Page 23 of Jackie

One afternoon when he’s out with Lem Billings, digging around in his jacket pocket for a spare dollar, he finds the photo strip from Woolworths.

“You want to see what she looks like, Lem?”

“Who?”

“Jackie Bouvier. She had this thing about her.”

“Past tense,” Lem says, studying the strip. “Not your type, pal.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Not my type at all.”

—

She’s skinny. Angular. Narrow hips. Breasts too small. A little bowlegged. Large feet. Nicotine-stained fingers, bitten nails, wide-spaced eyes. She told him once it took three weeks to get a pair of glasses made with a wide enough bridge to fit, but when her eyes get lit over some idea, there’s a feral bright core of her he can feel.

—

You only think you want her because she’s not after you, he tells himself. She’s not calling or pestering. She’s different. She smacks of wealth but doesn’t have it. Catholic, but with all the trappings of WASP. Her sense of humor is cool and dry. Not just smart, she’s quick. She gets his jokes and will come back with some stealth reply, enough to show she got what everyone else just missed. She claims politics bore her (“maybe I’m allergic, Jack, like you are to horses”). She just says a thing like that and leaves the comment there. Whether he answers or not, she pretends not to care. She loves to spar, then acts like she doesn’t. There’s an aloof dimension of her. Like a cat on a leash.

—

Months ago, at a party, he watched her put on her gloves. An evening back in May. She asked him to the Dancing Class. Her date had fallen through. “I’m sure you’re not free,” she’d said, and maybe because she said it like that, he canceled something else and went. She and her sister hosted a small party beforehand at Merrywood.

“An Auchincloss tradition,” she said, handing him a daiquiri. “Boozy cocktails by a pinewood fire. What’s the secret, Yusha?”

“Three kinds of rum,” her stepbrother said.

“That’s right. Dark Bacardi, light Bacardi, and the last?”

“Mount Gay. Plus lemon juice, lime, sugar, and a splash of orange—after the shake.”

“Look how it drenches the ice, Jack, like a sunset.”

That evening, before they left for the dance, she drew him away from the others to a table by the window.

“Are you looking forward to tonight?” she asked.

“I don’t love formal dances.”

“But the dowagers, Jack! They’ll be perched like owls on the big mauve sofa at the top of the stairs, looking down on us. Dowagers like Olympian gods.”

“I’m game to skip,” he said. “We can tell the others we’ll meet them there and go tear around in your car.”

She glanced at him then, a quick smile.

“You really don’t like dances, Jack, do you?”

“Sort of a waste of time.”

“They don’t have to be.” She picked up her gloves. There was green tint on her fingernails.

“Did you pick that green for me?”

“No. I had a run-in with developing fluid in the darkroom.”

“How much does Frank Waldrop pay you?”

For a moment she looked uncertain. “Forty-two dollars and fifty cents a week,” she said.

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