Page 177 of Jackie

“If you’re going to say something,” I say, “please say it. Otherwise I’ll think all sorts of things.” I say this easily, with warmth, the way I’ve learned, but he gives me that look I’ve seen before when someone is surprised I’ve read the nuance of a moment they were trying to hide.

“I’m just not clear yet what your title would be,” he says.

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me my title?”

“This is an unusual case.”

“Well, what’s the lowest title in publishing?”

He hesitates. “Consulting editor.”

“There it is.”

Fall 1975

There’s a crowd gathered outside the Viking offices at 625 Madison. I slip out of the taxi a block away, into the side entrance.

Tom introduces me to the staff. They’re polite, of course, but skeptical. Why wouldn’t they be? I try to connect. It all feels awkward. Tom shows me the office that will be mine. It’s small, so simple my heart leaps. Just a desk, file cabinets, a swivel chair.

“I love it,” I say. “Now I can work my way up to a room with a view.”

—

The crowd is there, outside every morning when I arrive and every afternoon when I leave. When I dash across the street to the diner for lunch, I steel myself just inside the door. I close my face into the empty face and push out into the flash of camera bulbs.

Weeks pass. I begin to get a handle on my days. I bring my lunch in a paper bag and eat in my office. I get my own coffee. I draft my own memos. I wait in line with everyone else to use the Xerox machines. And there’s a certain electrifying magic to the ordinary. I feel like this is something I’ve waited my whole life to know. Most evenings, I have a quiet dinner with John at home. After we eat, while he does his homework, I read manuscripts. I work only part-time. I call into the office every Monday and Friday to check in.

—

Some of the crazy continues. One day a bomb threat. Often, uninvited strangers arrive at reception, insisting I’ll want to see them. There’s a heavy stream of interview requests and canvas sacks full of what Tom calls “Jackie mail.” Once, among the letters and manuscripts, a .38 caliber arrives in a manila envelope addressed to me with a note.

I’m stepping into my office when Tom tells me about the gun. I stop, my fingers on the knob. It will never end. The mail and the threats will come. The crowds will wait.

“Are you all right?” Tom says.

“Oh yes,” I say. I step into my office, take out a blank sheet of paper, and I start a list for twenty potential book projects—why they might work, ways I can help make them work, why they are stories that need to be told.

That weekend, Caroline is home from London for five days. When John gets out of school on Friday afternoon, we pile into my jelly-bean-green BMW and drive out to the house in New Jersey. There was a storm the week before. The leaves had turned, and that storm took them down. Now they’re strewn across the road and the fields, gorgeous streams of burnished reds, coppers, golds. The children are bickering—not an argument—just that playful banter of you’re wrong and I’m right. John tells his sister that he’s planning to raise a python in her bathtub while she’s away. “Noooooo,” Caroline says. “You won’t let him, Mom, will you?” The road is awash with leaves; the beauty of them catches in my throat.

…

Just after Christmas, at a dinner at my apartment, the Schlesingers, the Mudds, and the Duchins raise a glass to my new adventure.

“Say a few words,” Arthur says. “Tell us. What’s it like to be a working woman again?”

“I love books. It’s that simple. I love how they expand my mind. Like travel, books let you explore other cultures, perspectives, histories—worlds markedly different from your own.”

“Hear, hear!” Arthur lifts his glass. The others join in. The candles are burning down into castled piles of wax. No one mentions the rumblings in the news—allegations of Jack’s affair with Judith Exner, a woman linked with mob boss Sam Giacana. The unraveling has only begun. In my gut I know this, and I hate what I know.

—

A few days later, an outline of Exner’s half-finished memoir appears in the Times, along with the claim that our marriage was in poor shape. In early March, news about Mary Meyer hits the papers. Two-year White House affair with D.C. artist…J.F.K. smoked grass. Laced through the smut are details of Mary’s murder.

That familiar awful heat under my skin.

—

It will burn for a while. Every detail—true and not—will catch like tinder. It’s our children I think about. And I think about walking into work tomorrow. The meetings I have next week. The ballet I was planning to attend. It’ll be everywhere by then, and I’ll relive it every time I meet someone’s eyes and see that complex web of pity, disbelief, and parasitic wonder. I told you this would happen.

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