Page 19 of Jackie

“Recite it,” he says. “I want to know what you’ve learned by heart.” He lies back on the bed, his legs dangling off, head propped on the pillow, looking at me, and the expression on his face is one I will always remember—complicated, trenchant, with a naked hunger I feel move through me.

A bell rings. Silence. It rings again.

“That’s the lunch bell,” he says. “It’s how she rounds us up.”

“Are we going to go?”

“I think we’ll be late. Pick a book. I want you to read aloud to me.”

“You should read to me,” I say. I pull The Iliad from the shelf.

“Why that?” he says.

Because Homer’s Troy is the kind of dream that alters us, I could say. That moves and inspires us. Because it’s a vast and tragic myth we can’t quite cage—a story of love, rage, devastating loss, which, at its most intimate, is also a form of desire.

The answer I give is far simpler.

“It’s a story I love,” I say.

…

That night after dinner, we borrow Morton Downey’s car to drive to a party in Osterville. A 1950 Plymouth, two-door, light blue.

I recognize the landmarks for a while, the little village, the main street leading through it. We turn onto another road, then another, and it’s different. Still the same landscape—shingled houses, beach plum, scrub oak—but at the same time, a place I haven’t been.

Earlier that afternoon, we all went swimming. I walked up to the house before the others, changed my clothes, towel-dried my hair, and came downstairs.

“Good swim?” Joe said, sitting down with me in one of the porch chairs.

“I love to swim.”

“How far did you go?”

“The second buoy and back.”

“You like open ocean.”

“Any ocean.”

He smiled. Jack and the others were coming up from the shore. I could see them—a laughing, galloping brood.

“And you also like when people underestimate you, don’t you, Jackie?”

“Not at all, Mr. Kennedy. Why on earth would you say a thing like that?”

—

“You want some music?” Jack asks now. He fiddles with the car radio.

“That song, please,” I say. “The one you just flipped by, about angels dining at the Ritz.” I tuck my legs underneath me. I like the feeling of being away from the house and the chaos, alone with him, heading somewhere, anywhere.

“I think I missed the turn,” he says. A car passes, going the opposite way. Headlamps sweep our car, his face. He is beautiful. Not a word a woman would usually use to describe a man. And yet.

When I lived in Paris for that one year, there were late-spring evenings when the light just lasted. I’d leave the Sorbonne and walk the narrow streets, looking into windows to catch fragments of lives playing out there. I’d walk the Seine, the quays and bridges, toward midnight as the sun kept setting in that strange extended day, and I had the sense that if I could just keep walking, I’d outwalk the light, disappear. I want the same thing now, only with him. To just keep driving, with no ending point or destination. Just to stay with him, moving, in this night car.

“Quiet again,” he says. That little smile, without looking at me. Another turn in the road. “Here we are.”

—

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