Jackie, page 37
“What exactly did you tell them, Bobby?”
“The Kennedy family will place no obstacle.”
I sit down on the sofa, my head in my hands. Rage, heat, fury, tears. It all pours into my hands.
“You told me to handle it, Jackie,” he says.
“I can’t do this,” I say. “I’m just getting out from under it.” I don’t look at him. I know I’m being unfair. “Please tell them you misunderstood.”
“But I didn’t.”
The room feels airless.
“Tell the writer to come,” I say.
* * *
—
I serve iced tea on the porch.
“Do you water-ski, Mr. Manchester?”
He shakes his head and for a moment looks uncomfortable.
“We’ll just go for an hour,” I say. “Then we’ll have some lunch and talk things through.”
I ski off the back of the boat, carving back and forth; I cross the wake, then cut the opposite way. After twenty minutes, I drop the tow. The boat circles back.
“Do you want a turn, Mr. Manchester? I’m sure you’ll have fun.”
“No.”
“All right, then. We can just swim.”
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a swimmer.”
“Oh, don’t be modest, Mr. Manchester.”
He follows me reluctantly over the side. I wave the boat off and start in. Within fifteen strokes, I’ve left him behind. He straggles onto shore half an hour later, still out of breath when he reaches the porch. I hand him a towel. A puddle on the floor where his trunks drip.
“Why have you asked me to come here?” he says.
“You can’t do this, I’m afraid.”
“You’re talking about the serialization.”
“I’m talking about all of it.”
“We have an agreement.”
There’s a pitcher of iced tea on the table and a plate of sandwiches. I unwrap the sandwiches and refill his glass.
I want to ask about things I’ve heard: how, as he wrote that book, he worked all day and night, gripping his pen so tightly, it forced blood from under the nail; how he was hospitalized for weeks from nervous exhaustion, didn’t eat, didn’t sleep; how, in Dallas, he crawled across the roof of the book depository to put himself into Oswald’s sixth-floor view; how he asked to see the clothes I wore that day. He unfolded the white towel my stockings were in, blood flaked off in grains.
When Bobby told me this last detail, I’d pushed for more. In some terrible way, Manchester wanted something no one else really did.
“Please read the book, Mrs. Kennedy,” he is saying now. “Then you can tell me what you object to, and we can make changes.”
I glance at Bobby—I’d almost forgotten he was there, and has been since we came in. His chin rests on one hand. He stares at the porch rail. A wave of rage hits me. These men. Moving me around like a piece on a game board, with their egos and ambitions. They want to take my private grief and torque it for their own ends. I’ve let them. Bobby glances up.
“I am going to fight this,” I say, looking at Bobby.
“That’s a mistake,” Manchester says.
I turn to him. “It’s all a mistake, Mr. Manchester.”
He doesn’t leave. He stays sitting where he is, half a sandwich on his plate, mayonnaise squeezing from the corner. His eyes dark and angry, rims with scattered bits of red fatigue.
“The only thing you want,” he says, “is the one thing you can’t have. One blank page for November twenty-second, 1963.”
* * *
—
“We’re going to sue,” I tell Bobby a month later back in New York.
He shakes his head. “That would be a disaster.”
“For whom?”
I know the question will hurt him and it does, but even through the hurt, he can’t look away, and there’s a part of me that wants to reach across the deep rift between us, run my fingertips along his cheek. Cutting and bizarre, the unique desire I felt for him, that sometimes I still feel, a desire I once thought might be enough.
“You failed me,” I say, because I just need to end it.
1967
As soon as the news of the suit is public, they go after me. An avalanche of headlines.
Mrs. Kennedy “Irked”
Uneasy Rests the Crown of JKF’s Jackie
From Mourner to Swinger
Jackie Comes off her Pedestal
They describe the conflict with Manchester as undignified and pointless.
* * *
—
Just after the New Year, I visit Bunny Mellon in Antigua. As I’m coming out of the water one day, brushing the sea from my eyes, a shadow falls in front of me. I look up. I’m surrounded by reporters; two photographers are wading toward me, cameras held like snapping Cyclops eyes, legs chopped at the shins by the waves.
* * *
—
“In Skorpios, there are no reporters,” Ari says when I tell him about it on the phone.
“And Cyclops?”
“That I can’t promise. Did you yell at them?”
I smile. “No. Though I think a little blasphemy is good for the soul.”
“But your people don’t see it that way.”
“I’m afraid my scuffle with Manchester isn’t good for their politics.”
“Just say the word, I’ll be there.”
“An ocean and six time zones away?”
“You must realize that, to me, that’s no distance at all.”
“Bobby’s very upset,” I say. “But the world wasn’t going to love me forever.”
“What does he want you to do?”
“To settle with the writer.”
“I see,” Onassis says. “And will you? Settle.” The emphasis he places on that last word isn’t lost on me.
“It might be better to have them despise me so much, they wipe me right out of the world.”
“The world would miss you.”
“That’s okay.”
“You’d be bored.”
“I would be mystery.”
This makes him laugh. “Lorca once said only mystery allows us to live.”
“Exactly.”
“I was in Buenos Aires with Lorca.”
“You mean with him there or there at the same time?”
“I drank with him. He was a refugee. I was a young man working at the telephone company with a wild scheme to produce a new type of cigarette. Back home in Greece, I’d seen my uncle shot in the head in the village square. In Buenos Aires, I decided I wanted to be rich, because I believed that with wealth, I could undo what had been done.”
“What did you learn from drinking with Lorca?” I ask.
“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring upon ourselves.”
“He wrote that for Dalí.”
“It applies to any desire.” He says this casually, like it’s only abstract.
“You know what I like about you, Ari? You never fail to surprise me.”
“Good,” he says. “So will you settle? As Bobby wants you to?”
“I might drag things out a bit. If I’m going to be yanked off the pedestal, I want to be sure they get all the screws.”
“When are you coming to Greece?” he asks.
“Are you going to ask me that every time you call?”
“Only until you say yes.”
* * *
—
I agree to settle. I ask for a proof of the Manchester book and, on a rainy day that winter, I read it. I find it fascinating—how he got right into Jack’s shoes, Oswald’s shoes, even mine; he traced every event, from every angle and point of view; he got right under the skin of that day.
He relives it as I do. He could never have written it like this otherwise.
* * *
—
The next time I see Ari Onassis, it is May. A ceremony in Newport News to christen the aircraft carrier named for Jack, two days before he would have turned fifty.
I’m sitting with Bob McNamara. My eyes sweep the faces in the crowd. Some familiar, many not. I tell McNamara, “I’d like to leave directly afterward, please. Is that all right?” He nods. My eyes shift across the space, and he is there. Onassis. What is he doing here? My eyes snap away.
The ceremony ends. McNamara sends Lyndon on ahead and walks me to the helicopter. Upon landing at the airstrip in Hyannis Port, I take a car along the familiar road, which looks as it does every spring, to the house and the upstairs room where the old man waits.
I sit with him, like always, and I tell him about the ceremony in honor of his son. I kiss his papery speckled hand. His flaccid face. In his eyes I can see he understands. He can read me as easily now as he did when we were whole.
I stay with him until he nods off.
There’s a rim of caked sand and salt along the window sash.
That night, after the children are asleep, I walk down to the beach. I know the agent is behind me in the dark, near enough if I should need him. I stand at the edge of the sea and the night and the stars, their distant fugitive selves, and I am alone. Only the future ahead.
High summer. Greece.
A craft appears on the horizon. He recognizes it.
“Gianni Agnelli,” he says.
“You can tell from here?”
“Lines of the boat.”
We’re at the house on the island. He steps to the edge of the terrace. “It’s Agnelli.” He is annoyed. “I’ll go down.”
“Are you going to tell him I’m here?” I say as he starts toward the car.
He looks back. “Is that what you want?” I don’t answer. He smiles. “I didn’t think so. I’ll manage it.”
I wait on the unfinished terrace. Everything about these last days has felt that way—half composed, surreal. The island, Skorpios, is like nothing I’ve seen. Seventy-four acres. He had utilities laid in, two hundred varieties of trees planted, a villa built, an airstrip, a dock. He bought a second island nearby with a mountain on it to pipe fresh water to Skorpios. Sand shipped from Salamis to make a sandy beach. He has told me these things since I’ve been his guest here. He doesn’t ever spend the night on the island. The rooms in the house were built for visitors. He only sleeps on the Christina, moored in the bay off the coast.
From the terrace, I can see them below. Ari leaves the car running, the door open to signal he has no intent to socialize. He strides up to the boat as two men disembark. He was right. One is Agnelli. I recognize him now, the lean posture, that ease in how he stands. They look small from where I sit on the cliff above the trees. I shift my chair, so even if they were to look up, I’d fall into the shadow of the umbrella. Their voices rise. Ari’s telling them to leave. Agnelli and the other man get back into the boat and cast off. Agnelli looks up at the house. His eyes scan the terrace like he knows someone is there, but from that distance he can’t pick me out from the lines of the house. I am wood, stone, fabric, tile.
* * *
—
I’ve been in Greece for four days. I don’t want to go back. Not yet.
At home, Bobby is cementing his intent to run for the presidential nomination on an anti-war, social-justice platform. All summer, he’s spoken out in support of Blacks, even as waves of unrest sweep up from the South. News of unemployment and fall-apart housing. Riots erupt, leaving a wake of the dead. In Newark, a Black cabdriver is beaten by police, a neighborhood burned to the ground. It’s felt like the end of the world. At the Cape, the Kennedy machine is revving up again—meetings, campaign strategy sessions, rings left by their drinks on coffee tables, cigarette butts in the ashtrays. I found myself in the crush of it—nowhere I wanted to be. I’ve begun to plan a longer trip for this fall, to visit the ruins in Angkor Wat. The kind of trip I used to take, before I met Jack, the kind of adventure I dreamed about when I was young. I’ve wanted that lately—to find my way back into who I was then, those things that once brought me alive.
It was a July afternoon in Hyannis Port when Onassis called. He was coming to New York for two days. He asked if I’d be in town.
“There’s a dinner that weekend up here,” I said.
A pause, then, “So I won’t see you?”
“Not that weekend.”
“When are you coming to Greece?”
He always asked that question. This time I answered it differently.
“Three weeks from now,” I said. “Would that work for you?”
* * *
—
I told no one, not even Bobby. Definitely not Bobby.
* * *
—
I sleep with Onassis on the Christina. He makes love to me until my body aches, my mind split apart, gone. Everything is ended in those hours. I am only a body, a woman with no past.
Afterward, we lie on the bed in the cooler air through the open window. The dark gathers. The stars burn through. We stay up past midnight and he tells me stories of his childhood, about his adored mother, Penelope, who died, and his grandmother, who taught him that men have to forge their own destiny. He tells me how, as a boy before the occupation, he loved the port of Smyrna—the smells of coffee, fresh baked bread, pine tar, jasmine, the sounds of ship engines and folk music in the streets. He tells me how forty years ago, in August 1927, Pascia’s troops moved into the region. His father was arrested and thrown into a camp. Ari was captured and lied to the military about his age, pretending to be only sixteen. The soldiers let him go, and he devised a simple plan to free his father. It was only after he’d helped his father escape that Ari, with two hundred dollars sewn into a hidden pocket in his coat, left Greece for Argentina. A third-class ticket belowdecks in the ship’s hold, packed with other immigrants. In Buenos Aires, he worked as a telephone operator and fell in love with a woman who opened the doors of the city, then broke his heart and left him for another man.
“So curious,” he says, “the immigrant’s sense of always being split between two homes, two lands, two languages. It never leaves you. The country you came from and the feeling of being divided. You’re half past, half future. And when you leave the place you’re from, as I did, young, in the midst of war, for what might be forever, you know that, even if you return, the home you go back to will never be the same as what you knew.”
It’s unexpected—the vulnerable mix in his voice of passion and loss, grit, failure, hardscrabble dream. He smiles at me.
“This surprises you. You thought I was someone else. Is that it? Someone who just goes after what he wants until he gets it, who feels nothing, then moves on.”
“I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.”
My body is half under the sheet. He runs his hand along the edge of my breast. Silence then.
“You’re going to leave?” he says.
“I’ll come back.”
“When?”
“In a few months.”
“Or next year.”
“Before that.”
“Or the year after. Or seven years from now. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here.”
His mouth is on me again. His hands everywhere. I lie back on the pillow, breathless, the inside of my left thigh sore from where his body did not mold easily to mine. It will ache in the morning. That weird aftermath of pleasure mixed with pain. I will be exhausted. The sun will wake me. I’ll have coffee and toast. I’ll swim, then sleep on the little beach, or on deck, somewhere in the sun.
I tell him that when I came to Greece before, I found it almost too beautiful, dangerous somehow, and when I left, a part of me was secretly relieved. Isn’t that odd?
“And now?” he says.
“It feels different to me now.”
He tells me his assistant Kiki describes me as a cat.
I laugh. “What did you say?”
“I told her someday you’ll bring John and Caroline to visit, and I will take them fishing.”
“Anything else?”
“No,” he says. “But I’d like that.”
I smile.
“Come back in October,” he says.
“I’m planning a trip to Cambodia. Apart from that, I’ll be with the children.”
“Stop in Greece on your way back from Cambodia.”
“I’ll have to see.”
“Are you going alone?”
“David Ormsby-Gore is going with me.”
He nods. “Safe.”
“Kind.”
“Is that a front? Or is he the real life behind the front?”
“David is a good friend, a front, and real life as well.”
“Three for three,” he says.
“All true.”
“No. Truth is what we eat and sleep and want and fuck and dream.”
* * *
—
I swim in the rain the day before I leave. A sudden storm. He told me it would come. Rain was rare in summer; the sky had been so clear and I did not believe him. We almost argued about it that morning. Then the wind changed. Vertical bands of clouds blew in off the sea, wrapping the island. I knew then he was right. The storm would come. It would not clear. The rain would last all day.
I swim in it. Heavy drops strike the surface, bounce, shot through with air and daylight. I feel a curious delight watching them and a strange splitting grief for what I can’t yet name.
1968
“There’s too much risk,” I tell Bobby. “Just come out against the war. That’s all you really want. You can do that and not run. You don’t need to run.”
