Chapter 40
“Are you still planning to go?” he asks.
Late September. He is leaving for a five-day trip to eleven Western states. Shortly afterward, I will fly to Athens. It’s Patrick. I’ve told Jack this. I don’t want to be away from him and the children, but I am in too many pieces.
“I’m sorry,” I say. He looks at me; it’s sharp and endless, the sadness in his eyes—soul so blunt it cuts my breath.
“Stay,” he says.
His eyes that day were different. I could see them long after the plane lifted off, his eyes on my face when he realized I would go, the feeling in them raw and deep and new—like he finally understood something had happened between us.
It’s not that I love you less,I could have explained. It’s not that at all. It’s just these waves of burning sorrow I’ve felt since we lost Patrick. There are whole days when all I am is grief.
“Stay,” he said. Just that one word. The memory moves around my edges as the coast beneath us falls away. I watch the night-limned clouds, and through the sadness and the missing and the doubt, wondering if I should have made a different choice, I feel a trace of something else—the quiet thrill I used to feel every time I left my life behind to go abroad, the thrill of being a woman with no country, no history, no past at all.
At the bay in Glyfada, our bags are loaded onto a dark mahogany speedboat. We fly across the water toward the pale mass of the Christina, moored farther out.
We come aboard. Onassis steps forward, takes my hand, and kisses me on each cheek. It’s polite, customary, but I feel Clint stiffen behind me. Other guests are already there. Sue and Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.; Onassis’s sister, Artemis; and Lee. I’m shown to my suite of rooms; in the private bathroom are solid-gold faucets on the sink, dolphin-shaped.
“Where are we going, Mr. Onassis?” I ask on the second day.
“Where would you like to go, Mrs. Kennedy?”
“I’d love to see the blue mosque in Istanbul.”
“Excellent,” he says. “I’ve planned that.”
“Already?”
He smiles. “As soon as you asked. Anywhere else?”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Crete, Knossos.”
“So it will be.”
On the Christina, time is elliptical, dreamlike. The bow plows through the swells. We anchor to swim and water-ski. We drink and talk and cruise. With a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses, I lie under the white-blue heat of the sky and read. It’s like waking from a dream of the world into the world. Everything feels perishable, heightened, acute.
“You’re not yourself,” Lee says one night as we’re dressing for dinner. “I know losing Patrick was a terrible loss, and I’m so glad you chose to come.” She’s looking at her own face in the mirror, lifting an eyebrow with her fingertip until the arch is set. She frowns, fastening an earring. Every afternoon, she disappears to Onassis’s cabin. She and Stas are still married. She makes the pretense of being discreet.
“The loss is only part of it,” I say.
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror.
It’s hard to articulate, the needing to leave Washington for a while—how it’s not just the bright, fast pressure of our life there but a desire to reconnect with some invisible core thing I used to crave and be. I won’t find the right words, so instead I tell Lee how when summer was over and I came back to the White House, I braced myself to see the room I’d decorated to be Patrick’s nursery. I sent the children off with Miss Shaw and walked into that room, only to realize, as the door swung open, that someone had already stripped every trace. No crib, no changing table, none of the blankets or curtains I’d chosen. It was the high-chair room again, just as it had once been.
Lee turns away from the mirror then, her beautiful eyes lit with tears.
“Oh, my Jacks,” she says. “You always seem so strong, I forget sometimes.”
I told her the story knowing how she’d react, but still it makes me sad—that it’s so much easier to be loved when I seem fragile, broken. Learn this, Jackie, I think, once and for all.