Jack's Widow (11 page)

She looked at him in a puzzled way.

“What I mean is, when I first arrived you were telling me that you went to Arlington the other night and told him you were through. And I notice that you have taken your wedding and engagement rings off.”

“Well, I only did that yesterday,” said Jackie.

“Don’t you understand that every time you are seen to be cherishing his memory you look greater, grander, better. Putting the pieces together for your children’s sake, trying to cherish the good moments, the times the four of you were happy. Every time you lead Caroline and John in prayer, anywhere in the world, people look at you and think, There is a saint.

“Believe it or not, what you do now is important to America.”

She pulled an unbelieving face.

“Look at the wider picture. This country badly wants not to feel
guilty. Many of those who think it’s their right to carry a gun will wonder, Am I a bit to blame for a nut like Oswald? Did I make it too easy for him?

“You, by staying here, by trying to do the best for your children, are a beacon.

“You can’t be that if you just bury yourself.

“You stay inside, hiding yourself away from the world, stop doing your charity work, stop putting your energy into the library they’re building in Boston, stop showing that you still care about America, and people will start thinking, Maybe the newspapers are right, maybe she isn’t what she was cracked up to be either.

“Remember, they’ve been burned. They were taken in by Jack. A pretty regular sort of family guy, they thought. Or at least that is how he was sold to ’em. Now they find he has these skeletons in the closets, in the drawers, behind the faucets…everywhere.

“Just like yourself, they don’t want to be taken for a ride again.

“If you aren’t out there, they will wonder what you’re hiding.

“Then they might believe that you
did
go along with a lie, posing for all those pictures and features about the perfect family. That you did want power at any price.

“Yes, I know it isn’t fair. Immediately after his death, yes, you were given the allowance to be truly upset, to retreat and cry for your man, for the future that was taken away from you. But now, over a year later and a lot of dirty linen after…if you hide away you lose your stature.

“Every day in this great country of ours, I would take a guess probably half a million women discover that their man has been fooling around. For them it has to be business as usual. They have to take the children to school, care for their elderly parents, go to the PTA and the supermarket.

“So at best they will think that you are behaving like someone who is so grand she feels that she can just dump her responsibilities. That you are behaving like a spoiled princess.

“At worst they will assume that the gossips are right. Because you have the power to raise money and bring in thousands of dollars
to charity—you know that your name does that—if you can’t be bothered to turn up you will look heartless, cold, and disinterested.”

He could see that she was unsettled by his words.

He gently rested his hand on her arm for a moment and looked into her eyes.

“The last thing I want to do is frighten you. But get outside of yourself and see how this might appear to Mr. and Mrs. Middle America.”

Jackie looked at him, huge eyes out on stalks.

“Sorry, but you did say you like the truth.

“Out there.” He pointed at the window in what he knew was a slightly melodramatic style. “It is so much worse for those who are ill, poor, lonely.”

He could see he had shocked her, so for a moment he turned his back and looked out of the window.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been rude and harsh,” he murmured.

“No,” she answered, “I know that you are doing it for the best of reasons. I’m going to think about what you’ve said.”

“Tomorrow I promise you that I’ll bring you the rest, everything that’s known about your late partner and his catting around, and you will have to decide how you process that information.

“My last piece of advice: you have a great understanding of animals and know that they do best in their natural habitat. Well, yours isn’t within this very elegant apartment, however large it is.

“Let’s face it, the kitchen is a foreign country to you.”

The old joke lightened the mood.

“Your natural surroundings are center stage. Your natural attitude isn’t bitter and twisted but making things happen, doing things, and helping others.

“Jackie, you’re our greatest asset, please don’t waste more time worrying about what was, think about what is and what could be.”

Within minutes he was gone.

When he arrived the next day and produced the notebook she leaned forward and put it back in his pocket.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.

He paid close attention as she paced back and forth in front of the fireplace.

He noticed the beauty of the room, which she had arranged so that when sunlight spilled through the window the antiques, the silverware, and the mirrors glowed.

“I sat here for hours after you’d gone. I went over everything you said. I turned it over and over in my head. You’ll be glad to know you’ve changed my mind on a lot of things.

“I want these stories to die.”

She looked into the middle distance and he knew not to interrupt.

“So don’t tell me what is in that little book. Please just keep it all to yourself. Someday when I am a very old lady I might ask you for it, so keep it safe, but for now, it’s over.”

He got up to congratulate her but she waved him down.

“Guy, this is so difficult. Let me get it over with.

“As you suggested I got to thinking about ordinary Americans, about those people who voted for us, for me and Jack, not just Jack.

“Everyone thinks I am apolitical. It’s not true. I know that I can do things that matter, and I do have things to do. Yes, I am going to go out, be active, but not just in the way you think. Not just to parties and VIP stuff. The only way to get over this is to shock people, but this time in a good way. I want to do something that makes a difference.

“And you are going to help me to do it.”

I
t was modesty that made her turn her back to him. It had been a long time since she had done this.

Slowly she bent over and carefully eased the sheer stocking up her leg. It was so quiet she fancied that the electric buzz between her skin and the flimsy nylon was audible. Once the inky black fabric was taut two tiny portions were clamped into the silky suspender that rested high on her thigh.

She began the same routine with the other leg. Apart from her stockings she appeared naked to him even though she had already slipped into her bra. All her lingerie, the tulle, satin and organdy, even the silken threads that held them together, was hand-dyed in Paris to match her skin to perfection.

She could feel that David, David the doctor whose mind and now whose hands had roused her out of her misery, was watching her.

Still naked on the couch he realized that they had not even had time to pull the curtains. Thank heaven his office was not visible from neighboring buildings. The only interloper had been the rare shard of late-afternoon sunshine.

“You know this is very bad. If we continue to behave like this
you are going to have to find yourself a new psychoanalyst.” He laughed as he attempted to pull his hair into some sort of tidiness while taking a cursory look for his shorts.

Without turning, she said, “Well then, you’d better find me a handsome one.”

The smile in her voice gave him all the encouragement he needed. He got up and pulled her into his arms.

Playfully he kissed the tip of her nose, her lips, then on down to the hollow in her throat.

He slipped behind her and held the strands of her deep brown hair roughly aside while he paid close attention to each of the tiny bones at the back of her neck.

She thought how much better the sex was than with Jack.

The appointment had begun as normal.

Ever since she had started therapy she had always been prompt for her twice-weekly appointment. It fitted neatly into the time between the end of lunch and her children’s return from school.

At the beginning she had been Jack-obsessed but gradually the thirty-nine-year-old psychiatrist had calmed her, engaged her thoughts, and led her from panic about the present into having the honesty and the inquisitiveness to behave like all his other patients and lead him through the road map of her past so that he could attempt to explain the workings of her mind.

She had thought him very attractive from the moment they met. But it was with the same regard that she might have for a curtain fabric or a vase. Her emotions were entirely bound up in the loss of her husband and his hidden love life in the parallel lane of their marriage.

At first the sessions did not go well. Years of being guarded kept her from being frank and speaking openly, but then life conspired to alter her attitude. She realized that the idea of maintaining control was foolish self-deceit. The continuing press disclosures about her husband’s betrayals meant that trying to retain a façade of containment would not work. So she opened up and gradually he persuaded her that her husband’s behavior was in no way re
lated to any failure on her part. Then he went to work peeling back the deeper layers of her unhappiness, starting with her position as an extremely youthful mediator in her parents’ miserable marriage.

For David Goadshem this was not only what he had trained for, this was what he knew about.

“Are all families so destructive?” she asked after they had spent many weeks analyzing the various effects that the Bouviers, Auchinclosses, and Kennedys had had on their offspring.

“Freud thinks so. I think that understanding why we behave as we do is the first step.”

She began to anticipate their sessions with plea sure. At Easter she sent him the gift of an Audubon print he had briefly mentioned and later a book of drawings. She was intrigued, perhaps curious about him.

David Goadshem knew that there was nothing unusual in that. He had been doing this work for ten years and it was expected, had even been discussed at medical school. It was inevitable that some female patients, especially those who had never had a man who really listened and talked to them, would start to see their psychoanalyst in a romantic light.

There were rules about sexual relationships between patients and doctors, rules he had never broken. The trajectory from living with his grandparents, who were still mentally dwelling in the shtetl outside Krakow, to medical school had been too steep for him to ever put his livelihood at risk. From the day he set himself up as a psychoanalyst he had never faltered, not even when some of his most glamorous clients arrived dressed as provocatively as possible and made it plain they were available. Not even when one of them had brazenly stripped on the couch.

Also, although he treated her in exactly the same way as all his other patients, he could not help feeling a little protective toward the former First Lady, so the thought of ever being involved with her did not occur to him.

It was a strange retrograde session that altered things. After
months of even progression she arrived obsessively chain-smoking, more anxious and nervous than ever before. The previous evening she had heard high-level Hollywood gossip about a biopic that was soon to go into production based on Marilyn’s life.

It was as if she had returned to the bleak, dark days of her early visits.

“The rumor is that it’s going to say that Marilyn was the love of Jack’s life.”

“Okay. Let’s do what we used to, let’s ask ourselves, Did Jack ever say he wanted a divorce?”

“No.”

“Did Jack behave differently to her or was she betrayed like everyone else?”

Lying in her usual position on the couch, she couldn’t see his face but found his voice compelling, determined yet failing to be completely unemotional. For the first time ever she sat up, turned, and stared at him. Examined him.

He couldn’t explain the rest.

The whirlwind of lust and passion was as strange to him as to her.

The next morning she had rung his receptionist with entreaties to fit her in with a last-minute appointment that very day.

In between seeing patients he tried to work out what this meant. She had never altered or added an appointment before. She was also breaking her sacrosanct rules, coming at a time when she would normally be with her children.

Was it more news about the film that was worrying her? Or did she just want to see him again? He had come to no conclusion by the time he had succumbed to her request to join her on the couch again.

Even though he knew they were both single he knew it was wrong. But he was elated.

As he stretched himself alongside her she turned over onto her stomach, raised herself up on her elbows, and put her face close to his own and stroked his cheek.

“David, David,” she breathed.

“Yesterday was wonderful.”

He didn’t dare move, passion and happiness imprisoned him.

“Then again, pretty much everything that has ever happened to me in this office”—she gazed round at the tall bookshelves, the low modern lamps on his desk—“has always been wonderful.”

He smiled up at her and was about to raise his lips to hers when she continued.

“But I know the rules. There are always the rules,” she intoned in a deeper voice.

“After you reminded me of them I had to check. You know me.” She tipped her face to one side.

There was stillness between them, a waiting; a crossroad had been reached.

“You were right, as always,” she said. “I can’t keep seeing you for therapy if, well, if other stuff is going to happen.

“I read pages and pages about how it is vital that the therapist and the patient are not emotionally involved. Apparently it screws things up, excuse the pun.”

“Well—” he began, but she interrupted.

“I hate to admit it but it does all seem very sensible, and David, you of all people know that it’s too much of a risk, for both of us. You’ve done so well for yourself, come so far to get here.”

He was still not sure where this was going and was desperate to interrupt, but she shushed him.

Speaking quickly, she continued. “I know that this will remain our secret, but let’s just say, in my life, I have discovered that walls have ears.”

He forced himself to look nonchalant but she wasn’t fooled.

“Please don’t be sad, I’ve thought of nothing else since I left here yesterday.

“I know what I need most is to talk to you. Here, in this room, I’ve found my release from hell and there’s so much more straightening out that I need to do.

“So, if I have to find myself another therapist, who will I go to? Who will I be able to trust? Who else will I respect?”

“Well,” he interrupted, “you know that whoever you go to, they are honor-bound to tell no one, absolutely no one, what you say, ever.”

Even as he said it he knew he was lost.

“Yes, but they will never be you, who understands me, every single bit of me, as we now know?” She grinned. “Also, if you do find me a new therapist everyone will wonder why…not to mention the other shrinks, who will come to the obvious conclusion.”

Gently she leaned over and kissed his forehead.

“Could we do it, have this”—her smile swept over the couch in a special reference to the application they had now found for it—“and still be able to have the other?”

“It has been known.” He shrugged.

“Okay, I admit, you’re a genius, so maybe it would work…for a little while. But we both know that in the end—”

“You think it wouldn’t work?”

“We’ll have become something else…won’t we?”

He was now gazing firmly at the ceiling.

She could not guess what he was thinking. In her experience men who went quiet were upset or angry or both.

“Please don’t be angry with me, I couldn’t bear that. You know how much you’ve done for me, you know I could never trust someone else…”

“Yes, well no, I don’t really.” He still wouldn’t look at her.

She knew that she had been right. Angry and upset.

Finally he turned to her. His expression, resignation tinged with lust, made her want to brush his lips with her own. They kissed again. Just before they began to undo each other’s clothes he pulled back and whispered.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got the message, I know that we must stop doing this.”

Later, as once again he watched her while she readied herself to leave he realized how irritated he was with himself for thinking that there could have been any other outcome. The moment she had
insisted on seeing him so soon, he should have known her well enough to have worked it out. Self-disciplined and determined to be finally at ease with herself, she knew that she still needed therapy. It was inevitable that she would not let sex, something she had done without for some time, remove her from his mental healing.

Making the best of it, he ascribed what had happened as a sensible addition to her treatment.

Before she left he told her: “Remember the discussions we’ve had about recrimination and revenge.

“As far as I know you haven’t used this before but why not think of sex in this way. We’ve talked about how having conversations with someone who is not with us, whether they are dead or just elsewhere, can be a way of overcoming the pain they’ve caused.”

She thought about the zillions of angry one-sided talks she had had with Jack since he had been shot.

“At least now every time you are in bed with someone you can think, ‘Here’s one in the eye for you, Jack.’ After all, apart from you and the children, the thing he’ll be missing most is sex!”

She laughed. “Oh, I hardly think that just because I’ve started again that I’ll be doing it so regularly that it will be of major support, but I’ll bear it in mind.”

Then she made him solemnly promise that they would return, with as much certainty as they could, to their previous incarnations by Thursday afternoon. This made them both so sad, so they made love for the fourth and, as they both insisted, for the last time.

Two hours later, preparing for early-evening drinks with her mother, sister, and an old friend, a Russian diplomat whom she had got to know while living in the White House, she chose to dress in a more daring way. Choosing a simple Madame Grès dress in yellow silk, she left off the matching jacket and cinched the waist with a wide leather belt so that the hem became fashionably shorter. She then added higher heels.

Her sexual reawakening also made her feel less like behaving like a former First Lady and more like a real one. Instead of sticking to such asexual subjects as the subtleties of Hungarian wines and the
relevance of foreign travel to the well-educated teenager, she managed to engage the man in a real conversation about his problems with a daughter who was hooked on sleeping pills, and while she had no intention of succumbing to his less than diplomatic overtures, she found that the last forty-eight hours had made it possible for her to launch herself back into the world of sexual nuance, flattery, and charm.

She was enjoying herself so much that she almost forgot that she was supposed to be trying to ease him out after just an hour. Guy was in town and had been unsuccessfully trying to visit her for nearly a week. He was due at eight
P.M.

The last time he had visited she was still being reclusive. Now, as part of her determination to stop raking over the past, she had taken practical steps to fill her evenings. After Dallas she had been inundated with requests from many of the foreign diplomats, artists, and politicians that she and Jack had befriended. Most had visited Jack’s grave but none had been given the chance to offer their personal condolences to his widow. Intellectually stimulating and knowledgeable, they were, she felt, a worthwhile alternative to going to New York events that brought back memories she wanted to avoid. She had vowed to do no more digging but she was still uncomfortable dealing with some of the old faces.

This low-key entertaining, usually no more than early-evening drinks at home, often including a member of the family because entertaining a man alone might give rise to gossip, gave her something to do at a time of the day when she was apt to feel low.