Page 174 of Jackie

“Ari rescued me at a time when my life was very dark,” I say. “I can say something like that and still be telling the truth. It’s almost a cliché, Teddy, but I’m forty-five, and the older I get, the more important it feels to live the truth.”

Teddy, like so many others, never understood how I could have let myself be pinioned into that Greek-wife life. That’s how he’ll claim to see it, though I know that he, of anyone, grasps the complex weight of what it is to be a Kennedy. The summer after Bobby died, Teddy would take the boys out to sail—Bobby’s sons and my John. Teddy was drinking so much then, wine settled in the cracked seams of his lips. He looked blasted all that summer.

“No one wants to be a myth,” I say. “We’re taught it’s what we’re supposed to want. No one tells you ahead of time the cost. They cry for you, jeer at you, cheer you on, hold you up, and, when that gets dull, they tear you down. It takes work, Teddy, in that charade, to piece together who you really are—what you think and want and believe. Jack and I used to talk about that.”

Silence then. Through the window, sheaves of cloud fall away.

—

Why is it, I want to ask, that every loss brings up every other?

—

The plane strikes the runway with a jolt. As the wheels find the ground, Teddy asks about the will.

“We’ll settle that later,” I say.

“This might be your chance.”

“Christina just lost the father she never had. That’s enough for now.”

“Then I’ll ask,” he says.

“Please don’t,” I say. “Not yet. But it’s nice, Teddy, that you look after me the way Jack would have wanted you to.”

He bites the edge of his lip, a boy again, the youngest, the scapegrace who was always trying to pull himself together enough to catch up.

—

Ari is buried in the chapel on Skorpios where we were married seven years ago. White lilies fill the courtyard. Red velvet drapes the stones. Cherry trees bloom on the terraced hill. The day is gray and overcast. Christina sobs, her eyes swollen. Artemis quietly weeps.

I do not cry. I can hear the word move like it’s coming alive out of the stones, curse, a lean, distinct black thread through the rustling grief and keening of the women. Curse. I grasp it then, standing in the damp chill of that small chapel. I could have stayed with Caroline that night. No matter what, they will hate me. Even if I’d been at his side when he died, they would hate me. At the same time, I understand that their hatred is a gift. I am the curse, black widow, outcast. Because of that, every last tie will be cut. I owe his memory nothing. I am free.

—

When I return to New York, I recognize it for the first time in years—the exquisite chaos of the city at night below my window. Above the moving lights of cars and the scrawl of trees in the park, the stars are faint, but they are there—what I can see and what I know exists beyond the range of sight—those irreverent solitary burnings yoked into constellated lines we imagine will hold them, lines that let us think, mistakenly, they do not belong to their own lexicon but to ours.

I am home, and my home, for the first time in my life, is solely mine.

What will I make of this now?

Part VI

Through corridors of light,

where the hours are suns…

their lips, still touched with fire

—Stephen Spender

Mornings, I linger over newspapers. Drink my coffee. Jog around the reservoir. One day, a blond baseball-capped reporter steps in front of me on the sidewalk. There’s been an article in the Times, he says, about Ari’s daughter, Christina, and “bitter hostilities” between us.

“Would you care to comment, Mrs. Onassis?”

“I’ve just received an invitation to her wedding in July,” I say. It’s essentially true. The invitation was Artemis-extracted. I go to step around him; he blocks the path.

“So, for the record, you deny the claim that Christina Onassis is ‘hostile’ toward you?”

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