Page 182 of Jackie

“Beauty School Dropout,” I say.

“That’s good!”

I love that Joe’s first job was as a busboy at the Dixie Pig in Abilene, Texas, and that he wears Justin cowboy boots with a three-piece suit. I love, too, the story of how when he was at Rolling Stone magazine and employee morale was down, he’d blast “Drop Kick Me, Jesus (Through the Goalposts of Life)” over the loudspeakers. The first time I heard that story, I called Joe up and invited him to lunch. We talked for four hours that day. We’ve been friends since.

As we walk along the beach, I tuck my arm through his. He asks about the books I’m working on. He asks about Caroline and her children. She has three now: Rose, who just turned five in June; Tatiana, three; and little Jack, six months old.

“And how is John?” Joe asks.

“He’s been very busy getting written up for hundreds of dollars in parking tickets and for eating apple pancakes with Daryl, biking with Daryl, dancing half naked on a roof deck with Daryl.”

Joe laughs. “Do you like her?”

For a moment I’m grateful he’d ask the question any mother should be asked.

“I do,” I say, aware the inflection in my tone makes it less clear. “He’s thinking about leaving the D.A.’s office to start a magazine. Maybe you could talk to him tonight, get a sense of what he’s thinking.”

“Then try to talk him out of it?”

I laugh. We keep walking. He asks about my trip to France. I tell him about the caves in Arles and our visit to La Camargue, the ritual of the horses running into the sea. I mention the summer flu that took weeks to shake. I don’t tell him that just this morning, I woke up, my sheets drenched, my body still so tired. I drank an extra cup of coffee with breakfast, which seemed to do the trick.

He is asking me now why I never wrote a book.

“I don’t even let them put my name in the acknowledgments, Joe.”

“You don’t even think about it?”

“I only want to look ahead.”

—

That last fall before you died, there was a day with the children at the house in Virginia, the stone path marked in sunlight; John was not quite three, running down the path ahead of us. He leapt to hit each stone and the dogs bounded alongside him, and the grass was trimmed short, a clean, open stretch of green on either side, that flagstone path laid out as bright and clear as anything I could have wanted for their lives. Caroline walked slowly by your side, her hand in yours, her blond head turning every so often to check her own small shadow trailing behind.

Thirty years since then. How could time have moved so fast that it feels at once like yesterday and like an entirely separate life?

—

“Jackie?”

“Oh, Joe,” I say, putting my mind into place. “I’m so happy you are here.”

…

After dinner that night, they gather around to sing me “Happy Birthday.”

I forget to make a wish. I eat a skinny piece of cake, then pull on my jacket and slip out for a quick walk and a smoke. The night is velvet on my skin. From the edge of the lawn, I can see them through the window. Caroline, her hair burnished in the lamplight, seems to glow, laughing with her brother and her uncle, with her husband, Edwin, as always, nearby. How different she seems since she married. She’s always been very much her own person. But it’s more noticeable now. At the window, Maurice glances out. He does not see me. I’m too far in the shadows. Then he turns and moves back across the room, that quiet, lumbering grace. They are all there, in that house I laid out in string, inspired by a vision of nights just like this one. Their voices drift through the open window across the lawn, mixing with the play of the waves and the distant toll of a channel bell near the lightships farther out.

I drop my cigarette, the hiss of it extinguished in the wet grass. Night dew has begun to bleed through my shoes.

—

As a child, I used to wonder who I was before I was a child. I used to imagine an egg living under the snow or a star pinned in the high dark, waiting to fall. I was convinced there was a definitive place I came from—a room of the world, a place of trees and rocks and sky, outside time.

—

I should go back in. I know this. I should go back and rejoin these people I’ve gathered here—the living that I love—but there’s a certain pleasure in being unseen, simply bearing witness to how they continue, in that house, those rooms, this hour, without me.

…

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