Jackie and Me(35)
126
LOUIS BAYARD
in their Palm Beach redoubt, leafing through the latest Life or Fortune. “Why, looky here,” I imagine myself saying as I thrust the full-page ad in Jack’s direction. Given time, he composes a crude response—something about horses—but the joke, by its very nature, imbues me with a new stature.
For he respects publicity.
I bring this up because it was a queer sensation to be
looked at in the way this casting director did. Through the lens of glamour. The closest I’ve come probably was escort-ing Jackie that summer around Washington. Put a pretty girl on your arm, I’m telling you, and the glitter rubs off.
Whether it’s a coat-check girl or a streetcar driver, every wink, every arched eyebrow declares that you must be somebody more than they first thought.
This was not my usual way of traveling through the
world, and I couldn’t help feeling like the impersonator in The Prisoner of Zenda, waiting for the true Ruritanian king to return. Yet Jack, having brought us together, had long since stepped away. In those days, whenever he called me— and this would have been two or three times a week—he’d
speak of everything but Jackie.
The Massachusetts Senate race was no longer a Honey
Fitz campaign but a national concern, combed over like
entrails for the opinion pages, pondered every Sunday morning by Meet the Press. No matter where you plunged your hand in, you could find a theme—Irish versus Wasp, upstart versus establishment—and still push out eight hundred
words by deadline. Jack, being in the thick of it, could only see ad buys in Newton. Should Bobby be allowed to speak?
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Would Ethel’s obvious pregnancy attract the housewife
vote? We never hashed things out at great length because he was always so exhausted. Some nights, I could actually hear the squelch of bathwater beneath him, and I realized that my contribution to the Kennedy campaign was to let him drift off to sea like an empty dinghy.
Now and then, he would pause and ask, apropos of
nothing: “All is well?” “All is well,” I would reply, without knowing exactly what I was replying to. And it was because we never spoke of Jackie that a feeling of illicitness began to attach itself to my encounters with her. Every time the switchboard operator at Emerson Drug put through one
of her calls, it came prefaced with “Your friend is calling.”
Water-cooler conversations halted as I approached. Bucky
McAdoo began clapping me on the back as he sailed out
the door. “It’s awfully late, Lem. Don’t you have somewhere better to be?”
One Saturday morning, I was reading the paper on the
back patio when Mother came out with a wondering expression. “Somebody on the phone.”
It was Jackie, of course. She’d needed to make some
last-minute change in our plans and, knowing I wouldn’t
be at the office, had taken the unusual step of calling me at home. The whole conversation took less than a minute, and I thought no more about it until Mother brought it up over
lunch.
“That girl. Is she the reason you go down to Washington
every Sunday?”
“She’s one of the reasons.”
128
LOUIS BAYARD
Mother stared into her wineglass. “Would I know her
family?”
“Not unless you know the Auchinclosses.”
The name landed somewhere behind her eyes.
“No. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Mother,” I said, “it’s all right. I’m just entertaining her.
She’s Jack’s girl.”
Strange to hear it spoken like that.
“He knows you’re seeing her?”
“Of course. It’s his idea.” I made a point of tugging up
the ends of my mouth. “There’s nothing improper going on,
dear one.”
“No, I know.”
“Then what?”
“I suppose it was how she said your name.”
“How was that?”
“Like a geisha.”
Nothing outwardly changed. We woke every Sunday for
the 8:30 Eucharist at Old St. Paul’s. If the weather was fine, we took coffee and pastries at a Charles Street café and an early-ish lunch at home. When the taxi pulled up a little before one, she would tell me to have a nice time and call if I was running late, and I’d kiss her on the cheek and climb into the cab. The only difference was that she’d wait until the cab had gone before heading back inside.
But whatever constraint I carried onto that train was
gone by the time I got to Washington, and over the course of that summer, my outings with Jackie became less a mission and more the filling of a vacancy, which had predated her
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and which I had not even necessarily grasped about myself.
To be sure, I had friends in those days, family, work, all the attachments one can expect to form, but in my experience, a man doesn’t always understand he has a vacancy until somebody begins, however inadvertently, to fill it. This is maybe just a way of saying I was a little lonely myself that summer and that our time together could make an hour pass more quickly than it was in the habit of doing.