Page 165 of Jackie

Ari comes to sit with me. “How is Bobby?” he asks.

“Running for president. I don’t see him often.”

“He’ll win, I think.”

“If that’s what he wants, I want that for him.”

“So Bobby will win. And then what?”

—

There are gifts. He calls them little nothings. “Just trinkets that made me think of you,” he says. A diamond-and-ruby bracelet, a sapphire pin, a string of pearls.

—

In May, he invites me for a short cruise through the Virgin Islands.

Bobby has won Indiana and Nebraska, but the numbers aren’t conclusive enough to throw McCarthy out of the race. Bobby and a raft of other Kennedys fly to campaign for Oregon and California. I don’t go with them. Instead, I fly to St. Thomas and the Christina. After dinner, we sit on deck, our voices mixing with the smells and sounds of the dark, the play of the waves, the distant chain of lights that mark the islands.

“It’s like cruising through stars,” I say.

Ari laughs. “But not as beautiful as Greece.”

He’s smoking one of his Montecristo cigars. The gangster-style glasses that storm his face rest on the table between us.

“So when are you coming back to my island?” he asks.

“After the election.”

A momentary blind comes over his eyes. Then he smiles, and that hardness just as suddenly is gone.

—

The day I fly home to New York, Bobby loses the Oregon primary. I call him.

“If I lose California,” he says, “I’m out.”

“That’s silly. You’re not close to out.”

“I’m out if I don’t win California.”

“It’ll work,” I say. “I didn’t want you to do this, but I can see now it’s the right thing.”

“I don’t trust Onassis,” he says abruptly.

“He’s not a bad man, Bobby.”

“Tell that to the European press.”

“You’re saying I should make my decisions according to the press?”

“I’m saying Greece, since the coup, is a military dictatorship and Onassis has no convictions.”

“His convictions may not be political. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“He’s a danger, Jackie.”

The word stops me for a moment. Then I say, “You don’t mean he’s a danger to me, do you, Bobby?”

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