Page 179 of Jackie

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Once, on Air Force One, I was changing between events. I’d started to unbutton my blouse; it was half off my shoulder when you came up behind me and touched me. It surprised me—that you’d come so near without my realizing, and that you had touched me that way. You ran one finger down my body, from the edge of my breast to my waist, and then you looked at me and you did not say it, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you would say, but your eyes did. They said, You are mine.

—

Some sand has blown in under the clubhouse door. I stand up and drop my napkin on the chair.

“Where are you going?” my mother says as I slip off my shoes. Tucking them under the table, I step toward the door with the crack underneath, then through it, to the porch and the bands of sun beyond the veranda, steps leading down to the beach.

“Jackie, where are you going?”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

…

I leave Viking and go to work at Doubleday. The following year, I find a stretch of coast on Martha’s Vineyard. I buy the land to build a house near the cliffs of Aquinnah, where the sea is woven into the sky. That spring, I walk the land with Bunny Mellon. We talk about the long gravel drive I love that winds over a creek with an old wooden gate. We draft the details of the house—saltbox, cedar shingle, white trim. I tell Bunny I want a home the children will want to return to, years from now, with their children.

“I want it to be happy,” I say, “with comfortable places to sit and flowers in every room.”

On the ground we lay the house out with string.

—

Caroline is finishing her junior year of college. John will be a freshman in the fall. There’s a girl he’s begun to bring around. Shy, dark hair, a glowing smile. They stop by the apartment one night on their way to the movies. They have an hour to kill. We talk for a while. John, restless, checks his watch, pushes a hand through his hair, and walks to the stereo. He sets a record on the player. As the song begins, he asks the girl, “Good for you?” She nods. She glances from John to me, then back to him, as he walks around the room, that caged gorgeous energy he has. Don’t lose your heart, I want to tell her. But how beautiful it is, that shining hopefulness of love before it learns. He comes back and sits down, leg still jiggling, and the air is filled with music, a sweetness to the night that reminds me of a life I lived before; for a moment I let it rush in—the joy of what I loved and dreamed and lost.

When they leave, I walk them out. They’re heading downtown. I’m going the other way, meeting my friend Maurice for dinner. The doorman offers to hail a taxi. “We’re all going to walk tonight,” I say, “but thank you.” I hug my son goodbye. His arms come around me, quick and strong and tight, then he lets me go. Half a block up, I look back. His arm around the girl, they’ve crossed the street toward the park, the wall and the dark and the shapes of the green. Light off the streetlamps rains down on them like blessings.

—

The presidential library is nearly finished. A tower of glass at Columbia Point that overlooks Boston Harbor. When the work is done, there will be a dedication. Teddy has told me he intends to run against Jimmy Carter. He won’t win. I know this. I left the last family meeting in Hyannis Port knowing it. A vague misguidedness hangs like a shadow over his campaign. But I’ll stand by him if this is what he wants. Or what he thinks he has to want. At the dedication of the library, Teddy will speak, as will Caroline, and John will read a Stephen Spender poem. One evening, when I am with Maurice, I read the poem aloud to him. My eyes ache as I near the last stanza.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while toward the sun…

Maurice’s hand slips over mine. He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel he understands. Poetry is not a luxury. Not to me. It cuts to the quick like any other tool of survival.

“In the days after that day,” I say, “I realized my only chance at life was with the children. They are my home.” I look at him when I say this.

“Of course,” he says. “How could it be otherwise?”

I feel something in me settle.

It’s unique, the friendship between us. I can tell him things I can’t share with anyone else. I can talk about Jack—not only Jack in the past but how he still burns through my present, and how I’ve come to understand that desire for what is irretrievable can be a sort of prayer. I’ve told him how Jack devoured life in a way that both fascinated and terrified me, like a man sucking the meat out of a lobster claw—the books he read, the food he ate, the boats he sailed, and, yes, the women. While the library is about his legacy, his ideals, and his call to service, for me it’s also a way to keep alive the catalytic hunger that defined him.

With Maurice, I can also share the harder things that even now, years later, I can’t bear to look at head-on, how Jack and I seemed to be finally figuring things out in those last few months before he died. I can still feel the sharp, heartbroken beauty of that time, that fall of 1963, at once so brief and endless, and the rage when he was taken from me. Maurice just listens, and something in how he listens softens the bitterness.

He is kind to me. He helps manage my finances, and he understands that the money I have is not simply money but freedom to live on my own terms. I love the nimble reach of his mind. Erudite, curious. We read poetry together and speak French. We go to concerts, museums, and for walks in the park. I first met him when Jack was a senator and Maurice was a diamond merchant in Africa. Part of me loves that he has that window into my past, though we rarely speak of it. He’s the kind of person who grasps that memory is wreckage touched in sunlight, and the soul isn’t something whole inside us. Rather, it comes to us in fragments, and it’s for us to build a sense of order out of shards and meaning where there’s none. He is still married. He’s moved out of the home he shared with his wife into rooms at the Stanhope Hotel, a few blocks from 1040 Fifth Avenue.

…

I turn fifty at the end of July 1979. There’s a flurry of articles. One I actually like comes out of an interview I agreed to do with Gloria Steinem about what it means for a woman to work, which women of my generation were not supposed to want to do. There’s a scathing piece in The Washington Post I decide to read. I pick up a few errors, typos, Skorpios spelled incorrectly, and punctuation where there shouldn’t be. I’m halfway through when I realize I’m bored. It doesn’t say anything, and it strikes me then how often it’s just this way with a woman’s story. No one wants to know the real story—the private story—the evolution of a woman’s interior life. They want events on a linear string. Some twists and turns, a little joy, a little danger, tragedy, of course, and, if there’s some transgression, comeuppance. When they tell the story of a woman, they never get right up against what she might have felt and thought and seen and feared and wondered. Rather, they tell the story of what happened to her, and in the world’s eyes, usually what happens to a woman is men.

Until at a certain point, perhaps, she decides that’s not what the story will be.

I fold the newspaper, put it aside, and pick up the manuscript I was working on.

Because the world will just keep at it, poking around, digging, turning over the dirt. The world will never stop trying to see past the drawn curtains of a room I stepped out of years ago.

Part VII

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