Jackie and Me(23)

Somewhere just south of Langley, she became perfectly

persuaded that she would vomit. Envisioned it with such

clarity that her mind nearly became an accomplice to the

act, and she found herself pressing a hand against her eyes to drive the vision back.

“You all right?”

“Of course,” she said.

The car took one last sickening swerve and relapsed into

stillness. She peeled her fingers from her face, gazed out in wonder. Merrywood.

She glanced at her watch. Just a few minutes shy of ten.

The Congressman was already strolling around the car,

guiding her to her feet. She felt a pleasantry froth on her lips—then felt, more distinctly, something circling her waist.

He was drawing her toward him. For what purpose she had

no way of knowing, she could only think: What a strange way to break it off.

82





LOUIS BAYARD


The kiss lasted no more than a second. Next moment,

they were staring at each other.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night.” She took a backward step in the gravel.

“Good night, Jack.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d addressed him by his first

name—he’d encouraged that from the start. It was merely the first time she felt herself claiming it. A couple of hours later, she was writing it across a sheet of stationery—JACK—then watching as her hand, seerlike, appended the letters I and E.

How suggestively they’d been entwined all along.

She lay in bed with the lights off, swallowing down coffee and smoking and trying to still her brain, her stomach, everything that kept her from isolating the graze of lip, the soft pressure of his chest through his coat. Had she passed whatever test lay embedded in that dreadful evening? What would be the consequences? If she could have piled them in

columns, she would have brightened at the thought of more

Lem, shuddered at the prospect of more family, but there was a larger consequence that her brain kept groping toward. He would be calling her again, at some to-be-determined point in the near future. Once more, his voice would buzz in her

ear, and with that the buzzing in her brain became only an

extension of him.

In fact, he called two days later, pretending in a not—

very-disguised voice to be an anonymous State Department

informant.



JACKIE & ME

83

“Oh, sir, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I should probably refer you to one of my reporter colleagues. I’m just a columnist.”

“Communist?”

“No, sir, columnist. You may have read my work.”

“I don’t read fifth columnists, thank you very much. I

report them is what I do.”

On it went, his voice shedding its last layer of pretense as the old gibing rhythm returned. They had picked up exactly where they’d left off, and this was both a comfort and a

disquiet, for it seemed to her that the one-second interval on the gravel drive should have lofted them to some new level, where a man addresses his girl in changed tones. But all he said in conclusion was: “Off to make sausage.”

He called again two days later. Again the following

Monday, again the following Friday. If she were to map

each call against the next, the pattern would scarcely have deviated. A slighting reference to whatever congressional business he had just sloughed off. An item from that day’s

newspapers. From there, her latest column. “Well now,” he’d say, “if I found out I’d married a Soviet agent, I’d just get Cardinal Spellman to annul it . . . Geez, beauty operators and barbers are completely entitled to tips, just not from me.” One afternoon he phoned her in a higher degree of merriment, having read a Times-Herald article that likened Washington bachelors to barnacles.

“It says here that by virtue of being the so-called ‘hunted sex,’ we have caused outbreaks of sexual promiscuity and 84





LOUIS BAYARD


increased requests for marriage counseling. I mean to tell

you I had no idea. I thought I was just helping out.”

“It’s not your fault you own a dinner jacket,” she assured

him.

In the brief suspension that followed, she wondered if

this was a roundabout way of asking her out again. Instead, he let out a trailing sigh and signed off with “The salt mines are calling.”

She knew she should be grateful for a great man’s attention, but it seemed to her that every joke, every tangent was an attempt to deny her clarity. What was she to him? He to her? At times, his ironic remove was such a goad that she

would sit listening in a kind of coiled fury, the blood pulsing so loudly in her wrists and temples that she imagined it to be audible on the other side of the newsroom. One afternoon she had just hung up the phone with him when a city editor

sidled over to her and said, “Tell your mother to stop calling at work.” She assumed at first he was joking. Then she thought back to the just-concluded conversation and realized that Jack could have had the same one, word for word,

with any of the men in the newsroom.

A more experienced or confident woman might have cut