Jackie and Me(3)

than I do, and I briefly wonder if she’s a housemaid or a

nanny, taking her one allotted evening out. Abruptly, she

stands and gives us two quick waves and then, as she jogs

to the passenger side, comes briefly ablaze in the headlights.

By now, of course, I’m extricating myself from the front

of the car and inserting myself with no great grace into the back, and the operation is so consuming that, for a second or two, I lose all consciousness of her, and then I hear her

8





LOUIS BAYARD


say—in that voice, like a ghost whispering through the pipes—“You must be Lem.”

I mutter something on the order of yes, I must be, and

she smiles. A wider smile than I would have guessed possible. The eyes even wider. Goat’s eyes, that’s my first churl-ish thought, or a madwoman’s, but maybe that’s to forestall the sense that I’m being seen through a wider lens. All in all, there’s a certain relief in being able to retreat into the Crestline’s back seat. A planetarium-like darkness, with the two of them swimming like moons. She has dabbed herself with Chateau Krigler 12 (I consider telling her it’s my moth-er’s favorite), and there is the complicating counter-aroma of Pall Malls, and somewhere at the back, simple bovine perspiration. For the first time, I begin to wonder if Miss Bouvier is nervous—though it’s difficult to confirm because she has a small voice and the wind seems to slap every word back down her gullet. Her general lilt, as best I can tell, is interrogative, but why should that be a surprise? Girls in these days are instructed to shoot out a clean, firm thread of inquiry at all times. The more interested they appear to be, the more the boys will understand they don’t have to be, in themselves, interesting, which is a relief to both parties.

Jackie, I imagine, is now asking the name of Bobby’s daughter or wondering if Eunice will be there and which one is

Pat? For all I know, she’s speculating about the Washington Senators’ pennant chances. If pressed, she’ll fall back on the weather. How chilly it is for March.

The point is there’s no way of knowing what they’re saying, and Jack sometimes gets cross if I talk too much with his



JACKIE & ME

9

dates (unless I’m doing something useful like showing them

the door). Nothing for it, then, but to watch Miss Bouvier’s head—under the weight of her impending introduction to the Kennedy clan—loll ever so gradually to the right.

It’s when we’re crossing back over Chain Bridge that she

rouses herself to ask: “Jack, what color is your car?”

Queer question. But then I realize she’s never seen Jack’s

car (or Jack himself, maybe) in the naked light of day.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “Red.”

“Pomegranate,” I say.

Something quickens in the column of her neck. By easy

degrees, she turns around and bestows on me a fuller version of that first smile. Then she leans toward Jack and, in a whisper stagy enough for me to hear, says, “I like your friend.”

TWO

O ne of the things about being retired is you either give

up on reading all those books you said you would

or you finally get around to them. Lately, believe it or not, I’ve been boning up on quantum mechanics—in part, I suppose, because the subject aligns with the trend of my own thoughts. Now, we tend to think of our destiny as a sealed

deal, but you take old Heisenberg. He said you can know

where a particle is or you can know how fast it’s moving, but you can’t know both things at the same time, and

the more you know about one, the less you know about

the other. Schr?dinger’s poor cat, cooped up in its mea—

ger little box, is neither dead nor alive or, you might say, is both dead and alive, until a single observer peeks into

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11

the box and settles the question—but only to the observer’s satisfaction.

So imagine that, embedded in every human life, there

are traffic crossings, where—if we were but to peek into the box—we would see the contingencies of our fate coming together and commingling, before charging off in opposed

directions. From the vantage point of 1981, for example, I

look back at my own life and force events into a certain

sequence. That point in my childhood, for instance, early in the thirties, when my father up and died. Looking back, I can say that, in one iteration, the dons of Choate respond to that calamity by graciously offering me a scholarship, which is how I am still around to meet Jack, which is how I come to be invited to Hyannisport, which is how I come to meet

the Kennedys. In another iteration, Choate responds by casting me fatherless to the winds, and I scramble for a spot at Sewickley Academy, and I never meet Jack, never go to

Hyannisport. Never meet Jackie. What does that Lem look

like? And is he even now living that life while I’m marching through mine?

Whoever he is, he can’t escape the basic infirmities of his genotype—asthma, nearsightedness, the voice that climbs always higher than he likes. Everything else is up for grabs.

Depending on where he’s being observed, he might at this

moment be an insurance salesman in Fox Chapel or a building contractor in Ligonier. He might be painting boardwalk