Jackie and Me(53)

blurted: “You.”

It was a line, of course—she’d heard plenty like it. At the same time, it was so out of character for him that it had the ring of truth. The grasshoppers kept coming, someone was always willing to light her cigarette, and as the night wore on, she and Johnny spilled, limb by limb, onto the pavement, entangled in ways that weren’t always clear. By the time the midnight bells rang out, they were tottering up the Rue du Vieux Moulin in the direction of the Left Bank. Her brain

was pickled, her face half buried in his peacoat.

Johnny muttered that it was so late they might as well

go back to his place, but it was impossible to believe they were going anywhere. She dozed at intervals, or forgot she was moving. Perhaps he carried her part of the way. She



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awoke, as if crawling from a sack, to find herself in the foyer of Johnny’s apartment building. An ancient concierge with mighty forearms was gazing at her from behind a tiny desk,

and Johnny, with some difficulty, was dragging open the

door to the elevator, one of those ancient Parisian models

with the coffin-sized cage that moved at the pace of a vast bureaucracy. Jackie followed him inside and braced herself against the grillwork as he jabbed the button to the top floor.

The cage, after some consideration, shuddered into motion,

and Johnny turned to face her, momentarily at a loss. Then

his mouth unlatched, and his breath began to clot into staccato rasps—a sound that should have been grotesque yet she found herself leaning into it. In the next second, they were lunging at each other. It might have been comical, two immovable forces colliding, but his superior weight drove her back against the elevator wall, the whole carriage groaning at the impact. He fumbled for his fly and fumbled for her skirt. She yanked down her girdle. Then, with a stunning infusion of strength, he hoisted her off the ground.

The iron grillwork pressed vividly into her lower back,

and she found she couldn’t distinguish the sensation of his hands from that of his hips. Every act and reaction seemed to be part of the same hydraulic process—she could almost

imagine it working without her. Johnny arched his head

toward the ceiling and gave out a great sorrowing cry, and

the elevator lurched to a stop, and in the remnant light of the fifth floor, they regarded each other. Johnny’s thing lolling shyly against his trousers. Jackie’s stockings piled at her feet.

Her gloves, shockingly, still on.

190





LOUIS BAYARD


She followed him into his apartment, then hustled into

the W.C. and washed herself on the bidet. Out of deferred

chivalry, Johnny spent the night on the sofa, and she took

the bed. She woke early the next morning, memory reas—

sembling itself. She dressed herself in last night’s clothes and stood staring out the casement window, smoking one of Johnny’s cigarettes. Then she walked over to the sofa and knelt beside him. Touched his hair, his face—softly, so as not to wake him. She must have loved him very much. That

was the only explanation, she told herself. The only reason, too, that she was crying.

Well, by the time she told me all about it, the tears had

dried up, and she had been absolved of her sin by two different priests. What was left was more on the scale of a problem. How would Jack take the news?

“What news?” I asked.

“That I’m . . .”

“How would he even know?”

“Well, there are ways to tell, aren’t there?”

I had to remind her this wasn’t the Middle Ages—nobody

was going to be checking her bedsheets for blood. It would

almost be better, I said, to go into marriage with a little bit of experience. That way, you wouldn’t be in such a terror about the sex part. I was moved, too, to detail some of Kick Kennedy’s unconventional romantic past, which had twice gotten her disowned by her mother but had never once

deterred Jack, who’d stood by her every step of the way.

“That doesn’t count,” said Jackie. “She was family.”

Well, honestly, how was I to know what a man wanted



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on his wedding night when I’d spent my life avoiding that

question? By the time we were walking toward the streetcar on Pennsylvania Avenue, I was distracted enough that

I didn’t hear her the first time and had to ask her to repeat herself.

“I sometimes think I still love him,” she said.

“Him?”

“Johnny Marquand.”

“Well,” I said after a space, “it’s perfectly natural to love your first real beau. I mean, you don’t love him more than Jack, do you? All things considered?”

She thought about it longer than I would have guessed.

“Jack needs a wife,” she said. “Johnny needs me. Even if

he doesn’t know it. Especially if he doesn’t know it.”

She was still speaking of him in the present tense, and I

soon found that they were corresponding regularly and that

their epistolary relationship was considerably less strained than the flesh-and-blood version. In print, he didn’t sulk or bridle, and she could try on different poses with him, different hats, without fear of repercussion. Whatever thread still bound them she was reluctant to sever, particularly now that his much hoped-for career was taking off. The book had been accepted by Harper and Brothers. It would be seri—