Jackie, page 39
Part V
The heart of a woman who waits, her mind like a man’s
—Aeschylus, translated by Chappell
After war, after any act of inconceivable violence, the world is neatly divided between those who are dead and those who remain. Troy was no different. When that ten-year siege was done—the walls of the glittering city razed, pillaged, burned—when the Greeks set off from the shores, when the old Trojan king was murdered along with his sons and the baby Astyanax hurled from a parapet, his tiny skull smashed—past and future leveled in an instant—afterward, who remains?
* * *
—
The mothers, the daughters, the wives. And sometimes, that’s when the play begins.
* * *
—
I am someone who did not die when I should have died.
* * *
—
Hecuba said that. The Trojan king’s widow. She’d watched her husband, sons, and daughters killed. She was destined to be exiled, enslaved.
* * *
—
Yes, I remember thinking when I read those words, I do know that feeling.
* * *
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One day took a world away.
* * *
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Yes, that too.
* * *
—
But the dream of the story continues. In some gorgeous zone of the imagination, told and retold, as if some new incarnation might shape a keener sense of meaning out of what was broken, burned, slain.
I have already decided by the time the children and I walk down the aisle of St. Patrick’s for Bobby’s funeral. The organist playing Mahler’s symphony, Teddy standing up there alone to speak, holding such a mantle of weight on his shoulders. His voice shakes and I feel his mind veer.
* * *
—
I have already decided as we leave the church and a woman turns to me, extending a hand in sympathy—Lady Bird? Is that who it is? I’ve already begun to recede from this world with such speed and distance that in that moment I’m not sure I know her.
* * *
—
After nine that night, Teddy and I kneel beside the coffin on the hill at Arlington, the same hill. Candles light that same dark, the night like a hand on my shoulder, the smooth chill of the coffin, the reflection of the moon on wood, slipping over the surface. I stand up and it startles me—that fallstreak hole of the actual moon perfectly round in the sky, the rush of air on my face like I’m hurtling away from the rest of them toward it.
* * *
—
Back in New York, I write to Ethel. Crumple up a first draft, a second, then finally I get down what I want to say, about her children. I want her to know that I’ll take them around the world + to the moon + back. I want her to know that if she needs me, I’ll be there, now and always. Then it’s finished, the envelope sealed. I look up. It is my apartment—chairs, sofa, curtains, desk—but everything seems a shadow of what it was before. Even the view from the window. The maze of streets and park and city. The books on the shelves. Spines flat. Closed.
* * *
—
I’ve told no one what I’ve decided when I’m sitting with Rose in Hyannis Port and she says to me out of the blue, “You deserve happiness.”
Late June. The day lilies in bloom.
I tell Rose I’ve asked Teddy to go to Greece with me in August. Ari wants to host a party for him, to show his support for the family. “Teddy and I will go together,” I say. “We’ll stay at Ari’s house in Athens.” I haven’t said anything about what I’ve decided to Ari either.
The chintz in Rose’s living room is essentially the same as when I first came that Fourth of July sixteen years ago. Rose is asking if I’d like another cup of tea. Her hands are veined, with a grace in them I’ve never really grasped. Those hands lift the teapot and start to pour as John rushes into the room, clutching three toy planes—a jumble of wings, noses, tails—long-boned contraptions of paper and tin. He holds one out to me but won’t let go of the others. There’s something he needs me to see, a wheel that has loosened and a place where the wing is bent. What kind of tool to fix it, he wants to know, and where would he find such a tool?
I study the plane, turning it over. “I think I know, John,” I say. “I’ll help you in a moment.”
I take the planes from his hands, set them on the table, and draw him to me. I can feel his little body squirm to get loose. You are my joy, I say, breathing in his skin, his softness, his smell, which will be mine for only a while.
* * *
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And the next time Ari asks me, I say yes.
Away.
* * *
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Is why I did it.
* * *
—
Away is what he gave me, and for that first year after Bobby died, away was what I needed most. Hours, weeks, a season alone, with only beach, water, sky, a vagrant blue, the small house on the cliff, the steep fall into the green, the scent of jasmine, olive, and the wind like the breath of the god I no longer believe in.
* * *
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Here on Skorpios I am free of the cult, the icon, the legend. I can design the life I want, the life I want for the children. Trips to museums, archaeological sites, plays, concerts, the movies in Athens, flights home to New York. Time to read, paint, swim. Ari’s money keeps them safe. My children. No one understands that. Why should I have to explain? Their approval means nothing.
* * *
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Sometimes he is here with me, but after the first few weeks, more often he is not.
* * *
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“You are marrying Greece,” he told me. “Now you will be a Greek wife. My Greek wife.”
* * *
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I remember very little of that day in October 1968. Twenty guests in the tiny chapel. I wore a simple white dress, ribbons woven through my hair. There was the exchange of rings and dark wine from a silver goblet. John and Caroline stood beside me, white lit tapers in their hands, their faces brave and somber as the priest intoned the Greek prayers I had learned. Outside, it began to rain.
* * *
—
“Rain at a wedding is a sign of luck,” Ari’s sister, Artemis, whispered to me.
…
America Has Lost Its Saint, runs a headline in the Bild Zeitung.
Sad and Shameful, claims France-Soir.
And in The New York Times: The Reaction Here Is Anger, Shock, and Dismay
* * *
—
“The Times gave us a whole page,” I tell Ari.
“How will you respond?”
“Do I have to?”
He looks…amused?
“If you had to, what would you say?”
I realize he’s testing me.
“The honest thing would be to say I’m going to do this because it’s what I want.”
A faint wicked spark in his eyes. “My dear, you’ve already done it.”
* * *
—
The papers say it’s the jet-set life. They say he’s ugly but irresistibly powerful. They call me desperate, hysterical, fearful—palatable things for a woman to be. They say I married him to outdo my sister. Poor Lee. Lee was upset at first but not that I was with him, only that I’d kept it from her.
* * *
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It’s Artemis who tells me what Fellini’s wife, the actress Giulietta Masina, says: “Myths, when they are human, are fatally subject to wear and tear. Why marvel if a woman at a certain point tears off the veils that cover her like a monument—a thirty-nine-year-old monument, still beautiful, extremely alive, obligated to a role that does not belong to her?”
* * *
…
That fall on Skorpios, I learn Greek and how to dance the sirtaki. I ask Ari’s friend Yiannis for lists of books on ancient Greek history, archaeology, art. I visit Artemis in Athens and wander the streets of the old quarter. I start to change things in the house—curtains, rugs. I move the furniture around and relandscape the gardens. One afternoon, reading Cavafy on the terrace, I overhear two of the older workmen grumble, “Winston Churchill’s feet touched these stones, but they’re not good enough for her. Soon, not even Mr. Onassis will be good enough for her.”
When I know Ari is flying in from Athens, I pull things into order. Declutter the house—books neatly closed, magazines in neat piles off to the side, flowers in every vase. When he is with me, we spend each night on the Christina. He sings to me and tells me stories. I read poetry aloud, and as his cigar smoke falls in delicate ropes around us, he tells me about the new business he has brokered with the junta, a factory he’ll build, a new oil refinery. He says it’s the largest investment ever made in Greece.
“The colonels love my new spectacular American wife.”
“I thought I was your Greek wife.”
When I reach for my cigarettes, he swipes the pack from my hand. I swipe it back. No malice. Just a running joke between us. After dinner, we dance on the mosaic deck of the swimming pool. I’m drunk on the ouzo from dinner; I can feel the night roll off me as I take it all in, the warmth, the heady rush of his hands slipping the edge of my blouse off my shoulder as we dance, like he will undress me right there. “My boat,” he would say, “my wife, why shouldn’t I?”
* * *
—
I fly to the children in New York; both in school now, it’s harder to peel them away. I come back to Skorpios in early November. I’m alone there. Ari is in Paris. Artemis stays with me.
“After Jack died,” I tell her, “the air was different. I could feel him in it.”
That day is still fire in my head. Molten. Unfinished. And there’s a pain that comes in my neck out of nowhere, then throbs for hours.
I do not tell Artemis this.
* * *
—
For the fifth anniversary of Jack’s death, I am with the children. We spend that week at a house I’ve rented in New Jersey. I ride with Caroline. We celebrate John’s eighth birthday on November 25. Caroline turns eleven two days later. Thanksgiving falls late that year, and I feel an aching loss—not just for Jack and Bobby, but for those years gone and all that’s changed.
* * *
…
The following summer, the children come to Skorpios for July. One afternoon on the deck of the Christina, Ari tells them the story of Icarus. Caroline’s heard it before but listens politely, keeping her silky distance. John’s face is rapt as Ari tells them about the boy whose father made him wings, and for the first time I wonder, What kind of young man was Icarus? That day in the labyrinth when his father came with his harebrained scheme and drew the route of their flight in the dirt—two bodies like matchsticks with those huge makeshift wings, woven quill, osier, wax. What did Icarus think as his father mapped it all out? Did he feel it then? The need to risk the sky?
* * *
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More than once you said, almost in passing, that my mind was the thing that drew you to me. It was different, you said, it made me different from any other girl.
* * *
—
“Time for a swim?” Ari says. I glance up. “Yes or no?” His eyes are fixed on me.
“Sure,” I say.
“You weren’t listening.”
“I was.”
“You should have been. The story of an arrogant young man who aimed too high.”
I don’t want him to see me react, not in front of the children.
“Icarus reached,” I say. “And there’s meaning in that.”
“Don’t rewrite the myth.”
“I’d love a swim.” I stand up, brushing off my shorts. I turn to the children. John jumps to his feet, but Caroline waits, listening, absorbing the harder underside of everything not said.
* * *
…
Days before I turn forty, the spacecraft Apollo is launched—an answer to Jack’s pledge to put a man on the moon before the decade’s end. As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins head toward lunar orbit and the Sea of Tranquility, Teddy drives an Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off the Dike Bridge into Poucha Pond with a girl named Mary Jo in the passenger seat. He gets out of the car and walks away. The girl doesn’t. He waits ten hours before reporting it, for reasons that will never quite be clear. The car is found in the water, upside down, by a boy who’s come to the bridge to fish that Saturday morning. The story is on the front page of the paper the day those astronauts take their first steps.
Car Plunges into Vineyard Pond
Man Walks on the Moon
I feel something inside me tear. Tattered dynasty, that spent dream. It was always going to end with something like this.
* * *
—
Ari throws a party for my birthday at his favorite bouzoukia in Athens. I wear a short Pucci dress with a long string of pearls and flip-flops. He gives me a gold belt with a lion-head clasp and a second gift he calls “a sentimental trifle”: a pair of diamond, ruby, and sapphire earrings to mark the Apollo moon landing.
“Is this your way of asking me to forgive you for the Icarus remark?” I say lightly.
“Why would I ask forgiveness from a wife who doesn’t know that a myth is just that?”
“The earrings are thoughtful, Ari.” He looks at me, wary. “I mean it,” I say. “A beautiful gift. That moon landing is what Jack”—I’m about to say reached for—“believed in,” I say instead. A brief smile, then I turn away, because the tears burn, and I just need to push them back; those tears aren’t for Ari but for the sudden rush of grief for all that Jack believed in and did not live to see.
“Those earrings are exquisite,” my friend Katina remarks later that night.
I smile at her. “And Ari has told me that, if I’m good, next year he’ll give me the moon itself.” I take out a cigarette and go to light it. Ari knocks it from my hand.
“Dirty,” he says.
* * *
…
The children fly home. They’ll spend two weeks with their cousins in Hyannis Port, then they’ll go to my mother’s in Newport. I’ll meet them there. The first night they’re gone, things revert. Fine bands of tension between us—an angry word, a tone of voice. An occasional insult under his breath that’s never quiet enough for me to miss. He’s begun to call me names. Circe, after the beautiful witch who ensnared Odysseus with her spells, turning men to pigs. Mummy is the name I hate. He swears it’s an endearment, but every time he says it, I feel something in me shrink.
“I fly out tomorrow,” he says one evening at dinner.
“So soon?” I say, picking a piece of octopus from a film of oil on my plate.
“Why bother to stay?” he says. “Your nose is always in a book, why should I be here?”
He leaves, and the house is empty. The island empty, except for the housekeeper, the workmen, the guards. We’ve been married for almost a year—apart for 141 days.
* * *
…
Joe dies that fall. On a small table in the bedroom is a photograph from his seventy-fifth-birthday celebration. September 1963. Joe has always loved that photograph. Every time I came to see him, he’d have me pick it up and bring it over to the bed. In the photograph, everything is as it was: Jack was alive, as was Bobby, everyone joking, laughing, only a few looking at the camera. Teddy was young, in a crisp blue shirt, his face unlined and tan, unmarked by his brothers’ deaths and the more recent disaster of the car and the girl Mary Jo and what he didn’t do to save her. In that photograph, Rose’s sweater echoes the chintz, and Joe is in his silk loungewear in the green upholstered chair. I kneel beside him, my younger self, sheathed in white, dark hair a cloud around my face. I never quite recognized myself in that photograph, apart from the slightly crooked smile. We’d lost Patrick only a month before, and you could see it in my face, a sadness that felt nearly timeless, even prescient. When I asked Joe why he loved that photograph so much, he would point to me in it, kneeling beside him, looking off to the side.
It is Teddy who calls to tell me Joe is dying. I leave Athens that night and fly to him.
Sitting by his bed, I talk with him and hold his hand, watch his wandering eyes. He cannot speak, and now he does not try. I stay with him as he sleeps, Teddy curled in a sleeping bag on the floor. I stay until Joe slips off, on November 18, 1969—two nights before Bobby would have turned forty-four.
