Page 160 of Jackie

This makes him laugh. “Lorca once said only mystery allows us to live.”

“Exactly.”

“I was in Buenos Aires with Lorca.”

“You mean with him there or there at the same time?”

“I drank with him. He was a refugee. I was a young man working at the telephone company with a wild scheme to produce a new type of cigarette. Back home in Greece, I’d seen my uncle shot in the head in the village square. In Buenos Aires, I decided I wanted to be rich, because I believed that with wealth, I could undo what had been done.”

“What did you learn from drinking with Lorca?” I ask.

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring upon ourselves.”

“He wrote that for Dalí.”

“It applies to any desire.” He says this casually, like it’s only abstract.

“You know what I like about you, Ari? You never fail to surprise me.”

“Good,” he says. “So will you settle? As Bobby wants you to?”

“I might drag things out a bit. If I’m going to be yanked off the pedestal, I want to be sure they get all the screws.”

“When are you coming to Greece?” he asks.

“Are you going to ask me that every time you call?”

“Only until you say yes.”

—

I agree to settle. I ask for a proof of the Manchester book and, on a rainy day that winter, I read it. I find it fascinating—how he got right into Jack’s shoes, Oswald’s shoes, even mine; he traced every event, from every angle and point of view; he got right under the skin of that day.

He relives it as I do. He could never have written it like this otherwise.

—

The next time I see Ari Onassis, it is May. A ceremony in Newport News to christen the aircraft carrier named for Jack, two days before he would have turned fifty.

I’m sitting with Bob McNamara. My eyes sweep the faces in the crowd. Some familiar, many not. I tell McNamara, “I’d like to leave directly afterward, please. Is that all right?” He nods. My eyes shift across the space, and he is there. Onassis. What is he doing here? My eyes snap away.

The ceremony ends. McNamara sends Lyndon on ahead and walks me to the helicopter. Upon landing at the airstrip in Hyannis Port, I take a car along the familiar road, which looks as it does every spring, to the house and the upstairs room where the old man waits.

I sit with him, like always, and I tell him about the ceremony in honor of his son. I kiss his papery speckled hand. His flaccid face. In his eyes I can see he understands. He can read me as easily now as he did when we were whole.

I stay with him until he nods off.

There’s a rim of caked sand and salt along the window sash.

That night, after the children are asleep, I walk down to the beach. I know the agent is behind me in the dark, near enough if I should need him. I stand at the edge of the sea and the night and the stars, their distant fugitive selves, and I am alone. Only the future ahead.

High summer. Greece.

A craft appears on the horizon. He recognizes it.

“Gianni Agnelli,” he says.

“You can tell from here?”

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