Jackie and Me(11)

joist, a load-bearing beam that, once disassembled, left a

girl unsure where to set her weight. Who would ever hover

over Jackie in the same smothering and infuriating way? Be

driven by her to the same murderous rages? If that wasn’t

love, what was? And so, as the train pulled out, Jackie found herself waving quite frantically and then, at the sight of her mother’s own constricted face, pressing her gloved hand to the window.

FIVE

T hat week with Vogue is, for me, one of the more mysterious interludes in Jackie’s life. There she was, ready to embrace this destiny that had fallen from the Condé Nast skies. Every day, she rode up the Graybar Building elevator, sat at her swivel chair and typewriter table with the stack of interoffice memo sheets and the pot of African violets. She was taken to lunch, given free ballet tickets, invited for cocktails at a Park Avenue apartment house, where she drank vodka straight for the first time and jitterbugged and ended up on the balcony with a young man in a leather jacket who played his ukulele for her.

Think what this Jackie might have gone on to. A life of lingerie boutiques and skating at the Garden and standing 38





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on some Sutton Place balcony, watching boat lights blink on the East River. That Jackie might have formed a straight line to the lacquered, manor-born creature of today who gets ferried back and forth to Doubleday and flicks away the public gaze like a cobweb and who only barely resembles the girl arriving in 1951, a terrapin without its shell, oozing doubt from every pore in a city that makes you doubt ten times harder.

In her youth, of course, Jackie had traveled from high-rise to high-rise and had always been able to float above, like the Chinese lanterns at one of the debutante parties she frequented. Working there put you at the bottom of the canyon.

The smell of burning chestnuts, the dragon fumes from the

subway. In those days, Reds were still screaming at you from lecterns in Union Square, trying to save the Rosenbergs, and cabbies actually drove after you if you undertipped, bellow-ing about their kids, and even the newspaper kiosks were yelling. The only tranquil figure in the mix was Black Jack Bouvier himself, who had cut short his six-week stay at the Silver Hill sanitarium and strolled back to his bachelor flat on East Seventy-fourth. Financial straits had forced him to give up the limousine and chauffeur, but he still had the Mercury convertible and a reserved late-night seat at the Racquet Club bar, and as he staggered to the breakfast

table every morning in boxer shorts and garters, he looked

from one angle as if he’d actually been taken to the cleaners and, from another, like the harem master of his own fancy.

“Jacks,” he’d say, “pour me another coffee, would you? I’ve got a bastard of a headache.”



JACKIE & ME

39

Shortly after, she would hear him heaving like a barge

in his bathtub and, at intervals, shouting out to her: “Let’s go to Cap d’Antibes! . . . Have you ever been to the Dublin Horse Show?” By sundown, whatever plan he’d had in mind had evaporated. Strangely, the one subject that seemed to

rouse him now was her matrimonial prospects. “Jacks,” he’d

say, “what kind of men are you meeting at this job?”

“Well, there’s the art director. He’s a lovely gentleman

from Russia.”

“Is he the type to take a girl to dinner?”

“He’s married.”

“What I’m wondering is if there’s anybody there who’ll

take a pretty girl to dinner.”

“One or two.”

“Would they try something after?”

“Don’t be crude.”

“Jacks, I’m just trying to save us all a great deal of time.

You know, if this magazine business doesn’t work out, you

can always come work for me. We’ll land you a sucker

before the week’s out. A ribeye-eating fellow with a cottage in Montauk.”

It was confusing when he spoke of work because she so

rarely caught him at it, but more confusing to hear him suggest that only a sucker would marry her. She wasn’t such a bad catch, was she? Bev Corbin, a Harvard boy with an Owl

Club address, had told her when she was just sixteen that

she was “rife with witchcraft” and had sulked for months

because she wouldn’t kiss him in front of his friends. In

Paris, a tall Russian émigré named Arkadi, at sight of her,

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had ripped off his shirt and danced with her to “Music,

Music, Music” and gifted her a portable record player as

a token of his esteem. She could feel, as a matter of daily course, men’s gazes trailing after her; the only question was whether to gaze back, which required a deciphering of intent that she had not quite mastered.

As for Black Jack, what would he be asking of her in the months to come? She knew she wasn’t his only link to the world. Her sister, Lee, currently in her final year at Miss Porter’s, was a regular visitor. There was a maid to make his coffee and send anything that smelled of pee to the cleaners, and there was some kind of Canadian girlfriend (not much older than Jackie) who wandered in now and then. But