In my mind, the lunch marks a transition in our working together—the writing is done and it’s now full steam ahead to publication. I perform a little due diligence on the Carlyle to put myself at ease. Allen had some interesting insight; it seems it was John Kennedy who really put the hotel on the map. As a senator in the 1950s he was such a frequent guest they installed a private phone line just for him. After he became president, the press dubbed it the New York White House. When he died, Jackie moved the children into a suite on the thirty-first floor as she hid from the world; the children would play in the lobby. It’s odd to me that she would keep this as a haunt, given her history with the place—but who am I to question.
I dress for the occasion in a jacket and tie, and arrive early to experience a drink at Bemelmans Bar, named for its murals by Ludwig Bemelmans, who illustrated the Madeline series of children’s books. (I’ve read he also painted a private mural on Aristotle Onassis’s private yacht, the Christina, but I know better than to mention that.) I take my Grey Goose on the rocks to a quiet table along the mural where a mustachioed man is handing a pointy-faced child a bouquet of balloons. Surrounding him are whimsically drawn scenes of France with the occasional odd touch like a rabbit in a man’s green suit with his arms sternly folded, dogs in their Sunday finest, and a giraffe poking its head through a tall fence. When I take a sip of my drink I notice the ceiling is gold foil. Even the lampshades are illustrated.
I remember the Madeline books; Naomi used to read them to me when we were kids. There was an old house in Paris, covered in vines, and out front stood a dozen little girls in two straight lines. There’s something very Jackie about Bemelmans’s style, as if maybe she had been one of the twelve girls herself. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to picture her as a child in a perfect yellow coat, legs tapered to a fine point like a ballerina’s. The murals remind me of something Joseph Kennedy allegedly said to his son, warning him about Jackie’s merits as a political spouse: “Too much status, not enough quo.” My time reading up on Jackie has unearthed a number of delicious remarks.
When twelve-thirty arrives I walk over to the restaurant, the vodka making me a bit punchy. Status, status, too much status.
“Mrs. Onassis’s table,” I say to the maître d’, unsure if the right amount of s’s (esses) spills out of my mouth.
“And you are . . .”
“James Smale.” He checks the reservation until he seems satisfied.
“Very good. Right this way, sir.” He collects a hardbound menu, leads me through the restaurant to a private table near the back (always the back), and motions for me to be seated. “Mrs. Onassis should be here presently.”
“Thank you.” I accept the menu with both hands, as if it’s carved in stone, and give it a quick study. I’m forever afraid of being caught off guard, like in a dream, to have a waiter arrive to take my order only to open the menu and see it’s in a language I cannot understand and everything is market price in a currency for which I do not know the exchange rate. I quickly settle on salad as appropriate lunch fare; eating a large sandwich can seem vulgar, and some of the classic dishes (Lobster Thermidor?) I don’t understand. I rule out the seafood salad, as I don’t like the sound of “lump crab,” and narrow in on the salade niçoise as the most sensible option.
Just like how the tide rapidly recedes from the shore before a tsunami thunders in, the ambient din of the restaurant drops and a strange quiet falls over the dining room (save for the sound of one falling fork) when Jackie enters. The shoulder pads in her bright-colored jacket along with its narrow waist make her look like the angular shapes in a Kandinsky painting. As she weaves through the restaurant she waves at certain guests with a gentle flutter of her fingers, almost as if she’s embarrassed to interrupt, smiling the whole time. She has a large manila envelope tucked under one arm.
I’m standing when she reaches the table.
“James, you look spiffy.”
I kiss her on the cheek, inhaling deeply, incarcerating some of her magic and satisfying a room full of prying eyes. “Thank you for the invitation.”
“It’s my pleasure. Shall we sit?”
A waiter in a white jacket materializes. “Something to drink, madam?”
“Champagne. Two glasses.” She turns to me and winks. “We’re celebrating.”
“Right away.”
“What are we celebrating?” I ask, once he is out of earshot.
She says, very plainly, “You.”
My face is warm, but not from the vodka.
“Congratulations again on a marvelous ending.”
“I just needed to be pushed.”
“And I was happy to oblige. You really let her have it!” She seems almost too enthusiastic.
“You’re sure it’s not too much?” I think about a potential time, years from now, when my mother breaks down and reads the book. How will she take this shellacking?
“I would have reined you in if it was.”
I gesture at the package. “Is that what I think it is?”
Jackie opens the envelope on the table and pulls out a galley for the book. “I wanted to place it in your hands myself.”
For the first time I am holding an advance copy of my novel. Not a manuscript, not a story, not stacks of loose papers held together by a rubber band. Bound pages. It’s weighty and thick, and across the top it reads: ITHACA A Novel. The cover image shows trees at the height of their fall foliage, and yellows and oranges and red pop off the cover like wildfire. At the bottom, in white, is the author’s name. My name. James Smale.
“This is . . . something else.” You’d think by now I would have learned to conquer speechlessness.
“The cover is luscious. And your name even sounds like an author’s.”
Have you read the latest James Smale? I imagine readers asking, about some future anticipated work. No, is it good? A whole conversation flashes through my mind. It’s sooooo good.
“Remember when we talked about spring?” I ask. We had once imagined a similar cover image with softer colors, yellows and greens under a mellow light. Spring, Jackie had said, suggested growth and renewal. Fall, I countered, represented change, a return (thinking of the Cavafy poem still), but also bounty and a harvest.
“You were right about autumn,” she says. I convinced her, I think, with another poem, Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” “Especially with the fiery new ending. It’s a handsome book, James. Your mother will be proud.”
Her optimism is almost contagious. “Should I send her a copy?” I chuckle. It’s the most I can do to even suggest that our family drama has not resolved itself, and in fact has managed to double.
She picks up on the story I’m not telling her. “Should I?”
I stop laughing.
The waiter arrives with two champagne flutes and sets one down in front of each of us.
Jackie raises her glass and toasts. “To Ithaca.”
“To Ithaca.”
“Coming soon to bookstores everywhere.”
I rub my temples. “I can’t imagine walking into a store and finding it there.”
“You won’t have to imagine. You’re mere months away from living it!”
“That doesn’t make it any more tangible.”
The waiter returns, and when he asks if we’d like to hear the specials, Jackie affirms that we would; the waiter beams and runs through his prepared list, grinning from ear to ear. I know she doesn’t think much of this effect she has on people (after all, she doesn’t do a thing to wield it), but it’s exciting to watch. When he finishes, she makes a humming sound, as if giving her deliberation the most serious thought.
“I’ll have the scallops, s’il vous plaît.” Jackie doesn’t even have a menu, and scallops were not one of the specials. Whether scallops are on the carte du jour, or when you’re Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all dining can be off
menu, I do not know.
“Salade niçoise.” I hand the waiter my menu. I don’t have the nerve to invent my own dish.
I want to tear through the galley, see every typeset page. Instead I arrange my napkin in my lap so as not to appear overeager.
“So how does it feel?” Jackie nods toward the book.
“I’m overwhelmed.”
“Is that . . . good?”
“I think so. I’m feeling a rush of things.”
She removes the envelope from the table and tucks it under her handbag. “So, now. Tell me how you finally came to your ending.”
“Courtesy of an unexpected ally.”
“Tell me more.”
It’s still difficult not to blurt out everything when she gazes so intently at you, but I address the visit to see my father in only the broadest strokes. “Well, the anger we discussed . . . but it took me getting really upset at someone myself before I could accurately let my characters express it. And then it didn’t feel right to just leave things there, so I thought a lot about what you said. About healing. I crave it at times in my own life, but I’m guilty of being passive, I think, in my quest to be whole and happy again. So forgiveness was equally important.”
Jackie nods. “And forgiving is an act.”
“Exactly. I went back to the opening pages and realized both characters had someone to forgive. And in letting them do so, it gave them enough common ground to move beyond their quarantine and start down a path toward forgiving themselves.”
“Well, it was superb, moving away from a tidy conclusion. The best endings, I believe, always leave the reader imagining what comes next.”
“Which is why, I suppose, I still feel a bit unsettled.”
“About the book?”
“About life.” And then I come clean. “About the healing in my own life. What comes next, now that the book is done?”
“This is what happens when you write autobiographical fiction. The book ends, but the story continues.” Jackie rests her chin on a single finger, like a myna bird on a perch. “Do you remember the riddle of the Sphinx?”
I look at her, confused. “Head of a human, haunches of a lion? That Sphinx?”
“Exactly. In Greek tradition, the Sphinx had a riddle. What walks on four hands in the morning, two at noon, and three at night?”
“Is this like Isis and Osiris? We’re going to have to work on getting you more modern references.”
She laughs. “I’m curating a book on Egypt.”
“I give up,” I say, without giving it any real thought.
“So easily? The Sphinx consumed all travelers who failed to answer.”
I twirl the stem of my champagne flute between my fingers, slowly rotating the glass on the table while I replay the riddle in my head. I study the bubbles in my glass before it dawns on me that I know this from a Classics course I took in college. “Man. Oedipus gave the correct answer.”
Jackie arches one eyebrow as if to say “well done.” “Lucky for Oedipus the answer was man.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I posit that any riddle whose answer is woman is inherently unsolvable.” She laughs and slides her own flute to the side and then places both hands on the table.
“My mother,” I say, just to clarify that we’re talking about the same thing.
She nods. “It’s the fact that you tried. The fact that you wanted to solve your riddle, to stand in front of the Sphinx and not shy away from the question. That is very noble.”
“Even if I’m eaten?”
“Even if you’re eaten alive.” Jackie’s eyes glisten.
“What about your own children. Do you mind me asking?” This is the champagne talking.
“Have they solved their riddle?” She considers this. “You’d have to ask them. They’d most likely tell you I like books, and beyond that it’s anyone’s best guess. They’ll probably turn out awful too.” Jackie winks, her playful side on full display.
I laugh. “Should they stop trying?”
“Some days I wish they would. But, no. Never.” She takes a pointed sip of champagne before looking at me. “And neither should you.”
We hold our focus until I blink and awkwardly reach for the galley. I soak in my name. When I flip the book over, words of praise from other authors (friends of Jackie’s, mostly) make my heart skip once again. I’m confronted by my own image when I open the back cover. What a phony, I think. I then scan the first few pages until I come across the copyright information and Library of Congress registration. Below that is my name in small print: SMALE, JAMES 1961–. There is no end date. I almost need to double-check that this journey hasn’t killed me, but nope—I’m still here. The book may have its ending, but I know that I, as yet, do not. I have to continue to chip away at my riddle, my mother. I have orders not to give up from Jacqueline Onassis herself.
◆ TWENTY-NINE ◆
Two older gentlemen stand outside the theater, outfitted like one imagines people dressed to see plays in an earlier time, the 1950s or 1960s, in tweed or gabardine, ties and pocket squares in colors like salmon and aubergine. They are deep in conversation, each leaning in closely to hear the other. No one notices them, although there’s no reason anyone should: They are invisible, at least to the younger crowd that brushes past them to pick up their tickets at will-call. But I can’t keep my eyes off them. One has posture like an exclamation point, even in his seventies, and may have once been a dancer. The other is hunched like a question mark, like he’s spent a lifetime in the types of folding seats that populate playhouse rows. Question Mark redresses Exclamation Point’s cravat.
“Stop fussing, it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. You look like some sort of mercenary.”
“And what kind of mercenary would that be?”
“The kind with a crooked cravat.” Question Mark stands back to admire his handiwork. “There you go, Fosse.”
Exclamation Point immediately loosens the fabric. “I can’t breathe. And why do you keep calling me Fosse?”
Question Mark beams. “Because you’re a singular sensation.”
It’s something you rarely see. Older gay men, together, happy. The 1980s took care of that. The Reagan administration took care of that. A cruel twist of fate obliterated an entire generation of homosexual men, save for these two and a few others like them, whom you only occasionally see at delis and museums and theaters fussing over a cravat. I wonder if that will be me and Daniel one day. If forever is an option for us.
“One s-s-singular . . .” Exclamation Point stammers. “That was Michael Bennett.”
“Who?” Question Mark asks like he’s hard of hearing; it’s impossible he doesn’t know the name.
“Michael Bennett choreographed A Chorus Line. You’re thinking of Michael Bennett.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” He fiddles with Exclamation Point’s cravat one last time. “There you go, Bennett.”
The two of them together are a dream in a beautiful sleep. The air is cool, and trees that dot the sidewalk have their full summer leaves. The air smells like Central Park cherry trees mingled with magnolias—although perhaps it’s someone’s perfume—and slightly of cigarettes, of car exhaust, of the city, but in a distant way that makes the additional layering inoffensive. The only siren I hear is blocks away, gentle, like a mewling kitten. This is the New York I love. This is the city Sinatra sings about. It makes me want to stroll west, to the riverbank, maybe. The very edge of Manhattan might offer the solace I seek. Instead, I’m here to support Daniel in his art, even if his support of mine still feels iffy.
“James?”
I’m awoken from my daze by the sound of my name.
I turn to see Mark standing behind me. “What, what are you doing here?” I stammer.
“It’s good to see you too,” he says, annoyed.
“Sorry. Surprised to see you is all.” We hug, and while I can’t help but be excited by his body pressing against mine, I’m careful not to let it linger.
Mark glances over at Question Mark and Exclamation Point and winces. It disappoints me. The dismissal of them, of love. But Mark sent me a supportive note after he read the final manuscript—a gesture that meant a lot to me in the moment—so I also immediately forgive him. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here with friends.” He indicates two plastic-looking people behind him; the three of them are awkwardly posed, looking like mannequins in a Macy’s window modeling trendy clothes that I would never wear because they’ll be out of fashion before fall. “You?”
I clear my throat. “My boyfriend is the director.”
Mark looks at me and says, “Ah.”
“Ah.” We stand in awkward silence.
“Did you invite Jackie?” he asks.
I momentarily brighten. “Would she have come?” The thought that she would even consider it makes me kick myself for not having mentioned it.
Mark shrugs. “Durang isn’t really her thing.”
He says it like he and Jackie have spent endless hours discussing Theater of the Absurd. As if late at night when they were the only two in the office, when the phones stopped ringing and the photocopier and the fax machines had been lulled into quiet sleep—maybe they had daiquiris and discussed Pinter and Beckett and Pirandello. Maybe she told him a story about lunch ladies and they laughed and toasted the work they would do together.
Maybe I am nobody special.
To her.
To anyone.
The Editor Page 23