Jackie, page 40
* * *
…
I go on mapping each season—my life in New York, the interludes in Greece—weaving a sense of order for myself and John and Caroline. There are birthday parties and boarding schools. I work with children at a shelter in Spanish Harlem and volunteer with wounded veterans. In their eyes I see the familiar dismantling of the ordinary. Some have endured things so much more severe than what I witnessed.
One evening in late spring, in the kitchen of my apartment in New York, as I’m taking down a glass from the shelf, something trips inside me, and I remember a warm night on one long weekend, as Jack and I walked home from his parents’ house in Hyannis Port. He took me by the waist and twirled me slowly around. He spun me out, away from him, then drew me back; his lips brushed my neck, and he kept on walking. I wanted to stop, to stand with him in the middle of that soft evening, to stave off the night and make everything stand still, but Jack never stopped, and so we kept walking, though he held my hand a moment longer than I’d expected he would.
I’ve forgotten to breathe, standing in the kitchen of my apartment, the cool glass in my hand, my mind light. How does it happen? Those slight rogue details one forgets that lie stored in some quiet dark of the underself and burst forth like angels—magnificent, bold—remembered only years later, radiant only then.
I’m holding the glass and then not. It slips from my hand and hits the floor. I expect it to shatter. It just rolls away.
* * *
…
The arguments escalate. Ari’s business dealings have begun to slip. The junta has not been the ally he’d hoped for. His influence has faltered. His archrival, Stavros Niarchos, has plans to marry Ari’s ex-wife, Tina. Their daughter, Christina, elopes to Las Vegas with a California real estate dealer.
He turns his rage on me because I am the one who is there. Slight things set him off. He complains I am cold, too quiet, too fey. I smoke too much, read too much, spend too much. I baby my children. I’m always in New York. I am not a dutiful-Penelope wife, patiently waiting at home.
Once, in a restaurant, when I point out that he’s mixed up the capitals of two African nations, his rage erupts. He calls me a cunt. The heads of the diners at the surrounding tables swivel toward us, the room stunned. I look down at my hands in my lap. I say nothing else for the rest of the evening. But I find slight ways to rebel. He hates a mess, so I find excuses to make one. I’ll leave pools of dripping water in the wrong spot on the deck of the Christina after jumping off and climbing back on board. I give the children haircuts in the bathroom; Ari explodes when he finds little hairs in the drain. He yells at me. I tune him out—a cool smile, a docile “Yes, Ari,” which infuriates him.
* * *
—
I know the night it ends.
We are at the house in Athens. A rainy evening. His friends Miltos and Yiannis have come for dinner. After we eat, I sit at one end of the sofa, reading, while the men talk. It feels awkward. As I slip a torn piece of paper into my book to mark my place, I notice the conversation has lulled. They seem to have come to a stopping place. I look up then and ask Yiannis what he thinks: Did Socrates really exist, or was he just an invention of Plato, a kind of paragon stand-in for the ideal Athenian philosopher?
There’s a pause as Yiannis considers the question. He opens his mouth to answer, but Ari stands up and takes an odd, deliberate step into the space between us. He turns on me. “What is the matter with you? Why do you have to ask about stupid things? Have you never noticed the statue of a man with a mustache in the center of Athens? Are you too stupid to recognize that is a statue of Socrates?”
I don’t think or hear or see or feel anything—only the faint stain of leftover rage in the air.
* * *
—
Even in the bigger houses, the walls were thin enough that Lee and I could hear our parents fight. Their voices broke like plates against the walls. I’d hear my sister crying. I’d go into her room, crawl into her bed, and hold her, her silky face against my chest, hands woven through my hair. We’d float that way together, an island of just the two of us. Lee would ask me to turn on the light, and I’d have to explain that, no, I could not do that, a light would bring them in, their whirling rage in tow. “It’s much nicer in the dark, Pekes,” I’d say instead.
* * *
—
I stand up from the sofa, Ari’s mouth still moving, loud words directed toward me coming out, which mean nothing, are nothing, because he is cruel. For the first time in so long, it seems, I have no fear. Beyond him, there is rain on the roof, light notes of beautiful rain. Rain for luck, Artemis told me once, but luck is worthless against the choices that we make. Still, that beautiful rain. That’s what I listen for—that sense of the world that remains. Ari takes another step toward me, the great maw of his mouth open. I hold my book tight against my body and thread my way between the chairs where the other men sit, unhappily looking on. I go upstairs, find my raincoat, and walk outside to where the floodlights sever the trees. As I cross the lawn, the wind hits me. Rain strikes my face, and the world is dark, the salt smell of the sea driven in on the rain, the smell of jasmine, the fainter smell of orange trees. The night on my skin is like fire. After a quarter of an hour, Ari sends Miltos out to find me. I don’t come right away, and by the time I do, it is over. The guests are still there, Ari still fuming. I come back into the hallway, passing by a vase of flowers on the side table. I walk into the room where the men still sit, an uncomfortable silence as I enter that I don’t try to fill. I sit down on the sofa next to Yiannis. My clothes are damp, and I watch the stain of the wet spread like a faint dark continent away from me. I see Ari notice it. “You’re making a mess,” he says with contempt. I just look back at him without saying a word, waiting for the explosion. It doesn’t come, and I understand that I have won. I am not Circe and he is not Odysseus. It was never that magnificent or noble. We are a man and a woman in a marriage that has failed.
* * *
…
Months later, another terrible call.
The plane was an old Piaggio. Alexander, Ari’s only son, told his father the plane was a death trap. They arranged for it to be sold in Miami. Alexander took it up on a test ride with the young pilot he’d hired to fly it across the Atlantic. They left the runway. Moments later, the controls failed, and they crashed.
I am in New York when the news comes. I fly to Athens. Alexander is in a coma, the right side of his face destroyed, his skull crushed.
In the weeks after, Ari won’t let me out of his sight. I hold him for hours when he cries. Decimated, he refuses to have his son buried; he refuses to accept that the death was an accident. He’s convinced it was the junta or the CIA. He has enemies, and their names twitch like rats in his brain.
He does not sleep. He paces the deck of the Christina, murmuring to himself. I find bottles of ouzo knocked over, rolling under a chair. He wants to deep-freeze his son’s body in a cryonic state until science has advanced enough that his shattered head can be restored. It’s Yiannis, always the good friend, who gently tells him that a father has no right to impede the journey of a child’s soul. So the body is flown to Skorpios, and Ari allows his son to be laid to rest in the white marble vault. He sets a makeshift bed beside the grave. When anyone talks to him about God or heaven, he answers: “My son is dead, I’ll never see him, I don’t believe in anything you say.”
One morning, he tells me to bring Artemis to the chapel for lunch. We arrive to a table set with four places, pressed napkins, silver, wineglasses, a linen tablecloth. Ari is already there, in one of the chairs turned toward the vault. He speaks in Greek to the fourth chair set beside it, raises the glass in his hand. The ouzo spills as his hand trembles, and he toasts his dead son.
* * *
—
By spring, his moods grow darker. Artemis tells me that since Alexander’s death, there is gossip that I—“the American Woman”—am the reason his son was killed. Before I came, people say, the Onassis family was strong. Now Alexander is dead. Olympic Airways is failing. Ari’s business deals have begun to sour. The black widow, they call me. The curse.
Artemis tells me that at first when Ari heard such things, he dismissed them as rubbish.
“At first?” I ask.
* * *
—
We spend Easter that year on the Christina in the Bahamas. The islands rise like sleight-of-hand coins as we cruise. The children are with us, a few friends, and Stas and Lee. Also on board is Lee’s young lover, photographer Peter Beard. Another headlong affair my sister is in right under Stas’s nose. It won’t last. Lee is too sulky, then contrite. She needs too much, and Peter is too strong to put up with it for long. He will love her until one day he wakes up and doesn’t.
Four hundred meters off the shore of Harbor Island, we anchor. The water is shallow. We can’t get closer in. I tell Ari that Lee and I want to go ashore.
“You don’t need to go shopping.”
“We want to explore the town.”
“We’re not going ashore.”
“Come on, Ari.”
“We need a good lunch.”
“So you can tell a string of nasty jokes? No one wants that kind of lunch.”
I knew it would set him off. He hates having anyone think he’s being run by a wife. I see the fury brewing in his eyes, the anger of a cornered man who wants more control of life than life will give to him again.
“You’re not going ashore,” he says. He turns to the others. “Lunch—who will join me?”
My clothes are noiseless as they strike the deck—the linen shirt, tank top, shorts, and hat. They fall in a pile, and I am over the side, swimming away toward land.
* * *
…
In the fall of 1974, I buy a two-story converted barn on ten acres in New Jersey. Ari comes to see me in New York. A few days later, he falls ill with the flu. His vision doubles. His speech begins to slur. He is hospitalized, diagnosed with progressive myasthenia gravis and a compromised heart.
Stress, alcohol, fatigue, the doctors explain. I sit beside him and listen. The cortisol they’ve injected makes his face swell. His eyelids droop. They prop them up with plaster.
He leans on me heavily as we leave the hospital, his eyes shielded by dark glasses.
“I’ve lost my touch,” he says sadly that night as I fix him a plate of bland food.
“You need to rest,” I say, “take better care of yourself. You’ll come back from this.”
“There are some voyages, Mummy, a man does not return from.”
My hand pauses, pouring a glass of water for him. “Don’t call me that again.”
* * *
—
I don’t return with him when he flies back to Athens. He falls ill again. I go to him then. I help Artemis and his daughter move him to Paris, where his doctors are. He refuses to go to the hospital, insisting he is fine, he will be fine. He’ll stay in his apartment, he says. His doctors will come to him. He’ll take whatever pills or infusion they force his way. He’ll rally.
* * *
—
I’m in New York, getting ready for a party to celebrate the premiere of an NBC documentary Caroline helped produce. She’s only seventeen. It’s late morning when the phone rings.
“Just Christina was there,” Artemis tells me. When Christina knew her father’s fever was rising, she never left his side. She told his doctors not to call anyone else. She wanted his last hours to be solely hers. An hour after he was gone, she tried to slash her wrists.
I set the phone back into the cradle and walk into the guest room, where my friend Karen has spent the night.
“Ari’s dead,” I say. “Please stay here and stand in for me as hostess. For Caroline. This is her night.”
As I pack, I try to close my mind against the unvoiced disappointment that my daughter—with her astute grace—will try to hide. She’ll understand my leaving. She will say it’s okay. This is what she’s learned to do. I consider staying the few extra hours, through the day, the party, the evening. But the world will watch. I know that. The world will be quick to judge the fact that hasn’t broken in the news yet, the one I can’t undo—that I wasn’t there when he died.
I close the suitcase, shift the lock.
* * *
—
Teddy flies with me through time zones. The Atlantic streams underneath as we gain on the night. I wear a black trench coat, a black leather skirt.
“They’re going to crucify me because I wasn’t there,” I say.
“They would’ve either way.”
He tilts his glass. Dark wine swirls. We fly in silence.
“I have to make a statement when we land,” I say.
“No, you don’t.”
“What will the press say if I say nothing?”
“We’ll explain you’re grieving.”
“I’m not.”
He looks at me sharply. He never particularly liked Ari. None of them did. But they want me to play my part.
“Ari rescued me at a time when my life was very dark,” I say. “I can say something like that and still be telling the truth. It’s almost a cliché, Teddy, but I’m forty-five, and the older I get, the more important it feels to live the truth.”
Teddy, like so many others, never understood how I could have let myself be pinioned into that Greek-wife life. That’s how he’ll claim to see it, though I know that he, of anyone, grasps the complex weight of what it is to be a Kennedy. The summer after Bobby died, Teddy would take the boys out to sail—Bobby’s sons and my John. Teddy was drinking so much then, wine settled in the cracked seams of his lips. He looked blasted all that summer.
“No one wants to be a myth,” I say. “We’re taught it’s what we’re supposed to want. No one tells you ahead of time the cost. They cry for you, jeer at you, cheer you on, hold you up, and, when that gets dull, they tear you down. It takes work, Teddy, in that charade, to piece together who you really are—what you think and want and believe. Jack and I used to talk about that.”
Silence then. Through the window, sheaves of cloud fall away.
* * *
—
Why is it, I want to ask, that every loss brings up every other?
* * *
—
The plane strikes the runway with a jolt. As the wheels find the ground, Teddy asks about the will.
“We’ll settle that later,” I say.
“This might be your chance.”
“Christina just lost the father she never had. That’s enough for now.”
“Then I’ll ask,” he says.
“Please don’t,” I say. “Not yet. But it’s nice, Teddy, that you look after me the way Jack would have wanted you to.”
He bites the edge of his lip, a boy again, the youngest, the scapegrace who was always trying to pull himself together enough to catch up.
* * *
—
Ari is buried in the chapel on Skorpios where we were married seven years ago. White lilies fill the courtyard. Red velvet drapes the stones. Cherry trees bloom on the terraced hill. The day is gray and overcast. Christina sobs, her eyes swollen. Artemis quietly weeps.
I do not cry. I can hear the word move like it’s coming alive out of the stones, curse, a lean, distinct black thread through the rustling grief and keening of the women. Curse. I grasp it then, standing in the damp chill of that small chapel. I could have stayed with Caroline that night. No matter what, they will hate me. Even if I’d been at his side when he died, they would hate me. At the same time, I understand that their hatred is a gift. I am the curse, black widow, outcast. Because of that, every last tie will be cut. I owe his memory nothing. I am free.
* * *
—
When I return to New York, I recognize it for the first time in years—the exquisite chaos of the city at night below my window. Above the moving lights of cars and the scrawl of trees in the park, the stars are faint, but they are there—what I can see and what I know exists beyond the range of sight—those irreverent solitary burnings yoked into constellated lines we imagine will hold them, lines that let us think, mistakenly, they do not belong to their own lexicon but to ours.
I am home, and my home, for the first time in my life, is solely mine.
What will I make of this now?
Part VI
Through corridors of light,
where the hours are suns…
their lips, still touched with fire
—Stephen Spender
Mornings, I linger over newspapers. Drink my coffee. Jog around the reservoir. One day, a blond baseball-capped reporter steps in front of me on the sidewalk. There’s been an article in the Times, he says, about Ari’s daughter, Christina, and “bitter hostilities” between us.
“Would you care to comment, Mrs. Onassis?”
“I’ve just received an invitation to her wedding in July,” I say. It’s essentially true. The invitation was Artemis-extracted. I go to step around him; he blocks the path.
“So, for the record, you deny the claim that Christina Onassis is ‘hostile’ toward you?”
“For the record,” I say, “my life is very dull right now. I shop at the local A&P. Excuse me, please. I need to go. My son is on his way home from school.”
