Chapter 4 #2
“No, I mean—I mean, yes, he is my husband.” Claire swallows hard, digging her nails in until her arm starts to shake. “I think he’s busy.”
Claire has no idea what kind of hysteria has gripped her. She feels manic, like she’s completely untethered from what’s appropriate—she only knows that she doesn’t want to go back out to the party, and she wants Jacqueline to meet Pete even less.
Jacqueline merely nods, rubbing her arm where Claire touched it.
“Sure,” Jacqueline says softly. “Do you want to go get some drinks instead?”
Claire gnaws on her lower lip, but she lets it go quickly before it ruins her lipstick. In truth she’d rather stay here, but she shouldn’t be bossing the hostess around in her own house.
“You know what, it’s a bit loud out there,” Jacqueline says, glancing towards the door as if she can sense Claire’s thoughts. Music and voices are audible through it and, distantly, a raucous shout, but Jacqueline doesn’t seem bothered by it. “Not a great place to talk. Follow me?”
She leads Claire instead to one of the other doors at the end of the hallway, beyond which looks to be the beginnings of an office—there’s a desk and chair, and a long table stacked high with cardboard boxes. It looks like Jacqueline threw a lot of her things in here to make room for the party.
Across the surface of the desk are scattered several expensive-looking cameras and film canisters, along with what looks like a disassembled tripod.
The canisters are each labelled with a name and date.
Claire picks one up, reading ‘Jacqueline Callas—16 March, 1969’. The day before Jacqueline moved in.
Jacqueline Callas. A lovely name, and perhaps a clue as to her origins—is it Spanish? Italian? Claire isn’t worldly enough to guess. She files the information away, setting the canister down.
“Do you really know how to use all of this?” Claire says, hovering awkwardly until Jacqueline pulls out the desk chair and indicates she should use it.
“I should hope so. It pays the bills.”
Claire sits, carefully arranging her skirt. “So you’re a photographer? No wonder you look so fashionable all the time.”
Jacqueline smiles. Since there are no other chairs in the room, she perches on the edge of the desk. She straightens out her socks, and then her feet swing back and forth; there’s a dark freckle on the smooth skin in the middle of her left knee. “That’s sweet of you to say.”
“I don’t know many women around here who work,” Claire says. She tears her eyes away from that freckle. It’s like a magnet for her eyes. “Or who can buy a house on their own.”
“I was lucky. I paid in cash, and the family was looking to sell quickly to the highest bidder,” Jacqueline says, with a wry smile. “It took ages to find a realtor who would even look twice at me. And photography is more like a hobby I sometimes get paid for. It hardly feels like a job sometimes.”
Claire presses her sweaty hands into the starchy material of her skirt. Jacqueline is being perfectly polite, volunteering information and asking questions, but somehow that doesn’t calm her nerves.
“I don’t even have time for hobbies anymore. That’s married life,” Claire says with a quiet chuckle.
Jacqueline’s smile melts into a look of mild concern. “Is it?”
“I mean, it takes so much time to do everything I need to do,” Claire says hastily, suddenly aware of just how uninteresting she must sound.
She worries at her pearls, lifting them to her mouth and tapping one against her teeth.
Pete hates it when she chews on them—Jacqueline surely feels the same, and that thought makes Claire drop them again.
“Such as?”
“Clean, and cook, and—and take care of Pete. Mend clothes. Tend the garden.”
Jacqueline’s legs stop swinging. That furrow between her brows is back. “There must be something you like to do, beyond all that.”
Claire’s mind races. Everything that comes out of her mouth seems only to reiterate her own dullness, in contrast to Jacqueline. Jacqueline the photographer, the bohemian city dweller. Jacqueline the enigma. “I do enjoy gardening. And the ladies in the neighborhood sometimes do a book club?”
“That sounds fun,” Jacqueline says. Her tone is polite, but it’s clear she’s not interested in a ladies’ book club.
Claire swallows hard. She traces along the edge of a photo frame—it’s face-down, so she can’t see Jacqueline’s work. She’s desperately curious about it.
“I…like to draw,” Claire says haltingly, fishing for the only thing she ever felt she was particularly good at.
Art classes had been her favorite part of the day once upon a time, but by senior year Pete was taking up most of her free time.
“And paint. At least, I used to. I won a drawing competition once, in school. Before Pete and I started dating.”
Claire is grasping at straws, but Jacqueline’s smile turns softer.
“Every painting needs a background,” Jacqueline says warmly. “I should have guessed you were an artist.”
Claire laughs. It’s a horrible nervous braying thing. “Oh, gosh, I wouldn’t call myself an artist. It’s not like I was making a career out of it, like you. It was just a silly distraction.”
“Did it make you happy?”
“Yes,” Claire says, with hardly a thought.
It had made her happy. She’d sit and sketch for hours, using it as an excuse to go for long walks in the park once her parents had deemed her too old to run around playing and scraping her knees.
Her bedroom was full of watercolors, until one day it wasn’t.
Jacqueline leans a little closer, like she’s sharing a cheeky secret. “Then it wasn’t silly.”
Claire isn’t sure what to say to that. Her hands are shaking again, for some reason. It seems to happen every time Jacqueline looks at her for too long with those beautiful, inscrutable eyes.
“I think I’d like to take you up on that drink,” she says, casting her eyes downward. They fall on that darn freckle again. It’s like a single drop of brown paint. Claire wants to smear it with a brush. Or with her finger, even.
Jacqueline is sliding off the desk and halfway to the door before Claire has shaken herself of that strange urge. That light, herbal scent washes over Claire as Jacqueline moves past her—it’s definitely too soft to be perfume. “Sure. I’ll be right back.”
“Oh, you don’t have to get it for me,” Claire says, standing up so quickly that the chair rolls across the carpet.
“We can go together,” Jacqueline says.
Reluctantly, Claire trails her back out to the living room. The noise of the party hits like a wall, and she grits her teeth against the onslaught of it as Jacqueline leads her towards the kitchen. Claire sticks close, hoping against hope that she can sneak through.
Just before the threshold, something catches her arm.
“There you are.”
It’s Pete, of course. His cheeks are red. Claire isn’t sure if it’s due to the beer, or the fact that the kissing in the pool seems to be a group activity, now. Just a glance is enough to make her own cheeks heat up.
“These people are embarrassing themselves,” Pete says gruffly. “Let’s go.”
“But we only just got here,” Claire protests.
“And now we’re leaving.”
“Where are Martha and Walter?” Claire asks, casting her eyes around. She doesn’t see them anywhere in the living room.
“Home, where we should be. This party is a zoo.”
Pete is cut off when Jacqueline appears at Claire’s other elbow with a drink in each hand.
“Everything peachy over here?” Jacqueline hands one of the drinks to Claire, her eyes lingering on Pete’s grip of Claire’s upper arm.
“This is Jacqueline,” Claire says quickly. She clutches the glass so hard that she worries it might shatter.
“So you’re the one in charge of this madhouse,” Pete says, dropping Claire’s arm. He takes the drink from her, setting it down on an end table.
Jacqueline’s eyes narrow. Though she’s smiling, it doesn’t quite look friendly. “You must be Pete.”
Jacqueline holds out a hand to shake.
Pete stares down at it. He looks flummoxed; Jacqueline offering a handshake to Claire when they met was one thing, but Claire can hardly believe the brazenness of this.
She’s never once in her whole life seen a woman extend a handshake to a man, uninvited.
Maybe in the city things are different, but here in Acacia Circle?
And to Pete? He’s the most traditionally-minded man Claire knows.
“Is this what parties are like wherever you’re from?” Pete says, rather than accepting the shake. Claire gets the feeling he’s referring to more than just her previous city of residence.
Jacqueline drops her hand, along with her smile. “Not at all. I’d actually say this is quite tame.”
The pain in Claire’s palm gets sharper than usual. When she glances down, opening her hand, her scabs have turned into four red grooves in the skin again. Two of her fingernails are tipped with crimson.
“Tame?” Pete says. His voice raises almost to the volume of the music. “This is a nice neighborhood you’re disrupting, you know that?”
“Nice is in the eye of the beholder,” Jacqueline says, never for a moment losing her confidence.
Pete is bristling like a porcupine, while Jacqueline seems unbothered. There’s something of a battle of wills happening, and Claire is astonished to see that Jacqueline isn’t standing down. It’s Pete who finally cedes the silent impasse.
“It certainly is,” he scoffs, putting a firm hand on Claire’s back to guide her away. “Consider any of our future invites rejected. Come on, Claire.”
Claire keeps her eyes on the floor as she follows Pete to the door. He’s just opening it to storm through when she braves a quick turnaround.
Jacqueline is still standing in the wide arched doorway to the kitchen, drink in hand; she raises it to Claire.
Claire waves back. She wiggles her toes inside her sensible shoes, and clenches her fist tight as Pete pulls her out the door.
Pete doesn’t give outright instructions not to see Jacqueline again.
He does rant about the party for close to an hour after they get home as Claire applies an ointment to her tender palm, but she tunes a lot of it out.
She catches words like shameless and foreign before he finally turns off his bedside lamp and goes to sleep.
And if he hasn’t given outright instructions, Claire wouldn’t be breaking them by visiting Jacqueline again. Would she?
Claire sits at her vanity by the window for longer than she should, watching the light and movement in Jacqueline’s living room windows as the party continues without her.