Well, where else were we hosties going to go when we got too old, too tired, when our voices gave out from all those smoky flights? When we’d spent years in the air, crossing the Pacific, crossing the Nullarbor, half imagining, because time seems to slow during plane travel, that the years weren’t passing below us, killing our parents, burying our friends in marriages and the wrecks of marriages, driving up the price of city real estate? So that when we retired, the single place we could afford to live was a tropical town so remote you could justify flying there only if you had an ex-employee’s airline discount. Midsize cruise ships stopped in all the time: for the sunsets, the seafood platters, the Japanese cemetery, the quaint pearling boats. But by car, the town was twenty-two hours from the nearest city.

Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.

Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.

Jill met me at the airport. She was wearing white shorts and a pale pink blouse, her face was bare and her hair was spiky, and the first thing she said was “Recognize me without my glad rags?” I did, of course; whatever she wore, she was unmistakable. I want to explain why, and won’t be able to, but here goes: she looked like luck. Jill had this open, mobile face, and a megawatt smile, and there was an intense vitality to her, a kind of giving-off of energy, like life was electric and she was at the very middle of it, even up there in that town on the shitty rim of nowhere. It was all irresistible. And what made it so irresistible was that while she hummed in the charged center of life she also seemed relaxed, unbothered. She walked with a kind of serene shimmy. She never moved or spoke or smiled quickly—she let it all unfold with a slight reserve that felt luxurious because it seemed so unnecessary. I couldn’t have said any of this back then, when I walked into that airport—which was basically a shed in the middle of a paddock—and saw Jill waiting for me. I just thought she was the most desirable thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to sleep with her, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I also felt, walking toward her, that my life would be better, easier, for her proximity; that she’d always be able to tell me what to do, and she’d always be right. She had a disheveled dog with her, sitting obediently at her feet—a standard poodle the color of toast.

Maybe that’s why, in those moments, I formed a crazy plan. I would walk toward her, the dog by my side; I would go down on one knee right there in arrivals and ask Jill to marry me. Not because she was in love with me, or even because I was in love with her, although probably I was, but because I was beginning to see life as a series of losses—that have already happened and are happening and will inevitably happen—and no one should have to face that alone. I sure as hell didn’t want to. This could be something permanent, I thought, me and Jill and the dog. Some family. Some luck.

I didn’t, of course. I didn’t even lift her in my arms and twirl her so carefully that her dress wouldn’t ride up and expose her backside. What did I expect to come through that door? A tear-stained face, a broken woman, a damsel in distress? What came was Jill. Her face seemed, as usual, to promise access to something fundamental, some deep source of beauty and generosity that had always been just outside my reach. No one would ever have guessed at the disappointment she’d just suffered. I had some sense, then, of the energy she must have expended every minute of every day, sustaining the myth of herself.