Jackie and Me(84)

Vernon, which stood in the clotting dusk like a doll’s house of white Palladian matchsticks with a red-shingle play-roof.

“Do you think they’re looking back at us?” she asked.

“Who?”

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LOUIS BAYARD


“The Mount Vernon ladies. They’re very, very tiny, and

they’re staring back at us through lorgnettes. They want to know who are those curious aerial creatures.”

“Who fly up but never come down.”

“Precisely.” She curled her hand around my arm and

leaned into me.

We sat in silence for a while. Now and then, a harassed

electrician’s voice would call up some reassurance—a new

circuit was being assembled—it was only a matter of time—

and I wanted to call back and ask what was time and what

was space. We had entered that strange hour of evening

when light and night merge, and the usual coordinates are

scrambled and the old distances are elided. Mount Vernon

was about as close as my wingtip, and the ground, for all I knew, was a thousand feet away. In a daze, I reached into the Cracker Jack box that was resting in Jackie’s lap and

came away with a tiny plastic satchel. Nothing more than

the trinket that came with every box. A second later, the

wrapping was peeled away and the prize was resting in my

hand. A gold-tin ring with a vermilion mock gem. I can’t

say even now what possessed me, but in the next moment, I

was slipping it onto Jackie’s finger. With what I would now call a feeling of presentiment for I was in no way surprised to see how easily it cleared the hurdle of the second knuckle and nestled without a trace of embarrassment against Mr.

Kennedy’s million-dollar ring.

“It fits,” she said.

“Of course it does.”



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It was then, on the purest of whims, that I twisted toward

her—the chair rocking from the surprise of it—and took her

hand in mine.

“Jackie . . .”

“Yes?”

“If things don’t work out with you and Jack . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . might I be your backup husband?”

Looking back, I see how many contingencies lay embedded just there. She might have flushed with embarrassment or contrived the tinniest of laughs. She might have chided me, begged me not to talk nonsense. In a spirit of charity, she might have ignored me altogether. Instead, there rose from her face a grin of such resplendence that I felt—well, apprehended.

“I would be honored, Lem.”

The sun had long since set and the hour was approaching nine when the Ferris wheel at last shuddered to life and began descending in asthmatic segments. Just seconds before we landed, Jackie slipped the ring from her finger and rested it with a quiet emphasis in my palm and whispered, “I love you, Lem.”

THIRTY-THREE

J ack reemerged from the Mediterranean a week later,

shaggy-haired and browned—and in no way ready to

address himself to the hard logistics of his own wedding. Like his fiancée, he had long since ceded control to Mr. Kennedy, and he cared less about what his best man Bobby would be saying than what kind of cigars would be available for the reception.

So when he invited me over to his Georgetown row house the

Sunday before, I was under no illusion we’d be trying on morning coats. Margaret had, in a helpless way, thrown together some leftover baked ham with leftover baked beans and a bowl of salted pumpkin seeds. By way of compensation, there was a full pitcher of Bloody Marys, salad included. Today, I suppose, they’d call the whole enterprise brunch, but back then, it was a

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Catholic boy tumbling out of bed too late for Mass. Jack didn’t bother to dress but threw on a monogrammed silk robin’s-egg blue bathrobe that he didn’t trouble to cinch the whole way.

We played a few rounds of backgammon—I lost three dollars

and seventy-five cents—and then Jack reached, in an arduous sort of way, for the last slice of ham.

“The condemned man’s last meal,” I was moved to say.

“Monday, Tuesday, Wed—no, I’ve got a few more.”

“Poor you. A beautiful girl forever at your beck and call.

The saints weep.”

“Why bring in the saints? Some things are just unwelcome. When regarded in a different light.”

That’s how I regarded him now.

“How exactly did the light alter?” I asked. “Between now

and two weeks ago? Please don’t tell me some girl dragged

you to the nearest justice de paix.”

“I was neither drugged nor dragged.”

“Then what happened?”

“Gunilla.”

I ran the syllables along my tongue in order to trust them.

Goo-NILL-a.

“She sounds like a wasting disease,” I said.

“She kind of is.”

“Does she have a last name?”

“Von Post.”

“Kraut?”

“Swede.”

I took the celery stick from my Bloody Mary, gave it a