Page 171 of Jackie

Car Plunges into Vineyard Pond

Man Walks on the Moon

I feel something inside me tear. Tattered dynasty, that spent dream. It was always going to end with something like this.

—

Ari throws a party for my birthday at his favorite bouzoukia in Athens. I wear a short Pucci dress with a long string of pearls and flip-flops. He gives me a gold belt with a lion-head clasp and a second gift he calls “a sentimental trifle”: a pair of diamond, ruby, and sapphire earrings to mark the Apollo moon landing.

“Is this your way of asking me to forgive you for the Icarus remark?” I say lightly.

“Why would I ask forgiveness from a wife who doesn’t know that a myth is just that?”

“The earrings are thoughtful, Ari.” He looks at me, wary. “I mean it,” I say. “A beautiful gift. That moon landing is what Jack”—I’m about to say reached for—“believed in,” I say instead. A brief smile, then I turn away, because the tears burn, and I just need to push them back; those tears aren’t for Ari but for the sudden rush of grief for all that Jack believed in and did not live to see.

“Those earrings are exquisite,” my friend Katina remarks later that night.

I smile at her. “And Ari has told me that, if I’m good, next year he’ll give me the moon itself.” I take out a cigarette and go to light it. Ari knocks it from my hand.

“Dirty,” he says.

…

The children fly home. They’ll spend two weeks with their cousins in Hyannis Port, then they’ll go to my mother’s in Newport. I’ll meet them there. The first night they’re gone, things revert. Fine bands of tension between us—an angry word, a tone of voice. An occasional insult under his breath that’s never quiet enough for me to miss. He’s begun to call me names. Circe, after the beautiful witch who ensnared Odysseus with her spells, turning men to pigs. Mummy is the name I hate. He swears it’s an endearment, but every time he says it, I feel something in me shrink.

“I fly out tomorrow,” he says one evening at dinner.

“So soon?” I say, picking a piece of octopus from a film of oil on my plate.

“Why bother to stay?” he says. “Your nose is always in a book, why should I be here?”

He leaves, and the house is empty. The island empty, except for the housekeeper, the workmen, the guards. We’ve been married for almost a year—apart for 141 days.

…

Joe dies that fall. On a small table in the bedroom is a photograph from his seventy-fifth-birthday celebration. September 1963. Joe has always loved that photograph. Every time I came to see him, he’d have me pick it up and bring it over to the bed. In the photograph, everything is as it was: Jack was alive, as was Bobby, everyone joking, laughing, only a few looking at the camera. Teddy was young, in a crisp blue shirt, his face unlined and tan, unmarked by his brothers’ deaths and the more recent disaster of the car and the girl Mary Jo and what he didn’t do to save her. In that photograph, Rose’s sweater echoes the chintz, and Joe is in his silk loungewear in the green upholstered chair. I kneel beside him, my younger self, sheathed in white, dark hair a cloud around my face. I never quite recognized myself in that photograph, apart from the slightly crooked smile. We’d lost Patrick only a month before, and you could see it in my face, a sadness that felt nearly timeless, even prescient. When I asked Joe why he loved that photograph so much, he would point to me in it, kneeling beside him, looking off to the side.

It is Teddy who calls to tell me Joe is dying. I leave Athens that night and fly to him.

Sitting by his bed, I talk with him and hold his hand, watch his wandering eyes. He cannot speak, and now he does not try. I stay with him as he sleeps, Teddy curled in a sleeping bag on the floor. I stay until Joe slips off, on November 18, 1969—two nights before Bobby would have turned forty-four.

…

I go on mapping each season—my life in New York, the interludes in Greece—weaving a sense of order for myself and John and Caroline. There are birthday parties and boarding schools. I work with children at a shelter in Spanish Harlem and volunteer with wounded veterans. In their eyes I see the familiar dismantling of the ordinary. Some have endured things so much more severe than what I witnessed.

One evening in late spring, in the kitchen of my apartment in New York, as I’m taking down a glass from the shelf, something trips inside me, and I remember a warm night on one long weekend, as Jack and I walked home from his parents’ house in Hyannis Port. He took me by the waist and twirled me slowly around. He spun me out, away from him, then drew me back; his lips brushed my neck, and he kept on walking. I wanted to stop, to stand with him in the middle of that soft evening, to stave off the night and make everything stand still, but Jack never stopped, and so we kept walking, though he held my hand a moment longer than I’d expected he would.

I’ve forgotten to breathe, standing in the kitchen of my apartment, the cool glass in my hand, my mind light. How does it happen? Those slight rogue details one forgets that lie stored in some quiet dark of the underself and burst forth like angels—magnificent, bold—remembered only years later, radiant only then.

I’m holding the glass and then not. It slips from my hand and hits the floor. I expect it to shatter. It just rolls away.

…

The arguments escalate. Ari’s business dealings have begun to slip. The junta has not been the ally he’d hoped for. His influence has faltered. His archrival, Stavros Niarchos, has plans to marry Ari’s ex-wife, Tina. Their daughter, Christina, elopes to Las Vegas with a California real estate dealer.

He turns his rage on me because I am the one who is there. Slight things set him off. He complains I am cold, too quiet, too fey. I smoke too much, read too much, spend too much. I baby my children. I’m always in New York. I am not a dutiful-Penelope wife, patiently waiting at home.

Once, in a restaurant, when I point out that he’s mixed up the capitals of two African nations, his rage erupts. He calls me a cunt. The heads of the diners at the surrounding tables swivel toward us, the room stunned. I look down at my hands in my lap. I say nothing else for the rest of the evening. But I find slight ways to rebel. He hates a mess, so I find excuses to make one. I’ll leave pools of dripping water in the wrong spot on the deck of the Christina after jumping off and climbing back on board. I give the children haircuts in the bathroom; Ari explodes when he finds little hairs in the drain. He yells at me. I tune him out—a cool smile, a docile “Yes, Ari,” which infuriates him.

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