Jackie and Me(83)

“I don’t remember yours.”

“But I’ve had more. So they become less remarkable. The

good news is you should be down by Tuesday.”

“That is my hope.”

“You’re almost twenty-four,” I said. “How does that

almost feel?”

“Do you know I think it’s the first birthday where I’ve felt—

oh, what? That I’m moving away from instead of toward.”



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“Away from what?”

She paused to puzzle it out. “What I might have been, I

guess. I sometimes think about what Berenson told me.”

All this time I’d known her, and I had to wait until we

were stranded on a Ferris wheel to learn she’d met the great critic Bernard Berenson. Who, back when I was a young art history major, was my sun, my moon. It’s not too much to

say I was going to be Berenson—tell the world exactly what it should be seeing.

“Oh,” said Jackie, “he was a perfectly charming man.

We met him at his villa in Florence, and he told me you

should only marry someone who will constantly stimulate

you, and you him. Don’t waste your time with people who

are—what was his—people who are life- diminishing. You had to live for your art.”

“It helps if you live in Florence.”

“Oh, no,” she answered, with a pulse of urgency. “You

can do it anywhere.”

That’s when she told me about coming down from the

Alps into Grenoble. All of twenty years old, and hurling herself at France in the pitch of summer, and finding, like an apparition, a flat scorching plain and above it a vast enfold-ing hot blue sky. Rows of poplars on the edge of every field to protect the crops from the mistral, and short spiky palm trees with blazing red flowers growing at their feet.

“I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful, Lem. I

remember thinking, What if I stopped right here? Never left?

Oh, I don’t know how I would have managed it. Knocked on

some farmer’s door, I guess, and begged for lodging—in the

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barn, maybe. I wouldn’t have had any useful skills to offer, but maybe I could have peeled potatoes or weeded the onion patch or something. I think I would have done anything they threw at me if I just could sit every day at the same time and watch the same sky, the same trees. Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, do you really see me as a milkmaid? The dirndl and lace cap?”

“Someone has to do it.”

“Thank God it wasn’t me.”

Her head, through some axis of weariness, declined

toward my shoulder. It was strange, I remember, to feel in

the midst of that humid evening air the more particular

humidity of another body.

“I’m not making a mistake, am I, Lem?”

“How do you mean?”

“Getting married.”

“Of course not.”

“Berenson would be so angry. I won’t be living for art,

I’ll be living for a man.”

“Oh,” I said, “there’s an art to that, too. Ask any wife.

Besides, you’re marrying the finest man I know.”

It’s funny. Until that moment, I’d never described Jack

that way. Why should I have done so now? If you’d asked me

to anatomize it, I might have mumbled something about a

rich, dilettantish young man, able to live exactly as he liked, making the extraordinary decision to live in a way that mattered. To be of value to people who weren’t rich and didn’t winter in Florida and who struggled even to put food on the

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table. Seen from that slant, power for him was just a tool for sharpening his value to a particular point.

Or was I really just thinking of his value in my own

life? When we first met, I had several inches and three

dozen pounds on him, yet, from our earliest days, he was

my defender. From the fascistic enforcers of the sixth form.

From the hated housemaster who backed me up one night

against our fireplace and shook me until I cried. “You should get your hands off him,” I remember Jack snarling. Nobody ever believes loud people can detect undertones, but I can’t tell you how many times I overheard someone encouraging Jack to, in so many words, get rid of the court jester and

hearing him respond—or not respond at all, with equal elo—

quence—that we were a package deal. And in his world, a

deal was a deal.

None of this was I able to articulate to Jackie atop that

Ferris wheel, but maybe some part leaked through because

she gave my hand a light squeeze and murmured, “What a

good friend you are.”

And then added:

“But, you know, fine men don’t always make fine

husbands.”

“This one will,” I said. “You can trust me.”

“He just needs to get it out of his system, is that it?”

I looked at her, then looked across the river toward Mount