most people don't smile much. Some, not at all. For my sister and Willie, a smile seemed the normal shape of their mouths.

Oddly enough, my sister preferred spending time with men who looked pained. Her boyfriend, a young stockbroker named Chuck, stood a little way off, grimacing and checking his watch. A shank of dark hair hung over his eyes; he wore chinos, Top-Siders, and a light blue cardigan. This stranger was the first to notice I had come. He nudged Laurel, glad, no doubt, to have this excuse to divert her from Willie. They turned to me then, and their expressions reflected just how tired I must have looked.

I hadn't been able to fall asleep. Ché's bed had been too narrow, and I was too excited about seeing Laurel. When I finally did doze off, I heard Laurel call my name.
Jane!
I heard,
Jane!,
although I knew she couldn't have been there. I jumped up—and saw that it was after nine. Miraculously, the stockings I had been wearing the night before hadn't ripped. But what would people think when I showed up at the Ritz in that puckered top and miniskirt?

Honey reached out and traced the shadows beneath my eyes. “Willie,” she scolded, “you promised you would look after her.”

Laurel extended her arms. She wore a lacy white shawl, which hung like a tattered sail. She wrapped those arms
around me. “You know,” she said so quietly only I could hear, “I miss you so much sometimes, I think, ‘If only Jane could see this, if only Jane could be here.' The next time I go to Europe, I'm taking you with me.” She was doling out just enough of what I needed to hear so I wouldn't finally give up and stop loving her. “You look wonderful,” she said. “You always do. You're one of those people who can jump out of bed and throw on anything and look terrific.” She liked giving me compliments. And maybe she still saw me through a younger sister's eyes. “Jane, this is Chuck. Chuck, this is Jane. My brilliant sister, Jane.”

Laurel's date took his hand from his pocket and extended it like a gift. “We had other plans,” he informed me. “But Laurel insisted we put them off. I finally gave in. I mean, how often do I get the chance to meet a genius?”

“Man,” Willie said, “who invented this brunch thing? If you eat when you wake up, then a few hours later you're sitting in front of this big old omelet, and you can't force down more than a few bites. If you
don't
eat, you're cranky as a bear.” He put on those dime-store glasses and peered at the menu. We ordered and made small talk. I tried not to watch my sister the way other people watched me. Was she tossing her head more than usual? Why did the marmalade slip from her knife before it reached her croissant? And why had she stopped playing the cello, as she mentioned she had, after practicing it so many years?

“I didn't give it up.” Laurel smiled and revealed that little bridge of flesh. “I just got busy with other things.”

I couldn't bear the thought of that beautiful cello going unplayed. How many hours had I sat in our living room
studying while the cello's mournful voice drifted down from upstairs? Once, on a shadowy October afternoon, I was lying on the couch reading a book about the Pleistocene era—those colossal sheets of ice churning down from the North Pole, those half-human creatures about whom we know so little except the shape of their bones—and I looked up from the page, past the rippling silver spine of the radiator, to the backyard, where the dried cornstalks in my mother's garden quivered in the wind, and the sound of my sister's cello was the sound the wind made rustling through those cornstalks, the sound those Cro-Magnon men and women heard as they crouched shivering in their caves.

Laurel's music teachers had encouraged her to make the cello her career. But even then, in high school, she didn't have the patience. She wanted to learn to dance. She rode horses. She skied in Switzerland. She explored an underwater reef off Australia. “Don't you want to leave something behind?” I asked her once. And she answered: “Who cares? I won't be here to see it.” Still, she had kept up her passion for dance. She had started ballet at six, and she kept taking lessons all through college, where she enrolled in a course called Physical Expression. She met some boys in that class, all of them beginners, and they worked up a routine. That being the early seventies, they took their friends' encouragement as a sign that they ought to drop out of school and start their own dance troupe, which they named Six Left Feet. The one time I saw them perform, they were so awkward and pretentious I slipped out before the end, to save myself from having to lie to Laurel.

My father wasn't pleased that his younger daughter was exhibiting her body on a stage. He gave her money to travel, and Laurel accepted it because he had plenty to spare and she thought she didn't have the time to earn it herself. No matter how often I reminded her that she had a fifty-fifty chance of escaping the disease, she remained certain that she would die even younger than our mother. I was working as much to save my sister, to prove she didn't have the gene for Valentine's so she could stop wasting her life, as I was to save myself.

Now, as we ate, Laurel told us about the time she had spent in Germany. She described what it had felt like to drive down the autobahn and see a sign for Bergen-Belsen, or to stand at the gates of Dachau. What she said was quite moving. But her life seemed a sort of scavenger hunt. She had brought back her knowledge of the Holocaust the way she had brought each of us souvenirs: a rare chardonnay for our father's birthday (I had been foolish enough to take him at his word that he didn't enjoy receiving expensive things he didn't need); an Hermès scarf for Honey (how had Laurel known to buy a gift for a woman whose engagement to our father hadn't yet been announced?); and a beautiful linen nightshirt from Belgium for me. When it came to Willie, Laurel rummaged through her handbag and pulled out a cassette, which, she explained, was one of only two copies of an original composition by a composer whose name I didn't recognize but caused Willie to nod his head. The composer had written this piece for Laurel. “We'll be giving a concert in Boston on Christmas Eve,” she told us. “It's
the first time I'll be choreographing my own pieces. I hope you all can come.”

Willie slid the tape into the breast pocket of his shirt.
How could you?
I thought, as if I were the only woman who had a right to that spot. “Always on the lookout for an excuse to visit the big city.”

Laurel smiled and said she hoped he wouldn't be disappointed. She described how difficult it was to choreograph a dance. Willie's face seemed a spotlight shining only on her. What could I expect? My sister had more interesting things to talk about than how to kill a mouse.

Only Honey seemed impatient. I saw her shuffle crumbs from the tablecloth to her palm, then hesitate, as if she weren't sure where she might deposit them. Glancing down, I was startled to discover she had taken off her shoes. Honey saw me staring and slipped them back on. Her hand fluttered to the vase and plucked a withered bloom. When the centerpiece was perfect, she raised her knife and tapped her glass.

“Everyone! Herb and I have an announcement. Don't we, Herb? You young people might think we're just a pair of old fools, but we've decided to take the big plunge.” She looked around the table, but none of us responded.

“Ahh,” my father said, “what she means is, when I hit sixty, she started to worry she'd been letting me
shtup
her for nothing. She was afraid I was going to drop dead without leaving her a dime.”

I felt sorry for Honey. But maybe my father's jokes were like the calluses on Dusty's feet, something rough she could
take satisfaction in smoothing away. “Herb!” she said. “The children know you're joking, but a visitor might believe the ridiculous things you say.”

My father turned to Chuck, who was patting his lips to conceal a smirk. “Think it's funny? Think you're rich enough and handsome enough you're going to be shacking up with beautiful young girls forever? Girls you have no intention of marrying?”

Chuck began to stand, as if he intended to ask my father to settle their dispute outside.

“Chuck,” Laurel said. “That's just my father. That's just the way he talks.”

Since this was true, I wondered why she felt compelled to bring her boyfriends home to meet him. Chuck stared at her, as if reminding himself of what he would lose by disagreeing. He flipped the hair from his eyes, and our father made a face that conveyed his disappointment that Chuck hadn't thrown the first punch.

“Excuse me.” Honey cleared her throat. “In my day, when a couple announced their engagement, someone wished them good luck.”

Willie stood and raised his tomato juice. “To our parents,” he said. “May you enjoy many years of joy,” at which my father gave Honey such an unabashed kiss I felt happy for them both. After she got over being flustered, Honey told us her plans for the wedding. She would fix up the house in Mule's Neck to accommodate a “modest lunch.” The reception would be held in the sunny backyard where my mother's garden used to be. Laurel smiled absently, as if
when these events came to pass, she wouldn't be here to see them
.
Chuck whispered something in her ear, and Laurel pushed back her chair.

“I'm sorry, everyone,” Laurel said. “One of Chuck's friends runs a skydiving school, and I'm supposed to take my first lesson in an hour.”

I imagined her falling through the clouds, her hair flying in all directions. In place of a parachute, she wore only that tattered shawl. “But you promised,” I said. “You told Mom you would never do it.” Years before, Laurel had gotten it into her head to take skydiving lessons. When our father reminded her how much things like that cost, our mother interrupted. Laurel, she said, promise me you won't even think of jumping out of an airplane until after I'm dead.

“I kept my promise,” Laurel told me now. “You know, Jane, I kept it.”

I nearly slapped her for thinking she could get away with saying that. She had always been rash. With our mother so distracted, I had been the one to keep Laurel from getting hurt. With my help, she had survived a bout with a hornets' nest and a near kidnapping by a stranger whose car she climbed into because that seemed easier than giving the man directions. I had cared for our mother for that entire awful year before she died. Yet my sister never acknowledged how much she owed me. “I borrowed a sailboat,” I said. “I wrote you. You said you were looking forward to being on the river again. To going sailing.”

“Jane,” she said, “I'm sorry. I forgot and made other plans.”

Anyone else might have believed this version of events. But my sister cultivated this aura of being flighty to provide a cover for getting out of what she didn't want to do. I knew that she was avoiding me. I had always been the good one. The one who stayed in college. The one who was doing something useful. When our mother had grown too feeble for our father to take care of, Laurel had hitchhiked home to help. She spent one week in Mule's Neck, then called me at midnight, sobbing, and said:
Please, Jane, I can't
.
You're the responsible one. I'm not. I can't stand to see her dying.

“I'll be back in Boston later this summer,” Laurel said now. “We'll go sailing then, I promise. We'll do whatever you want to do.”

I told her that it wasn't only a question of what
I
wanted. Didn't she think our father wanted to spend time with her? And what about Honey? Didn't Laurel think her new stepmother would want to get to know her?

My father waved away my anger. “Go on,” he said. “Honey and I understand. We have to be starting back anyway.”

I knew this was nonsense. My father wanted to be with Laurel as much as I did. But he never rebuked her. “You need some money?” he asked, and Laurel shook her head, although I knew he would send a check anyway, or slip it in her purse. “Be careful,” he said. “That's all I ask.” He jabbed a finger at Chuck. “And you. Anything happens to my girl, I'm pushing
you
out of a plane.” Chuck started to defend himself, but Laurel shushed them both. She clasped her shawl to her chest, leaned forward, and kissed me. She rubbed her cheek to Honey's. Then she surprised me by
brushing the hair from Willie's ear and whispering something until he laughed.

“Sure,” he said. “Of course I will.” Chuck led Laurel from the restaurant without even thanking our father for brunch.