Jackie, page 23
“For now. How was your ride?”
“Lovely out today.” Her voice is like soft rope, her eyes focused on the trees visible through the window.
He moves in the tub. The water shifts.
“So now what shall we do?” she says.
She is just beyond his reach. She doesn’t come closer. Or lean in. Only sits there, the horizontal slope of her bare thigh, and the curved white hem of the shirt, the dressage whip in her hand. If he sat up, he could reach out and touch her, but he understands that as long as he doesn’t, she’ll remain a body, not his but at a remove, and for that reason seductive, unknown, that wild light at the center of her he can feel.
“Come here,” he says.
“No, Jack. You come to me.”
* * *
—
Through the window of the bedroom, the trees swim.
Silence. Her body, the heat of her breath near his skin.
* * *
—
In the white space, the margins and the gaps, that’s where life dwells.
* * *
—
“Via negativa,” she will say absently as they lie together, her arms crossed under her head, that bone of her hip, angular, almost defiant, one leg bent, his hand on her body. He could not, would not, stop.
* * *
—
He will realize later:
He’ll never want a woman more than he wanted her in those hours.
He does not tell her this.
* * *
—
She gasps as his knuckles move into her, back arched, breasts tight, her finger twisting on herself, he gently bites her shoulder, her legs wrapped around him, pulling him down onto her and her hip against his in a way that will bruise, leaving a blue-black design he will watch on her body for days afterward with a kind of crazy secret pleasure as it grows, the bruise exploding slowly before it starts to fade.
Later, she slips from the bed, steps over the husk of sheets on the floor. She draws the curtain back. The sun fires into the room. He starts to get up, then doesn’t. Someone will come. When they need him, they’ll find him. There’s so little time in his life anymore that belongs to him alone.
Stay with her in this alone for now.
She’s walked over to the chair, her shirt draped over the back of it. He watches her body, the naked length of her, angular, the boyish cut of the hips, slim, small breasts.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks. He smiles.
“I’m remembering you.”
It is not the kind of thing he’d ordinarily say.
* * *
—
Even the next morning, though, it is still there. Slight, residual. He takes her hand across the breakfast table, turns it barely, and, with no one else seeing, he runs his fingertip down the inside of her wrist.
November 1962
We turn the clocks back. It’s dark by four. On nights when we are home and the weather is fair, we take the dogs for a walk.
I call for Clipper, and he claps for Charlie. We slip out and head toward the gates. We laugh together, wondering how long it will take for the Secret Service car to be behind us.
We talk about Steinbeck, who’s going to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
“Hardly a shoo-in,” Jack says.
“I’m surprised it wasn’t Lawrence Durrell.”
“Or Robert Graves.”
“I wanted Isak Dinesen.”
“I heard last summer it would be Dinesen. I think it would have been.”
“If a man had died, they would have given it to him anyway,” I say.
Clipper stops to sniff a hydrant. I clap softly. She trots back.
We talk about Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral the week before. I mention the piece I read by James Baldwin in The New Yorker, “Letter From a Region of My Mind.” We talk about Thanksgiving plans, the children’s birthday parties, Palm Beach at Christmas. We talk about the opening of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery in January. Jack laughs when I tell him that, every night, I dream of that painting heading toward us across the Atlantic.
The evening air is cool against my face. I’ve found a piece of land where we can build in Middleburg, Virginia, on Rattlesnake Mountain—acres of rolling hills and fields, a dizzying stretch of expanse looking out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“We have Glen Ora,” Jack says.
“We only rent that. This will be ours. The house will be modest, I promise.”
He rolls his eyes.
“And when it’s finished,” I say, “we’ll call it Wexford.” Wexford is the name of his family’s ancestral land in Ireland. I can tell it makes him happy I’d suggest that.
He asks me then to come with him to Miami when he speaks to the men who were taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. His voice breaks off. I wait. He throws a stick. Charlie bounds after it.
“Will you come?” he says.
“Yes.”
“It will matter to them,” he says. We’ve been closer since the missile crisis. The easy banter between us has deepened, and in that deepening, I can feel the softer edges of his need.
“Here, Clipper,” I call softly, and she runs to me.
A week ago, while visiting Lee in New York, I was flipping through the latest issue of Vogue and came to a photo essay on Marilyn Monroe. “The Last Sitting.” There were big orange X’s Monroe herself had drawn through the contact sheet. There were nudes where all she wore was a scarf. Others where she was in a black wig, her hair styled just like mine, a long messy string of pearls.
“What are you thinking?” Jack asks. Surprising. He never asks that question.
I close my mind and smile. “I’ll speak to them in Spanish. The Cuban exiles. When we go.”
* * *
…
Days before Christmas, Bobby brings us a piece from The Village Voice: “An Open Letter to JFK from Norman Mailer.” He gives it to Jack, who skims it, then hands it to me.
Quintessential Mailer—written directly to Jack, with that acerbic, intimate tone like he’s whispering to a friend: Of course, Mr. President, one does not even know whether it pleases you that America is to a degree totalitarian…. Your personality has nuances, almost too many nuances. The letter goes on for paragraphs, without posing the question it purports to ask but deconstructing Jack’s motives during the face-off with Khrushchev that fall: You were like a poker player with a royal flush, a revolver in his hand, unlimited money to raise each bet. He challenges Jack’s conscience, heart, care.
I glance up. “Do I have to finish this?”
“You should,” Bobby says, uneasy.
It’s there, in the last paragraph of that open letter addressed to Jack, that Mailer has floated a suggestion, as insurance against nuclear war: Why not send us a hostage? Why not let us have Jacqueline Kennedy?
I put the paper down.
“Will he ever stop?”
Jack laughs. “Not until he has you. That man’s obsessed with my wife.”
Earlier that year, in another piece, Mailer trashed my tour of the White House, describing me as manufactured, a royal phony. These phrases circle in me now.
“I’m sorry he drags you into it,” Bobby says. “It’s Jack he’s really after.”
It is and it isn’t, I could say. If it was only Jack, Mailer’s insights might be savage, but he wouldn’t target me.
“I don’t think he’s going to let either of us out of this life alive,” Jack says. His eyes dance. It amuses him, Mailer’s wit, the artful power of his mind, even when it’s harnessed to take him apart.
* * *
…
Elaine de Kooning is slight. An almost pixie look, a quick smile. She wears a dark jumper, a white blouse underneath. I watch her eyes move when she doesn’t think anyone’s looking, taking in sofas, vases, art, the play of light along the sills. She’s been hired to paint a portrait of Jack. She arrives in Palm Beach just before the New Year. An abstract expressionist, she’s not as well-known as her artist husband, Willem de Kooning. They’re friends with Krasner and Pollock. I had asked Bill Walton about her.
“She’s the fastest brush in the East,” Bill said.
“Yes, someone told Jack that. I think he agreed for that reason. He can shuffle around, and the thing will still get done.”
“Her portraits are interesting,” Walton said. “Those seated men she makes out of bright jagged edges.”
I read a feature on her in ARTnews, where she described how she wanted paint to sweep through like feelings. I remember those words as I watch her set up her easel. We’ve been told she doesn’t like to hang around. She’ll stay overnight, make a few sketches, then return to her studio and build a portrait out of those. At one point that first afternoon, she mentions to me, in an offhand way, that she’s more interested in character than style.
“Style can be a prison,” she says, then glances at me, apologetic. I smile.
“We all know something about that.”
She laughs. She’s more at ease with me then, but she maintains a remove. She keeps our world at arm’s length. I like that about her.
She stays for four days. I set up a small easel for Caroline next to hers with a little box of paint. I watch Elaine de Kooning watch my husband. I watch her fall a little in love with him. One afternoon, she remarks how different Jack seems from the photographs she’d seen in the papers and when she’s seen him on TV. She noticed that difference, she says, the first day she came.
“Different how?” I ask.
“He never stops moving. And there’s something elusive about him, always changing, like a shimmer. Larger than life.” Her eyes are grayish blue, soft and cool.
“How will you capture that?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She makes dozens of charcoals over those four days. Drawings, watercolors, a few rough sketches in oil. Then she packs her things. I see her on the afternoon she is to leave. Down on the beach, kneeling in the wet sand, sculpting a shape. Later, when she comes up to the house, I walk down. It’s Jack’s face she’s made in the sand. I stand over it. I can see how her fingertips smoothed the bones of his jaw and cheeks, his forehead, and the ridge over his eyes. There’s a weirdly finished quality to the face, the likeness eerie, almost alive, even as the tide begins to work down the edge.
1963
January. The elevators at the National Gallery break down the night of the opening of the Mona Lisa. Clint carries the train of my dress as I walk up the stairs. I laugh when we reach the second floor.
“I was afraid I’d trip, Mr. Hill, and we’d both roll right down the stairs, me in my chiffon like pink tumbleweed.”
I go to find André Malraux. The painting has been mounted in the West Sculpture Hall, against a velvet backdrop. The French and American flags flank it, along with two Marines. Malraux will speak first, then Jack. I read Jack’s speech as he was crafting it. It captures what I want to convey: the discipline of creative work; how art can exist at the heart of power; how it can transcend political and national differences and forge a common ground; how Da Vinci was not only an artist but a military engineer, who understood that the world of events and the world of imagination are one.
“La Joconde can be your symbol of the Cold War,” I told Jack. “Like your moon landing. A symbol of the work you’ve done to safeguard freedom. So many people will have the chance to see this painting while it’s here. That’s what art is meant to be.”
That night, the loudspeaker fails in the middle of Jack’s speech. The microphone gives out, and he has to shout to still the crowd. He shifts gears to what he does so well. He tells a few jokes and repeats key words of Malraux’s, about hope, the friendship between our nations, and a shared commitment to diplomacy and art. Malraux had described America as a young country entrusted with the future, but he was too soft-spoken to be heard over the cocktail chatter of two thousand guests. Maybe a thousand too many, I think. But I am happy. Despite the mechanical failures. No elevator, no loudspeaker, speeches that run off script, and too much chaos. It won’t matter. The speeches will be printed as they were written. There will be photographs in the papers, with the chaos excised. To the world, the evening will appear far more elegant than it was. For me, the life is here—in the night itself, with all its mad flaws. There’s magic in that, imperfect, glorious, free.
* * *
—
Days later, when Jack gives his State of the Union address, I sit in the balcony. The air in the high-ceilinged room is cold. I can feel the stiff curl of my hair against my cheek. “I always wanted the helm of Hades,” I told Kenneth as he styled it that morning. “The one that confers invisibility.”
Kenneth laughed. “I don’t think that’s in your cards today.”
The floor seats are filled. Lady Bird sits with me as Jack speaks from the podium about public service and the nation’s courage during the missile crisis. He calls for a commitment to educate every child and to strengthen fundamental American rights—the right to counsel, healthcare, and, most essential, “the most precious and powerful right in the world, the right to vote in a free election.”
He lets a beat of silence fall.
To me, it’s the most cogent speech he’s given since taking office. He weaves disparate issues together in deft ways. He balances the accomplishments of the past year with his emergent vision for the next. There’s strength in how he stands, how he talks, in his eyes. His voice cool. The embers of that early rage have cohered into a new resolution. Jack is fiercely logical. He always has been. Competitive, but also strategic. Now, though, it feels that something new has crystallized—not simply raw ambition or political calculation but some new bright grain of belief, born from ideals as well as failure. Over these last months, that quiet faith has merged into his rhetoric. He’s not a man who likes to be sideswiped by feeling, ever. He doesn’t trust it. Perhaps because it already runs deep. But as I watch him speak that day, I understand he’s begun to grasp how passion, when it comes from a place of integrity, can be leveraged to invoke change.
* * *
…
Waves of morning nausea. I’ve felt it every day for the past two weeks. It hits out of nowhere. I skip coffee, eat dry toast or sip ginger ale to take the edge off.
“Good morning, George,” I hear Jack say to his valet. I feel his weight shift, legs swing to the floor. I pull the blankets up. He rummages through the papers, I hear the distant rush of water running into a bath.
At eight, Miss Shaw brings in the children. Their little feet and voices, then a splash.
“That was my duck!” John cries.
“There are five more,” Jack says. “Here, they’re all up. And we’ll find that other one. What about you, Buttons, you’re not too old for a duck, are you?”
I slip out of bed. In the bathroom, the children have lined plastic ducks along the tub edge. The cables and memos Jack was reading before they came in are soaked. The ink bleeds.
They stay with him in the bedroom as he gets dressed. They lie on the floor, faces propped in their hands, watching cartoons. John rolls from one end of the room to the other until he strikes a hard surface, a bedpost, his father’s leg, then he rolls back. I sit in the rocking chair I had repadded for Jack’s back, as Caroline pulls him away from breakfast down to their exercise routine on the floor. They climb over him, their bodies wrapping his, until he has to leave for work. I should tell him soon. It’s been four weeks. I’m afraid, though. I don’t want to tell him, or anyone, yet.
* * *
—
“Mary,” I ask my secretary, Mary Gallagher, later that morning, “would you say I’ve done enough as First Lady?”
“More than enough.”
“Then now that the Mona Lisa is behind us, I’m taking the veil.”
I don’t tell her why. I tell Jack the following weekend when we go to New York to see Lee. After Sunday Mass, as we walk up Park Avenue, I tell him my period is five weeks late. For now, I tell him, I don’t want anyone else to know. He doesn’t break his stride, but he is smiling.
“You’ll have to stop riding,” he says.
“Luckily it’s winter.”
He pauses on the corner, catches my arm to keep me on the curb as the traffic flows by.
“And no water-skiing, Jackie.”
“Or tightrope-walking.”
“I mean it. You have to be careful.”
“We can still take walks.”
“Nothing too strenuous.”
“Fresh air is good.”
“You can’t get chilled.”
“And not too many teas,” I say. He laughs.
“What about the March dinner dance for Eugene Black?” he says.
“I’m always up for a good dinner dance.”
“And the Emancipation Proclamation fete?”
“Absolutely.”
“King isn’t coming,” he says.
I nod. Pam had told me. But I don’t tell him I already knew. “Did they give a reason?”
“King says as long as young Black men are being arrested for sit-ins and protests—”
“He wants you to move forward with a bill,” I say quietly, but in the blare and swirl of the city, I feel the air between us tense.
* * *
—
We’re down in Palm Beach with Joe for a few days in February when I bring up Mary Meyer. Tony Bradlee had mentioned how pleased her sister, Mary, was to be invited to the dinner dance in March. Which surprised me. Mary wasn’t on my list.
