Page 11 of Jackie

I wish you wouldn’t smile at me like that, I want to say.

“Would you like to sit down?” he says.

Leather couches, drink rings and cigarette burns, a sizable hole on one arm patched with fabric tape. Bachelor couches. I set my drink on the low coffee table, move the ashtray closer, and rest my cigarette on the edge.

“I do like history,” Kennedy says. “I always have. Mostly British.”

“Not American?”

“I like reading about the Civil War.” He smiles then. “And the Federalist Papers.”

I laugh. “Oh, that’s good. Why?”

“They were an argument for the Constitution, written when the country was up for grabs.”

“Now, though, looking back, it doesn’t seem like things could have unfolded any other way.”

He looks at me. “That’s right,” he says. “So what else do you do for fun?”

“I ride.”

“Horses? I’m allergic.”

“Seriously?”

“Would you ask me to go riding if I weren’t? Do you like the ocean?”

“I love the ocean. And I love to dance.”

“I have a bad back.”

“Would you ask me to go dancing if you didn’t?”

He smiles. “Old football injuries are unforgiving.”

“I imagine the war didn’t improve things. It sounded dramatic—your boat rammed by a Japanese destroyer. You saved your men, were shipwrecked, then written up in The New Yorker.”

“John Hersey was kind in that piece.” He looks a little embarrassed, though. I’m curious why. “So when’s the big day?” he says.

“What day?”

“You’re getting married. The wedding?”

“We’ve talked about June.”

“That’s right around the corner.”

I glance at him. Something light and teasing in his voice.

When Johnny Husted proposed, I almost put him off. I explained I wasn’t going to leave my job. I love my work. The interviews I get to do with random people in the street. I walk up to strangers and ask if I can photograph them. I ask them questions about topics in the news. I ask for their views on politics, the arts, their marriages and children. I weave snippets of their answers into my Inquiring Camera Girl column. There’s life in that work I don’t want to give up.

Jack Kennedy is just looking at me, like he’s waiting for me to say something; the waiting sharpens the air. That look in his eyes throws me a bit. I don’t want to talk about my engagement, or Johnny, or how, after we left the Carlyle on the night he proposed, with the huge ring on my left hand, Johnny assured me that of course I could keep working, at least until we had children. I don’t want to talk about how that night the snow was falling on Madison Avenue, thick flakes whisked by the gusts, and Johnny kept a tight comforting grip on my arm like he was tucking me right into place. Johnny’s a good man, all the right clubs, a terrific dancer; he wants to make me happy. I’m making a good choice, I keep reminding myself, a sensible choice that will be at once an anchor and freedom. “He is kind and safe and good, like Hughdie is to Mother,” I told Lee. Lee laughed, “Johnny is far better-looking than Hughdie.” A part of me wants to joke with Jack Kennedy about this. I have a feeling he’d laugh, and I like to make him laugh, but he has a more serious look on his face now, like he might be about to ask something more important, and the silence between us feels steep and unfinished.

Then John White is there, with Bill Walton and John’s sister Patsy. I feel my face flush like they’ve caught us at something, when of course there is nothing, but I shift away from Kennedy toward the other end of the couch. Bill Walton sits down in the space between us.

“How are you, Billy Boy?” Kennedy says. They’re friends. I like Bill Walton, very much. I met him at a dinner, where we learned we both knew Gore Vidal, my stepfather Hughdie’s stepson from an earlier marriage. “We joke about all those steps,” I told Bill Walton once. Originally from the Midwest, Bill is a journalist and an artist. Stunningly smart, kind, with a broad square-cut face, he’s the sort of person I trust, though I don’t know him well. Several weeks ago, at another party, we talked about how someday we’d go barhopping together in Provincetown.

“Say, Bill,” Jack says now, “is the rumor of a new Hemingway book true?”

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