Jackie, page 5
Once, at a party in Newport, there was a boy I flirted with. He was brutally handsome and knew it. I sat next to him on a long sofa set between two potted ferns. He lit a cigarette for me. I listened and oohed and aahed after every stupendously brilliant and arrogant thing he said, and when he finally shut his mouth, I gave a little swooning sigh and went to stub my cigarette out, just brushing his hand with the lit end. He jumped, that boy, spilling his drink right down the face of his white shirt. I pretended it was a terrible accident.
A part of me now wants to tell Jack Kennedy this, to see how he’d react, what he’ll say, if he’ll frown or, more likely, get that little smile. I like that smile. More than I want to.
“So what do you do,” he asks, “when you’re not making up questions for the paper about Chaucer and Marilyn Monroe?”
“I make little drawings to go with my questions.”
“Cartoons?”
“Sometimes.”
“What have you got for the coming week?”
“Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s smarter than she is?”
“Never.”
I wish you wouldn’t smile at me like that, I want to say.
“Would you like to sit down?” he says.
Leather couches, drink rings and cigarette burns, a sizable hole on one arm patched with fabric tape. Bachelor couches. I set my drink on the low coffee table, move the ashtray closer, and rest my cigarette on the edge.
“I do like history,” Kennedy says. “I always have. Mostly British.”
“Not American?”
“I like reading about the Civil War.” He smiles then. “And the Federalist Papers.”
I laugh. “Oh, that’s good. Why?”
“They were an argument for the Constitution, written when the country was up for grabs.”
“Now, though, looking back, it doesn’t seem like things could have unfolded any other way.”
He looks at me. “That’s right,” he says. “So what else do you do for fun?”
“I ride.”
“Horses? I’m allergic.”
“Seriously?”
“Would you ask me to go riding if I weren’t? Do you like the ocean?”
“I love the ocean. And I love to dance.”
“I have a bad back.”
“Would you ask me to go dancing if you didn’t?”
He smiles. “Old football injuries are unforgiving.”
“I imagine the war didn’t improve things. It sounded dramatic—your boat rammed by a Japanese destroyer. You saved your men, were shipwrecked, then written up in The New Yorker.”
“John Hersey was kind in that piece.” He looks a little embarrassed, though. I’m curious why. “So when’s the big day?” he says.
“What day?”
“You’re getting married. The wedding?”
“We’ve talked about June.”
“That’s right around the corner.”
I glance at him. Something light and teasing in his voice.
When Johnny Husted proposed, I almost put him off. I explained I wasn’t going to leave my job. I love my work. The interviews I get to do with random people in the street. I walk up to strangers and ask if I can photograph them. I ask them questions about topics in the news. I ask for their views on politics, the arts, their marriages and children. I weave snippets of their answers into my Inquiring Camera Girl column. There’s life in that work I don’t want to give up.
Jack Kennedy is just looking at me, like he’s waiting for me to say something; the waiting sharpens the air. That look in his eyes throws me a bit. I don’t want to talk about my engagement, or Johnny, or how, after we left the Carlyle on the night he proposed, with the huge ring on my left hand, Johnny assured me that of course I could keep working, at least until we had children. I don’t want to talk about how that night the snow was falling on Madison Avenue, thick flakes whisked by the gusts, and Johnny kept a tight comforting grip on my arm like he was tucking me right into place. Johnny’s a good man, all the right clubs, a terrific dancer; he wants to make me happy. I’m making a good choice, I keep reminding myself, a sensible choice that will be at once an anchor and freedom. “He is kind and safe and good, like Hughdie is to Mother,” I told Lee. Lee laughed, “Johnny is far better-looking than Hughdie.” A part of me wants to joke with Jack Kennedy about this. I have a feeling he’d laugh, and I like to make him laugh, but he has a more serious look on his face now, like he might be about to ask something more important, and the silence between us feels steep and unfinished.
Then John White is there, with Bill Walton and John’s sister Patsy. I feel my face flush like they’ve caught us at something, when of course there is nothing, but I shift away from Kennedy toward the other end of the couch. Bill Walton sits down in the space between us.
“How are you, Billy Boy?” Kennedy says. They’re friends. I like Bill Walton, very much. I met him at a dinner, where we learned we both knew Gore Vidal, my stepfather Hughdie’s stepson from an earlier marriage. “We joke about all those steps,” I told Bill Walton once. Originally from the Midwest, Bill is a journalist and an artist. Stunningly smart, kind, with a broad square-cut face, he’s the sort of person I trust, though I don’t know him well. Several weeks ago, at another party, we talked about how someday we’d go barhopping together in Provincetown.
“Say, Bill,” Jack says now, “is the rumor of a new Hemingway book true?”
Gore has told me stories of Bill Walton and Hemingway, how they met during the war through photographer Robert Capa. Bill was working as a war correspondent for Time, training to parachute into Normandy. Hemingway tagged along. They were at the Battle of Hürtgen in 1944. Hemingway saved Walton’s life, pushing him out of a truck they were driving moments before it was strafed. When France was liberated, they drank at the Ritz Bar in Paris. Walton watched Hemingway’s marriage unravel, right down to the night the writer showed up at his wife’s hotel room, naked, drunk, a bucket on his head, banging on her door with a mop. It seemed like such a big life, drawn in bold broad strokes and furious colors across a huge canvas. My father had a dimension of that in him, and a knack for the reckless.
The talk has shifted to the conflict in Indochina. I’ve dropped the thread. I watch Jack Kennedy. He listens, mostly. He has a curious way of asking questions but rarely offering his own view. His fingers move, touching his collar, pockets, hair, almost a nervous tic. The conversation swings back to lighter things; Bill Walton jokes that he quit his job at The New Republic for Lent to take up abstract expressionism because it seemed to be the language that made sense in a postwar world.
He has a kind of careless, distant radiance. That’s how I’ll describe Jack Kennedy to Lee.
He asks his questions, drawing stories and opinions out of everyone else until the air ripples and burns, and he just sits there, long legs stretched out, that boyish rugged awkwardness that seems like an act but maybe isn’t.
He is alone, the way I am alone.
The thought startles me.
“So what are your plans as senator?” John White’s sister is asking Jack now.
“I have to win first.”
“He’ll win,” John White says. “People want some new fire to believe in.”
“Some say the world will end in fire,” Kennedy says. The others laugh politely.
“Some say in ice,” I say. Robert Frost.
He looks at me, that smile again. “It’s a good poem, isn’t it. Jackie.” A slight pause before he says my name, which sends a shiver through me and, for a moment, the air drops out of the room.
* * *
—
Later that evening, as I fish around in my bag for matches, John White comes up to me and holds his lighter out.
“You’re extraordinary,” he says, snapping the lighter closed, “but that game you’re playing with Jack Kennedy is a game even you can’t win.”
“No game there I want,” I say.
“Ah, Jackie, that’s playing too well.”
I exhale and glance toward the sofa, where Patsy and Bill Walton are still sitting, talking with Jack. He nods, listening, but his eyes are on me. When he sees me looking over, he smiles—that same look he gave me when I first came in, as if this is all some glorious joke we’ve colluded on.
* * *
—
Nearly midnight when I cross back over the Chain Bridge to my mother’s house, heading slowly up the drive, the crunch of gravel under the tires, the house rising from the trees. I make scrambled eggs in the kitchen, eat them at the counter, and leave the pan to soak. I don’t feel tired, but I climb the stairs to bed. On the landing, I nearly trip over the moonlight. Delirious, it rakes through the window and over the mute ground outside, the fields and hills, wavering pale bars of it falling across the sill to the floor, like the night has been ransacked, everything untethered, blown around.
* * *
…
“I’d love to talk,” I say when John White swings by my desk at the paper. “But it will have to be another time. I’m late.”
“Aw, come on,” he says. “Let’s see what questions you’re taking out into the streets today.”
“My notebook’s already in my bag,” I say, but he picks up an earlier draft on my desk and reads the first few questions aloud: “Do you consider yourself normal? When did you discover that women are not the weaker sex? Are wives a luxury or a necessity?”
He skims silently, a smile as he nears the end.
“Do a candidate’s looks influence your vote?” he reads slowly. “And last but not at all least: The Irish author Sean O’Faolain claims that the Irish are deficient in the art of love. Do you agree?”
He sets the paper down.
“I notice a shift,” he says.
I just look at him.
White shakes his head. “He dislikes being alone, Jackie. He surrounds himself with friends and family. He doesn’t like to be around any one person for more than a few hours. Women are prey, but he does respect them in a certain way, if they’re a certain type. It’s double-edged. He’s coming by my place again next Thursday.”
“I have to leave now,” I say. “I have to be at the Hill by eleven.”
“Are you free Thursday?”
“No.”
“He’s understated, but don’t let that fool you. And I told you once, he’s ruthless when there’s something he wants.”
I point to the middle button on his tweed jacket. “That button’s hanging by a thread, John. Pop it off before you lose it.” I drop my pencils into the drawer, close it, then open it again and take out two.
“You like him,” he says.
“I’m engaged, John.”
“To a good catch who’s too dull for a girl like you.”
“That’s an awful thing to say.”
“You like Jack Kennedy.”
“I appreciate that his mind never seems to let up.”
“Like yours.”
“We’re nothing alike, John. If I was drawing a man like that, I’d draw a tiny body and an enormous head. I have to go.”
“What about Thursday?”
“I am very busy Thursday.”
“You are lying, Jackie Bouvier.”
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“Shame on him who evil thinks.”
I almost walk out the door without my camera. I smile at John White as I walk back to my desk, pick it up, then leave.
A long wolf whistle as I walk out of the building. Two boys from the fourth floor. The redheaded one and the one with the scrubbed prep school face. Heading up the stairwell, they lounge around the banister, watching me.
* * *
—
I don’t go to John White’s that Thursday. Johnny Husted is coming down from New York, a quick trip to D.C. We have dinner together. The next morning I drive him to the airport. A blinding rain. The windshield wipers sweep the world left to right to left, and as we drive, I tell him I think we should postpone the wedding. He asks if “postpone” is what I really mean. We reach the airport; I leave the car running. I get out to see him off. He pulls his collar up against the rain, sets his hat. “I’m sorry, Johnny,” I say, slipping his mother’s ring off my finger. I drop it into his pocket. “I’m so sorry.”
* * *
—
“He wasn’t good enough for you,” my mother says when I tell her.
“Or rich enough for you?”
“He just wasn’t enough.” She looks at me over the rim of her teacup, the curved edge of china against her face. “This isn’t about that skirt-chaser, is it?”
* * *
—
There’s a photograph of my parents that someone took when they were still married. Black Jack leans against a fence, rakishly gorgeous as he was back then, in a summer-weight suit. He’s holding hands with a woman who sits on the fence beside him, while my mother sits near them facing away—smartly dressed in her riding gear, a stoic turn in her face, pretending not to know what she knew.
* * *
—
“In a world of money and power, Jackie,” my stepbrother Gore said once, “sex is something you do, like tennis.”
We’d been talking about how badly, and publicly, our parents and stepparents behaved. I realized Gore was inviting me to see how wit might take the edge off pain.
“That may be true, Gore,” I answered. “But it’s quite a bit nicer for everyone if each point of the match isn’t documented in The New York Times.”
Spring 1952
Another May. Another dinner party at the Bartletts’. Peonies bursting from the centerpiece, conversations, laughter. Another warm spring evening spilling through the door propped open to the terrace.
Somehow, though, everything is different. I can feel it. The kaleidoscope has shifted a degree. The design is entirely new.
We’re all at the dinner table. Charley Bartlett is asking for Jack’s opinion on American involvement in Indochina, and I feel a rush of warmth as I listen to Jack talk in his easygoing way about the complexity of the conflict—how it’s the French who best understand the politics of that region they occupied for so long. The United States, he contends, can learn by studying the challenges the French have faced. I just listen; I don’t have to pretend, he’s too interesting not to listen to—those unexpected turns of mind. And somehow simply listening isn’t simple at all but throws the whole room off-kilter, the table and candlesticks, the faceless figures of the other guests, the bread plates and the soup bowls—the room is soaked in that casual magic. Light kicks the rim of a wineglass.
He glances up, a little look that, in that moment, is just for me.
You are a piece of eternity, I think. He leans across the asparagus then and asks if he can take me out next week, dancing at the Blue Room in the Shoreham Hotel.
Desire shreds time. Stuns it. A blink later, dinner is done, chairs pushed back, shaking hands and the after-every-dinner-party routine. A lovely evening. Yes, let’s do it again soon. Where are you spending the summer? Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me. A Tommy Dorsey record plays in the background and Martha Bartlett is squeezing my arm, everyone chatting and laughing and moving. I remember then what John White said about Jack Kennedy: a game even you can’t win. I feel a little scowl on my face. I bite my lip to squelch it, then notice Jack watching me across a small free space, three or four others between us, two talking as much to him as to each other, but his eyes are on me, that puzzled look I’ve seen before when he’s met some question he can’t immediately solve. Then the moment is cut, the abstracted look gone, and he smiles—a kind of shy and awkward smile; light breaks across his face like a bolt of sunshine that knocks the room down, and there is no sound then, no music, no voices, no laughter, nothing else, no one else. Even the room is gone and there is only him, with me, in a space that belongs to us alone, that smile like some electric bit of loneliness he thinks I’ll understand. And I do.
* * *
…
For most of that spring, it seems, he’s up in Massachusetts campaigning for the Senate. He’ll call out of the blue, coins tinkling through a pay phone, to tell me he’s coming back into town. He’ll invite me to a party or the movies—once a John Wayne Western (his choice), then an art film (mine). He is bored ten minutes in. He has to get up and walk around, he says, stretch his legs. In late May, I invite him last minute to a dance, and I’m surprised when he says yes. In June, we go to the new Gary Cooper movie, High Noon, with his brother Bobby and Bobby’s wife, Ethel. They met skiing in Mont Tremblant. Then Ethel wrote her college thesis on Jack’s book Why England Slept, which cemented her into the family.
After the movie, Jack invites me to Martin’s for lunch. From his jacket pocket he pulls out a book. John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door.
“I brought it for you,” he says.
A torn piece of paper marks a passage about a young soldier killed on the Somme. He would destroy some piece of honest sentiment with a jest, and he had no respect for the sacred places of dull men. I flip a few pages. Another underline. He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.
