In a Perfect World (6 page)

M
ark chose an afternoon when the children were on a field trip to Chicago with the public schools to bring Jiselle to the house for the first time. He drove downstate and into Illinois to pick her up in his ice-blue sports car. (“A Mazda RX-8. The only midlife crisis car I could pile three kids into.”)

Jiselle heard the engine in her driveway before she looked out the window. The car sounded like an enormous cat purring as it pulled in. The top was down.

Mark had been to her house only once, and Jiselle knew he’d been unimpressed. (“Kind of boxy, isn’t it? And the neighbors, too many, too close. But I guess what’s the point of having a nice place if you never stay in it anyway?”) This time, he didn’t even bother to step inside. He took her overnight bag out of her hand at the door, walked back to his car, tossed it in his trunk, and then turned to watch as she locked the front door and descended the little cement stoop. After she’d crossed the front lawn to him, he took her in his arms, pulled her to him, and kissed her. For a second, Jiselle let her eyes flutter open. Over his shoulder and across the street, she saw a teenage girl in cutoffs and a T-shirt watching them dreamily, but intensely, from her own front yard.

Of course.

How many times had Jiselle herself fantasized this scene when she was a teenager—a handsome man, a fast car in the driveway, the passionate kiss, the way he would sweep her into the car, drive her away?

In one of Jiselle’s earliest memories, she and Ellen had stuffed one of their Barbies into the passenger seat of a Barbie-Mobile, stretching out her long legs stiffly on the dashboard as Ken drove her wildly across the shag carpet in Ellen’s basement.

Clearly, that had been Ellen’s fantasy, too—except that the driver had been Jiselle’s father, who’d driven her drunk in his Roadster straight into oncoming traffic, and the next day Jiselle was called to the wrecking service, shown the car. The blood-soaked upholstery. The collapsed roof. A single high-heel shoe on the floor of the passenger side.

The wrecking yard workers had stood around her, telling her the car was still worth at least ten thousand dollars.

“You can’t just junk it,” one of them had said. “It’s a classic.”

But Jiselle had walked away from it with only a few coins she’d found scattered on the driver’s seat, believing that they had fallen from her father’s pocket and that she should keep them. But she had put them in her purse, where they were scattered among the other coins, and she finally spent them on a parking meter, maybe, or a package of gum.

After she settled into the passenger seat beside Mark, she put a clip in her hair, and as they drove off, Jiselle waved to the teenage girl, who looked away, pretending she hadn’t been watching.

They drove for miles without talking. Without needing to talk. Mark kept one hand on Jiselle’s knee, the other on the steering wheel. His house was seventy miles north of Jiselle’s town, on the diagonal. Like Jiselle, he was required by the airlines to live less than an hour away from O’Hare. His town, St. Sophia, had been one of those on the suggestion list Jiselle had been given when she’d taken her job, but she’d decided against it because she’d thought it was too small. There would be no single men to date.

How many flight attendants, she now wondered, had made the same mistake? Who among them might have been beside this pilot in his sports car today if it had been otherwise?

Mark drove the sports car the way he flew a plane, with total confidence, in deep concentration. Ahead of them, the highway wound blackly through green hills. For a while, they followed the river, which was smooth and dotted with stone-white ducks and seemed to have stopped moving altogether. After a while they came up behind a pickup truck carrying several large birdcages, each cage full of silky white doves. Hundreds of doves. The driver was an elderly woman, who glared at Mark and Jiselle as they passed her in the no-passing lane.

Mark and Jiselle smiled at each other.

They passed a few more cars. An empty school bus. An ice-cream truck. Another pickup—this one hauling a horse trailer out of which a horse’s amber tail swished the air.

They crossed rickety covered bridges spanning rocky little streams that bubbled and frothed below them, and then they were crossing the boundary to his town, St. Sophia, where a red-white-and-blue sign stated simply:
ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

They slowed down.

“We’re here,” he said. He took his hand off her knee and placed it on the steering wheel. Jiselle nodded and smiled over at him, but he was looking straight ahead, so she looked around.

Gingerbread Victorians lined the shady Main Street. There were brick and clapboard storefronts. The library had Greek columns. The fire station had one shining red truck parked out front and a Dalmatian lounging under an oak tree beside it.

“We moved here to have the kids,” Mark said, gesturing around him at his town. “It seemed so old-fashioned. So out of the way. Of course, it’s changed a lot since then.”

A flag flew from the yard of the school, which was a red brick two-story building with a few gothic flourishes around the doors. The post office had a cupola on the roof, a blue mailbox outside. There was a tidy park with a swing set and a merry-go-round and a wishing well. There was another flag flapping from a pole beside the courthouse.

Jiselle couldn’t imagine how St. Sophia had
changed.

There was about it a sense of time having stopped at some idealized moment—the sun at the highest point in the sky, the season stalled perfectly between spring and summer, the population poised between too few and too many. The happiest hours chiming from a clock tower. The sweetest period of American history reflected in the most romantic of American architecture. Peace, following a war. The kindest politics. A time of prosperity, but not materialism. An era during which people believed in things but were not fanatical.

A little boy riding a red bicycle too large for him waved excitedly as Mark and Jiselle drove by. Jiselle waved back, and Mark saluted. “A school chum of Sam’s,” he said.

They took Main Street from one brief end of town to the other, and then kept on going, until the Victorians slipped away and the trees grew up around them. The road to Mark’s house turned to gravel, and then to dirt, and then to clay.

Jiselle had known it was in the woods, at the edge of a ravine, but she was surprised by how deep into the woods it was, how alive the woods seemed to be—fluttering with leaves, and wings, and the fragile airy progress of butterflies.

They pulled into his driveway, and there it was—a small log house, the house Mark had described to her so well that the one in her imagination matched this one perfectly: The covered wraparound porch. The brick chimney. All of it pushed up to the edge of a ravine full of pines and white birches. There were lace curtains in the windows. A chipmunk sat on the front porch, cheeks stuffed with something, munching. It looked up as they pulled in, as if it had been expecting them, and when they stepped out of the car, it didn’t run away but waited until they’d reached the mossy cobblestone walk to the front door before slipping into the rock garden.

“Here it is,” Mark said. “Your home, if you’ll have it.”

He took her by the arm and guided her through the rooms to the kitchen, where he presented her with a bouquet of tulips he said the children had picked for her themselves. They were carefully arranged on the kitchen table in a white vase—three black-cupped blooms, each one seeming to burn with a small electric light at its center.

“Here,” Mark said.

When she woke up next to him in his log house on the afternoon of her first visit, in his big four-poster bed under a Navajo blanket after making love, Jiselle slipped out of his arms to wander into the rooms of his house, and felt as if she recognized them from somewhere deep inside herself, as if the place had grown up like a shell around her dream.

The sun was high in the sky, streaming through the lace curtains and the window shades, making a dappled splash at the foot of the bed, pooling on the wooden floorboards. Jiselle picked Mark’s shirt out of that pool of light, slid her arms into it, stepped through the curtain in the doorway into the other rooms, and she saw that all the thresholds were draped with colorful silk cloth instead of doors. It was such a beautiful gesture, those silk curtains stirring peacefully in the doorways to every room.

The house was small and cluttered but very clean. The walls were made of raw logs and planed boards trimmed with brick. The windows were old-fashioned, too—the kind you cranked open. Verdigris iron rimmed the panes. There were real wooden shutters on the outside.

Jiselle walked down the hallway between the bedrooms to the family room, with its comfortable tweed couch, two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table spilling magazines. A big TV took up one wall, and there was a sliding glass door against the other, opening onto a cedar deck.

Mark had told her about the deck—how it was built around an oak tree, how the tree looked, from the family room, as if it grew straight out of the house. Jiselle went to the sliding glass doors and saw that this was true.

The trunk of the oak poured upward through the cedar slats of the deck, and then it branched overhead, gloriously green—an enormous, ancient, tree. She slid the door open and stepped out. She touched the trunk. It was rough and warm.

Mark had also told her that he and Joy had built the house as close to the ravine as they could without having to worry about the house falling into it after forty years of rainfall and erosion. Jiselle stood on the deck and looked into that beautiful abyss. The air smelled pure. She inhaled so deeply it made her feel a little dizzy, and she steadied herself with a hand to the trunk of the oak before turning back to the house. She wanted to see the children’s rooms.

First, she peeked around the silk curtain in the doorway and into Sam’s room. A stuffed tiger on the floor. A cowboy hat on the desk. The bed was unmade, and the sheets had pirates on them—skulls and crossbones and tall-masted ships. There was a photo of Sam himself on the nightstand. From Halloween? His curly strawberry-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a patch over one eye.

Camilla’s room was spotless. Just a row of slim hardcover books on a white shelf. A round green rug on the floor. The clover-covered bedspread was pulled up carefully over the pillows. A dustless desk with a stapler, a laptop, a small bowl of thumbtacks, and a few pencils lined up.

Sara’s room, on the other hand, was the typical adolescent disaster. Clothes tumbled out of the closet and onto the floor. There was a half-full bottle of Diet Coke open on the nightstand. Books and notebooks were scattered across the desk. On the wall was an enormous poster of a wild-haired man with a naked torso, holding the neck of an electric guitar with one hand, the other pointed at the camera, middle finger raised. The bedspread was black, as were the silk sheets rumpled on the mattress, which had been pulled off the bed frame and onto the floor.

Jiselle stepped out of the room and back into the hallway quickly, but she wasn’t alarmed. Although she herself had kept a tidy teenage room under her mother’s vigilant administration, she remembered how teenage girls could be. She remembered Ellen’s room. The piles of dirty laundry. The books and magazines scattered across the floor. Having to wade though the debris to get to the bed, where you had to push away more debris to sit down.

She wandered to the kitchen then, where a bowl of red apples sat on the butcher-block countertop. She took one and smelled it before biting into it. Orchards and sunlight in that mouthful of apple. It was crisp. Tart and sweet at the same time. She stood and ate it down to the core in Mark’s kitchen, her bare feet on the ceramic tile, before finding the garbage pail under the sink and dropping it in.

Then she made her way to the living room, where she went first to the bookshelf, studied the titles on the spines lined up neatly:

Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials. Memoirs of an African Big-Game Hunter. The Art of Chess. The Sibley Guide to South American Birds. Woodcraft.

They were books that spoke of masculine hobbies—large, heavy books with glossy dust jackets, smelling of their own clean pages—and Jiselle thought with some shame of her own shelves, overstuffed with paperbacks. The broken spines and the pages folded over to mark a place to which she’d never returned. The library books were mixed in with the books she owned, so that she was always searching, and her books were always overdue.

She would, she vowed, clear the shelves when she got back, dispose of those books, return the library books, donate all the others to someone, something (a homeless shelter? an orphanage?) before she moved into this perfect house with Mark. She would let someone less fortunate have them. She would
clean up her act,
as her mother used to tell her to do.

She was thinking about that—about her fortune, and her worthless books, and her mother—when she turned and saw it hanging above the fireplace:

A framed photograph.

A full-length portrait.

A wedding portrait.

More than anything in that first moment of recognition, Jiselle was startled that it hadn’t been the first thing she’d seen when she walked in the door.

It took up half of an entire wall.

Framed in filigreed silver, it was perfectly centered over the mantel.

In it, Mark looked so much younger that she might not have even recognized him if it hadn’t been for his eyes, deep set and dark, and the playful lift of the eyebrows, an expression she recognized—one he’d make boarding a plane, saying, “Howdy, folks,” to the flight crew before the passengers boarded and one of the flight attendants, always a woman, came up behind him to help him slide out of his coat. His eyebrows would rise in that casual, inverted
V,
and he’d say, sighing theatrically, “Ah. A good day to die.”