Page 111 of Jackie

He laughs and puts the pen down. “Where’s my tie?”

Jack

Later, he’ll wish he’d grabbed that little drawing on the way out of the room. Folded it into his pocket to give to her on the plane home.

But he forgets all about it. She is late, and he forgets almost everything but the fact that she’s late. He knocks on the door of the room where she’s getting dressed. No answer. He knocks again, more sharply.

“Be right out,” she calls.

He paces the hall.

—

When the door opens five minutes later, he looks up and she is there, black velvet dress, long sleeves, her neck roped with pearls. The hotel staff is in a neat line as they walk down the narrow hall together. He greets them as they pass: “Hello.” “Good evening.” Back in their suite, someone else is packing their belongings, bringing the bags downstairs and loading them into the car for the drive to the Houston Coliseum, the dinner there, then on to the airport.

They cross the mezzanine floor of the Rice Hotel and walk into the ballroom, where Spanish workers from the League of United Latin American Citizens are gathered.

He steps up to the podium and says a few words about the Alliance for Progress. Then he introduces her and steps away, leaving her alone on the stage. She hesitates for a moment, then begins to speak in Spanish, the words slow, the smile almost shy. They quiet for her. He catches a word here, a word there. He can feel her voice resonate, that pale of her face and her long dark shape, and the feeling of her is like water in the rage of the lights shining down, that almost otherworldly calm about her, grace.

—

Afterward, on the forty-five-minute flight to Fort Worth, he tells her what he overhead Lyndon Johnson say to his aide Valenti. “People just love that gal.”

This makes her laugh.

He does not tell her that when Lyndon said that, Valenti almost didn’t hear him at first, because he was staring at Jack’s right hand and the involuntary shake of the fingers.

It’s worse, more intense, when he’s tired. He’d shoved his hand into his pocket, and Valenti’s head snapped up, embarrassed to have been caught staring.

—

Thirty minutes into the flight, she’s worked through nearly half a pack of Newport menthols. Eight stubs in the ashtray. One smolders. She notices him watching her. She picks up the one still lit and softly grinds it out.

…

George wakes him at 7:30 a.m. Gray rain beats against the window.

“Let’s hope it lets up, George,” he says.

—

The Connally vs. Yarborough conflict is in the headline news.

Storm of Controversy Surrounds Kennedy’s Visit. Widening Democratic Split.

—

Half an hour later, he walks out of the hotel into the drizzle and crosses the red-bricked street. The crowd thickens. Chants of his name mix in with the rain. A woman runs up to him, aiming something black at his face. A flash goes off, then someone gets hold of her and she is borne away. “Just a camera, sir. Sorry about that.”

—

The crowd is chanting her name now: “Jack-ie! Jack-ie!”

—

Her schedule had been on the table; he’d glanced at it before walking out of the room. Next to breakfast in the grand ballroom, her handwriting in red script. JBK won’t attend, she’d written.

“Tell Clint to get her down,” he says now to the agent with him. “I know she didn’t plan on it, but tell Clint to explain I need her down here. Now.”

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