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,