Page 140 of Jackie

As the tapes begin to spin, it’s like I can’t talk. Arthur’s voice is familiar, kind, but the words slip over the surface of things.

“Jack would read,” I say, “waking, at the table, at meals, after dinner, in the bathtub, a book propped open on his bureau as he was doing his tie. It’s funny, the things you remember that surface out of nowhere.”

I talk about General de Gaulle, Khrushchev’s wife, and the missile crisis—how hard it was, tense and strained, those thirteen days.

“When Jack came home for a nap, I’d lie down with him. When he went for a walk, he’d take me with him. And do you know what he said when the crisis was over? ‘Well, if anybody’s going to shoot me, today’s the day they should do it. I’ll never top this.’ He was the most unselfconscious person I ever met. In America, we have a great civilization—and so many don’t realize it. He and I used to talk about that.”

I stop there.

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I don’t say anything about how Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to disappear, but instead she grew up to be an artist whose medium was fame.

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I don’t talk about how every relationship requires its own set of strategies.

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I don’t say anything about mad young hearts or how once, before we were married, I was reading a poem to him, he leaned over and kissed me, and the words and the heat mixed between our mouths.

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I do not, of course, tell about that day of the tub and the whip at Glen Ora, or how I told Jack it wasn’t the women—it was never the women—it was the writer who’d come along someday to dig the dirt up and blow the house down.

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I don’t talk about how after Patrick slipped out of the world, I left and went to Greece, even when Jack asked me to stay. I turned away from his face and the longing in it I had waited years for because I’d finally given up waiting, and I didn’t want to risk my heart, and now I deeply regret that. I don’t talk about Dallas: the blazing sun, the sound, the sudden dark of his blood—hypnotic, mystical, iridescent.

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You don’t get time back. Any of it. You don’t get to make a different choice in a moment you think will be just another moment in a span of years you assume you have.

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You don’t get the chance, for example, to turn around and choose instead to stay.

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Sometimes, oddly, I see him throwing a football in Georgetown, that free, beautiful strength of his body, even when his back would twist and he would be in pain.

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I don’t talk about the countless times he’d look at me across a room, at a political event, a dinner, or a party. He’d search a sea of people to find me, his eyes on my face, and I became transparent, rootless, a balloon, belonging nowhere and to no one else when he looked at me that way.

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I say none of this.

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Life, when it happens, is more full of silence than words. I give Arthur only the words he came for.

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The tapes spin. One reel flows to the next. I tong ice into a glass, sip my drink, and I tell him how sometimes, at night, Jack and I would read together and sometimes he’d ask for a record, the floor cool under my feet as I crossed the room to set one on the turntable; the notes would rise, and when the songs ended, every night before bed, he would say a prayer.

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