Perfect Life Read online

  “Okay,” she called over her shoulder, as she scurried down the sidewalk after Nigel. “I’ll divide up the list and email you three of them. Divide and conquer, right? Bye-bye.”

  Elise and Chrissy and the boys waved from the doorstep.

  “The list?” Elise asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Oh, that.” Chrissy pushed her hair behind her ear and immediately Elise knew the list was going to be something she wouldn’t like. Something Chrissy knew she wouldn’t like.

  “We just thought maybe we’d get in touch with the others and see if they were interested in setting up some sort of email connection—you know, like a list serve.” Chrissy tossed this off as she was heading up the stairs with Nigel, her back to Elise.

  And standing there, at that moment, looking after Chrissy’s solid form ascending the stairs, Elise felt biology—her love, her life’s work—rise up between them like a transparent but impenetrable scrim.

  2

  JEREMY WAS DRIVING JENNY CRAZY. The stomach flu had turned into an endless migraine and an irritating dry cough. And his complaints were incessant. Or actually, not so much his actual complaints, but the hangdog look he wore around the house and the general torpor with which he approached everything from dinner at the Hendersons’ to a trip to the cabinet store. Buck up, she wanted to say. She wanted, physically, to shake him, almost. This was not the Jeremy who had started up a mobile phone software company from the bedroom of his first postcollege apartment and sold it for twenty million dollars. This was not the Jeremy with whom she had biked across New Zealand and hiked up Machu Picchu.

  The new Jeremy, for the first time in his life, did not seem ambitious or driven. His start-up had seed funding from a group of platinum investors, a great board, and a proven technical team. But Jeremy was home by seven every night. He talked about “waiting and seeing” when she asked how the beta installations were going. He wasn’t jumping out of his skin in suspense. He wasn’t even getting up early to check the user blogs.

  This morning, for instance, when she came back upstairs from her half hour of early morning email he was still in bed.

  “Jeremy,” Jenny said sharply from the doorway. “Jeremy Markingham.” This was his middle name and Jenny liked to use it in jest. This morning she was not joking, though. It just gave her a few more syllables with which to wake him from his trance.

  He stirred under the covers and groaned.

  “It’s six forty-five,” Jenny said.

  “You go ahead,” he mumbled.

  Jenny put her glass of water down on the dresser. “What do you mean? You’re not going to be able to do Sugarloaf if you don’t step it up.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to run it this year.”

  Jenny stared at her husband’s form under the sheets incredulously.

  “Since when?”

  They were both committed runners. Every year since they had first met they had run the Sugarloaf Marathon together. Every year they trained for the preceding three months together. Running had been, in fact, a major part of their courtship, their honeymoon, their first years of marriage.

  “I’m going to take the year off.” Jeremy’s voice was muffled and his narrow face was turned toward the wall. All she could see was the mess of pale blond hair, soft and straight as a doll’s—completely wasted on a straight man, she liked to joke—on the gray satin pillow.

  “That’s it?” Jenny asked. “You’ve decided?”

  “Mmmff,” Jeremy said into the pillow.

  “Well,” Jenny said coldly, stripping off her nightgown and pulling on her jogging bra. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “I am telling you,” Jeremy said, rolling onto his back to look at her. He shaded his eyes from the overhead light.

  Jenny yanked on her running shorts.

  “I don’t feel up to it, Jen.”

  “That’s because you’re out of the habit.” She glared at him.

  Jeremy held her gaze inscrutably.

  “I just don’t get it,” she said.

  Jeremy sighed. “I’m sorry, Jen—I didn’t know you’d mind.”

  The unwittingness of this infuriated Jenny. She could run the marathon alone, that was not the problem. It was the loss of the activity—their activity (any half-respectable relationship book or advice columnist would tell you couples needed an activity they shared, wouldn’t they?) that bothered her. And this whole thing—this new malaise that had settled over Jeremy—was becoming a real problem. It was all about Colin, she was sure. Jeremy had seen none of the fertility center counselors, and read none of the infertility literature she had encouraged him to. He had done nothing to deal with the feelings that she was sure were now rising up in him, poisoning his well-being and his energy.

  Jenny had been convinced he would refuse to let her use Neil’s sperm, but when she girded herself to bring up the idea—the conviction, really, because as soon as she had thought of it she had known it was right—Jeremy had listened quietly, asked a few questions, and agreed. They had been in the restaurant at the top of the Hancock Building, looking out over the spread of glittering land and smooth black water that was Boston at night, and Jenny had been nervous. She had picked the restaurant because it was the scene of their first date and she had wanted the meal to feel equally consequential, to bring up this memory and resonate for him, almost as if it were an alternate way of conceiving a child. But the conversation had felt hollow. Her own voice detailed her thinking, offered up facts and figures as if she were giving a PowerPoint presentation, and Jeremy meticulously cut, speared, and ate his venison in silence. A known donor, she explained, was like a guarantee—sure, sperm banks offered profiles and SAT scores and, in some cases, even pictures, but what was to stop the donors from making things up? Some banks offered employee impressions, but they were just that: impressions. Who were these people selling their sperm? With a known donor you knew what you were getting—family history, emotional disposition, intelligence. She heard her voice speeding through the reasons like a motor. What she did not explain was that the very idea of inserting an unknown person’s sperm into her uterus was almost pathologically repelling to her.

  “And you’re sure he’s the best person?” Jeremy had asked when she got to Neil. Jenny had launched into her answer, carefully reasoned and rehearsed. Neil was brilliant. He had gotten a summa on his undergraduate thesis. He had pulled himself out of New Bedford by his own bootstraps. He had gotten two 800s on his SATs without even studying—these were facts. He had misapplied himself since college, but that was fine, because the natural ability was there. And in a way it made things easier: after all, their worlds were completely different, they were unlikely ever to intersect. His parents were both alive and, she would confirm, cancer-free. Plus—she threw this in as extra enticement—he looked something like Jeremy. This was a stretch.

  “Okay,” Jeremy had said, picking up his napkin and wiping his mouth.

  “Okay, Neil?” she had asked.

  Jeremy had looked at her—his head tilted slightly, and something unfamiliar and inscrutable in his eyes. She would always remember this. “Okay, whatever you want, Jen.”

  His acquiescence threw her: he knew very little about Neil other than that she had gone out with him in college. He had only met him twice. She would have liked to continue somehow. To reach over and draw him out: what was he thinking? But she had a sudden uncharacteristic problem. She did not know how.

  It was not until later, in the engrossing rush of her workday, that Jenny was able to put the matter of Jeremy’s frustrating malaise out of her head. She had a meeting scheduled with Eric Watson, head of worldwide marketing for the large pharmaceutical company she worked for, and she had been looking forward to it with suspense. Entering his office, her Triple Venti Latte in hand, she felt the shimmer of excitement that accompanied a conquest. In her twenties these had been largely of the romantic variety; now, as a mother and a married woman, her conquests were professional. The rush was surpris
ingly similar, though, both kinds linked, at root, to ambition, that underrated stimulant.

  “So what do you think?” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “Cut right to the chase, hunh?” he said, grinning. “No ‘How are you?’ No small talk?”

  Jenny shrugged, grinning back. “We’ve got work to do.” She had an instinctive rapport with Eric Watson. He was a big man, with the bearing of an ex-football player and a surprising Boston accent. He was a man who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. And he reminded her of her father, or what her father would have been if he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.

  “All right,” Eric said, throwing up his hands. “So what do you think?”

  They were choosing an advertising agency to help bring Jenny’s baby, her brainchild, the project she had been plotting, scheming, and pushing for during the last six months, to life.

  “Ogilvy,” she said firmly, settling into the chair opposite Eric’s desk.

  “Why’s that?” he raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head in one of those stylized gestures of confidence that he actually managed to pull off.

  Jenny outlined her reasons.

  She had thought them through carefully, and, as with anything to do with the project, she was convinced she was right.

  For many years, Genron had been marketing Setlan, a ubiquitous SSRI, prescribed with roughly the same frequency as Prozac. For two of those many years, Jenny’s job had been to promote Setlan, which was, at this point, basically a self-selling drug. It was a steady but unchallenging job that had left her with no room to make a splash.

  And then she had given birth to Colin, and with him, a brilliant idea. She had looked around at all the women in the mothers’ group she had dutifully joined and seen a potential market—large, easily accessible, and full of potential. All these women staggering around like sleepwalkers or mugging victims, joggling infants on their squishy last-ten-pounds hips, making do with decaf coffee and minimal sleep. Women who would never previously have set foot outside their homes without a blow-dry and a spray of Chloé were now going out in sweatpants and spit-up-stained T-shirts. They were full of unfamiliar feelings—feelings they wanted, ad nauseum, to discuss, or placate, or denounce as unfair. And they felt duped! This was an unspoken undercurrent—motherhood was not what they had been promised. After so much hard work being pregnant, sacrificing good cheese and caffeine and alcohol, not to mention their previously fit and trim bodies, the daily experience of infant care was not the joyous reward they deserved. They needed something, Jenny could see. They were ripe for a marketing campaign aimed at their particular quandary.

  Yes, of course, of course, Setlan and Prozac were already available to them. But these came with certain stigmas and associations. And these women were used to a greater degree of specificity—they didn’t run in aerobics sneakers, after all; they didn’t use body lotion on their faces. They had a name for their problem: postpartum depression. Now they needed a solution specifically aimed at it: Setlan PPD. They would not even need to come up with a new drug: just new packaging, and a campaign. The plan was brilliant in its simplicity.

  Eric listened to her tick off the reasons that made Ogilvy the best ad agency for the job, nodding at intervals. “All right,” he said, laying a big hand, palm down, on his desk. “You have a deal. But it better be good, for that price.”

  Jenny was just opening her mouth to respond when Eric’s secretary, Violet, stuck her head in. “Your babysitter’s on the phone,” she said apologetically. “I figured I better get you.”

  “Go on, go on,” Eric said, waving her out. “We’re all set.”

  Jenny picked up the phone at Violet’s desk.

  “I’m sorry for bother you,” Colin’s nanny, Maria, said. “I just wanted to know where is the baby’s binky toy. I am looking everywhere for it—”

  “The binky toy?” Jenny asked, sighing.

  “From the stroller. Always it hangs on the stroller. But today—nowhere.”

  “Ohhh, the pacifier clip—right—that thing. No.” Jenny rolled her eyes at Violet, who was sitting at her computer. “It must be there. I didn’t take it off.”

  “No. I look everywhere.”

  “Maybe it’s stuck behind the seat?”

  “No.”

  Jenny could picture Maria standing there shaking her head, insistent. Colin was probably sitting at her feet, dressed in about seven hundred layers topped off by his fanciest clothes.

  “I don’t know, Maria. Maybe Jeremy took it off,” she said, although this was almost unimaginable. Jeremy mucking around with the stroller? Even in his current state the idea was preposterous. The whole conversation was ridiculous.

  “Okay. I use a string to tie a new one, Okay? From his hat?”

  “I don’t think that’s safe,” Jenny said.

  “Then he will lose,” Maria said stubbornly.

  “Well, bring a few, then,” Jenny said. “Don’t we have a bunch in the drawer?”

  “I find two.”

  Jenny sighed. “I don’t know, then, Maria. You’ll just have to do what you can.”

  “Okay, Jenn-eefer,” Maria said brightly. “Sorry for disturb you.”

  Jenny hung up the phone.

  “Binky emergency?” Violet quipped.

  “There’s always something,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes.

  But it was unsavory, actually, picturing that pacifier and the little clown clip Colin loved to chew on missing. Had some vagrant been rifling around in the stroller? Another reason why they should, by now, have been safely settled in Wellesley. The city, even the Back Bay, was no place to raise a baby.

  Jenny’s own childhood had played out entirely in a bland but dependably safe subdivision of DeSoto, California, a semirural suburb of Fresno. It had not been a compelling place to grow up: as soon as she was able, she had been desperate to get out. But it had been comfortable, distinctly all-American, and stable. It was not entirely new, like those soulless bedroom communities springing up outside of LA where you heard about latchkey kids becoming neo-Nazis and spending afternoons high on crystal meth. But it was certainly not old either—not even in the California sense of the word. It had been established in the 1940s to house the workers of the local canning plant, and the homes that lined the mathematically plotted streets bore a resemblance to the functional, boxlike houses of military bases. But someone had had the bright idea to paint DeSoto’s homes cheerful, outlandish colors: pink, turquoise, fern-green, vermilion…And this had become a source of pride in the community—a kind of wildness otherwise absent in the conservative town of industrial and agricultural workers. It had, Jenny always felt, provided an inspiring example of scrappy all-American spirit. She imagined discussing this in interviews sometimes. Or drawing on it in business school commencement addresses she would, someday, be invited to give.

  As a girl, in her peach-colored house on Pine Street, she had imagined she would become a veterinarian when she grew up. It was an ambitious career, in the spectrum of careers held by members of her family. Her father was a foreman at the canning plant and her mother stayed at home and raised her four children. Her grandmother worked, to Jenny’s embarrassment, in the local grade school lunchroom. And her oldest brother, whom she had worshipped as a handsome, popular football player when he was in high school, had gone on to become a threshing machine operator. Veterinary school had been a brainy, upwardly mobile aspiration applauded by her mother, who was ambitious for her bright, winning fourth baby. “Promising” was the word most often bandied about on Jenny’s report cards, and Jenny had felt the crisp anticipation of its syllables, and the pressure.

  Which was one of the things that made DeSoto seem, in retrospect, to have been a good place to grow up. Jenny had been recognized. She had stood out as exceptional among the mediocre-minded children of this homogenous community. The system for recognizing and categorizing had been simple and effective. Unlike the vagaries of urba
n education—the rowdy, unacceptable public schools that ground down so many bright, capable young people before they ever had the chance to shine, or the precious, coddling private schools full of rich kids whose genuine, innate level of promise was obscured by expensive tutoring and extracurricular commitments, trips to China, and parental connections, DeSoto had been truly—purely—democratic.

  Not that Jenny would want to raise her own children there. That wasn’t the point. Colin had come into the world with a full freight of assets in his favor. He didn’t really need to be recognized for his pure smarts. Honestly, he didn’t even have to be so smart (although, of course, Jenny knew he was). No, Colin already had so much Jenny herself hadn’t had; his upbringing was going to be an entirely different story. He would go to private school, and they would take exotic, enriching family vacations to Europe, Asia, or even Africa once a year. By the time he was old enough to remember anything, they would have a beach house. Colin could be one of those rich kids she saw at the Wellesley Sports Club pool, slouching their tanned bodies under baseball caps, lazily tossing lacrosse balls, talking about what a drag it was to accompany their “’rents” to Provence.

  And, of course, he had his own uniquely successful set of genes—genes she knew set him up for success in the world of culture and enterprise. Neil had screwed up, it was true, but his brain—his intelligence—was top-notch. And he possessed a rare sort of thoughtfulness Jenny had once heard a German word describe: weltschmerz. It was something Jenny did not have, but that she recognized. And, for reasons she could not explain, could not understand, really—reasons having to do with the quivering, shimmering sense of aloneness she felt running on the rubble-strewn beach near her in-laws’ house at dawn, or the draft of sadness things like her grandmother’s girlhood needlepoints raised in her as a child—she saw its value. Weltschmerz—it was something she could not pass on, but which she understood was in some way necessary for greatness, talent, and success beyond the world of money. And she wanted Colin to have opportunity for this too.