Page 12 of Jackie

Gore has told me stories of Bill Walton and Hemingway, how they met during the war through photographer Robert Capa. Bill was working as a war correspondent for Time, training to parachute into Normandy. Hemingway tagged along. They were at the Battle of Hürtgen in 1944. Hemingway saved Walton’s life, pushing him out of a truck they were driving moments before it was strafed. When France was liberated, they drank at the Ritz Bar in Paris. Walton watched Hemingway’s marriage unravel, right down to the night the writer showed up at his wife’s hotel room, naked, drunk, a bucket on his head, banging on her door with a mop. It seemed like such a big life, drawn in bold broad strokes and furious colors across a huge canvas. My father had a dimension of that in him, and a knack for the reckless.

The talk has shifted to the conflict in Indochina. I’ve dropped the thread. I watch Jack Kennedy. He listens, mostly. He has a curious way of asking questions but rarely offering his own view. His fingers move, touching his collar, pockets, hair, almost a nervous tic. The conversation swings back to lighter things; Bill Walton jokes that he quit his job at The New Republic for Lent to take up abstract expressionism because it seemed to be the language that made sense in a postwar world.

He has a kind of careless, distant radiance. That’s how I’ll describe Jack Kennedy to Lee.

He asks his questions, drawing stories and opinions out of everyone else until the air ripples and burns, and he just sits there, long legs stretched out, that boyish rugged awkwardness that seems like an act but maybe isn’t.

He is alone, the way I am alone.

The thought startles me.

“So what are your plans as senator?” John White’s sister is asking Jack now.

“I have to win first.”

“He’ll win,” John White says. “People want some new fire to believe in.”

“Some say the world will end in fire,” Kennedy says. The others laugh politely.

“Some say in ice,” I say. Robert Frost.

He looks at me, that smile again. “It’s a good poem, isn’t it. Jackie.” A slight pause before he says my name, which sends a shiver through me and, for a moment, the air drops out of the room.

—

Later that evening, as I fish around in my bag for matches, John White comes up to me and holds his lighter out.

“You’re extraordinary,” he says, snapping the lighter closed, “but that game you’re playing with Jack Kennedy is a game even you can’t win.”

“No game there I want,” I say.

“Ah, Jackie, that’s playing too well.”

I exhale and glance toward the sofa, where Patsy and Bill Walton are still sitting, talking with Jack. He nods, listening, but his eyes are on me. When he sees me looking over, he smiles—that same look he gave me when I first came in, as if this is all some glorious joke we’ve colluded on.

—

Nearly midnight when I cross back over the Chain Bridge to my mother’s house, heading slowly up the drive, the crunch of gravel under the tires, the house rising from the trees. I make scrambled eggs in the kitchen, eat them at the counter, and leave the pan to soak. I don’t feel tired, but I climb the stairs to bed. On the landing, I nearly trip over the moonlight. Delirious, it rakes through the window and over the mute ground outside, the fields and hills, wavering pale bars of it falling across the sill to the floor, like the night has been ransacked, everything untethered, blown around.

…

“I’d love to talk,” I say when John White swings by my desk at the paper. “But it will have to be another time. I’m late.”

“Aw, come on,” he says. “Let’s see what questions you’re taking out into the streets today.”

“My notebook’s already in my bag,” I say, but he picks up an earlier draft on my desk and reads the first few questions aloud: “Do you consider yourself normal? When did you discover that women are not the weaker sex? Are wives a luxury or a necessity?”

He skims silently, a smile as he nears the end.

“Do a candidate’s looks influence your vote?” he reads slowly. “And last but not at all least: The Irish author Sean O’Faolain claims that the Irish are deficient in the art of love. Do you agree?”

He sets the paper down.

“I notice a shift,” he says.

I just look at him.

White shakes his head. “He dislikes being alone, Jackie. He surrounds himself with friends and family. He doesn’t like to be around any one person for more than a few hours. Women are prey, but he does respect them in a certain way, if they’re a certain type. It’s double-edged. He’s coming by my place again next Thursday.”

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