Page 172 of Jackie

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I know the night it ends.

We are at the house in Athens. A rainy evening. His friends Miltos and Yiannis have come for dinner. After we eat, I sit at one end of the sofa, reading, while the men talk. It feels awkward. As I slip a torn piece of paper into my book to mark my place, I notice the conversation has lulled. They seem to have come to a stopping place. I look up then and ask Yiannis what he thinks: Did Socrates really exist, or was he just an invention of Plato, a kind of paragon stand-in for the ideal Athenian philosopher?

There’s a pause as Yiannis considers the question. He opens his mouth to answer, but Ari stands up and takes an odd, deliberate step into the space between us. He turns on me. “What is the matter with you? Why do you have to ask about stupid things? Have you never noticed the statue of a man with a mustache in the center of Athens? Are you too stupid to recognize that is a statue of Socrates?”

I don’t think or hear or see or feel anything—only the faint stain of leftover rage in the air.

—

Even in the bigger houses, the walls were thin enough that Lee and I could hear our parents fight. Their voices broke like plates against the walls. I’d hear my sister crying. I’d go into her room, crawl into her bed, and hold her, her silky face against my chest, hands woven through my hair. We’d float that way together, an island of just the two of us. Lee would ask me to turn on the light, and I’d have to explain that, no, I could not do that, a light would bring them in, their whirling rage in tow. “It’s much nicer in the dark, Pekes,” I’d say instead.

—

I stand up from the sofa, Ari’s mouth still moving, loud words directed toward me coming out, which mean nothing, are nothing, because he is cruel. For the first time in so long, it seems, I have no fear. Beyond him, there is rain on the roof, light notes of beautiful rain. Rain for luck, Artemis told me once, but luck is worthless against the choices that we make. Still, that beautiful rain. That’s what I listen for—that sense of the world that remains. Ari takes another step toward me, the great maw of his mouth open. I hold my book tight against my body and thread my way between the chairs where the other men sit, unhappily looking on. I go upstairs, find my raincoat, and walk outside to where the floodlights sever the trees. As I cross the lawn, the wind hits me. Rain strikes my face, and the world is dark, the salt smell of the sea driven in on the rain, the smell of jasmine, the fainter smell of orange trees. The night on my skin is like fire. After a quarter of an hour, Ari sends Miltos out to find me. I don’t come right away, and by the time I do, it is over. The guests are still there, Ari still fuming. I come back into the hallway, passing by a vase of flowers on the side table. I walk into the room where the men still sit, an uncomfortable silence as I enter that I don’t try to fill. I sit down on the sofa next to Yiannis. My clothes are damp, and I watch the stain of the wet spread like a faint dark continent away from me. I see Ari notice it. “You’re making a mess,” he says with contempt. I just look back at him without saying a word, waiting for the explosion. It doesn’t come, and I understand that I have won. I am not Circe and he is not Odysseus. It was never that magnificent or noble. We are a man and a woman in a marriage that has failed.

…

Months later, another terrible call.

The plane was an old Piaggio. Alexander, Ari’s only son, told his father the plane was a death trap. They arranged for it to be sold in Miami. Alexander took it up on a test ride with the young pilot he’d hired to fly it across the Atlantic. They left the runway. Moments later, the controls failed, and they crashed.

I am in New York when the news comes. I fly to Athens. Alexander is in a coma, the right side of his face destroyed, his skull crushed.

In the weeks after, Ari won’t let me out of his sight. I hold him for hours when he cries. Decimated, he refuses to have his son buried; he refuses to accept that the death was an accident. He’s convinced it was the junta or the CIA. He has enemies, and their names twitch like rats in his brain.

He does not sleep. He paces the deck of the Christina, murmuring to himself. I find bottles of ouzo knocked over, rolling under a chair. He wants to deep-freeze his son’s body in a cryonic state until science has advanced enough that his shattered head can be restored. It’s Yiannis, always the good friend, who gently tells him that a father has no right to impede the journey of a child’s soul. So the body is flown to Skorpios, and Ari allows his son to be laid to rest in the white marble vault. He sets a makeshift bed beside the grave. When anyone talks to him about God or heaven, he answers: “My son is dead, I’ll never see him, I don’t believe in anything you say.”

One morning, he tells me to bring Artemis to the chapel for lunch. We arrive to a table set with four places, pressed napkins, silver, wineglasses, a linen tablecloth. Ari is already there, in one of the chairs turned toward the vault. He speaks in Greek to the fourth chair set beside it, raises the glass in his hand. The ouzo spills as his hand trembles, and he toasts his dead son.

—

By spring, his moods grow darker. Artemis tells me that since Alexander’s death, there is gossip that I—“the American Woman”—am the reason his son was killed. Before I came, people say, the Onassis family was strong. Now Alexander is dead. Olympic Airways is failing. Ari’s business deals have begun to sour. The black widow, they call me. The curse.

Artemis tells me that at first when Ari heard such things, he dismissed them as rubbish.

“At first?” I ask.

—

We spend Easter that year on the Christina in the Bahamas. The islands rise like sleight-of-hand coins as we cruise. The children are with us, a few friends, and Stas and Lee. Also on board is Lee’s young lover, photographer Peter Beard. Another headlong affair my sister is in right under Stas’s nose. It won’t last. Lee is too sulky, then contrite. She needs too much, and Peter is too strong to put up with it for long. He will love her until one day he wakes up and doesn’t.

Four hundred meters off the shore of Harbor Island, we anchor. The water is shallow. We can’t get closer in. I tell Ari that Lee and I want to go ashore.

“You don’t need to go shopping.”

“We want to explore the town.”

“We’re not going ashore.”

“Come on, Ari.”

“We need a good lunch.”

“So you can tell a string of nasty jokes? No one wants that kind of lunch.”

I knew it would set him off. He hates having anyone think he’s being run by a wife. I see the fury brewing in his eyes, the anger of a cornered man who wants more control of life than life will give to him again.

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