Page 33 of Jackie

The thought strikes him. He knows it’s true, and he doesn’t quite want it to be.

She is not like anyone else.

—

“Do you love me, Jack?” she asked, and he felt a momentary impatience.

He knows what she wants when she says a thing like that. Magic. A fairy tale.

And part of him wants to promise her that, and part of him wants to tell her there’s no such thing.

He loves the banter between them, but she’d thrown that question out there like a dare. Waited a moment for his answer, then turned away, like she might not wait. He felt a sudden doubt. He hates that feeling. Too much of his life has been built on it. Doubt, charade, illusion. A charlatan’s sleight of hand. The glint of what’s unreal.

—

She’s waded farther out in the water now. Up to her thighs. The water breaks as she walks. Drops of sunlight shimmer on her skin, her body long, casually erotic. She stops, noticing something through the surface. She reaches down through the water, her arm disappearing past the elbow; she brings up a stone and turns it in her hand. She catches him watching her. Surprise at first, her features still. Her gaze shifts, deliberate, calculating, that little play. Her arm draws back, and she throws that stone. It wings across the surface, heading out, skip after skip. She looks at him then, her face with a faint expression of triumph, as if to say: You want to watch? Then see.

All of this happens. She happens. Long body, arm reaching, stone in flight, her blazing face, a collision of imperfect features adding up to a cogent enigmatic whole. He just stares back, a sharp desire for her he can feel.

She dives in. The surface closes. Her dark shape, underwater. He thinks he sees it, then is less sure. She’s gone for so long. He waits, eyes scanning, seeing nothing but the pale reflected sky, the water empty, mocking him somehow. She surfaces twenty yards away. She looks back, he goes to wave, but she’s already started to swim, straight out, that lean grace of her arm rising, dark head turning to breathe, her cheek against the surface, lips parting for air, the strong loaded rhythm of her body, ocean rolling off her shoulders like she is made of that water.

—

Ten years from now, he will remember this moment. Everything he would ever need to know about her was right there.

Part II

We are only what we always were, but naked now.

—Arthur Miller, The Crucible

If I had known getting married would create such a shift in him, in me, I don’t know that I would have gone ahead with it. He loved me. I knew that. I also knew—even then—he needed not to love me, or anyone, too much. We were creatures of distance, Jack and I. He needed his freedom. I needed my solitude. He kept different parts of his life in different compartments. I wanted to understand why. I wanted to know, too, what lay under that magnetic golden front, that mind that could outwit any other, that cool elusive grace. I couldn’t resist feeling that if I could just be more independent, more useful, less spiky, he would love me more. Such an easy net to get tangled in, isn’t it? That belief a woman sometimes has that she can change herself to change a man.

Fall 1953

Our wedding is compared to the Astor wedding of 1934. (Joe is ecstatic over this, I learn.) On the front page of The New York Times, the day after the ceremony in Newport, there’s a photograph of us, cutting into the five-tier cake. Notables Attend Senator’s Wedding.

There are painstaking details about my dress—tapered bodice, ivory tissue silk, and the lace veil woven with orange blossoms. There are details of my bridesmaids in their pink taffeta. Lee is my matron of honor. Bobby is Jack’s best man. There are details of the reception, over eight hundred of our nearest and dearest flung across the Hammersmith lawn, following the ceremony at St. Mary’s Church performed by Archbishop Cushing with the assistance of four priests.

I tease Jack: “How many priests does it take to marry a Kennedy?”

There are no details in the papers, though, about the scratches down Jack’s cheek from a run-in he had with a rosebush while playing a drunken game of football with his brothers and friends the night before. No details of how my wedding gown was ruined earlier that week when a pipe burst in the dressmaker’s studio, and the dress had to be entirely remade. Nothing written about the tears I bit back when I realized my father was not just late but not coming at all. Something small and old walked over my heart as I took my stepfather Hughdie’s arm instead and he walked me down the aisle.

The press is told my father was suddenly struck by a very bad cold—not that my mother sent someone to check on my father at his hotel when she couldn’t reach him by phone; that someone found him half dressed in his tux and more than half in the bag.

In the car leaving the reception, I brush rice off my lap and pull rose-petal confetti from my hair. The pearl-and-diamond bracelet Jack gave me the night before, my “something new,” glints.

“I’m so happy, Jack,” I say. He smiles at me. I lean my head against his arm.

“That’s not comfortable,” he says, something pained in the set of his jaw. “Just my back hurts from standing all day.” He shifts in the seat, turning slightly away toward the window.

…

On our honeymoon in Acapulco, in the little pink villa, I feel a strange deep joy being with him, near him, that sense of the sun in my body, an ache in my thighs from where his weight pressed down. A timelessness as the hours pass, marked only by heat, skin, desire.

His fingers brush the hair from my neck. I feel him inside me—a wash of light.

—

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