The Last Thing He Wanted

1

I should understand Treat Morrison.

I studied him, I worked him up.

I researched him, I interviewed him, I listened to him, watched him.

I came to recognize his way of speaking, came to know how to read the withheld phrasing, the fast dying fall or diminuendo that would render key words barely audible, the sudden rise and overemphasis on the insignificant part of the sentence (“… and by the way”), the rush or explosion of syllables jammed together (“… and the hell it is …”), the raising of the entirely rhetorical question (“… and … should I have regrets?”), the thoughtful acting out of the entirely rhetorical answer (head tilted up, a gaze into the middle distance, then “I … don’t think … so”), the unconvincingly brisk reiteration: “… and I have no regrets.”

No regrets.

Treat Morrison had no regrets.

Quite early in the course of these dealings with Treat Morrison I came to regard him as fundamentally dishonest. Not dishonest in the sense that he “lied,” or deliberately misrepresented events as he himself construed them (he did not, he never did, he was scrupulous to a fault about reporting exactly what he believed to be true), but dishonest in the more radical sense, dishonest in that he remained incapable of seeing the thing straight. At the outset I viewed this as an idiosyncrasy or a defect of character, in either case singular, peculiar to the individual, a personal eccentricity. I came only later to see that what I viewed as personal was deep in the grain of who he was and where he came from.

Let me give you a paragraph from my notes.

Not interview notes, not raw notes, but early draft notes, notes lacking words and clauses and marked with CH for “check” and TK for “to come,” meaning I didn’t have it then but planned to get it, notes worked up in the attempt to get something on paper that might open a way to a lead:

Treat Austin Morrison was born in San Francisco at a time, 1930, when San Francisco was still remote, isolated, separated physically from the rest of the United States by the ranges of mountains that closed off when the heavy snows came, separated emotionally by the implacable presence of the Pacific, by the???TK and by the???TK and by the fogs that blew in from the Farallons every afternoon at four or five. His father held a minor city sinecure, jury commissioner in the municipal court

There this particular note toward a lead skids to an abrupt stop. Scratched in pencil after the typed words “municipal court” is a comma, then one further penciled clause:

a job he owed to his wife’s well-placed relatives in the Irish wards (??CH “wards”) south of Market Street.

More false starts:

The son of a parochial school teacher and a minor city official in San Francisco, Treat Austin Morrison enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley when it was still offering a free college education to any qualified California high school graduate who could scrape up the $27.50 (??CH) registration fee plus whatever little he or she could live on. The man who would later become America’s man-on-the-spot in the world’s hottest spots, ambassador-at-large with a top-secret portfolio, earned part of his college costs by parking cars at the elite Hotel Claremont in Oakland, the rest by

Treat Austin Morrison may have been Saturday’s hero on the football field (XXX BETTER LINE TK), the University of California’s own All-PAC 8 (??CH) quarterback, but Saturday night would find him back in the kitchen at the exclusive Phi Gamma Delta house, where he paid for his room and board by hashing, washing dishes and waiting table for the affluent party animals who called themselves his fraternity brothers and from whom he borrowed the textbooks he could not afford to buy. The discipline developed in those years stands him in good stead as

T.A.M. was raised an only child

T.A.M., the only son and during most of his formative years the only living child of a

T.A.M., the only son and after his older sister’s suicide the only living child

There are pages of such draft notes, a thick sheaf of them, most of them uncharacteristically (for me) focused on the subject’s early deprivations and childhood pluck (uncharacteristically for me because it has not been my actual experience that the child is father to the man), all of them aborted. I see now that there was a clear common thread in these failed starts, that I was trying to deal with something about Treat Morrison that continued to elude me: this was a man who was at the time I interviewed him living and working at the heart of the American political establishment. This was a man who could pick up the telephone and affect the Dow, reach the foreign minister of any one of a dozen NATO countries, the Oval Office itself. This was a man generally perceived as a mover, a shaker, a can-do guy, someone who appeared to thrive on negotiation, on dealing, on calculation and calibration and adjustment, the very stuff that defines a successful social operator. Yet this remained someone who projected nothing so much as an extreme, even resistant loneliness, an isolation so impenetrable as to seem to demand analysis, examination, a reason why.

Treat Morrison himself appeared to have no interest in examining what I am distressed to notice I was choosing to call “his formative years.”

I would not hear from him about early deprivations or childhood pluck, nor would I get from him even the slightest clue that the traditional actors in the family drama (or, in the vocabulary into which I appear to have been sinking, the formative dynamic) had been in his case other than casual acquaintances.

“As far as I know she was regarded as an excellent teacher,” he said about his mother. “Very well thought of, very esteemed by the sisters who ran the school.” He paused, as if weighing this for fairness. “Of course she was a Catholic,” he said then.

Since this afterthought was the most specific and least remote information he had so far seemed inclined to convey, I decided to pursue it. “Then you were raised a Catholic,” I began, tentatively, expecting, if not revelation, at least confirmation or correction.

What I got was zero.

What I got was Treat Morrison waiting, at bay, his fingers tented.

“Or were you,” I said.

He said nothing.

“Raised a Catholic,” I said.

He aligned a square crystal paperweight with the edge of his desk blotter.

“Not to say that I entirely disagreed with many of the pertinent precepts,” he said then, “but as far as the whole religious business went, it just wasn’t an area that particularly interested me.”

“He was very well liked around the courthouse,” he said about his father. “As far as I know.”

“It was something that happened,” he said about the death of his sister at age nineteen. “I was twelve, thirteen years old when it happened, there were the seven years between us, seven years at that age could be a lifetime, to all intents and purposes Mary Katherine was someone I barely knew.”

“For all anyone knows it was an accident,” he said when I tried to follow up on this subject. “She was watching the seals, the surf came up and took her, Mary Katherine never had any coordination, she was always in the emergency room, if she wasn’t breaking her ankle she was dropping a bicycle on her leg or knocking herself out with a tetherball or every other damn thing.”

“I guess I didn’t see any useful reason to dwell on that,” he said when I suggested that very few people who get accidentally taken by the surf while watching the seals happen to have mailed goodbye notes to (although not to their mother or father or brother) three former teachers at Lowell High School and a former boyfriend who had recently left to go through OCS at Fort Lewis, MISSION TEEN A HOMEFRONT CASUALTY, the headline read in the San Francisco Chronicle the morning after the letters began to surface. I had found it on microfiche, LOWELL GRAD WROTE FINAL DEAR JOHN. “There you see the goddamn media again,” Treat Morrison said about this. “Goddamn media was meddling even then in something they couldn’t possibly begin to understand.”

“Which would have been what.” I recall trying for an offhand delivery. “What was it exactly that the media didn’t begin to understand.”

Treat Morrison said nothing for a moment. “A lot of people get some big mystical kick out of chewing over things that happened forty, forty-five years ago,” he said then. “Little sad stories about being misunderstood by their mother or getting snubbed at school or whatever. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, I’m not saying it’s self-indulgent or self-pitying or any other damn thing, I’m just saying I can’t afford it. So I don’t do it.”

I find in my notes and taped interviews only two instances in which Treat Morrison volunteered anything about his background that could be construed as personal. The first such instance is buried deep in a taped discussion of what a two-state solution would mean to Israel. Three-quarters of the way through a sixty-minute tape, at 44:19 to be exact, Treat Morrison falls silent. When he resumes talking it is not about two-state versus one-state for Israel but about having once had some pictures framed for his mother. It seemed that his mother had broken a hip and been forced to move from her house in the Mission district to a Mercy convalescent home in Woodside. It seemed that he had stopped to see her on his way to a meeting in Saigon. It seemed that she had kept mentioning these pictures, snapshots of him and his sister at a place they used to go on the Russian River. “She’d had them stuck in a mirror, she wanted them at the new place, I thought I’d get them put in a frame, you know those frames that take four or five little pictures. So fine. But when I go to pick it up, the clerk has written on the package ‘kids playing by stream.’ ”

47:17. A pause on the tape.

“So that was a lesson,” he says then.

Actually I knew immediately what the lesson would have been.

I had been working this row long enough to make the inductive leaps required by Treat Morrison’s rather cryptic staccato.

The lesson would have been that no one else will ever view our lives exactly as we do: someone else had looked at the snapshots and seen the two children but had failed to hear the music, had failed even to know or care that he or she was lacking the emotional score. Just as someone else could have looked at the snapshot Elena McMahon took from her mother’s bedroom and seen her father holding the beer and her mother in the apron printed with pitchforks (“man and woman at barbecue”) but never seen the fat little sizzler rockets, never seen the sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight. Never heard half a margarita and I’m already flying, never heard who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

I knew all that.

The conventions of the interview nonetheless required that I ask the obvious question, follow up, encourage the subject to keep talking.

50:05. “What was the lesson,” I hear myself say on the tape.

“In the first place,” Treat Morrison says on the tape, “it wasn’t some ‘stream,’ we didn’t have ‘streams’ in California, ‘streams’ are what they have in England, or Vermont, it was the goddamn Russian River.”

Another pause.

“In the second place we weren’t ‘playing.’ She was eleven, for Christ’s sake, I was four, what would we ‘play.’ We were getting our picture taken, that’s the only reason we were even together.”

And then, without a beat: “Which has to kind of give you an insight into how differently an Israeli and a Palestinian might view the same little event or the same little piece of land.”

That was one of Treat Morrison’s two ventures into the personal.

The second such venture is also on tape, and also has to do with his mother. It seemed that he had arranged to have his mother driven to Berkeley to see him receive an honor of some sort. He did not remember what the honor had been. What the honor had been was not the point. The point was that because they would have no other time alone, he had made a reservation to take his mother to dinner at the Claremont Hotel.

“Big white gingerbread job, just as you start up into the hills,” he says on the tape. “Funny thing was, I don’t know if you knew this, I parked cars there as an undergraduate.”

“I think I did know that.” My voice on the tape.

“Well then. So.” A pause, then a rush of words. “My memory of this place was of someplace very very — I mean the definition of glamour. I mean at that time for that side of the bay this place was pretty much the ne plus ultra of big-deal sophistication. So I take my mother there. And it still looked the same, same big lobby, same big wide corridors, except now it looked to me like a cruise ship beached in maybe 1943. I hadn’t walked into the place in twenty-five years. I mean, hell, I graduated in 1951, and I swear to Christ they still have the same piano player in the lobby. Playing the same goddamn songs. ‘Where or When.’ ‘Tenderly.’ ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ Now the night I’m there with my mother it so happened it was spring, spring 1975 to be exact, April, goddamn Saigon closing down, and outside the hotel while my mother and I are having dinner there’s this torchlight parade, march, conga line, whatever, all these kids carrying torches and chanting Ho Ho / Ho Chi Mirth. Plus something about me personally, I frankly don’t even remember what it was, that’s not the point. And inside the piano player keeps pounding out ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ And I’m sitting there hoping my mother doesn’t understand that the kids are outside because I’m inside. ‘Mary Katherine died thirty-three years ago tomorrow,’ my mother says. Real casual, you understand, never looks up from the menu. ‘I believe I’ll take the prime rib,’ she says then. ‘What will you take.’ What I took was another goddamn double bourbon, bring two while you’re at it.”

Ho Ho / Ho Chi Minh

The war Mister Morrison / Will not win

Was what they chanted outside the Claremont that night.

Something else I found on microfiche.

The first time Treat Morrison was alone with Elena he mentioned Mary Katherine’s death.

“Why did she do it,” Elena said.

“I don’t have an answer for that kind of tragedy,” he said.

“Which kind do you have an answer for,” Elena said.

Treat Morrison studied her for a moment. “I read you,” he said then.

“I read you too,” she said.

Of course she did, of course he did.

Of course they read each other.

Of course they knew each other, understood each other, recognized each other, took one look and got each other, had to be with each other, saw the color drain out of what they saw when they were not looking at each other.

They were the same person.

They were equally remote.

2

DREAM, the notebook entry is headed, all in caps. The notebook, a spiral-bound Clairefontaine with a red cover and pale-gray three-eighth-inch graph paper inside, was one kept by Elena Janklow during the months in 1981 and 1982 immediately before she left the house on the Pacific Coast Highway and once again became (at least for a while, at least provisionally) Elena McMahon.

“I seem to have had an operation,” Elena Janklow’s account of the dream begins. Her handwriting, all but the last entries made in the same black fine-point pen. “Unspecified but unsuccessful. I am ‘sewn back up again,’ but roughly, as after an autopsy. It is agreed (I have agreed to this) that there is no point in doing a careful job, I am to die, a few days hence. The day on which I am assigned to die is a Sunday, Christmas Day. Wynn and Catherine and I are in Wynn’s father’s apartment in New York, where the death will take place, by gas. I am concerned about how the gas will be cleared out of the apartment but no one else seems to be.

“It occurs to me that I must shop for Saturday night dinner, and make it special, since this will be my last day alive. I go out on 57th Street and along Sixth Avenue, very crowded and cold, in a bundled-up robe. My feet are very loosely sewn and I am afraid the stitching (basting really) will come out, also that my face is not on straight (again as in an autopsy it has been peeled down and put back up), and getting sadder and sadder.

“As I shop it occurs to me that maybe I could live: why must I die? I mention this to Wynn. He says then call the doctor, call Arnie Stine in California and tell him. Ask Arnie if you need to die tomorrow. I call Arnie Stine in California and he says no, if that’s what I want, of course I do not need to die tomorrow. He can ‘arrange it for later’ if I want. I continue shopping, for Christmas dinner now as well as for Saturday night. I get a capon to roast for Christmas. I am euphoric, relieved, but still concerned that I cannot be sewn back together properly. Arnie Stine says I can be but I am afraid I will fall apart while shopping, walking on my loose feet.

“I am trying to be careful when I wake up.”

It was Catherine who found the spiral-bound notebook, the summer Wynn picked her up at school and brought her first to the Hollywood Suite at the Regency and then to the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She had been looking through the desk in the pantry for takeout menus when she found the notebook, on which her mother had printed, in Magic Marker, the word MENUS. In fact there actually were menus in the notebook, not takeout menus of course but menus Elena had made up for dinners or lunches, a dozen or more of them, with notes on quantities and recipes (“three lbs lamb for navarin serves eight outside”), cropping up at random among the other entries.

The peculiarity was in the other entries. They were not exactly the kind of notes a professional writer or reporter might make, but neither were they conventional “diary” notes, the confessions or private thoughts set down by a civilian. What was peculiar about these entries was that they reflected elements of both modes, the personal and the reportorial, with no apparent distinction between the two. There were scraps of what appeared to be overheard dialogue, there were lists of roses and other garden plants. There were quotes from and comments on news stories, there were scraps of remembered poetry. There were what appear to have been passing thoughts, some random, some less so. And there were of course the dreams.

“I get a little spacey when I stop smoking, probably because I get too much oxygen.”

“What he’s best at getting hold of is other people’s money.”

This much I can see without going outside: climbing Cecile Brunner roses, Henri Martin roses, Paulii roses, Chicago Peace roses, Scarlet Fire roses, blue and white amaryllis, scabiosa, Meyer lemons, star jasmine, santolina, butterfly bush, yarrow, blue lavender, delphinium, gaura, mint, lemon thyme, lemon grass, bay laurel, tarragon, basil, feverfew, artichokes. This much I can see with my eyes closed. Also: the big yellow and white poppies in the bed on the south wall.

“You may have stayed at the Savoy, but I doubt very much you stayed at the Savoy and lost sixteen thousand pounds at Annabel’s.”

I have eaten dinner on Super Bowl Sunday in the most expensive restaurants in Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego and Tampa Bay.

Interview in LAT with someone who just resurfaced after thirteen years underground: “I never defined myself as a fugitive. I defined myself as a human being. Human beings have things they have to deal with. Because I was Weather Underground, being a fugitive was something I had to deal with, but it wasn’t a definition of me.” What mean??? If a fugitive is what you are, how does it change the situation to define yourself as a “human being”?

I fled Him down the nights and down the days I fled Him down the arches of the years

The most terrifying verse I know: merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.

DREAM, the next two entries nonetheless begin.

I go to my mother’s house in Laguna, crying. Ward’s daughter Belinda is also there. Catherine has been kidnapped, I tell my mother. “I thought she came to tell you she was having Christmas dinner at Chasen’s,” Belinda says.

A party in a house that seems to be this one. Wynn and Catherine and I live in it but so do my mother and father. The party is in progress and I go out on the beach for a little quiet. When I come back my father is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Catherine is either drunk or drugged, he says. He can hear her vomiting upstairs but doesn’t want to intrude. I run up and notice that the upstairs has been painted. This is a little disturbing: how much time exactly has passed?

The last entry in this notebook, not a dream, was actually not one but six notes, each made in a different pen and on a different page but all apparently made in response to the daily regimen Catherine had described in her eighth-grade autobiographical essay as “radiation zapping following the exsishun [sic] of a stage 1 good prognose [sic] breast lesion”:

The linear accelerator, the mevatron, the bevatron.

“Just ask for R.O., it’s in the tunnel.”

“A week before you finish you’ll go on the mevatron to get your electrons. Now you’re getting your photons.”

Photons? Or “protons”???

Waiting for the beam after the technician goes and the laser light finds the place.

The sensation of vibration when the beam comes. The stunning silent bombardment, the entire electromagnetic field rearranged.

“You don’t feel anything,” Arnie Stine said. “The beam doesn’t feel like anything.”

“Just between us nobody who hasn’t been on that table has any idea what the beam feels like,” the technician said.

The beam is my alpha and my omega

I finished this morning

How I feel is excluded, banished, deprived of the beam

Alcestis, back from the tunnel and half in love with death

3

Of course we would not need those last six notes to know what Elena’s dreams were about.

Elena’s dreams were about dying.

Elena’s dreams were about getting old.

Nobody here has not had (will not have) Elena’s dreams.

We all know that.

The point is that Elena didn’t.

The point is that Elena remained remote most of all to herself, a clandestine agent who had so successfully compartmentalized her operation as to have lost access to her own cut-outs.

The last entry in this notebook is dated April 27 1982.

It would have been not quite four months later, August 1982, when Elena McMahon left Wynn Janklow.

Relocated to the East Coast, as she put it.

It would have been some three months after that, late November 1982, when she returned for the first time to California.

She had flown out from Washington on the morning flight to interview a Czech dissident then teaching at UCLA and rumored to be short-listed for a Nobel Prize in literature. She had meant to do the interview and go straight to the airport and turn in the rental car and take the next flight back, but when she left UCLA she had driven not to the airport but up the Pacific Coast Highway. Just as she would make no conscious decision to walk off the 1984 campaign, just as she would make no conscious decision to ask for a flight to Miami instead of to Washington, she had made no conscious decision to do this. She was unaware even that the decision had been made until she found herself parking the rental car in the lot outside the market where she used to shop. She had gone into the drugstore and said hello to the pharmacist and picked up a couple of surfing magazines for Catherine and a jar of aloe gel for herself, a kind she had been unable to locate in Washington. The pharmacist asked if she had been away, he hadn’t seen her in a while. She said that she had been away, yes. She said the same thing to the checkout clerk in the market, where she bought corn tortillas and serrano chiles, something else she had been unable to locate in Washington.

She had been away, yes.

Always good to get back, right.

With weather this dry they were lucky to have gotten through Thanksgiving without a fire, yes.

No way she was ready to start dealing with Christmas, no.

She had sat then in the rental car in the parking lot, almost deserted at four in the afternoon. Four in the afternoon was not the time of day when women who lived here shopped. Women who lived here shopped in the morning, before tennis, after working out. If she still lived here she would not be sitting in a rental car in the parking lot at four in the afternoon. One of the high school boys who worked in the market after school was stringing Christmas lights on the board advertising the day’s specials. Another was rounding up carts, jamming the carts into long trains and propelling each train into the rack with a single extended finger. By the time the last light dropped behind Point Dume the carts were all racked and the Christmas lights were blinking red and green and she had stopped crying.

“What was that about,” Treat Morrison said when she mentioned this to him.

“It was about my not belonging there anymore,” she said.

“Where did you ever belong,” Treat Morrison said.

Let me clarify something.

When I said that Elena McMahon and Treat Morrison were equally remote I was shortcutting, jumping ahead to the core dislocation in the personality, overlooking the clearly different ways in which each had learned to deal with that dislocation.

Elena’s apparently impenetrable performances in the various roles assigned her were achieved (I see now) only with considerable effort and at considerable cost. All that reinvention, all those fast walks and clean starts, all that had cost something. It had cost something to grow up watching her father come and go and do his deals without ever noticing what it was he dealt. Father’s Occupation: Investor. It had cost something to talk to Melissa Simon on Westlake Career Day when all her attention was focused on the beam. You don’t feel anything, Arnie Stine said. The beam doesn’t feel like anything. Just between us nobody who hasn’t been on that table has any idea what the beam feels like, the technician said. It had cost something to remember the Fourth of July her father’s friend brought fireworks up from the border and to confine the picture to the fat little sizzler rockets she had not liked and the sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight.

To limit what she heard to half a margarita and I’m already flying, who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

To keep the name of her father’s friend just outside the frame of what she remembered.

Of course the name of her father’s friend was Max Epperson.

You knew it was.

Treat Morrison would not have needed to forget that detail.

Treat Morrison had built an entire career on remembering the details that might turn out to be wild cards, using them, playing them, sensing the opening and pressing the advantage. Unlike Elena, he had mastered his role, internalized it, perfected the performance until it betrayed no hint of the total disinterest at its core. He knew how to talk and he knew how to listen. He was widely assumed because he refused the use of translators to have a gift for languages, but in fact he communicated with nothing more than a kind of improvisational pidgin and very attentive listening. He could listen attentively in several languages, not excluding his own. Treat Morrison could listen attentively to a discussion in Tagalog about trade relations between the United States and Asia, and Treat Morrison could listen with the same exact calibration of attentiveness to a Houston bartender explaining how when the oil boom went belly up he zeroed in on bartending as an entrée to the private service sector. Once on the shuttle I sat across the aisle from Treat Morrison and watched him spend the entire flight, National to La Guardia, listening attentively to the stratagems employed by his seatmate in the course of commuting between his home in New Jersey and his office in Santa Ana.

“You have the Delta through Salt Lake,” I heard Treat Morrison prompt when the conversation showed signs of lagging.

“Actually I prefer the American through Dallas,” the seatmate said, confidence restored in the intrinsic interest of his subject.

“The American out of Newark.”

“Out of Newark, sure, except Newark has the short runways, so when the weather goes, scratch Newark.”

During the ride in from La Guardia I had asked Treat Morrison how he happened to have the Delta through Salt Lake at his fingertips.

“He’d already mentioned it,” Treat Morrison said. “Before we were off the ground at National. He took it last week and hit some pretty hairy turbulence over the Wasatch Range. I listen. That’s my business. Listening. That’s the difference between me and the Harvard guys. The Harvard guys don’t listen.”

I had heard before about “the Harvard guys,” also about “the guys who know how not to rattle their teacups” and “the guys with the killer serves and not too much else.” This was a vein in Treat Morrison that would surface only when exhaustion or a drink or two had lowered his guard, and remained the only visible suggestion of whatever it had meant to him to come out of the West and confront the established world.

This was another area he was not inclined to explore.

“What the hell, the last I heard this was still one country,” was what he said when I tried to pursue it. “Unless you people in the media have new information to the contrary.”

He regarded me in truculent silence for a full thirty seconds, then seemed to remember that truculent silence was not his most productive tack.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “There are two kinds of people who end up in the State Department. And believe me, I am by no means talking about where somebody came from, I’m talking about what kind of person he is.”

He hesitated.

A quick glance to assess my reaction, then the amendment: “And of course I mean what kind of person he is or she is. Male, female, space alien, whatever. I don’t want to read some PC crap about myself in the goddamn New York Times. Okay. State. Two kinds of individuals end up there. There’s the kind of individual who goes from post to post getting the place cards right and sending out the reminder cards on time. And there’s the other kind. I’m one of the other kind.”

I asked what kind that was.

“Crisis junkies,” he said. “I’m in this for the buzz, take it or leave it.”

This was Treat Morrison when his performance went off. When it was on he was flawless, talking as attentively as he listened, rendering opinions, offering advice, even volunteering surprisingly candid analyses of his own modus operandi. “There’s a trick to inserting yourself in a certain kind of situation,” he said when I once remarked on his ability to move from end game to end game without becoming inconveniently identified with any of them. “You can’t go all the way with it. You have to go back and write the report or whatever, give the briefings, then move on. You go in, you pull their irons out of the fire, you get a free period, maybe six months, no more, during which you’re allowed to lecture everybody who isn’t up to speed on this one little problem on the frivolity of whatever other damn thing they’ve been doing. After that you move past it. You know who the unreported casualties of Vietnam were? Reporters and policy guys who didn’t move past it.”

That was another difference between Treat Morrison and Elena.

Elena inserted herself in a certain kind of situation and went all the way with it.

Elena failed to move past it.

Which is why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the scene, Elena had already been caught in the pipeline, swept into the conduits.

Into the game.

Into the plot.

Into the setup.

Into whatever you wanted to call it.