Jackie and Me(65)

in some half-voluntary way his scent, or maybe I just mean

the scent of us, as we were then. Teenage boys, without a care for the future. And indeed, when Jackie came walking in that night, I started like a fourth-former caught smoking outside chapel.

“Would you mind company?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

She gave the coverlet a once-over before lowering herself,

with some reluctance, onto it.

“I’m sorry about that Skakel beast,” she said.

“Oh, I only came here to rest. I’ve had a week.”

“Me, too,” she said, kicking off her shoes and giving her

legs a stretch. Her eyes ranged from corner to corner, coolly recording each object. It occurred to me then this was the first time she’d been here.

“Cripes,” she said. “He told me he had a valet.”

“Oh, that poor guy has enough to do cleaning up the

rest of the house. Jack drags mess wherever he goes. Do you know I once found the remains of a hamburger on his living-room mantel? Half-eaten, green with mold.”

“And he never smelled it?”

“Nope.”

“Well then. He won’t know if we smoke in his room.”

“He wouldn’t know if we set it on fire.”

I took out a pack of Luckys and a lighter, and Jackie

fetched an ashtray from beneath a pile of old newspapers

and set it between us and took three long drags.



JACKIE & ME

231

“God, Lem, I feel ten years old and a hundred and everything in between. I keep telling myself it’s not an inaugural ball, it’s just another ghastly party.”

“On a larger scale, that’s all.”

“And, really, it’s so much better to be working it because

I won’t have time to ask what the hell I’m doing there.”

“Listen,” I said. “Can you help me out with something?”

“Sure.”

“See, I have this dilemma, and the best way I can come at

it is through metaphor.”

“I adore metaphor.”

“So let’s say a friend of yours is floating down a river

and—let’s say there might—I mean, there might be a waterfall round the next bend.”

“Ooh.”

“Well, you’d feel the need to warn that friend, wouldn’t

you? Just in case?”

“Of course. And then speak to them about their unfortunate floating habit.”

“Ha! Well, it’s not the friend’s fault, you see. The friend just sort of—fell in . . .”

“So not pushed.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Jumped in without knowing.”

“More like that.”

“Well, then of course you’d warn them.” She studied me. “I’m wondering if all this is more of an analogy than a metaphor.”

“You might be right.”

232





LOUIS BAYARD


“If that’s the case, I’m betting the one on shore is you.”

“That’s correct.”

“As to who’s in the water . . . well, Jack’s a much better

swimmer than I am . . . in real life, I mean, so . . . I can’t imagine him being swept away by anything.”

“Me, neither.”

“And I can’t imagine you wanting to save George Skakel,

so . . . I guess that just leaves me.”

The dawning settled gradually over her.

“The only question left,” she said, “is the nature of this

waterfall.”

“Well, you see, it’s only a potential waterfall. Pertaining to—to Jack himself. Who, you know, being a longtime bachelor, has gotten into certain habits, which are not the habits a fellow gets out of necessarily.”

“Lem, you’re circling.”

“Okay, so look at Mr. Kennedy. Married a good long

time, fathered nine kids, done his duty by everyone, but

once in a while, being a certain kind of fellow, he steps out.

Nothing serious. Not an affair of the heart. It might be a hatcheck girl at Ciro’s. A showgirl, that kind of thing.” My voice was still light, but my hands, I noticed, were woven as tightly as two helixes. “Well, it’s over before anyone knows it, and it’s all very discreet, and if Mrs. Kennedy is any the wiser, she doesn’t squawk because—well, I can’t speak

for her exactly, but she probably figures she’s got what she wants out of life. Or she figures that’s just how men are, the dogs.”

I remember Jackie was still amused enough to ask:



JACKIE & ME

233

“Is that how you are, Lem?”

“Oh, I don’t mean me. I don’t mean all men. The point is . . .”

She rested her cigarette in the ashtray’s indentation, gave it a tap. A second tap. Then she did something rather dis-combobulating under the circumstances. She looked at me.

And it was under that specific pressure . . . well, if I peer into Schr?dinger’s box, here again is the point where it all might have forked, if I had done what I’d been sent to do.