And suddenly it was as if you could actually hear the insuck of breath from the men and women sitting in the cafe that noon when they realized who she was, when they understood who she had to be. It was like that moment that comes in a movie when everything—music, motion and sense—is stopped for a few seconds and the figures on the screen are held temporarily in silent stasis and arrest. People in Holt felt shocked. She wasn’t anything like what they expected her to be. There were some in the cafe who even wondered if she weren’t part Indian.
For Jessie Burdette, it turned out, was a very quiet and solitary woman. She had brown eyes and dark brown hair and beautifully clear skin, and she was of less than medium height and she was quite slim, but she wasn’t petite. She didn’t make you think of girlish debutantes or of retiring primroses. She wasn’t even pretty really. That is, she was attractive, she was very attractive; and later, thirteen years later, when I came to know her well I thought she was the most attractive woman I’d ever known and absolutely the finest person. And in the end I was ready to do anything at all for her. Still she was not pretty in any conventional sense. She wasn’t at all the positive and cute, sunny little pert-nosed girl next door; nor was she any form of that brash California idea of female pulchritude either. Instead she was rather small and dark and quiet and obviously strong-willed. She seemed capable of a great deal. She seemed independent. Even on that first day, when I saw her for the first time in the Holt Cafe, there seemed to be a quality of aloofness about her, as if she preferred really to be left alone, or as if she knew very well what she wanted and if that happened to preclude being close to others—so that she must always seem a little set off and separate from other people in Holt, or, for that matter, from people anywhere else in the world—she was willing to accept that too.
So I don’t know why she married Jack Burdette. Not absolutely, at any rate. On the other hand, as I’ve suggested before, I think I do know why Burdette married her: out of boredom. He decided that charming Jessie was at least preferable to attending any more convention workshops. Then, too, he had those company charge cards in his pocket. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste an opportunity to spend money which did not belong to him, especially if it was simply a matter of having to scribble his name on a piece of paper. But I can’t say absolutely why Jessie married him.
I suppose part of it had to do with the fact that she was only twenty years old in 1971. She was still very young, although she was not entirely ignorant of the ways of the world and men. She had had some experience of both, some limited experience. But the point is, she was very young even so. She was not much more than a girl yet. Besides, she had lived her entire life in Tulsa. And I don’t think, at twenty, that Jessie Burdette believed that Tulsa was all there was in the world worth seeing.
So in April that year Jack Burdette arrived at the Holiday Inn. He was a big man and jovial, and he was ten years her senior and he was from Colorado. And so he charmed her. And then, rather than return to any more convention workshops, he proposed marriage to her. And, for her own reasons, she accepted. But there was one other little bit of play in this weekend romance too: sometime during those days and nights in the motel room Burdette managed to convey the impression to her that Holt was better than it is. He told her, for example, that you could see the mountains from Holt.