Chapter 20
The following days can only be described as one great prolonged crisis.
The numbness is gone, replaced now with something much worse. Claire can’t stop thinking about Jackie and Susan. They stick in her mind like a stain, like those stubborn droplets that spilled on her dress in Jackie’s darkroom. She’s scrubbed them three times over, and they still persist.
The way Susan had giggled, and touched Jackie’s arm with such familiarity.
The flushed, gratified look of them when they spilled out of that bathroom.
How had Claire not seen it? How had she been so blind?
She tries to picture what it might be like, whatever they did to each other in there that left Susan so giggly, but her experience of intimacy is limited to being bedded by her husband.
His rough hands, his scratchy kisses. Try as she might, she can’t imagine Jackie in that scenario.
Jackie must be different. She must know things. She’d be talented, Claire is sure. Soft. Confident, like the characters in the romance novels that Louise sometime tries to suggest for book club.
The thought exhilarates Claire as much as it makes her head spin. It brings to mind the dreams, which Claire is still having regularly. It’s impossible to deny now that the way Jackie touches her in them is how she should want to be touched by Pete.
Pete’s touch doesn’t even light a spark. She’s never looked at any other men with much desire, either. Yet when Jackie so much as puts a hand on Claire’s wrist?
Fireworks.
Cycling through these thoughts without anyone to share them with is excruciating. What would anyone else in her life think if they knew? She saw firsthand what the neighborhood ladies think. Claire can’t even begin to imagine what Pete’s reaction would be to the newest piece of chatter.
In a whirlwind, Claire digs up the scrap of paper with Theo’s phone number on it.
“Ronny, I’ve told you a hundred times,” Theo’s voice says on the second ring. “You can beg as much as you’d like, but this station is closed until you shape up. I won’t play second fiddle.”
“Theo?” Claire says, after a pause.
“…who is this?”
“It’s Claire Davis.”
Theo makes a little noise that reminds Claire of a chatty feline. “How on God’s green earth did you get my number?”
“It was on Jackie’s refrigerator,” Claire says in a rush. “I was wondering if you could talk for a moment? Please?”
“Talk?” Theo says. He pauses. “What about? From my understanding, you and Jacks aren’t speaking anymore.”
If Theo’s words were daggers, they’d be buried in Claire’s gut right now. She grits her teeth, willing herself not to choke up. “I know that. But I hoped that maybe you…I realize that you’re Jackie’s friend, and not mine. But you know things.”
“I know things. How cryptic,” Theo drawls. “But unlike dear Jackie, I have a stacked social calendar. Clock’s ticking. To what do I owe the unexpected call, Mrs. Davis?”
Claire could swear that he’s put an emphasis on the Mrs, but it’s hard to tell over the phone line.
“Right. Okay. Well, um. You’re a…” Claire takes a deep breath. It’s somewhat steadying, but she still feels shaky. “Theo. You’re…”
“Out with it, Suzy Homemaker,” Theo says.
“You’re a homosexual,” Claire blurts. “Correct?”
Theo laughs a little. “Hm. Interesting way to start a conversation. I think I’ve made that quite clear.”
Claire breathes out all at once. It leaves her light-headed. “Yes. So, my question is,” she says, drumming her fingers on the table, “I suppose, how you…knew. That you were…like that.”
“I hit puberty and wanted to fuck men,” Theo says simply. “Is that all you wanted to know?”
Claire tsks, pressing a hand to where her pearls used to sit. “Theodore!”
“Only Jacks can call me that. You phoned me up. Don’t get shy now.”
Claire’s stomach flips. She did call Theo up. She dialed his number to ask an absolutely ridiculous question, and the absurdity of it makes her stomach lurch.
What is she doing?
“You’re right. I don’t know why I did this,” Claire says. She’s pressing the phone so hard against her ear that it’s starting to hurt. “Cripes. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—please don’t tell Jackie. Don’t tell her I called.”
Claire has almost hung the phone up when she hears Theo’s voice, loud and clear.
“Wait.”
Claire’s hand hovers over the cradle. She wavers for a moment, the receiver hovering over the cradle, but curiosity gets the better of her—she puts it to her ear again. “Yes?”
Theo sucks at his teeth. “Why do you ask?”
Claire’s breathing has gone heavy. Her palms are sweaty, slipping on the plastic phone. Her line is private, but it feels like anyone could be listening.
“Because,” Claire says, her voice thin and warbly, “I have been having some…doubts.”
“About?”
“Everything,” Claire says. “My marriage, my—my whole life. All of it. I’m lost, Theo.”
Theo takes a long pause. He says nothing for so long that Claire wonders if maybe he’s hung up on her.
“Why do you feel the need to have this conversation with me?” he finally says, with none of the snark she’s come to associate with every word that comes out of his mouth.
Claire clings to the phone cord. Her fingers are all twisted up in it, wound into the tight coils until they get snarled with little tangles. “Who else could I ask? Who would even hear me out without sending me to the psychiatrist? Jackie trusts you, and I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought.”
Theo sighs. “I really did not want to get caught up in Jackie’s little burst of temporary mania.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to turn.”
For a few beats, there’s nothing but the crackle of the phone line. Fingers drum on a surface, and then he lets out a long sigh.
“It’s simple, really. I always felt different,” Theo finally says. “I didn’t want to do the things boys were supposed to. I never measured up. My father liked to point it out, before he left my saint of a mother to start his little white family.”
“Your father is white?” Claire blurts. “That’s—”
“That’s all you need to know about it,” Theo says, cutting clear through Claire’s pity. “Don’t trip over yourself again. Do you want to know how I fell in love, or not?”
Claire’s stomach is still flipping. She wants to know about that more than anything. It’s as if she’s filling with helium and floating away, as something complicated happens in the larger part of her brain. Her body is the front in a war between two feelings. “I do. You fell in love with a man?”
“I was seventeen,” Theo says. “We ran away together. I found community. I never looked back. That’s when I met Jacks. She dug me out of my hole when that relationship ended.”
“How did you know you were in love?”
Theo sighs. “It was obvious. Just looking at him set my heart off. Every song felt written for him. I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like, but he taught me.
And touching him, it was—it was like his skin was magic.
I wanted to be closer to him, no matter where we were. No matter who was watching.”
“Right,” Claire says, needlessly. It’s hard to say anything more meaningful when her thoughts are all of Jackie.
How it feels to look at her. How it feels to be touched by her, whether it’s a simple squeeze of the arm or Jackie’s fingers brushing against her chest as she unbuttons Clare’s shirt in a changing room.
Magic might be just the right word.
“I’d make up excuse after excuse to be near him. Eventually they got so flimsy that I couldn’t deny it anymore,” Theo says, his voice softer now. “I kissed him. And it was incredible. He just felt…right.”
Claire could count the number of times she’s felt just right on one hand.
She’s lived a life of just fine. A life of not quite.
The only moment that might have risen above it was that afternoon in the pool, when she had the thought of kissing Jackie.
When the very idea of it had set something in her ringing like a bell.
Claire doodles on the pad of paper next to the phone. A heart. A spiral. A great, sweeping cursive J.
“The ladies at book club said that Jackie slept with Susan Wilson,” Claire says.
She’s not sure how she expects Theo to react, but an irritated groan was certainly not on her list. It’s long and loud and ends in a sort of shout that makes Claire jump.
“Christ. I fucking told her,” Theo says. “Don’t get tangled up in the goddamn suburbs. Which one is Susan? You housewives all look the same to me.”
“Has there been more than one?” Claire squeaks.
Theo sighs. Claire hears something scratchy, like he’s rubbing his face but hasn’t shaved in a while. “That’s not my place to say. But it is my place to make sure Jackie doesn’t get given the run-around by some curious suburbanite who doesn’t care about her.”
“I do care about her,” Claire says hotly. “Very much. She’s the one who walked away from our friendship.”
“And are you in love with her?”
Claire’s argument dies on her lips. No matter what she’s starting to suspect, saying it out loud is another thing entirely.
Theo makes an amused noise. “Right. How about attraction? You asked me what it felt like. Do you feel that for her, at least?”
“I…”
Theo keeps pushing. “What about your husband? How do you feel about him? Does he make you hot?”
“Hot?” Claire says faintly.
“Under the collar. In bed. Do you like kissing him? Fucking him? Does his touch get you hot, or do you lie back and think of England?” Theo says, either ignorant to or uncaring of Claire’s growing discomfort.
Claire can’t describe anything Pete does as making her hot. Lovemaking is a wife’s duty. She’s never exactly enjoyed it, but then she’s not meant to, is she? That’s for the husband to enjoy. It’s her job to make sure he’s satisfied.
But then, what about Claire’s dreams?