Jackie and Me(41)

JACKIE & ME

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along, gazes fixed, groping for happiness where we find it.

A small minority, by grace of God or luck or heredity, are

afforded a different path. What they see along the way is

something we can’t imagine, but now and then, one of the

chosen might actually look back and pluck an unelected soul to be his companion. And this last class—the plucked—why, they’re the rarest of all, for they must have a foot in both worlds and never once lose their balance. It takes doing.

This is a theory I’ve had the luxury of elaborating over

time, so it’s quite possible that I hadn’t thought it all the way out. I say this because Jackie gave her cigarette another stab and said, half under her breath: “I’m not like you. I can’t just be somebody’s minion.”

She gauged her error at once. There followed a fugue of

apologies and reassurances. I told her it was quite all right, but I needed to get back. She offered to pay for my cab. I told her that wasn’t necessary. With a catching voice, she offered to give me the rest of her cigs, though I barely smoked. “No, it’s fine,” I kept saying. “I’m fine.”

I slept the whole way back on the train and woke in

Baltimore Penn Station with just a dim sense of rupture. It was only when I was putting the key to the house door that the word came sailing back. I drank a couple of Scotches

before bed, and the next day, over lunch with the art director, I took an extra martini, which reduced the word to a small whine in my left ear. That night, my mother came and

found me in the study.

“It’s her,” she said simply.

148





LOUIS BAYARD


I took the call in my bedroom. Waited for Mother to

hang up and then raised the receiver to my ear. Her words

came rushing out at me.

“Lem, I’m so sorry.”

“No, you—”

“Please let me finish. I said that to you because it was

how I was feeling and—it was wrong, Lem, because that’s not how I feel about you, and I love our time together, it’s the brightest part of my week—no, it really is, I wake up every morning and count the days, I do—and if all that should stop because of something childish I said, I don’t think I

could bear it, I couldn’t bear the idea that I’d separated us, Lem, it tears me up, you see, because I love you.”

A run-on sentence, if you want to be technical about it,

but the point, really, was where it ran toward. Those treach-erous words. I suppose, in my thirty-six years on Earth, I’d had them flung at me from some direction or other, but if I’m to be rigorous, they usually came with a we attached. I can recall, for example, the Kennedy girls or even Mrs. Kennedy saying, “How we love you, Lem,” or, “Lem, what would we ever do without you?” But “I love you,” that wasn’t quite as common. I could think of nothing better to say in reply than “I love you, too,” which was nearly as nice to say as

to hear. I was actually smiling a little by the time I set the phone back down. Marveling, too. So this was what all the fuss was about.

NINETEEN

T he next time I saw her, Jackie had a Bloody Mary

waiting at the table, plus a silk bias tie she’d bought

for me from Garfinckel’s and a manila envelope with a

month’s worth of her columns. “Only if you get frightfully

bored on the train,” she said. “Otherwise, use them to wrap fish.” She laughed extra loud at my jokes and let her hand rest a fraction longer on my sleeve, and I alternated between being touched and being at a loss, for surely this was the sort of reception a girl would give—well, a man friend. It got even more uncomfortable when Jackie, in an impulse of domestic intimacy, folded her hands over mine.

“Mummy wants to meet you.”

150





LOUIS BAYARD


A dry patch formed at the back of my throat. “Why?”

“She’s been badgering me to tell her who I spend my

Sundays with, and I was keeping it a mystery just to annoy

her, but that was getting dull, so I just up and said, ‘If you must know, he’s Lem, and he’s divine.’ So she said, ‘Let’s have him over then.’ ‘Well, I said, he can only do Sundays as he’s extremely busy.’ She said, ‘In that case, Sunday lunch.’

And the only reason I even agreed is it’s the only day in the week we don’t have to speak French at table. If you’re going to be thrown to these particular wolves, you should be able to speak your native tongue.”

Wolves. But I wasn’t the prey, was I? For days after, I labored under the presentiment that some Kafkaesque mistake had been made, that Mrs. Auchincloss (and, by extension, her husband and the world) was preparing to accuse me of crimes I had never even conceived of. More than once, I asked Jackie if this was really the best idea.

“Oh, it’ll be fine, Lem. We’re all God-fearing people.”

It seemed, then, that Pittsburgh would come to Newport, and all that remained were logistics. I would have to leave earlier than usual on Sunday, which meant missing church with Mother. It took me half an hour just to choose a bow

tie, and the whole way from Baltimore, I was in a stew over whether the straw boater was preferable to the Panama hat. I had some notion of ducking into Lansburgh’s to find