Jackie and Me(47)

“Say now,” Jack whispered to her. “This evening isn’t

turning out half bad.”

After dessert, we adjourned downstairs to Mr. Kennedy’s

state-of-the-art movie theater. This was a carryover from his days in the film business and, you might say, a sign that his home was not a retreat from but a rival to the world. Being a devotee of grosses, he took no special interest in aesthet-ics, and that night’s picture was a perfect stinker called The Winning Team. It was the kind of movie where they throw one damn thing after the other at the hero—he’s poor, he injures his eye, goes to war, develops epilepsy, becomes a

drunk—and he rises above every damn one with the help of

Doris Day.

It would have been one thing if Jackie were a baseball

fan, but she found the whole game bafflingly static: men

braced for the extremely off chance that something might

happen. She knew, though, there was no chance to excuse

herself with a yawn or a stretch, not when Mr. Kennedy

insisted on planting her in the front row—pinning her, in

effect, between himself and Jack. So it must have been a

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LOUIS BAYARD


relief of sorts when, halfway through, the old man tapped

her on her arm and motioned to the door. In the dimness of

that theater, she had some idea that the whole family would be trailing behind, but the door closed after her, and it was then she remembered—well, not the first thing Jack had told her upon her arrival but the third.

“Don’t let the old man get you alone.”

But Mr. Kennedy’s tall, stooped figure was already traveling down that crepuscular hallway. He paused before

the last door, then swung it open and ushered her inside.

Darkness sprang away before an infusion of electric light,

and Jackie found herself surrounded by an armada of dolls.

Hundreds upon hundreds—from every clime, in every costume—frozen and unblinking in glass cases. She told me

later she thought she’d stumbled into a charnel house, and

the only place she could bear to rest her eyes was on Mr.

Kennedy and only because he was alive.

“Did you have any dolls of your own, Jackie?”

“One or two.”

“I didn’t set out to be a collector, but we acquired so

damn many when we were in London. I don’t know why,

but when you’re an ambassador, people bring you dolls.”

“I suppose there are worse things.”

“Mm.” He executed a slow pivot. “Of course, in the old

days, this was just a plain old storage room. Lobster pots

and fishing rods. Beach chairs.” He waited no more than a

second before adding, in the exact same tone: “This is where I used to take Gloria. And I do mean take her.”

Who, she wondered, was Gloria? A secretary? A governess?



JACKIE & ME

169

Her mind shifted through the possibilities before settling on the most neutral.

“Is that so?”

“Again and again. The woman was insatiable, I tell you.”

In fact, as Jackie was about to learn, this Gloria had

the tastiest rosebud and the tightest pussy God ever gave a female and was capable of coming six times in a single evening. She loved swallowing his semen—claimed it had curative properties—and whenever she was ready for another round, she’d nibble on his ear and whisper, “Olé.”

Jackie sensed, not for the first or last time, that she was being tested. It was true that she’d heard anecdotes just as salacious, if not more so, from her own father, who, in the course of picking her up from Miss Porter’s, would speak in an almost fatigued way about which of her classmates’

mothers he’d fucked, embroidering every conquest down to

the smallest detail. Jackie had taken it in without a peep, her dark eyes gleaming with an occult knowledge, but it had all felt, under the conditions, like a clannish rite, the Bouviers against the world. By contrast, the experience of gazing into Mr. Kennedy’s gelid blue eyes, of watching him light a La Corona cigar, left her feeling like a minority of one. She

could feel her skin shrinking around her bones.

“How much do you earn, child?” he asked.

She hesitated but eventually volunteered that she earned

fifty-six a week from the Times-Herald (up from fifty-two) and a fifty-dollar monthly allowance from her stepfather.

“So a little more than thirty-five hundred a year.”

“I guess.”

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LOUIS BAYARD


“Does that seem like a lot to you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

“It’s pretty damn close. For a girl who likes nice things.”

Now, of all moments, she blushed. “I would say I care for

beauty,” she protested.

“That comes with a price tag, too. Or didn’t anybody tell

you? Even these dolls,” he said, sketching a circle around

the room. “It cost a small fortune to ship ’em across the

Atlantic. Well, it would have been a small fortune to anybody else.” His face unexpectedly blossomed into a grin.