Page 54 of Jackie

“It doesn’t do him justice,” I say. “In the first fifty pages, the author describes Jack as quiet, taut, casual as a cash register. And he plays to Jack’s detractors, implying he’s a lightweight, a puppet of his former-ambassador rich daddy.” I smile at Joe. “Johnson will love that.”

Joe has an expression he sometimes gets when I speak my mind.

“And I don’t like that he brings up the Addison’s,” I say.

“That was our suggestion,” Jack says. “It’s going to come out. We want to get ahead of it.”

“But he writes about it like you might not be up to the job.”

Joe laughs. “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”

On the side table next to my chair is a book Jack’s been reading on Jefferson and the August Life magazine. I’m on the cover: Jackie Kennedy: A front runner’s appealing wife. Jack is there as well but in the background, muted in a way he never is in life. I don’t like the photograph. My face looks too polished, almost smug. But there’s another in the interior pages that I love, of me in the surf with Caroline. I’m in my clothes, my pants rolled up as I swing her around. We’re both soaked. I barely remember the film crew shooting it, but I remember the moment itself—the cold of the sea and my daughter’s fierce laughter as she shrieked with joy, the light ballast of her body as she flew.

No one really wants that on a magazine cover, though.

“It’s always bad news, Dad,” Jack says, “when she gets quiet and just stares off like that.”

“I think you can win, Jack,” I say. “But we need to focus on what makes you different—your convictions, your vision and ambition, even your youth.” I look at Joe. “And you, I’m afraid, need to be just a nice old man we visit at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I can do that,” he says.

“Overall, though,” I say, “things seem to be going well.”

“Nothing wrong with better,” Joe says.

—

“Do you really want this, Jack?” I ask after Joe has left and we’re alone on the porch. He’s watching the clouds bank over the ocean. Strange, almost vertical bands of grated light.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“Do you want this?”

“Don’t worry about that biography.”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“It’s the presidency, Jackie. Don’t overthink it.” In the past, that sudden sharper tone might have stopped me. Now I can feel the uncertainty behind it.

“Actually, Jack, I think you need to spend a little more time thinking about it. Because that isn’t in the pages of that manuscript, and it’s not in the world yet either. Give them more of what you believe—this writer and that other man who wants to trot along after you on the campaign trail. Let them in. Decide what you want them to know. And when you go stumping around, no matter what little town you’re in—blue collar, white collar, factory, mining, East Coast, Midwest, South—set aside those two-sentence profiles everyone uses to prep you, because what you need to know is: What’s unique about this town? These people? What do they want, love, care for? What have they lost or sacrificed? What do they grieve, fear, dream?”

Jack

He watches her face as the words leave her. It’s fascinating to him, how words coming out of her mouth, the ideas and passion behind them, awaken her face. They are words she’s already forming into lines she might write down, a dashed-off memo she’ll hand to him. “Just some notes you might want to use for one of your speeches,” she’ll say.

He’s wanted to be there in the midst of that casual alchemy. In the air around her hand and a pencil, her face studying sentences on a page, that short double line between her brows. He can see it as she goes on talking, those lines like a portal. He remembers what he felt once when they were first together, a kind of hunger to track the complex workings of her mind, and when he realized he couldn’t—that, like him, she’d always keep some space of herself apart—something in him wanted to tear the whole architecture down.

The memory comes in a rush. He’s not proud of it—the coldness he showed her, the arguments and small cruelties. The odd satisfaction he used to feel sometimes when he said something dismissive and the words hit, and he watched that strong light in her eyes fade. He doesn’t like remembering this.

—

“What are you thinking?” she asks.

He smiles at her. “Come on,” he says, standing up. “Let’s go find Caroline and take a walk before the light is gone.”

1960

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