Jackie and Me
Louis Bayard
In memory of my mother
d
Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
—OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
JACKIE & ME
ONE
O f all places, the East Village. Miles from the Upper East Side, and there she was, sauntering down Avenue A in a linen skirt and black blouse. The Nina Ricci sunglasses clamped on like aviator’s goggles, the carriage nowhere more equestrian than when she stepped over the snoring, splayed drag queen. Was she coming or going? Catching a flick at
the Hollywood Theatre or meeting a friend at Old Buenos
Aires? There was no way of asking, with the gentleman-thug
from the Secret Service following ten feet behind. I could
have damned the torpedoes, I suppose, but I’m embarrassed
to say that at the sight of her I did what every other New
Yorker does. Stopped and gawked. As if she were some
golden hind, yes, trotting out of a glade.
2
LOUIS BAYARD
Imagine my frustration. Some six years have passed since
I last gazed on her— her, I mean, and not her immaculate Christmas cards—so it was startling to have the universe, after all this time, grant me such a clear angle on her—and, in the next breath, withdraw it. One second, I mean, she was coming straight at me. The next, she was turning the corner at East Sixth, her shoulder bag swinging after her.
Now it’s certainly possible that, before she made the
turn, she caught sight of me. It’s also possible that, even if she saw me—and this is the scenario that haunts me a little, a few hours after our crossing—she didn’t know me.
I bring that up because I don’t cut the same figure I used
to. Since we last laid eyes on each other, I’ve become a stouter specimen, slower. The lungs whistle, the hair’s longer. I’ve watched friends of long standing pass me in the street without a second glance, and in my mind now, I imagine myself somehow slipping past the Secret Service goon and stealing
up to that sunglassed figure and murmuring in her ear. “It’s Lem,” I would say.
And Jackie, having failed until now to connect the spectacle before her with the man she used to know, would hear
my voice, climbing always higher than I mean it to, and would call up every inch of her breeding and say something like, “How perfectly lovely to see you.”
The thing is it would have been lovely. No bean counting about all the times she could have seen me. Just the two of us, leaning in like old conspirators, the years laughed away. “Do you remember,” I’d say, “listening to Margaret
Truman? And getting stuck on the Ferris wheel? Watching
J. Edgar Hoover eat?” Such a pure back-and-forth that the
JACKIE & ME
3
bodyguard would instantly relax his grip on the hip holster and let us carry on untroubled down East Sixth—hell, all the way back uptown, that’s how much catching up we’d
have had to do, Jackie and me.
And really, if I had gone to all the trouble of approaching her, if I had risked the full hail of Secret Service bullets, I wouldn’t have squandered the moment by asking her something as banal as How are you? I mean, there are whole news organizations dedicated to exploring that question.
Photographers have been legally enjoined from pressing it
too hard. Maybe all I would have said was “I’m sorry.”
Now that’s odd. In conjuring this scenario, I wouldn’t
necessarily have guessed the words that would come tumbling from my mouth.
Also unexpected: that I should have had to go all the way
down to the East Village to catch sight of the great Jackie Ohhh. I mean, she lives no more than three minutes away from me by foot. Several friends have reported seeing her
jogging, escorted, around the Central Park Reservoir. More
times than I can recall, I’ve walked Ptolly past 1040 Fifth and silently counted up to the fifteenth floor. If it’s morning—say, seven-thirty or eight—I might imagine her greeting the day. (For, of course, she’s back to paid employment.) The ablutions. The hair piled in its Amazonian helmet. Shoulder pads, belted dress, and then, perhaps in the very moment of sallying through the lobby, the Nina Riccis clapped on. The whole Onassis carapace that the world is already expecting, the one it thinks it knows.
Only it doesn’t know how she got there.
4
LOUIS BAYARD
But I do. I was along for the ride.
And maybe the reason I couldn’t go up to that armatured
creature on Avenue A was because she bears only a passing
relation to the Jackie I once knew. The scrapping career girl, I mean, with the homemade clothes and the ladders in her stockings and the childlike sense of the ridiculous. The girl whose skin broke out every so often, who doubted herself at every turn, who wasn’t even sure she wanted to marry
at all—certainly not the kind of man she was supposed to
marry. The Jackie nobody else knew but me, really, and the
Jackie who can no longer be.
It shouldn’t be too hard to recollect her. I am by nature
an archivist and have assembled comprehensive scrapbooks