“How would I fly if I had a baby?”
He looks confused. “You wouldn’t.”
She is equally confused. For months he’d listened to her talk about what she wanted. She’d never said anything about babies. “I have to, though,” she says.
They look at each other in dismay. He puts one hand on her belly. “Not yet. Someday.”
“I don’t want to stop. Not ever.”
“You’re young,” he says in a patient tone. “What makes you happy now is different from what will make you happy later. You must know that I love you. I’ll take care of you. I’ll marry you.” These last are not posed as questions.
So he had never believed her. He had been indulging a child’s make-believe. A long blade of rage cuts through her, but she stops herself from reacting by remembering flipping him upside down, making him afraid. He’d thought he was reclaiming something when he put her face in the pillows, turned her body over and over like a pebble he was worrying in his pocket, but really he was only accepting what she’d offered. He’d needed her to give him the imperative of reclaiming his dominance, and she had. Could there be power in submission? She will probably have to marry him, she knows; he will win their game of push-pull, but if she agrees now, she will lose too much.
She says, “Not yet.”
* * *
—
She flies to Canadian farms and brings back cases of premium brands, learns more about the business. Barclay’s interests and supply chains are diffuse and diverse. He buys from middlemen who buy legally from boozoriums scattered around Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba. He has relationships with whiskey exporters in Scotland, with importers in Canada, with lawmakers and law enforcers. He has lawyers in Helena and Spokane and Seattle and Boise who cover his tracks and help out the little guys when they get caught.
One afternoon when they are in bed in the green-and-white house, he says, “I don’t feel right about this.”
“You seemed to enjoy yourself.”
“That’s not the point.” Petulantly: “I wish you’d just agree. If you’re going to eventually, why wait?”
A pessary snugly cups her cervix. She thinks of the device as her small but stalwart ally. Cora from Miss Dolly’s had gotten it for her at a steep price, of which Marian assumed a good chunk was commission. “Like this,” Cora had said, pinching it between her fingers. “Then you shove it up yourself and let go. It’ll pop into place.”
To Barclay, Marian says, “Only if you promise I can keep flying forever and never have any babies.” She speaks lightly, but he doesn’t smile. She tries again: “Why can’t we go on as we are? Eventually you’ll get tired of me, and you’ll be glad I’m just your pilot.”
He is serious, almost grim. “I have to hide almost everything I do. I want this to be on the up-and-up, respectable and official, and I want you to be respectable, too.”
“I’m not respectable?” The sting surprises her.
“I want you to be more secure, to have some kind of status in the world.” He touches her cheek. “I don’t want anyone ever to see you the way I first saw you.”
“I thought you said I fascinated you.”
“You did. You do. But that was something private between us. If anyone else had seen you like that at Miss Dolly’s, there would have been a simple, sordid misunderstanding, but I saw through your little outfit.” He props himself on an elbow. “It had to be me who saw you. I know it. I saw someone out of place, who needed me but didn’t know it yet. At first I was relieved you were a whore because I thought I could have you, but then I was so much more relieved when I realized you weren’t. I didn’t want anyone else to have you.” He rolls onto his back, pulls her against him with her arm over his chest, her leg over his thigh. “And what did you see? When you first saw me?”
“A stranger.”
“That’s all?”
“Not quite.” She doesn’t want to talk about Miss Dolly’s anymore. She wishes the memory didn’t loom quite so large for him. Her hand moves to his groin, and his breathing deepens.
“What else?” he says.
“I saw a man who would let me fly his biplane as much as I wanted forever and ever.”
“Yes,” he says, but he means the motion of her hand.
She had thought he might lose interest in her once she was plucked, no longer a figure of fantasy, but he hasn’t. If anything, her enthusiasm for sex has made him more fixated on marriage. He seems jealous of the act itself. The first time she’d clenched and pulsed around him, when they were in their second day of being trapped by rain and cloud in the Kalispell house and had gotten the hang of each other, he had stared at her in frank astonishment. He’d asked how she’d known how to do that, and she’d lied and feigned surprise and said it had simply happened. He’d told her not all women were capable of climax and, more important, not all men were capable of inspiring such phenomena. She was fortunate on both counts, he’d said.