Jackie and Me(33)

the Upper East Side, pondering trips it’s in no position to take. My last automobile ride was to see Mother’s grave in Pittsburgh; I didn’t even drive and still came home as wrung out as a wet polecat. When I want to take laps these days, I add codicils to my will. And yet within the mossed-over

prison walls of my self, I feel paradoxically free. Perhaps only now, staggering into my sixty-fifth year, do I know what it is to be free, which of course has nothing to do with one’s temporal condition and everything to do with one’s

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mind. Thus I sit, end-stage Lem Billings, at perfect liberty to rage, mourn, love, spend it all down as slowly or quickly as I please.

The other night, my friend Raul came by and found me

watching The Robin Byrd Show. Now, if you don’t live in New York, you would have no earthly way of knowing this is a nightly public-access chat program where the hostess

lolls around in a crocheted bikini and interviews porn stars and strippers. Sometimes she does more than interview them. Miss Byrd has bronze skin and white teeth and

remains the soul of cheer no matter what’s going on around

her. I sometimes think she has found the secret to happiness, and when she’s performing her signature tune, “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box,” I find myself wishing Jack were there

to witness the New Woman, the kind who requires no chas—

ing, no persuading. “Where’s the fun in that?” I imagine

him saying.

Well, Raul didn’t begin to understand my interest. “Papi,”

he said. (It’s not a nickname I particularly care for, but it does reflect the difference in our ages, and Raul, who is a New School professor, would tell you it’s an ironic reconfig-uring.) “Papi,” he said. “You must see she is the perfect wish fulfillment of colonialist heterosexual male desire.”

“She seems happy.”

Though, even now, the word I’m groping toward is free.

Well, Raul soon grew bored with the argument and

asked me how much I pay my housekeeper and why doesn’t

she even dust the scrimshaw. I told him I hire housekeepers less for what they do than for what they overlook.

120





LOUIS BAYARD


Hypodermic needles, puke. Sheila cleans around, and I’m grateful.

Grateful, too, for memories. How could I not be, thinking

back to that spring and summer of ’52, back to my Jackie, who was still counting her pennies then and shopping at Woodie’s and Hecht’s more than she would have liked and

working with a local seamstress to make knockoffs of the

latest designs. She wore every kind of thing. Cotton pin—

afores. A plaid gingham frock with a billow skirt and an

organdy petticoat. As the weather grew warmer, a navy

pima cotton sleeveless blouse. A chambray plaid gown with

a wide whirl skirt. Sunback dresses, sometimes with jackets. Whatever it was, she wanted my opinion. Not a mere

up or down vote, either, but a point-by-point critique, the kind she’d gotten as a girl, strolling Madison Avenue with Black Jack.

She loved it, I remember, when I said that her white

sleeveless shirt-dress reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor’s in A Place in the Sun or that her alligator-leather handbag was the same red as the Virgin Mary’s robes in Tintoretto’s Paradise. But there were times she’d have made up her mind before I got there. The terry coatdress had already been written off as the opposite of smart, and nothing I said could dissuade her. There was one skirt I wasn’t even allowed to

look at because it was too “swashbuckly” and would have

to be burned at sunset with her in it.

She was particularly bothered that summer by her hair.

Very much against her father’s wishes, she had got a poodle cut before the rest of the country caught on, and she was

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dismayed now to see how prevalent it had become. (“Lucille

Ball’s got one.”) But, hard as she tried, she couldn’t find her way to a clean break. She consulted the magazine oracles and poked her head in at K Street salons. She stopped women on the street, under the guise of Inquiring Photografer, to ask them what they’d had done. The way was no clearer by July.

“I’m the problem, Lem. My hair can only frizz out or sag all to hell. No medium ground. I think I should just shave it off and start over again . . .”

She could be quite clinical about herself, I remember.

“Well, obviously, my sister got all the curves, and don’t

think I don’t hate her for it. I guess I can look slim enough if I get the cut right, but nobody’s going to hire me as a swim-suit model. I’m a little tall for my liking, and my chin juts out a bit, and I don’t exactly have Cinderella feet so I have to be very careful about my shoes. And my eyes are so far apart it takes me three weeks just to order a pair of glasses because they have to custom build the bridge. God help me if I ever lose a pair.”

Not that I ever saw her in glasses.

I realize, in setting all this down, I’m giving the impression of vanity or narcissism, but I don’t think that’s quite true. Jackie—like Jack, in a way—subscribed to an aristoc-racy of beauty. Beauty in this case being not the raw elements but the way you chose minute by minute to recombine them. There was no better illustration, really, than her own face, a study in disproportion that I had lengthy intervals to study. It was her father’s square head, of course—the vast 122