Jackie and Me(17)

Jackie left without an interview or photograph. Maybe all

that was kindled was a tiny prick of light, out there where their two parallel lines—thanks to the laws or, better to say, the lies of perspective—were actually converging.

Through old habit, she went to Mass for guidance,

prayed hard. The letters from Johnny grew more impor—

tunate, her replies more formal. She kept the calls shorter, hedged about coming to New York again. One night, she suggested pushing back the wedding by six months. “Why?”

he asked. She was just so busy with work, and she’d promised her editor to stay through the year, and she didn’t want to leave them in the lurch, they’d gone out on such a limb with her. His response made two truths vivid. She had driven him beyond the bounds of frustration. And he had been harbor-ing a certain thought about her career.

“It’s not hard to take somebody’s picture.”

That night, as she lay in bed, it seemed to her that

Johnny’s mind was like a miner’s lamp, cutting a very bright straight line but otherwise surrounded by darkness. She

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59

had admired that at first, the linearity of him, but now she could see how many radiating avenues it closed off, and the thought of crowding into that single beam made her ache down to her bones. Her mother, wisely, was not pushing her

in either direction, so when Jackie announced that Johnny

would be staying with them the third weekend in January,

Janet made the necessary preparations and greeted him with

unusual cordiality. The couple spent Saturday, per usual,

trolling the streets of Washington, but on Sunday morning,

Jackie made sure that Nellie cooked him a crown roast, and

she volunteered to drive him to National Airport. They were about half a mile out when she told him he was one of the kindest people in the world. Even Johnny Husted knew what

that meant. In the end, there were no tears. They stood for a while, gazing out at the airfield, watching his plane trundle through the rain. A final kiss, then goodbye.

The ring he didn’t find until he got home. She’d slipped it into his pocket.

EIGHT

A s soon as she woke the next morning, she began canvassing herself for regrets, self-reproaches, second

thoughts—and found none. If anything, just relief, registering at first as a faint trickle and swelling into a full tide. Was severing a tie really as simple as all that?

Certainly, nobody at Merrywood was rushing in to console or commiserate. She might have wondered if it had

happened at all if her mother, at the breakfast table, hadn’t paused in the act of spooning her grapefruit to murmur: “I’ll send the correction to the Times.”

Somehow or another, she had got herself clear, and the

sense of her own escape buoyed her, so that the girl who

showed up for work that day was both a lighter creature,



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61

able to parry the flirtations of the criminal-courts reporter without a thought, and a more determined one, stalking the salesmen and hausfraus at the Home Show to ask them what

features they’d most like to see in a new home. Three bathrooms, she scribbled on her pad. Screened-in porch. Doric columns. And with each word, with each lofting of her camera, the disapproving specter of Johnny Husted seemed to recede into the mist. After filing her column, she reached

into her desk drawer and took a draft of the peach schnapps she kept for special occasions and sat for a while, contemplating the future. Then, still riding the fumes of her alcohol, she picked up her phone and dialed the Congressman’s office.

She told his press secretary she had to pin down some

key facts with the Congressman before her article could

go to print. She was less amazed by the effrontery of her

lie—for, of course, there was no article—than the coolness

with which she told it. Less than half an hour later, the

Congressman called her back.

“I find I have important news to share,” she told him.

“Go on.”

“It appears that a certain engagement of which we briefly

spoke is no longer an engagement.”

“I see,” he said. “Does anybody need to be socked in the

jaw?”

“No.”

“In that case, Miss Bouvier, I believe a celebration might

be in order. A girl doesn’t get herself unengaged just any

day.”

62





LOUIS BAYARD


“No, it’s quite rare.”

“Say now, I’m leaving town Friday, but are you free

Thursday night?”

Already, in her mind’s ear, her mother’s voice was sound—

ing. Don’t leap at the first offer. Nor the second. Pretend you have such a vast chain of social engagements you can’t pry yourself loose till August. Make him earn every minute you give him.

And perhaps it was because Janet Auchincloss wasn’t

there in person that Jackie heard herself say:

“Thursday should be all right. Why don’t you pick me up

from work?”

The car was a five-year-old leased black Cadillac, driven

not by a chauffeur but by a House gofer. The Congressman