Chapter 64
Mornings, I linger over newspapers. Drink my coffee. Jog around the reservoir. One day, a blond baseball-capped reporter steps in front of me on the sidewalk. There’s been an article in the Times, he says, about Ari’s daughter, Christina, and “bitter hostilities” between us.
“Would you care to comment, Mrs. Onassis?”
“I’ve just received an invitation to her wedding in July,” I say. It’s essentially true. The invitation was Artemis-extracted. I go to step around him; he blocks the path.
“So, for the record, you deny the claim that Christina Onassis is ‘hostile’ toward you?”
“For the record,” I say, “my life is very dull right now. I shop at the local AP. Excuse me, please. I need to go. My son is on his way home from school.”
I tell Tish about this over lunch a few days later.
She laughs, then says, “But how are you, Jackie?”
“Oh, Tish, you always ask the tricky questions.”
How would I explain it? It’s not the loss of Ari. It’s not the children growing up and into their own lives. I wouldn’t want that any other way. It’s not that I’m lonely or bored. I have plenty of dates and events, theater and concerts and readings. What then?
I study the menu. When the waiter returns with our drinks, I order a hamburger.
“Tish, I’ve decided that as long as you do your push-ups and jog around the reservoir, you can never go wrong with a hamburger.”
“Youcan never go wrong with a hamburger.”
I laugh, but I’m thinking about an article I read in the paper this morning about the fall of Saigon. Communist tanks rolling up to the palace, the boulevard strewn with burning cars. U.S. troops were picking up Vietnamese who fled in boats. Former soldiers blended in to lose themselves in crowds. One soldier walked up to an army memorial and shot himself. That stopped me. I read those lines twice. The war was over, to the extent that something that never should have been started can be over. More complex than any dark hell Shakespeare looked into. That’s how Bob McNamara described it once. But isn’t there something after every end?
“I want to work, Tish,” I say, “but I haven’t had a paying job since I married Jack.”
“What about Viking? You love books.”
“Loving books and being qualified for a publishing job aren’t the same.”
“You know Tom Guinzburg. Wasn’t he a friend of Yusha’s in college and part of your Paris Review circle?”
“I only wish it were mine,” I say.
When Lee married Michael Canfield, I’d felt a twinge of envy, not because my younger sister was racing ahead to the altar but because Lee was marrying into a publishing family. I couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than spending breakfast, lunch, and dinner talking about what books were being acquired, critiqued, reviewed. Funny. A twinge like that, so easily dismissed.
“You were a reporter,” Tish says as she picks up her fork and starts on her salad.
“A quarter of a century ago.”
“You’ve lived through an important part of history.”
“I suppose.”
“Just call him, Jackie. Call Tom and talk to him. See what happens.”
Years ago, there was a letter in a book you showed me, written by Einstein to the grieving family of his closest friend:
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Which is the equivalent of saying that the dividing line that marks “what happened” from “what will happen” is no more substantial than the fog of a child’s breath on glass.
I don’t call Tom Guinzburg. Not that I wouldn’t want the work. I’d love it. But what if I can’t handle being out in the world that way? How would I act? How would the world act toward me?
A few weeks ago, my friend Peter and I went to the opera, and Peter remarked that taking me anywhere was like taking King Kong to the beach.
I drive out to New Jersey to ride. When I get back to New York, I realize there are no eggs in the refrigerator. I walk to the store. On my way home, I run into Jimmy Breslin. He takes the bag of groceries and walks with me for a few blocks.
“Jimmy, do you remember how you told me once there have been so many of you in the course of your life, so many Jimmy Breslins, because you kept turning into the people you wrote about and they turned into you? You said that at a certain point it became impossible to pin down any one Jimmy Breslin.”
“So this is a serious conversation?” he asks.
“I’m thinking about going back to work.”
He stops walking. “You?”
“Yes, but which me?”
He laughs. “Do you really think you’re just going to attend openings for the rest of your life?”
The morning Tom Guinzburg is coming over, I dress carefully, and when I can’t choose between two tops, I realize I’m nervous. Silly. I’ve known Tom for a long time. He’s too kind to laugh at me, even if he thinks it’s absurd that I’d just show up at his office, dragging the circus behind me.
Whatever I do, the world will say what it says. I can’t live fighting or running or hiding from that. I can’t spend the rest of my life watching raindrops sliding down the windowpane.
Black top, I finally decide. White pants. Straightforward. Low-key. I put on my earrings in the mirror.
“There will be a fair amount of learning the ropes at first,” Tom Guinzburg tells me.
“I don’t have to convince you?”
He laughs. “If things don’t work out, I’ll just fire you.”
“That would be a story. Though I’ve been through worse.”
“There’s no glamour in publishing, Jackie.”
“I want to learn.”
“There will be plenty of that.”
“And I want to start where anyone else would start. Agreed?”
“You can take notes for a while. You don’t have the background, really, to be an editor. It’s not that you don’t have the talent or skill. You just don’t have the training. But you can sit in on meetings, and eventually we can work toward acquisitions.”
“Perfect.”
“How are the children?” he asks.
“Caroline’s going to work in London this fall.”
“Exciting.”
“I wish it wasn’t so far.”
Silence then. The quiet rush of sunlight down the curtains into layered maps across the floor.
“Listen, Tom. You’re not doing this just as a favor, a handout?”
“Not at all. You must realize this has advantages for me.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s pity case.”
He starts to smile.
“If you’re going to say something,” I say, “please say it. Otherwise I’ll think all sorts of things.” I say this easily, with warmth, the way I’ve learned, but he gives me that look I’ve seen before when someone is surprised I’ve read the nuance of a moment they were trying to hide.
“I’m just not clear yet what your title would be,” he says.
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me my title?”
“This is an unusual case.”
“Well, what’s the lowest title in publishing?”
He hesitates. “Consulting editor.”
“There it is.”