Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

blowing in his hair. An image of the contemporary Ulysses.”

One day during the cruise, Ari was standing on the bow of the Christina, looking very much like the photo in Jackie’s leather-bound book.

“There, there!” he suddenly shouted. “You can see it! Ithaca!”

Jackie had just finished reading Homer’s description of Ithaca—the fountains of Arethusa, the cave of the Naiads, the stalls of the swineherd Eumaeus, the orchard of Laertes. She was all fired up when the Christina weighed anchor and a launch took them ashore. Ari had arranged for a guide to give them a tour of the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, the brilliant nineteenth-century German archaeologist, who had also discovered the remains of the Homeric cities of Troy and Mycenae.

Jackie was deeply moved by Schliemann’s story, especially by how he had overcome an impoverished boyhood and poor health to master thirteen languages and restore to the world the glories of a heroic civilization. The ruins of Ithaca were like a giant stage set, and the place appealed to the art director in Jackie.

During a break in their tour, Jackie showed Ari a book of modern Greek poetry that had been given to her by Niki Goulandris. She especially liked C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca.”

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,

then pray that the road is long,

full of adventure, full of knowledge….

That the summer mornings are many,

that you will enter ports seen for the first time

with such pleasure, with such joy! …

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.

To arrive there is your ultimate goal.

But do not hurry the voyage at all.

It is better to let it last for long years….

One of the Christina’s passengers overheard the following exchange between Ari and Jackie:

“What does it mean?” asked Ari, who did not go in much for poetry.

“It means that our dreams and goals are never completely realized,” said Jackie. “They are always there before our eyes, but always just slightly out of reach. And so, as we strive to fulfill our vision, we must make the most of every living moment.”

“Indeed we should, my lady,” Ari said. “You and I are in complete accord.”

THE CABAL

As soon as they returned from Ithaca, however, Jackie began to pack her bags and prepare to leave for New York.

“Caroline and John need me to help them get ready for the new school year,” she explained to Ari.

“Your husband needs you, too,” he said.

“I know you do, Telis,” she said. “But gosh, I’ll only be gone a month.”

After she was gone, Ari phoned his old friend Costa Gratsos.

“Aristo!” Gratsos said. “Where are you? What’s up?”

“I’m in Athens,” Ari said. “Alone. I just put Jackie on a plane to New York.”

Gratsos knew how upset Ari became every time Jackie left Greece. “Shit on that!” Gratsos said. “Excuse me for saying so, but Jackie’s never around any more.”

“Don’t call her Jackie,” Ari said sharply. “Call her Mrs. Jacqueline, or Mrs. Onassis. Show some respect!”

“Okay, Mrs. Jacqueline,” Gratsos said. “But still, I say a wife’s place is beside her husband.”

“I don’t mind,” Ari lied.

“Shit on that!” Gratsos repeated.

“Look,” Ari said, “I’m free. I want to get the hell out of here. Let’s go to Paris and have some fun.”

Ari was only dimly aware of the connection between Jackie’s absences and his bad moods. Introspection was not one of his strong points, and it did not occur to him that whenever a woman withdrew from him, either physically or emotionally, he suffered the pangs of abandonment that he had felt when he lost his mother.

He knew that he had no right to be annoyed with Jackie. After all, hadn’t he said early in their marriage that they were both free to do exactly as they pleased? However, Ari was approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, and as he slowed down, he found that he valued the companionship of a wife more than before. The freedom to do as one pleased, he concluded, should apply to him, not to Jackie. Like most Greek husbands, he lived by a double standard.

“He was a Greek—that says it all, really—a Greek seaman who’d be home for a short while, then go away all over the world, then expect his wife and children to be waiting for him at home whenever he got back,” said Costa Gratsos’s executive secretary, Lynn Alpha Smith. “There was no way Jackie could give him that continuity. Nor did she understand his world. She was Catholic, Anglo-Saxon. He was an Eastern Orthodox, Mediterranean, and Jackie just didn’t understand.”

As far as Ari was concerned, only three women had ever completely understood him: his sainted mother Penelope, his sister Artemis, and Maria Callas. Of course, that was his narcissism and self-pity talking. But when he expressed this opinion to his friends, they were quick to agree.

It was all a matter of being Greek, they said. To be Greek, you had to grow up in Greece, speak the language, go to Greek schools, attend Orthodox services, eat Greek food, breathe the sun and air of Greece. You did not become Greek by reading books and visiting ancient ruins!

Ari was aware that, although his marriage was immensely popular among ordinary Greeks, none of his friends liked Jackie. They had banded together in a loose sort of cabal that had no use for Jackie. This cabal was composed of a half dozen people: Ari’s children, Alexander and Christina, who hated Jackie with a passion; Costa Gratsos, who was Christina’s honorary uncle, and had stayed close to Maria Callas after her breakup with Ari; Johnny Meyer; Maggie van Zuylen, a socialite who had introduced Maria to Ari; and Willi Frischauer, Ari’s authorized biographer, who believed that Jackie’s identity—and that of her children—had more to do with her dead husband than with her living spouse.

“JFK’s ghost will always cast a dark shadow over your marriage,” Frischauer warned Ari.

The members of the cabal seized every opportunity to bring up the subject of Maria Callas. She was Greek,