Jackie, page 41
* * *
—
I tell Tish about this over lunch a few days later.
She laughs, then says, “But how are you, Jackie?”
“Oh, Tish, you always ask the tricky questions.”
How would I explain it? It’s not the loss of Ari. It’s not the children growing up and into their own lives. I wouldn’t want that any other way. It’s not that I’m lonely or bored. I have plenty of dates and events, theater and concerts and readings. What then?
I study the menu. When the waiter returns with our drinks, I order a hamburger.
“Tish, I’ve decided that as long as you do your push-ups and jog around the reservoir, you can never go wrong with a hamburger.”
“You can never go wrong with a hamburger.”
I laugh, but I’m thinking about an article I read in the paper this morning about the fall of Saigon. Communist tanks rolling up to the palace, the boulevard strewn with burning cars. U.S. troops were picking up Vietnamese who fled in boats. Former soldiers blended in to lose themselves in crowds. One soldier walked up to an army memorial and shot himself. That stopped me. I read those lines twice. The war was over, to the extent that something that never should have been started can be over. More complex than any dark hell Shakespeare looked into. That’s how Bob McNamara described it once. But isn’t there something after every end?
“I want to work, Tish,” I say, “but I haven’t had a paying job since I married Jack.”
“What about Viking? You love books.”
“Loving books and being qualified for a publishing job aren’t the same.”
“You know Tom Guinzburg. Wasn’t he a friend of Yusha’s in college and part of your Paris Review circle?”
“I only wish it were mine,” I say.
When Lee married Michael Canfield, I’d felt a twinge of envy, not because my younger sister was racing ahead to the altar but because Lee was marrying into a publishing family. I couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than spending breakfast, lunch, and dinner talking about what books were being acquired, critiqued, reviewed. Funny. A twinge like that, so easily dismissed.
“You were a reporter,” Tish says as she picks up her fork and starts on her salad.
“A quarter of a century ago.”
“You’ve lived through an important part of history.”
“I suppose.”
“Just call him, Jackie. Call Tom and talk to him. See what happens.”
* * *
—
Years ago, there was a letter in a book you showed me, written by Einstein to the grieving family of his closest friend:
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
* * *
—
Which is the equivalent of saying that the dividing line that marks “what happened” from “what will happen” is no more substantial than the fog of a child’s breath on glass.
* * *
…
I don’t call Tom Guinzburg. Not that I wouldn’t want the work. I’d love it. But what if I can’t handle being out in the world that way? How would I act? How would the world act toward me?
A few weeks ago, my friend Peter and I went to the opera, and Peter remarked that taking me anywhere was like taking King Kong to the beach.
I drive out to New Jersey to ride. When I get back to New York, I realize there are no eggs in the refrigerator. I walk to the store. On my way home, I run into Jimmy Breslin. He takes the bag of groceries and walks with me for a few blocks.
“Jimmy, do you remember how you told me once there have been so many of you in the course of your life, so many Jimmy Breslins, because you kept turning into the people you wrote about and they turned into you? You said that at a certain point it became impossible to pin down any one Jimmy Breslin.”
“So this is a serious conversation?” he asks.
“I’m thinking about going back to work.”
He stops walking. “You?”
“Yes, but which me?”
He laughs. “Do you really think you’re just going to attend openings for the rest of your life?”
* * *
—
The morning Tom Guinzburg is coming over, I dress carefully, and when I can’t choose between two tops, I realize I’m nervous. Silly. I’ve known Tom for a long time. He’s too kind to laugh at me, even if he thinks it’s absurd that I’d just show up at his office, dragging the circus behind me.
Whatever I do, the world will say what it says. I can’t live fighting or running or hiding from that. I can’t spend the rest of my life watching raindrops sliding down the windowpane.
Black top, I finally decide. White pants. Straightforward. Low-key. I put on my earrings in the mirror.
* * *
—
“There will be a fair amount of learning the ropes at first,” Tom Guinzburg tells me.
“I don’t have to convince you?”
He laughs. “If things don’t work out, I’ll just fire you.”
“That would be a story. Though I’ve been through worse.”
“There’s no glamour in publishing, Jackie.”
“I want to learn.”
“There will be plenty of that.”
“And I want to start where anyone else would start. Agreed?”
“You can take notes for a while. You don’t have the background, really, to be an editor. It’s not that you don’t have the talent or skill. You just don’t have the training. But you can sit in on meetings, and eventually we can work toward acquisitions.”
“Perfect.”
“How are the children?” he asks.
“Caroline’s going to work in London this fall.”
“Exciting.”
“I wish it wasn’t so far.”
Silence then. The quiet rush of sunlight down the curtains into layered maps across the floor.
“Listen, Tom. You’re not doing this just as a favor, a handout?”
“Not at all. You must realize this has advantages for me.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s pity case.”
He starts to smile.
“If you’re going to say something,” I say, “please say it. Otherwise I’ll think all sorts of things.” I say this easily, with warmth, the way I’ve learned, but he gives me that look I’ve seen before when someone is surprised I’ve read the nuance of a moment they were trying to hide.
“I’m just not clear yet what your title would be,” he says.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me my title?”
“This is an unusual case.”
“Well, what’s the lowest title in publishing?”
He hesitates. “Consulting editor.”
“There it is.”
Fall 1975
There’s a crowd gathered outside the Viking offices at 625 Madison. I slip out of the taxi a block away, into the side entrance.
Tom introduces me to the staff. They’re polite, of course, but skeptical. Why wouldn’t they be? I try to connect. It all feels awkward. Tom shows me the office that will be mine. It’s small, so simple my heart leaps. Just a desk, file cabinets, a swivel chair.
“I love it,” I say. “Now I can work my way up to a room with a view.”
* * *
—
The crowd is there, outside every morning when I arrive and every afternoon when I leave. When I dash across the street to the diner for lunch, I steel myself just inside the door. I close my face into the empty face and push out into the flash of camera bulbs.
Weeks pass. I begin to get a handle on my days. I bring my lunch in a paper bag and eat in my office. I get my own coffee. I draft my own memos. I wait in line with everyone else to use the Xerox machines. And there’s a certain electrifying magic to the ordinary. I feel like this is something I’ve waited my whole life to know. Most evenings, I have a quiet dinner with John at home. After we eat, while he does his homework, I read manuscripts. I work only part-time. I call into the office every Monday and Friday to check in.
* * *
—
Some of the crazy continues. One day a bomb threat. Often, uninvited strangers arrive at reception, insisting I’ll want to see them. There’s a heavy stream of interview requests and canvas sacks full of what Tom calls “Jackie mail.” Once, among the letters and manuscripts, a .38 caliber arrives in a manila envelope addressed to me with a note.
I’m stepping into my office when Tom tells me about the gun. I stop, my fingers on the knob. It will never end. The mail and the threats will come. The crowds will wait.
“Are you all right?” Tom says.
“Oh yes,” I say. I step into my office, take out a blank sheet of paper, and I start a list for twenty potential book projects—why they might work, ways I can help make them work, why they are stories that need to be told.
That weekend, Caroline is home from London for five days. When John gets out of school on Friday afternoon, we pile into my jelly-bean-green BMW and drive out to the house in New Jersey. There was a storm the week before. The leaves had turned, and that storm took them down. Now they’re strewn across the road and the fields, gorgeous streams of burnished reds, coppers, golds. The children are bickering—not an argument—just that playful banter of you’re wrong and I’m right. John tells his sister that he’s planning to raise a python in her bathtub while she’s away. “Noooooo,” Caroline says. “You won’t let him, Mom, will you?” The road is awash with leaves; the beauty of them catches in my throat.
* * *
…
Just after Christmas, at a dinner at my apartment, the Schlesingers, the Mudds, and the Duchins raise a glass to my new adventure.
“Say a few words,” Arthur says. “Tell us. What’s it like to be a working woman again?”
“I love books. It’s that simple. I love how they expand my mind. Like travel, books let you explore other cultures, perspectives, histories—worlds markedly different from your own.”
“Hear, hear!” Arthur lifts his glass. The others join in. The candles are burning down into castled piles of wax. No one mentions the rumblings in the news—allegations of Jack’s affair with Judith Exner, a woman linked with mob boss Sam Giacana. The unraveling has only begun. In my gut I know this, and I hate what I know.
* * *
—
A few days later, an outline of Exner’s half-finished memoir appears in the Times, along with the claim that our marriage was in poor shape. In early March, news about Mary Meyer hits the papers. Two-year White House affair with D.C. artist…J.F.K. smoked grass. Laced through the smut are details of Mary’s murder.
That familiar awful heat under my skin.
* * *
—
It will burn for a while. Every detail—true and not—will catch like tinder. It’s our children I think about. And I think about walking into work tomorrow. The meetings I have next week. The ballet I was planning to attend. It’ll be everywhere by then, and I’ll relive it every time I meet someone’s eyes and see that complex web of pity, disbelief, and parasitic wonder. I told you this would happen.
* * *
—
I grab my coat and take a taxi to my friend Karen’s apartment. I walk in and sit down.
“You’ve read it,” Karen says.
“As much as I’ll read.”
Karen sits down next to me, and I want to explain that as long as it was secret, I could handle it. The rules of marriage were different back then. I knew what I’d signed up for. I don’t say that. I don’t try to justify it.
* * *
—
“Learn to let things go,” you told me once. “Be like a horse flicking away flies in summer.”
The edges of my eyes burn now for how ironic it is—that your wisdom should intercede to help me through the awful consequence of your foolishness and your hubris, your belief that the world would never turn against you.
* * *
—
As I leave Karen’s that day, a woman in the elevator turns around and stares. There’s no one else in the elevator. I slip on my sunglasses and look straight ahead, hoping all that woman can see is her own reflection in the mirrored lens.
* * *
…
I hurl myself into work. A book of Abraham Lincoln daguerreotypes. The Firebird, a collection of Russian fairy tales. Lawrence Durrell’s new novel, Sicilian Carousel. I take on a project with Diana Vreeland, who, over lunch one day, leans across the table to me with that Kabuki face and jet-black hair and says:
“There’s nothing duller, Jackie, than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.”
* * *
—
One afternoon, soon after Jack’s birthday—he would have turned fifty-nine—as I am walking up to the reservoir for my run, I notice that my sneaker lace is loose. I stop to retie it. There’s a couple nearby on a blanket, young, graceless, fumbling with each other like they can’t keep up with their own desire. A few yards away, a baby carriage in the shade. It is a Sunday. Services are over. The bells are ringing. I turn away and start up the path, the sound of those bells melding with the dappled shadows and the trees.
* * *
—
The landslide of tell-alls continues. Thirdhand gossip, anonymous interviews, insider secrets “newly revealed.” Jack’s affairs, our alleged unhappiness—it all gets dredged up. Juicy bits, nasty bits—some true, most conclusively not. It’s heartbreaking, humiliating, but after a while it just becomes too much to brace myself or try to anticipate what someone might say to John at school, what someone at work might have seen in a tabloid magazine while standing in line at the drugstore. Headline after headline. Jack and I, Jack and the women, Bobby and I, those nights after Jack died, the drink and the grief and those little blue pills—what might have happened that shouldn’t have, and in the end did it? God, there’s just so much. That glittering trash.
At a certain point it begins to feel like it’s the mirage of a woman they’ve conjured. She and I only happen to share the same name. She’s a caricature cobbled out of smear and myth, a cartoon life that runs alongside mine. Maybe it was always this way. I slip out from under it. I go on living my life—a woman in a trench coat, a scarf, and a pair of sunglasses, walking to work, so ordinary and visible I disappear.
* * *
—
“There’s nothing more important than books,” I say to John one evening after dinner at home. “When people are reading, they’re thinking. That’s how change takes place.”
John nods—his earnest dark eyes, patient with me always. At the same time, I know there’s no easy combination of words I can come up with to express the thrill of living in the world of books. I love to read the early drafts of a manuscript, to feel the work of a mind unfinished, then read it through again and mark it up, pencil carving the text so it comes alive on the page.
Cut it back, I’ll write in the margin. Be ruthless. Hold to what you want to say and how you choose to tell it. Everything is story.
* * *
…
August 1977. Hammersmith Farm will be sold. I go to walk the rooms of the house where I grew up. Then my mother and I drive to Bailey’s Beach. We sit on the porch at the beach club and order lunch, and I remember the swim Jack and I took the summer before we were married.
* * *
—
“Do you love me?” I asked you that day. It was the first time I felt bold enough to ask. And our mothers were calling us from up on the porch. We pretended not to hear. We swam and we did not get out; they kept calling, waving, two figures with their dresses and stockings, their hats and pearls, like tiny paper dolls, and I understood then that the mothers belonged to the formal machinations of that world while you and I belonged to the sea.
* * *
—
“Are you going to order?” my mother is asking now, glancing over the menu.
“What?”
“For lunch, what are you having for lunch?”
* * *
—
Once, on Air Force One, I was changing between events. I’d started to unbutton my blouse; it was half off my shoulder when you came up behind me and touched me. It surprised me—that you’d come so near without my realizing, and that you had touched me that way. You ran one finger down my body, from the edge of my breast to my waist, and then you looked at me and you did not say it, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you would say, but your eyes did. They said, You are mine.
* * *
—
Some sand has blown in under the clubhouse door. I stand up and drop my napkin on the chair.
“Where are you going?” my mother says as I slip off my shoes. Tucking them under the table, I step toward the door with the crack underneath, then through it, to the porch and the bands of sun beyond the veranda, steps leading down to the beach.
“Jackie, where are you going?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
* * *
…
I leave Viking and go to work at Doubleday. The following year, I find a stretch of coast on Martha’s Vineyard. I buy the land to build a house near the cliffs of Aquinnah, where the sea is woven into the sky. That spring, I walk the land with Bunny Mellon. We talk about the long gravel drive I love that winds over a creek with an old wooden gate. We draft the details of the house—saltbox, cedar shingle, white trim. I tell Bunny I want a home the children will want to return to, years from now, with their children.
