Chapter 8
August 1952
He doesn’t call that week, or the week after. Finally, in August, he calls.
“How are you, Jackie?” he says.
“Just so busy,” I lie. “You?”
“Nonstop. The campaign. Say, you haven’t had a chance to look at that French book, have you?”
“I started it.”
“Well, let me know.”
“What exactly do you want translated?”
“I’d love a sense of his take on Indochina.”
“Sure.” I heard he was in town last week. Some kind of dinner. I don’t mention it. The silence on the line feels awkward.
“I’ll give you a call when I’m back in D.C.,” he says. “It’ll be tough, though, from now until the election. We need to hit every town up here.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll call you soon.”
He uses it a lot, I’ve noticed. That word. Soon.
I wait, then hate that I’m waiting. I have dates and parties, weekend trips to Newport. During the week, I carry my camera and notebook through the stifling heat up to the Hill to pick off anyone who hasn’t skipped town for August. I have dinner one night in Georgetown with my stepbrother Yusha, who remarks, “You seem a little out of sorts, Jackie.”
I love Yusha. He is genuine, kind. The only son of my stepfather Hughdie’s first marriage to a Russian noblewoman. Of all the steps and half-steps, as Lee and I call them, Yusha’s my favorite.
“Sometimes I just think I made a mistake,” I say. “Not taking the job at Vogue.”
“You like working at the paper. You’ve said that. Having your own column.”
“But I lived in France for only that one year. I was just a student. Sometimes I think I made a mistake not going back.”
“Then go back,” Yusha says. “Just because you made one choice doesn’t mean you can’t make another.”
I hurl myself into work. The season turns, the start of fall. The city begins to hum. Work at the paper picks up. As the days cool, I hear things about Jack Kennedy. He won the Massachusetts primary. No challenge, really, when you basically run unopposed. I dump his book on Indochina into a drawer. I cancel him out of my thoughts. Two days later, he calls, saying he’ll be in town the weekend after next.
“You want to get lunch?” he says.
“I’m afraid we’re too busy.”
“We?”
“The paper.”
“Oh. What about Sunday?”
“I am going in to work that day.”
“On a Sunday?”
“Yes.”
“Leave a little early. Say one o’clock, Martin’s?”
“One-thirty.”
“Great,” he says. “See you then.”
I hang up, annoyed I’ve said yes, then annoyed I would care either way. It’s only lunch.
I arrive ten minutes late.
“I thought you might have stood me up,” he says, as I slide into the booth, across from him.
I’m happy to see him, excited, and I keep trying to talk myself out of what I feel. I skim the menu, sip my drink, drag my french fries through the ketchup, and I try to push off the butterfly giddiness—that flush of desire I always seem to feel when he’s across the table from me. Even when he’s just talking about the campaign or politics, no matter how dry the topic is, he seems to make everything interesting. Foolish, Jackie, stop being so foolish, this is nothing more than a schoolgirl crush on the older, more popular boy.Jack Kennedy’s not looking to settle down. He’s not that kind of man. Though I’m not really looking for that either. When I graduated from high school, I wrote in the yearbook, under Ambition in Life:Not to be a housewife.
He reaches for the check the waitress brings.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I remembered my wallet this time.” He looks almost sheepish for a moment, that lonely, sunlit smile. “I’m glad you came.”
After lunch, we walk the towpath along the canal and across the little bridge. Children lean against the rail, two boys throwing sticks. We sit down on a bench. It’s cool in the shade. He asks about my family. I ask about his. He tells me he read my column last week.
“I love my job,” I say.
“Do you think you’ll stay with it?”
“I like how it fuels my mind. Every day is a new puzzle I get to build out, then solve.”
He laughs and starts to ask something else. Then doesn’t. We talk about books. Books, I’ve come to see, are safe common ground: other people’s stories, words, lives.
“Did you read the new Hemingway?” I ask.
“About the Cuban fisherman. Not yet. On my list for November fifth.”
“You must have quite a November fifth list.”
“How about we go see the movie Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he says.
“I didn’t like it.”
“You saw it without me?”
It surprises me he’d put it that way.
“They completely changed the ending,” I say. “It was awful. They made it happy, which obscured the whole point of the story. In the film he’s a hero, handsome but dull. In the story, he’s so much more interesting—you can’t tell what he really wants. You can’t tell if he loves her.”
“That makes him sound weak.”
“No, but he’s conflicted. That’s what makes the story good. He’s conflicted about what he’s done with his life and if there’s meaning. That’s why he lashes out at her.”
“He’s dying,” Jack says.
“Which doesn’t give him the right to be cruel.”
“He knows he can’t keep her, so he doesn’t try. That wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“You think that’s for him to decide?”
“Who cares,” he says sharply, then, “It doesn’t matter, Jackie. Christ, it’s just a story.”
I’m angry. It hits in a wave. Tired of him wanting only as much as he wants when he wants it. I keep falling for him, believing he’ll let me in, then out of nowhere he’ll shut down, take off.
“Funny you should put it that way, Jack, saying it doesn’t matter. I was thinking the other day about those words you told me your father lives by, how it doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.”
I don’t look up. The air has tightened. I stare at the ground ahead of us. Two men walk by. Two pairs of trousers and brown shoes. “I’ve decided I disagree,” I say. “I like your father very much, but when you’re his age, Jack, I don’t think you’ll be looking back wishing you’d been a little more of what other people thought you ought to be.”
His hand closes on my wrist, so fast it startles me. The grip isn’t tight. By contrast, it’s loose in a way that feels like a threat. Then he lets go and looks away. A stony pressure in the silence. I’ve pushed too far, and I feel sad but at the same time a sense of closure. Things between us were always too close to the edge. Now it’s done. I won’t have to wait anymore for the phone to ring.
The noises nearby seem suddenly loud. Two girls skipping down the path, a mother scolding her child, those boys still throwing sticks into the rage of water flowing under the bridge. I hate how raw it feels to me—that night in the car on the way back to the house on the Fourth of July, his smile in the light off the dash as he slowed to pull off the road, his mouth on mine. I could tell him now how I’ve wanted to be back in that car, that moment, that simple and intimate passion. I want the way he looked at me that night as he pulled the car to the side of the road and drew me toward him, the way he touched me. I want it all, all over again, that night, that hour, that sense of my body under his.
I could tell him this. I could soften now, apologize.
I push the thought off. I look at my watch without seeing it and stand.