Joan Didion
Democracy

This book is for Dominique and Quintana.

It is also for Elsie Giorgi.

One

1

THE light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.

Something to behold.

Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.

He said to her.

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured it, never came close. The sky was this pink and the air was wet from the night rain, soft and wet and smelling like flowers, smelling like those flowers you used to pin in your hair when you drove out to Schofield, gardenias, the air in the morning smelled like gardenias, never mind there were not too many flowers around those shot islands.

They were just atolls, most of them.

Sand spits, actually.

Two Quonsets and one of those landing strips they roll down, you know, the matting, just roll it down like a goddamn bathmat.

It was kind of a Swiss Family Robinson deal down there, really. None of the observers would fly down until the technical guys had the shot set up, that’s all I was, an observer. Along for the ride. There for the show. You know me. Sometimes we’d get down there and the weather could go off and we’d wait days, just sit around cracking coconuts, there was one particular event at Johnston where it took three weeks to satisfy the weather people.

Wonder Woman Two, that shot was.

I remember I told you I was in Manila.

I remember I brought you some little souvenir from Manila, actually I bought it on Johnston off a reconnaissance pilot who’d flown in from Clark.

Three weeks sitting around goddamn Johnston Island waiting for the weather and then no yield to speak of.

Meanwhile we lived in the water.

Caught lobsters and boiled them on the beach.

Played gin and slapped mosquitoes.

Couldn’t walk. No place to walk. Couldn’t write anything down, the point of the pen would go right through the paper, one thing you got to understand down there was why not much got written down on those islands.

What you could do was, you could talk. You got to hear everybody’s personal life story down there, believe me, you’re sitting on an island a mile and a half long and most of that is the landing strip.

Those technical guys, some of them had been down there three months.

Got pretty raunchy, believe me.

Then the weather people would give the go and bingo, no more stories. Everybody would climb on a transport around three A.M. and go out a few miles and watch for first light.

Watch for pink sky.

And then the shot, naturally.

Nevada, the Aleutians, those events were another situation altogether.

Nobody had very pleasurable feelings about Nevada, although some humorous things did happen there at Mercury, like the time a Livermore device fizzled and the Los Alamos photographers started snapping away at that Livermore tower — still standing, you understand, a two-meg gadget and the tower’s still standing, which was the humorous part — and laughing like hell. The Aleutians were just dog duty, ass end of the universe, they give the world an enema they stick it in at Amchitka. Those shots up there did a job because by then they were using computers instead of analog for the diagnostics, but you would never recall an Aleutian event with any nostalgia whatsoever, nothing even humorous, you got a lot of congressmen up there with believe it or not their wives and daughters, big deal for the civilians but zero interest, zip, none.

He said to her.

Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor (who was born Inez Christian) in the spring of 1975.

But those events in the Pacific, Jack Lovett said.

Those shots around 1952, 1953.

Christ they were sweet.

You were still a little kid in high school when I was going down there, you were pinning flowers in your hair and driving out to Schofield, crazy little girl with island fever, I should have been put in jail. I’m surprised your Uncle Dwight didn’t show up out there with a warrant. I’m surprised the whole goddamn Christian Company wasn’t turned out for the lynching.

Water under the bridge.

Long time ago.

You’ve been around the world a little bit since.

You did all right.

You filled your dance card, you saw the show.

Interesting times.

I told you when I saw you in Jakarta in 1969, you and I had the knack for interesting times.

Jesus Christ, Jakarta.

Ass end of the universe, southern tier.

But I’ll tell you one thing about Jakarta in 1969, Jakarta in 1969 beat Bien Hoa in 1969.

“Listen, Inez, get it while you can,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor in the spring of 1975.

“Listen, Inez, use it or lose it.”

“Listen, Inez, un regard d’adieu, we used to say in Saigon, last look through the door.”

“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said one night in the spring of 1975, one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975, one night in the spring of 1975 when the C-130s and the C-141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon all night long, thirty-minute turnaround at Tan Son Nhut, touching down and loading and taxiing out on flight idle, bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants: “Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, “Harry Victor’s wife.”

Last look through more than one door.

This is a hard story to tell.

2

CALL me the author.

Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing table in her own room in her own house on Welbeck Street.

So Trollope might begin this novel.

I have no unequivocal way of beginning it, although I do have certain things in mind. I have for example these lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

The palm at the end of the mind,


Beyond the last thought, rises


In the bronze distance,


A gold-feathered bird


Sings in the palm, without human meaning,


Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Consider that.

I have: “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air,” Inez Victor’s fullest explanation of why she stayed on in Kuala Lumpur. Consider that too. I have those pink dawns of which Jack Lovett spoke. I have the dream, recurrent, in which my entire field of vision fills with rainbow, in which I open a door onto a growth of tropical green (I believe this to be a banana grove, the big glossy fronds heavy with rain, but since no bananas are seen on the palms symbolists may relax) and watch the spectrum separate into pure color. Consider any of these things long enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have.

Cards on the table.

I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction, lacked patience with the past and interest in memory; lacked faith even in my own technique. A poignant (to me) assignment I came across recently in a textbook for students of composition: “Didion begins with a rather ironic reference to her immediate reason to write this piece. Try using this ploy as the opening of an essay; you may want to copy the ironic-but-earnest tone of Didion, or you might try making your essay witty. Consider the broader question of the effect of setting: how does Didion use the scene as a rhetorical base? She returns again and again to different details of the scene: where and how and to what effect? Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How?

Water under the bridge.

As Jack Lovett would say.

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.



So I have no leper who comes to the door every morning at seven.

No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.

In fact no immutable hill: as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique. The very island to which Inez Victor returned in the spring of 1975—Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge — is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific. In this light it is difficult to maintain definite convictions about what happened down there in the spring of 1975, or before.



In fact I have already abandoned a great deal of what happened before.

Abandoned most of the stories that still dominate table talk down in that part of the world where Inez Victor was born and to which she returned in 1975.

Abandoned for example all stories about definite cases of typhoid contracted on sea voyages lasting the first ten months of 1856.

Abandoned all accounts of iridescence observed on the night sea off the Canaries, of guano rocks sighted southeast of the Falklands, of the billiards room at the old Hotel Estrella del Mar on the Chilean coast, of a particular boiled-beef lunch eaten on Tristan da Cunha in 1859; and of certain legendary poker games played on the Isthmus of Panama in 1860, with the losses and winnings (in gold) of every player.

Abandoned the bereaved widower who drowned himself at landfall.

Scuttled the festivities marking the completion of the first major irrigation ditch on the Nuannu ranch.

Jettisoned in fact those very stories with which most people I know in those islands confirm their place in the larger scheme, their foothold against the swell of the sea, the erosion of the reefs and the drowning of the valley systems and the glittering shallows left when islands vanish. Would it have been Inez Victor’s grandmother Cissy or Cissy’s best friend Tita Dowdell who wore the Highland Lassie costume to the Children’s Ball at the palace in 1892? If Cissy went as the Highland Lassie and Tita Dowdell as the Spanish Dancer (Inez’s grandfather definitely went as one of the Peasant Children of All Nationalities, that much was documented, that much Inez and her sister Janet knew from the photograph that hung on the landing of the house on Manoa Road), then how did the Highland Lassie costume end up with the Palace Restoration Committee on loan from Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? On the subject of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law, did her flat silver come to her through her father’s and Inez and Janet’s grandfather’s mutual Aunt Tru? Was it likely that Aunt Tru’s fire opal from the Great Barrier Reef (surrounded by diamond chips) would have been lost down a drain at the Outrigger Canoe Club if Janet or Inez or even their cousin Alice Campbell had been wearing it instead of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? Where were the calabashes Alice Campbell’s father got from Judge Thayer? Who had Leilani Thayer’s koa settee? When Inez and Janet’s mother left Honolulu on the reconditioned Lurline and never came back, did she or did she not have the right to take Tru’s yellow diamond? These are all important questions down there, suggestive details in the setting, but the setting is for another novel.

3

IMAGINE my mother dancing,” that novel began, in the first person. The first person was Inez, and was later abandoned in favor of the third:

“Inez imagined her mother dancing.

“Inez remembered her mother dancing.

“Brown-and-white spectator shoes, very smart. High-heeled sandals made of white silk twine, very beautiful. White gardenias in her hair on the beach at Lanikai. A white silk blouse with silver sequins shaped like stars. Shaped like new moons. Shaped like snowflakes. The sentimental things of life as time went by. Dancing under the camouflage net on the lawn at Kaneohe. Blue moon on the Nuannu ranch. Saw her standing alone. She smiled as she danced.

“Inez remembered no such thing.

“Inez remembered the shoes and the sequins like snowflakes but she only imagined her mother dancing, to make clear to herself that the story was one of romantic outline. You will notice that the daughters in romantic stories always remember their mothers dancing, or about to leave for the dance: these dance-bound mothers materialize in the darkened nursery (never a bedroom in these stories, always a ‘nursery,’ on the English model) in a cloud of perfume, a burst of light off a diamond hair clip. They glance in the mirror. They smile. They do not linger, for this is one of those moments in which the interests of mothers are seen to diverge sharply from the wishes of daughters. These mothers get on with it. These mothers lean for a kiss and leave for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left, but not for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left for San Francisco, on the Lurline, reconditioned. I specify ‘reconditioned’ because that was how Carol Christian’s departure was characterized for Inez and Janet, as a sudden but compelling opportunity to make the first postwar crossing on the reconditioned Lurline. ‘Just slightly irresistible,’ was the way Carol Christian put it exactly.”



What I had there was a study in provincial manners, in the acute tyrannies of class and privilege by which people assert themselves against the tropics; Honolulu during World War Two, martial law, submariners and fliers and a certain investor from Hong Kong with whom Carol Christian was said to drink brandy and Coca-Cola, a local scandal. I was interested more in Carol Christian than in her daughters, interested in the stubborn loneliness she had perfected during her marriage to Paul Christian, interested in her position as an outsider in the islands and in her compensatory yearning to be “talented,” not talented at anything in particular but just talented, a state of social grace denied her by the Christians. Carol Christian arrived in Honolulu as a bride in 1934. By 1946 she was sometimes moved so profoundly by the urge for company that she would keep Inez and Janet home from school on the pretext of teaching them how to do their nails. She read novels out loud to them on the beach at Lanikai, popular novels she checked out from the lending library at the drugstore in Kailua. “ ‘The random years were at an end,’ ” she would read, her voice rising to signal a dramatic effect, and then she would invent a flourish of her own: “ ‘Now, they could harvest them.’ Look there, random harvest, that explains the title, very poetic, a happy ending, n’est-ce pas?

She was attracted to French phrases but knew only the several she had memorized during the semester of junior college in Stockton, California, that constituted her higher education. She was also attracted to happy endings, and located them for Inez and Janet wherever she could: in the Coke float that followed the skinned knee, in the rainbow after the rain, in magazine stories about furlough weddings and fortuitously misdelivered Dear John letters and, not least, in her own romance, which she dated from the day she left Stockton and got a job modeling at I. Magnin in San Francisco. “Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Chanel suit, the real McCoy,” she would say to Inez and Janet. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Mainbocher evening pajama, the genuine article. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Patou tea gown, white satin cut on the bias, talk about drop dead, bare to here in back. The bias-cut Patou tea gown figured large in Carol Christian’s stories because this was the dress in which she had been sneaking a cigarette on the I. Magnin employees’ floor when Paul Christian stepped off the elevator by mistake (another fortuitous misdelivery) and brushed the shadows away, brought her happiest day, one look at him and she had found a world completely new, the sole peculiarity being that the world was an island in the middle of the Pacific and Paul Christian was rarely there. “When a man stays away from a woman it means he wants to keep their love alive,” Carol Christian advised Inez and Janet. She had an entire codex of these signals men and women supposedly sent to one another (when a woman blew smoke at a man it meant she was definitely interested, and when a man told a woman her dress was too revealing it meant he adored her), dreamy axioms she had heard or read or invented as a schoolgirl of romantic tendency and to which she clung in the face of considerable contrary evidence. That she had miscalculated when she married Paul Christian was a conclusion she seemed incapable of drawing. She made a love-knot of what she imagined to be her first gray hair and mailed it to him in Cuernavaca. “Mon cher Paul,” she wrote on the card to which she pinned the love-knot. Inez watched her tie the hair but did not see the card for some years, loose in one of the boxes of shed belongings that Paul Christian would periodically ship express collect from wherever he was to Inez and Janet. “Who do you f— to get off this island? (Just kidding of course) XXXX, C.”

She left dark red lipstick marks on her cigarettes, smoked barely at all and then crushed out in coffee cups and Coke bottles and in the sand. She sat for hours at her dressing table, which was covered with the little paper parasols that came in drinks, yellow, turquoise, shocking pink, tissue parasols like a swarm of brittle butterflies. She sat at this dressing table and shaved her legs. She sat at this dressing table and smoothed Vaseline into her eyebrows. She sat at this dressing table and instructed her daughters in what she construed to be the language of love, a course she had notably failed. For a year or two after Carol Christian left Honolulu Janet would sit on the beach at Lanikai and sift the sand looking for cigarettes stained with her mother’s lipstick. She kept the few she found in a shoebox, along with the tissue parasols from Carol Christian’s dressing table and the postcards from San Francisco and Carmel and Lake Tahoe.

Of the daughters I was at first more interested in Janet, who was the younger, than in Inez. I was interested in the mark the mother had left on Janet, in Janet’s defensive veneer of provincial gentility, her startling and avid preoccupation with other people’s sexual arrangements; in her mercantile approach to emotional transactions, and her condescension to anyone less marketable than she perceived herself to be. As an adolescent Janet had always condescended, for example, to Inez, and became bewildered and rather sulky when it worked out, in her view, so well for Inez and so disappointingly for herself. I was interested in how Janet’s husband Dick Ziegler made a modest fortune in Hong Kong housing and lost it in the development of windward Oahu. I was interested in Inez and Janet’s grandmother, the late Sybil “Cissy” Christian, a woman remembered in Honolulu for the vehement whims and irritations that passed in that part of the world as opinions, as well as for the dispatch with which she had divested herself of her daughter-in-law. Aloha oe. “I believe your mother wants to go to night clubs,” Cissy Christian said to Inez and Janet by way of explaining Carol Christian’s departure. “But she’s coming back,” Janet said. “Now and then,” Cissy Christian said. This conversation took place at lunch at the Pacific Club, one hour after Inez and Janet and their uncle Dwight saw the reconditioned Lurline sail. Janet bolted from the table. “Happy now?” Dwight Christian asked his mother. “Somebody had to do it,” Cissy Christian said. “Not necessarily before lunch,” Dwight Christian said.

I saw it as a family in which the colonial impulse had marked every member. I was interested in Inez and Janet’s father, Paul Christian, and in the way in which he had reinvented himself as a romantic outcast, a remittance man of the Pacific. “He’s going to end up a goddamn cargo cult,” Paul Christian’s brother Dwight once said about him. I was interested not only in Paul but in Dwight Christian, in his construction contracts at Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay, his claim to have played every Robert Trent Jones golf course in the world with the exception of the Royal in Rabat; the particular way in which he used Wendell Omura to squeeze Dick Ziegler out of windward Oahu and coincidentally out of the container business. “Let me give you a little piece of advice,” Dwight Christian said when Paul Christian took up Dick Ziegler’s side in this matter. “ ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Kierkegaard.” Dwight Christian had an actual file of such quotations, most of them torn from the “Thoughts on the Business of Life” page in Forbes and given to a secretary to be typed out on three-by-five index cards. The cards were his hedge against a profound shyness. “Recently I ran across a thought from Racine,” he would say on those occasions when he was called upon to chair a stockholders’ meeting or to keynote the Kick-off Dinner for Punahou School Annual Giving or to have his picture taken, wearing a silk suit tailored in Hong Kong and an aluminum hard hat stencilled “D.C.,” knee-deep in silica sand in the hold of a dry-bulk carrier.

That particular photograph appeared in Business Week, at the time Dwight Christian was trying (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to take over British Leyland.

I also had two photographs from Fortune, one showing Dwight Christian riding a crane over a cane field and the other showing him astride an eighteen-thousand-ton concrete dolos, with a Pan American Cargo Clipper overhead.

In fact I had a number of photographs of the Christians: in that prosperous and self-absorbed colony the Christians were sufficiently good-looking and sufficiently confident and, at least at the time Inez was growing up, sufficiently innocent not to mind getting their pictures in the paper. I had Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in a white jade holder as she presented the Christian Prize in Sugar Chemistry at the University of Hawaii in 1938. I had Dwight and Ruthie Christian tea-dancing at the Alexander Young Hotel in 1940. I had Carol Christian second-from-the-left in a group of young Honolulu matrons who met every Tuesday in 1942 to drink daiquiris and eat chicken salad and roll bandages for the Red Cross. In this photograph Carol Christian is wearing a Red Cross uniform, but in fact she was invited to join this group only twice, both times by Ruthie Christian. “Spend time around that crowd and you see how the green comes out,” she said when it became clear that she would not be included on a regular basis. “You see how the green comes out” was something Carol Christian said often. She said it whenever she divined a note of rejection or criticism or even suspended judgment in someone’s response to her, or, by extension, to Inez or Janet. She seemed to believe herself the object of considerable “envy,” a word Inez tried to avoid in later life, and perhaps she was.

“I detect just the slightest tinge of lime.”

“Positively chartreuse.”

“You find out fast enough who your friends are.”

In fact it would have been hard to say who Carol Christian’s friends were, since she had no friends at all who were not primarily Paul Christian’s friends or Cissy Christian’s friends or Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s friends. “Seems like a nice enough gal,” one of Paul Christian’s cousins said about her when she had lived in Honolulu for ten years. “Of course I haven’t known her that long.”

I had, curiously, only two photographs of Paul Christian, and neither suggested the apparent confidence and innocence with which his mother and his brother and even his wife met the camera. The first showed Paul Christian playing backgammon with John Huston in Cuernavaca in 1948. Paul Christian was barefoot and dark from the sun in this snapshot, which would have been taken at roughly the time arrangements were being made for his wife to leave Honolulu on the reconditioned Lurline. The second photograph was taken as Paul Christian left the Honolulu YMCA in handcuffs on March 25, 1975, some hours after he fired the shots that resulted in the immediate death of Wendell Omura and the eventual death of Janet Christian Ziegler. In this photograph Paul Christian was again barefoot, and had his cuffed hands raised above his head in a posture of theatrical submission, even crucifixion; a posture so arresting, so peculiarly suggestive, that the photograph was carried in newspapers in parts of the world where there could have been no interest in the Christians or in Wendell Omura or even in Harry Victor. In most parts of the United States there was of course an interest in Harry Victor. VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, the caption read in the New York Times.



You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing, the island, the family, the situation. I lost patience with it. I lost nerve. Still: there is a certain hour between afternoon and evening when the sun strikes horizontally between the trees and that island and that situation are all I see. Some days at this time one aspect of the situation will seem to me to yield the point, other days another. I see Inez Christian Victor in the spring of 1975 walking on the narrow beach behind Janet’s house, the last sun ahead of her, refracted in the spray off Black Point. I see Jack Lovett watching her, a man in his sixties in a custom-made seersucker suit, his tie loosened but his bearing correct, military, suggestive of disciplines practiced for the sake of discipline; a man who is now, as he watches Inez Victor steady herself on the rocks down where the water meets the sea wall, smoking one of the five cigarettes he allows himself daily. I see Inez turn and walk back toward him, the sun behind her now, the water washing the rough coral sand over her bare feet.

I see Jack Lovett waiting for her.

I have not told you much about Jack Lovett.

Most often these days I find that my notes are about Jack Lovett, about those custom-made seersucker suits he wore, about the wide range of his interests and acquaintances and of the people to whom he routinely spoke (embassy drivers, oil riggers, airline stewardesses, assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships, tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals) in Manila and in Jakarta and around the Malacca Strait.

About his view of information as an end in itself.

About his access to airplanes.

About the way he could put together an observation here and a conversation there and gauge when the time had come to lay hands on a 727 or a C-46.

About the way he waited for Inez.

I have been keeping notes for some time now about the way Jack Lovett waited for Inez Victor.

4

FIRST looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.

I wonder.

The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer’s studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez. Under different auspices and to different ends Inez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960, and although she was in the fashion department and I was upstairs in the afterthought cubicle that constituted the feature department we occasionally had reason (when a playwright was to be photographed as part of a fashion layout, say, or an actress was to actually model the merchandise) to do a sitting together. I recall coming late to the studio on this particular morning and finding Inez already there, sitting at a wooden table apparently oblivious to the reflector propped against her knee, to Chubby Checker on the stereo at eighty decibels, and to the model for the sitting, a fading beauty named Kiki Watt, who was having a comb-out and trying to tell Inez about some “Stanley” they both seemed to know.

“The doorbell rings at midnight, who else,” Kiki screamed through the music. “Stanley.”

Inez said nothing. The table at which she sat was covered with take-out bags from the delicatessen downstairs, one of which was leaking coffee, but Inez seemed not to notice. Her attention was entirely fixed on the man who sat across the table, a stranger, considerably older than we were and notably uncomfortable in the rather louche camaraderie of the studio. I had not met Harry Victor but I doubted the man was Inez’s husband. I recall thinking he could be her father.

“Somebody strike the music,” Kiki screamed. “Now. You can hear me. So. I said I had this sitting at dawn, but you know Stanley, Stanley had to have a drink. Naturally.”

“Naturally.” Inez looked at me. “This is Jack Lovett. He just got off a plane.”

Jack Lovett stood up, trying to acknowledge me without looking at Kiki, who had dropped her wrapper and was working pieces of cotton into her brassiere.

“ ‘This place is a pigsty,’ Stanley announces halfway through his drink.” Kiki sat on the table between Inez and Jack Lovett and began rummaging through the take-out bags. “ ‘The maid didn’t come,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you own a vacuum,’ Stanley says, ho hum, sarcasm, so interesting. ‘Actually no,’ I say. ‘I don’t own a vacuum.’ As a matter of fact I don’t, I mean I did but Gus pawned it with my jewelry. ‘Listen,’ Stanley says. ‘As soon as Daisy leaves for Maine I’ll bring over our vacuum. For the summer,’ he says. Believe it?”

“Absolutely,” Inez said. She took a doughnut from one of the take-out bags and held it out to Jack Lovett. Jack Lovett shook his head.

“Stanley left, I thought about it, I wanted to kill myself, you know?”

“Absolutely.” Inez took a bite from the doughnut, then dropped it back into the bag.

“Wanted to take every red I had in the apartment, you know why?”

“Because you didn’t want to use Daisy’s vacuum,” Inez said, and then she looked at me. “He has two hours in New York and he came to see me.”

She turned back to Jack Lovett and smiled.

I had known Inez Victor for perhaps a year but I had never before seen her smile that way.

“He can’t stay,” she said then. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.”



There it is, the first look.

The instructiveness of the moment remains moot.

Actually I know a lot about Jack Lovett.

Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers. They are comfortable for example on airplanes. They buckle in, establish certain ground rules with the cabin crew (to be woken or not woken, extra ice or none, a reading light that works and a move after Singapore to the bulkhead seat); stake out blankets, pillows, territory. They are solaced by the menus with the Dong Kingman water colors on the cover, by the soothing repetition of the meal (Rôti au Vol, Legumes Garnis) at arbitrary intervals during flights that run eleven, twelve, twenty-two hours. A flight of fewer than eight hours is a hop, a trip these men barely recognize. On the ground they seem easy only in hotel lobbies and transit lounges, in the Express Check-Ins and Clipper Clubs of the world, sealed environments in which they always remember the names of the attendants who make the drinks and arrange the connecting flights. Such men also recognize one another, and exchange desultory recollections of other travels, absent travelers.

“That joint venture in Dakar,” one hears them say.

“Frank was in Dakar.”

“I saw Frank in Hong Kong Friday, he’d come down out of China.”

“Frank and I were in a meeting in Surabaya with this gentleman who didn’t speak a word of English. He sat through this meeting nodding and smiling, you know, a regular buddha, and then he spoke the only English words I ever heard him speak. ‘Six hundred million sterling,’ he said.”

“They all speak sterling.”

“Frank takes it in stride, a real player, looks at his watch and stands up. ‘You decide you want to talk a reasonable number,’ Frank says to the buddha, in English you understand, ‘you can reach me tonight at the Hilton.’ No change of expression from the buddha. The buddha thinks Frank’s going to sweat out this call in Jakarta. ‘In Manila,’ Frank says then. ‘The Hilton in Manila.’ ”

They recall other Franks, other meetings, Hiltons around the world. They are reserved, wary, only professionally affable. Their responses seem pragmatic but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information. All information is seen as useful. Inaccurate information is in itself accurate information about the informant.

I said that Jack Lovett was one of those men for whom information was an end in itself.

He was also a man for whom the accidental did not figure.

Many people are intolerant of the accidental, but this was something more: Jack Lovett did not believe that accidents happen. In Jack Lovett’s system all behavior was purposeful, and the purpose could be divined by whoever attracted the best information and read it most correctly. A Laotian village indicated on one map and omitted on another suggested not a reconnaissance oversight but a population annihilated, x number of men, women, and children lined up one morning between the maps and bulldozed into a common ditch. A shipment of laser mirrors from Long Beach to a firm in Hong Kong that did no laser work suggested not a wrong invoice but transshipment, re-export, the diversion of technology to unfriendly actors. All nations, to Jack Lovett, were “actors,” specifically “state actors” (“non-state actors” were the real wild cards here, but in Jack Lovett’s extensive experience the average non-state actor was less interested in laser mirrors than in M-16s, AK-47s, FN-FALs, the everyday implements of short-view power, and when the inductive leap to the long view was made it would probably be straight to weapons-grade uranium), and he viewed such actors abstractly, as friendly or unfriendly, committed or uncommitted; as assemblies of armaments on a large board. Asia was ten thousand tanks here, three hundred Phantoms there. The heart of Africa was an enrichment facility.

5

THE woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1945 until 1952 described his occupation, whenever during the course of their marriage she applied for a charge account or filled out the forms for a new gynecologist or telephone or gas connection, as “army officer.” In fact Carla Lovett made a convincing army wife, a druggist’s daughter from San Jose who was comfortable shopping at the commissary and spending large parts of her day at the officers’ club swimming pool, indifferent to her surroundings, passive in bad climates. Fort Hood and Georgetown and Manila and Schofield Barracks were the same to Carla Lovett, particularly after a drink or two.

The woman to whom Jack Lovett was married from 1962 until 1964 was a Honolulu divorcee named Betty Bennett, a woman who lived only a few doors from Janet and Dick Ziegler on Kahala beach and with whom Janet Ziegler occasionally played bridge and discussed shopping trips to the mainland. Betty Bennett had received the Kahala house as part of the settlement from her first husband, and continued to live in it during and after her marriage to Jack Lovett, an eighteen-month crossed connection that left little impression on either of them. When Betty Bennett filed for her divorce from Jack Lovett (I say “her” divorce reflexively, I suppose because Betty Bennett was a woman who applied the possessive pronoun reflexively, as in “my house,” “my 450-SL,” “my wedding lunch”) she described his occupation as “aircraft executive.” According to Jack Lovett’s visa applications in 1975 he was a businessman. According to Jack Lovett’s business cards in 1975 he was a consultant in international development.

According to Jack Lovett himself he was someone who had “various irons in the fire.”

Someone who kept “the usual balls in the air.”

Someone who did “a little business here and there.”

Someone who did what he could.



Anyone who did any reporting at all during the middle and late sixties and early seventies was apt to have run into Jack Lovett. He was a good contact. He knew a lot of things. After I finished my first novel and left Vogue and started reporting I actually ran into him quite a bit, most often in Honolulu but occasionally in one or another transit lounge or American embassy, and perhaps because he identified me as a friend of Inez Victor’s he seemed to exempt me from his instinctive distrust of reporters. I am not saying that he ever told me anything he did not want me to know. I am saying only that we talked, and once in a while we even talked about Inez Victor. I recall one such conversation in 1971 in Honolulu and another in 1973, on a Garuda 727 that had jammed its landing gear and was in the process of dumping its fuel over the South China Sea. Jack Lovett told me for example that he considered Inez “one of the most noble” women he had ever met. I remember this specifically because the word “noble” seemed from another era, and as such surprising, and mildly amusing.

He never told me exactly what it was he did, nor would I have asked. Exactly what Jack Lovett did was tacitly understood by most people who knew him, but not discussed. Had he been listed in Who’s Who, which he was not, even the most casual reader of his entry could have pieced together a certain pattern, discerned the traces of what intelligence people call “interest.” Such an entry would have revealed odd overlapping dates, unusual posts at unusual times. There would have been the assignment to Vientiane, the missions to Haiti, Quebec, Rawalpindi. There would have been the associations with companies providing air courier service, air cargo service, aircraft parts; companies with telephone numbers that began “800” and addresses that were post-office boxes in Miami, Honolulu, Palo Alto. There would have been blank spots. The military career would have seemed erratic, off track.

Finally, such an entry would have been starred, indicating that the subject had supplied no information, for Jack Lovett supplied information only when he saw the chance, however remote, of getting information in return. When he registered at a hotel he gave as his address one or another of those post-office boxes in Miami, Honolulu, Palo Alto. The apartment he kept in Honolulu, a one-bedroom rental near Ala Moana in a building inhabited mostly by call girls, was leased in the name “Mid-Pacific Development.” It was possible to see this tendency to obscure even the most inconsequential information as a professional reflex, but it was also possible to see it as something more basic, a temperamental secretiveness, a reticence that had not so much derived from Jack Lovett’s occupation as led him to it. I recall a story I heard in 1973 or 1974 from a UPI photographer who had run into Jack Lovett in a Hong Kong restaurant, an upstairs place in the Wanchai district where the customers kept their bottles in a cupboard above the cash register. Jack Lovett’s bottle was on his table, a quart of Johnnie Walker Black, but the name taped on the label, in his own handwriting, was “J. LOCKHART.” “You don’t want your name on too many bottles around town,” Jack Lovett reportedly said when the photographer mentioned the tape on the label. This was a man who for more than twenty years had maintained a grave attraction to a woman whose every move was photographed.



In this context I always see Inez Victor as she looked on a piece of WNBC film showing a party on the St. Regis Roof given by the governor of New York; some kind of afternoon party, a wedding or a christening or an anniversary, nominally private but heavily covered by the press. On this piece of film, which was made and first shown on March 18, 1975, one week exactly before Paul Christian fired the shots that set this series of events in motion, Inez Victor can be seen dancing with Harry Victor. She is wearing a navy-blue silk dress and a shiny dark straw hat with red cherries. “Marvelous,” she is heard to say repeatedly on the clip.

“Marvelous day.”

“You look marvelous.”

“Marvelous to be here.”

“Clear space for the senator,” a young man in a dark suit and a rep tie keeps saying. There are several such young men in the background, all carrying clipboards. This one seems only marginally aware of Inez Victor, and his clipboard collides a number of times with her quilted shoulder bag. “Senator Victor is here as the governor’s guest, give him some room please.

“—Taking a more active role,” a young woman with a microphone repeats.

“—Senator here as the governor’s guest, please no interviews, that’s all, that’s it, hold it.”

The band segues into “Isn’t It Romantic.”

“Hold two elevators,” another of the young men says.

“I’m just a private citizen,” Harry Victor says.

“Marvelous,” Inez Victor says.

I first saw this clip not when it was first shown but some months later, at the time Jack Lovett was in the news, when, for the two or three days it took the story of their connection to develop and play out, Inez Victor could be seen dancing on the St. Regis Roof perhaps half a dozen times between five P.M. and midnight.

6

LET me establish Inez Victor.

Born, as you know, Inez Christian in the Territory of Hawaii on the first day of January, 1935.

Known locally as Dwight Christian’s niece.

Cissy Christian’s granddaughter.

Paul Christian’s daughter, of course, but Paul Christian was usually in Cuernavaca or Tangier or sailing a 12.9-meter Trintella-class ketch through the Marquesas and did not get mentioned as often as his mother and his brother. Carol Christian’s daughter as well, but Carol Christian had materialized from the mainland and vanished back to the mainland, a kind of famous story in that part of the world, a novel in her own right, but not the one I have in mind.

Harry Victor’s wife.

Oh shit, Inez, Jack Lovett said.

Harry Victor’s wife.

He said it on the late March evening in 1975 when he and Inez sat in an empty off-limits bar across the bridge from Schofield Barracks and watched the evacuation on television of one or another capital in Southeast Asia. Conflicting reports, the anchorman said. Rapidly deteriorating situation. Scenes of panic and confusion. Down the tubes, the bartender said. Bye-bye Da Nang. On the screen above the bar the helicopter lifted again and again off the roof of the American mission and Jack Lovett watched without speaking and after a while he asked the bartender to turn off the sound and plug in the jukebox. No dancing, the bartender said. I’m already off fucking limits. You’re not off limits from dancing, Jack Lovett said. You’re off from fencing Sansui amps to an undercover. The bartender turned down the sound and plugged in the jukebox. Jack Lovett said nothing to Inez, only looked at her for a long time and then stood up and took her hand.

The Mamas and the Papas sang “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

The helicopter lifted again off the roof of the American mission.

In this bar across the bridge from Schofield Barracks Inez did not say “marvelous” as she danced. She did not say “marvelous day” as she danced. She did not say “you look marvelous,” or “marvelous to be here.” She did not say anything at all as she danced, did not even dance as you or I or the agency that regulated dancing in bars might have defined dancing. She only stood with her back against the jukebox and her arms around Jack Lovett. Her hair was loose and tangled from the drive out to Schofield and the graying streak at her left temple, the streak she usually brushed under, was exposed. Her eyes were closed against the flicker from the television screen.

“Fucking Arvin finally shooting each other,” the bartender said.

“Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said. “Harry Victor’s wife.”

7

BY the spring of 1975 Inez Victor had in fact been Harry Victor’s wife for twenty years.

Through Harry Victor’s two years with the Justice Department, through the appearance in The New York Times Magazine of “Justice for Whom? — A Young Lawyer Wants Out,” by Harry Victor and R.W. Dillon.

Through the Neighborhood Legal Coalition that Harry Victor and Billy Dillon organized out of the storefront in East Harlem. Through the publication of The View from the Street: Root Causes, Radical Solutions and a Modest Proposal, by Harry Victor, Based on Studies Conducted by Harry Victor with R.W. Dillon.

Through the marches in Mississippi and in the San Joaquin Valley, through Harry Victor’s successful campaigns for Congress in 1964 and 1966 and 1968, through the sit-ins at Harvard and at the Pentagon and at Dow Chemical plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Through Harry Victor’s appointment in 1969 to fill out the last three years of a Senate term left vacant by the death of the incumbent.

Through Connie Willis and through Frances Landau (“Inez, I’m asking you nice, behave, girls like that come with the life,” Billy Dillon said to Inez about Connie Willis and Frances Landau), through the major fundraising in California (“Inez, I’m asking you nice, put on your tap shoes, it’s big green on the barrelhead,” Billy Dillon said to Inez about California), through the speaking tours and the ad hoc committees and the fact-finding missions to Jakarta and Santiago and Managua and Phnom Penh; through the failed bid for a presidential nomination in 1972 and through the mistimed angling for a good embassy (this was one occasion when Jakarta and Santiago and Managua and Phnom Penh did not spring to Harry Victor’s lips) that occurred in the wreckage of that campaign.

Through the mill.

Through the wars.

Through the final run to daylight: through the maneuvering of all the above elements into a safe place on the field, into a score, into that amorphous but inspired convergence of rhetoric and celebrity known as the Alliance for Democratic Institutions.

Inez Victor had been there.

Because Inez Victor had been there many people believed that they knew her: not “most” people, since the demographics of Harry Victor’s phantom constituency were based on comfort and its concomitant uneasiness, but most people of a type, most people who read certain newspapers and bought certain magazines, most people who knew what kind of girls came with the life, most people who knew where there was big green on the barrelhead, most people who were apt to have noticed Inez buying printed sheets on sale in Bloomingdale’s basement or picking up stemmed strawberries at Gristede’s or waiting for one of her and Harry Victor’s twin children, the girl Jessie or the boy Adlai, in front of the Dalton School.

These were people who all knew exactly what Inez Victor did with the stemmed strawberries she picked up at Gristede’s (passed them in a silver bowl at her famous New Year’s Eve parties on Central Park West, according to Vogue); what Inez Victor did with the printed sheets she bought on sale in Bloomingdale’s basement (cut them into round tablecloths for her famous Fourth of July parties in Amagansett, according to W); and what Inez Victor had paid for the Ungaro khaki shirtwaists she wore during the 1968 convention, the 1968 Chicago convention during which Harry Victor was photographed for Life getting tear-gassed in Grant Park.

These were people who all knew someone who knew someone who knew that on the night in 1972 when Harry Victor conceded the California primary before the polls closed Inez Victor flew back to New York on the press plane and sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with an ABC cameraman and the photographer from Rolling Stone.

These people had all seen Inez, via telephoto lens, drying Jessie’s fine blond hair by the swimming pool at the house in Amagansett. These people had all seen Inez, in the Daily News, leaving Lenox Hill Hospital with Adlai on the occasion of his first automobile accident. These people had all seen photograph after photograph of the studied clutter in the library of the apartment on Central Park West, the Canton jars packed with marking pencils, the stacks of Le Monde and Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review, the legal pads, the several telephones, the framed snapshots of Harry Victor eating barbecue with Eleanor Roosevelt and of Harry Victor crossing a police line with Coretta King and of Harry Victor playing on the beach at Amagansett with Jessie and with Adlai and with Frances Landau’s Russian wolfhound.

These people had taken their toll.



By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had come to view most occasions as photo opportunities.

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had developed certain mannerisms peculiar to people in the public eye: a way of fixing her gaze in the middle distance, a habit of smoothing her face in repose by pressing up on her temples with her middle fingers; a noticeably frequent blink, as if the photographers’ strobes had triggered a continuing flash on her retina.

By which I mean to suggest that Inez Victor had lost certain details.

I recall being present one morning in a suite in the Hotel Doral in Miami, amid the debris of Harry Victor’s 1972 campaign for the nomination, when a feature writer from the Associated Press asked Inez what she believed to be the “major cost” of public life.

“Memory, mainly,” Inez said.

“Memory,” the woman from the Associated Press repeated.

“Memory, yes. Is what I would call the major cost. Definitely.” The suite in the Doral that morning was a set being struck. On a sofa that two workmen were pushing back against a wall Billy Dillon was trying to talk on the telephone. In the foyer a sound man from one of the networks was packing up equipment left the night before. “I believe I can speak for Inez when I say that we’re looking forward to a period of being just plain Mr. and Mrs. Victor,” Harry had said the night before on all three networks. Inez stood up now and began looking for a clean ashtray on a room-service table covered with half-filled glasses. “Something like shock treatment,” she added.

“You mean you’ve had shock treatment.”

“No. I mean you lose track. As if you’d had shock treatment.”

“I see. ‘Lose track’ of what exactly?”

“Of what happened.”

“I see.”

“Of what you said. And didn’t say.”

“I see. Yes. During the campaign.”

“Well, no. During your—” Inez looked at me for help. I pretended to be absorbed in the Miami Herald. Inez emptied a dirty ashtray into the lid of a film can and sat down again. “During your whole life.”

“You mentioned shock treatment. You haven’t personally—”

“I said no. Didn’t I say no? I said ‘as if.’ I said ‘something like.’ I meant you drop fuel. You jettison cargo. Eject the crew. You lose track.

There was a silence. Billy Dillon cradled the telephone against his shoulder and mimed a backhand volley. “It’s a game, Inez, it’s tennis,” Billy Dillon always said to Inez about interviews. It was a routine between them. I had seen him do it that morning, when Inez said that since I had come especially to see her she did not want to do the AP interview. “Sure you do,” Billy Dillon had said. “It’s only going to last x minutes. Finite time. For those x minutes you’re here to play. You’re going to place the ball”—here Billy Dillon had paused, and executed a shadow serve—“inside the lines. The major cost of public life is privacy, Inez, that’s an easy shot. The hardest part about Washington life is finding a sitter for the Gridiron Dinner. The fun part about Washington life is taking friends from home to the Senate cafeteria for navy-bean soup. You’ve tried the recipe at home but it never tastes the same. Yes, you do collect recipes. Yes, you do worry about the rising cost of feeding a family. Ninety-nine per cent of the people you know in Washington are basically concerned with the rising cost of feeding a family. Schools. Mortgages. Programs. You’ve always viewed victory as a mandate not for a man but for his programs. Now: you view defeat with mixed emotions. Why: because you’ve learned to treasure the private moments.”

Private moments,” Billy Dillon mouthed silently in the suite at the Hotel Doral.

Inez looked deliberately away from Billy Dillon.

“Here’s an example.” She lit a match, watched it burn, and blew it out. “You looked up the clips on me before you came here.”

“I did a little homework, yes.” The woman’s finger hovered over the stop button on her tape recorder. Now it was she who looked to me for help. I looked out the window. “Naturally. That’s my business. We all do.”

“That’s my point.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

“Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can’t tell the difference.”

“But that’s why I’m here. I’m not writing a piece from the clips. I’m writing a piece based on what you tell me.”

“You might as well write it from the clips,” Inez said. Her voice was reasonable. “Because I’ve lost track. Which is what I said in the first place.”

INEZ VICTOR CLAIMS SHE IS OFTEN MISQUOTED, is the way that went out on the Associated Press wire. “Somebody up there likes you, it doesn’t say INEZ VICTOR DENIES SHOCK TREATMENT,” Billy Dillon said when he read it.

8

I HAVE never been sure what Inez thought about how her days were passed during those years she spent in Washington and New York. The idea of “expressing” herself seems not to have occurred to her. She held the occasional job but pursued no particular work. Even the details of running a household did not engage her unduly. Her houses were professionally kept and, for all the framed snapshots and studied clutter, entirely impersonal, expressive not of some individual style but only of the conventions then current among the people she saw. Nothing of the remote world in which she had grown up intruded on the world in which she later found herself: the Christians, like many island families, had surrounded themselves with the mementos of their accomplishments, with water colors and painted tea cups and evidence of languages mastered and instruments played, framed recital programs and letters of commendation and the souvenirs of wedding trips and horse shows and trips to China, and it was the absence of any such jetsam that was eccentric in Inez’s houses, as if she had buckled her seat belt and the island had dematerialized beneath her.

Of course there were rumors about her. She liked painters, and usually had a table or two of them at her big parties, and a predictable number of people said that she had had an affair with this one or that one or all of them. According to Inez she never had. I know for a fact that she never had what was called a “problem about drinking,” another rumor, but the story that she did persisted, partly because Harry Victor did so little to discourage it. At a crowded restaurant in the East Fifties for example Harry Victor was heard asking Inez if she intended to drink her dinner. In that piece of WNBC film shot on the St. Regis Roof, another example, Harry Victor is seen taking a glass of champagne from Inez’s hand and passing it out of camera range.

Inez remained indifferent. She seemed to dwell as little on the rest of her life as she did on her jobs, which she tried and abandoned like seasonal clothes. When Harry Victor was in the Justice Department Inez worked, until the twins were born, in a docent capacity at the National Gallery. When Harry Victor left the Justice Department and came up to New York Inez turned up at Vogue, and was given one of those jobs that fashion magazines then kept for well-connected young women in unsettled circumstances, women who needed a place to pass the time between houses or marriages or lunches. Later she did a year at Parke-Bernet. She served on the usual boards, benefit committees, commissions for the preservation of wilderness and the enhancement of opportunity; when it became clear that Harry Victor would be making the run for the nomination and that Inez would need what Billy Dillon called a special interest, she insisted, unexpectedly and with considerable vehemence, that she wanted to work with refugees, but it was decided that refugees were an often controversial and therefore inappropriate special interest.

Instead, because Inez was conventionally interested in and by that time moderately knowledgeable about painting, she was named a consultant for the collection of paintings that hung in American embassies and residences around the world. In theory the wives of new ambassadors would bring Inez the measurements, furnished by the State Department, of the walls they needed to fill, and Inez would offer advice on which paintings best suited not only the wall space but the mood of the post. “Well, for example, I wouldn’t necessarily think of sending a Sargent to Zaire,” she explained to an interviewer, but she was hard put to say why. In any case only two new ambassadors were named during Inez’s tenure as consultant, which made this special interest less than entirely absorbing. As for wanting to work with refugees, she finally did, in Kuala Lumpur, and it occurred to me when I saw her there that Inez Victor had herself been a kind of refugee. She had the protective instincts of a successful refugee. She never looked back.

9

OR at least almost never.

I know of one occasion on which Inez Victor did in fact try to look back.

A try, an actual effort.

This effort was, for Inez, uncharacteristically systematic, and took place on the redwood deck of the borrowed house in which Harry and Inez Victor stayed the spring he lectured at Berkeley, between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions. It had begun with a quarrel after a faculty dinner in Harry’s honor. “I’ve always tried to talk up to the American people,” Harry had said when a physicist at the table questioned his approach to one or another energy program, and it had seemed to Inez that a dispirited pall fell over what had been, given the circumstances, a lively and pleasant evening.

“Not down,” Harry had added. “You talk down to the American people at your peril.”

The physicist had pressed his point, which was technical, and abstruse.

“Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t,” Harry had said. “I happen to believe he was.”

In fact Inez had heard Harry say this a number of times before, usually when he had no facts at hand, and she might never have remarked on it had Harry not mentioned the physicist on the drive home.

“Hadn’t done his homework,” Harry had said. “Those guys get their Nobels and start coasting.”

Inez, who was driving, said nothing.

“Unless there’s something behind us I don’t know about,” Harry said as she turned into San Luis Road, “you might try lightening up the foot on the gas pedal.”

“Unless you’re running for something I don’t know about,” Inez heard herself say, “you might try lightening up the rhetoric at the dinner table.”

There had been a silence.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Harry said finally, his voice at first stiff and hurt, and then, marshalling for second strike: “I don’t really care if you take out your quite palpable unhappiness on me, but I’m glad the children are in New York.”

“Away from my quite palpable unhappiness I suppose you mean.”

“On the money.”

They had gone to bed in silence, and, the next morning, after Harry left for the campus without speaking, Inez took her coffee and a package of cigarettes out into the sun on the redwood deck and sat down to consider the phrase “quite palpable unhappiness.” It did not seem to her that she was palpably unhappy, but neither did it seem that she was palpably happy. “Happiness” and “unhappiness” did not even seem to be cards in the hand she normally played, and there on the deck in the thin morning sunlight she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.

She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges. There was a lunch in Paris that she remembered in detail: a late lunch with Harry and the twins at Pré Catelan in the rain. She remembered rain streaming down the big windows, rain blowing in the trees, the branches brushing the glass and the warm light inside. She remembered Jessie crowing with delight and pointing imperiously at a poodle seated on a gilt chair across the room. She remembered Harry unbuttoning Adlai’s wet sweater, kissing Jessie’s wet hair, pouring them each a half glass of white wine.

There was an entire day in Hong Kong that she managed to reconstruct, a day she had spent alone with Jessie in a borrowed house overlooking Repulse Bay. She and Harry had dropped Adlai in Honolulu with Janet and Dick Ziegler and they had bundled Jessie onto a plane to Hong Kong and when they landed at dawn they learned that Harry was expected in Saigon for a situation briefing. Harry had flown immediately down to Saigon and Inez had waited with Jessie in this house that belonged to the chief of the Time bureau in Hong Kong. The potted begonias outside that house had made Inez happy and the parched lawn made her happy and the particular cast of the sun on the sea made her happy and it even made her happy that the Time bureau chief had mentioned, as he gave her the keys at the airport, that baby cobras had recently been seen in the garden. This introduction of baby cobras into the day had lent Inez a sense of transcendent usefulness, a reason to carry Jessie wherever Jessie wanted to go. She had carried Jessie from the porch to the swing in the garden. She had carried Jessie from the swing in the garden to the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.

There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.

“Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”

The doctor came in a sweat suit.

“I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”

“I’m right here,” Harry said.

“Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.

“It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.

“It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”

“This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.

The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”

Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.

She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

“My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”

The therapist smiled.

Inez lit a cigarette.

It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”

“Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”

“Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”

“Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”

“Cynthia who?” Harry said.

“Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”

“At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”

“You always say her. Her name is Jessie.”

I know her goddamn name.

Strike Ann Arbor.

Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.

Strike Colorado Springs.

Adlai already had his agenda.

Jessie looked up from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and smiled fleetingly at the glass partition.

“The ‘problem at hand,’ as you put it, is substance habituation.” The therapist opened a drawer and extracted an ashtray and slid it across the desk toward Inez. She was still smiling. “I notice you smoke.”

“I do, yes.” Inez crushed out the cigarette and stood up. Jessie’s complexion was clear and her hair was like honey and there was no way of telling that beneath the sleeves of the Dalton School sweatshirt there were needle tracks visible on her smooth tanned arms. “I also drink coffee.”

The therapist’s expression did not change.

Let me die and get it over with.

Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.

Don’t tell Daddy.

Inez picked up her jacket.

On the other side of the glass partition Jessie took a pocket mirror from her shoulder bag and began lining her eyes with the IBM testing pencil.

“What I don’t do is shoot heroin,” Inez said.



The second therapist believed that the answer lay in a closer examination of the sibling gestalt. The third employed a technique incorporating elements of aversion therapy. At the clinic in Seattle to which Jessie was finally sent in the fall of 1974, a private facility specializing in the treatment of what the fourth therapist called adolescent chemical dependency, the staff referred to the patients as clients, maintained them on methadone, and obtained for them part-time jobs “suited to the character structure and particular skills of the individual client.” Jessie’s job was as a waitress in a place on Puget Sound called King Crab’s Castle. “Pretty cinchy,” Jessie said on the telephone, “if you can keep the pickled beet slice from running into the crab louis.”

The bright effort in Jessie’s voice had constricted Inez’s throat.

“It’s all experience,” Inez said finally, and Jessie giggled.

“Really,” Jessie said, emphasizing the word to suggest agreement. She was not yet eighteen.

10

OTHER COSTS.

Inez had stopped staying alone in the apartment on Central Park West after the superintendent told a reporter from Newsday that he had let himself in to drain a radiator and Mrs. Victor had asked him to fix her a double vodka. She took fingernail scissors and scratched the label off empty prescription bottles before she threw them in the trash. She stopped patronizing a bookstore on Madison Avenue after she noticed the names, addresses, and delivery instructions for all the customers, including herself (“doorman-Lloyd, maid lvs at 4”) in an open account book by the cash register. She would not allow letters that came unsolicited from strangers to be opened inside the apartment, or packages that came from anyone. She had spoken to Billy Dillon about the possibility of suing People for including Adlai’s accidents in an article on the problems of celebrity children, and also of enjoining Whos Who to delete mention of herself and Jessie and Adlai from Harry Victor’s entry. “I don’t quite see the significance, Inez,” Billy Dillon had said. “Since I see your name in the paper two, three times a week minimum.”

“The significance is,” Inez said, “that some stranger might be sitting in a library somewhere reading Whos Who.

“Consider this stranger your bread and butter, an interested citizen,” Billy Dillon said, but Inez never could. Strangers remembered. Strangers suffered disappointments, and became confused. A stranger might suffer a disappointment too deep to be lanced by a talk with Newsday, and become confused. Life outside camera range, life as it was lived by (Inez imagined then) her father and her Uncle Dwight and her sister Janet, had become for Inez only a remote idea, something she knew about but did not entirely comprehend. She did not for example comprehend how her father could give her telephone number to strangers he met on airplanes, and then call to remonstrate with her when he heard she had been short on the telephone. “I think you might have spared ten minutes,” Paul Christian had said on one such call. “This young man you hung up on happens to have a quite interesting grassy-knoll slant on Sal Mineo’s murder, he very much wanted Harry to hear it.” She did not for example comprehend what moved Dwight to send her a clipping of every story in the Honolulu Advertiser in which her or Harry’s name appeared. These clippings came in bundles, with Dwight’s card attached. “Nice going,” he sometimes pencilled on the card. Nor did she comprehend how Janet could have agreed, during the 1972 campaign, to be interviewed on CBS Reports about her and Inez’s childhood. This particular CBS Reports had been devoted to capsule biographies of the candidates’ wives and Inez had watched it with Harry and Billy Dillon in the library of the apartment on Central Park West. There had been a clip of Harry talking about Inez’s very special loyalty and there had been a clip of Billy Dillon talking about Inez’s very special feeling for the arts and there had been a clip of the headmaster at the Dalton School talking about the very special interest Inez took in education, but Janet’s appearance on the program was a surprise.

“I wouldn’t say ‘privileged,’ no,” Janet had said on camera. She had seemed to be sitting barefoot on a catamaran in front of her beach house. “No. Off the mark. Not ‘privileged.’ I’d just call it a marvelous simple way of life that you might describe as gone with the wind.”

“I hope nobody twigs she’s talking about World War Two,” Billy Dillon said.

“Of course everybody had their marvelous Chinese amah then,” Janet was saying on camera. Her voice was high and breathy and nervous. The camera angle had changed to show Koko Head. Inez picked up a legal pad and began writing. “And then Nezzie and I had — oh, I suppose a sort of governess, a French governess, she was from Neuilly, needless to say Mademoiselle spoke flawless French, I remember Nezzie used to drive her wild by speaking pidgin.”

“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon said.

Inez did not look up from the legal pad.

“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon repeated, “and ‘Nezzie.’ ”

“I was never called ‘Nezzie.’ ”

“You are now,” Billy Dillon said.

“They pan left,” Harry Victor said, “they could pick up Janet’s private-property-no-trespassing-no-beach-access sign.” He reached under the table to pick up the telephone. “Also her Mercedes. This should be Mort.”

“Ask Mort how he thinks the governess from Neuilly tests out,” Billy Dillon said. “Possibly Janet could make Mademoiselle available to do some coffees in West Virginia.”

Inez said nothing.

She had never been called Nezzie.

She had never spoken pidgin.

The governess from Neuilly had not been a governess at all but the French wife of a transport pilot at Hickam who rented the studio over Cissy Christian’s garage for a period of six months between the Leyte Gulf and the end of the war.

Janet was telling CBS Reports how she and Inez had been taught to store table linens between sheets of blue tissue paper.

Harry was on his evening conference call with Mort Goldman at MIT and Perry Young at Harvard and the petrochemical people at Stanford.

No Nezzie.

No pidgin.

No governess from Neuilly.

“That tip about the blue tissue paper goes straight to the hearts and minds,” Billy Dillon said.

“Mort still sees solar as negative policy, Billy, maybe you better pick up,” Harry Victor said.

“Tell Mort we just kiss it,” Billy Dillon said. “Broad strokes only. Selected venues.” He watched as Inez tore the top sheet from the legal pad on which she had been writing. “Strictly for the blue-tissue-paper crowd.”

1) Shining Star, Inez had written on the piece of paper.

2) Twinkling Star

3) Morning Star

4) Evening Star

5) Southern Star

6) North Star

7) Celestial Star

8) Meridian Star

9) Day Star

10)???

“Hey,” Billy Dillon said. “Inez. If you’re drafting a cable to Janet, tell her we’re retiring her number.”

“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”

Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the Lurline Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry. Aloha oe. I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been Night Star, but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.

11

IN the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.

What did this tell us, I asked my class.

Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.

Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.

Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:

Of my three-score years and ten


These twenty would not come again.


Black wing, brown wing, hover over


Twenty years and the spring is over.


This was the school in which we learned


That time was the fire in which we burned.

Sentimental sojourn.

Less time left for those visions and revisions.

In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.” Many of the students to whom I spoke said “being liberated.” “The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news,” one said, and when next we spoke I modified “falling” to “closing down.”

Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, and the Berkeley Gazette. Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.

I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.

I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repetitions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN HONOLULU, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the Chronicle and a separate sidebar in the New York Times, VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, were Inez and Harry Victor.

That was March 26, 1975.

A Wednesday morning.

I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.

12

SEE it this way.

See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

The warm rain down on the runways.

The smell of jet fuel.

The military charters, Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, clustered around the service hangars.

The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land masses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.

The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.

Five-thirty-seven A.M.

The ground crew in thin yellow slickers.

The steps wheeled into place.

The passenger service representative waiting at the bottom of the steps, carrying an umbrella, a passenger manifest in a protective vinyl envelope and, over his left arm, one plumeria lei.



The woman for whom both the passenger service representative and Jack Lovett are watching (Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport is not the same as Jack Lovett’s reason for being in the operations room at the airport) will be the next-to-last passenger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another glass of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and lustreless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark glasses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the passenger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.

The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.

She looks up, smiles at the passenger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.

Aloha, he would be saying.

So kind.

Tragic circumstances.

Anything we as a company or I personally can do.

Facilitate arrangements.

When the senator arrives.

So kind.

As the passenger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a glass window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.

This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.

Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.

Jack Lovett watching her.

“Get her in out of the goddamn rain,” Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.

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