All the Beautiful Girls

by Elizabeth J. Church

  Lily had projected all of her longing, her need, onto the Aviator. She’d made him into her answer to loneliness, to the lack of a loving family. She’d seen only what she wanted to see—a man she could trust, love. “I guess I just always pictured you a certain way. And now I’m finding out I was wrong about you, too. I’ve been wrong about every single man in my life. Jesus. I’m a complete idiot.”

  “But you weren’t wrong about me,” he said, pulling her hands apart and holding them in his own. “You know I care about you. You must know that. And, Lily—I’ve just had to be very, very careful. Jack has tenure, but I don’t have any protection. If anyone asks, we say I live in the casita, which means I can’t even answer the phone in the main house—because then someone might figure it all out.”

  “He’d do anything for you,” Jack said from where he’d come to stand behind the couch, a literal backdrop to the Aviator. “Stirling has talked about you from nearly the first moment we met. Hell, there was a point where I was even pretty jealous,” he said, and Lily thought she saw Jack resist resting a hand on the Aviator’s shoulder.

  The stack of Playboy magazines she’d seen in the casita—they had to be a prop. How hard it must be for them, she thought. They couldn’t acknowledge their love. They couldn’t hold hands across a restaurant table or as they walked down the street. They couldn’t use any of the endearments other couples used without thinking. Could they even grocery shop together? Would that generate too many questions? If Jack were hurt, in the hospital, the Aviator wouldn’t be able to touch him or show tenderness.

  And the names—the casual cruelty and ignorance of pansy and swish, fairy and faggot. Pillow-biter. She’d heard them all, never once connecting the venomous words with someone she loved. The secrets we carry, she thought. The heavy, shot-put weight of shame.

  “This is horrible,” she said, and caught a look of disappointment on both men’s faces. “Oh no—not you!” she quickly added. “I’m thinking about how you have to live. That you have to treat your love like some enfeebled cousin who’s locked away in an asylum. I’m so sorry!”

  “Then it doesn’t bother you? Now that you know about us?” the Aviator asked, still gripping her hands in his.

  Lily lifted their joined hands and held them in the air as if she were swearing a vow. “I don’t care,” she said, and then thinking that she’d again put her foot in her mouth, she added, “I don’t care that you’re homosexuals. I do care that you love each other. And that makes me very, very happy—for both of you.” She looked up at Jack to be sure he knew he was included.

  The Aviator stood and kissed her forehead, and Jack came from behind the couch and rested his meaty palms on her shoulders.

  “We’re going to get you back on your dancing feet in no time,” Jack said from behind her. “But you stay here as long as you like.”

  “Stay forever, if you want,” the Aviator said. “Jack and I want you here.”

  “I owe you,” Lily said to both of them.

  “No.” The Aviator shook his head. “No, Lily Decker. I owe you a debt I can never repay.”

  “Just tell me one thing,” Lily said, wanting terribly to lighten the atmosphere in the room. “When did you stop smoking?”

  “Jack made me.”

  “I told him I had no desire to lick an ashtray.”

  Lily blinked, hard. More unbidden intimacy. She tried again. “And the parakeets are Jack’s, right?” She smiled.

  “They make an unholy mess of the deck,” the Aviator said, confirming her suspicions. He grinned widely at his lover.

  “I’m trying to loosen him up,” Jack said, bending to pretend-whisper in her ear. “Someday, I’ll get the crease out of those pants.”

  “Ha!” the Aviator scoffed. “And I’ll get you to put your gardening tools away.”

  They sparred just like any couple, Lily realized. “Do you two need a referee?” she teased, thinking that maybe, just maybe, she’d landed in a real home—a place that would hold her gently, securely.

  * * *

  —

  THE WEEKS THAT followed fell into a pattern. Doctor’s visits, physical therapy, exercises and more exercises. The Aviator reported back to duty at Kirtland Air Force Base, and Jack spent his days at the university—with a good deal of free time, in between classes, at home, where he cooked, cleaned, and gardened. He even made peach jam, ladling the sweet, rose-gold preserves into mason jars that he carefully labeled in black ink.

  “Have you always liked to cook?” Lily asked, watching Jack work from a sunny spot she’d found at the table.

  “Always,” he said, licking sugar from his fingers and then rinsing them in cold water. “Do you want a taste?”

  “Absolutely.” Lily accepted a teaspoon loaded with jam. “Wow,” she said, feeling her mouth fill with saliva. “Nectar of the gods.”

  Jack sat down opposite her, sliding the morning newspaper out of the way. “My little sister and I cooked together. We baked cakes, and I actually got pretty good at making roses.” He mimed slowly squeezing an icing bag with both hands, and Lily burst out in laughter.

  “You have a salacious sense of humor,” she said, grinning widely.

  “Don’t tell Stirling.”

  “I suspect he knows.”

  “Oh, that he does,” Jack said, grinning back at her. “He just prefers that I not do it in public.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “With a few martinis in me, I would. Have,” Jack confirmed, his eyes narrowed by his smile. “I remember once there was a nine-inch pepper grinder…”

  Lily burst out laughing again. “Jack, I’d like to go out on the town with you. Ever been to Vegas? Oh, we’d have a blast. I mean, maybe you could be yourselves there. Could you, do you think?”

  “No,” Jack said, shaking his head, suddenly serious. “Not even there, my sweet.”

  They were quiet a moment, and Lily could hear the vibrant, hopeful chirping of the budgies drifting in from the poolside.

  “I grew up in Nebraska,” Jack volunteered. “My father was a farmer. Corn.”

  “So we’re both flatlanders.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t I know. Talk about mind-deadening.”

  “It must have been hard,” Lily said. “Growing up there. I mean—”

  “Mostly, I was confused. Horribly confused. Not about whether I liked men or not—that I always knew. More about why I was that way, what I could do about it. I will say this”—Jack picked up the newspaper sections and ordered them like some puzzle he needed to solve—“it pretty much guaranteed that I’d never believe in God. Not a god who did that to me, who made me something to be despised.”

  “Your parents?”

  “I’m banished. Shunned.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. My sister, on the other hand, she tries. She married a dairy farmer—as uptight and conservative as they come, a Barry Goldwater man for God’s sake—but she loves me, and we share a lot of memories. I used to help her climb out her bedroom window so she could go to dances.”

  “Do you see her at all?”

  “We talk on the phone. That’s pretty much it—and only when Drake is out in the barn or something.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “It is. But it’s also better than nothing.” He finally stopped fiddling with the newspaper.

  “And what about Stirling?” she asked.

  “Well”—Jack smiled across the table at her—“he has you.”

  “He’s pretty much always had me,” Lily said. “In a way, I don’t think we’ve ever been apart. At least not in my head, my heart.” She touched her fingertips to her breastbone. “He’s always been right here. Right here.”

  “There’s nowhere else he’d rather be. Of that, I’m certain.”

  * * *

  —

&nbs
p; THE ESTATE WAGON turned out to be Jack’s, which solved that puzzle for Lily. Far more in character was the Aviator’s burgundy, soft-top Camaro with black upholstery that seared bare skin in the strong, autumn sun. He often wedged Lily’s wheelchair into the backseat and took her for drives out along the western edges of Albuquerque, on traffic-free stretches of an old highway that paralleled the interstate and let him open up the throttle. They rocketed across impossibly sparse ranchland dotted with yucca and cacti, alongside remnants of extinct volcanoes and billboards advertising Acoma Pueblo, the sky-high Indian village.

  In the men’s shadowy, hushed library, Lily read as voraciously as she had when she was a child. She knew she’d found sanctuary with Jack and the Aviator, and while she sometimes missed the charged pace of her Vegas life, she could sense that for once she was exactly where she belonged. She read some of the Aviator’s Emerson and Thoreau, found that numerous passages resonated with her. She could see what meaning they might have held for the Aviator, too, who’d underlined a passage in Emerson’s Nature: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.” Lily hoped it was true that nature could repair her the way Emerson and the Aviator believed—or hoped—it could.

  Still, she found that she preferred fiction, and when she told the Aviator, he smirked and handed her a copy of The Scarlet Letter.

  “Oh, very funny,” Lily said.

  “Hawthorne was a transcendentalist, you know. You’ll have to read about Brook Farm. The hippies aren’t the first to try communal, utopian living.”

  “Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a commune?”

  “Keep reading from that shelf”—he pointed—“and you’ll see. But be careful. It’s a topic that Jack can’t get enough of. He’ll go on and on and—”

  “Will I now,” Jack said, coming into the library. It was their traditional after-dinner reading hour, a time when Geri tended to borrow a car to do her own thing, which apparently consisted of yoga and folk-dancing classes. “I thought maybe tonight we’d have a little opera,” Jack said, going to their shelves of record albums and pulling out Puccini’s Tosca. “Do you enjoy opera, Lily?”

  She was secretly cringing, thinking how much she’d prefer Crosby, Stills & Nash or Creedence. “I know so little about it,” she said, honestly.

  “Jack’s on the board of the Santa Fe Opera,” the Aviator said with evident pride.

  “It’s set in Rome, in 1800,” Jack said, placing the vinyl on the turntable. He blew across it to remove invisible dust and lifted the arm, keeping the needle suspended over the first track while he spoke. “It has all the drama you could want. Torture and murder and suicide.”

  “And some of the most beautiful arias ever written,” the Aviator added.

  “Vissi d’arte,” Jack said. “ ‘I lived for art; I lived for love.’ ”

  They listened for two hours, the men sipping their glasses of port, Lily drinking apple cider. To her surprise, she was enchanted by the music, raised up and sent spiraling by the melodies and the singers’ exalting or cascading emotions. Geri came in toward the end, flushed from whatever exercise class she’d attended. She stood behind Lily and rubbed the aches out of Lily’s shoulders and upper back.

  When the music ended, the four of them let the silence spool out. Finally, Jack stood to lift the needle. “This opera season is over, but next summer, Lily. Next summer, we’ll take you up to Santa Fe. It’s an outdoor theater. You’ll sit in the cool night air, and if you’re lucky, there will be an electrical storm flashing in the distance. You’ll see fabulous scenery and costumes, and hear world-class performers.” Jack held the box for the LPs in his hands, his thoughts elsewhere.

  But what Lily heard had set her heart racing. “Costumes?”

  “Magnificent costumes. Innovative designs,” Jack said.

  “Oh.” She sighed. “That’s my dream.”

  “You’ve already worn some of the best, I would think,” the Aviator said.

  “To design costumes. Did you see, when you were packing up my apartment?” she asked him.

  “Skimpy costumes?” he joked.

  “My sketchbooks, with my designs.”

  He smiled. “I’m teasing. Yes, I saw your sketchbooks, along with your watercolors. Quite a pile of them, as a matter of fact. Vivid made a point of paging through them with me before we boxed them up for the U-Haul. Your passion was evident.”

  “Passion, yes, but I don’t know if I have any talent. And besides, dance has defined me for so long. I mean, I’ve just always been a dancer in my heart, you know? And now I’m not sure who I am, who I can be.”

  “Then you’ve defined yourself too narrowly,” Jack said, his voice kind but authoritative. “First of all, you’re young. Second, we’re all more than just one thing. Stirling is more than a test pilot. A great deal more. Geri is so much more than a nurse. And you, my dear. While you’re no doubt a fine and talented dancer—and a great beauty—you are far, far more than that.”

  Lily felt tears begin to well in her eyes. “I’d planned to go to design school. I’d been saving for it.”

  “You still can,” the Aviator said. “I’ve kept your college fund.”

  “Which you’re spending now,” Lily said, looking down at her casts.

  “Stop,” the Aviator said, and the stringency in his tone surprised her. “Just open your hands, receive. Let me do this without a fight.”

  “Save your energy for your recovery,” Jack added.

  “Which is going along so well,” Geri chimed in. “It helps to have a patient who’s motivated. And who was in such great physical shape to begin with.”

  They all let it go after that, for which Lily was grateful. But this concept of receiving—it created an enormous dissonance within her. Lily was torn; she wanted to be cared for, to feel safe and protected. But that meant she’d have to let someone take care of her. She wasn’t at all sure she could do that, but she was more than willing to try.

  Lily liked to wheel her chair into the pool area, where she’d sit listening to the calming brush of the water against the pool tiles, the pump cycling off and on. She felt herself soothed, bathed in the thick warmth of humidity tinged with the clean scent of chlorine. The parakeets would abruptly stop singing when she entered, their hush telling her that she was—at least for a few moments—an intruder in their private world. She liked to wait for them, to watch for when they tilted their heads in response to a call from a bird outside the windows, and then to listen as they replied to that free bird’s voice with such strident optimism.

  This Saturday morning, she was watching the Aviator swim laps. Not surprisingly, his strokes were crisp, purposeful. She gazed at the water streaming along his sides, the white froth of his kick. He finished his habitual mile, which seemed to be composed mostly of turns at either end of the small pool, and then he shunned the ladder, instead easily pulling himself up and out using only his arms.

  Lily handed him his towel. “You have a beautiful body,” she said without self-consciousness—merely as someone appreciating a lovely creation.

  “Shall I tell Jack that you’ve been flirting with me?”

  Over the course of a couple months, they’d grown easier with each other, able to tease. He pulled a patio chair close to her and sat, dried his legs, and then draped the wet towel across his shoulders.

  “Jack says you were brought up Quaker, in Pennsylvania.”

  “I was.” He used the back of his hand to remove a drop of water that had traveled from his hair down his neck.

  “They do that silent worship thing?”

  “They do.”

  “And they’re nonviolent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Conscientious objectors, right?”

  “Right.” />
  “So what did your parents think when you joined the air force?”

  “They objected.”

  “Even to World War II? To Hitler and all?”

  “They object to violence across the board, and war is violence, no matter the impetus.”

  She wanted to ask if his parents had also disowned him for being homosexual. Or if they’d disowned him for going to war. Which came first. Or if they’d disowned him at all.

  “We’ve had a rough go of it,” the Aviator volunteered. “But we keep trying, we keep talking to each other—sporadically.”

  “They know about Jack?”

  “They know about Jack.”

  “And me?” Lily asked, surprising herself with her frankness.

  The Aviator stretched his toes, flexed his feet to stretch his calves. “They know everything,” he said.

  “The crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, do you mind my asking?”

  “About?”

  “What they think about you and Jack.”

  “Well, it’s interesting.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “They actually sent me a copy of a statement made by the Society of Friends in Great Britain, in 1963.”

  “And?”

  “It said that any act that expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to both individuals did not seem to them to be sinful.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “It’s called ‘Towards a Quaker View of Sex,’ and it says that the fact that an act is homosexual does not, by itself, render it a sin.”

  “That’s amazing. And your parents sent it to you, which must mean—”

  “That they continue to wrestle with it, that they want to understand.”

  “They sound pretty cool.”

  “They are.” He smiled at her. “So, now it’s my turn to ask a few personal questions.”

  “Okay,” Lily said, wondering what might be coming.

  “Have you made a decision? About the pregnancy.”