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4
At midnight, the band played “Auld Lang Syne”—different arrangement from last year, same sweet
song—and the balloons came drifting down. All around us, couples were kissing and embracing. We
did the same.
“Happy New Year, G—” She pulled back from me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
I’d had a sudden image of the Texas School Book Depository, an ugly brick square with windows
like eyes. This was the year it would become an American icon.
It won’t. I’ll never let you get that far, Lee. You’ll never be in that sixth-floor window. That’s my promise.
“George?”
“Goose walked over my grave, I guess,” I said. “Happy New Year.”
I went to kiss her, but she held me back for a moment. “It’s almost here, isn’t it? What you came
to do.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not tonight. For tonight it’s just us. So kiss me, honey. And dance with me.”
5
I had two lives in late 1962 and early 1963. The good one was in Jodie, and at the Candlewood in
Kileen. The other was in Dallas.
Lee and Marina got back together. Their first stop in Dallas was a dump just around the corner
from West Neely. De Mohrenschildt helped them move in. George Bouhe wasn’t in evidence. Neither
were any of the other Russian émigrés. Lee had driven them away. They hated him, Al had written in
his notes, and below that: He wanted them to.
The crumbling redbrick at 604 Elsbeth Street had been divided into four or five apartments
bursting with poor folks who worked hard, drank hard, and produced hordes of snot-nosed yelling
kids. The place actually made the Oswalds’ Fort Worth domicile look good.
I didn’t need electronic assistance to monitor the deteriorating condition of their marriage; Marina
continued to wear shorts even after the weather turned cool, as if to taunt him with her bruises. And
her sex appeal, of course. June usually sat between them in her stroller. She no longer cried much
during their shouting matches, only watched, sucking her thumb or a pacifier.
One day in November of 1962, I came back from the library and observed Lee and Marina on the
corner of West Neely and Elsbeth, shouting at each other. Several people (mostly women at that hour
of the day) had come out on their porches to watch. June sat in the stroller wrapped in a fuzzy pink
blanket, silent and forgotten.
They were arguing in Russian, but the latest bone of contention was clear enough from Lee’s
jabbing finger. She was wearing a straight black skirt—I don’t know if they were called pencil skirts
back then or not—and the zipper on her left hip was halfway down. Probably it just snagged in the
cloth, but listening to him rave, you would’ve thought she was trolling for men.
She brushed back her hair, pointed at June, then waved a hand at the house they were now
inhabiting—the broken gutters dripping black water, the trash and beer cans on the bald front lawn
—and screamed at him in English: “You say happy lies, then bring wife and baby to this peegsty!”
He flushed all the way to his hairline and clutched his arms across his thin chest, as if to anchor his
hands and keep them from doing damage. He might have succeeded—that time, at least—if she
hadn’t laughed, then twirled one finger around her ear in a gesture that must be common to all
cultures. She started to turn away. He hauled her back, bumping the stroller and almost overturning