Chapter 20 #2
She doesn’t have them every night, but it’s often enough that she can’t put them out of her mind.
Jackie is the only constant in them. Jackie in the pool, in the changing room, in the conversation pit, sitting on Claire’s bed.
Claire usually loses the details when she wakes up, but they leave Claire sweaty and trembling when her alarm trills.
The warm, slick evidence she cleans up between her legs every morning—is that the kind of hot that Theo means?
Theo clicks his tongue. “Saying it out loud helps, trust me. Share with your favorite homosexual.”
“I…” Claire says. Her voice is dry and croaky. She closed her eyes tight, letting her forehead fall onto the table. “Theo, I don’t know what any of this is supposed to feel like.”
“Then you should figure it out before you try to involve Jackie. I’m not letting her get hurt again.”
Again.
Claire sits up straight. She’s struck by remembrance, now, of something she hadn’t connected before—the married man that Jackie loved. The one she’s been so broken up over. If Jackie really is like Theo, then maybe it wasn’t a man at all. It must have been a woman.
The beautiful blonde woman from the pictures on Jackie’s table rushes into Claire’s memory. The inscription Jackie had written—you and me against the world. Always. A sentiment for a lover, not a friend.
I’ll wait as long as you need me to.
They were pressed together so intimately in that photo. Claire didn’t think to look, but she’d bet a hundred dollars that if she had, there would have been a wedding ring on the woman’s finger. Just like Claire. Jackie promised to wait, but all her waiting ended in heartbreak.
“Valerie,” Claire says softly.
Theo makes a startled noise. “Now how in the hell do you know that name?”
“Oh, my word,” Claire breathes. There’s too much happening at the moment to bother with explanations. “I’m right, aren’t I? The person who broke her heart isn’t a man at all. It was Valerie.”
“Someone’s a little snoop.”
“It was an accident,” Claire protests. “The photos were—I didn’t mean to.”
“Sure you didn’t, Nancy Drew,” Theo says. “Look, figure yourself out. Fuck her over, spread this around your little suburb in some twisted attempt to pretend you’re not tangled up in it, and I will personally take a monumental shit in your favorite kitchen appliance.”
Claire is left with a dial tone, and far too much to think about as she relies on muscle memory to prepare an angel food cake in the afternoon.
Rita’s fifty-fourth birthday party is tonight, and Pete’s entire family is going to be there.
It’s the last place she needs to be thinking about the fact that Jackie apparently cares enough about her to be given the ‘run-around’.
Does Jackie mirror Claire’s feelings? Does she too lie awake at night, thinking about how close their lips had been? Does she dream of Claire, and wake up shaking?
The thoughts persist as Pete drives them to his parents’ house, and as Rita comments that she prefers chocolate cake over sponge.
They spiral through Claire over dinner, where thankfully everyone is too preoccupied feeding and calming down the kids to pay much mind to the fact that Claire has barely touched her beef bourguignon.
Theo’s words stick with her when everyone gathers in the family room to take a group photo.
Is she attracted to Pete? It’s not a question Claire has ever been asked before.
It’s not something she ever thought to consider.
Looking at him, red-faced from the wine and laughing at some joke with his father, Claire doesn’t feel a stirring of anything Theo talked about.
Heat. Desire. She’s not sure she’s ever felt it for him, even when they first met.
Their courtship hadn’t exactly been electrifying.
He asked her to a dance in junior year, and Claire said yes, flattered by his interest—nobody had ever expressed any in her before.
She’d always been the tallest girl in her class, a tomboyish childhood turning into lanky awkwardness in her teenage years.
But people looked at her differently when she was with Pete.
Having a man by her side made all of those shortcomings ease, back then. She blended in.
But if this life is what it means, does she want to blend in? What was it that Jackie said, when they first met? Don’t bother with the background.
Wondering if it might just be Pete she isn’t stirred by, Claire considers his brothers, too.
Handsome men, all. His oldest brother John has always been kind to her, kinder even than Pete.
He’s broad-chested, with a neat beard and a wife who by all accounts seems to adore him.
He looks like the perfect father, bouncing his youngest son on his knee.
Is that attraction? Noting his nice qualities, his good looks?
Pete’s youngest brother Alan is clean-shaven, with hair almost to his shoulders that Rita continually tells him to cut.
He’s jovial and quick to smile, but he doesn’t make her laugh like Jackie does.
And Bill, two years Pete’s senior, is so similar to Pete that Rita often jokes they’re simply twins who weren’t born together. They even have similar moustaches.
They’re all strapping men. Perfectly acceptable. So why, in looking at them, does Claire feel nothing? Less than nothing? In comparison to the feeling that grips her when Jackie smiles at her, let alone the day in the pool when they’d been close enough to kiss, those men might as well not exist.
It’s only later when Pete is sound asleep and Claire is alone in the bath that she allows herself to consider the obvious conclusion.
If attraction really is the way Theo describes it, then she isn’t attracted to her husband at all. She’s never met a man who sparked that in her. But Jackie?
Even the slightest memory of that day in the department store changing room, of Jackie’s breath against her face and her nails scratching Claire’s scalp, sends a tingling through her.
An excitement that Pete has never stirred.
That antsy, restless feeling in her gut when Jackie smiles at her—is that attraction?
Or the tightness in her chest when she saw Jackie in a bathing suit for the first time?
When she leaned against the laundry basket and felt that explosion of sensation, conjuring memories of her dreams—is that what Theo means?
What would it mean to embrace whatever she’s feeling, and step into this great and terrible unknown?
Jackie and Theo would be her only life-rafts, and she hasn’t even spoken to Jackie in weeks.
If this is really who Claire is, if she’s like them, she’ll lose everything.
Her house, her marriage. Her friends, such as they are.
Pete has made it clear what polite society thinks of those people.
But why, Claire thinks suddenly, should she only be listening to Pete’s opinion on the topic?
Jackie is a good person. One of the best Claire has ever met.
She doesn’t put on the same airs of fake kindness that Martha and the other neighborhood ladies do—she’s genuine.
And Theo isn’t the downfall of society. He’s funny and witty, even if she rather wanted to hit him at first. He put effort into helping her today.
Why shouldn’t she want to be like them?
The idea of a life without Pete, stranded on her own with no husband to provide, has always terrified her.
Divorce always seemed like a death sentence.
She can’t drive, and she has no savings.
It would be an end to life as Claire knows it.
But maybe if she had the kind of community Theo talked about, that wouldn’t be so bad.
She could find a job somewhere, make her own money and support herself.
She could come home after a hard day not to a husband demanding dinner and drinks, but to someone like Jackie, who makes her feel more at ease than anyone she’s ever known.
She could hold Jackie close when she needs comfort.
She could kiss her. Fall asleep in her arms. Even take her to bed.
The very idea fills Claire with a longing so sharp that it kick-starts a gut-wrenching sob.
And then another. They feel good, in a way.
Rather than holding back Claire lets it happen, lets herself fall apart in the downstairs bathtub until every confusing emotion she’s been trying to quash has been wrenched out of her.
It’s a cleansing sort of cry. An all-out sobbing mess, the kind that leaves her exhausted and dehydrated and blissfully empty in the lukewarm water.
It’s strange to be relieved by something so life-shattering, but she is.
Finally, after months of confusion, there’s an explanation. She’s not losing her marbles.
She’s just like Jackie. She’s gay. She’s a queer.
What she doesn’t know is how on earth she’s supposed to decide what to do about it.