Page 148 of Jackie

“Why don’t you write a tribute we can include?”

“I can’t even write a letter to a friend.”

“It doesn’t have to be long. And it will be your words. You’ll have complete control.”

—

After they’re gone, I walk inside with Bobby. The children still play on the lawn. It’s almost dusk.

“Will you hurl yourself into Tennyson with me?” I ask.

“Sure.”

“Or Shakespeare?”

“Whatever you want, Jackie.”

I look at him and he doesn’t look away. It happens then, something stopped in the air between us, and through the awkwardness and the silence, I can hear the waves, the laughter of the children, still with that raw and terrible magic.

I pull out a book, find a page, and hand it to him. He reads. The lamplight plays its tricks, and his face looking down at the page is lovely and hungry and doomed. He glances up.

“What?” he says.

“I was thinking about a letter your father wrote to me once about Jack. How he was a child of fate. If he fell into a puddle of mud in a white suit, he’d come up ready for a Newport Ball.”

His eyes close to me then.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s one of those things my father would say.”

—

It isn’t about Bobby, is it? It never was. It’s about some other deeper thing inside me he ignites. Some deep, lost burning that reminds me of you.

—

That night, I sit at my desk. A stack of books, a pad of paper, a pen.

I start from memory. Incomplete passages, fragments. Not my words but the words of authors Jack loved. The writing calms me. I copy lines from Tennyson, lines from Richard III, lines from Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way.

I spend hours writing it out. Then I go back and make cuts and margin notes, my own words this time, which I weave into the rest. I tear up most of what I’ve done and start again. Each time I rewrite it, I know it’s not what I want and it isn’t enough, but it’s more than I had before.

I put the pen away.

—

In the dark you come to me. You cross the room from the window. You’ve just come in from sailing. Your clothes damp, hair raked with salt. But you are there, reaching toward me through the moon.

—

There was an evening once, years ago, when we were walking back to our house from dinner at your parents’. Caroline was with us. She danced on ahead, her white dress flitting. “Like an angel,” you said, then you stopped walking for a moment, your head tilted back, and the dark poured over your throat, your skin so pale, looking up toward the stars, those bits of radiance we barely noticed that fell like tiny bright knives through levels of distance and time.

—

How does it happen?

I want to ask you this.

How can I wonder something like this with anyone other than you?

---