Jackie and Me(18)

sat in the back, riffling so distractedly through memos that it wasn’t until he and Jackie were seated at the Occidental Grill, their menus thrust at them like sacred tablets, that he raised his eyes to hers.

They settled on cherrystone clams for appetizers and, for

an entrée, fried soft-shell clams. The Congressman crooked

a finger at the nearest waiter, while Jackie did a slow scan of the walls: framed photos of ex-presidents and ex-generals and (she was guessing) ex–cabinet officers, spaced at such regular intervals and gazing out with looks of such equiva—

lent starchiness they all seemed to be the same man.

“What are you looking for?” she heard him ask.

“You,” she said. “I figured you must be up there

somewhere.”



JACKIE & ME

63

“You’ll find me in the kitchen, next to the dishwasher.

Now maybe you’ll tell me,” he said. “What’s a nice Catholic girl like you doing in a town like this?”

Catholic girl. He knew that much about her.

“Well,” she said, “I grew up here. When I wasn’t staying

with my father. As for the religion thing, I try to keep that on the hush-hush.”

“Between you and God.”

“Something like that.”

He began at once to quiz her. Family, education, career

goals. It was no different than a job interview, really, only he would take any datum she lobbed at him and spin it into a whole line of inquiry. A casual mention of Cork, Ireland, for example, became under his interrogation a travelogue of her time in Europe. The tale of staying with a family in the Rue de Mozart expanded to include her twenty-first birthday, commemorated with sandwiches and red wine, and veered

from there to braving the outhouses of Spain and being

detained by Soviet troops in Vienna. No matter where she

wandered, he was ready with the next question. He seemed,

however, to discourage lines of inquiry about himself, as he did flattery. “You know,” he said, “we’re all just a bunch of worms over there.”

“Consequential worms.”

“Only to our districts, and only when we bring home

the pork. I couldn’t even tell you all the members of the

House Foreign Affairs Committee. Or even the Education

and Labor Committee, and I sit on that one. At least I think I do.”

64





LOUIS BAYARD


Perhaps because he seemed so indifferent to the impression he was making, she felt freer over their next two dinner dates to form her own. She noticed, for instance, how he favored Italian food over French and fettuccini over everything. How he liked his vegetables pureed and his drinks

mixed. (Straight-up liquor didn’t agree.) How he descended

a set of stairs even more slowly than he ascended them and

how, when he was concentrating on something, he would

tap his front teeth with his index finger, like a miner seeking ore.

How often, she noticed, did he find a way to touch himself. The gesture not so much nervous as existential—was he still there? The fingers flying to necktie, to jacket flap. To the hair, most of all, which he guarded like a miser with a golden hoard. His was the kind of male beauty that improved with acquaintance because it had nothing to do with regularity.

The ears jutted; the Fitzgerald teeth had never completely

settled into their Kennedy jaw; and, of course, in those days he was painfully thin in his two-button suits. But he was tall in a way that surprised her, and he was what the Victorian novelists used to like to call “well-knit,” and although the sickly ash color hadn’t quite left his skin, the steady diet of weekends at Palm Beach had scrubbed it into something like virility, a tawny blend that brought out the beautiful tapering of his fingers, the green-gray seascape of his eyes. It all added up somehow, and he was not unaware that it did, he simply carried it with him—carelessly, unthinkingly—the way you might half tie a sweater around your neck and forget it was there.



JACKIE & ME

65

When he walked into a restaurant, for example, he was

inevitably seated at the best table with the best view and the most conscientious waiter. The notion that any of this might have turned out otherwise seemed never to have crossed his mind, and it was this casually lofted privilege that left him queerly helpless at times. He had never once had to make his own dinner reservations, book his own tickets, clean his own clothes or make his own bed. He was driven as much as he drove and was told at most hours of the day and night where he needed to be. One evening, Jackie watched a napkin flutter from his lap to the floor. She waited, expecting him at any moment to snatch it back up, but he stared at it, as if to ask how it could have done such a thing, and then they both waited in a kind of anxious suspension until the

waiter rushed forward with a replacement.

Now, it could have been that Jack’s back wouldn’t let

him bend that far, but I don’t think she was wrong in detecting, beneath his composed exterior, a sense of limits and a certain anxiety about crossing them. She remembered

that single retreating step he had made upon entering the

Bartletts’, and her heart warmed again at the thought that

such an attractive and famous man might need someone to