Page 18 of Jackie

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“And that’s what’s nice.” A bend in his voice as he says it; I feel something deeper in him shift toward me.

Coming back into the house, we pass the little bedroom on the first floor.

“Can we go in?” I ask. “Your mother told me when you were little, this room was yours.”

A child’s quilt on the bed, bookshelves, a bureau. I pick up a photograph.

“That’s me with my dog Dunker. In the Netherlands.”

“You aren’t allergic to dogs in the Netherlands?”

“Always allergic, but I’ll always have dogs. My friend Lem took that picture. Upstairs, there’s another from that same trip. Lem and me at The Hague. I look better in the other one.”

I laugh. His vanity surprises me.

Next to Jack with the dog is an older framed photo, faded by the sun. A close-up of his face, the water abstracted behind him, dusty light. There’s a focused stillness in his eyes. What was he seeing in that moment? Thinking, dreaming, feeling? I want to ask.

“When was this taken, Jack? Do you remember?”

“No.”

He sits on the bed as I kneel by the small bookshelf and run my fingers along the spines. Buchan, Stevenson, Churchill. “Where are your poets?”

“Tennyson’s there. Homer and Byron.”

“Byron, man of loneliness, brooding mystery. What was that epithet? The mad, bad, dangerous to know. Do you think he was?”

“Not as bad as they made him out to be.”

“Thirty-six when he died,” I say.

“Then I’ve got one more year.” He laughs.

“Byron wasn’t one to commit, was he?” I say.

“Why do women always want to pin a man down?”

I feel a heat in my face. “Not all women. Most men are as dull as watching paint dry. Five minutes in, there’s nothing left to discover, and a woman has to just stand there nodding, smiling, bored out of her mind.”

“Are you bored, Jackie?”

“With you?”

A hesitation in his smile then, like part of him wishes he hadn’t asked.

“No,” I say. I glance back at the bookshelf. “There’s Tennyson.”

“That was Kick’s.”

The cover’s worn, spine frayed. “She loved this one.”

“Yes,” he says.

I look at him then, and his eyes are on my face, no game in them for once, just an openness I’ve seen only a few times before, like he might let me in, or even want to.

“When I was growing up,” I say, “on Wednesdays after dancing class, I went to visit my grandfather Bouvier. I had to bring a memorized poem every time I went. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was one he insisted I learn by heart.”

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