Page 89 of Jackie

Even the next morning, though, it is still there. Slight, residual. He takes her hand across the breakfast table, turns it barely, and, with no one else seeing, he runs his fingertip down the inside of her wrist.

November 1962

We turn the clocks back. It’s dark by four. On nights when we are home and the weather is fair, we take the dogs for a walk.

I call for Clipper, and he claps for Charlie. We slip out and head toward the gates. We laugh together, wondering how long it will take for the Secret Service car to be behind us.

We talk about Steinbeck, who’s going to be awarded the Nobel Prize.

“Hardly a shoo-in,” Jack says.

“I’m surprised it wasn’t Lawrence Durrell.”

“Or Robert Graves.”

“I wanted Isak Dinesen.”

“I heard last summer it would be Dinesen. I think it would have been.”

“If a man had died, they would have given it to him anyway,” I say.

Clipper stops to sniff a hydrant. I clap softly. She trots back.

We talk about Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral the week before. I mention the piece I read by James Baldwin in The New Yorker, “Letter From a Region of My Mind.” We talk about Thanksgiving plans, the children’s birthday parties, Palm Beach at Christmas. We talk about the opening of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery in January. Jack laughs when I tell him that, every night, I dream of that painting heading toward us across the Atlantic.

The evening air is cool against my face. I’ve found a piece of land where we can build in Middleburg, Virginia, on Rattlesnake Mountain—acres of rolling hills and fields, a dizzying stretch of expanse looking out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“We have Glen Ora,” Jack says.

“We only rent that. This will be ours. The house will be modest, I promise.”

He rolls his eyes.

“And when it’s finished,” I say, “we’ll call it Wexford.” Wexford is the name of his family’s ancestral land in Ireland. I can tell it makes him happy I’d suggest that.

He asks me then to come with him to Miami when he speaks to the men who were taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. His voice breaks off. I wait. He throws a stick. Charlie bounds after it.

“Will you come?” he says.

“Yes.”

“It will matter to them,” he says. We’ve been closer since the missile crisis. The easy banter between us has deepened, and in that deepening, I can feel the softer edges of his need.

“Here, Clipper,” I call softly, and she runs to me.

A week ago, while visiting Lee in New York, I was flipping through the latest issue of Vogue and came to a photo essay on Marilyn Monroe. “The Last Sitting.” There were big orange X’s Monroe herself had drawn through the contact sheet. There were nudes where all she wore was a scarf. Others where she was in a black wig, her hair styled just like mine, a long messy string of pearls.

“What are you thinking?” Jack asks. Surprising. He never asks that question.

I close my mind and smile. “I’ll speak to them in Spanish. The Cuban exiles. When we go.”

…

Days before Christmas, Bobby brings us a piece from The Village Voice: “An Open Letter to JFK from Norman Mailer.” He gives it to Jack, who skims it, then hands it to me.

Quintessential Mailer—written directly to Jack, with that acerbic, intimate tone like he’s whispering to a friend: Of course, Mr. President, one does not even know whether it pleases you that America is to a degree totalitarian…. Your personality has nuances, almost too many nuances. The letter goes on for paragraphs, without posing the question it purports to ask but deconstructing Jack’s motives during the face-off with Khrushchev that fall: You were like a poker player with a royal flush, a revolver in his hand, unlimited money to raise each bet. He challenges Jack’s conscience, heart, care.

I glance up. “Do I have to finish this?”

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