Jackie and Me(54)

alized in the Saturday Evening Post, anointed by the Book of the Month Club. Johnny had cleared the bar with room to spare, and she found herself thinking what an interesting vocation it would be to be an author’s wife. Renting a cottage in the Basque country. Taking excursions to Istanbul and Dubrovnik. She’d write dispatches for Vogue; he’d report on

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Greek politics for Harper’s. At the end of each day, he would set before her a sheaf of typewritten fiction, and she would retire with a glass of wine and read each line with a tactful, searching, generous intelligence, leaving the lightest pencil notes in the margins.

I don’t know that many people would believe that Jackie

Bouvier, having tasted of a Kennedy, might dream of another slightly less public path. One that led across the ocean to an acid, irascible writer who had never once said he liked her.

But in those days, some large part of her was still willing to serve as a votary of the arts, for it was in Beauty that life’s deepest meanings dwelled, or so she still believed, and I didn’t have it in me to disagree.

And I have to think that, if Johnny Marquand had but said

the word—the words—the right combination of need and help and impossible and muse, Jackie would have chucked her job and, with a queer sort of relief, her Congressman and caught the next plane to Paris and showed up at his door-step, daring him to reject her, and the second book would have got written, and the third, there would have been prizes and speaking engagements, essays for Life, visiting profes-sorships, film adaptations. The two of them gay and distingué, a couple in the least tedious sense of the word, trailing Old World glamour after them, Scott and Zelda without the madness.

So if I’m to speak of contingency, of Schr?dinger’s box, I

will add that this came within a whisper or two of happening.

In 1979, I was invited to a book party at George

Plimpton’s Upper East Side duplex. The author in question



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was a rather eccentric character who had struck it big with his maiden outing in the early fifties but had failed, despite years of effort, to get a second novel off the ground. Perhaps he’d needed a muse after all because all the writing in circles had finally broken him, or at least stripped away his ambition, and he had retreated into a second marriage, financially comfortable and childless, devoted to travel and exotic pets.

Now, after more than a quarter-century of literary silence, he was reemerging with a brief, illustrated monograph on the subject of parrots. Indeed, upon entering the book party, you found an actual parrot perched on the author’s arm.

In this way I came face-to-face with Johnny Marquand.

Eccentric and well-lubricated, in a rumpled Oxford and cor—

duroy blazer, looking as if he’d come from playing bocce in Central Park. Handing him my copy of Dear Parrot to sign, I happened to mention we had a friend in common. I was even on the verge of naming her, but, with a beery smile, he was already sliding the book back to me. “Friends are such an agony, aren’t they?”

I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but a year later,

I think I do. Friends are the ones who tend to be there when the portal to some alongside life opens. They see you make the choices or fail to make them, and they grasp the consequences. It seems to me now that Johnny Marquand spent

the rest of his life hearing the thrumming of a different destiny in his ear, and doing whatever he could to make the sound go away.

TWENTY-THREE

I doubt I ever would have learned about Johnny

Marquand if something hadn’t happened to me that

summer after one of our Sunday-afternoon jaunts. Jackie

left on the early side because she had to be at work first

thing the next morning. This gave me an hour or so to while away before heading back to Baltimore, and because the evening air was unseasonably mild, I took a little stroll through the downtown section. I ended up in Lafayette Park, where I struck up a conversation with a gentleman of about my

own age or perhaps a bit younger. We were standing by the

Andrew Jackson equestrian statue, and I remember speaking

to him about visiting the Hermitage in Nashville. I remember, too, how he could light a match with his own thumbnail,



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cupping his palm around the flame, and also light a match

on the heel of his shoe. Well, in the course of this conversation, I must have, without meaning to, put ideas into this gentleman’s head. For, as it proved, he was no gentleman but an undercover detective with the Metropolitan Police

Department. A second later, I was under arrest!

Handcuffs were slipped over my wrists, I was shuffled

toward a police cruiser and conveyed to the Indiana Avenue

station. I remember trying to stay in an urbane register the whole time—the tone that conveys misunderstanding, right minds will set it straight—but each step in the pilgrimage

pulled out another floorboard. There was the photograph.

The fingerprinting, each digit jammed into the card. The

surrender, one by one, of my hat, my wallet, my suspenders, my necktie, my shoelaces. They offered me the usual phone call, but whom was I to call? I had friends, of course, of

long standing—great influence, some of them. I ran through