Page 184 of Jackie

I am reading something intimate and unexpected. A young poet, Anne Carson, I haven’t read before, who blends Sappho and Euripides with modern slang and syntax. I’m curious to know what you’d make of it—these disparate elements merged. But it can happen this way, can’t it? Things meld, and that larger order we call history changes as we age. And yet—does that make what we once believed in less?

—

I pull my mind back. I’m treading water in the cove with Carly, the salty taste of ocean on my mouth. We’ve taken the Jeep down for a swim. In a few days, I’ll return to New York. As we float in the still-warm water, she tells me about her childhood, how hard it was, like a Tennessee Williams play, she says; she wonders if she could write about it. A buzzing sound overhead. A helicopter circling. At first I think it’s the Coast Guard, then realize it isn’t. Carly hasn’t figured it out yet. She will. She stares at the sky, curious—how lovely she is, long rectangular face, expressive mouth, her hair plastered dark and wet over her broad shoulders. She has that exquisite, almost violent strength glimpsed from time to time in younger women, a strength not yet fully owned.

“The press,” she says.

We start to swim.

…

When do I know?

It’s almost imperceptible. The slight changes in a body that occur as some new dark thing takes root. A cold that lasts longer than it should. A funny lingering chill that a second sweater can’t stave off. I close the windows earlier in the evenings, even though I hate them closed. That sign of another summer done. I don’t want that funny chill. I tell myself there’s always next year. I pack up the house—manuscripts to bring back to the city, summer clothes I’ll send to be cleaned and stored. The light has changed, and it is beautiful, a sharper angle of it on the marshes as they turn.

—

Forty years ago in September we walked into St. Mary’s Church, then went back to Hammersmith for the reception. After the cake was cut, I stood and told the eight hundred guests that my mother had always contended you could judge a man by his correspondence. Then I held up the postcard of a passionflower you’d sent to me when you were in Bermuda.

Wish you were here, you’d written. Cheers. Jack.

“And this,” I said, waving the postcard, “is my entire correspondence with Jack.”

I glanced at you then, and you met my eyes and laughed, a faint blush—a little sheepish—rising through your skin that filled me with a sharp, exquisite joy.

…

It’s a glorious autumn in New York. That dull feeling in my body, though, still. Like the bones are drenched.

“I’m tired,” I tell Maurice. “I’ve just been so tired.”

He is the only one I tell.

—

Breakfast, coffee, the paper each morning. A children’s dance performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A dinner for the Municipal Art Society.

I do yoga and take my runs around the reservoir. I watch the grandchildren once a week. I go into the Doubleday office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I no longer wear the sunglasses and scarf every time I walk in the streets. What a thrill it was, the first time I did it, to find that only a few heads turned, one or two whispers, then they looked away, and I realized that just as there was a switch I could turn on to draw a room toward me, there was another I could turn off to disappear. I could step out into the street and vanish, just a middle-aged woman in slacks and sneakers, a tote on her shoulder, ballet shoes tucked in with the books and manuscript pages, walking north toward Central Park.

—

I tell Tillie, my yoga teacher, that when I think about old-ladydom, the one thing I want to always be able to do is ride.

…

November again.

—

Thirty years this month. You come near me, as you do, every November. A momentary shudder and I feel you like a shadow cross my hands.

Sometimes it strikes me that I have become an entirely different woman from the woman that you knew.

—

This year I’ll spend the week before the anniversary in Virginia. I’ll ride in the hunt, then come home to be with the children for the actual day. But leading up to it, I want to be away.

I stay in a small cottage on Bunny Mellon’s farm, near the garden by the main house. Over the years, I’ve come to miss the world I remember from childhood, the wide rolling hills of Virginia, long open fields where I can build a horse’s speed to a gallop, riding faster across the swell of space with the sense that if I ride hard enough, I can catch up to those blue dusky mountains in the distance and lose myself there, in the speed where nothing is fixed and there’s only the smell of the horses, the saddle blankets, and the tack mixed with the fainter scent of hay and the rich cool damp of the green.

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