Page 139 of Jackie

“Read to me, please,” I say, taking the book from him, turning pages until I come to a passage I want. “Here.”

His voice is awkward at first—the funny harsh twang that reminds me of Jack, though his voice is rougher. I settle against the pillow, close my eyes. The words feel soft and cool.

He comes to the end of a section.

“Do you want me to go on?” he says.

“I love the stories of the Greeks,” I say, “how they believed in tragedy as transformation, that out of horrific pain you could construct a way forward.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t a perfect marriage, Bobby.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I shouldn’t have left him last fall to go to Greece with Lee. I was devastated over Patrick. That was most of it, but I was angry too.”

I don’t elaborate. Even to say it feels like a betrayal.

“Jack loved you, Jackie, more than he ever loved anyone—”

“Don’t. Just lie down with me for a while.”

He is looking at the wall across the room. I touch that part of his cheekbone, not with love or sympathy, not with anything really beyond an abstract macabre fascination. I can see how grief has done its work, shifting the structure of his face under the skin, darker hollows below his eyes. Scoured. The line of his mouth is thin and dry.

The sky is clear. I’ve left the curtains pulled back, and the moon shines through the divided window sash.

—

That night I cry for hours, my body like some vague streak of lightning in his arms.

—

He is gone when I wake up again. The overhead is off, but he left a lamp on. The room is empty. Just that pool of lamplight and the burning strangeness of being the one who remains.

…

I agree to meet with Arthur Schlesinger for the oral history he’s building about Jack’s presidency.

“I won’t talk to him about Dallas,” I tell Bobby the morning Arthur is due to arrive.

“You don’t have to.”

“And these tapes will be sealed, for as long as I decide they should be?”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll keep the right to strike anything I wish I hadn’t said?”

“It’s all up to you.”

“What about the writer, Manchester—is that also up to me?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“Good.”

—

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