Jackie, page 42
“I want it to be happy,” I say, “with comfortable places to sit and flowers in every room.”
On the ground we lay the house out with string.
* * *
—
Caroline is finishing her junior year of college. John will be a freshman in the fall. There’s a girl he’s begun to bring around. Shy, dark hair, a glowing smile. They stop by the apartment one night on their way to the movies. They have an hour to kill. We talk for a while. John, restless, checks his watch, pushes a hand through his hair, and walks to the stereo. He sets a record on the player. As the song begins, he asks the girl, “Good for you?” She nods. She glances from John to me, then back to him, as he walks around the room, that caged gorgeous energy he has. Don’t lose your heart, I want to tell her. But how beautiful it is, that shining hopefulness of love before it learns. He comes back and sits down, leg still jiggling, and the air is filled with music, a sweetness to the night that reminds me of a life I lived before; for a moment I let it rush in—the joy of what I loved and dreamed and lost.
When they leave, I walk them out. They’re heading downtown. I’m going the other way, meeting my friend Maurice for dinner. The doorman offers to hail a taxi. “We’re all going to walk tonight,” I say, “but thank you.” I hug my son goodbye. His arms come around me, quick and strong and tight, then he lets me go. Half a block up, I look back. His arm around the girl, they’ve crossed the street toward the park, the wall and the dark and the shapes of the green. Light off the streetlamps rains down on them like blessings.
* * *
—
The presidential library is nearly finished. A tower of glass at Columbia Point that overlooks Boston Harbor. When the work is done, there will be a dedication. Teddy has told me he intends to run against Jimmy Carter. He won’t win. I know this. I left the last family meeting in Hyannis Port knowing it. A vague misguidedness hangs like a shadow over his campaign. But I’ll stand by him if this is what he wants. Or what he thinks he has to want. At the dedication of the library, Teddy will speak, as will Caroline, and John will read a Stephen Spender poem. One evening, when I am with Maurice, I read the poem aloud to him. My eyes ache as I near the last stanza.
Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun…
Maurice’s hand slips over mine. He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel he understands. Poetry is not a luxury. Not to me. It cuts to the quick like any other tool of survival.
“In the days after that day,” I say, “I realized my only chance at life was with the children. They are my home.” I look at him when I say this.
“Of course,” he says. “How could it be otherwise?”
I feel something in me settle.
It’s unique, the friendship between us. I can tell him things I can’t share with anyone else. I can talk about Jack—not only Jack in the past but how he still burns through my present, and how I’ve come to understand that desire for what is irretrievable can be a sort of prayer. I’ve told him how Jack devoured life in a way that both fascinated and terrified me, like a man sucking the meat out of a lobster claw—the books he read, the food he ate, the boats he sailed, and, yes, the women. While the library is about his legacy, his ideals, and his call to service, for me it’s also a way to keep alive the catalytic hunger that defined him.
With Maurice, I can also share the harder things that even now, years later, I can’t bear to look at head-on, how Jack and I seemed to be finally figuring things out in those last few months before he died. I can still feel the sharp, heartbroken beauty of that time, that fall of 1963, at once so brief and endless, and the rage when he was taken from me. Maurice just listens, and something in how he listens softens the bitterness.
He is kind to me. He helps manage my finances, and he understands that the money I have is not simply money but freedom to live on my own terms. I love the nimble reach of his mind. Erudite, curious. We read poetry together and speak French. We go to concerts, museums, and for walks in the park. I first met him when Jack was a senator and Maurice was a diamond merchant in Africa. Part of me loves that he has that window into my past, though we rarely speak of it. He’s the kind of person who grasps that memory is wreckage touched in sunlight, and the soul isn’t something whole inside us. Rather, it comes to us in fragments, and it’s for us to build a sense of order out of shards and meaning where there’s none. He is still married. He’s moved out of the home he shared with his wife into rooms at the Stanhope Hotel, a few blocks from 1040 Fifth Avenue.
* * *
…
I turn fifty at the end of July 1979. There’s a flurry of articles. One I actually like comes out of an interview I agreed to do with Gloria Steinem about what it means for a woman to work, which women of my generation were not supposed to want to do. There’s a scathing piece in The Washington Post I decide to read. I pick up a few errors, typos, Skorpios spelled incorrectly, and punctuation where there shouldn’t be. I’m halfway through when I realize I’m bored. It doesn’t say anything, and it strikes me then how often it’s just this way with a woman’s story. No one wants to know the real story—the private story—the evolution of a woman’s interior life. They want events on a linear string. Some twists and turns, a little joy, a little danger, tragedy, of course, and, if there’s some transgression, comeuppance. When they tell the story of a woman, they never get right up against what she might have felt and thought and seen and feared and wondered. Rather, they tell the story of what happened to her, and in the world’s eyes, usually what happens to a woman is men.
Until at a certain point, perhaps, she decides that’s not what the story will be.
I fold the newspaper, put it aside, and pick up the manuscript I was working on.
Because the world will just keep at it, poking around, digging, turning over the dirt. The world will never stop trying to see past the drawn curtains of a room I stepped out of years ago.
Part VII
L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas. Ça n’existe pas. Il n’y a jamais de centre. Pas de chemin, pas de ligne. Il y a de vastes endroits où l’on fait croire qu’il y avait quelqu’un, ce n’est pas vrai il n’y avait personne.
The story of my life does not exist. Does not exist. There is no center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it is not true, there was no one.
—Marguerite Duras
There is a dream I have—often—of you. I dream that you come for me, but I hold up my hand.
Once, not really thinking about it, I mention the dream to John. It’s morning; he’s home from college for the weekend. We are in the kitchen. I tell him about the dream, how it recurs, how it haunts me, how abstract it is and how real it seems, how I keep dreaming it, month after month, year after year, and how it makes me wonder, if you came for me now, would I go with you?
John listens, and only later do I realize I inadvertently upset him. He misinterpreted what I said. I wasn’t saying I don’t or didn’t love you. I was reflecting on how far I’ve come from the girl you knew. Perhaps I should try to explain that to John. Perhaps it is cruel not to. In the end, though, I decide to let it lie. He should be able to live with the ambiguity—that raw uncertainty our hearts are made of.
* * *
…
In the summer of 1993, I turn to Maurice. We are in the caves in the south of France. “I am not quite well,” I say—a strange fever, the walls spin, rock pouring into rock, suddenly liquid, and those lines of a cave painting someone made thousands of years ago. I feel a flush of heat, my body suddenly weak. Maurice reaches for me and takes my arm. He has always been that kind of man, prescient, gentle. He guides me, step by rising step, out of the cave into the sunlight of Arles, the rocks and the ground and the wild swirl of cypress trees, the gorgeous blazing world.
* * *
—
A summer flu, a doctor tells us.
* * *
—
That August on the Vineyard, preparing the house for a party, I sit at the dining table, writing out place cards. Something strikes past the window. A shadow, a bird perhaps. Farther down, past the lawn and the scrub, is the sea. The surface shifts, the distant bulk of Nomans Land under a translucent sky.
My head is light.
Marta, folding the napkins, glances up.
“Are you all right?” she says.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I’m fine.”
* * *
—
I feel it, though—that odd and haunting loneliness that sometimes comes in high summer, even in the midst of life, when the house is filled with children, family, friends. Every morning a swim or a bike ride along Moshup Trail, then long afternoons reading books and manuscripts on the bricked corner of the patio behind the library.
* * *
—
I force the loneliness down. I finish the place cards. The menu was set days ago. The shopping is done. Maurice offered to do these things—“It’s a party for you,” he said. Caroline and John offered as well. They had wanted it to be more of a surprise, but I prefer it this way. I know who should be seated near whom to feel at ease. It feels important—still—to build a room, a night suspended from time, with laughter, conversation, shine.
* * *
—
You’d appreciate it, wouldn’t you? Some of my younger friends—the ones you never met. What would you say to them? How would you size them up? What would you ask? I’ve wondered this.
* * *
—
Your face, still, wherever I go.
* * *
—
I am tired. That drained sense I’ve felt since the trip to France. There’s a manuscript I want to finish before the guests arrive. I tell Marta I’ll be on the patio, working. I sit in the chair, a blanket over my knees, a wide-brimmed hat. The breeze is light on my face. A few chapters in, I close my eyes.
* * *
—
When Caroline was getting married, I said to Carolina Herrera, “I’m going to let Caroline decide with you what she wants. I’m not going to interfere, because I had a very bad experience with my wedding dress. It was the dress my mother wanted me to wear, and I hated it. Caroline told me the boys want blazers and white pants. No morning suits. If they’re happy, let’s do it. Just call me from time to time and let me know how it’s going.”
As promised, Carolina Herrera would call after each fitting.
“Is Caroline happy?” I’d ask.
“Yes, she’s very happy.”
“Perfect. That’s the only important thing.”
Caroline’s reception was in Hyannis Port. There was a dance floor, a tent, Japanese lanterns, and a thousand flowers, like the world had come into bloom. That night, Teddy raised a glass and called me “that extraordinary gallant woman—Jack’s only love.”
As Carly Simon sang, the fog rolled in off the sea. The fireworks were suffused in that fog, muted flashes of light and color like summer lightning, tethered to the earth.
* * *
—
I wanted you to see it. So many things I’ve wanted you to see.
Earlier that day, Teddy had walked Caroline down the aisle and given her away. Afterward, on the church steps, I stood with your brother and watched our daughter in a cloud of white organza, as a sea of people flooded in around her. I could not escape the sense that she was being lifted off, wrapped in the hands of an unseen future already woven through the summer air. The bouquet of orchids in her hand, the glint of pearl and diamond earrings, once a gift from you to me. I watched our son blow his sister a kiss as she glanced back to smile at me, before lowering her head into the waiting car. I was still standing with Teddy at the top of those steps. He waved to the crowd, and I let him carry the moment for us, as the car with Caroline in it slowly pulled away. I let my head rest on Teddy’s shoulder, and I looked through my tears to the stone at our feet, just to hold that image of our daughter—the bold, shining strength she had become—heading into her own life. I wanted it fast in my mind.
I told you once, Jack: These are the pieces we’re made of—births, marriages, deaths—these things that happen to anyone, these ordinary moments of a life.
* * *
—
I wake after three, Marta shaking me to say my friend Joe Armstrong has just arrived.
“I brought you a present,” Joe says.
“No gifts!”
“It’s just a cassette. The recording of a Beatles song, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four.’ ”
“I don’t know that one.” I take the cassette, walk over to the stereo, and plunk it in.
“It’s from 1967,” Joe says.
“Well, sixty-four was old age then.”
We lean on the edge of the sofa together and listen until the song has played through. Then I take his hand and pretend to be earnest.
“I’ll always feed you, Joe, and I’ll always need you. Even when I’m eighty-four. Now, come and meet my house.”
I introduce him to the kitchen, the sixteen-burner Vulcan stove.
“Perfect for someone who barely cooks,” I say. The fridge is covered with photographs of the children, the grandchildren, and there is one of me with Maurice. We walk through the dining room. In the library, I gesture toward the long shelves of books. “These are my other best friends.”
He inclines his head, a mock bow.
“I’ve been rereading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists,” I say. “There’s a wonderful chapter on how Da Vinci would walk through city streets where caged birds were sold. He’d buy the birds, just to set them free.”
“You and I need a street like that,” Joe says, “and a new project, since we’ve finished saving the ballet.”
“You love ballet now, don’t you?” I say. “Almost as much as I love my new favorite Beatles song.” I smile at him. “I want to show you the orchard. John says the trees get shorter every year.”
* * *
—
The house is set on a rise overlooking Squibnocket Pond and a sweep of woods and fields strung through with old stone walls. As we walk the path to the beach, I tell him I love how tough things have to be in order to grow in this kind of soil—the pitch pine, the bayberry, the scrub oak—their maze of gnarled roots that snake down through the sand as it blows up around them. The salt rose too, which blooms through storms and cold, throwing its scent deep into the fall.
We stop at the rowboat pulled up to the dunes, its hull splintered. I take off my sneakers and leave them on the thwart.
“Have you named it?” Joe asks.
“The boat?”
“Yes.”
“Beauty School Dropout,” I say.
“That’s good!”
I love that Joe’s first job was as a busboy at the Dixie Pig in Abilene, Texas, and that he wears Justin cowboy boots with a three-piece suit. I love, too, the story of how when he was at Rolling Stone magazine and employee morale was down, he’d blast “Drop Kick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)” over the loudspeakers. The first time I heard that story, I called Joe up and invited him to lunch. We talked for four hours that day. We’ve been friends since.
As we walk along the beach, I tuck my arm through his. He asks about the books I’m working on. He asks about Caroline and her children. She has three now: Rose, who just turned five in June; Tatiana, three; and little Jack, six months old.
“And how is John?” Joe asks.
“He’s been very busy getting written up for hundreds of dollars in parking tickets and for eating apple pancakes with Daryl, biking with Daryl, dancing half naked on a roof deck with Daryl.”
Joe laughs. “Do you like her?”
For a moment I’m grateful he’d ask the question any mother should be asked.
“I do,” I say, aware the inflection in my tone makes it less clear. “He’s thinking about leaving the D.A.’s office to start a magazine. Maybe you could talk to him tonight, get a sense of what he’s thinking.”
“Then try to talk him out of it?”
I laugh. We keep walking. He asks about my trip to France. I tell him about the caves in Arles and our visit to La Camargue, the ritual of the horses running into the sea. I mention the summer flu that took weeks to shake. I don’t tell him that just this morning, I woke up, my sheets drenched, my body still so tired. I drank an extra cup of coffee with breakfast, which seemed to do the trick.
He is asking me now why I never wrote a book.
“I don’t even let them put my name in the acknowledgments, Joe.”
“You don’t even think about it?”
“I only want to look ahead.”
* * *
—
That last fall before you died, there was a day with the children at the house in Virginia, the stone path marked in sunlight; John was not quite three, running down the path ahead of us. He leapt to hit each stone and the dogs bounded alongside him, and the grass was trimmed short, a clean, open stretch of green on either side, that flagstone path laid out as bright and clear as anything I could have wanted for their lives. Caroline walked slowly by your side, her hand in yours, her blond head turning every so often to check her own small shadow trailing behind.
