Author offers fresh take on Kennedys' courtship
Jackie & Me: A Novel Louis Bayard Algonquin
In the real world, we can't see inside a couple's shared life. Fiction, though, allows us to imagine our way inside instead, to explore the apparent contradictions and wonder how the pair came to be — and how they endured.
Take the Kennedy marriage. On the one hand was the idealized Camelot of it all. On the other was the president's highly public affairs. What explains it? And how did Jackie, a woman of such dignity and poise, come to tolerate it?
Louis Bayard's new novel, Jackie & Me, doesn't try to penetrate the Kennedy marriage by writing about it directly. Instead, Bayard focuses on the years when Jack and Jackie were still two distinct individuals navigating their ways through Washington.
The story begins in 1952, when Jacqueline Lee Bouvier attends a friend's party. The star of the evening is the congressman from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jackie hangs back. Educated at Vassar and the Sorbonne and George Washington, she has no desire to be one among many. And yet Jack perceives Jackie's assets: her loveliness, her good family name, her complementary Catholicism. Jack wants to keep her interested — and off the market — but he's too busy (with Congress, with other women) to do this by himself. And thus we meet Lem Billings.
Lem, Jack's oldest friend, is the narrator of Jackie & Me.
Lem describes escorting Jackie around town on Jack's behalf, taking her to museums, movies and restaurants through the spring and summer of 1952. Lem and Jackie share a natural affection, but it's platonic: Lem is gay, which is a large part of the reason Jack trusts him with Jackie.
Jackie & Me is a poignant, late-summer-afternoon kind of novel. There is a sweet, timeless joy in Lem and Jackie's shared scenes and the pages turn easily, even if the tension never quite reaches more than a low simmer.
Bayard explores what it means to repress one's own desires, to shape one's life and identity around another person. Lem's loyalty to Jack doesn't mean naiveté. When asked to keep an eye on Jackie, Lem asks: “Who am I working for? To what end?” Jack replies: “Dad thinks I can't get elected if I don't have a wife.”
Bayard captures his characters with deft economy. We see how Lem admires Jackie. We also see how, as he strings her along on Jack's behalf, he feels increasingly guilty. Lem is aware of his friend's sexual appetites and how those appetites are destined to continue, even after marriage.
A quibble: Lem's pervasive guilt could imply that he is responsible for Jackie's position, that he manipulated her into a certain outcome. But is Jackie so pliable? It seems to me she's far too smart not to see what is happening.