Page 36 of Jackie

He asks me to translate two passages for a speech. “Voltaire and Rousseau,” he says.

“I’d love that, yes.”

We start to eat. I cut off a piece of steak. He reaches for his water glass.

“Is the meat too dry?” I ask.

“It’s fine.”

A killing word. Fine.

Through the kitchen window, night again now. Our reflections in the glass turn back on us.

…

Winter rolls into spring. He works later hours. “That time of the year,” he says. To soften the loneliness, I hurl myself into readings for my history class and short trips to Merrywood to ride. I find a new rug, a few pieces of furniture, a lamp, and two oil paintings.

He appears in the living room one night with bills in his hand.

“I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t grow on trees,” he says.

I’m sitting at the table, my notebook open with a paper I’m writing. He is angry, his eyes like wood, waiting for me to respond. And say what? How has this happened? What exactly has happened? When I don’t say anything, he moves toward the door; the room feels suddenly erased.

This isn’t what I want.

At the door, he turns and holds up the bills. “Well?” he says.

“I’m not going to defend a rug,” I say, “or a small painting.”

“Two.”

“Only one rug.”

“Two paintings.”

I smile. “One’s a seascape. That shouldn’t count. A seascape is more of a window, and we both need a window or two cut in this stiff airless space we seem to have landed in, don’t you think?”

This stops him. Traces of anger in his eyes still, but those few words struck home.

He tells me then that a photo shoot has been arranged. Early next week. Our life in D.C.

“Time to turn up the BP,” he says. That’s what Joe calls it. Big personality.

—

The photographer is young. Orlando. I feel odd at first, self-conscious, but he is kind. He seems nervous himself.

Bobby shows up on the second day.

“Jack said you were bringing the Good Humor ice cream bars,” I say.

The camera shutter clicks, Orlando asking me to turn slightly to the right, tilt my head a fraction more. As the hours pass, I realize that with the camera trained on us, Jack and I laugh more, play more. It begins to be an idyll the young photographer captures: Jack and this woman named Jackie he has married, leaning on the balcony rail; Jack and Jackie walking in Georgetown; Jack painting a picture as Jackie looks over his shoulder; Jack playing football with Bobby while Jackie sits with Ethel, looking on.

“I’m perfecting the art of looking on,” I say to Ethel. Ethel looks at me blankly.

On the third day of Orlando, he photographs Jack at work. Jack, rising political star; Jack the intellectual, reading with his glasses on. The final series of shots, though, are me, the woman named Jackie, dressed in evening clothes, lighting a candle before a small dinner party, a brightness washing over her bare shoulders, intimate; light chisels the side of her face.

She is almost beautiful, I think weeks later when we see the proofs. That woman named Jackie the young photographer has made.

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