Jackie and Me(34)

LOUIS BAYARD


omniscient eyes, the Mediterranean mouth—held periodically hostage by her mother’s Northern European nose and

brows, and there were times when those features seemed

engaged in a kind of ancestral war. Then, through some tiny act of will—a tart remark, the slightest plumping of lip— she would call them back. Not into uniformity, exactly, but something better.

These moments might flash by in a second or, depending on the elements, extend for hours. One Sunday she got

us into an early-evening reception honoring the first lady of Ecuador. Her lipstick was fresh, her hair recently curled, her neck and collarbone resplendently naked in the chandelier light. It was, I think, the first inkling I had of her power, for it wasn’t just the trust lawyers in worsted suits and the senators’ wives in flowered prints, all craning for a view, no, it was the Portuguese attaché, who gave her the up-and-down and then did the same for me, as if to ask what latent powers I must harbor to own such a woman.

I got so used to observing her—in all lights, against all

backgrounds—that it rarely occurred to me she might be

observing me, too. But she was, down to the aglets of my

wingtips. There was a particularly steamy day in August, I

remember, when she demanded to know why my seersucker

wasn’t wrinkling. I hedged as long as I could and then confessed, with some embarrassment, that it was nylon. She

looked at me with changed eyes.

“How real it looks.”

As she got a better handle on my own tastes, she began

bringing me things. Nothing fancy. Black enamel cufflinks.



JACKIE & ME

123

A Princeton tie. (I already had three, but I was touched.)

Once she snuck me one of her stepfather’s old watches—a

Swiss Super Roamer, with a cognac leather wristband.

“Hold on,” I said. “You took this?”

“Well, he wasn’t wearing it anymore because he thought

it was broken. But that’s only because he’s deaf and can’t

hear it ticking.”

“It’s a hot watch, Jackie.”

“Oh, I’ll take the fall if it comes to it. Hughdie can never stay mad at me.”

Another time, she met me right at the station with a box

and a broad grin. “Jack won’t wear hats,” she said, “but

I know you will, and this is coconut straw with an India—

print hatband. I’ve always thought men look well in coconut straw, don’t you?”

It was, to be clear, a porkpie hat, which I had never in my life worn, and I wondered if for once she had misstepped, but a single look in the men’s-room mirror persuaded me

that her eye was true. I wore that hat for another ten years, and not just in her presence. Once she gave me a tartan-plaid handkerchief, and I muttered something about how she shouldn’t be spending her hard-earned money on me.

“But who better?” she asked. By now, she was on her

third Aperol spritz, which may explain why she reached for

my hand. “I like you to have nice things because you’re so

nice to look at.”

“If you incline to Mr. Magoo.”

“Take off your specs,” she ordered.

“All right.”

124





LOUIS BAYARD


“And stop squinting.”

“I don’t think I can.”

She traced a slow arc around my face. “Look at you.

Beautiful bone structure. Rippling jawline. Gorgeous eyes,

gorgeous mouth.”

“You should tell Jack,” I suggested. “He used to call me

Pithecanthropus erectus.”

“What does that mean?”

“Uh, walking ape man, something like that. I think he

was referring to my—I’ve a high forehead, you see.”

“It’s a powerful forehead. That’s why the Congressman

was jealous.”

“If you insist.”

“Stop it. I’m sure plenty of girls have made fools of themselves over you.”

“If they have, they never told me about it. Anyway, I’m

kind of busy for a social life.”

“All work and no play,” murmured Jackie. “Well, it’s a

good thing I’m already spoken for.”

Her lashes took a particularly luxurious downward turn,

and I realized that this was as flirtatious as she had yet been with me.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re spoken for.”

SIXTEEN

S ometime in my early forties, I was working an ad

shoot when a Leo Burnett casting director sidled up

in a grimly salacious way and asked if I was talent. “Hell, no,” I said. “I’m wrangling it.” “You’d be a perfect Marlboro Man,” she said. Well, I laughed to beat the band, but she only pressed her card more firmly into my hand and urged me to call her office for an appointment. I gave it a thought or two, but I couldn’t get past the image of me on a horse. Squinting at a butte, trying not to cough. I’ve always maintained that advertising is as much truth as lie, and a Marlboro Man who doesn’t, in some part of his soul, believe himself to be a Marlboro Man would never pass muster. All the same, it would have been gratifying to sit out with the Kennedys