In a Perfect World Page 7

  She turned to look. It was the man from Perfect Party Rentals. “Lady,” he said again, “there’s a problem with your tent.”

  “What?” Jiselle asked, but he’d already stepped past her to the garden. She followed him, holding her dress off the damp pavement with one hand, trying to hold the hastily tied ribbon in her hair with the other.

  The guests were already gathered, murmuring in a blur of colorful clothes. Mark was there. He stepped toward her, and then she saw it—the tent, collapsed onto the buffet table and the folding chairs and the ground. It looked as if a parachute had fallen to the earth with alarming speed, from a great height, directly onto Jiselle’s wedding. Her mother’s arms were crossed, her jaw set. She was standing in the shadows beside Pastor Gillingham, who had changed so much since Jiselle last saw him that she recognized him only by the way his bushy eyebrows, white now, took up so much of the surface of his face. His left arm dangled limply at his side. He looked back at Jiselle and did not register any recognition at all.

  “Jiselle?” Mark said quietly.

  He took her arm, peering into her face. His dark hair glittered with silver in the dusk. He appraised her, taking in the ripped seam, the safety pins, her hair wild around her face, the ribbon slipping out of it. Looking from her to the sky, he said, “If we do this before it starts to thunderstorm, Jiselle, we don’t need a tent.”

  She nodded weakly.

  She looked around.

  Her guests had circled the collapsed tent, and they were smiling apologetically at her. Sam, in his little blue suit, with his long strawberry-blond curls glistening in the hazy sun, had picked up an edge and was looking under it. Camilla, radiant in the yellow satin dress Jiselle had chosen for her, with her long elegant arms shining, brushed her blond hair out of her eyes and smiled. Sara, in a black lace dress, black tights, and black combat boots, stood with her arms crossed, staring at the ground, at her own shadow, it seemed.

  “All is well, sweetheart,” Mark said, cradling her elbow in his palm. “Nothing to worry about.” He motioned with his arm, then, to his children, calling them over, and they gathered behind him—Sam bouncing over, Camilla gliding, Sara shuffling reluctantly behind them.

  “Doesn’t Jiselle look lovely?” Mark asked them.

  “Pretty!” Camilla said. She was still smiling brightly, not a shred of sarcasm revealing itself on her face.

  “Jesus,” Sara said, breaking her vow. “You stink.”

  Somehow, the storm waited to explode overhead until after Pastor Gillingham had pronounced them man and wife. It was no longer dusk, but actual dark. Still, the sky, starless and clouded, reflected the lights of the town and glowed over them, and when Mark leaned down to “kiss the lovely bride,” as Pastor Gillingham instructed him, Jiselle opened her eyes wide, realizing that she was the lovely bride.

  The kiss went on and on. The guests laughed and clapped and stayed long enough under the darkening sky to raise a toast. They gathered around Mark and Jiselle. Even her mother looked peaceful, pleased, by then. She took Jiselle’s hands in hers, leaned into her, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Jiselle. You’re a lovely bride, and he’s probably nothing like your father.”

  “Thank you,” Jiselle said.

  “And what I said about—”

  “It’s okay,” Jiselle said.

  The guests stepped gingerly around the collapsed tent and raised their glasses, just as the warm rain began to fall in fat drops on their heads and arms, and said in unison, as if it had been planned, “To the perfect couple!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Puerto Rico, their plane skidded to a stop in the midst of a driving storm. Thunder, sounding like far-off artillery, rolled in off the Caribbean in one unbroken wave of sound. They’d flown through the night, and Mark was still heavily asleep beside Jiselle. His small airline-issued pillow had fallen onto her lap.

  On the flight from Newark to Ponce, there had been only a dozen other passengers, and these all seemed to be native Puerto Ricans, going home, speaking Spanish. The flight attendants never bothered to give their announcements in English, except for the standard warning that North American travelers who displayed suspected symptoms of the Phoenix flu could be turned away at their ports of entry without forewarning.

  Mark and Jiselle were alone in first class, separated by twenty rows from the rest of the passengers.

  When they deplaned, the flight attendants didn’t smile.

  While Mark went to fetch the rental car, Jiselle waited inside the little terminal and watched the baggage carrousel lurch in circles, bearing its suitcases and bags—an eternal loop slipping through and under the fringed rubber curtain, returning from that mysterious beyond with a new bag every few minutes. She watched as bag after bag passed by but didn’t see theirs. Finally, Mark came up beside her and said, “There’s no car for us, and apparently there’s not one fucking vehicle for rent on this entire fucking island.”

  They decided to make the best of it.

  It was their honeymoon!

  What else could they do?

  They laughed in the empty airport terminal. Mark made some calls to airline personnel, who said not to worry, they’d find the bags. The bags would be on the next flight. They’d be delivered to the resort.

  After numerous cell phone calls, a driver was procured who was willing to drive them to their resort, and Mark and Jiselle sat together on a bench outside the airport waiting for him. The air was warm, sultry. It smelled of seawater and the rot of weeds in seawater, but it was pleasantly pungent—a kind of necessary and utterly natural decomposition taking place offshore under turquoise waves. Eventually a rusted white van that read NORTH AMERICAN TRANSPORTER on the side, in stenciling that looked far newer than the van, pulled up.

  “Hola.”

  The driver was an elderly man. He bowed to them and said in a heavy Spanish accent what sounded to Jiselle like “Welcome to Purgatory” but must have been “Welcome to Puerto Rico.” Then he held out a wet towel and said, “Por favor, you must wash your hands.”

  Mark looked at Jiselle, amused. They shrugged, smiled at each other, and passed the towel between them, wiping their hands. It was warm and sodden and smelled of bleach. When they tried to hand it back to the driver, he only shook his head at it, and nodded toward a trash can. Mark stepped over and dropped it in, and they followed the driver to his van.

  The drive to the resort was quick. The freeway followed the seashore, which was lapped by azure water. The sky was radiant. The old man turned on the radio, and someone seemed to be reading poetry, in Spanish, in a monotone. The words washed around Jiselle with the breeze through the van windows. She put her head on Mark’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she found that she was no longer resting on Mark’s shoulder but had her temple pressed to the armrest between them, and Mark was outside of the parked van arguing with the driver, whose thin empty hand was held out.

  “No one takes North Americans in a van now! No one but me!”

  “It was a thirty-minute drive!” Mark said.

  “Well, it would have been a longer walk, señor. Two. Hundred. Dollars.”

  Mark stared at the old man in disbelief, and then looked into his open hand. After a few slow seconds, he reached around for the wallet in his pocket, took it out, counted ten twenty-dollar bills, and placed them in the open hand, where they disappeared instantly into the old man’s pocket.

  The Hotel Paradiso—which Jiselle and Mark would begin, over their seven-day honeymoon, to refer to jokingly as the Hotel Limbo—was nearly deserted except for another couple from the United States, also there on a honeymoon, and a family from New Jersey with three small children named Cato, Caitlin, and Calli.

  Except for those three occupied suites, the rest of the rooms seemed to be empty. The whole resort had the feel of something that had been abandoned abruptly. There were empty lounge chairs placed carefully around the pool. The hot tub bubbled forsakenly.

  Their luggage ne
ver arrived, so they bought bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts in the dive shop on the beach.

  The other honeymooning couple from the United States was younger than Mark and Jiselle and spent much of their time strolling along the beach. By the middle of the week they were both sunburned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were red and swollen—eyelids, lips, bloated with burn.

  “I think they sold us phony sunblock in the dive shop,” the young woman said. “We were both slathered in SPF forty-five, and this happened.” She gestured to her face. “Joe can’t even lie down,” she said, nodding at her husband.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said the mother of the three Cs from New Jersey, sauntering over to their table. “They hate us here. Have you seen all the buttons and bumper stickers?” She was referring to the red circles with slashes through the outline of the United States—similar to the ones Jiselle had seen in Denmark months before and in every country outside the United States she’d been to since.

  “Our kids wanted to snorkel,” the father of the three Cs said, scratching his large, hairy stomach, “so we asked about it in the dive shop, and the old woman said, ‘Well, you have killed our coral reef, so there can be no snorkeling.’ And I said, ‘Hey, señora, I’m not responsible for your coral reef…’ I mean, you can’t blame Americans for everything.”

  “But they do,” the honeymooning wife said. “They blame us for the coral reefs, and the fish, and the hurricanes, and the flu. All of it. A plane crashes, and it’s our fault. Some species of bird dies out, and we did it. You name it, they blame it on us.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  A bird high in a palm tree made a screeching sound, but otherwise there was just the white noise of waves washing onto sand.

  The mother of the three Cs agreed, nodding vehemently. She said, “You know, that witch at the front desk gave me the evil eye. She accused me of stealing my children.”

  “What?” all the others, including Mark and Jiselle, cried out at once.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “She said, ‘Look, you stole them all from different countries. They aren’t your children.’ I said, ‘We adopted our children from different countries—poverty-stricken countries. We didn’t steal them.’”

  “What did she say then?” Jiselle asked.

  The mother shrugged.

  “Well, I tell you,” the honeymooning wife said, “that’s unforgivable. And so is this.” She pointed to her sunburned neck.

  “And look at this,” her husband said, holding out his arms. “If they did this to me, it’s tantamount to attempted murder.”

  “That’s true,” his wife said. “This much sun can kill you. I tell you, I’m not coming back to Puerto Rico in this lifetime.”

  Jiselle looked out at the ocean. The undulating turquoise, and cobalt, and indigo. A pelican was riding an air current just over the water, looking black and prehistoric. It plunged into a wave, emerged with something silver and wriggling in its beak.

  Still, the days of Mark’s and Jiselle’s honeymoon were full of quiet luxuriating in each other’s company. They strolled alone along the ocean. They swam alone in the pool. They sat alone in the swirling vortex of the hot tub. They rented a kayak and stroked their way in perfect coordination out to the dead coral reef, where they snorkeled side by side.

  Just beneath the surface of the Caribbean, wearing that snorkel mask, Jiselle could hear only her own steady breathing. The sunlight turned the pale blue water on the ocean floor to dancing, electric brainwaves. And the ghosts of the coral, like a white forest, were spread out beneath her for what seemed like miles and miles of serenity. The rictus of cacti, bleached to bone. Or the bare branches of winter trees, coated in snow—blameless, voiceless, motionless peace. She cast her own floating shadow down on it, as if she were a cloud passing over the shared dream of a million vanished people. Mark, beside her, fluttering in his fins, reached out and caressed her through the water. She was so happy she shed a tear or two, but the tears simply slipped out of her snorkel mask and joined the salty, abiding tears of the sea.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER NINE

  It seems your son has head lice,” the woman on the other end of the line said.

  At first, no part of the sentence registered.

  Head lice.

  Your Son.

  But when Jiselle leaned down to look at the Caller ID, she saw that the woman was phoning from Marquette Elementary, where she’d dropped Sam off a few hours before.

  “You need to come and get him, I’m afraid. School policy.”

  When Jiselle arrived at the school, Sam was sitting alone in a corner of the main office. He was scratching his head, pulling the fingers of both hands through the long strawberry-blond curls. The secretary looked up at Jiselle with what seemed to be skepticism or disapproval. “Are you the nanny?” she asked.

  “No,” Jiselle said. “I’m the stepmother.”

  The secretary raised her eyebrows.

  “Here,” she said, sliding a piece of paper over to Jiselle gingerly, as if she, too, might be infested. “You need to sign him out.”

  Jiselle signed her name Jiselle McKnight—and then remembered, scratched it out, and wrote Dorn over the last name. The secretary took the clipboard, looked at it, and then looked up at Jiselle again, as if trying to see through her, to read something on the other side of the room, something Jiselle was blocking her view of. She said then, “You know, no one knows, but my thinking is that this virus could just as easily be spread by lice as by anything else. If he were my son, I’d shave his head right away.”

  Jiselle nodded at the woman and mouthed the words thank you, although no sound came out of her mouth.

  In the parking lot, Sam slid onto the passenger seat of Mark’s Cherokee, slouched over the backpack in his lap, and said, “This sucks.”

  Jiselle nodded at him, started up the car. “Yeah,” she said, and then, as an afterthought, quietly, “Sam, I think you’re not supposed to say ‘sucks.’” Wasn’t that one of the admonitions she’d heard Mark give him?

  Sam nodded with the infinite weariness of a very old child.

  They drove to the drugstore. The school receptionist had given Jiselle what looked to be a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a handout on head lice, and a list of the products you could buy to rid your child of them. Sam held that list in his hand beside Jiselle as she drove.

  It had rained hard the night before, and the weather—still like early autumn although it was the first week of November—had the feel of the tropics, although the leaves had fallen from most of the trees. Humid, bright air lingered over everything. Blue puddles of rain and oil dotted the drugstore lot. After she parked and picked up her purse, Sam said, “I don’t want to go in.”

  “No one can see them, Sam,” Jiselle said.

  “Mrs. Hicks saw them.”

  “No, she didn’t see them. She just—figured. Because you were itching.”

  “No,” Sam said. “She saw them.”

  Jiselle looked at Sam’s head.

  In truth, she thought perhaps she could see something black, and maybe moving, in the silky part in the hair at the top of his head.

  She said, “Okay. You can wait here if you want.”

  Inside the drugstore, Jiselle scanned the shelves for a few minutes for something with the word lice on it, until, finding nothing, she had to ask the girl behind the counter, who called across the store to the pharmacist, “Where’s the head lice stuff?” She felt relieved that Sam had waited outside.

  It took a minute or two, but the pharmacist came out from behind his glass cage and led Jiselle to the shelf for “pests and critters.” To get to it, they had to walk past the cardboard displays of flu “cures.” Life-size cut-outs of healthy-looking men and women holding bottles of Immune Master. Pink-cheeked children running across a green field overlaid with the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret!

  They made their way through the leftover Halloween costumes and candy and
decorations displays, and a variety of gags, such as battery-operated plastic hands that scooted across the floor, tarantulas and bats on strings. That year had been like no Halloween Jiselle ever remembered, festive and commercial beyond anything she would have imagined for what had, at one time, been the simplest, briefest of holidays.

  Mark had been home Halloween weekend. He’d donned a top hat, Jiselle had worn one of his trench coats, with black sunglasses, and they’d walked door to door with Sam, who had dressed as a soldier. Red vest over a white T-shirt. White pants and black boots. A tall red hat with a blue feather in it. He’d carried a pillowcase. By the end of the night, it weighed forty pounds.

  Not only were the children out trick-or-treating that night, but adults were, too. Alone and in crowds, with their children and without, wearing elaborate costumes—beggars, prostitutes, Abe Lincolns, Grim Reapers—they were swigging from flasks, passing the flasks to strangers, exactly the kind of germ-sharing they were constantly warned against. But they were happy, friendly. Raucous with laughter and polite at the same time. Some of the houses in town had absurdly elaborate Halloween displays. Enormous inflatable cartoon animals on their front lawns. Hundreds of them. Pranksters had taken to stabbing them with screwdrivers and box cutters. All over town, deflated decorations littered lawns. Their owners, playing along with the pranks, erected tombstones over them. R.I.P. SCOOBY-DOO. HERE LIES SNOOPY, STABBED THROUGH THE HEART BY A HEARTLESS KILLER.

  There were light displays, too, and someone had strung naked baby dolls from telephone poles all along one street. Someone else had built a scaffold in the elementary school parking lot and hung an effigy of the president wearing a witch’s hat. One family had dangled hundreds of plastic bats from the birch tree in their front yard.