FIC: Light Reading (3 of 3)
Sep. 12th, 2006 05:12 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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mash_slashTitle: Light Reading (3 of 3)
Author: Chase, aka Angryhaiku
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye, Hawkeye/Peg (no, really!)
Rating: 15+
Disclaimer: The characters and proprietary ideas of M*A*S*H are not mine, nor do I derive income from them. But boy I hope there’re more where they came from!
Summary: Hawkeye goes back to the States.
The camp, predictably, uses my impending departure as a pretense for a massive party, and no subtle hints can dissuade them. Eventually Colonel Potter, who’s always more perceptive than I give him credit for being, gently suggests that I stop feeling sorry for myself and accept their celebration in the spirit it’s offered – and by “gently suggests,” I of course mean he tells me that I’m acting like a horse’s ass, and should cut it out. BJ adds that going home is the great hope of everyone in camp, Regular Army and conscripts alike, and that tarnishing it would be a cruelty. There’s an edge in his voice when he says it, and as if I weren’t feeling guilty enough, I now get to add “ingratitude” to the list of my sins.
And I hate to acknowledge it, but they’re both right.
So when, as I’m trying to cram as many possessions as will fit into a duffle bag and keep down a cup of coffee long enough to extract some of the caffeine, my colleagues start arriving with gifts, for me or to send to others back in the States, I try to be unquestionably and unwaveringly thrilled to head home.
Radar, among the first to lurch back to consciousness after last night’s binge, offers me a polished rock he found he found near the mine field his first day in Korea and has been carrying around as a luck talisman ever since. I try to turn him down, but I see the shadow of Henry Blake in his eyes and instead I drop the stone in my pocket and thank him as sincerely as I can. Nurse Kellye brings me a tiny, chipped conch shell that she’s been keeping safe in her jewelry box since she left Hawaii and cries unashamedly, and several of the other nurses turn up with sweets for the flight or little tokens. Major Houlihan earns her nickname by marching up as though she’s going to sock me, but instead drags me down by my lapels and kisses me like I’ve seldom been kissed before. Before BJ can stop laughing or I recover the power of speech, she stomps off again. Klinger brings an enormous broach that he got from one of the less-scrupulous local peddlers for three weeks’ pay, clustered with grape-sized pellets of cut-glass rhinestones, and asks me to see that it gets to his mother. Father Mulcahy intended to offer me a precious novel to amuse me on the airplane – some uninteresting religious-themed thing he dredged up the last time he was in Seoul – but ends up leaving with all of my remaining Army scrip for the orphans.
BJ, his eyes dark with unarticulated emotion, has nothing for me, but asks me to take a thick letter for Peg and a pair of carefully wrapped dolls for Erin. He says he’s already mailed a letter to Crabapple Cove for me, and if I’m lucky maybe I’ll get it before the dawn of a new decade, and then, his good cheer used up in celebration over the last three days, he doesn’t say anything at all until I’m getting ready to get on the Jeep. Then it’s just a muttered “Safe journey, Hawk,” and he hugs me so hard I think he’s going to crack a rib.
Colonel Potter hands me a bottle of his favorite bourbon with a wink, and between that and the martinis I bolt in the airport bar in Seoul, it’s pretty easy to sleep through the flight to San Francisco. Which is just as well, because they’ve seated me next to a massive thick-necked marine who wants to tell me all about the Chinese he slaughtered on the line. The trip is painfully long, but I sleep almost straight through it, only waking long enough to drink myself back into a stupor. I splash some water on my face in the airport and more or less sober up to drag my duffle bag through the airport lobby.
And there, holding a sign that says “Capt. B. F. Pierce” and underneath that, in smaller letters, “(Hawkeye),” is Peg Hunnicutt.
She looks sweet, rather than beautiful, although she’s beautiful too. She’s smaller than I expected, right around five feet tall – next to BJ, she probably looks like a toy, an image enhanced because she seems to have no hard edges; even her elbows seem to curve, rather than bend. Her hair hangs straight down her back, not in the tight, fashionable styles of the rest of the women in the room, and she wears a floral-print dress with a full skirt, and has the kind of round face that seems moonlit even in the full light of day. She’d seem prettily uninteresting, except for the coolly amused smile she’s directing at a pair of toddlers tussling over a wooden train; there’s a flicker of sharpness there in her eyes, an odd glitter that makes me want to keep watching her.
It’s quite startling – I’ve seen her photo a thousand times, and never felt more than vague sympathy for BJ’s interest, but there’s something compelling about her in person that’s oddly electric. Her figure is okay, nothing to write home about, and she’s pretty, but not the prettiest girl in the room; in spite of that, I’m not interested in looking at anyone else.
I watch her watch them the whole time it takes me to walk across the airport lobby. It takes her a minute to realize that anyone has gotten off the plane, but when she does she recognizes me immediately and grins and waves.
“Peg!” I say.
“Hawkeye!” she answers. She hugs me, and startled, I throw an arm around her at the last second. She pulls away and starts to say something, and stops; I start to say something, and stop. We stare at each other for what seems like a long time, though it’s probably just a few moments.
“You smell like you rode here in a mostly empty barrel of Jack Daniels, Hawkeye,” she says, with the slow spread of a wry smile.
“Well, it was full when I got in it. You look beautiful, Peg.”
She smiles a little wider. “Thanks. I wanted – it’s the least like a uniform that I could find.” She takes my bag – I laugh, but there’s enough glint in her eye that I don’t protest – while she asks excited questions about BJ and the 4077 and how my flight was. She’s funny; she has in common with BJ a willingness to tell a joke and then pretend to ignore whether the recipient laughs or not. She drives a battered World War II-era Ford very poorly, even by my low standards, and concludes a tooth-rattling drive to the Hunnicutt household by slamming the rear passenger-side tire into the curb.
I was concerned that I wouldn’t like her, or that she would hate me on sight, but I clearly needn’t have worried: In most ways, she’s a slightly distorted reflection of BJ, sweetly even-tempered without being manipulable, generous without being naïve…she’s eager to be delighted with me, as well, I think for BJ’s sake as much as her own.
“Come on in!” she says brightly, holding the door for me. “I’ll put this in the guest bedroom, you go sit down in the living room.” The house is nice, but it isn’t really the kind of place that I’d have expected BJ to live. There’re books everywhere, on shelves and tables, and even a couple on the floor – a strange mix of penny dreadfuls and thick medical journals or texts, but the occasional child’s book or poetry collection intrudes into the collection. The house is not well lit and doesn’t seem big enough for three people, but with just Peg here it seems large and cold. I move a copy of Baby and Child Care to sit down on a fireside chair. It’s kept in very neat order, but it’s the sort of disastrously cheap furniture I owned in medical school. The whole house smells like BJ – or rather, like BJ did getting off the plane in Seoul, with his neat uniform and his G. I. haircut.
Peg walks back in to see me scrutinizing the carefully – almost invisibly – repaired upholstery. When I hear her and look up, her expression is coolly uninterpretable. “Are you hungry, Hawkeye?”
“Thank you, uh, no,” I say.
“I know BJ warned you about my cooking, but I picked some things up from the restaurant after work, so it should be just like real food.”
I’m a little hung over to actually be hungry, but seeing as she went to the trouble, I suppose I ought to eat something. “Thanks, if you’ve got food made, I’d love a little of whatever’s easy.”
“Great; you go take a shower, and I’ll go see what all I’ve got.”
Peg smiles and walks into the kitchen; I hear the oven opening repeatedly and a clatter of plates and crockery.
“Are you trying to imply, madam, that I stink?” I ask, in as baritone and baroque a tone as I can manage.
“No, no! Of course not. I’m trying to flat-out tell you that you stink, Hawkeye,” she laughs. “First door on your left.”
The water is opulently hot, and the towels are so beautifully clean it feels sacrilegious to profane them with my touch. I exhaust Peg’s water supply before I come out. The kitchen is too small for two people, especially with the alarming amount of dishes Peg seems to be preparing, so I sit back down in the living room, though it feels odd to let her do the cooking while I take my leisure.
“Something to drink?” she asks, not quite hollering over the sounds of cooking.
“I’d love some coffee,” I answer. Coffee that hasn’t sat in a samovar since V-J Day is a wonderful thought.
“Anything in it?”
“A little sugar, if you don’t mind.”
“Coming up!” More clattering; she drops something and mutters the things people say when they’re trying not to use profanity in front of children. “BJ said you thought you’d stay until tomorrow morning?”
“If I’m not intruding; I can get a commercial flight to Boston then and I don’t have to get back on a troop transport.”
“Oh, not intruding at all!” she says ingenuously, handing me a cup of coffee, scalding hot and flavored with something other than poorly-washed dishes and stewed beans. “It’s nice to have somebody to talk to who doesn’t answer in just ‘ba ga ba da,’ you know what I mean? Not that I don’t miss Erin.”
It’s so odd – overwhelming, really – to be back. Everything seems so smooth and perfect and finely made, even the made-over furniture and the ugly umbrella stand BJ and Peg both complain about. What was luxury in Korea is commonplace here. Everything – absolutely everything, even the cheap gin I drank in the airport bar, which I would’ve had some trouble choking down even as a medical resident – seems too nice. Not coarse enough. Even Peg; especially Peg.
“Erin isn’t here? BJ sent some, uh, Korean dolls as gifts.” Assuming they survived the flight; maybe I should check before I start making promises.
“Mmm, no, she’s staying with his parents. She’s in a phase where she starts screaming around two-thirty or three in the morning, and I thought you might want to sleep the night through your first night back,” she hollers over running water in the kitchen.
“I appreciate it.” There’re sketches on the coffee table – excellent sketches, in fact – of their new house in Stinson Beach, each one marked with a tiny ‘P. H.’ in the bottom right corner. Underneath the first is another, then another, each rendered in minute, time consuming detail. It must be hard for her too, living in this odd stasis, waiting for BJ to come home; beyond just missing him, she must feel the sense of having time stolen from her as acutely as her husband does.
“Food’s on the table,” Peg calls, breaking my reverie.
The kitchen table is practically groaning under the bounty of food that Peg has procured. There’re thick slabs of ham, turkey and beef, green beans, two different preparations of corn (neither of which, happily, are creamed), potatoes (and more potatoes), apple pie, bread and cornbread, scrambled eggs, incongruously, and a half-dozen other dishes.
“Peg,” I protest. “I didn’t bring the rest of the army back with me, you know!”
She looks at the table and blushes. “I wasn’t – I wasn’t sure what you would want,” she says.
So much food in one place reminds me of the mess tent, but the food is good and I’m hungrier than I thought I was. Maybe it just took real food to remind me what hungry was. There’s a discernable taste difference between what Peg prepared herself and what she brought from the restaurant, and it’s not in Peg’s favor. Peg toys with some green beans and turkey, but watches avidly what I eat; dimly it occurs to me that she’s thinking of this of a practice for when BJ comes home.
She wants to hear stories about Korea, so I tell the light, flip kinds of things that seem suitable for dinner conversation. In return she tells stores about BJ, most of which I’ve already heard from him, but her perspective is slightly skewed and so hearing them again isn’t tiresome.
Dinner – both in terms of the wealth of food and the wealth of company – feels deeply disconcerting. I keep staring at her in half-disbelief; I think she’s doing the same to me. I’ve been hearing about her for so long that she’s become emblematic of the American life I missed; having her here, having dinner with her, feels like having dinner with a mythical creature, like the Easter bunny or Betty Paige.
This all sounds painfully maudlin, but Peg is very funny; she exhibits a gentler version of BJ’s own gallows humor. I had expected to spend tonight as though at a wake, mourning with Peg for poor, lost BJ, but she’s so buoyant and ebullient that it’s impossible not to share in her good cheer, and by the time she shares out the apple pie I have to blot tears of mirth out of my eyes.
After dinner, we blink contentedly at each other for a long time. I say polite things about her cooking and she accepts them graciously; she reiterates how glad she is to meet me and I make polite reply. I feel like there is something I ought to tell her, if only I could think of what it is, but nothing comes to mind so I remain silent, and when I yawn enormously she starts stacking dishes and recommends that I consider going to bed. With a sense of faint, inexplicable disappointment, I do. Peg has left a slightly worn bathrobe, obviously BJ’s, hanging on a hook on the back of the bedroom door; the sight of it makes me feel more at home than all the rest of Peg’s hospitality. It moves me to retrieve the dolls and the thick letter from my duffle bag and bring them out. I’m not sure I have the strength to watch her actually receive them, though, so I orphan them on the coffee table and go back to the guest bedroom.
I lie in the bed for a long time, staring at a ceiling that seems odd for being a ceiling and not flimsily reinforced canvas, paradoxically too comfortable to fall asleep, before dragging the bathrobe on and walking to the living room. Peg is sitting on the uncomfortable love seat and sipping a glass of wine, and with her other hand she drags the pendant of her necklace back and forth along the chain. She’s staring at a spot of nothing on the far wall, with the letter unfolded in her lap, but she looks up and smiles bravely when the floorboards creak beneath my feet. She looks younger in her nightgown, barefoot, with no makeup – too young to be someone’s wife, certainly.
“Hawkeye,” she says, as though she were expecting someone else.
I look at the letter. “You miss him, don’t you?” It’s a stupid question, but I ask it more because I want to invite her to talk about it than because I wonder whether she does.
“Oh, it’s a dull ache,” she says. “It’s been so long – sometimes I don’t really, uh, I don’t…” she sets down the wine and rubs the back of her neck. “I’m sure it’s more acute for you, having just left him.”
“I don’t think it’s quite the same,” I say, moved but somewhat nonplussed that she would consider my loss of BJ comparable to her own.
She makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a concurrence. “I’m worried that I’m not – thank you for coming, Hawkeye.”
Frowning, I sit down next to her on the narrow couch, nearly touching her but not quite. “That’s the second time you’ve changed your mind mid-sentence. What were you going to say, Peg?”
“Nothing, really. I’m just worried that that – I’m not the same person I was when he left, Hawkeye. And he’s not the same person, either; it’s plain as day in this letter and in all the others. And – and in you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I…” I shrug helplessly, not following.
She frowns, clearly choosing her words carefully. “Neither of us would have had the courage to…to talk about what BJ feels for you. Before BJ went to Korea, I mean. We would have ignored it and it would have not – it wouldn’t have come to anything. And I think – please don’t get me wrong, Hawkeye, I think it was a good thing that we did.” She furrows her brow and looks so earnestly at me that in spite of all rationality, I believe her. “But he won’t be the same as he was before,” she says plaintively. She folds the letter neatly and replaces it in its envelope.
“You’re worried you won’t love him anymore when he comes home?” I ask, mostly in disbelief. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a pair of people so brilliantly and obviously in love as Peg and BJ Hunnicutt.
“No, actually.” She reaches out and runs two feather-light fingers over the back of my hand. “You reassured me that I will.”
“I did?”
She slips her small hand into mine and smiles. “I could love a person who could fall in love with you, Hawkeye.”
“Hey, Peg, that’s…” Moved, I have to swallow tears. “That’s pretty nice.” She smiles sweetly and rests her head on my shoulder. She’s so fine and lovely that I think I would be content to sit like that forever, but after just a few moments she picks her head up again and looks at me.
“Is there something you want to ask me, Hawkeye?”
“What?”
“You’ve been looking at me like I’ve got three heads all evening; I thought you might have something – um, something you didn’t understand.”
Now that she mentions it. “Well, I did – I was wondering about the things that you wrote to BJ.”
“I thought you might be; I would be if I were you.” She slides away from me on the love seat, preparing for battle. “You can ask, if you like; I won’t be offended.”
I laugh a little at that, but it makes sense that she would be uncomfortable. “Okay. And – feel free to not answer. My question, ah, sorry, this is a little on the nose, but: Why? Why did you give permission…why did you more-or-less command your husband to be unfaithful to you? Not that I – I don’t want to seem ungrateful, here, but I don’t think that that’s a choice that most women would make.”
“Well, I – God, just to keep him.”
“What?” I don’t know what kind of strange backward-logic she’s applying here, but it doesn’t seem to have any parallels to the logic the rest of the species applies.
“I didn’t – I didn’t have any other choice, Hawkeye. I could have ignored it, and BJ would have repressed what he felt, but he would have still wanted you. And he would have resented me for being the barrier between you both. It’s – I’m not –“ she sighs in frustration. “You know how…determined he gets when he’s resenting something; I wouldn’t want it ever directed against me. He would have come home, but he wouldn’t have been mine anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to question your judgment, but it seems like quite the leap to make.”
“What does it cost me if he loves someone else, as long as he doesn’t love me any less?” She smiles, and the love in her expression completely outshines the sorrow. “This way, he loves you and he loves me and we both profit from it.”
Her thinking is pretty, even if I’m not sold on it. She genuinely seems to believe it, and I don’t want to be rude after the generosity she’s shown.
“And it’s – BJ’s letters about you are so – oh, you must think me the worst kind of pervert!” she says, flushing a little.
“I only think well of perverts.” Her hand drags the locket until it meets the clasp, then back the other way until it meets the clasp again, a state of agitation in her that BJ has, once or twice, rapturously and drunkenly described as his favorite omen.
“So I’ve heard,” she says, mostly to herself. The same sharpness from the airport is in her eyes.
“Well, a fella likes his reputation to precede him,” I say, but she isn’t listening; she’s staring at me, at my lips. The intensity of her regard is disconcerting, but it’s also reminiscent of BJ, when he’s not thinking about the effect his look will have on the recipient. She’s like BJ and she isn’t like him, and I want her for both qualities.
Up close, her eyes are neither blue nor green, but some aqueous muddled color in between; leaden glass made animate.
“I’ve always thought that that’s the kind of thing you should judge for yourself,” I blurt, drunk on the influence of her eyes.
I’d more than half expected her to slap me, but her pupils snap open, and the hand plucking at her necklace stops instantly.
“What do you mean?”
In for a penny, I think, and lean forward slowly to kiss her. She looks confused for a beat longer than she should, but then her eyes slide closed; in the moonlight, I think I can see the shadow of every eyelash on her cheek. She sighs sweetly when I press my lips to hers, then kisses me again, with more enthusiasm than refinement.
She is more forward than I would have imagined; after that first moment, she opens her eyes and looks directly at me, hardly seeming to blink, her lips curled slightly in a faint smile. For a moment my sight seems doubled; I can’t tell whether my feelings for her are founded in lust or love, but then I blink and it doesn’t matter; we’ve found a new intermediate between them anyway. Her fearlessness and open admiration banishes the specter of BJ between us, and for the first time the pleasure of her company surpasses my yearning for him.
Peg is a good kisser, but she doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands until she knots her fingers in the belt of my robe and pulls it open. She strips me with grace and perhaps too much ease, even as I fumble with the eyelets of her nightgown. (Are my hands shaking? I can’t remember the last time I trembled like this.) Full of mercy, she helps, and kicks her other ankle free of the dress even as we fall together onto the ugly velour sofa, she with a breathy little laugh. Her hands are hot as they roam over my sides and back.
With small whimpers, she responds to the minutest shift of weight or intensity with such fervor that if she were anyone else, I would think that she was making fun of me. I thrust into her more peremptorily, and a little more roughly, than I know her husband would have done, and she gasps and rolls her hips in immediate response. Those molten eyes break to languid half mast as her neck bows impossibly backward, and she comes quickly and almost violently. Her fingernails cut lines from my shoulders to the middle of my back. I would have thought it was a fluke, but she shudders again as I do, and I fall, sweating, next to her. I smile into the hollow of her shoulder and smooth a lock of perspiration-damp hair away from her forehead.
Before I fall asleep she leads me to her bedroom. She puts her nightgown back on so languidly that the act of putting clothes on seems more sexualized than taking them off was a just a few minutes ago, and shuts off the lights as she passes them. In her bed she guides me to the side that I know is BJ’s, because it was his with me too, and curls up kittenishly with her forehead on my shoulderblade and her breath puffing delicately against my back. One proprietary hand rests on my hip. She hums a little in her sleep and I doze until sunlight glints off of the antique vanity mirror.
In the morning she’s shy, but there’s no air of self-recrimination; she smiles mutely when our eyes meet, but doesn’t say much until she slyly invites me to join her in the shower. She does not there look at me with the same frank intensity as she did last night, but neither does she close her eyes completely, even when I kiss her, and we spend so much time there that I almost miss the flight. Leaving hurts with an unremitting ache, in no small part because she feels like such a link to BJ. I don’t realize that it’s mutual until we arrive at the gate and she frowns, teary-eyed, at me.
“I’d like you to stay,” she says, her voice trembling. “But I know you can’t, so I won’t ask, but Hawkeye, our door is always open to you. I hope…please come and visit again, before or after BJ comes back.”
I want to stay.
If it weren’t for my father –
But that isn’t precisely true, because even when my dad kicks me out of Crabapple Cove, I don’t go back to California.
“Thank you, Peg,” I say. “I – thank you. I’ll see you soon.”
Author’s Note: Thanks to editor Aalais, who once again has sworn that she will never again copy edit for me. Sorry for the delay, this one effing killed me!
Author: Chase, aka Angryhaiku
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye, Hawkeye/Peg (no, really!)
Rating: 15+
Disclaimer: The characters and proprietary ideas of M*A*S*H are not mine, nor do I derive income from them. But boy I hope there’re more where they came from!
Summary: Hawkeye goes back to the States.
The camp, predictably, uses my impending departure as a pretense for a massive party, and no subtle hints can dissuade them. Eventually Colonel Potter, who’s always more perceptive than I give him credit for being, gently suggests that I stop feeling sorry for myself and accept their celebration in the spirit it’s offered – and by “gently suggests,” I of course mean he tells me that I’m acting like a horse’s ass, and should cut it out. BJ adds that going home is the great hope of everyone in camp, Regular Army and conscripts alike, and that tarnishing it would be a cruelty. There’s an edge in his voice when he says it, and as if I weren’t feeling guilty enough, I now get to add “ingratitude” to the list of my sins.
And I hate to acknowledge it, but they’re both right.
So when, as I’m trying to cram as many possessions as will fit into a duffle bag and keep down a cup of coffee long enough to extract some of the caffeine, my colleagues start arriving with gifts, for me or to send to others back in the States, I try to be unquestionably and unwaveringly thrilled to head home.
Radar, among the first to lurch back to consciousness after last night’s binge, offers me a polished rock he found he found near the mine field his first day in Korea and has been carrying around as a luck talisman ever since. I try to turn him down, but I see the shadow of Henry Blake in his eyes and instead I drop the stone in my pocket and thank him as sincerely as I can. Nurse Kellye brings me a tiny, chipped conch shell that she’s been keeping safe in her jewelry box since she left Hawaii and cries unashamedly, and several of the other nurses turn up with sweets for the flight or little tokens. Major Houlihan earns her nickname by marching up as though she’s going to sock me, but instead drags me down by my lapels and kisses me like I’ve seldom been kissed before. Before BJ can stop laughing or I recover the power of speech, she stomps off again. Klinger brings an enormous broach that he got from one of the less-scrupulous local peddlers for three weeks’ pay, clustered with grape-sized pellets of cut-glass rhinestones, and asks me to see that it gets to his mother. Father Mulcahy intended to offer me a precious novel to amuse me on the airplane – some uninteresting religious-themed thing he dredged up the last time he was in Seoul – but ends up leaving with all of my remaining Army scrip for the orphans.
BJ, his eyes dark with unarticulated emotion, has nothing for me, but asks me to take a thick letter for Peg and a pair of carefully wrapped dolls for Erin. He says he’s already mailed a letter to Crabapple Cove for me, and if I’m lucky maybe I’ll get it before the dawn of a new decade, and then, his good cheer used up in celebration over the last three days, he doesn’t say anything at all until I’m getting ready to get on the Jeep. Then it’s just a muttered “Safe journey, Hawk,” and he hugs me so hard I think he’s going to crack a rib.
Colonel Potter hands me a bottle of his favorite bourbon with a wink, and between that and the martinis I bolt in the airport bar in Seoul, it’s pretty easy to sleep through the flight to San Francisco. Which is just as well, because they’ve seated me next to a massive thick-necked marine who wants to tell me all about the Chinese he slaughtered on the line. The trip is painfully long, but I sleep almost straight through it, only waking long enough to drink myself back into a stupor. I splash some water on my face in the airport and more or less sober up to drag my duffle bag through the airport lobby.
And there, holding a sign that says “Capt. B. F. Pierce” and underneath that, in smaller letters, “(Hawkeye),” is Peg Hunnicutt.
She looks sweet, rather than beautiful, although she’s beautiful too. She’s smaller than I expected, right around five feet tall – next to BJ, she probably looks like a toy, an image enhanced because she seems to have no hard edges; even her elbows seem to curve, rather than bend. Her hair hangs straight down her back, not in the tight, fashionable styles of the rest of the women in the room, and she wears a floral-print dress with a full skirt, and has the kind of round face that seems moonlit even in the full light of day. She’d seem prettily uninteresting, except for the coolly amused smile she’s directing at a pair of toddlers tussling over a wooden train; there’s a flicker of sharpness there in her eyes, an odd glitter that makes me want to keep watching her.
It’s quite startling – I’ve seen her photo a thousand times, and never felt more than vague sympathy for BJ’s interest, but there’s something compelling about her in person that’s oddly electric. Her figure is okay, nothing to write home about, and she’s pretty, but not the prettiest girl in the room; in spite of that, I’m not interested in looking at anyone else.
I watch her watch them the whole time it takes me to walk across the airport lobby. It takes her a minute to realize that anyone has gotten off the plane, but when she does she recognizes me immediately and grins and waves.
“Peg!” I say.
“Hawkeye!” she answers. She hugs me, and startled, I throw an arm around her at the last second. She pulls away and starts to say something, and stops; I start to say something, and stop. We stare at each other for what seems like a long time, though it’s probably just a few moments.
“You smell like you rode here in a mostly empty barrel of Jack Daniels, Hawkeye,” she says, with the slow spread of a wry smile.
“Well, it was full when I got in it. You look beautiful, Peg.”
She smiles a little wider. “Thanks. I wanted – it’s the least like a uniform that I could find.” She takes my bag – I laugh, but there’s enough glint in her eye that I don’t protest – while she asks excited questions about BJ and the 4077 and how my flight was. She’s funny; she has in common with BJ a willingness to tell a joke and then pretend to ignore whether the recipient laughs or not. She drives a battered World War II-era Ford very poorly, even by my low standards, and concludes a tooth-rattling drive to the Hunnicutt household by slamming the rear passenger-side tire into the curb.
I was concerned that I wouldn’t like her, or that she would hate me on sight, but I clearly needn’t have worried: In most ways, she’s a slightly distorted reflection of BJ, sweetly even-tempered without being manipulable, generous without being naïve…she’s eager to be delighted with me, as well, I think for BJ’s sake as much as her own.
“Come on in!” she says brightly, holding the door for me. “I’ll put this in the guest bedroom, you go sit down in the living room.” The house is nice, but it isn’t really the kind of place that I’d have expected BJ to live. There’re books everywhere, on shelves and tables, and even a couple on the floor – a strange mix of penny dreadfuls and thick medical journals or texts, but the occasional child’s book or poetry collection intrudes into the collection. The house is not well lit and doesn’t seem big enough for three people, but with just Peg here it seems large and cold. I move a copy of Baby and Child Care to sit down on a fireside chair. It’s kept in very neat order, but it’s the sort of disastrously cheap furniture I owned in medical school. The whole house smells like BJ – or rather, like BJ did getting off the plane in Seoul, with his neat uniform and his G. I. haircut.
Peg walks back in to see me scrutinizing the carefully – almost invisibly – repaired upholstery. When I hear her and look up, her expression is coolly uninterpretable. “Are you hungry, Hawkeye?”
“Thank you, uh, no,” I say.
“I know BJ warned you about my cooking, but I picked some things up from the restaurant after work, so it should be just like real food.”
I’m a little hung over to actually be hungry, but seeing as she went to the trouble, I suppose I ought to eat something. “Thanks, if you’ve got food made, I’d love a little of whatever’s easy.”
“Great; you go take a shower, and I’ll go see what all I’ve got.”
Peg smiles and walks into the kitchen; I hear the oven opening repeatedly and a clatter of plates and crockery.
“Are you trying to imply, madam, that I stink?” I ask, in as baritone and baroque a tone as I can manage.
“No, no! Of course not. I’m trying to flat-out tell you that you stink, Hawkeye,” she laughs. “First door on your left.”
The water is opulently hot, and the towels are so beautifully clean it feels sacrilegious to profane them with my touch. I exhaust Peg’s water supply before I come out. The kitchen is too small for two people, especially with the alarming amount of dishes Peg seems to be preparing, so I sit back down in the living room, though it feels odd to let her do the cooking while I take my leisure.
“Something to drink?” she asks, not quite hollering over the sounds of cooking.
“I’d love some coffee,” I answer. Coffee that hasn’t sat in a samovar since V-J Day is a wonderful thought.
“Anything in it?”
“A little sugar, if you don’t mind.”
“Coming up!” More clattering; she drops something and mutters the things people say when they’re trying not to use profanity in front of children. “BJ said you thought you’d stay until tomorrow morning?”
“If I’m not intruding; I can get a commercial flight to Boston then and I don’t have to get back on a troop transport.”
“Oh, not intruding at all!” she says ingenuously, handing me a cup of coffee, scalding hot and flavored with something other than poorly-washed dishes and stewed beans. “It’s nice to have somebody to talk to who doesn’t answer in just ‘ba ga ba da,’ you know what I mean? Not that I don’t miss Erin.”
It’s so odd – overwhelming, really – to be back. Everything seems so smooth and perfect and finely made, even the made-over furniture and the ugly umbrella stand BJ and Peg both complain about. What was luxury in Korea is commonplace here. Everything – absolutely everything, even the cheap gin I drank in the airport bar, which I would’ve had some trouble choking down even as a medical resident – seems too nice. Not coarse enough. Even Peg; especially Peg.
“Erin isn’t here? BJ sent some, uh, Korean dolls as gifts.” Assuming they survived the flight; maybe I should check before I start making promises.
“Mmm, no, she’s staying with his parents. She’s in a phase where she starts screaming around two-thirty or three in the morning, and I thought you might want to sleep the night through your first night back,” she hollers over running water in the kitchen.
“I appreciate it.” There’re sketches on the coffee table – excellent sketches, in fact – of their new house in Stinson Beach, each one marked with a tiny ‘P. H.’ in the bottom right corner. Underneath the first is another, then another, each rendered in minute, time consuming detail. It must be hard for her too, living in this odd stasis, waiting for BJ to come home; beyond just missing him, she must feel the sense of having time stolen from her as acutely as her husband does.
“Food’s on the table,” Peg calls, breaking my reverie.
The kitchen table is practically groaning under the bounty of food that Peg has procured. There’re thick slabs of ham, turkey and beef, green beans, two different preparations of corn (neither of which, happily, are creamed), potatoes (and more potatoes), apple pie, bread and cornbread, scrambled eggs, incongruously, and a half-dozen other dishes.
“Peg,” I protest. “I didn’t bring the rest of the army back with me, you know!”
She looks at the table and blushes. “I wasn’t – I wasn’t sure what you would want,” she says.
So much food in one place reminds me of the mess tent, but the food is good and I’m hungrier than I thought I was. Maybe it just took real food to remind me what hungry was. There’s a discernable taste difference between what Peg prepared herself and what she brought from the restaurant, and it’s not in Peg’s favor. Peg toys with some green beans and turkey, but watches avidly what I eat; dimly it occurs to me that she’s thinking of this of a practice for when BJ comes home.
She wants to hear stories about Korea, so I tell the light, flip kinds of things that seem suitable for dinner conversation. In return she tells stores about BJ, most of which I’ve already heard from him, but her perspective is slightly skewed and so hearing them again isn’t tiresome.
Dinner – both in terms of the wealth of food and the wealth of company – feels deeply disconcerting. I keep staring at her in half-disbelief; I think she’s doing the same to me. I’ve been hearing about her for so long that she’s become emblematic of the American life I missed; having her here, having dinner with her, feels like having dinner with a mythical creature, like the Easter bunny or Betty Paige.
This all sounds painfully maudlin, but Peg is very funny; she exhibits a gentler version of BJ’s own gallows humor. I had expected to spend tonight as though at a wake, mourning with Peg for poor, lost BJ, but she’s so buoyant and ebullient that it’s impossible not to share in her good cheer, and by the time she shares out the apple pie I have to blot tears of mirth out of my eyes.
After dinner, we blink contentedly at each other for a long time. I say polite things about her cooking and she accepts them graciously; she reiterates how glad she is to meet me and I make polite reply. I feel like there is something I ought to tell her, if only I could think of what it is, but nothing comes to mind so I remain silent, and when I yawn enormously she starts stacking dishes and recommends that I consider going to bed. With a sense of faint, inexplicable disappointment, I do. Peg has left a slightly worn bathrobe, obviously BJ’s, hanging on a hook on the back of the bedroom door; the sight of it makes me feel more at home than all the rest of Peg’s hospitality. It moves me to retrieve the dolls and the thick letter from my duffle bag and bring them out. I’m not sure I have the strength to watch her actually receive them, though, so I orphan them on the coffee table and go back to the guest bedroom.
I lie in the bed for a long time, staring at a ceiling that seems odd for being a ceiling and not flimsily reinforced canvas, paradoxically too comfortable to fall asleep, before dragging the bathrobe on and walking to the living room. Peg is sitting on the uncomfortable love seat and sipping a glass of wine, and with her other hand she drags the pendant of her necklace back and forth along the chain. She’s staring at a spot of nothing on the far wall, with the letter unfolded in her lap, but she looks up and smiles bravely when the floorboards creak beneath my feet. She looks younger in her nightgown, barefoot, with no makeup – too young to be someone’s wife, certainly.
“Hawkeye,” she says, as though she were expecting someone else.
I look at the letter. “You miss him, don’t you?” It’s a stupid question, but I ask it more because I want to invite her to talk about it than because I wonder whether she does.
“Oh, it’s a dull ache,” she says. “It’s been so long – sometimes I don’t really, uh, I don’t…” she sets down the wine and rubs the back of her neck. “I’m sure it’s more acute for you, having just left him.”
“I don’t think it’s quite the same,” I say, moved but somewhat nonplussed that she would consider my loss of BJ comparable to her own.
She makes a sound somewhere between a laugh and a concurrence. “I’m worried that I’m not – thank you for coming, Hawkeye.”
Frowning, I sit down next to her on the narrow couch, nearly touching her but not quite. “That’s the second time you’ve changed your mind mid-sentence. What were you going to say, Peg?”
“Nothing, really. I’m just worried that that – I’m not the same person I was when he left, Hawkeye. And he’s not the same person, either; it’s plain as day in this letter and in all the others. And – and in you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I…” I shrug helplessly, not following.
She frowns, clearly choosing her words carefully. “Neither of us would have had the courage to…to talk about what BJ feels for you. Before BJ went to Korea, I mean. We would have ignored it and it would have not – it wouldn’t have come to anything. And I think – please don’t get me wrong, Hawkeye, I think it was a good thing that we did.” She furrows her brow and looks so earnestly at me that in spite of all rationality, I believe her. “But he won’t be the same as he was before,” she says plaintively. She folds the letter neatly and replaces it in its envelope.
“You’re worried you won’t love him anymore when he comes home?” I ask, mostly in disbelief. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a pair of people so brilliantly and obviously in love as Peg and BJ Hunnicutt.
“No, actually.” She reaches out and runs two feather-light fingers over the back of my hand. “You reassured me that I will.”
“I did?”
She slips her small hand into mine and smiles. “I could love a person who could fall in love with you, Hawkeye.”
“Hey, Peg, that’s…” Moved, I have to swallow tears. “That’s pretty nice.” She smiles sweetly and rests her head on my shoulder. She’s so fine and lovely that I think I would be content to sit like that forever, but after just a few moments she picks her head up again and looks at me.
“Is there something you want to ask me, Hawkeye?”
“What?”
“You’ve been looking at me like I’ve got three heads all evening; I thought you might have something – um, something you didn’t understand.”
Now that she mentions it. “Well, I did – I was wondering about the things that you wrote to BJ.”
“I thought you might be; I would be if I were you.” She slides away from me on the love seat, preparing for battle. “You can ask, if you like; I won’t be offended.”
I laugh a little at that, but it makes sense that she would be uncomfortable. “Okay. And – feel free to not answer. My question, ah, sorry, this is a little on the nose, but: Why? Why did you give permission…why did you more-or-less command your husband to be unfaithful to you? Not that I – I don’t want to seem ungrateful, here, but I don’t think that that’s a choice that most women would make.”
“Well, I – God, just to keep him.”
“What?” I don’t know what kind of strange backward-logic she’s applying here, but it doesn’t seem to have any parallels to the logic the rest of the species applies.
“I didn’t – I didn’t have any other choice, Hawkeye. I could have ignored it, and BJ would have repressed what he felt, but he would have still wanted you. And he would have resented me for being the barrier between you both. It’s – I’m not –“ she sighs in frustration. “You know how…determined he gets when he’s resenting something; I wouldn’t want it ever directed against me. He would have come home, but he wouldn’t have been mine anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to question your judgment, but it seems like quite the leap to make.”
“What does it cost me if he loves someone else, as long as he doesn’t love me any less?” She smiles, and the love in her expression completely outshines the sorrow. “This way, he loves you and he loves me and we both profit from it.”
Her thinking is pretty, even if I’m not sold on it. She genuinely seems to believe it, and I don’t want to be rude after the generosity she’s shown.
“And it’s – BJ’s letters about you are so – oh, you must think me the worst kind of pervert!” she says, flushing a little.
“I only think well of perverts.” Her hand drags the locket until it meets the clasp, then back the other way until it meets the clasp again, a state of agitation in her that BJ has, once or twice, rapturously and drunkenly described as his favorite omen.
“So I’ve heard,” she says, mostly to herself. The same sharpness from the airport is in her eyes.
“Well, a fella likes his reputation to precede him,” I say, but she isn’t listening; she’s staring at me, at my lips. The intensity of her regard is disconcerting, but it’s also reminiscent of BJ, when he’s not thinking about the effect his look will have on the recipient. She’s like BJ and she isn’t like him, and I want her for both qualities.
Up close, her eyes are neither blue nor green, but some aqueous muddled color in between; leaden glass made animate.
“I’ve always thought that that’s the kind of thing you should judge for yourself,” I blurt, drunk on the influence of her eyes.
I’d more than half expected her to slap me, but her pupils snap open, and the hand plucking at her necklace stops instantly.
“What do you mean?”
In for a penny, I think, and lean forward slowly to kiss her. She looks confused for a beat longer than she should, but then her eyes slide closed; in the moonlight, I think I can see the shadow of every eyelash on her cheek. She sighs sweetly when I press my lips to hers, then kisses me again, with more enthusiasm than refinement.
She is more forward than I would have imagined; after that first moment, she opens her eyes and looks directly at me, hardly seeming to blink, her lips curled slightly in a faint smile. For a moment my sight seems doubled; I can’t tell whether my feelings for her are founded in lust or love, but then I blink and it doesn’t matter; we’ve found a new intermediate between them anyway. Her fearlessness and open admiration banishes the specter of BJ between us, and for the first time the pleasure of her company surpasses my yearning for him.
Peg is a good kisser, but she doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands until she knots her fingers in the belt of my robe and pulls it open. She strips me with grace and perhaps too much ease, even as I fumble with the eyelets of her nightgown. (Are my hands shaking? I can’t remember the last time I trembled like this.) Full of mercy, she helps, and kicks her other ankle free of the dress even as we fall together onto the ugly velour sofa, she with a breathy little laugh. Her hands are hot as they roam over my sides and back.
With small whimpers, she responds to the minutest shift of weight or intensity with such fervor that if she were anyone else, I would think that she was making fun of me. I thrust into her more peremptorily, and a little more roughly, than I know her husband would have done, and she gasps and rolls her hips in immediate response. Those molten eyes break to languid half mast as her neck bows impossibly backward, and she comes quickly and almost violently. Her fingernails cut lines from my shoulders to the middle of my back. I would have thought it was a fluke, but she shudders again as I do, and I fall, sweating, next to her. I smile into the hollow of her shoulder and smooth a lock of perspiration-damp hair away from her forehead.
Before I fall asleep she leads me to her bedroom. She puts her nightgown back on so languidly that the act of putting clothes on seems more sexualized than taking them off was a just a few minutes ago, and shuts off the lights as she passes them. In her bed she guides me to the side that I know is BJ’s, because it was his with me too, and curls up kittenishly with her forehead on my shoulderblade and her breath puffing delicately against my back. One proprietary hand rests on my hip. She hums a little in her sleep and I doze until sunlight glints off of the antique vanity mirror.
In the morning she’s shy, but there’s no air of self-recrimination; she smiles mutely when our eyes meet, but doesn’t say much until she slyly invites me to join her in the shower. She does not there look at me with the same frank intensity as she did last night, but neither does she close her eyes completely, even when I kiss her, and we spend so much time there that I almost miss the flight. Leaving hurts with an unremitting ache, in no small part because she feels like such a link to BJ. I don’t realize that it’s mutual until we arrive at the gate and she frowns, teary-eyed, at me.
“I’d like you to stay,” she says, her voice trembling. “But I know you can’t, so I won’t ask, but Hawkeye, our door is always open to you. I hope…please come and visit again, before or after BJ comes back.”
I want to stay.
If it weren’t for my father –
But that isn’t precisely true, because even when my dad kicks me out of Crabapple Cove, I don’t go back to California.
“Thank you, Peg,” I say. “I – thank you. I’ll see you soon.”
Author’s Note: Thanks to editor Aalais, who once again has sworn that she will never again copy edit for me. Sorry for the delay, this one effing killed me!
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Date: 2006-09-13 02:47 am (UTC)*rubs hands together and gets ready to read ... no wait, I have to finish the BJ Papa San screencaps first ... THEN I'll read*
YAY!
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Date: 2006-09-13 11:22 am (UTC)(Awww, BJ Papa San -- poor Beej!)
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Date: 2006-09-14 02:23 am (UTC)so. much. love. for. this. fic.
The only part I didn't like was this ... "Title: Light Reading (3 of 3)" because that means no more fic. *sigh*
Loved the way you had Hawkeye and Peg get together. It was sweet and totally believable. This is my favorite passage:
>>With small whimpers, she responds to the minutest shift of weight or intensity with such fervor that if she were anyone else, I would think that she was making fun of me. I thrust into her more peremptorily, and a little more roughly, than I know her husband would have done, and she gasps and rolls her hips in immediate response. Those molten eyes break to languid half mast as her neck bows impossibly backward, and she comes quickly and almost violently. Her fingernails cut lines from my shoulders to the middle of my back. I would have thought it was a fluke, but she shudders again as I do, and I fall, sweating, next to her. I smile into the hollow of her shoulder and smooth a lock of perspiration-damp hair away from her forehead.<<
... and then this:
>>Leaving hurts with an unremitting ache, in no small part because she feels like such a link to BJ.<<
Excellent job! I hope that you plan to write more in the future ... I'm looking forward to reading more from you :)
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Date: 2006-09-15 03:51 am (UTC)There is a third story in this series, but I have no earthly idea how long it'll take; so far it's been a slow extraction.
Thanks for the feedback, it really improved my day!
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Date: 2006-09-21 03:04 pm (UTC)YAY! I'll be waiting ... patiently. Believe me, I understand "slow". I've got three fics started ... barely started and all of them have stalled on me. GAH! I hate it when that happens. I'm guessing it's because I'm so preoccupied with getting ready for Disney and trying to plan my Halloween display, that there's no room in my brain for creative writing. Though I *know* I have plenty of room to think *about* writing BJ/Hawkeye. *sigh* so pretty those boys.
Glad to hear there will be more from you. And I'm super glad I made your day. Your fic was excellent.
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Date: 2006-09-24 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-25 03:28 am (UTC)GAH! Don't do that ... it may be a while, and I don't want to be responsible for your non-eating. If you want to skip lunch in protest, that would be okay. ;)
>>Your Halloween pictures on my Friendslist have been consistently making me giggle -- I heart your pillars!<<
I'm so glad! I LOVE Halloween and really enjoy making that stuff, so I'm happy that there are people out there that appreciate it :) So thanks!!!