Page 178 of Jackie

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I grab my coat and take a taxi to my friend Karen’s apartment. I walk in and sit down.

“You’ve read it,” Karen says.

“As much as I’ll read.”

Karen sits down next to me, and I want to explain that as long as it was secret, I could handle it. The rules of marriage were different back then. I knew what I’d signed up for. I don’t say that. I don’t try to justify it.

—

“Learn to let things go,” you told me once. “Be like a horse flicking away flies in summer.”

The edges of my eyes burn now for how ironic it is—that your wisdom should intercede to help me through the awful consequence of your foolishness and your hubris, your belief that the world would never turn against you.

—

As I leave Karen’s that day, a woman in the elevator turns around and stares. There’s no one else in the elevator. I slip on my sunglasses and look straight ahead, hoping all that woman can see is her own reflection in the mirrored lens.

…

I hurl myself into work. A book of Abraham Lincoln daguerreotypes. The Firebird, a collection of Russian fairy tales. Lawrence Durrell’s new novel, Sicilian Carousel. I take on a project with Diana Vreeland, who, over lunch one day, leans across the table to me with that Kabuki face and jet-black hair and says:

“There’s nothing duller, Jackie, than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.”

—

One afternoon, soon after Jack’s birthday—he would have turned fifty-nine—as I am walking up to the reservoir for my run, I notice that my sneaker lace is loose. I stop to retie it. There’s a couple nearby on a blanket, young, graceless, fumbling with each other like they can’t keep up with their own desire. A few yards away, a baby carriage in the shade. It is a Sunday. Services are over. The bells are ringing. I turn away and start up the path, the sound of those bells melding with the dappled shadows and the trees.

—

The landslide of tell-alls continues. Thirdhand gossip, anonymous interviews, insider secrets “newly revealed.” Jack’s affairs, our alleged unhappiness—it all gets dredged up. Juicy bits, nasty bits—some true, most conclusively not. It’s heartbreaking, humiliating, but after a while it just becomes too much to brace myself or try to anticipate what someone might say to John at school, what someone at work might have seen in a tabloid magazine while standing in line at the drugstore. Headline after headline. Jack and I, Jack and the women, Bobby and I, those nights after Jack died, the drink and the grief and those little blue pills—what might have happened that shouldn’t have, and in the end did it? God, there’s just so much. That glittering trash.

At a certain point it begins to feel like it’s the mirage of a woman they’ve conjured. She and I only happen to share the same name. She’s a caricature cobbled out of smear and myth, a cartoon life that runs alongside mine. Maybe it was always this way. I slip out from under it. I go on living my life—a woman in a trench coat, a scarf, and a pair of sunglasses, walking to work, so ordinary and visible I disappear.

—

“There’s nothing more important than books,” I say to John one evening after dinner at home. “When people are reading, they’re thinking. That’s how change takes place.”

John nods—his earnest dark eyes, patient with me always. At the same time, I know there’s no easy combination of words I can come up with to express the thrill of living in the world of books. I love to read the early drafts of a manuscript, to feel the work of a mind unfinished, then read it through again and mark it up, pencil carving the text so it comes alive on the page.

Cut it back, I’ll write in the margin. Be ruthless. Hold to what you want to say and how you choose to tell it. Everything is story.

…

August 1977. Hammersmith Farm will be sold. I go to walk the rooms of the house where I grew up. Then my mother and I drive to Bailey’s Beach. We sit on the porch at the beach club and order lunch, and I remember the swim Jack and I took the summer before we were married.

—

“Do you love me?” I asked you that day. It was the first time I felt bold enough to ask. And our mothers were calling us from up on the porch. We pretended not to hear. We swam and we did not get out; they kept calling, waving, two figures with their dresses and stockings, their hats and pearls, like tiny paper dolls, and I understood then that the mothers belonged to the formal machinations of that world while you and I belonged to the sea.

—

“Are you going to order?” my mother is asking now, glancing over the menu.

“What?”

“For lunch, what are you having for lunch?”

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