In a Perfect World Page 2

  Dear Ms. McKnight, It has been brought to our attention etc. etc. etc. on the evening in question etc. etc.—and in conclusion may we remind you that your job is not only to be liked by the passengers but to maintain safety, order, and a professional outward appearance of calm…

  But it was nearly unbearable, passing down the aisle, having to endure the glares directed at her. It had happened before, of course, but how could anyone get used to that?

  When Captain Dorn’s voice finally came over the intercom and he said they’d been directed back to the terminal, something like a cry of despair and an exhalation of relief rose from the passengers at once, the kind of sound Jiselle imagined a crowd gathered at a mining disaster might make upon receiving news that one of the fifty miners had been found alive. She tried to smile as she passed back down the aisle this time, but the only passengers who would look at her did not smile back—and then an elderly woman reached up and grabbed her wrist.

  Jiselle stopped, looking down at her own wrist in this woman’s bony hand, and then into the face of the old woman, who said nothing but who fixed Jiselle with an expression of such bitter rage and contempt that, until all the passengers were off the plane, Jiselle could not stop shaking.

  “What did the hag say to you?” Jeremy asked. He was wearing so much ChapStick that his lips shone from the overhead lights. Earlier, she’d watched him applying it, over and over, from the corner of her eyes as they sat strapped beside one another in the bulkhead during the turnaround.

  “Nothing,” Jiselle said.

  And it was true.

  But the old woman’s eyes had been ice blue. Her hair, pure white. She’d hated Jiselle. The expression on her face said it so clearly that the old woman hadn’t needed to speak. Her hatred had been projected so powerfully that Jiselle felt she could read the old woman’s mind, hear the old woman’s voice inside her head, saying:

  You think you can pass through this life pretending, and smiling, and acting as if nothing of this has to do with you, don’t you?

  But you can’t.

  A curse.

  A spell.

  Later, at the hotel bar, when Captain Dorn glanced down at her legs crossed on the barstool a few inches away from his, Jiselle took a sip of her wine and tried to will that old woman and her evil eye away.

  “What a life,” he said, raising his glass to hers.

  She raised hers to his, and they touched the glasses together just lightly enough to make the faintest of sounds—the muffled sound of a very tiny glass bell ringing on the collar of a cat, which might have been rolling in some lush green grass under a warm sun in a country far away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The afternoon Jiselle announced her engagement to Captain Dorn, she saw them for the first time:

  The white balloons.

  She was driving on the Red Arrow Highway, which meandered along the Lake Michigan shoreline, back to Illinois from the small Michigan town in which her mother lived.

  She gasped when she glimpsed them.

  The balloons must have originated in Chicago. Now they floated in her direction over the lake, which rippled under them in bright brain waves. At least fifty balloons, their strings trailing silver tails behind them.

  Jiselle had heard of the groups of volunteers and activists who gathered every Sunday in cities all over the United States to set them loose—a white balloon for every victim of the Phoenix flu—but as yet she’d seen them only on television.

  They were controversial. There had been objections. Some said that the balloons served no purpose other than to scare people, that they were really about inciting panic. Not the compassionate expression they pretended to be, but an implicit criticism of the present administration, a political maneuver rather than a commemoration of the dead. Others said they were simply, purely beautiful.

  And, seeing them for herself that afternoon as she drove away from her hometown, Jiselle had to agree. The silent, swift, traveling emptiness of those balloons, their strings glistening loosely on the air as they lifted higher in a steady stream toward the sky. They seemed to be lifted in unison by a gust of wind, trembling a little against the backdrop of blue.

  Intellectually, Jiselle knew what they stood for, but like so many other things at the beginning of this surprising time, they appeared to her more as a wonder than a sign.

  She had never been so happy.

  Could she ever be happier?

  Even after the sharp words with her mother, and the dead man in his coffin, Jiselle could not help but feel lighthearted.

  Jiselle’s mother had asked her, “What kind of a woman agrees to marry a man she’s known for three months? A man with three children? A man whose three children she hasn’t met?”

  If Jiselle had been a different kind of daughter, or woman, she might have said, “The kind of woman I am, Mother,” but even as an adolescent, when her best friend was regularly screaming “I hate you, you bitch!” at her own mother, Jiselle was apologizing to hers for forgetting to say please when asking for a second helping of salad.

  She said, instead, “Mom, I love him.”

  Her mother snorted.

  Of course, it was more than that, more than love, or why marriage, why the rush? But how could Jiselle have explained to anyone what a strange wild mystery this was to her? When it came to imagining herself a bride, she’d given up! And then—Captain Dorn! The handsomest man in the land!

  He was a pilot with eyes the color of the grass in spring. When he stood in the threshold of the control cabin after landing a plane, men, exiting, would nod solemnly to him, offering their thanks. Women, smitten, made expressions of surprise, sheepish appreciation, when they saw him there. Leaning on the doorjamb of the cockpit, wearing his uniform, his jacket unbuttoned and all those dials and knobs behind him, Captain Dorn sometimes caused those female passengers to freeze in their places, open their mouths as if to speak, nothing coming out—love at first sight. Annette would elbow Jiselle and whisper, “Another one bites the dust.”

  A few always tried to come back to the plane, to see him again. (“Did I leave a book called The Single Woman’s Guide to Rome in my seat pocket by any chance?”) Sometimes they stalled near the gate of their arrival, waiting to catch another glimpse of him. He’d tip his cap. Flash his smile. Walk crisply past—those long strides, pressed black slacks, shining shoes. Sometimes a fluttering suit coat, sometimes a pilot’s black leather jacket. Women looked up from their magazines and their cell phones, from the pacifiers they were struggling to place in their squirming toddlers’ mouths, to watch him pass. If there was a female flight attendant in the country who did not know who Captain Mark Dorn was, Jiselle hadn’t met her.

  He looks like a movie star. Those eyes!

  And his wife…I don’t know.

  Something tragic.

  Brain tumor.

  Suicide.

  Car accident.

  He never talks about it.

  That he was a widower made him even more mysterious and romantic.

  The other flight attendants were ebulliently envious. “You hit the jackpot,” one said, “you fucking bitch.” Another said, when Jiselle announced her engagement, “I’m so jealous, I want to kill you. I could kill you. We all wanted to marry him.”

  If there was a single woman—and a single woman in her thirties!—who would have said no if Captain Dorn had asked her to marry him, Jiselle hadn’t met her, and couldn’t imagine her.

  Even the children. The romance of the handsome devoted single father, reliant on nannies and fast food, calling before takeoff to find out who’d won the soccer game, how the math test had gone. He carried their photographs in his wallet, although he apologized that each one was outdated. The children had grown older more quickly than he’d remembered to exchange each year’s school photo for the next.

  Camilla, in her picture, was a ninth-grader. A cascade of blond hair. Her perfect teeth, gritted. Sara was in middle school, wearing a black beaded headband and a
low-cut T-shirt. Looking at the photographs of these beautiful, provocative girls, the flight attendants would joke, “You’re going to have your hands full there, Dad! I hope you’re ready for that!”

  And his son, Sam. In the photograph Mark carried in his wallet, Sam was only six, with a big gap in the front of his smile—but smiling nonetheless, as if he were perfectly happy with this life, as if the whole idea of life itself pleased him beyond all reason. He had masses of curly, shining, strawberry-blond hair—the kind of hair Jiselle suspected women had been touching, longingly, since he was a baby, saying things like, “Why are the beautiful curls always wasted on the boys?”

  Those children were frozen at the ages they’d been on some past Picture Day. The school photographer’s absurdly blue sky behind them swirled with the implication of summer clouds.

  “You’re not marrying the man,” her mother said. She was wearing a black skirt, black blouse, a string of black pearls, and had her hands on her hips. Jiselle took a step backward, shook her head, and looked toward the coffin, as if for help.

  The dead man in it was a great-step-uncle. He’d been ninety-two years old when his heart finally stopped. Even the people gathered around the corpse, laid out in a tuxedo, were laughing, patting one another on the back, punching each other in the arm. Jiselle, her mother, and the dead man were the only ones in the room not smiling, the only ones wearing black, which Jiselle had worn only because she knew her mother would say something about it if she didn’t. Even in his coffin, Uncle Ernie looked comfortable with the idea that he was dead—hands folded over his ruffled chest, chin set, eyebrows raised above his closed eyes. He might as well have been twiddling his thumbs. It had been a decade since Jiselle had seen him alive, but she could tell he hadn’t changed. Really, she’d come to the funeral to tell her mother, in person, in a public place, about her engagement.

  “No,” Jiselle said. “I am marrying him, Mom.”

  Her mother shook her head, looking around the room as if for a silver lining, and then she said, “Well, you’re not going to live with him.”

  She was serious, Jiselle realized. It wasn’t a question. It was a command—like, Clean your room. Or, Clear the table.

  “Mom, I’m—”

  Her mother raised a hand, pointed a finger at her daughter, and said, “You’re not going to move in with a man with three children—”

  “Mom—”

  “—a man who’s out of the country half the month and out of town most of the month. Have you thought about why he’s in such a big hurry to marry you?”

  Her mother was not, of course, the first one to suggest to Jiselle that perhaps this dashing pilot pursuing her with flowers, and jewelry, and strolls along the Seine, and proposals of marriage, might be looking for someone to take care of his three children. One older flight attendant, who’d known Mark since his first flight, said, when Jiselle told her they were going to be married, “So, I guess his latest nanny didn’t work out?”

  Jiselle flushed, and the woman hurriedly insisted that she was only joking, but Jiselle knew exactly what the woman meant, and she was right about the latest nanny, who’d given twelve weeks’ notice because she was going to marry a geologist and move to Wyoming. All the flight attendants knew the trouble Mark had with nannies, and childcare, and children. Before Jiselle started seeing him, she’d heard members of the flight crew advise him, “Captain Dorn, you need to get married again. That’s the only answer to your problems.”

  “No,” he’d say, “I can move my mother up from Florida if I have to. Believe me, there’s nothing she’d like better than to raise my kids. If I get married again, it will be because I’m in love.”

  When he said this, all the flight attendants tilted their chins, lifted their eyebrows. Some even sighed.

  Jiselle’s therapist also asked Jiselle if she might be “at all concerned about his motives.”

  Jiselle put her hands on the leather armrests of the chair in his office and said, “He doesn’t need me to take care of the children, if that’s what you mean. They have a grandmother.”

  Dr. Smitty Smith looked down at his fingernails and asked, “Did I say I thought he was marrying you to take care of the children?”

  Jiselle knew exactly where this was supposed to go. Instead of answering, she lifted one shoulder, and let it drop.

  “I just don’t want—” Dr. Smith stopped himself in mid-sentence. He almost never gave advice, although he occasionally stammered out the beginning of it. “I’m concerned, as I’m sure you are, that there not be any fuzzy logic.”

  Fuzzy logic.

  Like sins of the father, it was a catchphrase between them, left over from Jiselle’s first session, when she’d made an appointment through the University Health Services—right after she’d dropped out of college but before they’d canceled her student benefits. Her father and Ellen had been dead for a few months, and Jiselle was flunking out, when she’d gotten a paper returned to her from her Western Civilization course.

  On the bottom of it, scrawled in red pen, was “F—Fuzzy Logic.”

  Nothing else.

  As if no further explanation could be given or would be needed.

  Jiselle no longer had any actual memory of the paper itself. Of writing it, of stapling its pages together, of her thesis and argument and support, of handing it in, but the words had stayed with her over the years. They were the words that had brought her to Smitty Smith, in whose office she had wept on that last winter day of her college career, and in which she was smiling helplessly now after announcing her engagement to Captain Mark Dorn.

  Dr. Smith said nothing more until a few minutes had passed in silence, and then he said, “Well, we’ll have to finish talking about this next time,” and then, wearily, like a man with a low-grade fever, “Congratulations, Jiselle.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He nodded and said, “But just, you know, think hard about this. Think clearly.”

  But there were others—plenty of them—who urged Jiselle not to think too hard, to act quickly.

  “Find me a man like that, Jiselle,” another flight attendant said, “and I’d stay home with his brats, I’d iron his shirts, I’d wax his floors.”

  A chorus of flight attendants gathered around her at the gate and agreed.

  When Jiselle herself uttered reservations (“You know, I haven’t even met his children yet…”), this chorus sang out in unison, “Who cares? They’ll be awful! All children are awful, whether they’re yours or someone else’s! But you’ll be married to Captain Dorn!”

  In Jiselle’s fantasy, the children were not awful. When she imagined herself with Mark’s children, they were always sitting in a circle around her in a forest. In this fantasy, a soft bed of fallen pine needles was spread out beneath them, and Jiselle had her gilt-edged collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales open on her lap—the book from which her father used to read to her—and she was about to start a story.

  It didn’t matter, for this particular fantasy, that Mark’s daughters were certainly too old to be read to, or that once, when Jiselle visited his house while the children were in Madison with their nanny, she’d picked up the diary of one of the girls and read the most recent entry:

  If he marries that fucking bitch, I’m going to make her life a living hell.

  The diary was black and leather-bound and had been left on the kitchen counter, where, surely, the new girlfriend of her father visiting the house that weekend was supposed to find it.

  Jiselle had put it down and stepped away from it slowly. Her heart had been thrumming like a bird trapped in a box.

  But, in Jiselle’s fantasy, Sara would come to realize how much she had in common with her new stepmother, and how much she had missed not having a mother all these years. She would confide in Jiselle and grow to love her.

  In her fantasy, Jiselle and the three children in the forest were all wearing white, and although they were sitting on the ground, their clothes did not ge
t dirty.

  The afternoon he asked Jiselle to marry him they were in Kyoto, in bed in a hotel room full of cherry blossoms, and they’d left the curtains open while they made love.

  Afterward, they went to the window and looked down.

  The roads were thronged. It was the day of the Lantern Parade, which was one of the city’s most important festivals, or so Jiselle had been told by her taxi driver, in perfect English.

  Conceived during a plague in the ninth century as a ritual to purify the land and to appease the rampaging deity Gozu, the first parade had ended the plague, and so had been held every year since by the citizens of Kyoto, who even managed, the driver told her, to keep the Americans from dropping an atomic bomb on their city with their religious devotion and their beautiful parade.

  Ten stories below them, a float made entirely of pink blossoms moved along slowly, trailing long silk flags through the streets. From a throne at the center of it, a little boy in Shintu robes was swinging a pale yellow lantern. When the boy looked up, Jiselle yanked the curtain around her naked body as quickly as she could, although he couldn’t have seen her so far above him—a woman in one of a hundred tiny windows in a tower, looking down.

  “I’m not a perfect man, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I’ve got some baggage. But I’m in love with you. And I need you.” He turned from the window to her. “They need you, too,” he added. “We’ll be a family.”

  An automatic family.

  Was it such a crazy thing to want?

  At the checkout lines at every airport gift shop were women’s magazines and tabloids announcing HOW TO KEEP YOUR FAMILY SAFE IN TROUBLED TIMES, beneath the stunning, smiling, face of Angelina Jolie, as full of inner peace as any medieval Madonna, her brood of twelve children gathered around her.