Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Steven Rowley 2019

Steven Rowley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008333249

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780008333256

Version: 2019-03-08

Praise for The Editor:

‘The Editor offers a delightful fictional glimpse of an iconic American family – but it is, at heart, a tribute to every family whose last name isn’t Kennedy’ Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists

‘At equal turns laugh-out-loud funny and searingly poignant, Rowley has created a truly unforgettable story of a son trying to understand his mother’ Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six

‘The Editor is an absolute triumph! Rowley is a master of creating characters you fall in love with, and never want to leave’ Julie Klam, author of The Stars In Our Eyes and You Had Me at Woof

‘The Editor will have you weeping tears of joy when it’s not quietly breaking your heart’ Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding

For my parents

In short, there’s simply not

A more congenial spot

For happily-ever-aftering than here

In Camelot.

—Camelot, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for The Editor

Dedication

Epigraph

The Quarantine: A Novel by James Smale

Dreams: February 1992

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Go Your Own Way: July 1992

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Yesterday’s Gone, Yesterday’s Gone: November 1992

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Everything Turned Around: December 1992/1993

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

What Tomorrow Will Do: May 1994

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Steven Rowley

About the Publisher

THE QUARANTINE
A Novel by James Smale

The room was warm, too warm, Russell thought, to share with a dead body, but no one seemed concerned. Guests wore their coats cinched tight at the waists, as if taking them off would obligate them to stay. In the back of the room a giant silver percolator was brewing coffee, and there was another kettle for tea. His mother, having had three cups black, did laps around the room like the women who exercised inside the Pyramid Shopping Center—mall milers, they called them—somehow connecting with anyone in her path and simultaneously avoiding everyone.

“Look at her,” Russell said, watching his mother’s path from his vantage point by the casket. “When this is over I swear I’m going to lock her in a room.”

“Who?” Sean tried to follow his brother’s moving gaze.

“Mom.”

“Mom? Why?”

“Why?” Wasn’t it obvious? She’s all they had left. He tugged at his tie. “Is it warm in here?”

“Very.”

Russell ran his hand across the closed casket; his father had it worst of all, stuffed inside in the suit he hated and wore only to church. Or maybe he had it best. If only Russell could give his father some air. “She has to answer some things.”

Sean offered his hand to the Speighs as they approached and gave him and his brother, the sons of Dick Mulligan, a solemn nod. “Thank you for coming.”

“Dick was a good man,” Mr. Speigh said, his nose twice the size it once was, not from the lie but from age. “It’s a shame what he d—”

“… what happened,” Mrs. Speigh corrected, tugging at her husband’s arm. No one wanted to say it out loud.

“Your father had some of my tools …”

“Of course,” Sean said. Eventually they would clean out the garage.

“Another time, Arthur.” Fed up, Mrs. Speigh gave her husband a full yank, pulling him toward the door.

Sean waited until their old neighbors were out of earshot. “What things? What does Mom have to answer?”

“Questions! She has to answer questions. Without circling the room, without walking away. Face-to-face. It’s time.”

“Now? You think now is the time. In the wake of …”

In the wake of, well, this wake.

“YES.”

“And how will she answer them, these questions, locked in a room.”

Russell stared at his brother, his eyes red, cried out, but overrun with inspiration. “I’m going to lock myself in with her.”

And that’s when the idea for The Quarantine took hold. As his mother, on her umpteenth lap, passed the table with the cups and the saucers and decided they needed restacking. As Sean removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves like a politician hitting the campaign trail. As his sister, Fiona, held everyone’s hand and listened as the same drab stories were told again and again and again. As his own head throbbed with torment and heartbreak. A quarantine. Russell wouldn’t go home, back to California. He would stay in Ithaca, secured inside a room with his mother until there were no more secrets, until they knew each other as well as two people could. As two people with the same blood should. It was the only way he could make sense of the gunshot that took half his father’s face.

It needed to shatter everything.

Dreams

ONE

She moves quickly and with purpose, threading the tight corridor between a hedge maze of cubicles and the string of office doors. Her stride is serious; I have a thousand questions, but the snap to her step suggests I should select only one. Maybe two. Nope, one. I try to take everything in, to remember the details—I’m going to want to recount them later, to relive this in my head—but we’re moving so fast. I see paper. Lots of paper. And push-pins, I think, colorful ones, tacked directly into the cubicle walls, holding calendars, schedules, memos, and important lists (more paper!) in place. Marketing standees announce titles as Coming Soon, and a parade of book covers framed like art hang evenly spaced on the walls between door-frames, following me down the hall as if I’m viewing them through a zoetrope.

“I’m sorry, where are we going?” Just like that, my one question wasted. And I hate that I apologize. I have been invited here and I need to act like I belong before they figure out that I’m the wrong guy. An imposter. A dupe.

Without looking back, she says, “Conference room. End of the hall.” Then, with barely a pause, “Would you like some water, James?” The sound of my name startles me. Hers is Lila. She told me, by the bank of elevators, where we were introduced. My agent’s assistant told me it was Lisa, but that’s typical Donna. Thank goodness Lila introduced herself before I had a chance to call her by the wrong name. That would have really started things out on the wrong foot. Lila has blond hair, but not so blond that you can’t take her seriously. I really like her shoes.

“No. No water, thank you.” I can’t imagine walking this fast with a glass of water and not sloshing it everywhere, on my sleeve, or—heaven forbid—down the front of my pants. “I’m sorry I was late.” Another apology, but this one is warranted.

“You were five minutes early.”

Was I? “I’m usually ten minutes early, so in that sense I was late.”

Lila ushers me inside the last room at the end of the hall. “Here we are. Conference room.” She stares at me, and for the first time I notice her clothes are impeccably tailored. She’s serious for a beige girl. That’s what I’ve heard people call a lot of young women in publishing. I’m not fond of the term; it reeks of an unnecessary sexism. They’re called that, beige girls, because they wear understated monotones and sweaters to match. But this girl (woman!) is a different animal. Power beige. Like a café-au-lait color, or camel or ecru.

“It’s nice,” I say, about the conference room, which is stupid. It makes me sound impressed, like I’ve never seen such a room before, and of course I have. I’ve worked at pretty much every office in Midtown in a never-ending string of toxic, depressing temp jobs. This conference room is exactly like any other conference room, with a bulletin board, a whiteboard, a phone in the center of a long table (at least I think it’s a phone—it looks somewhat like a light-up game I had as a child), and a set of dry-erase markers.

“It serves a purpose.” Her enthusiasm is considerably less than mine.

Yes, conferencing. For some reason I try to sell her on it. “It has everything. Even a window.” Then, as an afterthought, “Anyone ever jumped?”

“Out the window?” She is appalled. I can tell. She tucks her hair back behind an ear while pursing her lips.

“It’s just … I can imagine these meetings get a little … I mean, I know I’m feeling …” Fraught? Power Beige is just staring at me. “I’m sorry.” I cringe. My third apology inside two minutes. “You’re not interested in my twaddle.”

For the first time in our incredibly brief relationship, she perks up. “I’m interested if you’re going to jump out the window.”

“I promise I’m not going to jump out the window.”

She exhales. Disappointed? Perhaps. “Why don’t you just have a seat, then.” We’ve officially run out of things to say.

Silence.

Which I abhor.

I pull a chair back from the table and start to sit and then stop. There’s a loud ringing in my ears similar to the one I would get as a kid after swimming endless summer hours in Lake George. “I always thought I’d be more of a pills person.”

“More twaddle?” There is the vaguest hint of a smile. She’s joking with me, letting me know to relax.

“Ha, no. It’s just, I don’t like it when other people have to clean up my messes.” Talk of suicide has gone on so long, it may be professional suicide. To change the subject, I try to steer us toward business. “So, my manuscript. You’ve read it?”

“I have.”

I replay that last bit in my head; it doesn’t sit right. “Not that I think my manuscript is one of my messes! I just wanted that to be clear.”

“It was. Clear.” Lila picks up a dry-erase marker from the table and sets it on the lip of the whiteboard. In doing this, she softens slightly. “And even if it wasn’t, that’s an editor’s job sometimes. To clean up.”

“And you’re interested? In being my editor?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“It’s nerves, I guess. I tend to …” I make a motion with my hands like I’m vomiting words. Lila grabs the corner wastebasket and holds it out for me. She smiles again, this time more broadly. I decide I like her; she has the ability to play along.

“No,” she responds.

“Oh.” I can feel the heat in my cheeks.

“You’re here to meet with someone else.”

“Oh my gosh. I’m sorry. I was told by my agent’s assistant to ask for Lila. Well, she said Lisa, but she can’t read her own handwriting.” I’m going to have real words with Donna for putting me in this predicament.

“James, it’s okay. I set up the meeting for you and this editor.”

“And he liked it? The editor I’ll be meeting with?”

“She.”

“Sorry.” Apology number four! I wince. This must be some sort of record.

“Take a deep breath. We’re not really in the business of calling writers in to personally tell them how much we didn’t like their work.”

A wave of relief. “No. I don’t suppose that’s the best use of anyone’s time.”

“It’s easier to do that in a letter.”

“I received plenty of those,” I say, before realizing how unvarnished that truth sounds. “Well, not plenty. A normal amount.” Pause. “Lila.” I use her name as punctuation, unsure if it sounds like an exclamation point or a period.

She pulls the chair out farther and pats the back of it. “It won’t be long now. If you’d like to have a seat.”

I sit before I get myself in any more trouble, and she leaves the room, closing the door behind her. I swear I can hear her chuckle on the other side before heading off down the hall.

Alone, I rifle through my bag to make sure I have a copy of my manuscript, should they ask to see it. I do. I walk over to the window and press my forehead against the glass to look straight down at moving vehicles that look like Matchbox cars. SPLAT. That would do it. I cross back to the phone. What was the name of that game? Simon. There’s one visible button, and without thinking, I push it. It beeps loudly and I jump, but then there’s a dial tone. I push the button again, quickly, and it stops. I pray the commotion doesn’t summon Lila. She would not be pleased.

I’ve been a writer for ten years. Since I graduated college. Or maybe it’s twenty-five years. Depending on when you start counting. My mother had an old Swiss Hermes typewriter when I was growing up; I have no idea where she acquired it or why she had it, but it was a thing of beauty to me. It was robin’s-egg blue and came with a lid that clamped to the typewriter itself, turning it into a stylish, if heavy, attaché. The keys clacked and the bell dinged and I always pulled the lever for the carriage return like I was casting the deciding vote in a crucial election.

“You’re not writing about me, are you?” I remember my mother asking, when I was only seven or eight years old. Like many of her questions, she delivered it more like a command.

“No,” I would say, and at the time that was the truth. My stories were small, trite, about cats and the neighbors with the horse stables and a pond in the woods that wasn’t much more than a puddle. But I felt they carried literary heft once they were typed. To me, typing was akin to publishing. I lived for that typewriter, and I would agonize when the ribbon became twisted, or the keys stuck, and I needed my mother’s assistance. She didn’t prioritize typewriter repair the same way I did. When I would point this out to her she would roll her eyes and say, “One day you can tell your therapist.” She said that about a lot of things. But instead of getting a therapist, I became a writer. Instead of telling one person, I aspire to tell the world.

I rearrange the thumbtacks in the bulletin board on the wall into a peace symbol before having a seat. At least I think it’s a peace symbol. It may be the Mercedes-Benz logo. I often get those two confused, so I get back up to undo my work in order to keep my mind on track.

I had some early success. As a writer. Two short stories published in two different literary journals. With typical youthful naïveté, I thought it would always be that way, but, of course, it wasn’t. I took odd jobs to pay bills, convincing myself the whole time that these jobs provided life experience—essential to a writer who wants to have something important to say. But I don’t have much insight from these experiences to share other than how to make coffee and remain invisible in a room full of people and battle a growing depression. It’s been years now since I’ve had anything published, so long that I wonder if it’s still acceptable to call myself a writer. That thought in itself is depressing, so I sit. Someone, an editor, is finally interested in my work, I remind myself, and I have to make the most of this nibble. I have to turn it into a bite.

Then I have to turn that bite into a sharklike chomp.

As soon as I’m settled in the chair the door opens. A woman enters, immediately turning her back to me so that all I can see is her slender frame and that she is a brunette and tall. She closes the door, taking pains to do so as gently as possible.

I scramble to my feet, knocking a knee against the table with a deafening whack. And even though I want to scream out in pain, to sink back into the chair and massage my leg, when she turns around and I meet her gaze, I stop. And then, strangely, I begin to bow.

Because … because … I don’t know the protocol.

I don’t know the rules of conduct in this situation.

But I no longer feel any pain. I don’t remember that I have knees, that everyone has knees or what knees are even for. I’m completely mesmerized by her hair, blown back and resting gently on her shoulders, and a demure smile both shy and radiant. I look down at the ground as if I’ve dropped something, convinced when I look up again it will be someone else, a look-alike, perhaps, a woman who molded her style after hers.

But when I look up it’s still …

It’s her.

TWO

It’s you. I almost say it out loud.

She’s immediately recognizable. Her posture, her eyes—there is no mistaking her. Of course I know who she is. But that’s an understatement. I try to breathe. Have I not been breathing? In fact, it’s perhaps the biggest understatement in the history of understating things. Which on its face sounds hyperbolic, but in this case I don’t think it is. It’s not even whatever falls just shy of hyperbole. Embellishment? Overstatement? No. It’s a simple declaration of fact.

Because everyone knows who she is.

Now I try to remember how to breathe. What is breathing? The process of moving air in and out of your lungs. It involves the diaphragm? Something expands, something collapses, the blood gets what it needs. Oxygen in, CO₂ out. My inner dialogue is as deafening as it is dull.

“James,” she says. “Lovely to make your acquaintance.” Her voice is breathy, impossibly feminine, even in her … I try to attempt some quick math … late fifties? She’s wearing dark slacks. A cashmere pullover. A jacket. It has shoulder pads. Chanel, maybe. Something distinguished like that. I’m not good with designers or labels. Daniel would know. He knows these things. She’s very still and her gestures are small, her arms stay close to her body; it’s as if she’s spent a lifetime trying not to make sudden, attention-grabbing moves. When she steps farther into the room, she glides with a seamless light-footedness.

“I’m Jacqueline,” she says, somewhere between the French and American pronunciations. That voice! Is it real? Is it really addressing me? She holds out her hand and I watch as my arm rises reflexively (lifted, perhaps, by an invisible bouquet of helium balloons), and as my hand reaches out for hers, I try to say something, but words fail me. That’s not good for a writer. She looks at me quizzically before moving her hand the rest of the way to meet mine. We shake. Her skin is soft. My only thought is that she uses lotion. “You are James, aren’t you?”

I blink. My own name somehow passes my lips. “James.” I manage another word. And my last name. “Yes. Smale.”

She smiles and our hands drop back to our sides. “Very good. And you were offered something to drink?” She pulls back a chair for herself but hesitates before sitting.

“Not anything strong enough for this.”

“I’m sorry?” Her apology has an airy lightness; it’s not clumsy like mine. It’s less an expression of regret and more a cue for me to make yet another apology myself.

“No, I’m sorry. I may be in the wrong place. I was told by Lisa to wait here for an editor regarding my manuscript.” It’s a sentence, but it ends on an upswing, impersonating a question.

“Lila,” she corrects. Goddammit, Donna! “You’re in the right place.”

I look at her, because it feels like I’m on one of those hidden-camera shows that are becoming increasingly common because they’re cheap to produce. “Are you in the right place?” I say it hesitantly.

“Oh, yes. My office isn’t very accommodating, and closing the door for privacy just makes it seem that much smaller. I thought we would both be more comfortable in here.”

I can’t hold it in any longer. “You’re Jacqueline,” I say, although my pronunciation is entirely American. “Jacqueline Kennedy.”

“Onassis.”

“Onassis. Right. And I’m …”

“James Smale. How nice of us to recap.” She offers another shy smile.

“Yes. I guess we’ve covered that ground already. And, believe me, it’s very nice to meet you. I’m just not sure what we’re doing here. Right now. In this room.” And then, to drive the point home, I say, “Together.”

She takes a seat and motions for me to do the same, so I pull back my chair and sit and she reaches out and rests her hand on top of mine. It’s motherly, calming. She’s wearing a distinctive bracelet that rattles softly like a tambourine. “James, I’m the editor who liked your book.”

My entire life I’ve been waiting to hear someone at a New York publishing house say these words. But in the thousands of ways I may have imagined this moment, not one time did it look anything like this. Tiny fireworks are exploding in my head like it’s the Fourth of July. For some reason I can’t take my eyes off her earrings, which are pearl. “This is a lot to take in. Maybe I should have accepted that glass of water.”

“Of course.” She pats my hand twice and then stands. “I’ll get it for you.”

I start to protest—I can’t have the former First Lady of the United States fetch me a glass of water—but she’s already gone. Am I crazy? I scramble to pick up the phone, push the button for the dial tone, but who am I going to call? Lila? Even if I had her extension, wouldn’t I just be humiliating myself further? What’s more, she’s obviously enjoying this, wherever she is. She could have prepared me—that would have been a small act of kindness—and yet she didn’t. This is not off to a good start. I retreat to the corner and do ten jumping jacks, a coping mechanism I’ve developed for writer’s block: ten perfect jumping jacks and blood moves to your brain (in theory, at least). Was my agent really not in on this? He’s a practical joker, the type that likes other people to squirm—it helps, I guess, in negotiation. But would he do that to a client? Would he do that to me? I barely finish my jumping jacks when Jacqueline—JACK-well-in? Zhak-LEEN?—returns, holding a glass of water. She doesn’t notice me at first in the corner.

“Ah. There you are,” she says. I cross back to my chair and she hands me the glass. “I thought perhaps you had jumped out the window.” She nods at the view and I lean in to make sure I heard her correctly, then laugh, probably too hard. Should I explain why that’s so funny?

I hold up the glass of water as if to say “Cheers,” then down most of it in several gulps, and she gestures for us to retake our seats.

“All set, then?” she asks.

I nod and watch her position herself gracefully in her chair, cross her legs, and pull herself in toward the table. When I take my seat, the chair unexpectedly drops several inches and I have to fuss with a lever underneath to bring it back to a proper height. Flustered, I try to say something, anything, to mask this awkward spectacle. “My middle name is Francis.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“Francis, my middle name is …” I slow to a stop like a windup toy whose crank has run down.

Jacqueline Onassis studies me; I watch her eyes sweep across my face. After an interminable silence she says, “Bobby.”

“Yes, sorry. That needed some prefacing. My middle name is Francis. After Robert Kennedy. I’m … I don’t know why I’m saying this. Your time is valuable. I will focus.” Deep breaths. “I can’t believe you read my book.”

“I read it twice,” she says. She says nothing about my predicament with the chair as I fidget underneath and somehow sink farther, in a second humiliating display.

“Twice?” I try to sound nonchalant.

“Does that surprise you?”

“I’m still getting used to your reading it once.” I finally master the chair’s mechanics and lock it in a respectable raised position. I pull myself into the table and take another sip of water.

She flips through some notes on a pad of legal paper, and I wonder if they are notes about me, about my book. I strain to see, without looking like I’m straining to see; I’m dying to know her every thought. “It’s quite difficult to put down. Once it gets going.”

“A friend told me it’s slow to start.”

“Not slow. Deliberate. In order to deconstruct the American family, you must work diligently to construct it.”

“That’s what I said!” I brighten, and for the first time feel like I find my footing.

“I’m wondering if we could discuss the book, the two of us.” The way she adds “the two of us.” Persuasion. Just us. Alone in a room. Is she doing this on purpose? Is she luring me in only to lowball me with an offer? How can I think of business at a time like this? Whatever she’s doing, it’s artful. I’d be happy to sit here and talk books—my book, any book—until the afternoon is gone.

Until all of the afternoons are gone.

“I would be honored.”

“The Quarantine,” she says. It’s an almost out-of-body experience to hear the title of my book in her unmistakable voice. I can hear the word’s Italian origins, the way she says it. Quarantina. Forty Days.

“Yes.”

“Did you live through such a thing?”

“An actual quarantine?”

“An isolation.”

“With my mother?”

“With anyone.”

“No. Not as such. Not formally.”

Jackie nods. “How did you come to it as a framing device?”

I take a deep breath. “We all feel isolated, don’t we? At one time or another?” Does she? Oh, God. “People yearn to connect—it should be easy, and yet it seldom is. That’s true with my own mother. We talk, often past each other, somehow unable to convey meaning. It’s fantasy, I suppose. Putting two characters in tight quarters. Eventually they can’t avoid saying the things they desperately need to say.”

She scribbles a thought on her pad. Scribble is the wrong word; I doubt she’s careless with anything. “And that … fantasy, you call it …”

“I wasn’t going to get my actual mother in a room for any length of time.”

“That led you to write a novel.”

“I didn’t set out to. I considered myself more a writer of short stories. I thought I might have one published in The New Yorker one day, like many of the writers I admire. Updike. Cheever. Mavis Gallant. Dreamed I might, not thought.” Ugh, thought has an element of presumption. I bite the inside of my cheek to slow myself down. “So, one of the early chapters in the book? The one after the service? With the argument over pie? That’s the one I wrote first. When I finished it, I imagined this, finally, was my New Yorker story. And then I showed it to a friend, who encouraged me to write more.” I pause here, expecting her to interject; she looks at me, poised and unblinking. “I realize now how unsatisfying it would have been as a short story. That it was inherently … incomplete.”

“What a delightful note to receive as a writer. More.”

I smile at her like a child asking for juice.

“And you. Are you …” She checks her notepad. “Russell?”

“The character in the book? I’m not not Russell.” Check yourself, James. Now is not the time to be cute. “He is a version of me, I suppose, in that we are both seeking and searching—yearning to understand.”

“I would love to know more about the mother.”

“What would you like to know?”

“What would you like to tell me?”

Afraid this is some unanswerable riddle, a test I’m doomed to fail, I revert to her previous question. “If you’re asking if she’s my mother, she would say no.”

“Has she read the manuscript?”

“No.” As soon as it comes out of my mouth I realize just how harsh it sounds on its own, so I say it again, softer this second time. “No.” And then, because it’s a point of contention between us, I add, “Not even once.”

Jacqu—Mrs. Onassis taps her pen twice on her notepad. “Why not?”

“I wish she would. I suppose she’s afraid of what she’ll see.”

“I saw something quite lovely.”

My eyes are growing wet. Mortifying. It’s a little early in the year to pass it off as allergies; I blink twice in an effort to stop it. “I thank you for saying so, but it’s almost beside the point. She doesn’t want to be written about.”

Mrs. Onassis sets her pen down. “Well, your mother’s in good company there.”

“I suppose so,” I say, smiling so that she knows I understand she’s referring to herself.

“So why did you choose to write about her?”

“I’m not sure I did. Choose. I thought I would have endless stories. Deep, complicated, rich narratives that had profound things to say. I started a half-dozen novels centered on characters I thought would jump right off the page. But after numerous starts and stops they all seemed kind of flat in comparison to the most complicated character I knew.”

“Your mother.”

“My mother.” I glance down at the pad between us and it reminds me of the terror of blank pages. “So, desperation, I guess?”

Mrs. Onassis raises an eyebrow. “Well, I think you’ve observed her quite eloquently. I admired her.”

I look down at my nails and am embarrassed to see it’s been a while since I’ve cut them. I quietly move to sit on my hands.

“Since I’m not asking her, I’m asking you—is she your mother?”

“Absolutely.” And then, since I’m also deeply protective of her, I add, “A carbon copy. One that I can place just outside our relationship and stretch and mold and make malleable. Get inside. One that serves the novel, I hope. And one that I can possibly come to understand.”

Mrs. Onassis makes additional notes and I wonder if she’s writing down what I’m saying, which fuels my self-consciousness. Are these thoughts worth recording? When she looks up she asks, “One you can come to set free.”

Your mother’s in good company. Sitting across from someone so well known, I can’t help but conjure a slideshow of every image I have of her, that every American has. The iconic moments, the idyllic portraits. Any one of them is imposing; together they are irrepressible. I try desperately to clear them from my mind—to focus on the woman in front of me—but in person she’s no less an artfully framed photograph: stoic, quiet, still. The exotic bird, caged for voyeurs like myself. Have I done that to my mother? Cataloged her in snapshots? Confined her to a lifetime of observation? “One I can come to set free. I like that.”

A man with a beard and wide tie opens the door, startling us both. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jackie. I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

“That’s quite all right,” she says, and the man quietly closes the door. It’s all so normal—he calls her Jackie, he sees her every day, they probably sit in staff meetings—I want to call after that man just to make sure he knows who his coworker really is.

I take advantage of the interruption. “May I ask you a question?”

“I would be happy if you did.”

“Why am I here?”

Laughter. It’s almost indescribable, the feeling of making her laugh. Like somehow all is right with the world, even if this laugh is at my expense.

“Are we speaking existentially?”

“No, no. Despite how my question sounds. I’m genuinely asking.”

“Why are you here, as opposed to another author?”

“Why my book?”

Mrs. Onassis flips back the pages that are folded over the binding of her legal pad and sets her pen down on top of it. “Well, books are a journey. And I’m always excited to embark on a journey I haven’t taken before. So I wanted to meet you, James.”

“Thank you.”

“I found your book to be very mature for a first effort. I have some ideas, if you are open to hearing them.”

“Of course.”

“Ideas that would strengthen the work and amplify the book’s central themes. It’s a wonderful setup, and there’s work to be done on the ending, but we can fix all that. In short, I would like to acquire this novel for publication. It is my sincere hope that you’re willing to work with me.”

And just like that, I’ve completed the slow climb to the top of a roller coaster. I’m about to experience the first drop and people all around me are clutching their hats and sunglasses and screaming in both fear and exhilaration and my mouth is open to scream as well, but no sound comes out. The feeling is so intense I have to look down to make sure my chair hasn’t collapsed again.

“James?”

I close my mouth in a vain attempt to appear sane. “It would be an honor to work with you.”

“Would you like to take some time to think about it?”

“Should I think about it?”

“My father always advised me to sleep a night on important decisions.”

“My father had no such counsel.”

“Well, if I may.” The way she asks permission suggests both a timidity and a deliberate command in steering our conversation. “It’s a rare editor anymore who is more … well known, shall we say, than her authors. So, immediately, there’s that to consider.” She pauses, as if to make sure I’m following. “It would also mean you saying ‘no’ to me when you believe I’m wrong. Do you think you could do that?”

“Oh, no.”

She leans back, hopefully amused. “Is that a joke?”

I have to think about it. “Perhaps. A lame attempt at one rolled in the truth. I could learn to.”

“Make a joke?”

“Say no.” It feels like a little rapport we’re building. Daniel’s heart is going to stop when I recount this bit for him later.

“I would like us to have a conventional editor/writer relationship. And that means I’ll stand up for the things I believe in strongly, and you’ll stand up for the things you believe in strongly. And we’ll debate until there’s a victor.”

For a brief second, I picture us going toe-to-toe in a boxing ring, performing the most delicate pas de deux, me too afraid to ever throw a punch. “I would like that too. For us to have a normal relationship.” No boxing gloves. “Although, it might knock my friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt down a peg.” I say the roo in Roosevelt like in kangaroo, as that’s how Dustin Hoffman says it in the movie Tootsie, and it always makes me laugh. Mrs. Onassis, however, doesn’t. Laugh. “Another joke,” I clarify.

“You must have more questions for me.”

I do. I have eleventy million questions, but synapses are firing, or misfiring—if synapses even fire (or misfire)—and all that comes out is one of those passing non sequiturs that are embarrassingly easy to access in moments of great awkwardness. “How tall was Charles de Gaulle?”

She cocks her head, like I’ve started speaking in tongues, before finally emitting a laugh. “How tall was …?” She stops to give it some thought. “Tall.”

“I don’t suppose that’s the kind of question you had in mind.”

“No, it was not.”

“I didn’t want to be obvious.”

“In that you’ve succeeded.”

“I’m sort of a Francophile. I love Paris. Which sounds dumb now that I say it—I mean, who doesn’t love Paris. But here you are and you’ve met Charles de Gaulle.”

“Well, he was very tall. He …” She starts to say more, then stops. She studies me, scanning my eyes to see if I can be trusted. She proceeds, but does so with caution. “This is neither here nor there, but I suppose I will follow your lead and be unexpected. He struck me as somewhat sad. He rode with President Kennedy and me through Paris, and when we got out of the car I remember thinking of Shelley’s Frankenstein monster. It was something about the way he moved, slowly, deliberately, and the streets were lined with villagers. I tried my best to be charming. At the time I was very focused on bringing the Mona Lisa to the United States—it had never been on loan before to a foreign nation. I wanted to be bright, sunny, for my mission. As for the monster himself, it was hard to pierce that sadness.”

I’m struck by her answer, the way she attributes Frankenstein to Shelley—in case anyone listening would miss the literary nature of the reference; I want to linger on it, but there are so many other things I want to know. About today, and every other day. About history. About the world and our place in it. About everything she’s witnessed. About why she says “President Kennedy” instead of my husband or Jack. But I can’t delve into any of that so I simply ask “Were you successful?”

“In getting the Mona Lisa? Oh, yes. I can be quite persuasive when I want to be. Even to monsters.” This time she winks.

I understand that in being allowed to ask questions I’m being further persuaded. But I can’t stop. “How long have you worked at Doubleday?”

“Fourteen years.” She crosses her hands in her lap. “And several at Viking Press before that.”

“That’s probably more in line with what you were expecting.”

She dips her head in agreement.

“And you have an office? In this building?”

“I have an office here, down the hall. It’s a regular size and stacked high with manuscripts. I get my own coffee and wait in line to use the copier, same as anyone else.”

“And, this is embarrassing. But what do I call you?” Is there a title for former First Ladies? “Ma’am?”

“I think Mrs. Onassis would be appropriate, if you agree.”

I nod. I’ve been nodding a lot in this meeting, overwhelmed to find all the right words.

I lean in, set my arms on the table, and join my fingers. “And you want to work together.” I should feel awkward for retracing so much ground, but surprisingly I don’t.

“I see great promise. The work needs polishing, if I may be blunt, but now that I’ve met you I’m confident we will accomplish good things together.”

My cheeks grow flushed and I start to sweat and it dawns on me that we could be spending some real time together, beyond this meeting, beyond today. And if she opened up to me about Charles de Gaulle, even momentarily, she might open up to me about much, much more. That maybe she sees me as some sort of kindred spirit. That we might become … friends. My brain marches ten steps ahead of me and I do all within my power to reel it back.

I see Mrs. Onassis glance at the clock on the wall, and it’s obvious from that one small signal that our time is almost up.

“So.” It’s that awkward moment at the end of a first date. “What do we do now?”

She stands and offers her hand and I leap up to take it. We shake. I lean in, just a little bit, just enough to absorb her intoxicating presence a heartbeat longer; her hair smells like perfume and also, surprisingly, of cigarettes.

“Why don’t I have a conversation with your agent to work out the details. And then the hard work begins.”

I laugh nervously, realizing how difficult—crushing, even—it might be to hear real criticism, constructive though it may be, from this woman. When she lets go of my hand, I desperately try to think of anything to prolong this good-bye—clamber to name other mid-century heads of state and devise pressing questions about them. Alas, my mind roars only with the flat hum of an ocean, a momentous sound for a consequential occasion.

“We will be in touch.”

I open the conference room door for her, as any gentleman would, and as quickly as she entered my life she is gone.

THREE

I manage to stay collected until I reach the bank of elevators, even though I can feel everyone’s eyes on me as I walk down the hall, back through the paper and push-pins and cubicles and past the framed book covers; I trip and pause only when it hits me that my cover will perhaps one day be among them. Miraculously, I get an elevator to myself for four floors, leaving just enough time for me to self-defibrillate before the doors reopen and three chatty coworkers enter the elevator and join me for the rest of the ride to the lobby, complaining the whole way about a new brand of powdered coffee creamer that leaves a residue in their mugs. I wonder if they have any idea what just happened. I’m curious if they can glimpse my secret, if they can smell it on me, my own residue, and the coffee-creamer conversation is a cover. I try to smell myself, to see if there is some trace of Jackie’s perfume, or, better yet, some faint whiff of American decorative arts from her White House restoration, leather or oils or fine upholstery. It occurs to me they think I’m crazy, a man in a corner with a stunned expression, smelling himself for any trace of 1962.

Does Jackie (surely she’s not Mrs. Onassis in my thoughts) drink office coffee with powdered creamer out of a foam cup—does she like it, or just choke it down to fit in? Does she talk about her weekend in dreamy terms (“How was your weekend, Mrs. Onassis?”; “Fine, I reframed the Chagall and then got some sun in Belize”)? Or is she just one of us, stretching her lunch breaks when spring is in the air, stealing uni-ball pens from the supply closet to use at home.

When the elevator reaches the ground floor I let the others off first, then push through the lobby and revolving door, almost forgetting to exit on Fifty-Second Street. The sharp February air enters my lungs and jolts me like a shot of ice-cold vodka. I line up in front of the first hot dog vendor I come to, even though I don’t eat hot dogs; when I get to the front of the line I pretend not to have my wallet and continue toward Times Square as I start to replay what just happened.

I lied to Jackie in our meeting, about how I came to write about my mother. Because it was a choice, even if I said it was desperation. We were once close—very close—and slowly as I grew older we were not. She blames me for the end of her marriage, for my father. She never said so explicitly, but honestly how could she not? My father was a difficult man, older, not just from another generation but from another time. He never knew what to make of me. He certainly didn’t approve of me, my sensitive nature, my creative ambitions, my wanting to live in the city, my insistence on being myself. He called me foppish once, and I think we both knew it was a placeholder for another derogatory f-word. My mother spent a lot of time running interference. I think she thought she was doing what was best—shielding me from him—but it cost my father and me any chance at a real relationship and she paid a price for it too.

I retreated into adolescence; a casual observer would say I was barely there as my parents’ relationship crumbled. But I was ever-present, lurking in the shadows, an aspiring writer already reading Tennessee Williams, fascinated by human behavior. I mastered the spell of invisibility, at least as much as a powder keg could. I knew instinctually I was the catalyst, the spark for the fury around me. I dimmed my light as long as I was able, but gunpowder is made to ignite—especially when that gunpowder is repressed teenage sexuality. The explosion was not something the three of us survived.

After they divorced, my mother withdrew and she became a mystery for me to unravel. A more patient son might have waited for this to self-correct. I could have led by example as I grew into the man I was meant to be, been a beacon for truth that somehow lit the way. But the more closed off she became, the louder the invitation was to unscramble her; I would pursue, she would retreat—it became an endless, vicious loop. Eventually I chose fiction as a way toward fact. It was inevitable that she would become my subject.

“I’m writing a book about Mom,” I remember telling my sister, Naomi, when I completed a particularly inspiring writing intensive. It was a three-day workshop and I came out feeling the time for a novel was now.

“Oh, God. Why?” was her response.

It was so obvious to me. “Have you met her? C’mon. Why not.”

I thought I could show my mother how much I understood her, how grateful, in fact, I was for everything she had sacrificed for me. My brother Kenny told me there were certain questions about Mom that were just going to remain unanswered, and the sooner I accepted that, the happier I would be. He was able to make peace with it. Naomi was able to go about her life just fine. But a child wants to be close to his mother, and I was forever the baby. I think Kenny and Naomi felt that by not kicking the hornet’s nest, they would be just close enough. Not so for me.

I started writing and I didn’t stop. I was obsessive, writing for an audience of one. I stayed up nights, wrote through lunch breaks, and canceled plans with friends. Daniel had to remind me to eat, and even at times to sleep. Nine months later, right on cue, I delivered a novel I called The Book of Ruth, after the mother character, despite the heavy-handed allusion to the Hebrew text. Because of the Jane Hamilton novel I settled on a new title, The Quarantine, after the self-imposed isolation (literal and figurative) at the heart of the book.

Did I say any of this to Jackie? No, because I lied and said it was desperation. Although, wasn’t it? Just not desperation for a subject, desperation for something else. Reconciliation. Repatriation. Damn. Why wasn’t I better prepared for this meeting?

My agent!

Allen sent me walking into the lion’s den with no warning of the lioness. I pass a pay phone by a Sbarro pizza and empty my pockets of their contents. I fish dimes from a pool of pennies and subway tokens, then pick up the receiver, making as little contact with it as possible. How many drug dealers and prostitutes and (worse) tourists have used this phone before me today? I dial my agent’s number, which I memorized after our first meeting. The phone rings three times before his assistant picks up.

“Donna? It’s James Smale. Could you put Allen on the line?”

Donna laughs. “He said you’d be calling.”

I hate being obvious (should I ask him about former French presidents?), but there’s no way around it. “May I talk to him, please?”

“How was your meeting with Lisa?”

“It was Lila, Donna. Her name was Lila.” Actually, that wasn’t her name at all.

“I can never read my own chicken scratch. Anyhow, he’s on another line.”

“Have him hang up!” I’m shouting, but I can’t tell if it’s from excitement or from the din and chaos around me.

“What? It’s hard to understand you. Where are you? Do you want me to interrupt him?”

It occurs to me he might be on with Doubleday, that the call might be about me. “No, no!” I say, both to her and to someone who has just approached with a cigarette, harassing me for a light. “Just have him call me. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.”

I hang up the phone and turn around to see a black man dressed in drag as the Statue of Liberty approaching, torch in the air and all. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, honey,” he says.

I smile and think of the last line of the poem, which has stuck since I learned it in Mrs. Chaddon’s sixth-grade class. “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

“That’s right you do, baby,” he says, before disappearing into a tour group wearing green-foam Statue of Liberty visors exiting the Sbarro.

A bus stops at the red light in front of me with the high-pitched squealing of poorly maintained brakes. I glance up at the people on board before noticing that the bus sports a tattered poster for Oliver Stone’s JFK, released in theaters this past Christmas. The poster is faded and torn, as if some drunk NYU student tried to pry it off for his dorm room wall and abandoned the theft halfway through.

I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. I just met a woman in a conference room who is also somehow everywhere, even in the image of a tattered American flag draped over Kevin Costner’s face on the side of this bus.

It’s impossible to reconcile.

Across Seventh Avenue, I spot a mother holding her child’s hand. Her eyes dart from one potential danger to another, and she places her other hand on the boy’s shoulder so as not to lose him—that single touch a time machine for me. My first ever visit to this neon circus, I think I was seven. My parents decided to drive us into the city from our sleepy upstate home so we could feel the energy, walking us all the way up Fifth Avenue from the Empire State Building to Central Park. On the way back to the car, my father charged forward, insisting that Times Square was a sight everyone should see. Kenny and Naomi were teenagers, able to withstand the bustle of the city and seemingly unfazed by it all. But my mother held me so tightly, at times I thought I might bruise.

“Keep up, Aileen. The boy’s fine,” my father bellowed. And then, “What we should really do is see the subway. A marvel of urban transportation.” Those were the things that interested my father, tunnels and bridges and trains.

But I didn’t want to go underground, like rats—I could barely breathe above; I looked desperately for patches of sky. I glanced to my mother for help, prayed she would never let go, and she leaned down and whispered in my ear the words that would one day change my life: “You know, all the great writers live in New York.” And just like that, the city transformed from menacing commotion to inviting possibility.

In eight years of living here, I’ve lost the sensation of my mother’s excited whisper and firm grip. Times Square came to mock me—symbolic of the dismissal I faced trying to make it as a writer. It was every rejection letter, every failed job interview, every face that chuckled when I revealed my dream, every horrible, soul-crushing temporary job. It led to my hating New York. Hating myself. I never felt the same energy of that day again.

Until now.

I count to ten to just “feel the energy,” giving my father at least that much, then blow into my cupped hands to warm them. Gloves! I have gloves. I find them in my coat pocket and put them on before scurrying west across Forty-Ninth Street. I have to get home to Hell’s Kitchen. I have to get home to tell Daniel and to be there when my agent calls.

I have to get home before I wake up.

FOUR

I bound up the steps of our five-story walk-up, two at a time from floors one through three, then individually until I reach the top. On the fourth-floor landing, my messenger bag swings forward and I almost eat one of the steps that leads to our door. It’s then that I realize just how grungy our building is, the stairs thick with years of grime and grease from whatever unpleasant bits of the city people track in on their shoes. I brush myself off, but not the troubling realization that we really do live like this. It’s not at all suitable to entertain these new circles I may be traveling in. When I reach the apartment door, it’s locked. I mean, of course it’s locked. Even though this is David Dinkins’s New York, we’re not animals. Usually I have my keys in hand, but I ran up the stairs too quickly to retrieve them. I reach in my pocket and pull out a crumpled gum wrapper. Please tell me I wasn’t chewing gum during the meeting! I check my mouth. No gum. Breath not great, but no gum. This brings some small relief. I find my keys, but it takes me three attempts to open the door.

Inside, Daniel is lying on the couch.

“I was hoping that was you. I thought we were being burgled.” Daniel is the type of person who says “burgled” instead of “robbed,” and he’s not even a writer—or a lawyer. He directs theater. I stare at him, his maddeningly thick hair and dark features, unsure of what to say. Not what to say so much as how to begin to say it. Also because my heart is pounding from my sprint up the stairs and I taste something coppery and I may be having a stroke. “You’re not going to believe this.” He gestures toward our nineteen-inch television. “There’s another one.”

I start to catch my breath. “Another one what?”

“Another bimbo. It was just on CNN.”

“Another one?” Strike that. I don’t want to get engaged in conversation about politics, something I don’t particularly care about at this moment.

“I think this is the end of his campaign.” Daniel looks up at me and notices my chest heaving. “Jesus. Did you run up the stairs?”

And that’s when I break into a huge, cat-who-ate-the-canary kind of grin.

“What?” Daniel has this look on his face that I love. I remember he made it on our first date, maybe even in response to my smiling devilishly at him. Brown eyes wide, lips slightly parted, hinting at the whitest teeth behind them, one of his pronounced Latin eyebrows slightly higher than the other. Five years later, that look still slays me.

I shrug and grin more. I must look like the Joker. Or at least Jack Nicholson.

“You’re not going to defend him, I hope.”

“Clinton? Nope.” Then I burst out laughing. It’s orgasmic, like a release for the whole day.

“What, then?”

Daniel and I met when we were both trying to get rush tickets to the Broadway revival of Cabaret. I made a crack about Joel Grey getting top billing for playing the emcee. I mean, he had won an Oscar for the role, but he was still the emcee. Daniel overheard me gripe and said it was like reviving Grease as a starring vehicle for Doody and I laughed. I had noticed him earlier on line for the box office and wanted to sleep with him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was the way he jumped up and down while pleading for a ticket, any ticket, like a dog on its hind legs, begging for scraps. We were unsuccessful that day but left far from empty-handed.

I snap off the TV.

“I was watching that,” he protests.

“It’s CNN. It’s on all day.” I take off my gloves and my coat and throw them on the chair. “I think I sold my book.”

Daniel stares at the blank TV screen until that sinks in. “Wait, you what?”

“Well, the offer will go to my agent and I’m sure there will be some back-and-forth and we’ll have to come to some agreement on terms. He may be on the phone with them now. Did Allen call? And there’s work to be done on it still. Hard work, she called it. On the ending, mostly.” I bite my lip. “But … yeah. I think I sold my book.”

Daniel’s legs swing around and his feet plant firmly on the ground. He pushes himself up with his fists and hovers just over the couch, preparing to leap up if necessary. “To a publisher?”

“To a doorstop salesman.” If it’s going to take him so long to catch on to this bit of the news, the rest of it will be a Sisyphean task of explanation on my part.

“Obviously to a publisher. To a good publisher?” Daniel doesn’t leap, but at least he stands. “Who?”

The grin is back. This is going to knock his socks off. “I sold it to a giant.”

“A giant,” he says skeptically.

“That’s right.”

“A literary giant?”

“A GIANT giant.”

Daniel crosses over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders, concerned. I peripherally glance down at his hands. “Wait, I’ve heard this before,” he says. “You sold your book for a handful of magic beans.”

Daniel is going off the deep end. “What?”

“And we no longer have a cow. But I shouldn’t worry, because you’re going to grow a beanstalk!”

“No. Stop it. Not a giant. An icon. But I’m sure she hates that word. She’s a really big person.”

“Like, obese?”

This is coming out all wrong. “Okay, I’m ready to move on from this part. Jackie. I sold my book to Jackie!”

Daniel thinks on this for a minute. “Karen’s friend? The lesbian who works at Reader’s Digest?”

“KENNEDY. Jackie. Kennedy.”

He freezes. Finally. The reaction I was looking for. “Oh,” he says, quietly. But he’s still not quite there.

“Oh …” I repeat. And then I coax, “Na-ssis.”

Finally, magic happens. In unison: “Jackie … Kennedy … Onassis.”

It’s just like out of a movie, us saying it together: a scene that would strain credulity but would still be an audience favorite and get high marks in test screenings.

“Get out!” Daniel removes his hands from my shoulders and pushes me in the chest. Hard.

“Ow.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You just punched me in the sternum.”

“Jackie fucking Kennedy.”

“Onassis. Except I don’t think that’s her middle name. And she says Jacqueline, but like in the French pronunciation.”

“You’re joking.”

“Non, non,” I say, mustering my best French. “Je ne …” I can’t think of the word. “Joke pas.”

He looks at me, scrutinizing my face, just as he did the first time I told him I loved him, to see if I am recklessly toying with his emotions or if I’m indeed telling the truth. He scans my eyes, perhaps to check if my pupils are dilated in the throes of some drug-fueled hallucination. At last he smiles, a recognition that I am of sound mind, just as he did upon I love you.

“Oh my God! When do you meet her?”

“I just came from there.”

“From where?”

“From meeting her. At Doubleday.”

“Her office. You just came from there.” This is two steps forward and one step back. I try to be patient; it took me time to catch on to all this and it happened with me in the room. “You just entered our apartment door, coming straight from Jackie fucking Kennedy’s office.”

“Yes. Well, no. A conference room. Her office was too small.”

“Her office is too … small.”

“That’s what she said, yes.”

“She’s the widow of Aristotle Onassis, who was, for a time, the richest man on the planet.”

I fail to make the connection. “So?”

“She could probably buy Doubleday. And the building it’s in. But you’re telling me her office is small?”

I see his point, but I can actually answer this one. “She doesn’t want to buy Doubleday. She doesn’t want special treatment.”

“She told you that?”

I try to recall our exact conversation. She said something along those lines. And could she buy Doubleday? I seem to remember something about Onassis’s daughter getting the money. “We didn’t go over her financials or anything. It’s all kind of a blur, to be honest.”

“But you know this because you just came from there.”

“Exactly.”

“And you had a meeting—not in her office, which is small, but in a conference room, where she made an offer to buy your book.”

“It took me a while too. You’re doing great.” Daniel rolls his eyes. He thinks I’m being patronizing, but I’m really not. I’m being sincere. So I wrap my arms around him, nuzzle my face in his shoulder, and excitedly scream.

“Did you just spit on my shirt?” He stretches the fabric for evidence.

“Daniel! Focus!”

He returns his attention to me. “So. What did you talk about? You and the former First Lady.”

“I asked her about Charles de Gaulle.”

“The airport?” Daniel peels me off of him.

“The French president.” I bang my head against his shoulder several times, embarrassed.

“As in how he’s doing? Because I think Charles de Gaulle is dead.”

I laugh, because that’s the man I fell in love with. The man who makes me laugh every night before we fall asleep holding hands. “I asked if he was tall.” I kind of throw my hands up as if to say, What else are you supposed to ask her about? and also, I know! in recognition of my own ridiculousness.

“You asked her a question that rhymed?” Daniel is incredulous.

“I don’t think I phrased it as a couplet.”

“But it was about the physical stature of the former president of France.”

“I couldn’t think of what else to say!”

“And that’s what popped in your mind. Not ‘What do you do in your spare time? Is that an original Oleg Cassini design you’re wearing? Do you have any shirtless pictures of your son?’”

“Who is Oleg Cassini?”

“My point is—”

“Your point is clear,” I interrupt. “But what else are you supposed to say to someone who wants to publish your book?”

Daniel takes a lap around our minuscule living room. Since the couch and the coffee table and the TV and the one accent chair we found on the curb near Ninth and Forty-Third take up most of the space, he basically turns in a very tight circle, careful not to trip on the edge of the oriental rug, which is folded in half because it’s too big for the room. When he stops he says, “What I don’t get is why. Why does she want to publish your book?”

I mime a dagger going into my heart.

“Oh, come on. I don’t mean it like that. I’ve read your book. I love your book!”

“But you can’t imagine anyone wanting to publish it.”

“In fact, I can. I just didn’t think she published fiction.”

“It’s a memoir. Sort of. Just fictionalized.”

“It’s a novel, genius, and I didn’t think she did that.”

“What did you think she did?”

“I don’t know. Art books.”

I blanch at the thought, but I don’t know why. If you asked me yesterday what kind of books Jackie Kennedy published I would have had no idea. I had only a vague recollection that she even worked in publishing. Today I have no sense of her list either, but I’m feeling oddly defensive of it.

“You know,” Daniel continues. “Coffee-table books. Like on the history of tatting.”

It’s infuriating at times, the things he knows. In the middle of our worst arguments he’ll produce a fact that makes me want to hit him in the face with a shovel.

Daniel can read my bewilderment. “Lacemaking.”

“The history of lace?” The idea is almost absurd.

“The history of making lace.”

I glare at my boyfriend. “You frighten me.”

Daniel does another turn in place, the way a dog might before lying down.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you other than she’s interested in publishing my book. We’re going to work on it. Together.”

Daniel chews the inside of his cheek. “And what if she wants to change it?”

“I imagine she will want to change it. That’s her job. It’s called editing.”

“But what if she wants to change it and you don’t agree with how she wants to change it, but you can’t say anything because she’s Jackie fucking Kennedy?”

“You’ve really got to stop calling her that.”

“I’m serious. What if she wants to set the story on Cape Cod?”

“You could try being excited for me.”

“What if she wants to set the story on Cape Cod and add schooner racing as a leitmotif because that’s what she and Ethel did off of Nantucket.”

“She and Ethel discussed leitmotif?”

“No. Raced their … lady schooners.”

I want to laugh but also bang my head against the wall. “Please don’t say ‘lady schooners’ again.”

“But …”

“She doesn’t.”

“You just know.”

I nod. I don’t know how else to explain it to anyone who wasn’t there. We talked a little about characters and relationships and motivation, and I know we will talk more. And even if we hadn’t, we definitely discussed my ability to tell her no.

Daniel finally relents, his engines out of steam. “Well, congratulations. I mean it. Bravo.” This time he hugs me.

“Thank you.” This is what I’ve wanted. I grip him tight. His T-shirt smells like dryer sheets from the fluff-and-fold we splurge on sometimes when we have money. But more than that. It smells like him. Daniel breaks the hug first to look me square in the eyes and I bite my lip to avoid a toothy grin.

“You had me going there for a moment,” he says. “The bit about Charles de Gaulle was a nice touch.”

Huh?

“Can you imagine if you ever did meet her and that’s what you asked?”

“I did meet her and that is what I asked.”

Daniel laughs. “Is Charles de Gaulle tall? Was he on the ball or off the wall? Did you two break bread on the National Mall? Tell me, Jackie, is the frog the opposite of small?”

I punch Daniel in the arm. Normally when I do this it’s meant to be playful. This time I’m not so sure. “I asked that for my mother. She used to talk about the presidential visit to Paris like she was there and not stuck in rural New York with three children under the age of ten. I knew she would love whatever the answer was. Oh! And there’s a whole story about the Mona Lisa that I can’t wait to tell her.”

“Your mother …” Daniel says.

“You may remember her. You’ve been introduced on numerous occasions.”

“Your mother, who has adored the Kennedys for most of her life.”

Oh, shit.

“Your Irish Catholic mother whom you wrote a not entirely flattering, although, to be fair, not entirely unflattering, book about? The one who named you Francis? The one who will have a book about her edited by Jackie Kennedy?”

At least he doesn’t say “fucking” this time.

And then it hits me. As frustrated as I have been with Daniel for not immediately getting it, there are layers to this bonanza that even I have yet to process. I’m still scooping my chip through the top layer of a fourteen-layer dip. There are thirteen more layers of mush and fattening sludge to get through before I reach the bottom. As I chew on that image I realize it’s a horrible metaphor—with each passing moment, I feel more like the dip, in another sense of the word.

“Come here.”

Daniel motions for me to step closer, but I’m frozen in place.

“Come. Here.”

I take two steps in his direction and he hugs me again, this time for real. “You really did this. You really met Jackie Kennedy.” He pauses, the truth now undeniable. He cups the back of my head, massaging my scalp.

“I thought you didn’t believe me.”

“I do now! It’s written all over your face. You bastard.” I can feel him smile, his cheek pressed against mine. “I’m so proud of you.”

He squeezes me even tighter.

“What’s more, I think this is a terrific marriage.”

“You don’t believe in marriage,” I say, halfheartedly. I’m hundreds of miles away.

“I don’t believe in monogamy and the subjugation of women, but I’m not so worried in this case.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“This could be a great creative marriage.” He leans back to see if I’m paying attention. “You’ve worked so hard. Been so disciplined. This is your moment. I’m really happy for you.” He musses my hair. “Seriously, though. How are you going to tell your mother?”

“I don’t know.” I’m certain the words fall out of my mouth, but in my head I just say Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, over and over again until my mind goes dark.

FIVE

I wake to the sound of my mother crying. I grasp and find one of the buttons sewn on the mattress, the one that I cling to when I wake from nightmares of monsters grabbing my feet, but the button fails to provide familiar comfort for a simple reason—I’ve never heard my mother cry. Not like this. And it’s more frightening than any demon.

“Mom?” I call, but no one answers.

I study the contents of my bedroom in the morning light to distract myself. I can see my dresser and my toys and the needlepoint fire engine my grandmother stitched. The curtains flutter and float on the breeze sneaking in the open window. I know where I am and I know my name and that I am seven years old and I’m comforted by at least that much. Still, I feel apprehension, bordering on anxiety—what news could this crying possibly bring?

I look down under the bed like I always do to make sure it’s safe before planting my feet on the floor, and slowly slink out of my room. My mother is in the living room chair where my father usually sits, smoking a cigarette. She’s watching our small TV while clutching a mug, as she does in winter when she wants to warm her hands. The news people on the screen seem especially somber, more so than usual. The volume is low and I can’t make out their words, but their expressions need no interpretation.

“Mom.” I say it again, real quiet this time, in case I am not supposed to see this.

I fidget with the snaps on my pajama pants, grasping for an activity so that I’ll appear casual when I am eventually seen (and I will be seen). I count the seconds, as I somehow know they are the precious foundation of a future important memory; the more seconds I can count, the stronger the memory will be. There won’t be many. My mother has eyes on all sides of her head.

… nine … ten … eleven … twelve …

“You should be getting dressed for school.” Her head remains perfectly still, encased in a cloud of dancing smoke.

I remove my hand from the snaps of my pants and take a step closer, looking at the thick, brown carpet the entire time, imagining it a sea of mud. Or quicksand. I quickly lift my feet just to make sure I still can.

“Go on, Francis,” she says, encouraging me again to retreat, to get dressed, to leave. Sensing that I am not only disobeying her but am actually advancing, she sets her mug on the TV tray, ashes her cigarette, and wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands in a vain effort to transform this crying stranger back into the mother I know.

I place one foot in front of the other, carefully, deliberately, heels touching toes every time, each foot docking with the other before I attempt any further forward motion. I can smell the acrid smoke of my mother’s cigarette and I inhale it deeply, inhale her. Eventually I am beside her. I grasp the arm of the chair, afraid to reach out for her, afraid, given her strange trance, that she might dissolve into ash like her cigarette from even the faintest human touch.

“It’s Bobby.” She starts sobbing. I’m startled by how much sobbing looks like laughing. And by how the way she tucks her head into her arm makes her look like one of the preening swans that used to visit our duck pond. “They got him.” I wrack my brain trying to place this Bobby, and discern just how close he is to us. They got him? I’m not even sure what that means. Did a van pull up alongside him? Is he a cousin or a family friend? If they got him, were we somehow in danger of being snatched too?

I look closely and can spot where tears have dripped and stained the sleeves of the blouse that covers her spindly arms. I want to lick them, her tears, like our dog Casper did mine the night my hamster died. I remember how loved I felt in that singular moment, puppy lashings covering my salty face, both rough and soft like the finest-grained sandpaper from my father’s workshop; I want nothing more than for my mother to feel this loved too. But just as I work up the nerve and I can feel the smallest tip of tongue cross the threshold of my lips, my mother inhales so deeply on her cigarette that I can hear the paper and tobacco crackle; somehow it’s the loudest sound in the room.

She exhales her words. “They killed him just like they did his brother.”

Nothing my mother ever said has stopped me so cold. This was not grief I was witness to, it was rage. I want to ask who “they” are, who is doing this killing, but I know better than to open my mouth. I want to know how people could be so angry or violent, but I know not to form this thought in words. Not right now. The only way to coax more information out of my mother is to stay silent and let her volunteer it. I delicately trace the five freckles on her forearm; I have them memorized. They are stars, the makings of a constellation filled with stardust and matter that holds the answer to every question that could ever be asked. You just have to be quiet enough to listen, so I put my ear to her arm.

She stubs her cigarette in the clay ashtray I made for her in Scouts, giving my handiwork her full attention as if soaking in its imperfections, its mottled shape and uneven glaze. She then turns to me, startled to see me leaning against her, and stares at me this time, taking in my imperfections, the excuses she would have not to love me if I were someone else’s son.

“Remember his name. Robert F. Kennedy. He was a good man.”

His full name does not help me place him, so I stare at the television, hoping the images will help. Most of the pictures are of chaos, and they move too quickly to clarify much of anything.

“Who is he?”

My mother thinks about how to answer. “He was Irish like we are Irish. He was Catholic like we are Catholic.” She clutches the cross that she wears around her neck. “He represented a hope that the future would be good. Now I don’t think I understand the future at all.” She kisses me on my head, as if to wish me luck in these unknowable times, and I lean in, trying to get her to do it again. But she doesn’t say anything else for so long, I think the conversation is over. Then, out of nowhere, she adds, “You share a name with him, in fact.”

I think of my name, James Smale, finding no overlap.

“Francis. You have the same middle names.”

“Dad gets mad when you call me Francis.”

“Your father gets mad about a lot of things.”

“I like Francis,” I say, my ability to suck up to my mother knowing no bounds.

“Your father’s name is James and he wanted you named after him. But I chose Francis, and so it became your middle name.” She starts to quiver again, but this time she doesn’t break. She gets up to turn off the television and I hear the hum of static and then nothing. Silence, except for the twittering of birds by the feeder outside and the faint singing of chimes. I want my mother to stop crying, but I also know that when she feels sad I am the only one who can comfort her—and that means maybe getting out of going to school today.

So I remain perfectly still.

SIX

It’s been like two minutes.”

The silence on the other end of the line is so absolute, I swear I can hear my mother’s refrigerator hum. My first instinct was to wait, to tell her about Jackie in person, but I knew in my gut this was news that wouldn’t age well. The best thing to do was to get it over with, rip off the Band-Aid and come clean. I drank half a bottle of merlot for liquid courage, then picked at the $5.99 price sticker while having a staring contest with the phone; eventually I blinked and dialed. When she picked up she said she was glad I called, having just had an uncomfortable exchange with the neighbor over a rapidly growing tree encroaching over her property line. When she finished recounting that, I asked after Domino, her overweight cocker spaniel recently diagnosed with canine diabetes (unsurprising, I suppose, given he’s named after the yellow bag of sugar). Domino’s responding to his medication, she said, but he has to go outside more often to pee. When we exhausted all possible topics of conversation, I dropped my news like I was carpet-bombing Baghdad in Desert Storm.

I check my watch. “Three minutes. It might help if you say something.”

The first time I ever mentioned the book to my mother, more than a year ago now, I had already finished a draft. I had an unexpected lull between temp assignments and I drove out to see her. Naïvely I thought she would be curious to know everything about it, so I printed her a copy at the shop near our apartment and had it spiral-bound—the presentation was a nice throwback to the stories I once typed on her typewriter. Instead, she diligently sliced a tomato as I told her about the undertaking, explained the inspiration, and described the long hours I put into the endeavor. When I finished, all she said was, “Have some tomato,” and she pushed the cutting board my way.

“I don’t want any tomato,” I replied. I wanted a reaction to the fact that I’d written a book. A book!

“Well, this is dinner,” I remember her saying, “I wasn’t expecting company.”

“Dinner is a tomato?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not dinner even if you weren’t expecting company. I thought we could celebrate.”

I’ll never forget the look on her face, pallid yet outraged. “Celebrate what?”

Celebrate what. And that sums up where we’ve been ever since.

I’m about to switch the phone to my other ear and check my watch a third time when my mother finally speaks. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” If I’m not mistaken, there’s panic in her voice, but maybe it’s just surprise.

“You should at least read it.”

Another long silence.

“You’re still not going to read it?”

“What difference does it make if I read it now?”

I’m confused. “Do you not get this? It makes a difference to me.”

“Well, I just assume not.”

“You’re being crazy.” I don’t mean to be accusatory, it just comes out.

“How wonderful for you. Now you can tell Mrs. Kennedy I’m crazy and mean it.”

“You think I told her you were crazy and didn’t mean it?” I smile because it’s a clever line, though I’m aware my mother can’t see my smile over the telephone. I swirl the remaining wine in my glass; shame sets in as I watch it slow and then fall still. I know my mother’s not in the mood for jokes.

“I have no doubt you meant it.”

“I didn’t tell her you were crazy.”

The clanging of pots and pans. She’s always doing some ridiculous task when I call. Today’s project, it seems, is emptying the cupboards. “Maybe you didn’t say it in those exact words.”

“Maybe not in any words. I don’t think that you’re crazy, so it’s not something that’s in my head to tell.” When speaking on the telephone, it’s easy to conjure the mother I know from the past, when we were close. Her voice sounds much as it always has, at least since she gave up smoking. I like to think she’s frozen in time, and that’s mostly true; she looks to me the age she was when I was maybe fourteen—not young, far from old, with a kind of natural, easy beauty. The only difference: Her hair has gotten lighter over the years, dyed, perhaps, to mask the gray. I wonder if she’s all too aware of time passing, self-conscious about aging, but I could never ask. Certainly she doesn’t see herself through the same softening filter of nostalgia. And I’m sure it’s much harder for her to look at me and imagine I’m still fourteen.

“People are going to read this now. Is that what you’re telling me?”

I clear my throat. “My novel? I hope so. Which is why it’s important you read it first.”

“They’re going to read that I stood on the table and made up words to ‘Carol of the Bells’ when I burnt the Christmas ham.”

“So you have read it.”

“Naomi told me.”

“Naomi told you,” I repeat, imagining this conversation between her and my sister. “Well, you did stand on the table and make up words to ‘Carol of the Bells’ when you burnt the Christmas ham. Or new words. ‘Carol of the Bells’ already has words.” I can tell by her silence she thinks I’ve wandered into the reeds. “And you conducted an invisible orchestra with a wooden spoon.”

“Then how is it a novel!”

I have to push past this because we can’t litigate every scene from the book she may or may not have heard of secondhand. Certainly not over the phone. “Dad had just … Forget it. You are not insane. You are a human being. It was quite beautiful, that moment, and I wrote it that way. What does it matter if strangers read that?”

“Mrs. Kennedy is not a stranger.”

I’m momentarily puzzled. “Are you friends?”

“She read that I stood on a table and waved a wooden spoon.”

“Yes, she read that.” And then I add, although I don’t know why, as it certainly doesn’t help my cause, “Twice.”

I’m in my own kitchen now, with no recollection of getting here—when I first dialed her I was down the hall. With the cordless pinned between my shoulder and my ear, I reach for a box of croutons and pop a handful in my mouth.

“What are you eating?” she asks.

“Croutons.” When I swallow I add, “It’s nonstop glamour over here.” It is glamourous now, though, in my mind. Starving writer is far more chic than starving office temp.

“Croutons,” she repeats disapprovingly, but after the tomato incident I doubt she eats much better. We should get together more often; between us, we could almost make a salad. “I can’t believe you let her read those things,” she finally says. “About me.”

“About Ruth Mulligan, a fictional character.”

“Based on me, Aileen Smale.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“She knows you have a mother.”

“I assume she does not think I was immaculately born!”

My mother aggressively exhales. I’ve skirted too close to blasphemy.

I hear a cabinet door close and all I can think is that she should sell the house. That I’ve moved on, and she needs to also. Naomi came closest to convincing her a couple years ago, introducing her to a Realtor friend. “It’s too big for you,” we all told her. But she got skittish and we backed off. I remember I cried at the time, because I was so ready to say good-bye. I’d been ready for a good while.

“Everyone’s going to know that it’s me.”

“Everyone who?”

“Everyone who reads it.”

“So what!” I fail to see what the big deal is; I would be honored if someone wrote a book about me. “I think people who buy books have a firm grasp on what fiction means.”

“Write what you know. Isn’t that what they say writers do? They write what they know. You know me, therefore she is me.”

I’m almost impressed with her logic. “Res ipsa loquitur.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“What.”

I sigh. “It’s Latin. The thing speaks for itself.”

It’s surprising to me that this is now her concern. When I asked her to read it the first time, she was quite adamant that the mother character was not her.

“It’s not about me,” she had said at the time.

“It’s not?”

“No. And you know how I know? Because you don’t know me.”

It was the ultimate slap to the face. A son a stranger to his mother—how could he have written an entire book about her? A mother, a stranger to her son—she had let herself be observed but never seen.

Naomi was our mother’s defender at first. When I called to complain, she told me, “You would feel differently if things were reversed.”

“If I exposed something of myself?”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t think there are pieces of me on every page of that book? What do you think writing is?”

I remember she paused, not awkwardly, but like she was genuinely giving it thought. “I don’t think I ever considered it.”

At least I had ushered one ally over to my side.

“I don’t know why you’re so worried,” I say to my mother now, when we’ve been quiet so long I almost forget we’re still on the phone. The box of croutons is empty. “Nobody’s perfect. I think people will recognize that.”

“Certainly not in this family.”

“In any family.”

“I don’t—” My mother stops. “It too late now.”

I consider the world’s imperfections. Not even the world’s, our family’s. The way everyone has tacitly agreed to leave so much unspoken. Everyone, that is, except me.

“I don’t want to be written about. Let’s leave it at that. Good night, James.”

“Don’t you even want to know what she said? Mrs. Kennedy?”

The sound of another cabinet door closing and then things go quiet again. I’m almost certain I can hear her click off the kitchen light. “I want to go to bed. I’m tired.”

“It’s worth adding two more minutes to your day.” I almost add “promise,” but it’s not a promise I’m certain I can keep.

“I’m not tired from the day. I’m tired from forty years of my children.”

“Your children haven’t kept you up in years.”

“And yet here you are.”

I plow forward before she can hang up. “She said she admired the mother. She said the reason she responded to the book so strongly was because she admired the character at the heart of it.” I let that sit before emphasizing, “She was saying she admired you.”

I can hear my mother breathing, the labored way she used to when we were young and a migraine headache was bearing down. “And you believed her.”

There’s a click and then the line goes dead.

SEVEN

My agent’s office occupies a small suite on West Fifty-Ninth Street. It’s cozy and dim; the wooden shutters are kept mostly drawn and the office is lit with Tiffany table lamps, giving it a soft glow. It has the requisite characteristics of what you think a literary agent’s office once was, and still should be: someplace where you’d like to curl up with a good book and read. And you could find plenty of them—books—as the walls of the main room where Donna sits are lined with dark walnut bookcases crammed with endless titles. The rest of the office is littered with stacks of dusty newspapers, old copies of The New York Times Book Review, and past issues of The New Yorker. Sometimes I have to move papers out of a chair just to sit down.

Donna usually greets me with the enthusiasm of a poodle who has been left home all day. Most of Allen’s business is conducted via phone and fax, as his clients are spread across the country; I don’t think they get many visitors. But when I walk through the door, the office is quiet and empty, and I jump when the door closes behind me.

“Allen?”

No response. I take a precursory look at Donna’s desk to see if there’s any paperwork with my name on it. I don’t see any, and head farther into the office, nearly tripping on a box from UPS. Usually I can hear Allen on the phone, but it’s so quiet I start to wonder if this idyllic agency setting isn’t also an exemplary place to stumble on a body or two. Mrs. Peacock in the office with the quill pen.

“Allen?” I ask again, this time a little louder.

I hear motion in his office and I freeze (is the killer still here?), and then Allen peeks his head out the door. “I thought you were Donna.”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Come here.” Allen waves me into his office and shuts the door behind me. He starts unbuttoning his shirt.

“Did you spill something?”

“No.” He looks me square in the eyes.

“Allen …” When he has the shirt all the way undone, I put up my hands like I’m fending off an attack. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Just look at this.”

I jam my eyes closed. “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me, but …”

For my own safety I lift one eyelid just enough to peek. He slides his shirt off his shoulders, revealing a surprisingly broad, muscular frame.

“Allen, I’m flattered, it’s just …”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of red; curiosity gets the best of me, so I open my eyes fully. His back is battered and the color of a rich cabernet.

“Is there bruising?” he asks.

“Jesus, what happened to you?”

“Reggie.” Allen excitedly nods his approval.

I lower my voice to a whisper. “Should I call the police?” I make a quick scan of the office for weapons. Do I have it in me to three-hole-punch an attacker?

“No, no. Of course not.” He slips his shirt back on and starts buttoning.

“Was this part of a negotiation?” I’m thoroughly confused and maybe a little impressed, as I’m left to wonder if Allen would really go to the mat in this way for his clients.

“Reggie’s this guy. In Chinatown. I pay him to do that.”

I’m appalled but also fascinated. “Beat the shit out of you?”

Allen’s eyes swell with pride. “I got in a few good hits.”

Of course the writer in me wants to know everything, but he’s already crossed behind his desk to move on.

“So, contracts,” he says, tucking his shirt into his pants. He looks under a stack of papers.

It’s been six weeks since I first walked into Doubleday. Allen did his part and negotiated a fair deal on my behalf. I’m not sure if Jackie has real sway, if the book is indeed good, or if they let her buy whatever she wants to keep her from taking her prestige elsewhere; when Allen told me the official offer came in I had to sit down. It wasn’t the money (the advance isn’t much to speak of), but the fact that Jackie came through. That this wasn’t a dream—it was really happening.

When the contracts arrived, Allen messengered a copy over to me and we spent a good hour or two dissecting it over the phone. He pointed out where he was able to do well for me, and also what were industry-standard terms. When I felt I understood the agreement as best I could, I made an appointment to sign.

“You ever met her?”

“Jackie?” he asks. “We spoke on the telephone.”

“In person, I mean.”

“Sit down, sit down.”

For once there’s an empty chair, but I have to push a few manuscripts on the floor aside so there’s room for my feet.

“Not one-on-one like you, hotshot. But back in the day when she was first at Viking. I knew Tommy Guinzburg, the publisher. We’d do business together and he’d invite me to the office when he knew she’d be there. She’s tall. Surprising, right?”

“She was mostly sitting down.”

Allen guffaws. “I wish I could have seen the look on your face.”

“Yeah, well. You were no help.”

“Listen. I didn’t want you to be in your head. Remember our first meeting? You’re very engaging, but you can get in your own way.” I shake my head in protest even though he’s got me pegged. The first time we met I was trying to make a joke about his credentials and mispronounced the word emeritus. After that, I was tripping over my tongue for the entire conversation.

“Bygones, right? I got the two of you in a room together.”

“You’re quite the yenta.”

You can tell Allen’s still pleased with himself; he chuckles, forming a slick grin. He leans back in his chair, then grimaces and bounces forward.

“Bruises?”

“Yeah. That’s going to smart for days. Anyhow, I don’t even know why he hired her. Tommy. She had no experience. Her Rolodex, I guess. Thought she could bring in some big books as an acquiring editor. I think he offered her something like two hundred bucks a week. I’m not sure the whole experience was even worth that.”

“Why not?” I’m fascinated.

“The relationship only lasted two years before it blew up in his face. She quit over some two-bit novel they did about the assassination of Ted Kennedy.”

“You mean Bobby?” I’m confused.

“No. Ted. It was some alternate-history sort of thing. She sent him a letter of resignation in the middle of the night. The middle of the night! The book was in poor taste, but still. Meanwhile, for those two years? Chaos.” Allen looks all over his desk and finally produces a pen. “You have to put it in context. She was enticingly available to the public for the very first time. She had an office, regular hours. Their poor receptionist had to field every whack-a-doo who stepped off the elevator wanting to see her. People would show up with a ream of blank paper and demand a meeting like they were the next Mario Puzo. Meanwhile, phones ringing off the hook. Mike Wallace on one! Barbara Walters on two! Some housewife called like clockwork for a daily report on what Jackie was wearing. One man showed up, and when he was refused an audience he said he was wrapped in dynamite! Tommy himself had to intervene and talk the man down. Ha!” He reads the shocked expression on my face. Clearly, I’m not finding this as funny as he does. “Ah, well. You’d have to know Tommy.”

“So, what happened?” I hesitantly ask.

“Bah.” Allen dismisses my concern with the wave of his hand. “There was no dynamite.”

I roll my eyes. “Is it still that crazy? Do I need a flak jacket?”

“Oh, no. She got down to work and disappeared. Novelty eventually wore off.” Allen hands me four copies of the publishing agreement and the pen.

“So I’m not nuts, then. To sign these?”

“You may be nuts, kid, but not for signing these.”

I flip the top contract open to the final page, which is tabbed “sign here.” I pause, wondering if I should do something special to mark this occasion but decide it’s best not to stand on ceremony. I put Allen’s pen to paper and … nothing. It’s out of ink. I shake the pen and try again. Nada. “I hope this isn’t a sign.”

“Oh, come on.” Allen rummages through a drawer. “DONNA!”

“I don’t think she’s here.”

“You celebrate yet?” He pats himself down to see if there’s a pen in his pockets.

“Nope. Waiting to sign these.”

“Family happy?”

“I’ve been keeping a low profile. Superstition.” I cross my fingers on both hands to emphasize the point before remembering that some consider that bad luck.

Allen looks up at me. “Your mother?”

I put my finger on my nose. “I don’t know what she thinks. She hasn’t read it.”

“What do you mean she hasn’t read it?”

“I asked her to read it, she gave me a tomato.”

“She threw it at you?”

“No, just offered it. To eat. I asked her a second time and she said she’d still rather not.”

“Rather not what?” Allen conjures another pen, removes the cap, and hands it to me. It’s a promotional giveaway from a paper supply company in New Jersey and the top of the pen has bite marks. It feels anticlimactic, to say the least. I imagine if Jackie were the one to countersign these agreements (and not some business-affairs person) she would do so with an elegant fountain pen. I guess we all work with what we have.

“Read it, I guess. But I suppose she’d rather it not exist at all.” I hover the pen above the contracts and my hand shakes. Allen notices my hesitation.

“It’s a loving portrait,” he says.

“It’s an honest portrait.”

He chuffs. “She’ll come around. If not, now you’ve got a spare.”

“What, who—Jackie?” My face turns as red as Allen’s back.

“Editors are mothers of sorts.”

I’m annoyed the shutters aren’t more open so that I can stare dramatically out the window onto Fifty-Ninth Street. This is my last chance to do the right thing by my mother. Yet would that be the right thing for me? Is the mark of adulthood putting others first? Or is it standing behind your own vision, your own work, your own view of the world? Beads of sweat form on my forehead and I have to wipe my brow.

My hand still trembles, but I manage to sign all four agreements. I stare at my signature, barely recognizing it as my own. My name looks foreign. Like it’s not mine but my father’s—someone else who let my mother down. I thought this would be fun, I thought I would want to remember this moment, but in truth I just want to move on. “When do we get paid?”

“First check upon execution!” Allen takes the contracts from me and I place the pen in an empty mug, which I’m hoping is a pencil jar and not the remnants of his morning caffeine. He flips through the agreements to make sure everything is in order.

I suddenly see the wisdom in paying someone to hit me. I even consider asking Allen for his guy’s number. If I’m indeed causing my mother pain, wouldn’t some in return be rightful penance? And even if not, I already feel like the wind’s been knocked out of me—perhaps a few swift punches could knock it back in. I lean forward and put my head between my knees.

“You okay, kid?”

“Thought I dropped something.” I don’t tell him I’m suddenly nauseated.

“One for you, one for me, two for them. I’ll have Donna send them over this afternoon. Whenever Donna returns from Donnaland.”

I sit up as he stacks the contracts, fastens them together with a binder clip, and slides them into a large envelope. “We good?”

I nod, unable to say anything more.

“One more thing.” Allen thrusts a piece of paper with a phone number in my direction. “Your new mommy wants you to call her.”

EIGHT

It’s two minutes before five o’clock when Lila guides me back down the long hallway that leads to the conference room, her coworkers packing up to go home. I try to make eye contact with everyone, smile to diffuse their annoyance. I can read the stress on their faces. Who is this arriving just as we are leaving? Do I have to stay? Will I miss my train? Lila keeps her usual pace; had we not met before, I would feel she, too, was itching to leave. She probably is, but Lila has only one setting: rushed. This time when we hit the conference room we bear a sharp right, down another hall, toward, I assume, Jackie’s office.

“Do you want coffee?”

I can picture the coffee mugs washed and put away for the day and the kerfuffle it would cause if I said yes. “No, thank you.” And then, because I can’t help myself from babbling around Lila, “Caffeine makes me jittery this late in the day.” I don’t want to say what we both already know: I’m jittery enough already.

A young, fair-haired man, handsome, maybe twenty-five, approaches us while pulling on a blazer in a windmill-like fashion I imagine members of a varsity rowing team do. He locks eyes with me like we’re cruising for random sex in an out-of-the-way park, and while unnerved, I can’t look away. I’ve spent years wanting to belong in these halls; glancing down would send the wrong message.

“Oh, hey.” Lila stops us. “This is Mark. He’s Mrs. Onassis’s new assistant. Mark, this is James Smale.” Lila punctuates my name with an air of disinterest.

“James Smale,” Mark says, shaking my hand while trying to place my name.

Lila rolls her eyes, I hope at Mark and not at me. “Jackie’s new acquisition.”

“Right.” Mark clasps his other hand on mine, they are soft and warm.

“Acquisition?” Like I’m some antiquity she’s acquired on an exotic foreign trip? “I guess we’ll be working together.”

“I look forward to it.” Mark lets go of my hand, but not before he winks. Thankfully, Lila doesn’t see that, her eyes might roll fully back in disgust. He walks past me and we both turn back for one last look. I’m one who feels invisible more often than attractive, so I’m almost giddy when I see him smile at me. Not to say Daniel doesn’t do his best to prop up my self-esteem, but he’s obliged to; the return date on me has long since passed and he doesn’t have a receipt. But was this flirtation? Or just aggressive friendliness. I stumble forward to catch Lila. Whatever that was, I don’t have time to process it.

We stop in front of a door that’s only slightly ajar.

“Here we are.” Lila raps on the door three times. Loudly. I would have knocked gently, with decorum; I’m instantly horrified. I turn to protest, but she’s already gone.

“Found it!” The unmistakable voice rings out from inside the office.

I knock again, quietly this time, and open the door a few more inches. “Mrs. Onassis?” I peer around the open door into the office and see no one. I bite my lip just in time to keep from saying “Jackie.” I peek farther into the room and find her standing by a bookshelf in the space behind the door. “Oh, hello again,” I utter awkwardly. I realize I have no idea what’s going on and hope for my own sake that what she’s found isn’t a manuscript more intriguing than mine. “What did you find?”

“A book I brought from home. Come in, come in.” She ushers me inside her office and I push the door closed most of the way behind me. I have the good sense to leave the door cracked, enough, at least, so that I can’t be accused of doing something untoward; it feels inappropriate to be entirely behind closed doors with her.

The office is not what I would call small, although it’s decidedly not palatial. It’s quite nice—comfortable, even. There’s nothing that would have prevented us from meeting here when we were first introduced. I’m wondering now if she didn’t select the conference room as neutral territory to put me more at ease, and I feel empty-handed suddenly, a gentleman caller without flowers or wine or chocolates.

“So nice to see you again, James.”

I can feel myself blush. “You as well.”

Jackie steps over several boxes (books, I’m guessing), which, in her skirt, is no small feat of gymnastics. They seem out of place, these boxes, uncharacteristically messy, but upon closer inspection her shelves are at capacity with manuscripts and galleys. There’s a painting of a dancer on the wall that looks like it could be worth a good deal of money, but I don’t know enough about art to be sure. I half expect her desk to look like her husband’s from the Oval Office, but instead it’s a Formica-topped eyesore that looks more like it might belong to a junior-high science teacher. The desk itself is covered in more manuscripts, weighed down with decorative glass paperweights.

Jackie holds the book up with both hands before circling behind her desk to take a seat. “I thought this would be just what we need for our working together tonight. Have you read the poet Constantine Cavafy?”

I glance at the book—his collected works. “No, I haven’t.” I wait for her to sit behind her desk before taking a seat in one of her guest chairs. I want to appear well read (and if there was homework for this meeting, I want to have done it), but this particular poet might be a little too obscure to fake a passing knowledge of.

“He’s not widely read in the States. My second husband introduced me to his works and he fast became a favorite. He has a poem, ‘Ithaka.’”

“The location of my book,” I say, although these must be very different Ithacas. I’m doubting that any poet named Constantine wrote about central New York.

“I’m wondering if it might be a good title for your novel.”

“Ithaca?” I’m momentarily disheartened. Not that I’m overly invested in my own title, but that the time has arrived to get down to work. I already miss the part where we fawn over me and the book. Can’t we have several more meetings like that?

“Though we generally try to avoid publishing titles with negative onomatopoeic sounds …”

I chew on that for a second. Ithaca. “Ick?”

“It makes the marketing department frown.”

Is she pulling my leg? There’s an uncomfortable pause and then I laugh politely, but not too much, in case I’ve misread her. I look around the office for clues that will put me at ease. Something that I recognize could belong to anyone, to normalize our interaction. The truth of the matter—it’s all rather conventional. It’s an office, like any other.

“So why Ithaca?” Jackie resumes. “Why set the book there?”

“Oh,” I say, the question snapping me back. “I grew up there. Well, a microscopic town just outside. So when people ask me where I’m from, that’s what I say.” Daniel’s voice fills my head. “You don’t want to change it to Cape Cod, do you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I shake my head slightly. “Someone told me that you would … never mind. Nothing. It’s small, Ithaca. Exotic-sounding, perhaps. I like the Greek name. I think it evokes the book’s underlying tragedy. But otherwise, there’s nothing special about it. Like the characters themselves, at first glance. They’re unremarkable. On the surface they could be any mother and son. But I find simple can be … quite complicated.”

“Oh, so do I. You only passingly refer to the name of the town in the manuscript. It got me thinking that you might mean it as more of a state of mind. Or a state of being. Does that make sense?” Of course she must know that it makes perfect sense, but phrasing it as a question sets me up to agree. Perhaps a skill she’s used in the past, asserting her own ideas by involving others.

“It certainly does.”

Jackie looks like she’s about to say something and then stops. She thinks again before picking up the book. “I’ve marked the page. I don’t have my glasses. Would you do the honors?” She opens the book and hands it to me. It takes a moment for it to sink in that she’s asking me to read.

“Happy to.”

“Just the last few lines.”

I fumble with the book, almost losing her place, until I manage to get a good grip. I scan down the text of the poem, looking for just the right place to jump in. “Ithaka has given you the beautiful journey.” Already I feel a lump forming in my throat so I read quietly until I get to the very end. “And if you find her threadbare, Ithaka has not deceived you. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must have always understood what Ithakas mean.” I glance up at Jackie and she’s looking just past me, as if considering the meaning again for the very first time. “That’s … wow,” I say. I left my apartment early to walk here, gathering courage along the way in the invigorating March air, desperately dreaming up intelligent phrases and casual topics of conversation to use as filler, should our dialogue sputter. And yet, all I can come up with is “wow.”

But it is remarkable, especially if Ithaca is not a town or a place or a state of being, but a person, a mother, a soul. Indeed, she has not deceived me; somehow, I must have always understood that.

Once again Jackie opens her mouth to speak, then stops. But this time she plows forward without any further hesitation. “I have a thought.”

“Oh?”

A grin spreads across her face, hinting at the woman one always suspected lay just beneath the decorum. She opens her desk drawer, pulls out an expensive-looking bottle of rum, and plunks it on her desk. The alcohol sloshes, creating a rippling meniscus.

“This was a recent gift from one of my authors after a trip he took to Barbados.”

I’m not sure I’m following. “Rum was your thought?”

“Close,” Jackie says. She stands, lifting the rum to inspect it. She pulls her shoulders back as if not to let the heavy bottle topple her forward. Allen was right—she is indeed tall. “Daiquiris.”

David Letterman recently aired a Top Ten List of Least Popular New York City Street Vendors and the number-one entry served “Stunned Mouse in a Dixie Cup.” I don’t know why that comes to mind now, except that it became a punchline between Daniel and me (What would you like for dinner tonight? How about stunned mouse in a Dixie cup!) and—talk about stunned—even I wish I could see the look on my face right now. “Daiquiris.” I scramble out of my chair; when a woman like Jacqueline Onassis stands, a gentleman does too.

She reaches back in her drawer and pulls out what miraculously appears to be simple syrup. I’m beginning to think this particular drawer is a magician’s hat. “Don’t tell me you’re a teetotaler,” she says.

I struggle to remember if teetotaler means someone who is on, or off, the wagon. “No. Far from it. I just don’t usually drink daiquiris.”

“That’s because you don’t usually drink with me.” She notices me standing. “Sit, sit. I’m going to collect some ice.”

Jackie places her hand on my shoulder as she squeezes past me and out the door. Alone in her office, I lean forward and grab the rum. It’s hard not to think she’s putting me on. I hold it up to my nose, and not only does it contain alcohol, it may be one hundred and fifty proof. Do I know her to drink? Are there photos of her drinking? Magazine profiles that mention the habit? If I were her, there’s no way I could not drink. Should I put a stop to this? Is this a bad idea? I have just enough time to place the bottle back on her desk before she returns carrying a little silver platter with several limes, a knife, club soda, and two glasses with ice.

“What else do you have in that desk? A coconut tree?”

“Don’t ever underestimate me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, and that’s the God’s-honest truth.

“I think you will like this. It’s distilled from molasses instead of sugarcane.” She adds a healthy pour of rum to each glass and a more conservative amount of simple syrup. Whatever it is that she’s doing, she’s quite adept at doing it. Then she slices several limes and squeezes as much juice as she can into each glass; I can see the tendons in her sinewy arms. “I had to borrow these earlier from the cafeteria ladies.”

Good God, she’s been planning this all day. “I hope they didn’t mind.” Should I point out they won’t be getting them back?

“Oh, they like me.” She repeats the process with another lime, then tops each glass with a splash of soda. “On my first day here—this goes back a while now …”

“Fourteen years?” I try to recall her résumé from our first meeting. Jackie pulls a silver letter opener from a pencil cup and gives each cocktail a good stir.

“That’s right,” she says. “Back then, no one—and I mean no one—knew how they were supposed to behave in my presence. If I got into the elevator, people would get out. If I walked down the hallway, people would turn around and scramble in the opposite direction. If I went to the breakroom to pour a cup of coffee, people would panic and hand me theirs.”

“That sounds …” I grasp for the right word. “Lonely.”

Satisfied that each cocktail is well mixed, Jackie gently taps the letter opener on the rim of one glass and it makes the most perfect chime. She picks up the tray and holds it out for me as if she’s the most overqualified spokesmodel ever to be hired on a game show.

“Thank you,” I say, accepting a drink. I hold it firmly in both hands by my lap, even though the ice makes it uncomfortably cold to the touch.

“It was. Devastatingly lonely. It was like I had the plague. After several weeks of this nonsense, I decided to head down to the cafeteria for lunch. Of course, everyone put their trays down and got out of line in front of me and disappeared from sight. It was horribly embarrassing, because the last thing I wanted was anyone thinking that I felt entitled to go to the front of the line. But it’s not like I could tell them to hop back in line—they had evaporated! Anyhow, this one lunch lady, a rather robust woman, urged me to the counter with an exaggerated wave and bellowed, ‘WHAT’LL IT BE, JACKIE?’”

My easy laughter catches me off guard. “So, what was it?”

“Tuna fish salad, if I recall.” We both laugh. “I don’t suppose everyone was fond of my being here. But after that, things were different. Better.” Jackie leans in to the memory, taking a full beat before coming back. “In case that story didn’t do it for you, consider this your lunch lady.”

I hold up my drink and we clink glasses with good cheer, this long story a toast of sorts to our new relationship and the work we hope to accomplish together. “To Ithaca.”

“To Ithaca,” she echoes.

I take a sip, and the drink is … tart, citrusy. Only a little pulpy. A few of these would be downright dangerous.

“How does it taste?”

“It’s … sly.”

“You’re lucky you’re here this week. Last week I was keen on acquiring a book of cold blended soups. Lila and I tried a few of the recipes. As it turns out, after gazpacho there aren’t many cold soups worth a damn. Have you ever had cream-of-cashew soup? Cold?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“Believe me, there’s no pleasure to be had. Unless you like wallpaper glue.”

I grimace, then gesture toward the Cavafy book, and she gives me permission to take it. I open to the marked page. “Ithaka referred to in the feminine, like she is mother herself. You must have always known what Ithakas mean.”

Jackie makes a rich sound like an exquisite piece of chocolate is melting on her tongue. “And those are just the last few lines. Beautiful, isn’t it? Take that book home with you and read the rest.”

“It’s remarkably … apropos.” But have I always known? Is my book some sort of misadventure to understand something that, deep down, I already know?

“Inspired by Homer, if I’m not mistaken.” Of course she’s not mistaken.

“The return of Odysseus home,” I say, grateful this time for something more intelligent to say. “Homer, I’ve read.”

“The maturity of the soul as we all travel home is, I think, all the traveler can hope for. I want you to think of that, especially in the context of your manuscript’s ending. I think that’s where the bulk of your work lies.”

“The ending.”

“The last third of the book. I have a clear picture of who your characters are at the start of the quarantine, but I don’t know exactly who they are at the end. To each other, to themselves.”

“I keep thinking of our first conversation. How you said books are journeys.”

“That’s right.”

“But …”

Jackie rests her chin on the back of her hand. “What is it?”

I hesitate, not sure how I can say this. “I’m sorry. I haven’t worked with an editor before. I don’t want to overstep.”

“I tell my writers our conversations are privileged. Like doctor and patient.”

“Lawyer and client?”

“Priest and parishioner. Confession only if you want.” Jackie raises her glass.

“I was just thinking if my book is in part about motherhood, that’s a journey you have taken.”

“One that has given me some of my most sublime moments. But your book. Yes, it’s about motherhood, but through the eyes of a son. And I haven’t been one of those.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I concede.

Jackie takes a long, slow sip from her glass. “I want to see real growth on the page, how the events have changed them, particularly the son. You have a remarkably fresh voice, so I know you have it in you.”

My drink is going down too easily, and I can feel the rum rushing to my face, coloring my cheeks, creating a blessed hollowness between my ears, allowing me not to pass out. “I can taste the molasses.”

Jackie narrows her eyes, scrutinizing me. “It’s hard for you to hear a compliment.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve received enough compliments to know.”

“That was wonderful deflection. The molasses.”

“Another compliment?”

“Another deflection?” She takes one more sip, then sets her glass down on a coaster. “You can taste it, though, I’ll give you that. Especially when you know that it’s there.”

I place the Cavafy book on the corner of her desk and inspect what’s left of my drink.

Jackie refocuses. “Before we get to the ending, tell me more about your mother.”

I burst out laughing and am immediately embarrassed, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Oh, heavens. I sounded like your analyst.”

I’m fascinated to know if she’s familiar with the language of therapy. It wouldn’t surprise me, and yet it’s hard to imagine her vulnerable enough to seek help. But as much as our conversations may be privileged, I’m sure the privilege of probing conversation flows only one way. “What would you like to know?”

“Was she always sad?”

“No” is my first answer. But then I have to think—Is she sad? “I don’t think so. Perhaps. Are we talking about Ruth? I’m afraid I’m a little confused.”

“There’s confusion in the character.” She leans forward to retrieve the glass from my hand, and I barely loosen my grip enough for her to take it. If it weren’t for the condensation from the ice, it might not have wiggled out of my hand at all. “There are several moments where you get close to expressing something real, and I think you pad your observations with what I guess are fictional details and it keeps you from hitting some of the harder truths.”

She pours more rum into my glass. “Not too much,” I say. But as she refills my drink I think, To hell with it. You know? If we’re going to do this, let’s do this. Let this be the grand marshal in a parade of lunch ladies to come.

“Tell me something true,” she says.

“About my mother?”

“Even if it has nothing to do with the book.”

I think about this and how not to further betray her. She’d already be horrified if she were a fly on the wall right now. Do I tell Jackie my mother resents me for her being alone? That she took my side once, and it cost her her marriage? That even though it was the right thing to do, in the moment she probably didn’t envision how long life would be in the wake of it? That we’re barely on speaking terms right now? “I don’t think my mother got much of what she wanted out of life.”

“She has her children.”

“That’s true, but hardly anything else.”

“Does anyone? Get what they truly want.”

The question strikes me as odd, borderline offensive, even, from someone who has lived such a fascinating life. I need more alcohol for this. “Well, no. I would imagine that’s rare. But I also don’t think she was given the tools to ask.”

“That’s true for a lot of women our age.” Jackie steps in front of her desk to hand me my drink. She stands and leans elegantly with her legs crossed and one hand on the desk, looking like the perfect line sketch a fashion designer might make while dreaming up patterns for clothes. “I feel for her.”

“That’s good. As a reader, I hope that you would.”

“I’ll try over the course of our working together not to sound like your analyst. Writing it, I’m sure, was therapy enough.”

“If I hadn’t written it, I think I might have gone insane. Or become a Republican. Something horrible.”

Jackie laughs in such a way, not heartily but genuinely, that I want it to be my validation forever. “You remind me of my son.”

I can feel my face turn beet red, so I look down at my feet. They look cloddish in large, heavy shoes, the opposite of her narrow, elegant heels. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Acknowledge that I have difficulty accepting compliments, then lay the biggest one of all on me and expect me to be okay.”

Jackie waves her hand over her drink, wafting in some of the aroma. “Perhaps this round is too sweet.”

“Deflection!” This is the rum talking. “Are you not comfortable with compliments either? Could this be something we have in common?” I take a victory sip.

She shakes her head. “You didn’t compliment me.”

“The heck I didn’t.”

“A compliment for my son is a compliment for me?”

I nod enthusiastically, and I can tell this pleases her. She moves behind the desk to retake her seat. “He failed the bar exam multiple times, which I’m sure you know if you read the Daily News.” I can feel her utter sense of pride in him, as if this were self-depreciation.

I sink back into my chair and chuckle. I do remember the headlines: “The Hunk Flunks.” That must have stung. But, still. I can’t believe how much fun I’m having. I can’t believe how much my outlook has changed in a matter of weeks. I can’t believe that this is my life now. It feels resurgent, sparkling with possibility, like I’ve made some sort of comeback from an exile I hadn’t deserved.

“I think my lunch lady is working,” I confide.

Jackie sips from her cocktail and her eyes sparkle with thousands of secrets. “I think mine is too.” When she finishes, she sets her glass down and holds out the silver tray to collect mine. Another magical moment ended too soon, and we’re on to something new. “Now,” she says. “Let’s get down to work.”

Go Your Own Way

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