Page 56 of Jackie

“Home, to get ready for you,” Jack says. “Rumor is you’re coming to dinner.”

She laughs, a long hand draped over the steering wheel. “May I bring a guest?”

“Only someone interesting,” Jack says.

Oatsie nods to the man in the passenger seat. He tips his hat.

“Ian Fleming, this is Jack Kennedy, and Jackie.”

“You’re James Bond,” Jack says.

—

Halfway through dinner that night, Jack pauses mid-conversation with Joe Alsop and turns to Fleming. “Say, here’s a question for you. If you were writing the perfect climax for a novel, how would you depose Castro?”

“I’d shame him out of office,” Fleming says.

“How?”

“Bombard him with inanity.”

“Example?”

“Air-drop leaflets over Cuba with fake scientific facts. Claims that beards draw radioactivity and cause impotence.”

The table erupts into laughter. Everyone but Jack.

“Ridiculous, and also smart,” Jack says. “Castro’s power is built on ego. What else?”

“Infuse the currency with fake bills.”

Jack nods. “Skew the economy. Throw his authority into chaos. I like it. Go on.”

Fleming picks up a dinner roll and tears off a piece. “Just more of that. Target those illusory things he uses to bolster his myth. Disrupt them. Get him to resign or be forced out. Of course, in fiction, it’s all possible.”

Jack smiles. “Everything is fiction.”

—

When he returns from campaigning in Wisconsin, I tell him I’ve skipped a period.

“So only one more trip for me,” I say. “After that, the doctor says, I should step back.”

“You mean stay home.”

“For the baby.”

He smiles. That word. I’m suddenly afraid.

“I don’t want to lose this baby, Jack.”

“You won’t.”

I touch his mouth, gently. He lets me.

He beats Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary for the Democratic nomination. I fly down to meet him in Charleston. Together we walk into the crowded hall of the Hotel Kanawha. Flags, banners, lights, everyone cheering and yelling his name. Moments later, I’ve lost him. He’s drifted away, lifted by the chanting of the crowd. I push through the warm crush of bodies toward the stairs. Tony Bradlee finds me there.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she says, but I can see in her eyes she senses something’s wrong.

---