Page 162 of Jackie

“In a few months.”

“Or next year.”

“Before that.”

“Or the year after. Or seven years from now. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here.”

His mouth is on me again. His hands everywhere. I lie back on the pillow, breathless, the inside of my left thigh sore from where his body did not mold easily to mine. It will ache in the morning. That weird aftermath of pleasure mixed with pain. I will be exhausted. The sun will wake me. I’ll have coffee and toast. I’ll swim, then sleep on the little beach, or on deck, somewhere in the sun.

I tell him that when I came to Greece before, I found it almost too beautiful, dangerous somehow, and when I left, a part of me was secretly relieved. Isn’t that odd?

“And now?” he says.

“It feels different to me now.”

He tells me his assistant Kiki describes me as a cat.

I laugh. “What did you say?”

“I told her someday you’ll bring John and Caroline to visit, and I will take them fishing.”

“Anything else?”

“No,” he says. “But I’d like that.”

I smile.

“Come back in October,” he says.

“I’m planning a trip to Cambodia. Apart from that, I’ll be with the children.”

“Stop in Greece on your way back from Cambodia.”

“I’ll have to see.”

“Are you going alone?”

“David Ormsby-Gore is going with me.”

He nods. “Safe.”

“Kind.”

“Is that a front? Or is he the real life behind the front?”

“David is a good friend, a front, and real life as well.”

“Three for three,” he says.

“All true.”

“No. Truth is what we eat and sleep and want and fuck and dream.”

—

I swim in the rain the day before I leave. A sudden storm. He told me it would come. Rain was rare in summer; the sky had been so clear and I did not believe him. We almost argued about it that morning. Then the wind changed. Vertical bands of clouds blew in off the sea, wrapping the island. I knew then he was right. The storm would come. It would not clear. The rain would last all day.

I swim in it. Heavy drops strike the surface, bounce, shot through with air and daylight. I feel a curious delight watching them and a strange splitting grief for what I can’t yet name.

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