Page 104 of Jackie

“You’re drunk, Lee,” Onassis says. Cool and dismissive, the way he says it, and while he might claim it’s out of respect for me, I like him less.

—

We’ve been on board the Christina for almost four days.

—

There was a photograph I once saw of the Christina—the same space where we’re sitting tonight, configured differently. In the photograph, the mosaicked deck was lowered to form a swimming pool but there was no water in it. Onassis and Churchill sat in that drained pool in two rattan chairs, Onassis in lightweight slacks and a loose-fitting button-down shirt, Churchill in his black suit. He had his cane and wore his hat, black dress shoes resting on the mosaicked flank of the minotaur.

—

“Is it going to rain?” I ask Onassis the next morning. A low body of clouds appears to move toward us over the sea.

“No,” he says.

“How do you know that?”

“By how the clouds are moving. How the air smells.”

“So interesting,” I say. “It’s interesting, too, the way you’re so sure.”

“It isn’t much good to be otherwise, is it?” The faintest smile then.

—

After dinner, we move out onto the deck, and he tells stories of Greek history, mythology, and heroes; stories of Odysseus, his wandering and battles; stories of the master craftsman Daedalus, who became a prisoner of the labyrinth he had designed, those massive wings of wax and pinion he built to escape with his son Icarus.

“The old poets say that every evening the sun falls into the sea is a reminder of that story. For them, the gods were not remote at all. They roll our lives like dice.”

He looks at me then, like we share a secret. I feel a flash of anger. There is no secret. He’s toying with my sister, and now he’s begun to tire of her, which only makes Lee cling more tightly.

—

That night in my cabin, I look through sketches I’ve made. Watercolors, rough landscapes with the edges unfinished, I’d wanted them that way—fading color toward the margin, the blue sky and a wash of sea, the scrawl of an island, the horizon—a grayish thin taut line, far off.

—

“Stay,” you said as I was leaving.

Painting on deck earlier today, I thought of you. The sun bright on my face, I could feel all the things I wanted to say before I left, things I couldn’t get out of my body to say aloud. Things about desire and voltas, what you spoke into my neck once, years ago, about everything and more. And as I felt these things, it was like I walked through a door in the air, and I was with you, and beginnings were beginnings again.

It’s been two years since I came to Greece for the first time. How different it seems to me now, not the place, but my understanding of it, my sense of what a hero is, what legends are. As Sophocles wrote—the good and the evil, the dark and the light, joy pierced with regret. It’s only there—in those intimate fault lines—that what is larger than life exists.

“Stay,” you said. Just that one word. How open it was—the look in your eyes. I’d wanted to fall into that openness. I wanted it to last. I was afraid it wouldn’t. I was afraid that, as soon as I gave myself over to it, you would leave again.

—

In three days, we go to Marrakesh, then London, then home. Before we disembark, Ari has said he wants to show me Skorpios. His island. I notice sometimes I use his first name in my head now.

—

I set the sketches down, take out a sheet of blank paper, pick up a pen. I write the date in one corner.

—

I miss you, Jack….

I think that I am lucky to miss you—

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