#cleganmarge

PARTS 1-3

She’s wistful for her sewing machine, and for more time to get their fancy dress organised, but compromises with a pair of moth wings and a mask from a five-and-dime. She thinks that Gale should be a Spanish matador in black and red, or an Old West outlaw with a bandana over his face, or a Roman centurion in a tunic and sandals, and he can’t meet her eye as he murmurs, “I don’t know I can afford all that, Marge.” She doesn’t miss a beat, and her pretty smile doesn’t even flicker, and she’s bracing and sweet as she tells him, “We’ll pull something together.”

Marge orders him to close his eyes, hiding something behind her back, and he’s got no reason not to trust her; he thinks it’s a hat at first, when she fits the wig on his head.

“Look at that,” she says, laughing and impressed. “You make a fine girl, Gale.”

It’s always been the way, that when Marge says jump, Gale says, how high? and it’s an easy option, one that more than a few fellas have fallen back on at parties Gale has been to, because all it takes is a dress borrowed from a sister or a friend. Always gets a few laughs, which might be nice because although Marge giggles at all Gale’s jokes, not many other people seem to. They aren’t in Casper anymore, anyhow.

Mr. and Mrs. Spencer do chuckle at seeing Gale all dolled up, and Mr. Spencer says, “Now you girls look after yourselves, and watch out for those boys trying things they shouldn’t.” Walking down to the party, Marge links their elbows together the way Gale has seen her walk with her girlfriends, but once they’re in the ballroom, kisses his cheek just below the domino mask which matches her own.

She goads him into dancing because they don’t know anyone there, and both of them are gasping laughter as they try swapping the lead and Gale can’t give it up properly, and the wig almost knocks off his head when he doesn’t duck enough to spin under her arm. Marge orders them a couple of Cokes at the bar, and both the bottles have straws poking from the top, which sets them off laughing all over again.

Gale is leaving the bathroom when he collides with the clown. He’s tall and broad and wrapped up in black-and-gold polka-dots with a big silly ruff at his neck, and even with his own mask, his costume is somehow lower effort than Gale’s.

“Holy—My mistake, miss. Gotta look better where I’m goin’,” the clown blurts, steadying Gale with a hand on his arm. He blinks, eyes stormy-blue and squinting as he grins. “I mean, look what there is to look at.” His leering is obvious, definitely drinking his fill, and Gale’s snorting a laugh before he can stop it. That only gets the clown’s grin stretching, opening like he’s seen something he can’t quite believe. “Hey, get a look at that dress. What do they call a pretty thing like you?”

“Gale.” There’s a chuckle in it, and a surge of fluttering in Gale’s lungs, the kind that comes whenever there’s a chance to do something a little dumb and dangerous.

“Gale.” The echo comes not from the clown, but from Marge, leaving the women’s powder room just a door down the hallway, and the clown looks three places seemingly all at once: Marge, then the door behind Gale with the sign Gents painted on it, then back at Gale in his pink satin and pearls.

“When you gotta go,” Gale says to the clown through the bubbling laughter, and takes Marge’s hand to tug her back to the party.

“Gosh, he looked ready to drop to one knee,” Marge hisses at him, delighted, and when Gale turns to check over his shoulder, the clown is watching them walk away with a slack jaw, bathroom urgency all forgotten.

The clown finds him later sitting on the wall drinking another Coke while Marge takes a turn with a wooden soldier who started stuttering when Marge asked Gale if he’d mind her dancing with another man. The soldier’s hands are definitely staying where Gale can see them, and even from a distance he can tell that Marge is getting a kick out of making a stranger nervous. Smelling whisky first, then smoke, Gale turns as the clown plops into the chair next to his own and says, “Wouldn’t have picked you for a wallflower, Gail. ‘S that a nickname? Is it Abigail, for company?”

“Who’s askin’?”

“John Egan. I just want to know what name to put on our marriage certificate, dollface.” Gale can’t hold in the guffaw, because it’s one thing knowing how other boys try pitching woo, but a different thing entirely to hear how stupid it is up close. He’s never been this ridiculous with Marge, surely. The laughing doesn’t turn John off, evidently, because he just leans in a bit closer and keeps on smiling under his patchy teenage moustache, and leers, “Say, you got a great laugh. Best laugh of any girl I’ve met.”

“That so?”

Quickly, Gale learns that John is 19 years old and up from St. Paul, where he goes to college and is on the baseball team—him and the shortstop, second and third base, the catcher, and centre fielder snuck out of where they were staying because they’d heard this band was hot and the girls would be pretty.

“I think the guys who told us that were selling things a bit short, though,” he says, and Gale knows he’s supposed to be flattered by the compliments and impressed by the sports talk, but all he can think to say is, “Uh huh.” All he can think to say is, “Uh huh,” when John asks him to dance as well, and when Gale can’t give up the lead properly, they’re both laughing just how him and Marge did. Gale catches Marge’s eye as they spin past each other, giddiness and giggles sparking in the pretty brown and around her lipsticked mouth too, and he snorts a little when she winks at him. Gale hasn’t had liquor before, but when people talk about getting jazzed and squiffy, maybe this is some of the feeling: like there’s bubbles all inside him, like everything is funny, like he could lift off the ground and fly. It’s a game, a dangerous one, but John seems to like him and keeps on talking, not talking at Gale but talking to him and taking it in stride that Gale doesn’t have much to say in return.

They dance a few numbers, and Gale sees Marge with a pirate and a cowboy and a sailor—she blows him a kiss as she twirls past with a devil—and the crowd is thick and pressed close around them, bumping along with the beat, when John leans in a bit too close to Gale’s mouth. The punch is a reflex, and connects hard enough given the limits on the space, meeting square with John’s jaw and deflecting his attempt at a kiss.

“I got a girlfriend,” Gale says stupidly.

“And a helluva right hook, for a little lady.” He’s taken his hand from Gale’s waist to rub at the blooming red spot on his face, and Gale can see what he said gaining meaning behind John’s eyes, and his whole throat starts tasting like the smell of oil. “Huh?” is what John says next, squint of his eyes this time because his brow is furrowing, and then the band leader is calling a countdown and a drumroll and the horn section is blowing and everyone around them is taking off their masks. Gale sweeps off his mask and wig in one, and John is still holding his other hand. He drags up from his punched jaw to his own mask, pushing it back into his hair, and the face he reveals isn’t any of what Gale had been starting to think, has seen on other boys and men around Casper and his own dad—John’s face is all screwed-up confused, mouth-open astonished, but there’s not even a fleck of anger.

“Christ,” he says, and gives a whistle. “And to think, I was fallin’ in love.” Gale’s grin comes back so wide he thinks his face might be splitting with laughter.

“Sorry to disappoint, John.”

“Are you kiddin’? This is terrific. You could be a goddamn spy! Workin’ undercover to bust crooks; you sure convinced me. Fuck, is there egg on my face.” He’s swearing now, and drawling broader, and there’s an ease in his stance that wasn’t there a second ago, but he’s still holding Gale’s hand. “I’m sorry, for tryin’ to—but hey, that’s some dress you got on there.”

“It’s my Sunday best.” John guffaws at that, leaving his mask pushed into his curls to chuck Gale on the shoulder. “It was last minute, I borrowed it from—”

“There you are.”

“Marge.” Gale wraps his arm around her shoulders, wig and mask still dangling from his fingers. She’s smiling up at him with a raised eyebrow and an unspoken question, so Gale says, “This is John Egan. He’s bein’ a real good sport.”

“Madam Butterly herself.” Marge trills a laugh at that, and counters, “Moth.” John whistles again, an impressed sort of note.

“Shakespearean. You got Mustardseed and Cobweb floatin’ around as well? Hold on,” he breaks in, dropping Gale’s hand to snap his fingers at them like he’s remembered something, “maybe this is why they made us read all those old plays in high school—to warn us not to talk to pretty girls at masked balls. It might turn out to be a fella with a great-lookin’ kisser.”

“See?” Marge rasps, knocking her hip against Gale’s, their skirts whispering together for a moment. “I told you that you make a fine girl.”

John is shocked to learn they’re still in school, and starts calling them you crazy kids. He tells them a bit about the town, things to see and do, but they’re hitting the road tomorrow, Gale explains to him. John thinks that’s too bad, but then remembers that he’s headed back to St. Paul on the bus in the afternoon anyhow. He buys them a couple more Cokes, and tells them stories about pulling all kinds of pranks at college, and dances with Marge for the last song of the night, and starts to invite them on to somewhere else before he checks his watch and says, “Ah, nuts. I’ll turn into a pumpkin if I don’t make tracks now.” There’s someone yelling, “Bucky,” and John turns to look who, sending back a wave before saying to Gale and Marge, “You kids look me up if you’re ever in St. Paul. Or Manitowoc—who knows, could be another semester and I blow the whole thing and flunk out. See ya, dollface. Thanks for the kiss.” He taps Gale’s jaw with his fist, a lot sweeter than how Gale hit him, and then he’s gone in the crowd.

“Wowee,” Marge says, and Gale has to agree.

It’s 1940 and Gale is 21 years old, and all his possessions fit inside the single suitcase that he’s unpacking in an Air Force Flight School dorm room in Texas. He has an address in his pocket, for a ladies’ dorm at a local college, home to Marjorie Spencer. Gale had been thinking he’d never see her again, after the Spencers moved away during his senior year. His roommate’s name is John C. Egan, and Gale is telling himself that John is a common enough name. It’s too many coincidences. Too many dangerous, hopeful things.

“Gale W. Cleven,” someone says while Gale is stacking books at the edge of the lone desk in the room, and when he turns around the clown is standing in the doorway, only he’s wearing the same flight cadet uniform that Gale is and he’s a lot more grown than he used to be. His moustache has filled in more, but only a little bit.

“John,” Gale says. John holds out his hand and crosses the room in barely three strides.

“Call me Bucky. Good to meet you, Gale. Say,” he rolls on, dropping Gale’s hand after shaking it and snapping his fingers like he’s remembered something, “you look sort of familiar. We haven’t met somewhere before, have we?”

“I—”

“No, Christ, you know what it is? You look just like a guy I used to know back home—Buck, we called him. You ever been through Manitowoc, Wisconsin?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

Meanwhile, Gale's blind to the growing connection between his wife and best friend because he’s grappling with his demons - feeling desire for Bucky is something he can’t reconcile with what he thinks is acceptable. It doesn't help either when Marge starts mentioning Bucky in a seemingly idle manner while she and Gale are in bed, even during foreplay.

So, sometimes, when Bucky gets too close or Gale feels overwhelmed, Gale gets extremely awkward and leaves under some bullshit excuse.

After one of these occassions, Marge goes up to Bucky and tells him that she knows what Bucky's doing. Bucky tries to play innocent, but she goes on. She tells him that Gale wants him too, she can see it in his expressions when Bucky touches him, but that he needs to be eased into it. She tells him about how hers and Gale’s relationship progressed.

Bucky's quiet for once, trying to make sense of her motives, then says he’s no homewrecker. Marge nods and tells him she knows. The home doesn't need to be wrecked to include another person. They stare at each other, then Marge strokes his arm. Then his face. After a moment, she says she'll go find Gale, but before she can leave, Bucky catches her hand. She smiles at him, gives him a kiss on the cheek, and says she'll talk to Gale.

She finds Gale pacing and agitated in the bedroom, fiddling with a toothpick. She has to grab his hands to make him stop. She puts them on her waist, draws him close and starts talking about how much she loves and accepts him. And then she takes the plunge and tells him she knows how he feels about Bucky and that she also feels the same. She talks it through with Gale, pushing through his attempts at denial and resistance, until Gale agrees to let Bucky join them in the room.

Bucky comes in silently, searching both of their expressions before focusing on Gale. They stare at each other, then Bucky takes a resolute step forward and kisses him square on the mouth. Gale almost crushes Marge's hand, completely frozen.

When Bucky pulls away, panting, Marge turns Gale's face towards herself gently and gives him a sweet, comforting kiss. Then she looks at Bucky, breaks into a smile. Bucky smiles back and kisses her too.

It takes a few more kisses and touches before Gale snaps out of it - but once he does, he takes over the whole thing and gets them all into bed. Bucky's so surprised by the sudden change that it makes Marge laugh. She tells Bucky that once he knows what he wants, Gale likes to be in charge.