Page 7 of Jackie

He dusts his lips with a napkin. “The running of the bulls.”

“Because there’s no book I love more than The Sun Also Rises. And nobody lives their life all the way up, except you, Daddy, and the bullfighters.”

He laughs. He calls for the check, flirts with the waitress, then gives her a tip.

“Or should we have one more drink?” he says.

“No more drinks.”

“See, Jacks, if you’re in my city, how easy it will be to keep me in line. What time is your train?”

“I have two hours.”

“Let’s walk in the park.”

“I’d love that.”

He touches his mustache, brushing some invisible thing from one end. “When you and your sister are gone,” he says, “be sure to write to your mother.”

“I know. Or she’ll imagine me dead.”

“Or married to an Italian.”

He laughs at his own joke. There’s often a joke at my mother’s expense tucked in. He excuses himself to go to the “the gents’.” I watch him thread among the tables, the graceful stroll, the light easy on his shoulders; he pauses every so often to greet someone, exchange a few words. I play with the lines of a made-up poem in my head. Lee and I have done it since we were children. I’d start with a line, she’d add one, we’d go back and forth. Sometimes I made little drawings to go along with them. My father has stopped at a table to talk to a couple. His hand rests for a moment on the wife’s shoulder—always the actor, always the player—a brief gallant wave, then he’s off again. He passes the bar, takes a right turn, and disappears.

Oh, we’re not at all what you think we are

We’ve traveler’s checks and a little car

—

When I lived in France for that college year abroad, my friend Paul de Ganay took me to parties at the home of Louise de Vilmorin, who was once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In her drawing room, silk coverings sheathed the walls. There were banquettes under each window, long ebony tables, and malachite elephants. The conversation was smart and quick, with currents of French and English, and extraordinary guests. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, French filmmaker Jean Cocteau.

One night, Paul introduced me to a woman named Pamela Churchill. A horsewoman. We were talking about the shows at Olympia and Bath when she suddenly stopped.

“Did Paul say you live near Washington?” Pamela asked. “You must know the Kennedys.”

“Of them,” I said.

“Kick was my best friend. She died, I’m sure you heard, in a terrible plane wreck. They went into a dive in the Cévennes Mountains. Kick had such life. Everyone loved her.”

I nodded. I hadn’t actually heard this.

“And her brother,” Pamela continued. “Not the oldest who was killed in the war but the next one. Jack. A congressman now. He came to visit Kick once. We all piled into her old station wagon and drove to Ireland to find the original Kennedys. He called me in London one night and said, ‘I think I need a doctor.’ I brought him to Lord Beaverbrook’s doctor, the best I know. Jack was ill for days, you can’t imagine how ill, and I sat by his hospital bed as the life just drifted in and out of him. The doctor said it was something in his constitution and he might not live three years.”

“I don’t know Jack Kennedy,” I told Pamela Churchill that night, which was only partly true. By then I’d met him on the train. I decided that didn’t count. I didn’t want to go into it. There was something about him even then that got under my skin, which I did not have language for.

—

My father is on his way back. He stops to chat up one of the waitresses. The prettiest one, I’ll tell Lee later, and we’ll laugh about that and roll our eyes—So Black Jack—but it will remind us both of those harder, more ruined spaces in our childhood we don’t like to dwell on.

Oh, we’re not at all what we seem to be…

No one could be wronger, much wronger than he

—

I stand up; the air in the room feels gauzy, strange, like the reasonable world has begun to dissolve in the heat of the midafternoon.

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