We passed an NHK satellite truck beaming to Tokyo and then a BBC truck, and I said to my handler, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price.”
“Mr. President?” he said, pressing me to prove I wasn’t rambling. He was a very young man.
“You probably never even read my inaugural address,” I said.
He was reaching for his cellular phone.
“Dave, you don’t have to call. I’m just having a little joke. It’s all right. The Director and I talked it over. There’s no better place to hide than the glare.”
Dave pulled his hand back to the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
“That’s okay, Dave. In case of domestic insurrection, the president has contingency plans to go to a safe house in Arlington, Virginia.”
His hand went for the phone again.
“Chill out, Dave. That was President Johnson’s plan. Old news. I said that on purpose as a joke.”
“I respectfully request that you don’t joke like that, Mr. President.”
My handler is right to be nervous. After all, loose talk is why I’m in the position of having to sneak into the public auction of the effects of my late wife. It’s why my long-suffering Jackie was led to live, unaware, as a bigamist, the wife of a Greek who had a face that could stop a thousand ships.
The bullets fired on that fateful afternoon in Dallas killed only the editor in my brain. After that moment, I could not hold my tongue about anything. I woke up on the gurney rolling into the hospital and began at once to disclose all the state secrets of that very secretive time. Of no use now. But it’s far too late to explain any of this to a world that the Agency determined quite quickly must never have even momentary access to me.
I completely agreed with the decision. It’s only the editor that’s gone. My powers to reason are still completely intact, and this was the only reasonable course. Anyone who came near me would become a security risk. And of no import to the CIA but critical to me, I would have talked endlessly to Jackie about the things that we agreed would never be spoken. Along with the secret details of our foreign policy, the smells and sights and tastes of all the women I’d ever known would come tumbling out. There was no choice but to bury the wax dummy in my place. Not only is my faculty of reason untouched, so are my powers to remember. Sweet memory. It’s been the great comfort of my confinement.
Still, I’m very glad now to be sliding to a stop in front of this white awning. I know I can meet my commitment to silence. I realize that it’s still important. I say that what I know is of no use. But I suspect that if I were to speak now of the doomsday rocket silo twenty miles north by northeast of Burgdorf, Idaho, in the Gospel Hump Wilderness, I would be speaking of something still in place, though perhaps the target agenda of Moscow, Peking, Pyongyang, and Hanoi would have changed slightly. But I am determined to withhold even the faintest allusion to these things.
As I pointed out to the Director, I never asked to go to the funerals or the weddings. I didn’t ask to go to Teddy when he left that girl in the dark water at Chappaquiddick or to my nephew, who never even had a chance to know me, when it was clear to me that he needed to speak honestly of what he’d done to that girl in Florida. I didn’t even ask to go to John-John to warn him about the magazine business. But this auction was a different thing.
I step out of the car. I suspect the Director has watchers in the crowd. I am never out of sight. But for a moment I feel alive again. I feel that I am living in my body, in the present moment. How sweet that is, I’ve come to realize in these thirty-two years of exile. How often in the life I used to lead was I in a place that could have filled me with memories, but my mind carried me elsewhere. I missed the moment. Now, on the sidewalk in front of Sotheby’s, I head to the end of a long line of people whose faces once would have turned to me, whose hands would have come out to touch me. It took me a long time to get used to that touching. I never quite did. But I crave it now. They touch me now in my dreams. Hands trembling faintly from excitement, warm with the flush of desire. I touch them back, each one.
But here, the TV lights glare and the crowds line up and they yearn to touch only the things I touched. I think this is similar to what Abraham Lincoln dreamed the week before he was killed. He dreamed that he awoke from a deep sleep and he heard distant sobbing. He arose and made his way through the empty hallways of the White House to the East Room, where he found a great catafalque draped in black. A military guard stood there and Lincoln asked, “Who is dead?” The man replied, “It is the President.” I could ask anyone now in this line, “Whose French silver-plated toothbrush box with cover is this, being auctioned off to strangers?” And the reply would be, “It is the President’s.”
I pass all these hands stuffed in pockets or clutching purses or fluttering in conversation. I pass all these faces turned away from this bearded man with close-cropped hair and the faint line of a scar on the side of his skull and the hobble of a very bad back. And I know I should be glad that there is not the tiniest flicker of recognition. The Director and I are in complete agreement. He’s stuck his neck out for me. Pity for an old man and his past. Trust that old age has slowed my tongue, which it has, somewhat. But part of me is ready to tell, at the slightest glance from a stranger, how Mayor Richard Daley found fourteen thousand votes in the cemeteries of Chicago to swing a state and elect a president. And I would point out the debt of gratitude the whole planet owes those dead voters. None of us knew at the time of the missile crisis of 1962 that the Soviet general in charge of troops in Cuba was authorized to use tactical nuclear weapons. After the Soviet Union broke up, the general appeared on TV—I get all the cable channels—and he said if the American President had chosen to send troops to the island, they would have been nuked. If Richard Nixon had been the President, he certainly would have sent those troops. What does this mean? It means those dead Chicagoans prevented a nuclear holocaust. My impulse to talk about these things aside, credit should be given to this necropolis of American heroes.
But no stranger gives me a glance. I go to the end of the line and my back is hurting, but out here in public, the pain reassures me somehow. A woman up ahead in the line turns her face idly toward me. She has hair the color of the old Red Grange model football we used in Hyannis the same autumn I made love on the overstuffed chair in my Senate office, to a woman who was all bones and freckles and teeth and her thick hair was the same color, a roan color, and she sat on my lap and thrashed her hair around me. She has spent time with me often these past years, in my memory. And this woman in line turns her eyes briefly to me and then her attention passes on. She is perhaps thirty-five. In my memory I am thirty-five, but this woman before me now sees only an old man. But I’m still sitting on that overstuffed chair and the leather squeaks beneath me and I’m sweating and smelling the woman’s hair and I tell her about its color, the color of a Red Grange football, and she laughs. The woman in line laughs now. She is with someone near her, but I don’t look to see who it is. I watch her face dilate sweetly in laughter and if she were standing next to me, I know I would speak to her of this other woman, whose name I can’t remember and whose eyes I can’t remember, though I’ve often tried in these years of exile. I would like to remember her eyes, because remembering these other things as vividly as I do makes me feel as if the memory of her eyes should be there too but it got put aside and then sold off or given away and it was a big mistake. I want it back.
I want my Harvard-crest cufflinks back, too. I’m thinking of them as I finally make it through the front door of Sotheby’s and a young Negro woman in a uniform holds out her hand to help me through the metal detector. I would not call her a Negro to her face—I know the language has changed—but I am still a creature of my time and Martin called himself that. I will always remember where I was on the day Martin was shot. I was in the little stone-walled garden in the c
ottage in the compound in Virginia. I was about to launch a putt across the fifteen-foot green whose one hole has pulled me to it ten thousand times a year for all these years. I was just aligning the head of my putter—I want my old putter back, too, by the way, though it’s sure to draw a small fortune—I was just squaring up the head of my putter when whatever aide it was assigned to me at that time—I don’t remember him except that he was young—stepped out of the back door and he said “Mr. President” with a rasp in his throat and I knew that it was something terrible. Poor Martin. How nice it would have been if only his editor had been shot away and they thought to bring him to me. We could have told each other so many things we never had sense enough to talk about when we were living our public lives. And Bobby too. We three could live together and I’d talk with Martin and I’d wrestle my little brother to the ground—even with my back—and with his editor shot off Bobby could tell me what he really thinks of me, and that would do him good.
So this young Negro woman reaches out to the old man she sees in front of her, an old man having trouble straightening up, having just gone up some steps with a very bad back, and her hand clutches me beneath my forearm. And though there are two sleeves between me and her flesh, I thrill at her touch. I straighten up, not wanting her to be touching the arm of a stooping old man, and there must be pain but I don’t feel it. She looks me in the eyes, just before I step through, and I think there is some flicker of recognition there.
“Do you know me?” I ask.
“No sir,” she says.
I realize I’m on the verge of telling her about the perfect hit man we’d hired to kill Fidel Castro in 1963. Pedro Antonelli. I don’t know why I think she’d be interested in this. But I know I’m not supposed to say anything. So I step through the arch of the metal detector, and the machine cries out as if it had seen a ghost. The woman who touched my arm is beside me and I’m ready to confess.
But before I can speak, she says, “Do you have anything metal, sir?” and I understand.
I tap the side of my head, on the tight ridge of scar tissue, and I say, “Metal plate. From service for my country.” I think she can hear the ring of it beneath my knuckle.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she says, and I’m hoping she will reach up to touch the place herself. But her hand goes to my arm again and urges me toward a desk. “Thank you,” she says. “Show your registration slip over there.”
I move away from her and there is still a ringing in my head and at the desk they give me my bidding card, and from the push of people behind me I’m going up more steps, made of stone, and my back is hurting again and I’m growing older by the moment, though I can still feel her touch on my arm.
The Director has not been very good in recognizing my desires as a man. I’ve always understood the risks. There weren’t very many women with the highest Agency clearances who were prepared to open themselves to me. One or two over the years. And there was always a drug to slow my tongue, because even the highest clearance is still bound tight by the need-to-know test. I presume the rest of me was slowed as well by the drug, certainly my awareness was, for I remember these women only very faintly. I wish there had been another way, a safer way, a fully conscious way, for me to feel the touch of a woman. But I did not ask what more they could do for me. I only asked what I could do for my country.
The room is very large and I struggle toward the front, but the rows of padded beige chairs are filled more than halfway back already. I look around and I straighten again, this time with clear pain, but a pain put aside. I see Jackie down the row. She has not yet sat down. She has a pillbox hat and that stiff bouffant hairdo. But I remind myself that she couldn’t be that young. And she’s dead. I look again. Her eyes—she is smoothing her hot-pink dress and looking around the room—her eyes are Asian. Her gaze fixes and hardens and I follow it and coming down the aisle is another Jackie, a Caucasian one, dressed in mint blue, unaware still of her rival.
I sit. I am on the aisle and breathing heavily. I suspect there are several of me in the room as well, though I hope not to catch even a brief sight of them. I can’t help but look up, and the second Jackie, with a slightly longer hairdo, twirled up at the bottom, brushes past me. Her face turns and her eyes fall and she looks straight at me. She doesn’t show any sign at all of sensing who I am. As false as she is—her eyes are much too close together and her mouth is too thin—I’m briefly disappointed that she doesn’t recognize me. I look away and I close my eyes. Jackie has been with me, as well, all these years.
When John and Caroline were sleeping in the afternoons, I’d clear half an hour in the affairs of state and tell my staff to leave us alone, and Jackie and I would make love in the room where they all made love, the presidents of the United States. And I’d ask her to talk to me about art while we touched. I wanted her mind in this act, and her voice, breathy as a starlet. I’ve been slandered over and over in the books. Smathers was way out of line telling those things about our Senate bachelor days. I might’ve talked like that about women with him—men have always talked stupidly about women with each other. And it’s true that my mind was often elsewhere when I touched the women who always seemed to be there, open to me. But not because I didn’t value them. Not because they were objects to me, taken up and cast off even more coldly than the objects for sale in this crowded room. There are suddenly too many things in my head at once. This happens sometimes. The voice of a woman now. “New bidder on my right at sixty thousand.” I don’t know what it is that’s for sale but I have only four thousand and I clench inside, a little desperate for a reason I can’t quite identify. Jackie would rise naked above me as I lay delicately still, trying not to let my back distract me. She would rise into a column of sunlight from the window and her skin was dusky and her voice was soft and she would be wearing a single strand of pearls, the only thing left on her body, and she would speak of the geometry of Attic pottery in the tenth century B.C., and the bands of decoration were drawn in black on cream-colored clay and there would be meanders and chevrons and swastikas and then, gradually, as the ninth century B.C. passed and the eighth began, there was an advent of animal forms. She spoke of all these wonderful vessels: the amphora with its two great handles and the krater with its fat belly and wide mouth and the skinny lekythos, for pouring. Jackie would throw her head back and her mind would make my breath catch and now the eighth century B.C. was in full flower with horsemen and chariots and battle scenes crowding these clay pots, and scenes of men and women lamenting the dead, and her eyes would tear up, even as we touched and she fell forward and I put my hands on her back and felt her bones.
“No, m’am, it’s not your bid.” A long, sweetly handsome face, a Boston sort of face, to my eye, is floating over the lectern at the front of the room, rolling out numbers. “It’s at a hundred and ten on the phone. Now a hundred and twenty in the front. Yes, m’am, now it’s yours, at a hundred and thirty. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars. A hundred and forty at the back of the room.” I look away from her and I think for a moment that it must be a Grecian krater for sale, something I’d always hoped Onassis would buy for her but that she would never speak of with him. Then on a TV monitor to the side of the room I see a triple strand of pearls. A hundred and forty and now fifty and now sixty and I squeeze my eyes shut. Jackie crosses the White House bedroom to me, her clothes strewn behind her and the pearls tight at her throat, and they make her nakedness astonishing to me, as if no woman has ever been this naked before, and it takes the contrast, the failed covering of the thin string of pearls, to show me this.
The room has burst into applause. I look up. And the second Jackie, her eyes too close together but rather large, very dark, is looking at me. She is in the aisle seat directly across from me and she is looking at me intently.
“Now lot number 454A,” the woman at the front says.
This Jackie in blue won’t look away. She knows me. She knows.
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“A single-strand, simulated-pearl necklace and ear clips.”
I drag my attention away from the simulated Jackie’s gaze and on the TV screen is the necklace my wife wears in my memories of our lovemaking. Perhaps not that very one. Perhaps some other necklace. She wore a single strand of pearls at our wedding, too. When Jackie wore pearls, I felt her nakedness always, even beneath her clothes. I stare at this necklace on the television screen and it could well be the pearls of any of a hundred memories I’ve taken out and handled on countless nights of what has been my life. I feel myself rise up slightly, briefly, from my chair. I hold back my hands which want to lift to the screen, to this image of her pearls. I want these pearls very badly.
“The opening bid is ten thousand dollars,” the woman with the long face says.
I cry out. My cry is in anguish, but there are twenty cries at the same moment and they are all saying “Ten thousand.” So no one hears. Except perhaps the Jackie across the aisle. This necklace is beyond my reach already. All the fragments of my life in this place are beyond my reach. I look to the right and she is fixed on me, this thin-lipped faux first lady. Her mouth moves.
I stand up, I turn, I drop my bidding card and push my heavy legs forward, the pain in my back flaring at each step. Twenty thousand. Thirty. The bidders’ hands fly up, flashing their cards, the dollars pursue me up the aisle. Forty thousand from the phones. Fifty from the front row. I touch her there, at the hollow of her throat just below the pearls. Jackie rises up straight, nestled naked on the center of me, and I lift my hand and put my fingertips on the hollow of her throat. And I am out the main door of the auction room, breaking through a hedge of reporters who pay no attention to me. I stop, my chest heaving and the pain spreading all through me, and I look over my shoulder and just before the reporters close back up, I see her. She’s coming toward me. The Jackie in blue has risen and is following.
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