Page 183 of Jackie

I wake early the next morning. I have coffee, rub cold cream over my face, and drive down to the pond to meet Carly Simon for our swim. By the time I come back, the house is awake. Caroline’s little girls have dragged the dollhouse into the hallway and are zooming tiny cars at breakneck speed across the floor. Through the trees and past the garden streams the light, a pendulum at play.

At an afternoon beach picnic, the girls swim with Caroline, while Carly and I sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” to baby Jack, who’s crawling around a blanket on the sand. I take him for a walk, just the two of us. The wind is soft and warm, and he turns his face into it, his little eyes half-closed. We walk and I tell him how smart he is, how kind he will be, and the extraordinary things he will do in this life. His head tucks into that hollow place at the curve of my neck, where it just fits. “Next summer, you’ll be in my kayak,” I say. “I’ll put you in a life jacket, and we’ll go off on a paddle.”

—

The house begins to empty—first the guests, who need to get back to their lives, then the children, with kisses and promises to return soon. When they’re gone, I go through the house, looking for toys or books left behind a cushion or under a chair. There’s a sadness that comes when the oak floors are empty, no mess strewn about, everything in its place. Maurice stays for a few days, then returns to the city. The days flow by. There are dinners with the Styrons, Carly, and the Clintons—Hillary, whom I like very much. One Sunday, Lady Bird comes for lunch. It’s a lovely day and we sit under the arbor. Shadows stripe the table and the silver and our hands. We talk about our children and our present lives. We do not talk about the past.

—

I’ve wondered this: Would you have wanted to know that severe daylight in Dallas would be the last you’d see?

…

Every Monday I drive to Oak Bluffs to see Dorothy West.

“Do you know I lose my way almost every time I come here?” I say.

We’re drinking tea in Dorothy’s kitchen in the house on Myrtle Avenue. A small plate of egg salad sandwiches, a bowl of carrot sticks, and manuscript pages on the table in short piles arranged by section and chapter.

“I’ll tell you what, Dorothy. You get this book finished for us, and I promise not to get lost anymore between my house and yours.”

“By next summer?”

“Yes. Next summer.”

Dorothy likes to talk, to tell stories. Someone once remarked that Dorothy didn’t know when to set a period, but I love Dorothy’s voice—that hard, open Bostonian A—and her stories. She tells me about living in New York with Zora Neale Hurston and starting a magazine with Richard Wright. She has a column now in the Vineyard Gazette, and on our Monday visits, she always insists on serving tea.

“Does it ever strike you,” I say, “that here we are, the two of us. You never married. I’ve been married twice and am quite finished with it. And here we are working on a book called The Wedding.”

Dorothy laughs.

“Look at these pages.” I pull out a section of the manuscript and point to a passage I’ve marked. “This. What’s happening here—it’s brilliant. The voice in this passage.”

“That’s a voice from forty years ago,” Dorothy says.

“I know. Don’t lose it.”

—

Driving home, past the moors and the tumble of brush and stone wall, I think about how solitude is the stuff the self is made of. When I am here, on the island alone, I remember who I was before I met you—half a life before. Sometimes what I remember is clearly, definitively true. Other times I feel like it’s only a loosely glued collage of what took place, what I witnessed, did, and felt.

Who would I have been if I’d stayed in France or moved to New York for that job at Vogue? If I’d pursued more, risked more, let myself want more. What would have happened if I had made—all those years ago—a different choice? And why does it seem like such a radical thing? The idea of a woman in love with her own life?

—

The days stream by, one after the next, into fall. Storms come, fronts building far out on the water. From the house, I watch the iron-dark walls of rain move over the surface, the bright strike of lightning. The gaps in time between those flashes and the thunder shrink as the storm nears. Since I was a child, I’ve loved storms, the reminder that what is wild and unpredictable is always there.

From that time

all his angels

have the one

same

face.

—

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