The Invitation Read online

  “I don’t think we should do that again,” she said softly.

  “Me neither.” His voice was firm, as though he was telling himself that he could not again do what he had just done. When he turned back to her, he was smiling once again. The only difference she could see was that the skin around his neck seemed to be a little pinker than usual.

  With a detached air, William took a step forward and deftly, swiftly, unbuttoned her pajama top all the way down. “Now go get dressed. I’ll do the buttoning and tie your shoelaces.” His head came up and there was a look of pleading in his eyes. “But, Jackie, please try to close your own zippers.”

  She started to laugh, but the look in his eyes was too serious. “I’ll do my best,” she said solemnly, but she was bubbling with joy inside. It was lovely to feel desirable, she thought as she practically skipped to the bedroom. When you’re seventeen and men desire you, it’s frightening. You have no idea what to do with them. At that age you want to be thought of as an intelligent woman, no longer a child. At seventeen you want to prove to your mother that you are an adult, that you can get a man, just as she did, and that you are adult enough to be able to run a house and take care of that man—just as she did. It annoys you that all a man can think of is putting his hands inside your clothes. Why weren’t seventeen-year-old boys serious about life and the future? Didn’t they know what lay ahead for them? There were few things in life more serious, more earnest, more confused, than a seventeen-year-old girl.

  But at thirty-eight, you no longer had to prove yourself to your mother. By thirty-eight you knew that running a house and taking care of a man wasn’t some great challenge; it was just repetition. Over and over again, washing his socks, figuring out what to feed him, doing the same things again and again. At thirty-eight you wanted to feel desirable—and you wondered what had happened to all the seventeen-year-old boys who couldn’t keep their hands off girls. Just as a woman began to relax and want to have a little fun, she found herself married to a man whose only desire in life was to sleep until dinner, then sleep until bedtime. What happened to all that energy? All that lust?

  Sometimes it seemed to Jackie that men and women were mismatched. When she had first married Charley, she wanted to prove to him that she was worth his having married her. To her this meant cooking and keeping his clothes clean and, of course, flying. She so wanted to impress him with her flying. But Charley liked to spend afternoons in bed; Jackie wanted to spend afternoons in a plane.

  Now, many years later, Jackie felt that she was where Charley had been years ago. She’d proved herself to herself—to the world, actually—and now she wouldn’t mind…She wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon or so in bed with a man.

  Of course, she reminded herself, not this man. This man, this very young man, William Montgomery, was off limits. If she missed the company of a man she should look for someone more…appropriate. Yes, that was the right word. Appropriate meant the right age, the right social background, the right everything. It meant a man who could help her along life’s pathways. Yes, that was right. An older man would have the wisdom to help a woman. At that thought Jackie snorted. She’d had one man in her life who was as much a father as a husband. She didn’t need a third father in her life.

  Jackie shook her head to clear it. Just enjoy this, she thought. As an elementary school teacher’s students might fall in love with her, so William thought he was in love with an older woman. And she was mature enough to enjoy his attention, wasn’t she? Enjoy it and handle it.

  Smiling, feeling that she was being a mature adult, she did the best she could at getting out of her pajamas and into a pair of loose gabardine trousers, a rayon shirt with patch pockets, and a big white cardigan tied about her shoulders. She managed the zipper on her trousers, but the buttons were impossible. She took just a bit longer with her hair and face than she would have on an ordinary day, but she excused herself for that. Every woman wanted to look nice when she went out, didn’t she? Never mind that many times in the past Jackie had laughed at women who fixed their hair just so before flying an airplane. An hour in a dust storm and you were lucky to have any hair left, much less have it arranged.

  Holding her shirt together, she walked into the living room where William was occupying himself by rearranging the drawers of her desk. When she let out an exclamation, he turned and told her she looked beautiful, and there was honesty in his eyes.

  “Would you mind staying out of my drawers?” she snapped angrily.

  He was buttoning her shirt. “Is that drawers as in knickers?”

  “Most certainly not!” she said, sounding like a shocked schoolmarm in a bad novel. “Would you behave yourself?”

  “That depends on what one defines as correct behavior. From my point of view I am behaving myself.”

  “Then behave yourself from my point of view.”

  Bending over, he picked up a picnic basket, slipped the handle over his arm, then took her arm with his other hand. “Just as soon as you decide what your point of view is.” He didn’t give her a chance to reply to that nonsense. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  She knew that he was referring to her injury, but for some reason the question annoyed her. Did he think she was too old to go hiking? Was he hinting that she’d be better off in a rocking chair by the fire? “I can outclimb you, city boy, any day of the week. While you’ve been pushing a pencil, I’ve been crawling all over airplanes, pulling engines from—” She stopped because William was laughing at her. She narrowed her eyes threateningly, which just made him laugh harder.

  “Come on, Tarzan, let’s go,” he said as he slipped his arm through hers and led her toward the door.

  Who would have believed, she wondered, that little Billy Montgomery would turn out to be so much fun? Just plain old-fashioned fun. So maybe he didn’t like to ride upside down in an airplane, but there were lots of people who wouldn’t consider that activity fun. But William did enjoy other things.

  For one thing, his sense of humor was childlike and physical. Jackie enjoyed the kind of humor where people sat in a bar and exchanged bons mots, but she also enjoyed the slip-on-a-banana-peel type of humor. William all too clearly understood her outburst when he’d asked her if she felt well enough to go hiking, so he pretended to be old and tired and ill, thereby forcing her to help pull him up the hills. The pulling, then William’s collapsing against her in mock fatigue, made for a great deal of physical contact. Every few minutes he seemed to have his arms around her, his head on her shoulder, his face pressed into her neck. She told him to stop what he was doing, but there was about as much strength in her words and her gestures as there was in wet seaweed.

  When Jackie allowed herself to be honest, she enjoyed this play with William. She’d missed play as a child and as a young woman. For all that William was right when he said she did what she wanted when she was growing up, what she had really wanted was to be an adult, to be independent. When she was ten years old she wanted to be an old woman. One time her mother had said in exasperation, “Jackie, are you ever going to be a child?”

  Could a person age in reverse? Could a person get younger as she got older? When she was in high school all the kids wanted to do was play and have a good time. Jackie had been completely disdainful of them; all she thought of was her future and what she was going to do, how she was going to get out of this one-horse town and do something with her life. Other girls her age were saying they wanted to “Marry Bobby and be the best wife in the world.” Jackie’s arrogant laugh was now an embarrassment to her.

  She had missed play. She had missed a time of courtship with Charley. What honeymoon they’d had was spent inside an airplane. He was her teacher as well as her husband. She had loved it then and she was glad for it, but now she wanted to relax, to…to smell the roses.

  William made her laugh. He teased her and chased her around a tree, and in the late afternoon he spread a cloth in the sunlight, on sun-warmed rocks near the edge of a cliff, so t