The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  We sit silently for most of the speech and I move only once to adjust myself in the chair. At times I want to cut in with a comment or an observation, but Jackie is watching the television screen with such scrutiny that I don’t dare interject. Is she as taken with Clinton the man? Clinton the politician? Is she mournfully lost in the memory of seeing her own husband on such a stage, remembering the night he himself became the Democratic nominee? I study her Little Mermaid and I see her desperately wanting to live in another world too. Not at Madison Square Garden, but in a parallel world where the promise of Jack and Bobby was fully realized.

  About two-thirds of the way through the speech, I hear Clinton say, “Them, the minorities. Them, the liberals. Them, the poor. Them, the homeless. Them, the people with disabilities. Them, the gays.”

  I sit straight up in my seat. Did he say “gay”? “The gays”? Has a presidential candidate ever acknowledged gay people in such a prominent way? I lean forward, resting my chin on my hands, listening intently as Clinton continues.

  “We’ve gotten to where we’ve nearly them’ed ourselves to death. Them, and them, and them. But this is America. There is no them. There is only us.”

  “YES.” I say it out loud, and for the first time Jackie turns to me. Just when I think I might be in trouble for speaking out of turn, she raises an eyebrow and nods as if to say not bad.

  “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

  “This is good,” Jackie says, and then we’re silent again until the very end of the speech when Clinton name-checks John Kennedy. Not heavy-handedly—in fact, it’s quite graceful. “As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship.”

  I keep Jackie in my peripheral vision, imagining the looks she endures when much of the history she witnessed—or made—is mentioned.

  “That America was the greatest nation in history because our people had always believed in two things—that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.”

  The speech crescendos with a call and response and I know that it’s coming to a close. Or it would be if I were writing it; no writer worth his salt would put a rejoinder in the middle. Clinton pauses and bites his lower lip. Where most politicians would be relieved that such a task is behind them, there’s a twinkle in his eye that suggests he’s almost sad it’s done. That he doesn’t want to deliver the last line, that he doesn’t want it to end. Fortunately for him, and I believe for us, it’s hard to imagine this is the tail end of his time in the spotlight.

  “My fellow Americans, I end tonight where it all began for me—I still believe in a place called Hope. God bless you, and God bless America.”

  The auditorium goes wild and balloons fall, and Hillary appears onstage, followed a moment later by their daughter, Chelsea, and the Gores, and then, belatedly, the Gore children too. Fleetwood Mac roars through the hall as the opening chords of “Don’t Stop” start to play. The crowd is eating it up and there’s confetti and signs and straw hats—where do people who aren’t in Dixieland bands get so many straw hats?

  “Well,” Jackie says, “that about does it.”

  “What did you think?”

  Jackie struggles for something to do with her hands in one of the only moments I’ve seen her appear inelegant. “I think the country belongs to your generation now.”

  I try to take that in. The baton being passed. The mantle of responsibility.

  Maybe it’s adrenaline from hearing a soaring speech, or from being here; for the first time in a long time I feel ready for what lies ahead. Even if that means facing my mother again and making peace with what keeps us apart, whether or not we can heal it.

  To do that, I have to go home.

  I watch as Jackie swings her feet to the floor and then rises to turn off the television. “I’m going to get us both some sherbet.”

  Lost in thought, I realize she’s already out of the room before I can speak. “That sounds delicious!”

  There’s a gentle, constant sadness she exudes, but I find it comforting. Familiar. Here is a woman who in some of this country’s darkest hours taught a nation how to mourn. But being here with her now, listening to her rummage in the freezer for frozen dessert, I wonder if she herself ever fully healed.

  Yesterday’s Gone, Yesterday’s Gone

  November 1992

  ◆ FIFTEEN ◆

  In a scene straight out of a movie, I race across Fifty-Third Street toward Fifth Avenue from the copy place near my house to get my completed manuscript to Jackie before Doubleday closes for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t my plan to cut things this tight, but the copy place had a toner issue (whatever that means) and it took twice as long for me to print. And then the register tape jammed, so I finally just threw cash down on the counter and told them to keep the change. A casual observer would diagnose me suicidal the way I’m racing through city streets at dusk; when I can’t plow into traffic without facing certain death, I jog in place like a runner who doesn’t want his heart rate to slow while waiting for the light to change. I make it most of the way in one piece before skidding on a jettisoned museum map outside of MoMA like it’s a discarded banana peel.

  When I reach the building, my trailing scarf gets caught in the revolving door, and for a flickering second I imagine suffering the fate of that dancer from the 1920s (what was her name?) whose scarf caught in the open spokes of her car’s rear wheel. I can picture myself crumpled on the floor between revolving glass door partitions, manuscript pages raining down on me like prize money inside the cash booth on Beat the Clock. (Isadora Duncan! That was her name.) But the door plows forward and so do I and before I know it I’m in the lobby, making awkward eye contact with the security guard who would have been tasked with retrieving my strangulated body. I sign in, the same as I’ve done maybe a half-dozen times over the past few months, and catch an elevator to the Doubleday floor just as someone is exiting.

  The receptionist is packing up and I wave and say, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Big plans?” she asks.

  “Going h-home.” The word gets caught in my throat. “You?”

  “Same. Enjoy!” She waves me through and points the way, even though she knows I know where I’m going. Enjoy! I laugh to myself; if only a trip home were that carefree. I proceed down the hall with the cubicles and the framed covers, doing this weird trot that’s faster than a walk but slower than a run, bank a right at the conference room, and proceed directly to Jackie’s office. Her door is closed, but her assistant, Mark, is sitting at his desk in the hall.

  “She in?”

  “James.” He smiles at me and I’m confronted by his perfect teeth. “You just missed her.”

  I slump to my knees dramatically and the manuscript lands on the edge of his desk with a thud.

  “Oh, relax,” Mark says, unimpressed with my theatrics.

  “I told her I would get this to her before the holiday,” I say, grabbing a piece of scrap paper and jotting down a phone number.

  “She’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “On Thanksgiving?” I’m appalled. And then saddened at the thought of her not having holiday plans.

  “James. It’s Tuesday. Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow.”

  Not knowing what day it is can be one of the hazards of working from home. “I raced . . .” I breathe in deeply to get oxygen into my lungs.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Eleven blocks.”

  “I can tell.”

  “For nothing.”

  “You won’t have to come back tomorrow.” It’s more a statement of fact than an encouragement to look on the bright side.

  But he has a point. At some hour tomorrow I would have certainly realized it was not Thanksgiving and done this all again on a day when the offices were all but certain to close even earlie
r. How many days in a row can one dash through the streets like a maniac and not get hit by a bus? “Well, anyway. Here’s a number where I can be reached over the holiday.” I slide him the scrap paper with my mother’s information.

  “I’m just shutting down for the day. Any interest in grabbing a drink?”

  “With you?” I say it out of surprise and not disgust, but Mark gives me the finger anyway. I laugh. His hair forms this one sandy curl that swoops down over his eyebrow. “Sure.” This could be a welcome distraction from the growing agita I feel at the mere thought of Thanksgiving dinner with my family.

  I wait while he collects his things and wonder if this is appropriate. Surely he’s asking me to drinks as a young man working in publishing; knowing writers is a smart way to advance his career. Yet he’s only a few years out of college and he’s working as an assistant to Jacqueline Onassis, so he probably already has some connections—it can’t possibly be a job you get having your résumé blindly selected from the slush pile. So if he’s well connected, with a guaranteed career trajectory, is this something else?

  “Where to, hotshot?” he asks.

  I look at him, really look at him. He’s handsome, for sure—blue eyes, strong chin, rigid nose—but his best feature just may be his confidence.

  “Forty Four?” I suggest the bar at the Royalton Hotel, but almost cringe as soon as it comes out of my mouth. I find dimly lit hotel bars erotic, and since I don’t know what Mark’s intentions are, it feels like playing with, if not outright fire, a modest flame. A smarter idea would be a well-lit bar without top-shelf booze, filled with tourists, that doesn’t have floors of bedrooms piled above it.

  “Great.” I guess he likes hotel bars too.

  We walk together, and the fall air is crisp and I can tell it’s one of the last few nights I will be able to get away without a winter coat. I ask where he went to school (Brown), and then a bit about Rhode Island and his family. His father ran for Congress as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district and put up respectable numbers (he lost by eight points less than the candidate in the previous cycle), making some Democratic higher-ups take notice. I wonder if this is how Mark got his job (Democratic higher-ups certainly have a line to Jackie), but asking outright seems rude, like I’m questioning his own credentials; I would never want anyone to think I achieved anything because of my father.

  Forty Four, while not empty, is not buzzing with the usual after-work crowd. People, it seems, are already splitting town. We order our drinks at the bar and find a small table tucked in a quiet corner with plenty of shadow for cover. Mark gestures for me to sit down first, which makes me feel like I have more years on him than I actually do. My drink, a hickory old-fashioned, contains an ingredient called black dirt apple jack, which reminds me of Jackie’s father Black Jack Bouvier (a nickname I learned from A Woman Named Jackie, a biography I checked out of the library). Mark sips some concoction with gin and ginger beer.

  “What’s it like?” I ask.

  “Working with her?”

  I notice he says with her instead of for her. If that’s his natural confidence or the arrogance of privilege and youth, I don’t know. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. You work with her too.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Yeah. I’ve never been to the Vineyard,” Mark says, punctuating that very difference. I laugh nervously, but he pushes on, saving me from having to spill any secrets. “What’s it like? Her phones are busy. Everyone wants to talk to her. You have to know who to let through and, more important, who not to.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I remember once I transferred President Nixon through to her desk thinking it was some other Dick.”

  I laugh. Dick.

  “No, I didn’t mean it like . . .” He slaps my knee and I bite down on the inside of my cheek so as not to react. “Someone else named Dick, one of her authors, and when she picked up the line she was stuck. I don’t think she hates anyone as much as she hates Richard Nixon. I got in so much trouble for that.” Mark pauses and sips his drink. “This is all just between us, right?”

  “Of course,” I say, kicking his foot gently. I study the wide wale of his corduroy pants and the way his cuff bounces with my nudge. I’m not sure what prompts me to do this, the bourbon or the black dirt apple jack or his confidence with me. Or I’m lying to myself and it’s my own newfound confidence, from my new identity as author—even in quiet moments like this, my book’s publication likely still the better part of a year away. In either case, I want him to know he can trust me.

  “Because officially, Mrs. Onassis doesn’t hate anyone. She’s too busy for that.”

  “She’s above the fray.”

  “Exactly.” Mark looks over his shoulder to make sure no one is within earshot. “I mean, she really is. She works very hard. She’s edited nearly one hundred books.”

  I look over Mark’s shoulder as well. “You worried she’s here?”

  “The Carlyle is more her style, but you never know.”

  “Should we come up with a code name?” I ask.

  “Sometimes, to friends, I call her Jo. Just, you know.”

  “Joe?” Giving her a blue-collar man’s name seems almost too coded.

  “Her initials. J-O. It’s less show-offy.”

  “Ah.” Now it makes sense. “Ever share a drink?”

  “With Jo? Once. Not bourbon though,” he says, indicating my glass. “She doesn’t like it.”

  “Hmm. Do you like it?”

  Mark reaches over and takes a sip of my drink without breaking eye contact. He shrugs. “It’s all right. Not my drink.” I look down at my glass where his lips just were and wonder if they touched the same spot as mine.

  “Do you think Jo’s always wanted to work? That she would have pursued a career earlier if she could have? I think about that sometimes. The why of it all.” Our eyes are fixed on each other. “Is this weird? I have no one else to talk with about this stuff.”

  Mark waves off my concern. “Oh, I know she would have. Worked. In fact, I think someone said she brought up the idea when she was married, but Onassis forbade it. Mediterranean men.” Mark shudders with a mild disgust that makes me laugh; he’s like a child repeating a grown-up phrase he heard without actually understanding the meaning.

  “Date a lot of Mediterranean men at Brown, did you?”

  “Ha ha,” he says, but then genuinely laughs too.

  I should not encourage this, but it feels good to have a man treat me as someone who matters, for my work. Mostly, it’s nice to have Jackie in common with someone, to share her just enough to have a friend to gossip with about the absurdity of it all.

  “You know, there are a lot of gay authors in her stable. A lot of gay men in her life,” Mark says.

  I cock an eyebrow. “Stable.”

  “Giddy-up.” He takes a long sip of his drink.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know. We’re sensitive.”

  “Ha,” I scoff. “Speak for yourself.”

  “You don’t think you’re sensitive?”

  “I don’t think of myself as particularly sensitive, no,” I reply.

  “There’s a four-hundred-page manuscript on my desk that says otherwise.”

  My face grows flush; I can actually feel the reddening of my cheeks. It’s embarrassing to be read so completely by someone so young. If he can see through me, Jackie certainly will. I think of her reading this draft and feel dread.

  “There’s a book, in her library, in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Have you been? To 1040?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Just the Vineyard,” he says, shaking his head. “Well, I’ve only been to deliver stacks of manuscripts and occasionally mail, so I’m not showing off.” Now he’s concerned with grandstanding. “Anyhow, it was entitled Th
e History of Homosexuality. Or something like that. It jumped out at me as out of place.”

  “I got that book. At orientation. I never cracked it.”

  Mark leans in, squeezes my calf and says “Ha,” then crunches on an ice cube until it’s gone. “I mean, who would read such a book? Most people either like homosexuals or they don’t. I’ve never heard of anyone researching the subject to decide if they should.”

  I look down at my leg where he touched me. The modest flame is in need of containment. “Maybe she did, like gay people, and what she was researching was why.”

  Mark shrugs. “Maybe.”

  “You still find that weird.”

  “I don’t know. I guess not that weird. She has a book on everything. I’m sure she likes books more than people.”

  “Even gay ones,” I agree.

  “Gay books?”

  “Gay people.”

  We laugh, although the idea of her preferring books to people is not an overstatement. We blather on about titles we’ve read and publishing in general, and as we near the end of our second round, Mark asks, “What are we doing here?”

  “You suggested we grab a drink.”

  “I did?”

  “You did.”

  “That was bold.” He laughs, but I get the sense it’s not particularly bold for Mark. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I lean back in my chair and swirl the last of the watered-down bourbon in my glass. I take a few seconds before answering. Since I told Jackie about Daniel it seems unwise to tell Mark something different. “I do.”

  He shrugs. “Good. I wouldn’t want you to get attached.” He curls his lip like Billy Idol.

  I do a quick calculation of the number of rooms in this hotel: Eighty, ninety, maybe? Plus another dozen or so suites and penthouses? I wonder how many are currently occupied and how many are host to people having sex right now. It’s early still. Seven-thirty. Probably only a few, if that. People engaging in a quickie before going out for the night. Are any hotel guests having sex with someone other than their professed partners? These are the thoughts that make hotel bars so erotic, this is the math that made coming here a bad idea.