Page 6 of Jackie

“Johnny Husted almost proposed,” I say. My father’s spoon stops en route to his mouth.

“Almost?”

“He was fishing.”

“But you didn’t bite.”

“No.”

“That’s my girl.” He raises his Bloody Mary to me, then drains it. “Is Johnny the one in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Why not, then? Play hard to get, then say yes. You have my blessing, as long as you’ll be in New York.” He smiles at me, his dark eyes shining. “Another drink?”

“No.”

“You’ve only had one.”

“I still have half a glass left.”

“There’s a lot to celebrate.” He flags the waiter. “When do you and Lee leave for Europe?”

“The week after next.”

“Your plans for the crossing?”

“Third class on the Queen Elizabeth.”

“Your stepfather can’t spring for first?”

“We’ll ignore the signs and infiltrate.”

He makes a face. I steer the conversation away from the subject of money. “We’ll dock at Southampton, then go to the Savoy. I’ll let Lee have two or three days of dinner dances in London, then I want to buy a little car, a Hillman Minx if I can find one. We’ll drive it all over England and onto the boat train to Paris.”

“Because my girl loves her France.”

“Your Bouvier France.”

“Exactly.” He scoops up a spoonful of grits.

“I want Lee to fall in love with Paris,” I say. “I’m going to take her to all my old haunts.” Dancing at L’Elephant Blanc in Montparnasse, visiting the Luxembourg Gardens and the portrait of my beloved salonista Madame Récamier at the Louvre.

“Don’t forget the Kentucky Club,” my father says.

Dark and smoky, even by day, jazz blaring.

“That’s right,” I say. “Lee’s first existentialist nightclub.”

My father pauses for a moment, then, “You love Paris, don’t you?”

How to explain it? When I lived there for my junior year abroad, it was like living two lives. The city had been shattered by the war. Coffee and sugar were still rationed. Heat was scarce. We could only take one bath a week. I studied bundled up in a coat and gloves. That winter, I boarded with a comtesse who’d been in the Resistance; her husband had died in a labor camp. I’d fly from her apartment in the 16th arrondissement to my classes at Reid Hall. After class, I’d meet my friends at the little café on Rue de l’École. The world had begun to roar back. Jazz spilling from open windows. Fierce debates about postwar politics and the role of philosophy and art. We went to plays in basement theaters and took weekend trips to the south of France on third-class trains. There were free hours in the afternoons when I sat in the Jardin des Tuileries painting copies of the impressionists—Degas, Monet, Manet—that I’d invariably tear up. There were long spring evenings when the daylight just lasted and I walked through the city, that sense of my mind touched by the fire I so often feel in a foreign place—unbound, no family, no social circle with its demands, just a self alone in the world. I’d walk for hours on those evenings, looking down alleyways and narrow streets like I could take a turn down one and step through a doorway into an entirely new life.

“Yes, I love Paris,” I tell my father.

“Don’t love it so much you don’t come back,” he says. “Will you take Lee to Spain?”

“Pamplona.”

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