Jackie and Me(55)

them all in my mind. Family members, old prep-school

chums. It was then I realized that, for all our relatively brief acquaintance, Jackie was the one person I couldn’t imagine blanching at the news. The one person who might carry on

afterward as if it had never happened, laugh it all to the

winds, which was the only comfort I could extract.

So I called the extension at Merrywood. I must have

dialed four or five times before a maid picked up. Another

five or six minutes before Jackie came on the line.

“What’s up, Lem?”

Still I was striving for urbanity. “You won’t believe it.” “Fellow came right up to me.” “Just being pleasant.”

196





LOUIS BAYARD


“Thought he was just some drifter down on his luck.” “Next

thing you know.” In retrospect, I can see there must have

been a hollowness at the root because Jackie cut back in.

“What’s the bail?”

“Well, it’s five hundred, which is totally ridiculous. I

mean, there’s got to be a bondsman awake at this hour. Hell, there’s always a bondsman awake, isn’t there?”

“No,” she said. “It should be cash.”

This gave me pause. Rich people rarely walked around

with money in those days.

“I’ll ask Mummy,” she said. “She’s got cigar boxes salted

everywhere. I just have to figure out where they are. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Strange, it was only then I realized I’d been carving div—

ots out of my scalp, so deeply that blood now blazed like

war paint from my fingertips. I must have made some cry

because she asked if I was all right. I nodded, stupidly,

as if she could see me. Then I asked if she could call my

mother.

“What should I tell her?”

“Oh, just . . . tell her I’m not feeling so hot. Tell her I’m staying over at Jack’s. And . . . you won’t tell Jack, will you?”

“Of course not.”

Well, there must have been a lot of cigar boxes scattered around Merrywood because hour massed on hour. My

cell was twelve-feet square with a single toilet, unflushed, unflushable. My cellmates were a young boy charged with firing a pistol and a drunk of no clear age who slept through



JACKIE & ME

197

the night except to vomit. The contents of his stomach

formed a steadily welling pool around him that drove me

finally to the furthest corner, where I sat, speaking to no one. I grieved, as though the world had already sawed out a circle beneath my feet. I thought of my mother, my sister, my colleagues at Emerson Drug. But the image that gave me the sharpest pang was Jack. How many thankful prayers

did I cast up that my actual, hated first name—the name

on my driver’s license, the name on the booking card—was

Kirk. Only somebody well versed in Billings genealogy could travel from there to Kirk LeMoyne, thence to Lem, thence to Lem’s friend. No matter what happened, I kept reassuring myself, Jack would never be touched.

But the night bled on and the concrete dug in and the

smell of rot fixed in my pores, and my mind, sprung from

the cage that contained my body, sprinted toward every

calamity. Cameras at my arraignment. My picture, pinned

by flashbulbs to every front page. For some reason, it was

Mrs. Auchincloss I envisioned, pausing in the act of sprin—

kling Worcestershire on her shirred eggs to squint at my

half-toned image. By God, he looks familiar! The dawning would be gradual but ultimate and would be followed by phone calls. The news would fan out until there would be no square left in Christendom to harbor me.

Well, one way or another, I don’t think I got more than

five minutes of sleep that whole night, but if I didn’t exactly doze, I dazed, until I heard my own last name, piercing the clay of evening-morning-afternoon.

“Billings.”

198





LOUIS BAYARD


My effects were waiting for me in the anteroom. So was

Jackie, dressed for work in a tailored blue linen suit with a tiny white check. She could not have looked more foreign to her surroundings, yet she fairly beamed to see me and

hooked a hand through my arm and walked me past the

interrogation department and the booking station, chattering the whole way, as if we’d just met up at Harvey’s or the Occidental.

“Oh, Lem, what an awful bore for you. Now listen, I’ve

found a lawyer. He’s very well connected—son of a congressman—and he gets every one off. I mean, he strolls into court and prosecutors throw up their hands. So here’s his card—he said to call him when you get back. Not from the

office, of course. Oh, and I talked to your mother, and she says you should only come home when you’re feeling up to it.

I told her it was probably just one of those twenty-four-hour affairs, and it didn’t sound like she was at all fretting. But maybe call her from Union Station to let her know you’re on your way.”

Her speech, it seems to me now, was a kind of flume,