“I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed this.” Lily looked toward the sun traveling low in the sky and softened by a skim of milky clouds. “Just being outside feels heavenly.”
“I believe that nature is essential,” the Aviator said. “Everything supernatural is in nature.”
“Are you a transcendentalist?” Lily smiled.
“Devotedly so. You’ll find a very long shelf of transcendental writings in our library.”
“Books.” Lily smiled at him. In many ways, books represented their most precious link to each other.
“You have to eat,” the Aviator said noticing that she’d left her burger untouched.
“Because I’m eating for two?” she asked.
He stared at her from behind his dark green sunglasses, and Geri abruptly volunteered to go inside to get more napkins despite the obvious pile sitting in the middle of the table.
“I don’t really know what to say.” The Aviator dipped a French fry in a puddle of ketchup.
“There isn’t anything to say, I guess.” Lily reached for one of his fries.
“I don’t know if abortion is legal in New Mexico. I haven’t had occasion to know,” he said, his true feelings still hidden behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.
Lily looked past him to a small grocery store that advertised a sale on pork chops and fresh roasters. A woman wearing a flowered housedress and pink sponge curlers was coming out of the door, carrying a brown paper grocery bag in each arm.
“Do you ever hear anything about my aunt Tate?” Lily asked.
“Maybe you know your uncle had a massive heart attack. About a year ago, I think it was. I didn’t know whether I should tell you, and then I decided you’d ask, if you wanted to know.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
He carefully folded the paper that had covered his burger and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. It was perfectly pressed, with knife-sharp creases.
“You’re still fastidious.” Lily smiled.
He smiled back at her, refolded the handkerchief, and then said, “You’d be a much better parent. A loving, caring, thoughtful parent. If that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“They didn’t set the bar very high.”
“Someday,” he began, and then stopped as Geri approached.
“Someday what?” Lily asked.
“Just someday,” he said cryptically, unwilling to go on with Geri seated at the table.
The Aviator stood and walked to the station wagon. Lily watched his erect back, his faultless posture. She realized his carefulness was camouflage, his carriage a perfect cloak for his well-pressed secrets.
There was a lot, she thought, that the Aviator kept hidden. But would he ever share those secrets with her?
* * *
—
ARIZONA’S PETRIFIED FOREST was eerily beautiful in its desolation. Lily gazed at the colors whirring past and thought about Aunt Tate, how she would be as a widow. Would she still sit on the couch and watch television at night, Uncle Miles’ empty recliner next to her, a silent, obstinate memorial? Or would she have taken hold of her newfound freedom, rearranged the furniture, painted the walls, begun an evening class in tatting? Maybe she’d sold the house and moved into a nice apartment where others did much of the work for her. Or maybe Aunt Tate roomed with one of her Bible-study sisters, ate mashed potatoes and fried chicken for Sunday dinner.
Lily didn’t feel hatred for Aunt Tate. She didn’t feel anger—not anymore. She felt pity. Pity for a woman who had lived such a truncated, tightfisted life. A woman who’d allowed herself such minimal love, who’d foregone passion. Aunt Tate had been absurdly loyal to a man who didn’t begin to deserve her devotion. Had she ever really seen him? Known him for who he truly was? Had she worn blinders throughout her marriage, or had she felt that she had no other viable option? No means of escape?
Love is blind, Lily thought. And then, immediately, Good Lord. She was criticizing her aunt for the very thing she’d done. For nearly a year, Lily had loved a man who was unworthy of her; she’d failed to see his mutinous heart.
Well, Aunt Tate hadn’t paid the price Lily had. But then again, she’d paid a different price, hadn’t she? Maybe we all pay a price, Lily thought. Maybe love is always costly.
She thought of Uncle Miles’ shrouded raspberry bushes, lined up like the ghosts of murdered children. She thought of the ghost of herself and realized she didn’t know who she’d been before Uncle Miles. Who she was during. She didn’t know who she was now, either.
They passed into New Mexico, winding through the vast desolation of the Navajo reservation and Gallup’s red rock formations. After the sun set, they stopped at a line of malapropos, stuccoed Plains Indian tepees, and bought one last tank of gas and used the restrooms. Geri begged a little extra time to peruse the tacky gift shop for arrowheads and moccasins, and while Geri shopped, Lily and the Aviator lingered beneath adamant stars.
“How are you doing?” he asked, leaning against the station wagon’s paneling.
“Truth?” Lily said, keeping her face toward the India-ink night.
“Yes. Always.”
“I feel naked. And I know that sounds bizarre, coming from someone who makes her living parading around on a stage in a state of decided undress.” She cast a smile toward him in the dark.
“So explain it to me.”
“I think it’s because this is all so intimate,” she said finally. “I mean, we don’t know each other that well, you and I, not really.” She pushed on before he could disagree. “And now you’re seeing me helpless, not even able to go to the bathroom by myself. I’m completely dependent—physically, financially. And you’ve seen my folly, my ruin.” She sighed. “Does it get more intimate than that?”
He’d kept his eyes focused on the heavens, as if by doing so he could lessen their mutual discomfort. But now he looked down at her. “I can’t pretend to know what you’re feeling,” he began. “But I can say that I know what it’s like to feel exposed. That’s what we have those awful dreams about, isn’t it? The dreams in which we’re naked, walking down some hallway with everyone pointing and staring.”
“It’s true. One of our greatest fears is in being seen without the safety of our costumes. Of being revealed for what we really are, right?”
“So the experts say. But, Lily, I want for you to know you can trust me. Oh, hell.” He slapped his thigh in frustration. “Just as soon as I say that, I realize how ridiculous and empty it sounds. You must feel so little trust for anyone at this point.”
“Actually,” she said, reaching from her wheelchair to touch his arm. He squatted so that his eyes were on a level with hers, and she continued, “I trust you more than anyone else on the face of this earth.” Then, feeling oddly emboldened, she added, “And I love you.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, leaning across the arm of the wheelchair to kiss her cheek. “You are so loved.”
He smelled of perspiration and that old, familiar citrus aftershave. Lily was tempted to think of him as a soft blanket in which she could wrap herself. At the same time, she felt the stirrings of her old adolescent longing for him, his physical attraction.
The Aviator stood and looked one last time at the emerging night. “You and I—we met under some very different stars.” His voice was solemn, sepulchral, and she had no response. He cleared his throat. “Over there.” He pointed. “The bright one—that’s Venus. Venus rising in the night sky. It’s the only planet named for a female, you know,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder and squeezing. “And she’s no easy, dull female. Venus is alive with storms, lightning-shot clouds of sulfuric acid. They think she may even have cyclones.”
Lily tried to picture Venus’ storms, and then she thought about trust. She remembered that
as she stood on the precipice of her bus trip to Vegas, the Aviator had told her to trust no one. His advice had been prescient. And yet—she had to trust someone. How else to negotiate the rapids of life? Her error was in trusting the wrong person—that was more than obvious now. Her compass was broken.
But she’d trusted Rose’s father, and then Rose. Vivid and Dee. Even Evan Brashear and Bob Christianson. The Aviator, now. Those people were not mistakes. The mistakes came when she fell in love. That’s where her instruments failed to register properly. She’d so purposefully, obstinately defined the context in which she saw Javier—choosing to see him as her rescued, wounded creature rather than someone bent on using her. But why? What led her to fall so hard for him that she refused to see?
When they were moving again, she could glimpse the night sky from her makeshift bed. She was tired of thinking. It was exhausting, this fruitless, circular analysis and puzzlement. Maybe it was the painkillers that muddled her thought process, blurred all the edges. She shifted, trying to loosen her caftan, which had become bunched up beneath her. Vivid had given her two caftans that could easily be slipped over her head. They were a paisley flurry of bright colors, and one had gold piping circling the belled sleeves and hemline. Vivid had ensured that Lily was a very fashionable invalid, although her hair definitely needed a trim.
After over eight hours of driving, they came to what the Aviator called Nine Mile Hill, on the western outskirts of Albuquerque. Twisting to look out the windshield, Lily managed a brief glimpse of the jeweled lights of Albuquerque spread along a broad valley, a great hulking backdrop of mountains, and a fat moon hoisting itself up and over the peaks.
The main house was a hundred-year-old, low-slung adobe with sensuous, undulating walls that were nearly two feet thick in places. A sunroom with a red brick floor had been added to the south side of the house, its windows filled with wandering vines of pink bougainvillea. Two bedrooms contained heavy, carved wood furniture. A third bedroom had been made into a library with built-in bookshelves lining all four walls, a generously sized Persian carpet, and a chestnut-brown leather couch with matching chairs. The hacienda even included a small indoor swimming pool, around which swooped two dozen relentlessly cheerful yellow, green, and blue parakeets.
Geri and Lily were staying in what the Aviator referred to as the casita, a separate, modern guesthouse set back behind the hacienda. The casita was larger than Lily’s Vegas apartment, with two bedrooms, a full kitchen and pantry area, a bathroom with a walk-in shower, and a living room. The plastered walls were the color of melted chocolate ice cream, and generous windows opened onto a view of the Rio Grande and the cottonwoods that rimmed the river. From her bed on that first morning, Lily spotted a roadrunner stalking lizards in the leafy debris beneath a peach tree in what the Aviator referred to as “our orchard.”
Our was the operative word. Because on that first morning, sitting in the Aviator’s kitchen and being served a breakfast of French toast and fresh strawberries, she’d met Jackson “Jack” Powell.
At six foot three, he was a big man, powerfully built, who nevertheless gave the impression of being an easygoing teddy bear. He wore tattered blue jeans, a loose-fitting Mexican shirt of thin vanilla cotton, and despite Albuquerque’s early autumn heat, Birkenstock sandals with socks. His mussed, light brown hair flew in every imaginable direction; he had pale blue eyes, and a pronounced Fu Manchu mustache.
Jack made them all breakfast and then settled in beside Lily. She could smell the cinnamon and vanilla he’d used for the French toast. As he poured a generous flow of maple syrup over his toast, Jack looked up and caught her staring.
He smiled and said, “I told him not to say anything until you got here. About us, I mean.”
“I—” she began, at a loss for words. What did he mean, us? She looked between the two men. The Aviator sat across the table in a baby-blue, crisply ironed oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. A crease was pressed into the legs of his khaki pants, and his short hair was, as always, carefully combed. Lily looked at the angles of his fingers as he held his silverware, the way he cut his French toast into precise rectangles, the way he tried to ensure that each piece soaked up an equal portion of maple syrup.
And Jack—the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, the light emanating from his features, the promise of nurturance she saw there. She tried to comprehend the yin and yang of the two men. They weren’t living together to save money—it was clear that wasn’t the case. But…
That was it, wasn’t it? When the Aviator looked up from his breakfast plate and smiled across at Jack, Lily saw it. She saw the Aviator’s shoulders relax, his jaw muscles loosen. In that brief moment she could see they were a couple, that they loved each other.
“You didn’t know,” Jack said, reading her expression and grinning widely. “Don’t fret, Lily. No one knows.” He looked across the table toward the Aviator. “For obvious reasons,” he added, still gazing across the table. Lily saw the Aviator’s cheeks color, and he looked down, focused on slicing a strawberry into four pieces.
“I just—” Lily tried again. She laid down her silverware. How could she have missed it? The Aviator was a homosexual. She said it to herself several times over, trying to take in yet another dose of the Elixir of Lily’s Eternal Blindness.
They hadn’t had homosexuals in Kansas when she was growing up. Well, certainly, no one she’d known. She’d met some effeminate men in Vegas, especially in the costume design rooms, but it had never entered her mind that the Marlboro Man Aviator was—oh, God. This was insane. He’d had that petite girlfriend—that Jackie Kennedy wannabe Lily had seen at the Tah-Dah! fundraiser.
Lily couldn’t take this in. Buying time, she took a sip of her fresh-squeezed orange juice. “This is delicious,” she managed.
“It’s a truly lovely feast, Jack,” Geri added.
“Do you want to tell our story, or shall I?” Jack asked the Aviator.
“Go ahead,” the Aviator said. “I think you’re better equipped.”
“Ah,” Jack said, accepting the Aviator’s dodge without comment. “Well then. ‘The Ballad of Stirling and Jack.’ ”
Lily had almost forgotten the Aviator’s real name: Stirling Sloan.
“I was hired to give a training at the air force base,” Jack began, his gaze alternating between Lily and the man seated across the table from him. “To a bunch of cocky test pilots,” he said, grinning. “I’m a psych professor at UNM—the University of New Mexico—and I was told that these fine men needed to learn about stress reduction.” He picked up a strawberry, bit off the top, and dropped the remainder in his mouth. “Stirling and I had lunch afterward, and we got to talking. Primarily about chess, as I recall. The strategies of warfare, more generally, yes?” he asked the Aviator.
“And you challenged me to a match,” the Aviator said, his eyes softening, a corner of his mouth rising with humor.
“We discovered that we both love books, philosophy in particular. Antiques. A nice glass of port,” Jack said.
“Quiet contemplation,” the Aviator added. “Emerson. Thoreau.”
“And each other,” Jack said, without embarrassment.
Lily looked down into her lap. She felt a fist grab hold of her heart and squeeze. She tried hard to calm herself, to hide her confused feelings.
“I already owned this house,” Jack continued. “And then we added the guesthouse so that if the federal government chose to check on Stirling in connection with his security clearance, we could easily persuade them that he lived as my tenant in the guesthouse—not here with me.”
“Lily?” the Aviator said, clearly worried. “What’s wrong?”
Lily shook her head. She was losing again. Another removal. Now she’d lost the Aviator. And yet she knew that she was being horribly selfish—wanting him all to herself. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
“I’ve been an idiot,” Jack said, scooting his chair so that he faced Lily in her wheelchair. He cupped her shoulder in his hand. “Lily,” he said softly, as if he might frighten away a skittish horse. “I didn’t do this well. Not at all. I’ve been insensitive.”
She shook her head. “No. It’s not you, Jack. It’s me.” She was still unable to meet anyone’s eyes and so instead stared steadily into her lap.
“You’ve had so much to deal with, in such a short time,” Jack said. “Too much.”
“Jack,” the Aviator said. “Why don’t the three of us go talk in the library. No offense, Geri.”
“None taken. I’ll earn my keep, get the dishes cleared,” she said, standing.
The Aviator came around behind Lily’s chair and took hold of the handles. “Okay?” he asked, and in response Lily took her napkin from her lap and set it beside her plate.
* * *
—
JACK OPENED THE library’s French doors, which looked onto a small, flagstone patio with an old stone fountain. Shadows flickered across the stones, and birds dipped into the fountain’s waters. “There’s no air-conditioning,” Jack said. “The house is too old. But these breezes help.”
“I’ve had to be careful—still am careful,” the Aviator said, sitting on the end of the couch and facing Lily in her wheelchair. “My career depends upon it. If anyone found out, I’d be tossed out of the air force. Actually, I’d be prosecuted. Criminally.”
“But you had that girlfriend,” Lily said, her hands gripping each other as if in prayer. “The one who looked like Jackie Kennedy.”
“Oh, you mean Judith. No, Lily,” the Aviator said. “She was my beard.”
“Your what?”
“Beard. You hide behind a beard. She was my disguise, in case people started to ask questions—like Why isn’t he married? And Maybe my sister Mary would be a good match for him.”
“Oh.”
“She was a willing accomplice. Judith had her own reasons for wanting to throw people off the scent.”
All the Beautiful Girls Page 28