Chapter 32
“You’re not going to Italy to get back at me, are you?” he says.
“Of course not.”
“But it’s August.”
She hesitates, the surface of her eyes shift. There’s something she’s not telling him. Some secret.
She is not unlike him. He realized that when they first met. Leaving is something she knows how to do.
Her face is still and smooth, the way it gets when she knows she’s being watched.
“You always think there’s a game, Jack,” she says. “I’m not playing a game. I love you. You know that. I have to live my life and do things I want to do. While I’m gone, you’re free to do the things you want to do. Then we will both be back.” She stops, but he can infer the rest. We will both be back in ourmaison blanche. The dinners and candles and music and speeches. It will be the transactional beauty you want, the kind you need to get what you want.
She doesn’t need to say any of this. He hears it. The way she is looking at him. Steady, calm, matter-of-fact.
From somewhere down the hall, the children’s voices.
“We won’t be gone long,” she says, that smile with its implacable charm. “What was it you said to me once, Jack? Flights always return.”
Passionless. Her voice. No inflection. Then she adds, “Please don’t forget, though, before I leave, we have to meet with Bill Walton about the designs for Lafayette Square.”
She is taking Caroline with her to Italy. They’ll be gone for three weeks.
He reads about her trip in the papers. The landing in Rome, the short flight to Salerno, where she and Caroline meet Lee. As the days unfold, photographs appear in the press of Jackie with Gianni Agnelli. In those photographs, something taut in the chemistry between them.
Salinger mentions it.
“You think it’s an issue?” Jack asks.
Salinger nods. “You might want to ask her to cool it.”
He misses her. He misses Caroline more. He misses the shape of his daughter resting against him as he reads aloud to her at night, the weight of her small body, half on his lap on the boat as the wet salt wind breaks against his face and strands of her hair blow across his skin, his arm tight around her. John is different, completely of this world, almost two, all boy, rolling on the floor. Caroline, though. He has always felt bound to her in some great, mysterious way, so even when she is right there, with him, she feels like memory. Her sweet voice, her smell, her hands around his neck, her small heart flipping in her chest as she breathes, mouth falling open, eyes closing to sleep as he holds her—those spare moments of their time together alter him in incremental ways, her laughter, her silence, the dimensions of her moods. She has always been the deep of his heart. Like some tiny god. She’s the one soul in the world he feels entirely accountable to. Something of who she is, how she looks at him, what she expects, that sudden naked trust that will break across her small face turned up to his, demanding more than greatness. Goodness. How uncomplicated it is, the way he loves her, the way he’s always loved her, as straightforward and essential as wind.