Jackie and Me(69)
Patrick’s Day: “The Irish author, Sean O’Faolain, claims the Irish are deficient in the art of love. Do you agree?”
How closely Jack was holding up his end I can’t say, but
they did go out to dinner on a regular basis, and for the first time ever, he agreed to be interviewed—on the subject of Senate pages. It was from Jack’s own page that she learned
how malnourished he was, and she began at once traveling
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to his office with an osier basket of lunches prepared by
the Auchincloss cook. On weekends, if she could spare the
time, she shopped for clothes, and, finding his complexion
sallow, lured him away one afternoon to a touring carnival. Afterward, she showed me the pictures they snapped in
the photo booth, not too different from the ones Jack and I took when we were lads applying for passports to Europe.
The same stop-motion succession, each head angled toward
the other in some changed way, each image related to and
utterly distinct from the next. They stayed in the booth long after the camera had ceased snapping and came out disheveled and a little abraded.
Jackie was still looking for a way to be of use, and Ho
Chi Minh provided it. As a newcomer angling for the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Jack needed to get on top of the Indochina question, which was submerged in reams of French: a dozen or so books that covered everything from Asian colonialism to Algerian despotism. He would have remembered Jackie was a French literature major, but he couldn’t have
known she’d been studying the Indochina issue from her days in the Sorbonne. Nor could he have known that, having asked her to translate, she would spend so many hours each night squeezing those dry gourds for their secrets before carrying the translated pages next morning to Jack’s office.
In April, he escorted her to Lee Bouvier’s wedding. It
was perhaps the couple’s most public outing yet; it was also a carpet of landmines for Jackie, whose younger sister had developed the maddening habit of matching her every accomplishment. Debutante of the Year, French école, top-flight
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women’s magazine. Now she had gone a step further. She’d
beaten Jackie to the altar.
And had snagged not just some dime-a-dozen stockbroker but the adopted son of a wealthy publisher and (it was
whispered) the natural son of British royalty. Even Mrs.
Auchincloss was impressed. If Michael Canfield drank a little more than he ought and took more pills than were strictly good for him—if he would, before another seven years had elapsed, keel over dead on a transatlantic jet—at the time, he looked safe as houses. The only possible counterbalance Jackie could set on the scale was to hook her hand around
the arm of a war hero and senator.
Only Jack, far from laying claim to her in the manner of
a proper boyfriend, seemed to detach himself by the filmiest of degrees the moment they entered the church. Indeed, he proved such an object of desire that, during the after-reception, Jackie had to insert herself more than once between him and the guests, like a gal Friday dragging her boss to his next appointment. Once, he vanished from sight altogether, and although he was back again within ten minutes, behav—
ing like one who had never left, she couldn’t stop looking.
Not at him, she realized, but his hair. Some hand had visited it. The obvious candidate was his own, but Jack guarded his mop the way trolls patrol bridges and, having once plunged his fingers through it, never touched it again. There was,
moreover, a foreign layer of scent, in the jasmine family,
pressed against his skin, waiting to be translated.
“Why do you keep staring at me?” he asked.
*
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She brought it up with me the next time I saw her, and I
told her she was imagining things.
“Oh, I know,” she said. “A man wouldn’t just skip out on
his date in the middle of a wedding and do that, would he?
Men aren’t that way, are they?”
She tried, but the scent memory wouldn’t leave. Nor
would the words of her mother, who, after the newly married couple had gone off in their hired Rolls-Royce, bent toward her daughter and said, “Your senator did well. Bachelors usually hate going to other men’s weddings, but he was the
calmest body in the room.”
It was true. Jack had surveyed that vast matrimonial apparatus—the orchids, the trays of champagne, the
golf-collared dress shirts, the jazz octet, the Washington and Lee a cappella group, the pearl-gray waistcoats, the gabar-dine going-away dress—with the serenity of one who would never be at its mercy.
At the newspaper, the Inquiring Camera Girl’s questions
began to take a darker tone. Perhaps she was still imagining that mysterious hand, combing Jack’s hair. “Should engaged couples reveal their past?” she demanded to know. “If your
spouse spoke another person’s name in their sleep, what
would you do?”
From there: “When did the romance go out of your marriage?” “What should a wife do if her husband is brought up in a prostitution case?” “Should a man ever tell his wife to shut up, in so many words?”