Jackie, page 26
“What is it, Jack?” she asks again. “What are you thinking?”
* * *
—
He just looks at her. He can’t, it seems, stop looking at her.
* * *
—
Her skin lightly tan, that splash of freckles across her cheek that comes when she’s had too much sun, her eyes focused on something past his shoulder. He could turn to see what, but he finds himself arrested by her face, the face he has taken apart again and again. He sees it differently now. The wholeness of it. Not just her face but, surfacing in it, the face of the woman she will be—those lines at the corners of her eyes that mark what she’s wanted, what he’s given her, what he’s said and done, withheld and left undone. As she ages, this is the face he will see. The dark in her hair will strip, streaks of gray, silver. She will still smoke, her fingers stained with nicotine. She will bite her nails and he will strike her hand away to keep her from doing it, but more gently, maybe, in the future. He’ll try to be more gentle, more patient and aware.
It levels him—this odd want he can feel in his body to be more of what she needs. She is close to him now and, at the same time, light-years removed, her eyes still focused on something beyond him—the children in the shallows or someone walking by.
She couldn’t know what he questions sometimes, what he hides, that sense of fear and failure, the weakness he loathes, the shame that hits every morning when that back brace snaps into place, the metal click reminding him of what he will never be or be able to do again. He wants to tell her this, take the weight and nuance of it and pour it all into that radiant, ruthless mind. He wants her to know that sometimes he’s quite sure there is no such thing as greatness, or if there is, he is so far from it. There is conviction, yes. There is also doubt, a sense that maybe she was wrong, as the world was wrong, to put faith in him. Perhaps this is all just some glittering palace of illusion. Engineered, unreal. He wants to ask how she sees it—this destiny that wasn’t his to begin with, this mantle he took up because someone had to and he was the someone next in line. Fate by default. Where’s the greatness in that? And can it ever be enough? That underneath the machinations of ambition and power and play, there’s a hope that, in spite of all the doubt and charade, he might make a difference.
One day, when he was still a senator, he sat with her in his office, piles of books on the table between them. Half-finished speeches, outlines, everything spread out on that surface. She was the one who found words from a speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave on Memorial Day 1884—a speech about war, grief, and the dead who wore their wounds like stars. That day in the Senate office, she copied some lines down on a piece of paper that she passed across the table to him: In our youth, our hearts were touched by fire.
He remembers this now, that day, those words, and it strikes him how so much of what’s deeply essential can drain away. He wants to ask if she remembers. He wants to ask if she thinks that kind of fire can burn a hole through history wide enough that some new brighter world can emerge.
* * *
—
How would she see it?
* * *
—
She glances at him.
“Jack, what is it?” Then a smile. That smile.
* * *
—
The silence has softened and the world is different. The wind works against the current on the bay. White sails race toward the point.
She moves closer to him, her body lightly grazing his. She smells of sky, and underneath all other sounds, the squawk of gulls, the wavebreak, the shriek of the children playing, he can hear her breathe.
Ten years ago, he was with her here at this same beach, not yet married, but the gears were in place, everything kicking into motion. She wore the ring, and the mothers were up on the porch of the beach club, conferring about dates, menus, seating plans.
“Let’s go,” he’d said to her, and she did not ask where, just followed him down the steps across the sand to the sea. They’d waded in when she asked that question, “Do you love me, Jack?” and when he did not answer, she dove. The surface was a blue mirror where she disappeared, the dark knife of her body underneath. He thought he saw it, then was less sure. She was gone for so long. The water fell still like she’d never broken through it, and he waited, eyes scanning, seeing only that pale reflected sky, gorgeous, mocking, empty. When she surfaced, far out, she glanced back; he went to wave, but she’d already started to swim. The water was cold that day—he remembers the creep of it up his thighs as he walked in deeper—and she swam straight out, toward nothing, her body long, that slim grace of her arms, driving forward.
That was the moment he first loved her. He sees it now. That sense of love so intense, he shut it right down. It catches up with him, that memory of her, the awareness of her strength, the loaded will of her body as she swam, the light and the wet on her skin, her head turning to breathe like she was made of that water.
He feels it, what he didn’t let himself feel in that moment all those years ago.
So odd. How life can do this. You can have every fact right, every logistic, and still miss the point.
He loved her then, the way he will love her, always.
* * *
—
She is looking at him. “Jack, you aren’t upset about the bracelet, are you?” she says, teasing. “I love that bracelet, Jack. You must have known I would. I only wondered why you’d give me all those other things too and ask me to choose.” She smiles. “Sometimes it’s funny, Jack, the things you don’t seem to know.”
She is looking directly at him now, not anywhere else.
* * *
—
The world is alive to me because of you.
* * *
—
He thinks it. It’s nothing he says. Not yet. There are years to say a thing like that.
* * *
—
Agent Foster is walking toward them on the beach, his head down like he’s watching his own shoes moving through the sand. Jack knows the news is bad even before Foster tells him that a cable arrived. A Baptist church in Birmingham was bombed. Four young Black girls killed.
“You have to go, Jack,” she says.
He waits for a moment before standing up. “Is the car ready, Mr. Foster?”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Foster turns and heads back toward the lot, dark pant cuffs rimmed with sand.
“This kind of violence,” she says, “this hatred, it never ends, does it? We make a few steps forward, then something like this.”
The sound of a jet overhead. He looks up, squinting, shielding his eyes from the sun. He follows it, the liquid mercury streak of that plane bisecting the blue.
“Are you still planning to go?” he asks.
Late September. He is leaving for a five-day trip to eleven Western states. Shortly afterward, I will fly to Athens. It’s Patrick. I’ve told Jack this. I don’t want to be away from him and the children, but I am in too many pieces.
“I’m sorry,” I say. He looks at me; it’s sharp and endless, the sadness in his eyes—soul so blunt it cuts my breath.
“Stay,” he says.
* * *
—
His eyes that day were different. I could see them long after the plane lifted off, his eyes on my face when he realized I would go, the feeling in them raw and deep and new—like he finally understood something had happened between us.
It’s not that I love you less, I could have explained. It’s not that at all. It’s just these waves of burning sorrow I’ve felt since we lost Patrick. There are whole days when all I am is grief.
“Stay,” he said. Just that one word. The memory moves around my edges as the coast beneath us falls away. I watch the night-limned clouds, and through the sadness and the missing and the doubt, wondering if I should have made a different choice, I feel a trace of something else—the quiet thrill I used to feel every time I left my life behind to go abroad, the thrill of being a woman with no country, no history, no past at all.
* * *
…
At the bay in Glyfada, our bags are loaded onto a dark mahogany speedboat. We fly across the water toward the pale mass of the Christina, moored farther out.
We come aboard. Onassis steps forward, takes my hand, and kisses me on each cheek. It’s polite, customary, but I feel Clint stiffen behind me. Other guests are already there. Sue and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.; Onassis’s sister, Artemis; and Lee. I’m shown to my suite of rooms; in the private bathroom are solid-gold faucets on the sink, dolphin-shaped.
* * *
—
“Where are we going, Mr. Onassis?” I ask on the second day.
“Where would you like to go, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“I’d love to see the blue mosque in Istanbul.”
“Excellent,” he says. “I’ve planned that.”
“Already?”
He smiles. “As soon as you asked. Anywhere else?”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Crete, Knossos.”
“So it will be.”
* * *
—
On the Christina, time is elliptical, dreamlike. The bow plows through the swells. We anchor to swim and water-ski. We drink and talk and cruise. With a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses, I lie under the white-blue heat of the sky and read. It’s like waking from a dream of the world into the world. Everything feels perishable, heightened, acute.
“You’re not yourself,” Lee says one night as we’re dressing for dinner. “I know losing Patrick was a terrible loss, and I’m so glad you chose to come.” She’s looking at her own face in the mirror, lifting an eyebrow with her fingertip until the arch is set. She frowns, fastening an earring. Every afternoon, she disappears to Onassis’s cabin. She and Stas are still married. She makes the pretense of being discreet.
“The loss is only part of it,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror.
It’s hard to articulate, the needing to leave Washington for a while—how it’s not just the bright, fast pressure of our life there but a desire to reconnect with some invisible core thing I used to crave and be. I won’t find the right words, so instead I tell Lee how when summer was over and I came back to the White House, I braced myself to see the room I’d decorated to be Patrick’s nursery. I sent the children off with Miss Shaw and walked into that room, only to realize, as the door swung open, that someone had already stripped every trace. No crib, no changing table, none of the blankets or curtains I’d chosen. It was the high-chair room again, just as it had once been.
Lee turns away from the mirror then, her beautiful eyes lit with tears.
“Oh, my Jacks,” she says. “You always seem so strong, I forget sometimes.”
I told her the story knowing how she’d react, but still it makes me sad—that it’s so much easier to be loved when I seem fragile, broken. Learn this, Jackie, I think, once and for all.
Jack
It bothers him. The way she left. The fact that she needed to. That there was no other choice.
He’s at his desk, looking over a memo draft. He scribbles a note in the margin. Dust streams through sunlight. He thinks about Mary Meyer. It’s been months since her last visit, since he told her he had to end it.
He pushes the memo aside, pulls out a sheet of paper…
Mary,
Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here—or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all these years—you should give me a more loving answer than that.
Why don’t you just say yes.
Halfway down the page, a wave of what feels like nausea hits.
When Jackie went into labor with Patrick, he was in the air. It was the seventh of August, twenty years to the day since he and his crew, marooned in the Pacific, were rescued. Patrick was born six weeks premature, with the film around his tiny lungs and a 50/50 chance of survival. As the plane turned around, heading back to Otis, to Jackie and Patrick, all he could think was: I’m never there when she needs me.
On his desk now: the black alligator pad, pencil holder, blotter—a gift from De Gaulle on his first state visit to Paris. Next to that, his calendar, the Steuben glass etching of a PT boat, his inaugural medal, and leather-bound copies of Churchill’s Marlborough and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. There’s a small 1963 congressional directory, the Hercolite lamp, and an ashtray J. Edgar Hoover gave him as a gift. He has to deal with Hoover. Bobby said that. Hoover and his tapes on King. Hoover hates King. “We’ve got to manage him, Jack,” Bobby said. Manage Hoover; finalize the test-ban treaty; deal with Vietnam—the growing storm between Diem and the army generals who want him gone.
Every hour, some new crisis.
Why not slip Mary in? Take a break.
* * *
—
Years ago, during the Senate campaign, when Jackie was pregnant with Caroline, he was leaving to board a plane. He remembers that day without remembering where he was going. Jackie walked him to the door of the Hyannis airport. She said his name. He turned to her. “What?” His voice impatient. She didn’t answer, or if she did, he can only remember how she scanned his face, like she was looking for some way into him. Her eyes dropped, she looked away.
* * *
—
He hates the sense of “without her” in the house. It fills him with an odd dread.
* * *
—
When did she leave? he wonders. When did that door inside her close? When did she vanish, standing right in front of him, the children turning somersaults on the rug as she called them to come brush their teeth, get their shoes tied?
* * *
—
All of this was happening. Years of his life transpired, while part of her, he understands now, was absent all along.
* * *
—
He looks down at the unfinished letter to Mary Meyer. He puts it away in the drawer.
* * *
—
That night, he calls Caroline. She and John are in Newport with Janet.
“I’ll be there soon, sweetheart. How’s your brother?”
“He misses you.”
“And you?”
“I understand.” She says this in her grown-up voice, which makes him smile.
“Is the water still warm enough to swim?” he asks.
“I jumped in, but it might be too cold for you.”
“Never. I love you and I’ll see you soon.”
“When?”
“This weekend.”
“Not until then?”
“That’s Friday.”
“Well, Friday is soon.”
On the phone table, there’s a homemade pink valentine she made for him, a cardboard backing to keep it upright.
“In your opinion, what will the American press do with this?” Onassis asks.
We are somewhere off the coast of Crete. It’s late. Most of the others have peeled off to bed. The three of us sit near the pool. Lee has moved closer to Onassis now that the others are gone, her hand on the edge of his thigh.
“What will the press do with what?” I say.
“Your trip here.”
“The usual things, I assume. Where we went, what we ate, who we met, what I wore. They might be kinder this time.”
Lee breaks in. “Because of the baby—”
“You’re drunk, Lee,” Onassis says. Cool and dismissive, the way he says it, and while he might claim it’s out of respect for me, I like him less.
* * *
—
We’ve been on board the Christina for almost four days.
* * *
—
There was a photograph I once saw of the Christina—the same space where we’re sitting tonight, configured differently. In the photograph, the mosaicked deck was lowered to form a swimming pool but there was no water in it. Onassis and Churchill sat in that drained pool in two rattan chairs, Onassis in lightweight slacks and a loose-fitting button-down shirt, Churchill in his black suit. He had his cane and wore his hat, black dress shoes resting on the mosaicked flank of the minotaur.
* * *
—
“Is it going to rain?” I ask Onassis the next morning. A low body of clouds appears to move toward us over the sea.
“No,” he says.
“How do you know that?”
“By how the clouds are moving. How the air smells.”
“So interesting,” I say. “It’s interesting, too, the way you’re so sure.”
“It isn’t much good to be otherwise, is it?” The faintest smile then.
* * *
—
After dinner, we move out onto the deck, and he tells stories of Greek history, mythology, and heroes; stories of Odysseus, his wandering and battles; stories of the master craftsman Daedalus, who became a prisoner of the labyrinth he had designed, those massive wings of wax and pinion he built to escape with his son Icarus.
