Jackie and Me(25)

So it caught me off guard, I admit, to see him training his sights higher, and I couldn’t help feeling a little displaced, for it was one thing to run a startup campaign with old ladies and one-armed vets in Cambridge (as I’d done for his first

House campaign); it was another to wage a statewide war



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and be hectored by every concave-chested, chain-smoking,

rosary-clutching pol in Massachusetts. Even if I’d wanted to help, I was living in Baltimore with my mother, on the rung that lies just above genteel poverty, and I was making a career that involved paying the closest possible attention to the market share of Bromo-Seltzer and going to bed with those numbers dancing in my brain like Dia de Muertos skulls.

God knows Jack wasn’t begging me to sign up. In fact,

I heard nothing at all from him for a spell. Then, sometime in April, he called up to say: “I need you to take Jackie to the National Gallery.”

By now enough time had elapsed that the name didn’t

quite register.

“Miss Bouvier,” he said.

To be clear, I hadn’t forgotten her. I’d simply ceased to

associate her with Jack, for the simple reason that she was most alive to me during that brief tête-à-tête in Bobby and Ethel’s backyard.

“When is this to happen?” I asked.

“Saturday. I promised her we’d go but now I have to

unpromise.”

“Because . . .”

“The Franklin County selectmen are meeting in

Springfield.”

I smothered my laugh. “What about Sunday?”

“Red Cross drive in Fall River.”

“Friday, then. The House is always off on Friday.”

“B’nai B’rith in Haverhill. You know, you’d be much better

company, anyway. I told her this shit is right up your alley.”

90





LOUIS BAYARD


“This shit?”

“I believe I said, ‘Lem is a perfect savant when it comes

to the French masters.’”

“Italian, but . . .”

“The point is when I mentioned your name, she said,

Ooh. Just like that. It escaped her. Ooh, he’s nice. Clearly she doesn’t know you.”

This is what comes, I thought, from taking pity on a girl

who wanders away from a game of Categories to have a

furtive smoke.

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” I hedged.

“Start with hello. If you’re feeling venturesome, ask how

she is.”

“What am I supposed to discuss?”

“What people do.”

“What am I not supposed to discuss?”

“Christ, Lem, I know it’s been years since you’ve been

on a date, and I know it’s because no girl who isn’t blind or clinically insane would have you, but I figured you could be depended upon to look at pictures and make conversation for a couple of hours. A mop could do as much.”

This is something Jack never got about me. An exhi—

bitionist is not necessarily an extrovert. I’ll give you an example. When I strolled down from Union Station to the National Gallery that Saturday, I found Jackie sitting at the top of the Mall-side steps, as still as when I first beheld her.

At the sight of me, she smiled and gave a slow beauty-queen wave. That was all the impetus I needed to start strutting up

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those steps, knees pumping, arms flung wide—climbing my

stairway to paradise. I could see the tourists staring; at least one child pointed and laughed. But having reached the top of the steps, I was suddenly at a loss. I was half an hour late, owing to the trains from Baltimore Penn. Even hello was a little beyond me. Jackie, bless her, said:

“My, how you move on that marble! I get as nervous as

an old lady.”

I offered her my arm, but once inside, she gently detached

herself, and traveled from room to room, alone, in her crepe tunic dress, the exhibit brochure dangling unread by her side. If I’d been timing her, I might have said she lingered longer over the Vuillard and Matisse than the Renoir and Bonnard, but she meted out to each canvas a quantum of

respectful attention, then moved on. She didn’t need an

escort, I remember thinking. She just needed someone to

leave her alone.

That freed me, you might say, to wander on my own

recognizance, and after passing through a couple of rooms,

I paused before Monet’s portrait of his wife, Camille. She

was standing in a garden with another painter, name of

Bazille, who wore a sack suit and a felted-wool bowler, and the wife had on a white cotton promenade dress with a pos-tilion jacket, but what made it unusual for an Impressionist work was that the psychology was more interesting than the composition. Madame Monet gazes off into the middle

ground—at a plane tree, a lark—but her companion has

eyes only for her. You could almost hear his voice in her ear.

“They look like lovers,” said Jackie.

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LOUIS BAYARD


She had sneaked up behind me.