Fic: These Letters (M)
Jul. 29th, 2006 11:21 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
angryhaiku.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
mash_slashTitle: These Letters
Author: Chase
Pairing: BJ/Peg, with implications of BJ/Hawkeye
Rating: Solid Colonel (that is, Mature): Kinders be warned. The slash is semi-subtextual, so please be appraised of that as well.
Summary: Hawkeye reads one of BJ's letters.
Disclaimer: I don’t own ‘em, and by the time I got hold of ‘em they were already out of the original packaging. Any money I receive from this will be mailed to Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, with my compliments.
I was trying to get through a chapter of a different story when this came out instead. Frankly, I think we’d all rather read some smut anyway, right? This is my first attempt at it (and also my first story to this community!), so I’d appreciate any feedback – good and bad – that you might have.
---
BJ does something odd every third or fourth letter he gets from his wife.
I don’t mean he gets depressed. Though he does get depressed, every letter, like clockwork. Sometimes he’s better about hiding it, but it always takes a few hours for him to shake the hangdog expression after the Chronicles of Mill Valley. That I understand; ever letter from my father is bittersweet: It makes me think about all the things I have, but also all the things I’m missing.
Every third or fourth letter, he’ll open it, shake the paper out, then carefully return half the pages to the envelope and stash the envelope in the cigar box he keeps in his footlocker, usually in the guise of putting away or consulting a medical journal. I asked him once what he keeps in there; he shrugged and told me canceled checks and financial records. I could see Lorraine Blake sending her husband canceled checks, but from what BJ’s said, Peg Hunnicutt seems a reasonably savvy woman. BJ’s claim doesn’t wash, because I would guess Peg can balance her checkbook better than BJ can.
For the sake of argument, let’s acknowledge that one might make conclude (it has been so concluded in the past) that all this is none of my business. I may not agree, but I can certainly see the logic of it. Here’s the interesting part, though: Late at night, when all his fellow Swamprats are asleep (or so he thinks; I sleep so much that some of that time has to just be me lying in my bunk with my eyes closed), he takes the letters out. If it’s warm enough outside he goes out and doesn’t come back for hours; if it’s cold, he just takes them out and reads them with the help of a small flashlight we filched from supply, his back to Frank and I, with these muffled gasps that sound suspiciously like sobs. Then he hides them back in the cigar box. I can’t let my dear bunkie cry himself to sleep nights without trying to find out the cause, can I?
These aren’t the letters that make him depressed – well, not usually. In fact, now that I think about it, the boost BJ gets from one of those letters seems greater than from a normal letter. The morning after he reads one, the spring is back in his step, he eats food from the Chateau Shigella without complaint, and even his appetite for anarchic lunacy is greater than usual.
What could Peg be sending him that would make him cry, then be happy? What could anyone send him, for that matter?
It would take a greater man than I not to wonder. Certainly it would take a greater man than I not to sneak into his footlocker and find out.
Okay, yes, I should probably feel guilty about this. But the man is wearing my socks right at this very moment. Socks he stole out of my footlocker. Why should his privacy be any more sacred than mine?
---
Filching the cigar box wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It should have been easy to sneak into his footlocker and swipe it while he was on duty or even while he was forgetting his troubles in the O-Club, but for some reason – damnable luck, or maybe BJ’s become prescient – BJ has been hanging around like an abandoned puppy. Even when he absolutely has to be somewhere else, there’s Frank, just waiting to fink on me. I think he and Hot Lips must’ve had some kind of fight, because he’s been surlier than usual and can hardly muster up the energy to go to meals, and his zeal for his normal pleasure in tormenting the enlisted and…I don’t know, kicking babies, whatever else it is Frank does for fun – seems to have been leeched right out of him. I can’t go through BJ’s footlocker with Frank sitting on his bunk, piously copying passages out of the Bible; it wouldn’t take him but half a moment to decide to rat me out. Not out of any loyalty to BJ or – heaven forefend! – a commitment to property rights, but because nothing would delight him more than to have evidence that I betrayed BJ.
I’m not betraying BJ. I’m just investigating.
Anyway, eventually BJ went to post-op and Frank heard a rumor (founded, I regret to report, only in my own mind) that Margaret was flirting with a visiting dentist. He went to search the VIP tent for blonde hairs, and I went to BJ’s footlocker to search for…
Well, if I knew what I was searching for I wouldn’t have to search, would I?
I snatched the cigar box – easy peasey, it’s a well known fact that BJ keeps the key to his footlocker in the copy of Gray’s Anatomy under his bed. Inside was a few dollars in Army scrip, a broken watch, a Chinese coin promised to be 1,200 years old that he’d bought in Seoul, and a small mountain of envelopes, all addressed to BJ in the same immaculate boilerplate handwriting.
I had planned to swipe the entire box, but looking at the hole its absence made in the footlocker, I just took one letter. If BJ had needed something out of his footlocker before his shift was over, he would’ve seen the difference immediately; the lack of a single letter out of two dozen would be much less obvious.
Frank seemed to have hit paydirt with Major Houlihan; I could hear her bellows of outrage clear across the compound. I’ll be amazed if Frank actually breaks down and accuses her of infidelity. Instead, his frustration will manifest in some hideously tactless remark about her appearance or professionalism, and she, being struck where her fortifications are strongest, will return the favor by completely annihilating his sense of self-worth.
All in all, not a bad evening’s work, even without any extra-curricular activity. And as an added bonus, it guarantees me plenty of time to read the letter. I put it in a novel – if BJ or Frank, or maybe Nurse Archer, who has a standing invitation to stop in at the Swamp whenever I’m by myself, turn up, the letter can quickly vanish, and I have a plausible explanation for what I was doing.
You know, just so I don’t have to brazen it out.
Look, BJ would do the same to me!
I took the leaves of paper out. The letter was hand-written on cream-colored paper. I know it well, because Peg always writes her letters on the same stationary in her suburban-schoolteacher handwriting. Well, not exactly; the handwriting here was slanted a little further, the loops a little less identical, as if it’d been written in a hurry. I didn’t know what to make of that, so I set the information aside for the moment and sniffed the letter. I’d kind of hoped it would still offer a whiff of the aromas of exotic California, but the pages smelled mainly of the cigars the box once held and BJ’s footlocker, an unmistakable bouquet of gin, socks, and antiseptic.
Once I reassured myself that no one was headed straight for the Swamp (it only occurred to me afterward that sticking my head out the window and peering around was more or less the most conspicuous thing I could possibly do), I started to read.
“My darling,
“It’s uncommonly warm here. The breeze blows hot from the east, and perhaps it’s the northernmost edge of the Santa Anas, but it makes me shiver and want to chase the moon.
“Erin is sleeping like a champion upstairs. I closed all the windows and put the fan on, and she couldn’t even stay awake through a bedtime story. I wish I could slip so easily into slumber myself, but now, as always, my thoughts are of you.
“For my own sake, I’m sitting in the study in just a linen slip, with all the windows open so I can feel the wind on my skin. It makes me anxious; it makes my skin crawl.”
Someone stumbled in the dirt outside and I flinched away from the letter. It was probably just Klinger on a night patrol. I stared without seeing at my novel until I heard the distinctive sound of someone picking himself up and walking away. The silence stretched on for a long time until I felt safe again, but the sound of someone stumbling drunkenly to the latrine reassured me that no one was coming.
“Lately I find myself daydreaming about when you come home. That may seem redundant; I know you’re dreaming of the very same day. I am sure, though, that this is no ordinary daydream, my love, because it recurs with such frequency and vividness that I’ve had to stop what I’m doing on several occasions and wait for it to pass – or, if Erin is occupied elsewhere, to revel in it.
“I can see myself in the airport, waiting impatiently; I can see you descending from the ‘plane. I can see you so clearly in your dress uniform, darling, from the angle of your hat to the glare on your boots and the silly mustache in between. I race to meet you, to throw my arms around your waist, to lead you home (and this is the only part of the dream that’s unclear, maybe because I cannot look away from you long enough to observe our surroundings).
“In the dream, I scarcely allow the door time to close before I (forgive a lonely woman, my dear) close to kiss you; my lips on your lips, my hands in your hair, urgently drinking in your presence. You smell like clean water and salt and unperfumed soap, and faintly of travel and places I’ve never been. You shake off your silly jacket as I pull on the knot in your tie, and you kiss me back, so hard I step backward into the entry wall. I claw at your uncooperative shirt front, but lust has sapped my coordination and one of the buttons snaps off and goes bouncing under the ugly umbrella stand your sister gave us. You laugh a little, gently, at my desperation; the vibration of it resonates in my own throat. I pull your shirt and undershirt out of where they’re tucked into your pants to stroke the beautiful curve of your waist, and feel the glass of your muscles cut lean beneath velveted skin.
“(Are you softer or harder than you were when you went away? Will there be new flesh to explore, new planes of muscle to memorize? If there is any kindness in the cruelty of your absence, it is only the assurance that when you return there will be new things to learn about you.)”
It’s obvious, now, what kind of letter this is going to be; it’s obvious that I should put it back and try to forget I ever saw it, for Peg’s sake if not for BJ’s. I can’t. Her halting, slightly uncomfortable purple prose has stirred something in me, though something creeping that I’d rather not address suggests that the source of my discomfort is that I’m empathizing more with the author than the subject of this letter.
“You smile, but we aren’t joking now; the bedroom is just a few steps away, but it feels like miles as we walk. I step out of my shoes on the way, and you shed the offending shirt.
“For a moment in the bedroom I am shy. It feels strange to be here with someone else, after months of seeing only Erin or myself in this room, and I grin bashfully at you, but it’s your turn to be the aggressor now and you close the half step between us with a smile. You kiss me, and the kiss lasts at least as long as the war did, and by the time we step apart I can feel you hard against my belly.
“With expert hands you open my dress, and I twist carefully so it falls to the ground without my having to step away from you. You run your hands over my exposed flesh, and already I am throbbing, whimpering a little in desire for you. It’s only the span of a breath before we’re both naked and then the bed is too inviting to ignore.
“You settle on top of me and the weight is so familiar but exciting; having you present is almost enough to send me over the edge, especially when you rasp a lightly callused thumb over the peak of my breast. But I don’t want to go, yet, there’s still too much novelty in your presence and I want to savor it for a while. I wriggle from underneath you (you seem to like that, pet) and turn you over onto your back.
“I nibble on your earlobe, and you groan a little and murmur something inaudible. I had intended kissing a seductive trail down your throat, but I don’t think either of us can wait that long. I nip at your Adam’s apple, draw a line of kisses from the point of your sternum to your navel, and with a final, somewhat sheepish glance up at you, I lick the length of your hardness and take you into my mouth. You taste basic and intensely familiar, and when you groan I start moving.”
I look away from the letter again, halfway to heartbroken. Oh, oh, it’s too much that this lovely girl, this obvious sexual neophyte, is attempting to describe a sex act she’s clearly never performed. Basic?
One of the few conversations BJ and I have had about non-hypothetical sex – and there haven’t been many, because he gets…not uncomfortable; after all, the man’s a doctor, but certainly awkward – led me to conclude that he was unfamiliar with the concept of oral sex. Beej is so quietly confident when he talks about Peg that it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t actually had that much experience with women. That copy of Gray’s is probably the most pornographic thing he’s ever read. He tried his best to play it cool, when (before I knew about his monastic dedication to Peg) I drunkenly explained that a few of the nurses are willing to be rather unconventionally friendly, if one repays them in kind, but it was obvious he had no idea what I was talking about.
And when he figured out what I meant, he got really quiet. (Much as I myself did, the afternoon Cy Griesmayr explained to me the brilliant new game he and his girlfriend had invented, thereby introducing me to a concept that would effectively be an obsession for the next fifteen years. Imagine my shock when I found that Cy and Lucy hadn’t actually invented anything.)
I suppose he’s writing Peggy his own version of these letters, a thought that makes me shift uncomfortably in my bunk and return to the letter at hand.
“You thread your hands through my hair as I move, and when your hips start to tremble uncontrollably, I pull away. Without breaking eye contact, you pull me up to eye level with you. ‘God, Peg,’ you say, then, still unblinking, you press me down against the bed and rest again on top of me. Deftly, you stroke me from front to back, caressing my clitoris with feather-light delicacy. I can hardly stand it; I am so close already.
“’BJ,’ I gasp, and you stroke into me.
“BJ, my love, the moment is ecstatic. It has been so long that your penetration is like an awakening. You pause a moment so I can adjust, and kiss me softly, and smile at me with mingled lust and contentment.
“It only takes a few strokes before I feel a ripple start in all of my extremities. It cascades inward and all of my muscles tense. I am paralyzed, my head thrown back and my eyes closed in pleasure, too overwhelmed even to scream. You follow a moment after, gripping my hips tightly to press further into me.
“Eventually the world rebuilds itself around us, and you slide down to lie beside me. I turn to rest the crown of my head under your chin, and you snake your arms around my waist. We doze contentedly for a few hours, until hunger (for food or something else) rouses us again.
“(Your leave for a moment to compose myself, my dear. I shall have to step away and think about new compost for the orange tree, or the Dodgers, at least until I can hold the pen without my hand trembling. There; see how my letters are neater now?)
“My darling, by now the crickets have faded into silence and I can hear only the muted sounds of true night, and yet I still feel unwilling to leave you. Sitting here in quiet dimness, it seems as though the distance between us is abridged, and you’ll come in at any moment to ask what keeps me up so late. If you were here, I know you would tease me about the flush of my cheeks and throat and lower still (and how I can still feel shy about naming anatomy, after writing such a letter as this, I do not know!). My love, I hope these letters are as great a comfort to you as yours have been to me. Know that I think of you always, and that I miss you so acutely it’s all I can do not to get in a rowboat and paddle for Korea.
“After breakfast tomorrow I will write you a wholly different kind of letter, to recount the mundane trivialities of my week. I promise it will be full of the kind of wifely piety to be found in the letters my mother sent my father during the Great War, safe to read aloud and full of anecdotes you can bore your friends with. I’ll fold the letters together and hum ‘My Blue Heaven’ on the way to the postbox with all the fervency of a prayer. And although the woman who writes that letter and the woman who writes this one will not be precisely the same, I miss you and she misses you and we both pray you’ll come home soon, healthy and whole.
“It is late now and I must go. Write me back soon, my love, tell me more stories of surgery and Hawkeye and making trouble where you shouldn’t. Tell me about every moment, write down everything you can stand. Each word is a drop of water in a vast and thirsty desert.
“Though distance separate and circumstances besiege us, I will remain,
“Your loving,
“Peg Hunnicutt”
So all those times I heard him trying not to cry in the dark…
…weren’t trying not to cry, were they.
Well, that certainly explains how BJ has been able to resist the temptation of willing nurses without even the aid of dirty magazines.
I can’t take it. I fold the letter, hastily, slide it back into its envelope and return the envelope to BJ’s cache, then throw on my bathrobe and stomp off to the showers. As expected, they’re deserted at this late hour; the rest of the personnel have decided to create or demolish whatever passes for civilization here during their free time, and mostly that involves a lot of alcohol and members of the opposite sex. The showers are dry from at least an hour’s desertion, and I, trying to rid myself of the arousal Peg’s letter has given me, strip quickly, take my accustomed place, and turn the water on cold. The chill makes me sputter and swear, but it still feels better than the things going on inside my own head.
I can stand under this freezing spray as long as I want, and I’ll still be mad at BJ.
I’m mad that he found her first. (Or maybe that she found him first, but that isn’t the issue at hand right now.) I’ve always been a little skeptical about the game of house BJ and Peg have been playing in the suburbs; it seemed a little too perfect to be true. Surely, I thought, if only for my own piece of mind, Peggy can’t love BJ as much as BJ loves her; surely she’s good enough and kind enough to be generous with his adoration, but she can’t really share his star-blinded lovelorn expression and doelike devotion. Except that she obviously does, enough that she’s willing to set aside her own sense of propriety to write halting pornography, to confess or even construct fantasy so he won’t have to deal with the catastrophic loneliness all on his own.
I’m mad that, even after a shower this long, I can’t get images of Peg and BJ out of my mind. I can’t stop thinking about his smile of effortless concentration as he regards her perfect cream shoulder, or her eyes – eyes I’ve never even seen in person! – hooded and smoky with a year of pent-up lust. Or of her lips closing over him and his soft groan of gratitude – I can practically hear it; I can practically echo it myself.
Hell, I’m childishly mad that I’ve offered to share my dirty magazines with him, while he’s kept that treasure trove to himself. I share all my obscene correspondence, and here he’s been holding out!
Mostly I’m mad at myself. It hurts a little, how much BJ and Peg love each other. If that sounds like jealousy…well, it is. I’m jealous that BJ has someone to love so completely, and that Peg gets to be so close to BJ, and that between them they share something so brilliantly beautiful that it hurts to look at, like an eclipse. I shouldn’t have looked. Not so much for BJ’s well-being or privacy or anything, but for my own peace of mind. I could’ve blinded myself.
Well, now I know, and there’s nothing to be done about it except abandon my carefully constructed fantasies of meaning as much to BJ as his wife does, put on my robe, go back to the Swamp, and consume homemade gin until I fall asleep.
The first is impossible, but the rest are awfully easy. I slip back into my robe and walk to the tent, but it’s clear something is wrong before I even open the door.
Two lights are on: Mine and BJ’s. I left mine on, but the rest were dark.
I open the door confidently, as though I own the place, but BJ’s blank look takes the façade of gloat out of my stride. He’s standing at the foot of his cot – shouldn’t he still be in Post-Op? – his open footlocker next to him, the cigar box in one hand and the letter I so recently read in the other, regarding me with the carefully blank expression he cultivates when he’s truly enraged.
“Doing a little light reading?” he asks, letting the “t” and “g” fall hard into place. I don’t quite know what to say.
---
The end.
---
Author’s Note: Writing M*A*S*H fanfiction is certainly an impetus for strange research. For this story, I looked up when Gray’s Anatomy was published, what year the US Army adopted air conditioning, and spent an hour or two trying to find out about the prevalence of oral sex in the 1950s. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this business and that you’ll leave some feedback, even if it’s just lambasting me for wrecking characters you like.
I owe several debts of style and inspiration in this story. Primarily, it was inspired by an exchange early in the forth season between BJ and Hawkeye. BJ mentions a fear of heights, Hawkeye answers that Freud says that has something to do with sex, and BJ smiles and says “Not for me; my wife’s only five-one.” That smile seemed the kind of thing perverted dreams are made of. It was also (somewhat obliquely) inspired by Lisa M’s “Rollercoaster,” which first made me consider the possibility of a randy Peg. The style of the letter itself is loosely modeled on Andrew Carroll’s War Letters, kinda sorta.
Author: Chase
Pairing: BJ/Peg, with implications of BJ/Hawkeye
Rating: Solid Colonel (that is, Mature): Kinders be warned. The slash is semi-subtextual, so please be appraised of that as well.
Summary: Hawkeye reads one of BJ's letters.
Disclaimer: I don’t own ‘em, and by the time I got hold of ‘em they were already out of the original packaging. Any money I receive from this will be mailed to Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, with my compliments.
I was trying to get through a chapter of a different story when this came out instead. Frankly, I think we’d all rather read some smut anyway, right? This is my first attempt at it (and also my first story to this community!), so I’d appreciate any feedback – good and bad – that you might have.
---
BJ does something odd every third or fourth letter he gets from his wife.
I don’t mean he gets depressed. Though he does get depressed, every letter, like clockwork. Sometimes he’s better about hiding it, but it always takes a few hours for him to shake the hangdog expression after the Chronicles of Mill Valley. That I understand; ever letter from my father is bittersweet: It makes me think about all the things I have, but also all the things I’m missing.
Every third or fourth letter, he’ll open it, shake the paper out, then carefully return half the pages to the envelope and stash the envelope in the cigar box he keeps in his footlocker, usually in the guise of putting away or consulting a medical journal. I asked him once what he keeps in there; he shrugged and told me canceled checks and financial records. I could see Lorraine Blake sending her husband canceled checks, but from what BJ’s said, Peg Hunnicutt seems a reasonably savvy woman. BJ’s claim doesn’t wash, because I would guess Peg can balance her checkbook better than BJ can.
For the sake of argument, let’s acknowledge that one might make conclude (it has been so concluded in the past) that all this is none of my business. I may not agree, but I can certainly see the logic of it. Here’s the interesting part, though: Late at night, when all his fellow Swamprats are asleep (or so he thinks; I sleep so much that some of that time has to just be me lying in my bunk with my eyes closed), he takes the letters out. If it’s warm enough outside he goes out and doesn’t come back for hours; if it’s cold, he just takes them out and reads them with the help of a small flashlight we filched from supply, his back to Frank and I, with these muffled gasps that sound suspiciously like sobs. Then he hides them back in the cigar box. I can’t let my dear bunkie cry himself to sleep nights without trying to find out the cause, can I?
These aren’t the letters that make him depressed – well, not usually. In fact, now that I think about it, the boost BJ gets from one of those letters seems greater than from a normal letter. The morning after he reads one, the spring is back in his step, he eats food from the Chateau Shigella without complaint, and even his appetite for anarchic lunacy is greater than usual.
What could Peg be sending him that would make him cry, then be happy? What could anyone send him, for that matter?
It would take a greater man than I not to wonder. Certainly it would take a greater man than I not to sneak into his footlocker and find out.
Okay, yes, I should probably feel guilty about this. But the man is wearing my socks right at this very moment. Socks he stole out of my footlocker. Why should his privacy be any more sacred than mine?
---
Filching the cigar box wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It should have been easy to sneak into his footlocker and swipe it while he was on duty or even while he was forgetting his troubles in the O-Club, but for some reason – damnable luck, or maybe BJ’s become prescient – BJ has been hanging around like an abandoned puppy. Even when he absolutely has to be somewhere else, there’s Frank, just waiting to fink on me. I think he and Hot Lips must’ve had some kind of fight, because he’s been surlier than usual and can hardly muster up the energy to go to meals, and his zeal for his normal pleasure in tormenting the enlisted and…I don’t know, kicking babies, whatever else it is Frank does for fun – seems to have been leeched right out of him. I can’t go through BJ’s footlocker with Frank sitting on his bunk, piously copying passages out of the Bible; it wouldn’t take him but half a moment to decide to rat me out. Not out of any loyalty to BJ or – heaven forefend! – a commitment to property rights, but because nothing would delight him more than to have evidence that I betrayed BJ.
I’m not betraying BJ. I’m just investigating.
Anyway, eventually BJ went to post-op and Frank heard a rumor (founded, I regret to report, only in my own mind) that Margaret was flirting with a visiting dentist. He went to search the VIP tent for blonde hairs, and I went to BJ’s footlocker to search for…
Well, if I knew what I was searching for I wouldn’t have to search, would I?
I snatched the cigar box – easy peasey, it’s a well known fact that BJ keeps the key to his footlocker in the copy of Gray’s Anatomy under his bed. Inside was a few dollars in Army scrip, a broken watch, a Chinese coin promised to be 1,200 years old that he’d bought in Seoul, and a small mountain of envelopes, all addressed to BJ in the same immaculate boilerplate handwriting.
I had planned to swipe the entire box, but looking at the hole its absence made in the footlocker, I just took one letter. If BJ had needed something out of his footlocker before his shift was over, he would’ve seen the difference immediately; the lack of a single letter out of two dozen would be much less obvious.
Frank seemed to have hit paydirt with Major Houlihan; I could hear her bellows of outrage clear across the compound. I’ll be amazed if Frank actually breaks down and accuses her of infidelity. Instead, his frustration will manifest in some hideously tactless remark about her appearance or professionalism, and she, being struck where her fortifications are strongest, will return the favor by completely annihilating his sense of self-worth.
All in all, not a bad evening’s work, even without any extra-curricular activity. And as an added bonus, it guarantees me plenty of time to read the letter. I put it in a novel – if BJ or Frank, or maybe Nurse Archer, who has a standing invitation to stop in at the Swamp whenever I’m by myself, turn up, the letter can quickly vanish, and I have a plausible explanation for what I was doing.
You know, just so I don’t have to brazen it out.
Look, BJ would do the same to me!
I took the leaves of paper out. The letter was hand-written on cream-colored paper. I know it well, because Peg always writes her letters on the same stationary in her suburban-schoolteacher handwriting. Well, not exactly; the handwriting here was slanted a little further, the loops a little less identical, as if it’d been written in a hurry. I didn’t know what to make of that, so I set the information aside for the moment and sniffed the letter. I’d kind of hoped it would still offer a whiff of the aromas of exotic California, but the pages smelled mainly of the cigars the box once held and BJ’s footlocker, an unmistakable bouquet of gin, socks, and antiseptic.
Once I reassured myself that no one was headed straight for the Swamp (it only occurred to me afterward that sticking my head out the window and peering around was more or less the most conspicuous thing I could possibly do), I started to read.
“My darling,
“It’s uncommonly warm here. The breeze blows hot from the east, and perhaps it’s the northernmost edge of the Santa Anas, but it makes me shiver and want to chase the moon.
“Erin is sleeping like a champion upstairs. I closed all the windows and put the fan on, and she couldn’t even stay awake through a bedtime story. I wish I could slip so easily into slumber myself, but now, as always, my thoughts are of you.
“For my own sake, I’m sitting in the study in just a linen slip, with all the windows open so I can feel the wind on my skin. It makes me anxious; it makes my skin crawl.”
Someone stumbled in the dirt outside and I flinched away from the letter. It was probably just Klinger on a night patrol. I stared without seeing at my novel until I heard the distinctive sound of someone picking himself up and walking away. The silence stretched on for a long time until I felt safe again, but the sound of someone stumbling drunkenly to the latrine reassured me that no one was coming.
“Lately I find myself daydreaming about when you come home. That may seem redundant; I know you’re dreaming of the very same day. I am sure, though, that this is no ordinary daydream, my love, because it recurs with such frequency and vividness that I’ve had to stop what I’m doing on several occasions and wait for it to pass – or, if Erin is occupied elsewhere, to revel in it.
“I can see myself in the airport, waiting impatiently; I can see you descending from the ‘plane. I can see you so clearly in your dress uniform, darling, from the angle of your hat to the glare on your boots and the silly mustache in between. I race to meet you, to throw my arms around your waist, to lead you home (and this is the only part of the dream that’s unclear, maybe because I cannot look away from you long enough to observe our surroundings).
“In the dream, I scarcely allow the door time to close before I (forgive a lonely woman, my dear) close to kiss you; my lips on your lips, my hands in your hair, urgently drinking in your presence. You smell like clean water and salt and unperfumed soap, and faintly of travel and places I’ve never been. You shake off your silly jacket as I pull on the knot in your tie, and you kiss me back, so hard I step backward into the entry wall. I claw at your uncooperative shirt front, but lust has sapped my coordination and one of the buttons snaps off and goes bouncing under the ugly umbrella stand your sister gave us. You laugh a little, gently, at my desperation; the vibration of it resonates in my own throat. I pull your shirt and undershirt out of where they’re tucked into your pants to stroke the beautiful curve of your waist, and feel the glass of your muscles cut lean beneath velveted skin.
“(Are you softer or harder than you were when you went away? Will there be new flesh to explore, new planes of muscle to memorize? If there is any kindness in the cruelty of your absence, it is only the assurance that when you return there will be new things to learn about you.)”
It’s obvious, now, what kind of letter this is going to be; it’s obvious that I should put it back and try to forget I ever saw it, for Peg’s sake if not for BJ’s. I can’t. Her halting, slightly uncomfortable purple prose has stirred something in me, though something creeping that I’d rather not address suggests that the source of my discomfort is that I’m empathizing more with the author than the subject of this letter.
“You smile, but we aren’t joking now; the bedroom is just a few steps away, but it feels like miles as we walk. I step out of my shoes on the way, and you shed the offending shirt.
“For a moment in the bedroom I am shy. It feels strange to be here with someone else, after months of seeing only Erin or myself in this room, and I grin bashfully at you, but it’s your turn to be the aggressor now and you close the half step between us with a smile. You kiss me, and the kiss lasts at least as long as the war did, and by the time we step apart I can feel you hard against my belly.
“With expert hands you open my dress, and I twist carefully so it falls to the ground without my having to step away from you. You run your hands over my exposed flesh, and already I am throbbing, whimpering a little in desire for you. It’s only the span of a breath before we’re both naked and then the bed is too inviting to ignore.
“You settle on top of me and the weight is so familiar but exciting; having you present is almost enough to send me over the edge, especially when you rasp a lightly callused thumb over the peak of my breast. But I don’t want to go, yet, there’s still too much novelty in your presence and I want to savor it for a while. I wriggle from underneath you (you seem to like that, pet) and turn you over onto your back.
“I nibble on your earlobe, and you groan a little and murmur something inaudible. I had intended kissing a seductive trail down your throat, but I don’t think either of us can wait that long. I nip at your Adam’s apple, draw a line of kisses from the point of your sternum to your navel, and with a final, somewhat sheepish glance up at you, I lick the length of your hardness and take you into my mouth. You taste basic and intensely familiar, and when you groan I start moving.”
I look away from the letter again, halfway to heartbroken. Oh, oh, it’s too much that this lovely girl, this obvious sexual neophyte, is attempting to describe a sex act she’s clearly never performed. Basic?
One of the few conversations BJ and I have had about non-hypothetical sex – and there haven’t been many, because he gets…not uncomfortable; after all, the man’s a doctor, but certainly awkward – led me to conclude that he was unfamiliar with the concept of oral sex. Beej is so quietly confident when he talks about Peg that it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t actually had that much experience with women. That copy of Gray’s is probably the most pornographic thing he’s ever read. He tried his best to play it cool, when (before I knew about his monastic dedication to Peg) I drunkenly explained that a few of the nurses are willing to be rather unconventionally friendly, if one repays them in kind, but it was obvious he had no idea what I was talking about.
And when he figured out what I meant, he got really quiet. (Much as I myself did, the afternoon Cy Griesmayr explained to me the brilliant new game he and his girlfriend had invented, thereby introducing me to a concept that would effectively be an obsession for the next fifteen years. Imagine my shock when I found that Cy and Lucy hadn’t actually invented anything.)
I suppose he’s writing Peggy his own version of these letters, a thought that makes me shift uncomfortably in my bunk and return to the letter at hand.
“You thread your hands through my hair as I move, and when your hips start to tremble uncontrollably, I pull away. Without breaking eye contact, you pull me up to eye level with you. ‘God, Peg,’ you say, then, still unblinking, you press me down against the bed and rest again on top of me. Deftly, you stroke me from front to back, caressing my clitoris with feather-light delicacy. I can hardly stand it; I am so close already.
“’BJ,’ I gasp, and you stroke into me.
“BJ, my love, the moment is ecstatic. It has been so long that your penetration is like an awakening. You pause a moment so I can adjust, and kiss me softly, and smile at me with mingled lust and contentment.
“It only takes a few strokes before I feel a ripple start in all of my extremities. It cascades inward and all of my muscles tense. I am paralyzed, my head thrown back and my eyes closed in pleasure, too overwhelmed even to scream. You follow a moment after, gripping my hips tightly to press further into me.
“Eventually the world rebuilds itself around us, and you slide down to lie beside me. I turn to rest the crown of my head under your chin, and you snake your arms around my waist. We doze contentedly for a few hours, until hunger (for food or something else) rouses us again.
“(Your leave for a moment to compose myself, my dear. I shall have to step away and think about new compost for the orange tree, or the Dodgers, at least until I can hold the pen without my hand trembling. There; see how my letters are neater now?)
“My darling, by now the crickets have faded into silence and I can hear only the muted sounds of true night, and yet I still feel unwilling to leave you. Sitting here in quiet dimness, it seems as though the distance between us is abridged, and you’ll come in at any moment to ask what keeps me up so late. If you were here, I know you would tease me about the flush of my cheeks and throat and lower still (and how I can still feel shy about naming anatomy, after writing such a letter as this, I do not know!). My love, I hope these letters are as great a comfort to you as yours have been to me. Know that I think of you always, and that I miss you so acutely it’s all I can do not to get in a rowboat and paddle for Korea.
“After breakfast tomorrow I will write you a wholly different kind of letter, to recount the mundane trivialities of my week. I promise it will be full of the kind of wifely piety to be found in the letters my mother sent my father during the Great War, safe to read aloud and full of anecdotes you can bore your friends with. I’ll fold the letters together and hum ‘My Blue Heaven’ on the way to the postbox with all the fervency of a prayer. And although the woman who writes that letter and the woman who writes this one will not be precisely the same, I miss you and she misses you and we both pray you’ll come home soon, healthy and whole.
“It is late now and I must go. Write me back soon, my love, tell me more stories of surgery and Hawkeye and making trouble where you shouldn’t. Tell me about every moment, write down everything you can stand. Each word is a drop of water in a vast and thirsty desert.
“Though distance separate and circumstances besiege us, I will remain,
“Your loving,
“Peg Hunnicutt”
So all those times I heard him trying not to cry in the dark…
…weren’t trying not to cry, were they.
Well, that certainly explains how BJ has been able to resist the temptation of willing nurses without even the aid of dirty magazines.
I can’t take it. I fold the letter, hastily, slide it back into its envelope and return the envelope to BJ’s cache, then throw on my bathrobe and stomp off to the showers. As expected, they’re deserted at this late hour; the rest of the personnel have decided to create or demolish whatever passes for civilization here during their free time, and mostly that involves a lot of alcohol and members of the opposite sex. The showers are dry from at least an hour’s desertion, and I, trying to rid myself of the arousal Peg’s letter has given me, strip quickly, take my accustomed place, and turn the water on cold. The chill makes me sputter and swear, but it still feels better than the things going on inside my own head.
I can stand under this freezing spray as long as I want, and I’ll still be mad at BJ.
I’m mad that he found her first. (Or maybe that she found him first, but that isn’t the issue at hand right now.) I’ve always been a little skeptical about the game of house BJ and Peg have been playing in the suburbs; it seemed a little too perfect to be true. Surely, I thought, if only for my own piece of mind, Peggy can’t love BJ as much as BJ loves her; surely she’s good enough and kind enough to be generous with his adoration, but she can’t really share his star-blinded lovelorn expression and doelike devotion. Except that she obviously does, enough that she’s willing to set aside her own sense of propriety to write halting pornography, to confess or even construct fantasy so he won’t have to deal with the catastrophic loneliness all on his own.
I’m mad that, even after a shower this long, I can’t get images of Peg and BJ out of my mind. I can’t stop thinking about his smile of effortless concentration as he regards her perfect cream shoulder, or her eyes – eyes I’ve never even seen in person! – hooded and smoky with a year of pent-up lust. Or of her lips closing over him and his soft groan of gratitude – I can practically hear it; I can practically echo it myself.
Hell, I’m childishly mad that I’ve offered to share my dirty magazines with him, while he’s kept that treasure trove to himself. I share all my obscene correspondence, and here he’s been holding out!
Mostly I’m mad at myself. It hurts a little, how much BJ and Peg love each other. If that sounds like jealousy…well, it is. I’m jealous that BJ has someone to love so completely, and that Peg gets to be so close to BJ, and that between them they share something so brilliantly beautiful that it hurts to look at, like an eclipse. I shouldn’t have looked. Not so much for BJ’s well-being or privacy or anything, but for my own peace of mind. I could’ve blinded myself.
Well, now I know, and there’s nothing to be done about it except abandon my carefully constructed fantasies of meaning as much to BJ as his wife does, put on my robe, go back to the Swamp, and consume homemade gin until I fall asleep.
The first is impossible, but the rest are awfully easy. I slip back into my robe and walk to the tent, but it’s clear something is wrong before I even open the door.
Two lights are on: Mine and BJ’s. I left mine on, but the rest were dark.
I open the door confidently, as though I own the place, but BJ’s blank look takes the façade of gloat out of my stride. He’s standing at the foot of his cot – shouldn’t he still be in Post-Op? – his open footlocker next to him, the cigar box in one hand and the letter I so recently read in the other, regarding me with the carefully blank expression he cultivates when he’s truly enraged.
“Doing a little light reading?” he asks, letting the “t” and “g” fall hard into place. I don’t quite know what to say.
---
The end.
---
Author’s Note: Writing M*A*S*H fanfiction is certainly an impetus for strange research. For this story, I looked up when Gray’s Anatomy was published, what year the US Army adopted air conditioning, and spent an hour or two trying to find out about the prevalence of oral sex in the 1950s. Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this business and that you’ll leave some feedback, even if it’s just lambasting me for wrecking characters you like.
I owe several debts of style and inspiration in this story. Primarily, it was inspired by an exchange early in the forth season between BJ and Hawkeye. BJ mentions a fear of heights, Hawkeye answers that Freud says that has something to do with sex, and BJ smiles and says “Not for me; my wife’s only five-one.” That smile seemed the kind of thing perverted dreams are made of. It was also (somewhat obliquely) inspired by Lisa M’s “Rollercoaster,” which first made me consider the possibility of a randy Peg. The style of the letter itself is loosely modeled on Andrew Carroll’s War Letters, kinda sorta.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}