Jackie by Dawn Tripp EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Dawn Tripp
- Language: English
- Genre: contemporary romance
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- Size: 4.3 MB
- Price: Free
Growing up, I never had flying dreams or dreams of being onstage. I
wanted to ride horses on an empty coast. I wanted to be Sappho, or
invisible, or the circus queen who ran off with the daring young man on the
flying trapeze.
I loved art, ballet, horses, and dogs. I had skinned knees and braces on
my teeth, but there were writers like Chekhov and Shaw on a shelf in the
room where I had to take naps. I never slept but sat on the windowsill
reading. My heroes were Mowgli and Scarlett O’Hara. Later, there were
poets—Virgil, Tennyson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. I loved to dance but didn’t
care for dancing school. By the time I was twelve, I was taller than most of
the boys. Clumsy and dull, they could never keep rhythm, too fast on the
waltz, too slow on the foxtrot.
I kept my back straight, eyes over their heads,
keeping time with the circling walls. And as those rooms spun, I dreamed of
France. I wanted to grow up to write stories in a garret apartment in Paris;
I wanted to smoke rolled cigarettes, date artists and aristocrats, drink
grasshoppers, and dance in clubs on the West Bank until midnight.
I wanted to walk home alone by the Seine and be no one.
—
That was the future I’d marked off for myself. I could see it, almost breathe
it. That was the edge of life I was standing on when I was twenty-one, the
night I met you at the Bartletts’.
You were not part of that future. But that night there was something in
you that I recognized—something hurtling, disparate—the ranging
curiosity, incisive intellect. You were good-looking, of course. Your golden
swagger could bend a room. I eschewed that. It smacked of arrogance. That
night, though, there was something else in you I saw: something deeper,
more fugitive and fragile, a kind of curious hunger to break on the world
like a star.
You were not my kind of adventure. Too American. Too good-looking.
Too boy. Too much about politics and new money.
Your life, I told myself, was not the life I was looking for.
Spring 1951
“He’s a kind of cheerful lightning,” Charley Bartlett tells me.
“I’ve already met your congressman,” I say. “On a train when I was still
at Vassar.”
“And?”
“He was a flirt. We rode the same train for a while. I was the only girl in
the car. I was reading and I wasn’t going to waste an hour I wouldn’t get
back for a man like that.”
“Like what?”
“The kind who loves a game and will leave it once he’s won.”
Now I’ve been rude. Silence on the line. Then Charley says, “Jack’s
better than that.”
“No, Charley,” I say. “You’re better than that.”
Charley Bartlett. Smart, kind, a wonderful writer. He was what my
stepbrother Yusha called “an intellectual beau.” Charley tried to introduce
me to Jack Kennedy at a wedding the summer before. A ritzy night on Long
Island,
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