Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

The room has burst into applause. I look up. And the second Jackie, her eyes too close together but rather large, very dark, is looking at me. She is in the aisle seat directly across from me and she is looking at me intently.

“Now lot number 454A,” the woman at the front says.

This Jackie in blue won’t look away. She knows me. She knows.

“A single-strand, simulated-pearl necklace and ear clips.”

I drag my attention away from the simulated Jackie’s gaze and on the TV screen is the necklace my wife wears in my memories of our lovemaking. Perhaps not that very one. Perhaps some other necklace. She wore a single strand of pearls at our wedding, too. When Jackie wore pearls, I felt her nakedness always, even beneath her clothes. I stare at this necklace on the television screen and it could well be the pearls of any of a hundred memories I’ve taken out and handled on countless nights of what has been my life. I feel myself rise up slightly, briefly, from my chair. I hold back my hands which want to lift to the screen, to this image of her pearls. I want these pearls very badly.

“The opening bid is ten thousand dollars,” the woman with the long face says.

I cry out. My cry is in anguish, but there are twenty cries at the same moment and they are all saying “Ten thousand.” So no one hears. Except perhaps the Jackie across the aisle. This necklace is beyond my reach already. All the fragments of my life in this place are beyond my reach. I look to the right and she is fixed on me, this thin-lipped faux first lady. Her mouth moves.

I stand up, I turn, I drop my bidding card and push my heavy legs forward, the pain in my back flaring at each step. Twenty thousand. Thirty. The bidders’ hands fly up, flashing their cards, the dollars pursue me up the aisle. Forty thousand from the phones. Fifty from the front row. I touch her there, at the hollow of her throat just below the pearls. Jackie rises up straight, nestled naked on the center of me, and I lift my hand and put my fingertips on the hollow of her throat. And I am out the main door of the auction room, breaking through a hedge of reporters who pay no attention to me. I stop, my chest heaving and the pain spreading all through me, and I look over my shoulder and just before the reporters close back up, I see her. She’s coming toward me. The Jackie in blue has risen and is following.

The bodies of newsmen intervene but I know she will soon be here. Now I wish for the Director’s men. I want their hands to take my elbows and I want them to whisper, This way, Mr. President, and I want them to carry me away, back to the empty garden and a patch of sunlight where I can just sit and sort out the strange things going on inside me. But I am on my own, it seems. The main staircase is before me, but there are more reporters that way and the faux Jackie will catch me just in time for them.

I turn blindly to the right, I go along a corridor, my face lowered, trying to disappear, and another staircase is before me, a modest one, linoleum, a metal handrail. My hand goes out to it, I take one step down and her voice is in my ear.

“Please,” she says.

I stop.

“I recognized you,” she says.

I turn to her.

“But I didn’t mean to drive you away.”

Her eyes are very beautiful. The brown of them, like the earth in the deepest hole you could dig for yourself, like a place to bury yourself and sleep forever, is like the brown of Jackie’s eyes. I want to tell her secrets. About myself. About missile silos. About anything. All the secrets I know.

“I thought I read somewhere you were dead,” she says.

She sounds charmingly ironic to me. But there is something about her eyes now, a little unfocused. And she is dressed as my wife, who is dead.

“I didn’t believe it,” she says.

“Good,” I say, struggling with my voice which wants to speak much more.

Then she says, “I’ve seen all your movies.”

There is a stopping in me.

“ The Grapes of Wrath is my favorite.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Hurry back to the auction now. You must buy some of Jackie’s pearls.”

She tilts her head at the intensity of my advice.

I turn away from her, move myself down the steps.

“Yes,” she calls after me. “I will.”

I am out the side entrance now, on York Avenue. It is quieter here. No one looks at me. I am a ghost again. I turn and walk away, I don’t know in what direction.

But this I do know: I love Jackie. I know because inside me I have her hands and her hair and her nipples and her toes and her bony elbows and knees and her shoes and belts and scarves and her shadow and her laugh and her moans and her simulated-pearl necklaces and her yellow gypsy bangle bracelets and her Gorham silver heart-shaped candy dish and her silver-plated salt and pepper shakers. And somebody has my golf clubs. And somebody has my cigar humidor. And somebody has my Harvard crest cuff links. And somebody has a single strand of Jackie’s pearls, a strand that I also have. And what is it about all these things of a person that won’t fade away? The things you seek out over and over and you look at intently and you touch. You touch with your own hands. Or you touch with the silent movement of your mind in the long and solitary night. Surely these things are signs of love. In a world where we don’t know how to stay close to each other, we try to stay close to these things. In a world where death comes unexpectedly and terrifies us as the ultimate act of forgetting, we try to remember so that we can overcome death. And so we go forth together in love and in peace and in deep fear, my fellow Americans, Jackie and I and all of you. And you have my undying thanks.

The cold air hanging in this room, it feels like the North Atlantic. Not nearly so cold as that, really, but so surprisingly cold on this hot summer day that it has the same shock to it as the air on that night where the greater part of me continues to dwell, and I move to this place on the wall and the air is rushing in and I pull back away from it, it feels like a gash there, a place ripped open by ice and letting all this cold air rush in. Cold. I was so cold in the boat, and before me was this vast interruption of the sea, of the night, ablaze at a thousand places on it with spots of light and the smoke still slithered up from its stacks and for a moment the lights struck me as the lives still there on the boat and then the smoke struck me as the souls of those lives departing already, climbing to heaven from this death that was falling even at that moment upon the bodies, though in fact there was no one dead yet, probably, unless it were some poor engine room workers whom the vast jagged wall of ice sought out at once, in that first moment of the calamity, a moment I recognized instantly, perhaps even before the captain of the ship did, damn fool of an arrogant man he must have been, a man, of course, and me a scorned woman bullied in the streets of London only a few days before by men who would not let us speak, much less gain the vote. But this woman knew what had happened to this man’s ship with the first faint shudder and the distant hard cry of the hull.

Now I am in this room in a place and time as foreign to me as the planet Mars, which has canals and civilized life, if Percival Lowell the noted astronomer of the distinguished Lowell family of Massachusetts is to be believed, and I read his book as a teenager, in 1895, a book given to me by my father, who put the story on his front page— The New York World Ledger declared “Life Possible on Planet Mars”—and I did believe, so if I can believe there is life on Mars, then why am I still slow in believing in the reality of this hotel room in a year decades removed from the night when I fled a ship and then fell into a deep sleep? Perhaps the problem is the fear I have of this room, for it has this gash and the cold air pours in and I worry that the room will fill and it will sink.