Jackie, page 43
Thirty years since then. How could time have moved so fast that it feels at once like yesterday and like an entirely separate life?
* * *
—
“Jackie?”
“Oh, Joe,” I say, putting my mind into place. “I’m so happy you are here.”
* * *
…
After dinner that night, they gather around to sing me “Happy Birthday.”
I forget to make a wish. I eat a skinny piece of cake, then pull on my jacket and slip out for a quick walk and a smoke. The night is velvet on my skin. From the edge of the lawn, I can see them through the window. Caroline, her hair burnished in the lamplight, seems to glow, laughing with her brother and her uncle, with her husband, Edwin, as always, nearby. How different she seems since she married. She’s always been very much her own person. But it’s more noticeable now. At the window, Maurice glances out. He does not see me. I’m too far in the shadows. Then he turns and moves back across the room, that quiet, lumbering grace. They are all there, in that house I laid out in string, inspired by a vision of nights just like this one. Their voices drift through the open window across the lawn, mixing with the play of the waves and the distant toll of a channel bell near the lightships farther out.
I drop my cigarette, the hiss of it extinguished in the wet grass. Night dew has begun to bleed through my shoes.
* * *
—
As a child, I used to wonder who I was before I was a child. I used to imagine an egg living under the snow or a star pinned in the high dark, waiting to fall. I was convinced there was a definitive place I came from—a room of the world, a place of trees and rocks and sky, outside time.
* * *
—
I should go back in. I know this. I should go back and rejoin these people I’ve gathered here—the living that I love—but there’s a certain pleasure in being unseen, simply bearing witness to how they continue, in that house, those rooms, this hour, without me.
* * *
…
I wake early the next morning. I have coffee, rub cold cream over my face, and drive down to the pond to meet Carly Simon for our swim. By the time I come back, the house is awake. Caroline’s little girls have dragged the dollhouse into the hallway and are zooming tiny cars at breakneck speed across the floor. Through the trees and past the garden streams the light, a pendulum at play.
At an afternoon beach picnic, the girls swim with Caroline, while Carly and I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to baby Jack, who’s crawling around a blanket on the sand. I take him for a walk, just the two of us. The wind is soft and warm, and he turns his face into it, his little eyes half-closed. We walk and I tell him how smart he is, how kind he will be, and the extraordinary things he will do in this life. His head tucks into that hollow place at the curve of my neck, where it just fits. “Next summer, you’ll be in my kayak,” I say. “I’ll put you in a life jacket, and we’ll go off on a paddle.”
* * *
—
The house begins to empty—first the guests, who need to get back to their lives, then the children, with kisses and promises to return soon. When they’re gone, I go through the house, looking for toys or books left behind a cushion or under a chair. There’s a sadness that comes when the oak floors are empty, no mess strewn about, everything in its place. Maurice stays for a few days, then returns to the city. The days flow by. There are dinners with the Styrons, Carly, and the Clintons—Hillary, whom I like very much. One Sunday, Lady Bird comes for lunch. It’s a lovely day and we sit under the arbor. Shadows stripe the table and the silver and our hands. We talk about our children and our present lives. We do not talk about the past.
* * *
—
I’ve wondered this: Would you have wanted to know that severe daylight in Dallas would be the last you’d see?
* * *
…
Every Monday I drive to Oak Bluffs to see Dorothy West.
“Do you know I lose my way almost every time I come here?” I say.
We’re drinking tea in Dorothy’s kitchen in the house on Myrtle Avenue. A small plate of egg salad sandwiches, a bowl of carrot sticks, and manuscript pages on the table in short piles arranged by section and chapter.
“I’ll tell you what, Dorothy. You get this book finished for us, and I promise not to get lost anymore between my house and yours.”
“By next summer?”
“Yes. Next summer.”
Dorothy likes to talk, to tell stories. Someone once remarked that Dorothy didn’t know when to set a period, but I love Dorothy’s voice—that hard, open Bostonian A—and her stories. She tells me about living in New York with Zora Neale Hurston and starting a magazine with Richard Wright. She has a column now in the Vineyard Gazette, and on our Monday visits, she always insists on serving tea.
“Does it ever strike you,” I say, “that here we are, the two of us. You never married. I’ve been married twice and am quite finished with it. And here we are working on a book called The Wedding.”
Dorothy laughs.
“Look at these pages.” I pull out a section of the manuscript and point to a passage I’ve marked. “This. What’s happening here—it’s brilliant. The voice in this passage.”
“That’s a voice from forty years ago,” Dorothy says.
“I know. Don’t lose it.”
* * *
—
Driving home, past the moors and the tumble of brush and stone wall, I think about how solitude is the stuff the self is made of. When I am here, on the island alone, I remember who I was before I met you—half a life before. Sometimes what I remember is clearly, definitively true. Other times I feel like it’s only a loosely glued collage of what took place, what I witnessed, did, and felt.
Who would I have been if I’d stayed in France or moved to New York for that job at Vogue? If I’d pursued more, risked more, let myself want more. What would have happened if I had made—all those years ago—a different choice? And why does it seem like such a radical thing? The idea of a woman in love with her own life?
* * *
—
The days stream by, one after the next, into fall. Storms come, fronts building far out on the water. From the house, I watch the iron-dark walls of rain move over the surface, the bright strike of lightning. The gaps in time between those flashes and the thunder shrink as the storm nears. Since I was a child, I’ve loved storms, the reminder that what is wild and unpredictable is always there.
From that time
all his angels
have the one
same
face.
* * *
—
I am reading something intimate and unexpected. A young poet, Anne Carson, I haven’t read before, who blends Sappho and Euripides with modern slang and syntax. I’m curious to know what you’d make of it—these disparate elements merged. But it can happen this way, can’t it? Things meld, and that larger order we call history changes as we age. And yet—does that make what we once believed in less?
* * *
—
I pull my mind back. I’m treading water in the cove with Carly, the salty taste of ocean on my mouth. We’ve taken the Jeep down for a swim. In a few days, I’ll return to New York. As we float in the still-warm water, she tells me about her childhood, how hard it was, like a Tennessee Williams play, she says; she wonders if she could write about it. A buzzing sound overhead. A helicopter circling. At first I think it’s the Coast Guard, then realize it isn’t. Carly hasn’t figured it out yet. She will. She stares at the sky, curious—how lovely she is, long rectangular face, expressive mouth, her hair plastered dark and wet over her broad shoulders. She has that exquisite, almost violent strength glimpsed from time to time in younger women, a strength not yet fully owned.
“The press,” she says.
We start to swim.
* * *
…
When do I know?
It’s almost imperceptible. The slight changes in a body that occur as some new dark thing takes root. A cold that lasts longer than it should. A funny lingering chill that a second sweater can’t stave off. I close the windows earlier in the evenings, even though I hate them closed. That sign of another summer done. I don’t want that funny chill. I tell myself there’s always next year. I pack up the house—manuscripts to bring back to the city, summer clothes I’ll send to be cleaned and stored. The light has changed, and it is beautiful, a sharper angle of it on the marshes as they turn.
* * *
—
Forty years ago in September we walked into St. Mary’s Church, then went back to Hammersmith for the reception. After the cake was cut, I stood and told the eight hundred guests that my mother had always contended you could judge a man by his correspondence. Then I held up the postcard of a passionflower you’d sent to me when you were in Bermuda.
Wish you were here, you’d written. Cheers. Jack.
“And this,” I said, waving the postcard, “is my entire correspondence with Jack.”
I glanced at you then, and you met my eyes and laughed, a faint blush—a little sheepish—rising through your skin that filled me with a sharp, exquisite joy.
* * *
…
It’s a glorious autumn in New York. That dull feeling in my body, though, still. Like the bones are drenched.
“I’m tired,” I tell Maurice. “I’ve just been so tired.”
He is the only one I tell.
* * *
—
Breakfast, coffee, the paper each morning. A children’s dance performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A dinner for the Municipal Art Society.
I do yoga and take my runs around the reservoir. I watch the grandchildren once a week. I go into the Doubleday office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I no longer wear the sunglasses and scarf every time I walk in the streets. What a thrill it was, the first time I did it, to find that only a few heads turned, one or two whispers, then they looked away, and I realized that just as there was a switch I could turn on to draw a room toward me, there was another I could turn off to disappear. I could step out into the street and vanish, just a middle-aged woman in slacks and sneakers, a tote on her shoulder, ballet shoes tucked in with the books and manuscript pages, walking north toward Central Park.
* * *
—
I tell Tillie, my yoga teacher, that when I think about old-ladydom, the one thing I want to always be able to do is ride.
* * *
…
November again.
* * *
—
Thirty years this month. You come near me, as you do, every November. A momentary shudder and I feel you like a shadow cross my hands.
Sometimes it strikes me that I have become an entirely different woman from the woman that you knew.
* * *
—
This year I’ll spend the week before the anniversary in Virginia. I’ll ride in the hunt, then come home to be with the children for the actual day. But leading up to it, I want to be away.
I stay in a small cottage on Bunny Mellon’s farm, near the garden by the main house. Over the years, I’ve come to miss the world I remember from childhood, the wide rolling hills of Virginia, long open fields where I can build a horse’s speed to a gallop, riding faster across the swell of space with the sense that if I ride hard enough, I can catch up to those blue dusky mountains in the distance and lose myself there, in the speed where nothing is fixed and there’s only the smell of the horses, the saddle blankets, and the tack mixed with the fainter scent of hay and the rich cool damp of the green.
* * *
—
Early that morning, when I arrive at the stables at Rokeby, a crust of frost on the grass snaps under my boots. My breath is white in the cold clean air. I look for the horse I usually ride, Frank, the horse I won the trials with three years before.
Afterward, I’ll try to remember what I was thinking when I chose the other horse instead—a dark bay thoroughbred gelding with a neatly braided mane and tail, the one the groom told me used to fly over fences but now might be too settled, too content to follow the hunt.
I lead the horse over to join the others. The hounds pick up the scent of the fox. The horse’s girth and stride feel unfamiliar. Then I adjust, and we’re swept into the speed and rhythm, the cry of the hounds, the peal of the horn echoing back through the valley while a mist fills in among the hills. We come to the wall, gaps where the rise is low. I move away to find a good place to cross, back the horse up, then urge him forward to jump.
* * *
—
I feel it happen, the jerk as his hoof clips an edge of the wall, and my body flows over his head toward the ground.
* * *
—
I open my eyes. You’re somewhere nearby, on the beach. You’re with me and we’re lying in the sun. No one is there. I know this somehow. No one’s looking for us. No one knows we are gone. You’re lying beside me, eyes closed, and the sun has shaped your face. You’re a man in relief—alien, divine—pulled out of sand, dune grass, light. Your eyes open then, your face turning just enough so you’re looking at me, and it is only you again. Young. The way I remember. Your eyes with a kind of forever in them I’d only glimpse from time to time.
“Swim?” you say.
The image snaps. Like the vanishing zip on a television screen before it goes dark.
* * *
—
Bunny’s face. No, not Bunny. Another woman. Bunny’s friend Barbara, leaning over, and a man as well, concerned faces. They tell me I’ve been out for over fifteen minutes. They have phoned Bunny and she is on her way. Their voices waver like static. I remember the last bad fall I took. That one, too, was this time of year. November.
* * *
—
At Loudoun Hospital Center, Bunny’s doctor finds a lump at the top of my thigh.
“You haven’t been feeling well?” he says.
“Always cold. Tired. I was unwell earlier this year, in France. I haven’t seemed to shake it since.”
“Fever?”
“Sometimes at night. Not every night, but some nights.”
He nods. “You’ve been fighting an infection,” he explains. He prescribes a heavy antibiotic. After he leaves the room and I’m slipping off the examining table, finding my clothes, I feel a wave of relief. I’d been afraid it was something worse.
* * *
—
So my spirits are light over the holidays. I spend Thanksgiving with the children, celebrating their birthdays, each in turn as always. Colder weather begins to descend—days of biting wind, a dusting of snow. Holiday lights swathe the avenues, carolers gather in the park, Christmas displays in store windows, the smell of roasted chestnuts, pine. I take my granddaughters to The Nutcracker. I put up a tree in the apartment, draped with old-fashioned ornaments. Their mirrored surfaces catch splintered fragments off the fire.
* * *
—
Marta helps me load the little BMW with presents, my weekend bag, and extra rolls of wrapping paper, ribbon, bows. As I drive out to New Jersey, where I’ll spend Christmas with Caroline’s family, John, and Maurice, I listen to the cassette of Carly’s duet with Sinatra. Then I pop that tape out and pop in another. It’s Carly’s voice I want to fill the car—that big, bold poet voice, carving hunger out of nothing. I hum along, tapping the steering wheel, even as I hit the tunnel and the line of cars ahead slows. A few years ago, I was passing through this same tunnel in my car. I’d let my friend William drive. We got caught behind a tractor trailer. William was so tentative, stuck behind that truck. He’d edge out, then edge back in, refusing to cross the solid double line to pass, although there was no oncoming traffic. “You’re not going to let us spend the next half hour like this, are you?” I asked as he edged out again. “Oh, for God’s sake, William. Just gun it.”
* * *
…
In the Caribbean after Christmas, I’m with Maurice when I’m struck by an agonizing pain in my back and groin, a swelling in my neck that doesn’t abate.
We come home to New York early.
* * *
—
The diseased cells are anaplastic—what the doctors call “primitive,” which sounds like it might be early and a good thing but which I learn is neither. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t know this until now. I didn’t have that word—cancer—with me over Christmas. I didn’t have that word traveling with Carly’s voice and all those gifts piled into the car as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel toward my children.
It strikes me as extraordinary—the way I am floating up there in a corner of the ceiling in the doctor’s office, the way one word can change the shape of everything.
