Page 100 of Jackie

I smile and pick up a piece of shell. “I like that, Jack.”

“I told Sorensen I want that UN speech to signal a new approach to the Cold War. I want to talk about how peace isn’t just an event. It’s not something you achieve, then it’s done. You have to work at it—day in, day out.”

“Like a marriage.” The words are out before I can call them back. He laughs, and I expect him to say something then, but he doesn’t, and silence falls again between us.

Jack

She hasn’t turned to look at him again. She’s looking away, as if focused on something else, her gaze averted, deliberate, toward the distance past his shoulder. Without shifting her eyes, she says:

“Why are you looking at me like that, Jack?”

He doesn’t answer. He is remembering that other question she asked years ago, that day in the water the summer before they were married when they were here, on this same beach, wading in.

“Do you love me, Jack?” she’d asked.

—

How would he answer that now? Of course he loves her. She’s his wife. He loves her beauty, her intelligence and charm, her passion for language and art. Her style and her grace. He loves the way she is beloved. But even as he runs down this list in his head, he understands he’s running down a list of attributes that add to her value, and part of him wants to explain he’s never really had a chance to fall in love with her, in his own way, on his own terms. Everything’s moved so fast. There’s always something he’s already late for, some fire he has to put out, somewhere else he has to be.

Faint lines at the corners of her eyes. He sees them now, the light on a slant. She is here. Flesh, bone, eyes. And in her face he can see traces of the girl she was ten years ago and traces of the older woman she’ll become; he can see these different moments of her life, past, future, woven through the living incandescence of her face, turned slightly away from him.

“What is it, Jack?” she asks again. “What are you thinking?”

—

He just looks at her. He can’t, it seems, stop looking at her.

—

Her skin lightly tan, that splash of freckles across her cheek that comes when she’s had too much sun, her eyes focused on something past his shoulder. He could turn to see what, but he finds himself arrested by her face, the face he has taken apart again and again. He sees it differently now. The wholeness of it. Not just her face but, surfacing in it, the face of the woman she will be—those lines at the corners of her eyes that mark what she’s wanted, what he’s given her, what he’s said and done, withheld and left undone. As she ages, this is the face he will see. The dark in her hair will strip, streaks of gray, silver. She will still smoke, her fingers stained with nicotine. She will bite her nails and he will strike her hand away to keep her from doing it, but more gently, maybe, in the future. He’ll try to be more gentle, more patient and aware.

It levels him—this odd want he can feel in his body to be more of what she needs. She is close to him now and, at the same time, light-years removed, her eyes still focused on something beyond him—the children in the shallows or someone walking by.

She couldn’t know what he questions sometimes, what he hides, that sense of fear and failure, the weakness he loathes, the shame that hits every morning when that back brace snaps into place, the metal click reminding him of what he will never be or be able to do again. He wants to tell her this, take the weight and nuance of it and pour it all into that radiant, ruthless mind. He wants her to know that sometimes he’s quite sure there is no such thing as greatness, or if there is, he is so far from it. There is conviction, yes. There is also doubt, a sense that maybe she was wrong, as the world was wrong, to put faith in him. Perhaps this is all just some glittering palace of illusion. Engineered, unreal. He wants to ask how she sees it—this destiny that wasn’t his to begin with, this mantle he took up because someone had to and he was the someone next in line. Fate by default. Where’s the greatness in that? And can it ever be enough? That underneath the machinations of ambition and power and play, there’s a hope that, in spite of all the doubt and charade, he might make a difference.

One day, when he was still a senator, he sat with her in his office, piles of books on the table between them. Half-finished speeches, outlines, everything spread out on that surface. She was the one who found words from a speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave on Memorial Day 1884—a speech about war, grief, and the dead who wore their wounds like stars. That day in the Senate office, she copied some lines down on a piece of paper that she passed across the table to him: In our youth, our hearts were touched by fire.

He remembers this now, that day, those words, and it strikes him how so much of what’s deeply essential can drain away. He wants to ask if she remembers. He wants to ask if she thinks that kind of fire can burn a hole through history wide enough that some new brighter world can emerge.

—

How would she see it?

—

She glances at him.

“Jack, what is it?” Then a smile. That smile.

—

The silence has softened and the world is different. The wind works against the current on the bay. White sails race toward the point.

She moves closer to him, her body lightly grazing his. She smells of sky, and underneath all other sounds, the squawk of gulls, the wavebreak, the shriek of the children playing, he can hear her breathe.

Ten years ago, he was with her here at this same beach, not yet married, but the gears were in place, everything kicking into motion. She wore the ring, and the mothers were up on the porch of the beach club, conferring about dates, menus, seating plans.

“Let’s go,” he’d said to her, and she did not ask where, just followed him down the steps across the sand to the sea. They’d waded in when she asked that question, “Do you love me, Jack?” and when he did not answer, she dove. The surface was a blue mirror where she disappeared, the dark knife of her body underneath. He thought he saw it, then was less sure. She was gone for so long. The water fell still like she’d never broken through it, and he waited, eyes scanning, seeing only that pale reflected sky, gorgeous, mocking, empty. When she surfaced, far out, she glanced back; he went to wave, but she’d already started to swim. The water was cold that day—he remembers the creep of it up his thighs as he walked in deeper—and she swam straight out, toward nothing, her body long, that slim grace of her arms, driving forward.

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