Chapter 57
As soon as the news of the suit is public, they go after me. An avalanche of headlines.
Mrs. Kennedy “Irked”
Uneasy Rests the Crown of JKF’s Jackie
From Mourner to Swinger
Jackie Comes off her Pedestal
They describe the conflict with Manchester as undignified and pointless.
Just after the New Year, I visit Bunny Mellon in Antigua. As I’m coming out of the water one day, brushing the sea from my eyes, a shadow falls in front of me. I look up. I’m surrounded by reporters; two photographers are wading toward me, cameras held like snapping Cyclops eyes, legs chopped at the shins by the waves.
“In Skorpios, there are no reporters,” Ari says when I tell him about it on the phone.
“And Cyclops?”
“That I can’t promise. Did you yell at them?”
I smile. “No. Though I think a little blasphemy is good for the soul.”
“But your people don’t see it that way.”
“I’m afraid my scuffle with Manchester isn’t good for their politics.”
“Just say the word, I’ll be there.”
“An ocean and six time zones away?”
“You must realize that, to me, that’s no distance at all.”
“Bobby’s very upset,” I say. “But the world wasn’t going to love me forever.”
“What does he want you to do?”
“To settle with the writer.”
“I see,” Onassis says. “And will you? Settle.” The emphasis he places on that last word isn’t lost on me.
“It might be better to have them despise me so much, they wipe me right out of the world.”
“The world would miss you.”
“That’s okay.”
“You’d be bored.”
“I would be mystery.”
This makes him laugh. “Lorca once said only mystery allows us to live.”
“Exactly.”
“I was in Buenos Aires with Lorca.”
“You mean with him there or there at the same time?”
“I drank with him. He was a refugee. I was a young man working at the telephone company with a wild scheme to produce a new type of cigarette. Back home in Greece, I’d seen my uncle shot in the head in the village square. In Buenos Aires, I decided I wanted to be rich, because I believed that with wealth, I could undo what had been done.”
“What did you learn from drinking with Lorca?” I ask.
“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring upon ourselves.”
“He wrote that for Dalí.”
“It applies to any desire.” He says this casually, like it’s only abstract.
“You know what I like about you, Ari? You never fail to surprise me.”
“Good,” he says. “So will you settle? As Bobby wants you to?”
“I might drag things out a bit. If I’m going to be yanked off the pedestal, I want to be sure they get all the screws.”
“When are you coming to Greece?” he asks.
“Are you going to ask me that every time you call?”
“Only until you say yes.”
I agree to settle. I ask for a proof of the Manchester book and, on a rainy day that winter, I read it. I find it fascinating—how he got right into Jack’s shoes, Oswald’s shoes, even mine; he traced every event, from every angle and point of view; he got right under the skin of that day.
He relives it as I do. He could never have written it like this otherwise.
The next time I see Ari Onassis, it is May. A ceremony in Newport News to christen the aircraft carrier named for Jack, two days before he would have turned fifty.
I’m sitting with Bob McNamara. My eyes sweep the faces in the crowd. Some familiar, many not. I tell McNamara, “I’d like to leave directly afterward, please. Is that all right?” He nods. My eyes shift across the space, and he is there. Onassis. What is he doing here? My eyes snap away.
The ceremony ends. McNamara sends Lyndon on ahead and walks me to the helicopter. Upon landing at the airstrip in Hyannis Port, I take a car along the familiar road, which looks as it does every spring, to the house and the upstairs room where the old man waits.
I sit with him, like always, and I tell him about the ceremony in honor of his son. I kiss his papery speckled hand. His flaccid face. In his eyes I can see he understands. He can read me as easily now as he did when we were whole.
I stay with him until he nods off.
There’s a rim of caked sand and salt along the window sash.
That night, after the children are asleep, I walk down to the beach. I know the agent is behind me in the dark, near enough if I should need him. I stand at the edge of the sea and the night and the stars, their distant fugitive selves, and I am alone. Only the future ahead.