Page 153 of Jackie

“Will you say just a few words at the ceremony?” he asks again.

“Will you have Macmillan speak as well?”

“I’ll have to see what I can do,” he says.

“Oh, David, please do a little more than that.”

“So you’ll come, Jackie?”

I smile. “I’ll have to see what I can do.”

—

Soon it will be summer again. When I can bike and walk and swim and drop my mind. I want to watch our children in the waves, limbs baking brown, legs longer this year, running down the beach. This summer, as they wade farther out, I will watch the light shift across that line of sea and sky, that taut edge of the horizon you live behind now.

—

Lee throws a party for me.

“But there’s no occasion, Pekes,” I say.

“A party is the occasion,” Lee says. “Just a teeny tiny dinner dance for less than a hundred. I’ve picked out a dress for you. You can’t wear that old yellow thing you’ve worn for every single dinner since you moved to New York.”

“I didn’t wear it for every single one.”

“You did.”

“I didn’t.”

“People are starting to notice, Jackie.”

It feels like a slap.

“We have to be forgiven,” I say, “for things we’ve done since Jack died.”

Lee looks at me. “We?”

She thinks I mean Bobby. That he is always with me or near me. People have talked.

“Things like wearing the same dress, Lee. That’s all I meant.”

I don’t tell her that when Aristotle Onassis was in town two weeks ago, he invited me for dinner. Very last minute. But I went. I didn’t wear that old yellow dress. I wore a different dress.

—

Averell Harriman is my escort the night of Lee’s party. Stas welcomes us at the door. He and Lee seem to be patching things up. Bobby is there. He catches my eye, then looks away. It’s a beautiful party. That’s what Lee does—she trafficks in beautiful things. Everyone is kind. They mean well, I know, even as part of me has gone off to sit in the corner, a casual absence. We move from course to course, cycle through predictable topics of conversation. My practiced smile. I laugh when cued. The evening is like water rushing by.

Someone mentions how well I look.

You don’t get past it, I almost say. You don’t even really move on. The world moves on. But the wrenching loss remains. With no logic and no lexicon. You live that loss again and again.

…

I fly with Bobby, Teddy, and the children to England for the dedication at Runnymede. On the plane, Bobby asks about the speech I wrote. It’s not long, I tell him. Just some remarks about how English literature influenced Jack as no other dimension of his education did. How he loved history. He believed that history was alive in the present, continually shaping the course of events.

Bobby nods, his face reflected in the plane window. A palpable remove between us now, cool. I don’t bring it up. I miss him. I miss the closeness, though I have no right to.

—

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