Jackie and Me(2)

of all my friends’ lives. News clippings, magazines articles, letters, telegrams, menus, leaflets, ticker tape, parking tickets, they’re all here, ready to jar loose every associated memory. It shouldn’t be too hard at all. The only hard part will be finding myself in the mix.

For, of course, I was there too. Some version. Which, in

this moment, feels like it wants to be known, too, no matter the reckoning. Words were said, deeds were done, and they can’t be called back, but they can be heard again in a new

light.

And I ask myself: Do I really have any better use for my

remaining hours? There are only so many books to read,

episodes of Magnum, P.I. to watch. Only so many Kennedy relations requiring a guest room or a vomitorium. Only

JACKIE & ME

5

so many times you can read your own will and wonder if

you’ve got it right.

Times Square is a terror, Central Park a savanna. The

buses and subways are in the crapper. Our current president is a former Warner Brothers actor, and everyone in

America is waiting for a giant panda in the National Zoo to get knocked up. All in all, it might be just the time to leave 1981 behind—a lark, even, to travel back to the passenger seat of Jack’s Ford Crestline, and reintroduce myself to the fellow who’s sitting there.

It’s the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, 1952, and

there’s still a late-winter nip in the Virginia air, but Jack always keeps the top down because, by age thirty-four, he knows how dashing his hair looks in high wind. We’re due

at Bobby and Ethel’s that night, but Jack instead cuts across Chain Bridge. I shoot him a look, and he says—imagine the offhandedness—that we have an additional passenger.

“Oh, yes?” I say. “And who should that be?”

“A Miss Bouvier.”

Mind you, there’s nothing in that honorific Miss to signify a lady of distinction. He refers to virtually all his girls that way. She might be a cashier at the Montelle Pharmacy or Finland’s deputy chief of mission, and you won’t know

until you’ve pulled up in front of her apartment building and seen her tottering through the front gate, a blonde in a crew-neck cardigan or a brunette in a bullet bra, and it’s always the latter who raises her hand for you to kiss and the former who comes at you straight on like an encyclopedia salesman, and whoever it is remains “Miss” in our conversation until 6





LOUIS BAYARD


such time as the business is consummated, at which point

she devolves into her component parts.

There is nothing, in short, about a “Miss Bouvier” to separate her from her predecessors. Were I to search his face—

his soul—down to the most granular level, I would find no

clue, for there is perhaps none to find. Miss Bouvier is a destination. And now that we’ve crossed into Virginia, the only thing left to figure out is where she might live. Clarendon?

Cherrydale? A group home in Fort Myer, maybe. But we

speed past all those destinations before steering up Old

Dominion Drive. Nature rushes forth, and the car dealers

and the Hot Shoppes fall away before dogwoods and tulip

trees, tatters of forsythia.

“Have you known her long?” I ask.

“Not so very.”

“Define not so.”

“A year. Off and on.”

“More off or more on?”

“More off.”

“Young or old?”

“Young.”

“Dewy?”

“Engaged,” he says. “Or was.”

I glance at him. “To you?”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“Will we be chauffeuring her fiancé, too?”

“We’d have to drive clear to New York for that. I understand he’s not worth it.”

By now, my glasses are fairly crusted over with pollen, so



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7

I’m making windshield wipers of my index fingers as I ask

what it is that Miss Bouvier does with her days.

“Journalism,” he says.

“Is that how you met?”

“Oh,” he says. “I’m not on her beat.”

There’s something half buried in that remark, and I don’t

know how to disinter it. Forests of redbud and magnolia

are thickening around us, and somehow they’re all in on

the secret, and Kay Starr sings “Wheel of Fortune” on the

radio, and, during the second chorus, I sneeze, and Jack

says, “Perfectly in tune, Lem,” and then the song is over,

and we’re pulling up in front of . . .

Well, where? I can’t even tell. All I can make out through

my encrusted specs are a row of white pilasters and a front portico. Where sits a girl.

Doesn’t she hear the car’s tires on the gravel? Or see our

headlights slicing through the trees? When we first happen

upon her, her face is angled away, as though she’s cocking

her ear for a nightingale. Her knees are drawn protectively to her chest, and there’s something quite exposed about her.

I mean, she doesn’t look like she belongs there any more