Page 138 of Jackie

“They want to eat me alive,” I tell Bobby.

“No,” he says, “they worship you.”

“Only because I’m obliterated.”

I hate how bitter it sounds. I know it bothers him—that tone in my voice. Like I’m accusing him too. Which isn’t what I mean.

—

We talk about the writer Manchester, who’s anxious to get started on the book he’s been contracted to write. Not yet, I say. I’m not ready. There are other interviews as well that have to be done with Arthur Schlesinger about Jack’s presidency.

“To set the historical record,” Bobby says. “We need to start in a few weeks.”

Too soon.

He tells me about the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination, to confirm there was no conspiracy.

“How could there not have been a conspiracy?” I say.

I’ve gone back to the Edith Hamilton book, The Greek Way. I’ve reread, twice, the chapter on Euripides, who wrote about war with a modern eye, peeling away the sham glory of violence to the evil underneath. He was the one who wrote about the women. Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra. The ones who were left.

“I won’t be able to stay here,” I tell Bobby. “In Washington.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“France.”

“I mean where here?”

“Not here.”

“New York?”

“I love New York.”

“Good,” he says. “We’ll move to New York.”

I smile. “We? That’ll cause a stir.”

“I’ll run for senator from New York. We’ll move there.”

“Won’t we have to stagger things a bit? People will begin to think the unimaginable.”

He doesn’t answer, and I suddenly realize he’s already considered this.

“No one will think anything,” he says, “because there’s nothing to think.”

“You must try to like Lyndon a little more,” I say lightly, “if you want to run for Senate.”

—

Still Bobby comes, every morning, every evening. And still there’s the burnout design of that day in November between us—the memory I have and he does not.

Sometimes we talk. Sometimes hours pass without us exchanging a word. Sometimes I cry, and he holds me until I sleep. Sometimes when I wake up, he’s gone, but more often he’s sitting by my bed in a funnel of light with my book The Greek Way, underlining passages, dog-earing a page.

“That book will be ruined, Bobby, if you keep going at it like that.”

He glances up, like he’d forgotten I was there.

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