Jackie and Me(19)

comfort or reassure him. Once, in the act of listening to one of his war stories, she was even moved to rest a hand lightly on his forearm. He glanced at it, then glanced away. For a man with such a playboy reputation, he was surprisingly

reticent with her: a handshake after their first dinner and a European kiss to the cheeks after the second. Yet, for all the absence of skin, there was something pleasingly illicit about 66





LOUIS BAYARD


these encounters. A more conventional suitor would have

picked her up at home and been permitted to leave only on

the condition that he have her back by ten. But congressmen weren’t necessarily subject to bourgeois standards and, at twenty-two, Jackie was too old for a curfew, and as much

as some part of her wanted the world to know, a larger part didn’t.

He was no less secretive about her. Their dinner dates

were arranged privately by Mrs. Lincoln, and if by some

chance a minor Washington figure stumbled over to their

table to pay homage, the Congressman never paused to

introduce her, never even allowed his gaze to slide her way.

Was it possessiveness, she wondered, or rudeness? Or simply distractedness? Days would go by without a word from

him and then, from nowhere, he might call her at her desk

and chat with her as amiably as an old school pal. More

than once he surprised her by having read her column. “I’m

amazed,” he said, “that anybody even thinks about what

their last meal on earth would be. If you’re about to go to your reward, why bother eating?”

She asked him then what he would do in his final minutes. There was a pause, and then:

“Put me down as ‘pray to God.’ In less polite company,

I’d be more truthful.”

It was the first time he made her blush, and she realized

that the telephone lines, rather than keeping them apart,

produced a deeper kind of intimacy. His voice, shorn of a

body, had a way of insinuating itself into her ear, and if she closed her eyes, she could summon the body, too: leaning

JACKIE & ME

67

back in his swivel chair, his lips forever flirting with a

smile.

The calls grew longer: two minutes, four. Once they were

interrupted on his end by a series of pulsing alarms.

“Time to vote,” she suggested.

“I guess.”

“So you have to go.”

“I guess.”

Yet he stayed, even through the second round of pulses,

leaving her to wonder if politics really was his vocation. If anything, his tendency was to tug toward the personal. One afternoon, he began unaccountably speaking of a dog he’d

run across in Germany.

“Dachshund puppy. We found him somewhere between

Munich and Nuremberg, and we named him Dunker. He

was supposed to be a present for a girl back home, but we

both grew so attached to him that we were trying to figure out how to smuggle him across the English Channel.

But then, wouldn’t you know it, my allergies kicked in. I

couldn’t breathe, my face got puffy. Fever, hives. By the time we reached the Hague, we knew we’d have to find him a new family, so we found this couple sitting out by the Noordeinde Palace, and thank God, they spoke English and they were ready to step up. So Dunker went off with them, and we

stood there waving goodbye, and that was—God, fifteen

years ago, before the war, and I still find myself thinking about him, isn’t that funny?”

“No, it’s sweet,” she said, and waited a few seconds

before inquiring who the other half of that we was.

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LOUIS BAYARD


“Oh,” he answered. “Lem.”

Just the barest syllable, with no further explanation, not

even a gender, but it was followed by:

“You’ll meet him.”

Thus, weeks before she’d laid eyes on me, I had become

in Jackie’s mind a milepost of sorts. For it seemed to her that if a man was prepared to introduce a girl to his friend, he had begun thinking of her in a new and more serious light.

Yet if this was the case, he had yet to share it with her, and in the absence of any other sign, she began, in her own indirect way, angling to meet Lem.

“What does he do for a living?” she asked.

“Advertising.”

“Does he have a wife?”

“God, no. Who’d marry that chump?”

“Maybe he’d like to meet us after work sometime.”

“Ehh. He lives in Baltimore.”

She persisted nonetheless, spacing her inquiries at intervals wide enough to avoid suspicion and assembling in the

process a piecemeal portrait. A big, bespectacled guy who’d been pals with the Congressman since the third form of Choate and had somewhere along the line been drawn into

the wider Kennedy bosom so that no family holiday could be

considered complete without him and no party could really

get under sail until his high-pitched cackle came sailing

across the room. Lem’s here!

“I kid him all the time,” said the Congressman, “but he’s