In a Perfect World

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