Jackie and Me(66)

Would she have doubled down? For exactly the reason Jack

suggested, that she wanted to square accounts? Or would

she have taken flight?

“The point is,” I heard myself say, “Jack isn’t like his father. He won’t be that kind of man.”

What amazes me, looking back, is that it was spoken

with the same force as truth. Perhaps more force, because it seems to me now I was wishing it into being. And that’s why, I think, my eyes were already drifting away from hers.

Toward that ideal outcome.

“So you’re saying he wouldn’t be that kind of husband,”

said Jackie.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he cares for you, goose. More than he’s ever

cared for anyone, really.”

“Then who needs to be saved?”

I blinked at her. “Who . . .”

“Your analogy.”

234





LOUIS BAYARD


“Oh, well, it turns out nobody. It’s all fine. It was only a potential waterfall anyway.”

“So the person in the water can stay there.”

“Sure! If she wants.” I reached out and gave her wrist

a light squeeze. “Because there’s someone on the shore.

Making sure she’ll be all right.”

Now, for some reason, it was no longer a task to hold her

gaze.

“I love you,” she said. “I love you, Lem.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

B ack when my friend Raul was coming over more

often, I would sometimes find him peering at the

framed photographs on my walls. I assumed at first he was

just idly curious, but eventually, at some private cost to him, I learned that his family had come to America not long after the Bay of Pigs and that the Kennedy name had for him the effect of a lighthouse signal. It fascinated him, I think, to see the great man reduced to these segments, and once he had exhausted the photos, it was probably inevitable he should

start digging into the cabinets and built-in drawers and the secretary. One morning, I found him sifting through a file folder of Jackie’s Times-Herald columns, organized by date.

236





LOUIS BAYARD


“Old newsprint is very fragile,” I said. “Please do not paw.”

He lifted one of the tannin pages to the light. “Papi, I

believe you are the only man in the world who has kept these.”

I was going to suggest that the news doesn’t really die,

but then, in a brusque voice, he asked, “Does she know you

keep them?”

“You mean, have I told her? No, I keep them for me.”

“When was the last time that you spoke with her?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

He set the page back in the stack. “But you are friends

and all.”

“Well, of course. People get busy.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you even know her.”

He was kidding, of course. He’d seen the photos. Jackie

and me in every setting, her cheek to my jowl. There’s a

picture I’m particularly fond of from those early years.

The three of us sitting on some Washington, D.C. parapet,

maybe the west side of the Capitol. It’s summer, to judge

from my cream suit, and the mood is summery, too. Jack has

made some crack, and Jackie is recoiling right into me, for it’s my arm that’s curled protectively around her shoulder.

Well, I would have to be the world’s most spectacular forger to have inserted myself into that image, or indeed the countless other images where we were captured together. Take me out of those photographs, they no longer cohere.

Yet now, isn’t it funny? Sometimes I will lift one of those same silver-framed pictures from its perch on the wall or the credenza, and some of Raul’s skepticism must seep through because I pause in a wondering confusion. Was I really there?



JACKIE & ME

237

I suppose, if I really wanted confirmation, I could simply

pick up the phone. I still have the number but, for some reason, I’ve been less inclined to use it lately. A few years back, I did call her up to say Bobby Junior was in town and Chris Lawford, too, and wouldn’t it be grand if she could bring over the kids. “Gosh,” she said. “I’m not sure that works

for us.”

“Well, maybe next Friday? I’ve got a shipment of scrimshaw, and it’s got John Junior’s name all over it.”

“Oh, you know, now’s not a good time.” There was only

a touch more color to her voice when she added: “I’m just

trying to keep them safe, Lem.”

Which of us was the first to hang up? Did we promise to

check in over the holidays? I don’t recall feeling that a rupture had happened. More a puzzle that, having been severed into its component pieces, required only a little application to piece back together.

Jackie, I should say, had long since yanked her kids

from the Hyannis bacchanal. She’d heard—the world had

heard—the tales of expulsions, arrests, overdoses, Jeep