Jackie and Me(27)

recognize.”

“Not you, though.”

“Well, that was then. Now I’m just another working

slob.”

She smiled. “It’s still nice to look at pretty pictures.”

I drew out a packet of Pall Malls, offered her one, which,

upon reflection, she took.

“Jack told me you were in the war,” she said.

“Well, I tried. I couldn’t get into the service because of my eyesight, so Mr. Kennedy pulled strings and got me in the Ambulance Corps. Don’t you love how the Army thinks?

Blind as a mole. Let’s give him wounded soldiers to ferry to safety. After a couple of years, the Navy drastically lowered its standards, so in I went. Course I wasn’t a hero or anything. Nothing like Jack.”

“You keep saying all the ways you’re not like Jack.”

“Well, there are many, as you can probably perceive. I’ve

been on enough double dates to know that.”

She quirked her brow. “I guess that’s just how best friends work.”

“Why, sure. I bet when you talk about your best friend, you—”

“I don’t have one.”

“There’s a sister,” I suggested. “Or a brother.”

96





LOUIS BAYARD


She thought.

“My stepbrother was the first boy I ever kissed. But that’s not what you meant.”

“Well.”

“I think I need training in this friend business.”

“Okay.”

“And, Lem, let me tell you, I’m a quick learner, ask anybody. And I take perfect notes, and you can invoice me every month.”

Even now, all these years later, I’m not sure how serious she was. Whenever I looked at her, levity and solemnity lay entwined, and if her eyes were widening farther than I would have thought possible, it might have been the crème

de menthe.

“You’re in luck,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette. “After a couple of drinks, I do pretty much anything for free.”

“That was my hope.”

TWELVE

O n the train ride back to Baltimore, I may have flashed

back to an exchange or two or wondered what

it would be like to have a friend who unfurled the words

Scuola Grande when you brought up the subject of Venice.

And it’s true that, over dinner that night, Mother asked me what I was smiling about, and I didn’t realize I was smiling.

It’s true, too, that I was sort of hoping Jack would call

to ask me how it had gone only so I could revisit it in the telling. But, of course, he was now in full politicking flight, and I had seen enough of campaigns to know they had their own minute-to-minute exigency. God help whatever affair

of the heart was trying to break through the Chamber of

Commerce luncheon or the VFW picnic.

98





LOUIS BAYARD


I don’t think it’s too much to add that I was also distracted by my own career. Emerson Drug was just the latest stage in a journey that had progressed from passing out free samples of Juicy Fruit to selling Coca-Cola to New Jersey drugstores to finding feet for General Shoe of Nashville. Anyone who’s hiked that long is still hiking, and that lends itself to ragged days and long nights and tense moments. You can’t imagine, for example, how much artifice goes into a fifteen-second spot at the eight-minute mark of Howdy Doody. That’s why, once I’d resubmerged myself in my Baltimore life, my afternoon with Jackie began to recede a bit—life was rolling back over it like a breaker. So when Jack called a couple of weeks later and asked if I’d come down to Washington for drinks—that very night—I was only put out at the timing.

“You want me to drop everything,” I said. “On a

Wednesday night.”

I did, of course, pliable beast. We met at Longchamps, a

knockoff of a New York restaurant chain that was already a

little knocked off itself. Simulated-leather banquettes, plastic-topped tables. The kind of place that served bowls of glazed nuts. Jack was late, as usual, and by the time he staggered in, necktie listing eastward, I’d already staked out a corner booth as unlit as a confessional. Even in the shadows, I could make out the dark smears under his eyes.

“This is the Happy Warrior,” he said, lowering himself as

if by crane onto the banquette. “This is he.”

It was the usual discursive chatter: Stalin and some starlet Jack was hot for after seeing her in Bird of Paradise and what she would look like without a sarong, and I was distracted

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99

enough that my eyes drifted over to a pair of young men,

in salt-and-pepper suits, facing each other across the table.

One of them kept taking off his steel-rimmed spectacles and rubbing them on his tie, and I had to fight off the strangest urge to wander over.

“Do you still find Miss Bouvier dear?” asked Jack.

“Oh, well . . . better than that. No, she’s charming.”

“She’s been promoted, then.”

“Two or three pay grades.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Unaccountably, she liked you, too.”

I leaned back in the booth, studied him for a second.