Lovemaking itself was divine. Freedom, she thought. The headiness of freedom. With William she knew she wasn’t being judged or compared. She knew that whatever she did was, to him, the right way, the only way. It was amazing how it changed her outlook when she knew that someone liked whatever she did. After the first couple of days, she and William seemed to adopt the attitude of “Let’s try this and see how that feels.” Feeling. It was everything to both of them. Touching hands, touching lips, trying different positions during sex.
And then there was William’s creativity. It was as though he’d saved all of his imagination for this one ongoing event. He’d sat through school and studied other people’s words and spat them back out with all the inventiveness of a parrot, but here at last he’d found a place where there were no rules he had to follow. Sometime during the third day, during a moment when sweat was dripping off both of them, William said, “Jackie, I like this,” with such feeling that she laughed out loud. “Me too,” she’d answered.
The only person they encountered during this week was silent Pete. They did their best to keep their passion from his sight, but they weren’t successful. Jackie recalled an Arabic saying that she had always liked: “There are three things you can’t hide: pregnancy, love, and a man riding a camel.” She and William proved the second one true. The morning after their first night together, they cautioned each other that it would be better to keep their newfound passion from others. William had reluctantly agreed. “Since you won’t marry me, I guess we should,” he said. Jackie had just said that it would be better for both their reputations.
They had gone outside, confident that they were the greatest actors on earth and that no one would know anything was different between them. For all of approximately eleven minutes they were able to fool Pete. He was cleaning distributor segments with a cloth soaked in kerosene and, trying to act as though everything were the same, they stood, one on either side of him, and talked of that day’s activities. Jackie and William didn’t look at each other for several minutes. Then William said something about picking up some passengers for Denver, and when Jackie answered him, she made the mistake of looking into his eyes. For several moments they were silent, just looking at each other over Pete’s head. The next moment Pete looked up, and his face turned as red as though he’d stumbled into the bedroom of a honeymoon couple. In the blink of an eye he left the hangar, leaving Jackie and William standing alone, doing nothing but looking at each other. It was a gaze that nearly ignited the kerosene.
Without exchanging a word, without so much as a raised eyebrow of communication, they turned toward the house. The door was barely closed before their clothes were on the floor and their hands were clutching at each other’s bodies. They didn’t leave the house again for two days.
Their idyll ended on the eighth day when Mrs. Beasley, the town gossip, walked into the bedroom and saw Jackie and William in bed together.
Chapter Ten
William and Jackie were alone in the house, sitting together on the sofa in the living room. Or perhaps “together” wasn’t the right word, since Jackie was perched at one end, as far away from William as possible. This morning, the town snoop, who prided herself on having no idea what a closed door meant, had walked into their bedroom. No doubt she had felt it was her duty to see exactly what was going on way out there in that ghost town, so she’d put on her best hat and made up an excuse to borrow something from Jackie. Which of course was absurd since Mrs. Beasley lived much nearer the stores, as well as other neighbors, than Jackie did.
But she’d seen what she’d hoped to see: something to satisfy her hunger for gossip. She had scurried out the door and sped away in her little car so fast William couldn’t get into his trousers and catch her before she left. It had always been a town joke that the fastest runner in the world was a Beasley girl with a hot piece of gossip.
So now everything that Jackie had not wanted to happen in Chandler had. She had wanted to become respectable, to prove to the townspeople that she wasn’t fast or easy, that she deserved a place in their town. For once in her life, she’d wanted to conform, not be an outsider. But this morning Mrs. Beasley had ruined her one chance. Now she was going to have to go into town and see people’s eyes shift to one side when they saw her. She was going to know that they were repeating every story ever passed around about her.
William didn’t want to leave, but Jackie begged him to go to Denver for a few days. “I need to face this alone,” she said, referring to the people of Chandler.
“Face what alone, Jackie? What is there to face? Do you think we’re the first people in this town to have gone to bed together before marriage? Half the children of this town are politely called ‘premature’ because they were born six months after the wedding.”
She wasn’t going to answer him, because he knew as well as she did that the two of them were not an ordinary couple.
When she didn’t respond, he turned and left the room, moments later reappearing with his suitcases. He started to take her in his arms, but she held him away. With a hardened jaw, he picked up his luggage. “I’ll be back in three days,” he said, then left the house.
Jackie didn’t have to wait long for the sky to open up. It opened in the form of Terri, her face angry, her body rigid as she stalked toward the house, ready to do battle.
“Is it true?” she asked as soon as Jackie opened the door, not even bothering with conventional greetings.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jackie said, trying to keep her dignity. Why did people always think they should talk to you “for your own good”? “Would you like some tea?”
“No, I don’t want any tea. What I want is to try to talk some sense into you. You aren’t thinking of marrying this…this child, are you?”
Jackie gave a great sigh. “William is not a child. He is a full-grown man.”
To her consternation, Terri collapsed on the sofa in tears. Jackie had not expected this. She had expected outrage and anger from her friend, but not tears. Jackie went to her, put her arm around her shoulders. “Talk to me.”
“No,” Terri said, “you don’t want to talk. Do you know how much you mean to me, Jackie? Do you have any idea how important you are to my life?”
Unfortunately, Jackie did have an idea how much she meant to Terri. She couldn’t be oblivious to those dreadful sons of hers; she’d heard talk of Terri’s husband, who couldn’t hold a job. A couple of times in town Jackie had seen Terri unaware, had seen the misery on her face; it was not a face that she showed to Jackie.
“Yes,” Jackie said, handing Terri several tissues. “I think I know.”
“You are my idol. You are the idol of lots of women in America. You aren’t just someone ordinary like me. You’re special.”
Yes, Jackie thought, and that was one of the major problems of her life. She had wanted to fly airplanes, but she’d never wanted to be a celebrity.
Terri looked at her. “Are you going to marry him?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Then he has asked you?”
Jackie didn’t answer, which was all the answer Terri needed.
“Have you thought this through?”