Page 102 of Jackie

“Where are we going, Mr. Onassis?” I ask on the second day.

“Where would you like to go, Mrs. Kennedy?”

“I’d love to see the blue mosque in Istanbul.”

“Excellent,” he says. “I’ve planned that.”

“Already?”

He smiles. “As soon as you asked. Anywhere else?”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Crete, Knossos.”

“So it will be.”

—

On the Christina, time is elliptical, dreamlike. The bow plows through the swells. We anchor to swim and water-ski. We drink and talk and cruise. With a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses, I lie under the white-blue heat of the sky and read. It’s like waking from a dream of the world into the world. Everything feels perishable, heightened, acute.

“You’re not yourself,” Lee says one night as we’re dressing for dinner. “I know losing Patrick was a terrible loss, and I’m so glad you chose to come.” She’s looking at her own face in the mirror, lifting an eyebrow with her fingertip until the arch is set. She frowns, fastening an earring. Every afternoon, she disappears to Onassis’s cabin. She and Stas are still married. She makes the pretense of being discreet.

“The loss is only part of it,” I say.

Her eyes meet mine in the mirror.

It’s hard to articulate, the needing to leave Washington for a while—how it’s not just the bright, fast pressure of our life there but a desire to reconnect with some invisible core thing I used to crave and be. I won’t find the right words, so instead I tell Lee how when summer was over and I came back to the White House, I braced myself to see the room I’d decorated to be Patrick’s nursery. I sent the children off with Miss Shaw and walked into that room, only to realize, as the door swung open, that someone had already stripped every trace. No crib, no changing table, none of the blankets or curtains I’d chosen. It was the high-chair room again, just as it had once been.

Lee turns away from the mirror then, her beautiful eyes lit with tears.

“Oh, my Jacks,” she says. “You always seem so strong, I forget sometimes.”

I told her the story knowing how she’d react, but still it makes me sad—that it’s so much easier to be loved when I seem fragile, broken. Learn this, Jackie, I think, once and for all.

Jack

It bothers him. The way she left. The fact that she needed to. That there was no other choice.

He’s at his desk, looking over a memo draft. He scribbles a note in the margin. Dust streams through sunlight. He thinks about Mary Meyer. It’s been months since her last visit, since he told her he had to end it.

He pushes the memo aside, pulls out a sheet of paper…

Mary,

Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here—or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all these years—you should give me a more loving answer than that.

Why don’t you just say yes.

Halfway down the page, a wave of what feels like nausea hits.

When Jackie went into labor with Patrick, he was in the air. It was the seventh of August, twenty years to the day since he and his crew, marooned in the Pacific, were rescued. Patrick was born six weeks premature, with the film around his tiny lungs and a 50/50 chance of survival. As the plane turned around, heading back to Otis, to Jackie and Patrick, all he could think was: I’m never there when she needs me.

On his desk now: the black alligator pad, pencil holder, blotter—a gift from De Gaulle on his first state visit to Paris. Next to that, his calendar, the Steuben glass etching of a PT boat, his inaugural medal, and leather-bound copies of Churchill’s Marlborough and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. There’s a small 1963 congressional directory, the Hercolite lamp, and an ashtray J. Edgar Hoover gave him as a gift. He has to deal with Hoover. Bobby said that. Hoover and his tapes on King. Hoover hates King. “We’ve got to manage him, Jack,” Bobby said. Manage Hoover; finalize the test-ban treaty; deal with Vietnam—the growing storm between Diem and the army generals who want him gone.

Every hour, some new crisis.

Why not slip Mary in? Take a break.

—

---