Page 155 of Jackie

He smiles. It says everything, the smile.

I put the Cavafy book into my bag as our entrées arrive.

“Are you happy in New York?” he asks.

“I can almost disappear.”

He laughs. A quick laugh. Alpha teeth. White and strong.

“You should come back to Greece,” he says.

Such a curious man. With his overtures. Presumptuous at times. But when he tells his stories, the room slips over my head.

Over crème brûlée, I mention the ongoing battle with the biographers, even Schlesinger and Sorensen. “Jack would hate what Sorensen’s done,” I say. “Too hagiographic.”

“Better than the alternative.”

“I suppose. Schlesinger has portrayed Jack as a Roman senator, cool, unemotional. I told him that was all wrong. Jack was more like the Greeks. He brought light to the dark. He made decisions with an eye to the long throw of time.”

And an eye to glory, I almost add. Like Achilles. That’s the comparison Jack would have wanted. Achilles or Odysseus. Neither, though, has ever felt quite right to me. I tell Onassis then that I sometimes think of the scene in The Iliad when Achilles murders Hector, the Trojan prince. For twelve days, out of grief and rage, Achilles drags the body around the walled city, and every night, after each desecration, the gods quietly restore Hector’s body. Heal his cuts, the broken bones and wounds. They rinse the dust from his skin.

“It’s how myth is made,” I say. “Destroyed, resurrected, destroyed, retold.”

Later I will feel like I talked too much, too freely. Why? Because he’s an outsider? Is that why?

“In the American papers,” he says, “everyone seems quite concerned about which invitations you accept and which you decline. They talk about you like you are their queen.”

“I do have to consider what Widow Kennedy can or should do.”

“Because there are other Kennedys with ambitions?”

“Bobby’s good to me,” I say. “And he is so good to John and Caroline.”

“He’s a noble man.”

A lie, I know. He doesn’t like Bobby. He never has.

“Are you going to Hyannis Port soon?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Give him my best, please.” A slight smile around his mouth. Not kind.

“We were having such a nice time,” I say.

“I meant it in a perfectly nice way.”

“Please, Mr. Onassis, don’t be like everyone else and pretend.”

—

There was more we spoke about that night, but that, for me, was the note on which it ended.

…

The first night I spend at the Cape that spring, the house has the cold damp smell of winter trapped in wood. I throw the windows open.

—

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