Page 84 of Jackie

Her face is still and smooth, the way it gets when she knows she’s being watched.

—

“You always think there’s a game, Jack,” she says. “I’m not playing a game. I love you. You know that. I have to live my life and do things I want to do. While I’m gone, you’re free to do the things you want to do. Then we will both be back.” She stops, but he can infer the rest. We will both be back in our maison blanche. The dinners and candles and music and speeches. It will be the transactional beauty you want, the kind you need to get what you want.

—

She doesn’t need to say any of this. He hears it. The way she is looking at him. Steady, calm, matter-of-fact.

—

From somewhere down the hall, the children’s voices.

—

“We won’t be gone long,” she says, that smile with its implacable charm. “What was it you said to me once, Jack? Flights always return.”

Passionless. Her voice. No inflection. Then she adds, “Please don’t forget, though, before I leave, we have to meet with Bill Walton about the designs for Lafayette Square.”

—

She is taking Caroline with her to Italy. They’ll be gone for three weeks.

—

He reads about her trip in the papers. The landing in Rome, the short flight to Salerno, where she and Caroline meet Lee. As the days unfold, photographs appear in the press of Jackie with Gianni Agnelli. In those photographs, something taut in the chemistry between them.

Salinger mentions it.

“You think it’s an issue?” Jack asks.

Salinger nods. “You might want to ask her to cool it.”

—

He misses her. He misses Caroline more. He misses the shape of his daughter resting against him as he reads aloud to her at night, the weight of her small body, half on his lap on the boat as the wet salt wind breaks against his face and strands of her hair blow across his skin, his arm tight around her. John is different, completely of this world, almost two, all boy, rolling on the floor. Caroline, though. He has always felt bound to her in some great, mysterious way, so even when she is right there, with him, she feels like memory. Her sweet voice, her smell, her hands around his neck, her small heart flipping in her chest as she breathes, mouth falling open, eyes closing to sleep as he holds her—those spare moments of their time together alter him in incremental ways, her laughter, her silence, the dimensions of her moods. She has always been the deep of his heart. Like some tiny god. She’s the one soul in the world he feels entirely accountable to. Something of who she is, how she looks at him, what she expects, that sudden naked trust that will break across her small face turned up to his, demanding more than greatness. Goodness. How uncomplicated it is, the way he loves her, the way he’s always loved her, as straightforward and essential as wind.

August 1962

The night before we leave for Italy, Caroline and I stay in New York. I wake to the headlines on August 6.

Marilyn Monroe Kills Self…Found Nude in Bed…Hand on Phone…took 40 Pills

I stare at the paper and feel something inside me cave. Nude in bed, hand on phone.

Who was she calling?

…

Less Agnelli, More Caroline. That’s the telegram Jack sends to me in Italy a week after we arrive. The curtness stings. I know the photographs he means. We were all there, walking together, but the press cropped the image so it looks like I was walking with Gianni Agnelli alone. Caroline, Lee, Gianni’s wife, Marella, and of course Clint were cut from the frame.

The cliff below the nine-hundred-year-old villa in Ravello is rocky and steep. There are lemon trees, stone archways, wrought-iron gates. There are evenings when we smoke and talk, go out dancing, get back late. In my room, I sit at the small desk and write to Jack. I tell him how different the sky seems here—pure, almost cloudless. The sunsets seem to last forever though it does seem a little dull compared to the invasive gorgeous mess of clouds and glowing color we get on our New England coast.

I mention the Agnellis once, as in Lee, the Agnellis, and I…

I don’t mention the stories Gianni tells about fighting under Mussolini, then switching sides to join the Allies, or his passion for gambling, skiing, fast cars, which he claims are all incarnations of one instinct. I don’t write about the moment I mentioned that my favorite movie last year was La Dolce Vita and Gianni cried, “Ah, but that’s the title of my life!” and how that made me laugh. How good it feels to laugh like that—some clenched place in me released.

…

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