Jackie and Me(52)

Had Jack really packed twice as many socks as underwear

when they traveled to Europe? Yes, and there was a theory behind it that has long since escaped me. Biography was where most of our conversations stayed, with the occasional excursion to medical history. Jack was allergic to dogs, yes, and—how this pained her—horses, and was a touch deaf in one ear and longer in one leg than the other and could eat

any quantity of dairy products without gaining a pound.

Now and again, even as she absorbed the minutiae, she

chanced a deeper inquiry. One Sunday, for instance, she surprised me by asking, apropos of nothing, “What would Jack do with a virgin, I wonder?”

Well, I knew he wasn’t the type to guide a trembling

maiden, step by step, to Hymen’s temple. He would be in

too great a hurry. Then again, he wouldn’t necessarily want a girl to be a “voyager” because then she’d have too many ports of comparison. So I bluffed out some sort of reply and deduced, from the mere raising of the question, that Jackie herself was still a virgin. This, of course, was something nobody would have remarked on in 1952, except to endorse

it. Girls were to approach their wedding night with no clue as

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to what awaited them other than what they’d gleaned from

girlfriends and Forever Amber. I remember trembling a little for Jackie, thrust up against so much sexual experience, so many notches in so many bedposts. Oh, she knew the ways of the world, all right. She had a healthy streak of observa-tional wickedness in her—it was one of the things that had endeared her to me—but of carnal knowledge I assumed her

largely innocent. Not too long afterward, though, she gazed rather moodily in the direction of a nineteenth-century call box and asked, “Do you think it’s possible to love more than one person? I mean, really love?”

I told her that I knew as much about love as I knew about

leprechauns. In both cases, I assumed them to be fantasies.

She smiled a little and said nothing, and then a week later, under rather unusual circumstances, told me what was on her mind. And here is where I peer into the Schr?dinger’s

box of Jackie’s life and find an utterly different path leading to an utterly different John.

She met him in Paris during her year at the Sorbonne.

She knew him by name or, rather, by his father’s name.

J. P. Marquand, though largely forgotten today, was one of

the premier fictional portraitists of America’s Wasp establishment, a caste to which he himself was a rather embittered outsider—biting, as Mrs. Auchincloss once put it,

the hand that had never fed him. John Marquand Junior—

Johnny, to his friends—was embittered in his own way and

had consciously marked out a route opposed to his father,

serving overseas in World War Two, then settling down in



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the Paris he had helped to liberate and separating himself

from the entirely appropriate wife who had, in the postwar

spirit of normalcy, been assigned to him. Jackie first encountered him at an expat literary salon in Montmartre, and it was in a weird way his unattractiveness that drew her. Not

that he wasn’t pleasing to the eye—sandy hair, bright blue

eyes, declarative Anglo-Saxon bones—but he had a way

of stooping and brooding and snapping. He could play the

piano by ear but hated doing it and hated anyone who asked

him, and he had, over his left biceps, a snake tattoo that, having long ago horrified his parents, had become a hollow mockery. Whenever he encountered her, in whatever bar or walk-up, he never looked pleased to see her or regretful to see her go. She wasn’t always sure he remembered who she was.

Here, finally, was what made her soft on him: He was

writing a novel.

It was called The Second Happiest Day, and in his mind, it would transport the dry sociological voice of his father into the 1950s while positioning John Junior—John Phillips was the nom de plume—as the prophetic voice of his generation, those children born on the bare limb cut from under them by war. Johnny had got the whole thing figured out,

with one glaring exception. He hadn’t yet grasped he would

need a muse.

By then Jackie was a little late to shape the first master—

piece, which was just a few months from completion, but

she wasn’t above wanting to stamp herself on the next one.

She had only a feathery sense of how muse-ing worked—she

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sensed there was some gazing involved, discussion into the

early hours—and she hadn’t abandoned the inchoate ambi—

tions that had brought her to Paris in the first place (art director of the twentieth century), but she had enough sense to keep her options open. And as she and Johnny began to meet with greater frequency, drinking grasshoppers and

chain-smoking Gauloises Caporals at L’éléphant Blanc, she

began to find in him tiny coral veins of warmth that might

be coaxed out. It seemed to her that the mere fact that she was willing to make this sometimes excruciating effort, if only for a few minutes at a time, meant that she might be in love, a little. One night, they were dancing to “Come on-a My House,” and she noticed him looking at her in a slightly less vexed way than usual. “What’s more beautiful than any work of art?” he asked, and before she could answer, he