Jackie, page 7
“Why that?” he says.
Because Homer’s Troy is the kind of dream that alters us, I could say. That moves and inspires us. Because it’s a vast and tragic myth we can’t quite cage—a story of love, rage, devastating loss, which, at its most intimate, is also a form of desire.
The answer I give is far simpler.
“It’s a story I love,” I say.
* * *
…
That night after dinner, we borrow Morton Downey’s car to drive to a party in Osterville. A 1950 Plymouth, two-door, light blue.
I recognize the landmarks for a while, the little village, the main street leading through it. We turn onto another road, then another, and it’s different. Still the same landscape—shingled houses, beach plum, scrub oak—but at the same time, a place I haven’t been.
Earlier that afternoon, we all went swimming. I walked up to the house before the others, changed my clothes, towel-dried my hair, and came downstairs.
“Good swim?” Joe said, sitting down with me in one of the porch chairs.
“I love to swim.”
“How far did you go?”
“The second buoy and back.”
“You like open ocean.”
“Any ocean.”
He smiled. Jack and the others were coming up from the shore. I could see them—a laughing, galloping brood.
“And you also like when people underestimate you, don’t you, Jackie?”
“Not at all, Mr. Kennedy. Why on earth would you say a thing like that?”
* * *
—
“You want some music?” Jack asks now. He fiddles with the car radio.
“That song, please,” I say. “The one you just flipped by, about angels dining at the Ritz.” I tuck my legs underneath me. I like the feeling of being away from the house and the chaos, alone with him, heading somewhere, anywhere.
“I think I missed the turn,” he says. A car passes, going the opposite way. Headlamps sweep our car, his face. He is beautiful. Not a word a woman would usually use to describe a man. And yet.
When I lived in Paris for that one year, there were late-spring evenings when the light just lasted. I’d leave the Sorbonne and walk the narrow streets, looking into windows to catch fragments of lives playing out there. I’d walk the Seine, the quays and bridges, toward midnight as the sun kept setting in that strange extended day, and I had the sense that if I could just keep walking, I’d outwalk the light, disappear. I want the same thing now, only with him. To just keep driving, with no ending point or destination. Just to stay with him, moving, in this night car.
“Quiet again,” he says. That little smile, without looking at me. Another turn in the road. “Here we are.”
* * *
—
The clouds are bone-gold shapes passing near the moon. They seem to rush, gauzy, weirdly lit. We head toward the open tent set by the clubhouse; music drifts out, the clink of glasses, laughter. Lanterns are strung along the roof of the tent and woven up the halyards of the boats moored offshore. Paper-bag luminaria mark a path from the tent to the clubhouse stairs.
He drops my hand as a man steps out of the crowd toward us. His cousin Joey.
“Where’ve you been, Jack?”
We are swept into the tent, then apart, knots of people milling through the space. I recognize some from Virginia and New York. Jack moves away, shaking hands, working the crowd. Here is the younger Hatton, pushing his way through to see me, to say hello. And Lila, whom I know from the horse shows, has my arm and is turning me toward a pretty brunette with a pixie cut, who apparently knows Lee and is asking how Lee is and is it true she’s working for Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar?
“Right now she’s in Rome,” I say, “with her new English beau, Michael Canfield.”
“How serious is it?”
“Well, nothing’s really serious until it is.”
Jack is a short distance away, with a fellow in a gray sports coat. Jack is talking to him but looking at me, the way he does, the way I love, with that little fixed look. His eyes pass over my body, slow, more intentional. I feel my flesh burn.
“Jackie—” Lila’s saying.
A sudden boom as the sky breaks apart, fireworks; an “Oooohhh” erupts from the crowd; we move in a wave toward the dark at the edge of the tent as raw chains of color and light trail down. Rafts of aftersmoke.
He finds me, his mouth near my cheek. “Are you okay?” he says.
“Yes.” I want him near me. I want this.
A Roman candle shoots up, a rising hiss on the ascent. I feel the length of his arm against mine, the touch warm, light.
By the time the fireworks end, a low fog has rolled in, but the high night sky, still, is bright as water. The band starts up, the crowd regathers. A few cars pull away, headlamps stripe the lawn. Jack catches my eye, nods his head to go. We walk in silence toward the car. He takes my hand. The stars are wayward, spinning out there above the fog. I feel like we’re on the edge of that night.
In the car, his hand moves over the shift onto my thigh. In the light off the dash, I see him smile; I can feel what it does to me—that smile, his touch—driving fast down that blue night road. We are less than a mile from the house when he pulls off into the grass and kills the lights.
“Come here,” he says. He holds my face in his hands as he kisses me, his mouth on mine, that electric touch. I feel my skin rise, his fingers drawing the edge of my blouse open.
August 1952
He doesn’t call that week, or the week after. Finally, in August, he calls.
“How are you, Jackie?” he says.
“Just so busy,” I lie. “You?”
“Nonstop. The campaign. Say, you haven’t had a chance to look at that French book, have you?”
“I started it.”
“Well, let me know.”
“What exactly do you want translated?”
“I’d love a sense of his take on Indochina.”
“Sure.” I heard he was in town last week. Some kind of dinner. I don’t mention it. The silence on the line feels awkward.
“I’ll give you a call when I’m back in D.C.,” he says. “It’ll be tough, though, from now until the election. We need to hit every town up here.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll call you soon.”
He uses it a lot, I’ve noticed. That word. Soon.
* * *
—
I wait, then hate that I’m waiting. I have dates and parties, weekend trips to Newport. During the week, I carry my camera and notebook through the stifling heat up to the Hill to pick off anyone who hasn’t skipped town for August. I have dinner one night in Georgetown with my stepbrother Yusha, who remarks, “You seem a little out of sorts, Jackie.”
I love Yusha. He is genuine, kind. The only son of my stepfather Hughdie’s first marriage to a Russian noblewoman. Of all the steps and half-steps, as Lee and I call them, Yusha’s my favorite.
“Sometimes I just think I made a mistake,” I say. “Not taking the job at Vogue.”
“You like working at the paper. You’ve said that. Having your own column.”
“But I lived in France for only that one year. I was just a student. Sometimes I think I made a mistake not going back.”
“Then go back,” Yusha says. “Just because you made one choice doesn’t mean you can’t make another.”
* * *
—
I hurl myself into work. The season turns, the start of fall. The city begins to hum. Work at the paper picks up. As the days cool, I hear things about Jack Kennedy. He won the Massachusetts primary. No challenge, really, when you basically run unopposed. I dump his book on Indochina into a drawer. I cancel him out of my thoughts. Two days later, he calls, saying he’ll be in town the weekend after next.
“You want to get lunch?” he says.
“I’m afraid we’re too busy.”
“We?”
“The paper.”
“Oh. What about Sunday?”
“I am going in to work that day.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“Leave a little early. Say one o’clock, Martin’s?”
“One-thirty.”
“Great,” he says. “See you then.”
I hang up, annoyed I’ve said yes, then annoyed I would care either way. It’s only lunch.
I arrive ten minutes late.
“I thought you might have stood me up,” he says, as I slide into the booth, across from him.
I’m happy to see him, excited, and I keep trying to talk myself out of what I feel. I skim the menu, sip my drink, drag my french fries through the ketchup, and I try to push off the butterfly giddiness—that flush of desire I always seem to feel when he’s across the table from me. Even when he’s just talking about the campaign or politics, no matter how dry the topic is, he seems to make everything interesting. Foolish, Jackie, stop being so foolish, this is nothing more than a schoolgirl crush on the older, more popular boy. Jack Kennedy’s not looking to settle down. He’s not that kind of man. Though I’m not really looking for that either. When I graduated from high school, I wrote in the yearbook, under Ambition in Life: Not to be a housewife.
He reaches for the check the waitress brings.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I remembered my wallet this time.” He looks almost sheepish for a moment, that lonely, sunlit smile. “I’m glad you came.”
After lunch, we walk the towpath along the canal and across the little bridge. Children lean against the rail, two boys throwing sticks. We sit down on a bench. It’s cool in the shade. He asks about my family. I ask about his. He tells me he read my column last week.
“I love my job,” I say.
“Do you think you’ll stay with it?”
“I like how it fuels my mind. Every day is a new puzzle I get to build out, then solve.”
He laughs and starts to ask something else. Then doesn’t. We talk about books. Books, I’ve come to see, are safe common ground: other people’s stories, words, lives.
“Did you read the new Hemingway?” I ask.
“About the Cuban fisherman. Not yet. On my list for November fifth.”
“You must have quite a November fifth list.”
“How about we go see the movie Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he says.
“I didn’t like it.”
“You saw it without me?”
It surprises me he’d put it that way.
“They completely changed the ending,” I say. “It was awful. They made it happy, which obscured the whole point of the story. In the film he’s a hero, handsome but dull. In the story, he’s so much more interesting—you can’t tell what he really wants. You can’t tell if he loves her.”
“That makes him sound weak.”
“No, but he’s conflicted. That’s what makes the story good. He’s conflicted about what he’s done with his life and if there’s meaning. That’s why he lashes out at her.”
“He’s dying,” Jack says.
“Which doesn’t give him the right to be cruel.”
“He knows he can’t keep her, so he doesn’t try. That wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“You think that’s for him to decide?”
“Who cares,” he says sharply, then, “It doesn’t matter, Jackie. Christ, it’s just a story.”
I’m angry. It hits in a wave. Tired of him wanting only as much as he wants when he wants it. I keep falling for him, believing he’ll let me in, then out of nowhere he’ll shut down, take off.
“Funny you should put it that way, Jack, saying it doesn’t matter. I was thinking the other day about those words you told me your father lives by, how it doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.”
I don’t look up. The air has tightened. I stare at the ground ahead of us. Two men walk by. Two pairs of trousers and brown shoes. “I’ve decided I disagree,” I say. “I like your father very much, but when you’re his age, Jack, I don’t think you’ll be looking back wishing you’d been a little more of what other people thought you ought to be.”
His hand closes on my wrist, so fast it startles me. The grip isn’t tight. By contrast, it’s loose in a way that feels like a threat. Then he lets go and looks away. A stony pressure in the silence. I’ve pushed too far, and I feel sad but at the same time a sense of closure. Things between us were always too close to the edge. Now it’s done. I won’t have to wait anymore for the phone to ring.
The noises nearby seem suddenly loud. Two girls skipping down the path, a mother scolding her child, those boys still throwing sticks into the rage of water flowing under the bridge. I hate how raw it feels to me—that night in the car on the way back to the house on the Fourth of July, his smile in the light off the dash as he slowed to pull off the road, his mouth on mine. I could tell him now how I’ve wanted to be back in that car, that moment, that simple and intimate passion. I want the way he looked at me that night as he pulled the car to the side of the road and drew me toward him, the way he touched me. I want it all, all over again, that night, that hour, that sense of my body under his.
I could tell him this. I could soften now, apologize.
I push the thought off. I look at my watch without seeing it and stand.
Jack
It picks at him for days after. That stupid exchange about Hemingway. That argument over nothing that suddenly escalated into something. He should have kept things light.
* * *
—
She’s not like other women. She’s read just about everything and remarked once, like she was commenting on the weather, how a story told the right way could blow time apart.
She’ll come out with things like that, things he’ll find himself mulling over weeks later in ways that make him want to see her again. At the same time, there’s something too smart, almost maddening about her, and in that conversation on the bench, he felt her push, and he fell right into it, let his cool break down, grabbing her wrist like that. Like some pawn in a dime-store romance who’d just been played.
* * *
—
One afternoon when he’s out with Lem Billings, digging around in his jacket pocket for a spare dollar, he finds the photo strip from Woolworths.
“You want to see what she looks like, Lem?”
“Who?”
“Jackie Bouvier. She had this thing about her.”
“Past tense,” Lem says, studying the strip. “Not your type, pal.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Not my type at all.”
* * *
—
She’s skinny. Angular. Narrow hips. Breasts too small. A little bowlegged. Large feet. Nicotine-stained fingers, bitten nails, wide-spaced eyes. She told him once it took three weeks to get a pair of glasses made with a wide enough bridge to fit, but when her eyes get lit over some idea, there’s a feral bright core of her he can feel.
* * *
—
You only think you want her because she’s not after you, he tells himself. She’s not calling or pestering. She’s different. She smacks of wealth but doesn’t have it. Catholic, but with all the trappings of WASP. Her sense of humor is cool and dry. Not just smart, she’s quick. She gets his jokes and will come back with some stealth reply, enough to show she got what everyone else just missed. She claims politics bore her (“maybe I’m allergic, Jack, like you are to horses”). She just says a thing like that and leaves the comment there. Whether he answers or not, she pretends not to care. She loves to spar, then acts like she doesn’t. There’s an aloof dimension of her. Like a cat on a leash.
* * *
—
Months ago, at a party, he watched her put on her gloves. An evening back in May. She asked him to the Dancing Class. Her date had fallen through. “I’m sure you’re not free,” she’d said, and maybe because she said it like that, he canceled something else and went. She and her sister hosted a small party beforehand at Merrywood.
“An Auchincloss tradition,” she said, handing him a daiquiri. “Boozy cocktails by a pinewood fire. What’s the secret, Yusha?”
“Three kinds of rum,” her stepbrother said.
“That’s right. Dark Bacardi, light Bacardi, and the last?”
“Mount Gay. Plus lemon juice, lime, sugar, and a splash of orange—after the shake.”
“Look how it drenches the ice, Jack, like a sunset.”
That evening, before they left for the dance, she drew him away from the others to a table by the window.
“Are you looking forward to tonight?” she asked.
“I don’t love formal dances.”
“But the dowagers, Jack! They’ll be perched like owls on the big mauve sofa at the top of the stairs, looking down on us. Dowagers like Olympian gods.”
“I’m game to skip,” he said. “We can tell the others we’ll meet them there and go tear around in your car.”
She glanced at him then, a quick smile.
“You really don’t like dances, Jack, do you?”
“Sort of a waste of time.”
“They don’t have to be.” She picked up her gloves. There was green tint on her fingernails.
“Did you pick that green for me?”
“No. I had a run-in with developing fluid in the darkroom.”
“How much does Frank Waldrop pay you?”
For a moment she looked uncertain. “Forty-two dollars and fifty cents a week,” she said.
“You tell him I said you deserve a raise.”
