Page 57 of Jackie

“This is how it will be if he wins.” I wish I hadn’t said it. I catch sight of Jack across the room. I wait for him to turn and scan the crowd for me. I touch the banister. The air feels close.

“I’m going to step outside for a moment,” I tell Tony. I leave through the back entrance and go to the car. I sit there for an hour in the hard warm dark of the backseat, until he gets in.

“Where were you?” he says. “When did you come out here?”

“Just a few minutes ago. It was so hot—”

“Over sixty percent, Jackie,” he says. “Humphrey’s thinking about bowing out.”

“That’s wonderful, Jack. I’m just so happy for you.”

…

“Will you go to the convention?” Joan asks. It’s early summer. We’re in Hyannis Port with the children.

“You should go for me,” I say. “I have to stay home and be pregnant.”

“And tape those radio commercials in Spanish and French.”

I laugh. “They’re finding all sorts of things for me to do.”

“You really won’t go to the convention?” Joan says.

“No. I need to read up on disarmament and that black-bearded dictator in Cuba.”

Cuba, I’ve learned, is the perfect way to shift a conversation. No matter who I’m talking to, communist angst is so deep, just a passing remark is enough. I don’t want to go to the convention. I have no interest in being pregnant in that southern California heat. I don’t tell Joan—I haven’t told anyone—how leveled I felt that night in Charleston, how easily Jack turned away and I just stood on the stairs watching the night unfold like a future where I’d ceased to exist.

“You aren’t nervous?” Joan asks, her voice careful.

“Nervous?”

“About Jack going alone to L.A.?”

I suddenly realize what she’s asking.

“It’s best this way,” I say. “He’ll be free to play tag around the bed with Marilyn Monroe.”

The sudden crumbling in her face stops me.

“I’m teasing, Joan.”

“I know. Well, sort of.”

“Sweet Joan,” I say, “you’ll know things, even things you wish you didn’t know, and you’ll move on. Besides, it’s much more likely that in L.A., Peter and the Rat Pack will drag Jack off in a car and they’ll all drive down to Palm Springs to toast the premiere of Ocean’s 11 and pour rum punch into Jack Haley’s pool.”

“I know that too,” Joan says—again that young smile.

“As Joe says: Doesn’t matter who you are, it only matters who people think you are.”

“You do such a good imitation of him,” she says.

I feel something bend inside me, the youth and tinge of wonder in her voice, and again I remember that day last summer holding Caroline’s small arms as I spun her through the surf, the driving sense I had that, if I could just keep spinning, my daughter’s body weightless, skimming those waves, I could embed that hard, free joy deep in a way that might last.

“I love Joe,” I say, “despite all.” Gently, I tuck a strand of Joan’s hair behind her ear.

—

On July 13, at the Democratic National Convention, Jack clinches the nomination on the first ballot. The next day, he invites Lyndon Johnson to be his running mate.

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