Page 169 of Jackie

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Is why I did it.

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Away is what he gave me, and for that first year after Bobby died, away was what I needed most. Hours, weeks, a season alone, with only beach, water, sky, a vagrant blue, the small house on the cliff, the steep fall into the green, the scent of jasmine, olive, and the wind like the breath of the god I no longer believe in.

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Here on Skorpios I am free of the cult, the icon, the legend. I can design the life I want, the life I want for the children. Trips to museums, archaeological sites, plays, concerts, the movies in Athens, flights home to New York. Time to read, paint, swim. Ari’s money keeps them safe. My children. No one understands that. Why should I have to explain? Their approval means nothing.

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Sometimes he is here with me, but after the first few weeks, more often he is not.

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“You are marrying Greece,” he told me. “Now you will be a Greek wife. My Greek wife.”

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I remember very little of that day in October 1968. Twenty guests in the tiny chapel. I wore a simple white dress, ribbons woven through my hair. There was the exchange of rings and dark wine from a silver goblet. John and Caroline stood beside me, white lit tapers in their hands, their faces brave and somber as the priest intoned the Greek prayers I had learned. Outside, it began to rain.

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“Rain at a wedding is a sign of luck,” Ari’s sister, Artemis, whispered to me.

…

America Has Lost Its Saint, runs a headline in the Bild Zeitung.

Sad and Shameful, claims France-Soir.

And in The New York Times: The Reaction Here Is Anger, Shock, and Dismay

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“The Times gave us a whole page,” I tell Ari.

“How will you respond?”

“Do I have to?”

He looks…amused?

“If you had to, what would you say?”

I realize he’s testing me.

“The honest thing would be to say I’m going to do this because it’s what I want.”

A faint wicked spark in his eyes. “My dear, you’ve already done it.”

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The papers say it’s the jet-set life. They say he’s ugly but irresistibly powerful. They call me desperate, hysterical, fearful—palatable things for a woman to be. They say I married him to outdo my sister. Poor Lee. Lee was upset at first but not that I was with him, only that I’d kept it from her.

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