Page 143 of Jackie

“I don’t agree,” the priest said.

The score, I remember, was deuce. I served. The ball nicked the edge of the service box and flew out of his reach. My point.

“I need all of this behind me,” I say to Bobby now.

It’s spring again. Buds on the trees. How can it be spring?

…

The writer, William Manchester, is edgy, red-faced. Faint stains of sweat when he takes off his jacket. Nails bitten down to the quick.

He’s arrived with his tape recorder, his notebook. He has a kind of unkempt intensity. Feral. He was a Marine, I remember, as Bobby walks him into the living room.

“Please sit down, Mr. Manchester,” I say. “Would you like a cigarette?”

“Quit two years ago.”

I strike a match. “Are you sure?”

He hesitates, then accepts, and I relax. He is not a Mailer. He’s one I can manage.

—

“Are you going to put down all the facts,” I ask, “like who ate what for breakfast? Are you going to put yourself in the book too?”

He looks at me for a moment. “I’m not part of the story.”

“I think you know what I mean. How will you create an objective account?”

He places the tape recorder behind the plant on a side table.

“Have you started the tape?” I ask.

“Do you hear it?”

“No.”

He nods, a little smile.

—

As his questions begin, I realize he’s already lived through that day. He is asking the questions that matter.

Manchester is different.

—

“You seem to know most of the details,” I say. “What do you really need from me?”

“Everything you remember.”

—

He’s nervous. I can feel it. He is also looking for something in me no one else has wanted to see. I remember Bobby telling me that Manchester was in the ground war at Okinawa, the island battlefields of Tarawa in 1943, from November 20 to November 23. Twenty years before Dallas, he was in the middle of death. Men next to him were killed. He’s been spattered by blood. Like me, he knows what it is to be the one who survives.

—

“Mr. Manchester.”

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