The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  When she arrived at the house in Sweetwater at five-thirty that afternoon the screen door was unlatched and the television was on and her father was asleep in a chair, the remote clutched in his hand, a half-finished drink and a can of jalapeño bean dip at his elbow. She had never before seen this house but it was indistinguishable from the house in Hialeah and before that the unit in Opa-Locka and for that matter the place between Houston and NASA. They were just places he rented and they all looked alike. The house in Vegas had looked different. Her mother had still been living with him when they had the house in Vegas.

  Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

  She would deal with that later.

  She had dealt with the plane and she would deal with that.

  She sat on a stool at the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen and began reading the Miami Herald she had picked up at the airport, very methodically, every page in order, column one to column eight, never turning ahead to the break, only occasionally glancing at the television screen. The Knight-Ridder reporter who had been sitting next to her on the plane the day before appeared to have based his file entirely on the most-likely-voters story the wires had moved. California political insiders are predicting a dramatic last-minute shift in primary voting patterns here, his story began, misleadingly. An American hostage who had walked out of Lebanon via Damascus said at his press conference in Wiesbaden that during captivity he had lost faith not only in the teachings of his church but in God. Hostage Describes Test of Faith, the headline read, again misleadingly. She considered ways in which the headline could have been made accurate (Hostage Describes Loss of Faith? Hostage Fails Test of Faith?), then put down the Herald and studied her father. He had gotten old. She had called him at Christmas and she had talked to him from Laguna last week but she had not seen him and at some point in between he had gotten old.

  She was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

  Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

  She had told him on the telephone from Laguna but it had not gotten through, she was going to have to tell him again, he would want to talk about it.

  It occurred to her suddenly that this was why she was here.

  She had arrived at LAX with every intention of returning to Washington and had heard herself asking instead for a flight to Miami.

  She had asked for a flight to Miami because she was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

  That her mother had died was not going to change the course of his days but it would be a subject, it was something they would need to get through.

  They would not need to talk about Catherine. Or rather: he would ask how Catherine was and she would say fine and then he would ask if Catherine liked school and she would say yes.

  She should call Catherine. She should let Catherine know where she was.

  We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

  She would call Catherine later. She would call Catherine the next day.

  Her father snored, a ragged apnea snore, and the remote dropped from his hand. On the television screen the graphic Broward Closeup appeared, over film of what seemed to be a mosque in Pompano Beach. It developed that discussion of politics had been forbidden at this mosque because many of what the reporter called Pompano Muslims came from countries at war with one another. “In Broward County at least,” the reporter concluded, “Muslims who have known only war can now find peace.”

  This too was misleading. It occurred to her that possibly what was misleading was the concept of “news” itself, a liberating thought. She picked up the remote and pressed the mute.

  “Goddamn ragheads,” her father said, but did not open his eyes.

  “Daddy,” she said tentatively.

  “Goddamn ragheads deserve to get nuked.” He opened his eyes. “Kitty. Don’t. Jesus Christ. Don’t do that.”

  “It’s not Kitty,” she said. “It’s her daughter. Your daughter.”

  She did not know how long she had been crying but when she groped in her bag for a tissue she found only damp wads.

  “It’s Elena,” she said finally. “It’s me.”

  “Ellie,” her father said. “What the hell.”

  That would be one place to begin this story.

  Elena McMahon’s father getting involved with the people who wanted to make the deal with Fidel to take back the Sans Souci would have been another.

  Way back. Much earlier. Call that back story.

  This would have been another place to begin, also back story, just an image: a single-engine Cessna flying low, dropping a roll of toilet paper over a mangrove clearing, the paper streaming and looping as it catches on the treetops, the Cessna gaining altitude as it banks to retrace its flight path. A man, Elena McMahon’s father, the man in the house in Sweetwater but much younger, retrieves the cardboard roll, its ends closed with masking tape. He cuts the masking tape with an army knife. He takes out a piece of paper. Suspend all activity, the paper reads. Report without delay.

  November 22 1963.

  Dick McMahon’s footnote to history.

  Treat Morrison was in Indonesia the day that roll of toilet paper drifted down over the Keys.

  On special assignment at the consulate in Surabaya.

  They locked the consulate doors and did not open them for three days.

  Treat Morrison’s own footnote to history.

  8

  I still believe in history.

  Let me amend that.

  I still believe in history to the extent that I believe history to be made exclusively and at random by people like Dick McMahon. There are still more people like Dick McMahon around than you might think, most of them old but still doing a little business, keeping a hand in, an oar in the water, the wolf from the door. They can still line up some jeeps in Shreveport, they can still lay hands on some slots in Beaumont, they can still handle the midnight call from the fellow who needs a couple or three hundred Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights. They may not remember all the names they used but they remember the names they did not use. They may have trouble sorting out the details of all they knew but they remember having known it.

  They remember they ran some moves.

  They remember they had personal knowledge of certain actions.

  They remember they knew Carlos Prío, they remember they heard certain theories about his suicide. They remember they knew Johnny Roselli, they remember they heard certain theories about how he turned up in the oil drum in Biscayne Bay. They remember many situations in which certain fellows show up in the middle of the night asking for something and a couple or three days later these same identical fellows turn up in San Pedro Sula or Santo Domingo or Panama right in the goddamn thick of it.

  Christ if I had a dollar for every time somebody came to me and said he was thinking about doing a move I’d be a rich man today, Elena McMahon’s father said the day she was going down to where he berthed the Kitty Rex.

  For the first two weeks at the house in Sweetwater she conserved energy by not noticing anything. That was how she put it to herself, she was conserving energy, as if attention were a fossil fuel. She drove out to Key Biscayne and let her mind go fallow, absorbing only the bleached flatness of the place, the pale aquamarine water and the gray sky and the drifts of white coral sand and the skeletons of live oak and oleander broken when the storms rolled in. One day when it rained and the wind was blowing she walked across the lowest of the causeways, overcome by a need to feel the water lapping over her sandals. By then she had already shed her clothes, pared down to essentials, concentrated her needs, wrapped up her gabardine jacket and unopened packages of panty hose and dropped them, a tacit farewell to the distractions of the temperate zone, in a Goodwill box
on Eighth Street.

  There’s some question here what you’re doing, the desk had said when she called to say she was in Miami. Siegel’s been covering for you, but you understand we’ll need to move someone onto this on a through-November basis.

  That would be fair, she had said.

  She had not yet conserved enough energy to resume thinking on a through-November basis.

  At a point late each day she would focus on finding something that her father would eat, something he would not immediately set aside in favor of another drink, and she would go downtown to a place she remembered he liked and ask for containers of black beans or shrimp in garlic sauce she could reheat later.

  From the Floridita, she would say when her father looked without interest at his plate.

  In Havana, he would say, doubtful.

  The one here, she would say. The Floridita on Flagler Street. You used to take me there.

  The Floridita your mother and I knew was in Havana, he would say.

  Which would lead as if on replay to his telling her again about the night at the Floridita in he believed 1958 with her mother and Carlos Prío and Fidel and one of the Murchisons. The Floridita in Havana, he would specify each time. Havana was the Floridita your mother and I knew, goddamn but we had some fun there, just ask your mother, she’ll tell you.

  Which would lead in the same replay mode to her telling him again that her mother was dead. On each retelling he would seem to take it in. Goddamn, he would say. Kitty’s gone. He would make her repeat certain details, as if to fix the flickering fact of it.

  She had not known how sick Kitty was, no.

  She had not seen Kitty before she died, no.

  There had been no funeral, no.

  Kitty had been cremated, yes.

  Kitty’s last husband was named Ward, yes.

  It was true that Ward used to sell pharmaceuticals, yes, but no, she would not describe it as dealing dope and no, she did not think there had been any funny business. In any case Ward was beside the point, which was this: her mother was dead.

  Her father’s eyes would go red then, and he would turn away.

  Pretty Kitty, he would say as if to himself. Kit-Cat.

  Half an hour later he would again complain that he had tried to call Kitty a night or two before and the asshole dope dealer she lived with had refused to put her on the line.

  Because he couldn’t, Elena would say again. Because she’s dead.

  Sometimes when the telephone rang in the middle of the night she would wake, and hear the front door close and a car engine turning over, her father’s ’72 Cadillac Seville convertible, parked on the spiky grass outside the room in which she slept. The headlights would sweep the ceiling of the room as he backed out onto the street. Most nights she would get up and open a bottle of beer and sit in bed drinking it until she fell asleep again, but one night the beer did not work and she was still awake, standing barefoot in the kitchen watching a local telethon on which a West Palm Beach resident in a sequined dress seemed to be singing gospel, when her father came in at dawn.

  What the hell, her father said.

  I said to Satan get thee behind me, the woman in the sequined dress was singing on the television screen.

  You shouldn’t be driving, Elena said.

  Victory today is mine.

  Right, I should take out my teeth and go to the nursing home, he said. Jesus Christ, you want to kill me too?

  The woman in the sequined dress snapped her mike cord as she segued into “After You’ve Been There Ten Thousand Years,” and Dick McMahon transferred his flickering rage to the television screen. I been there ten thousand years I still won’t want to see you, honey, he shouted at the woman in the sequined dress. Because honey you are worthless, you are worse than worthless, you are trash. By the time he refocused on Elena he had softened, or forgotten. How about a drink, he said.

  She got him a drink.

  If you have any interest in what I’m doing, he said as she sat down at the table across from him, all I can say is it’s major.

  She said nothing. She had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what her father was doing. This had been difficult only when she had to fill out a form that asked for Father’s Occupation. He did deals. Does deals? No. She had usually settled on Investor. If it came up in conversation she would say that her father bought and sold things, leaving open the possibility, in those parts of the country where she had lived until 1982, raw sunbelt cities riding high on land trades, that what he bought and sold was real estate. She had lost her scholarship at the University of Nevada because the administration had changed the basis for granting aid from merit to need and she had recognized that it would be a waste of time to ask her father to fill out a financial report.

  Right from the top, he said. Top shelf.

  She said nothing.

  This one turns out the way it’s supposed to turn out, he said, I’ll be in a position to deal myself out, fold my hand, take the Kitty Rex down past Largo and stay there. Some life. Catching fish and bumming around the shallows. Not my original idea of a good time but it beats sitting here getting old.

  Who exactly is running this one, she said carefully.

  What do you care, he said, suddenly wary. What did you ever care who was running any of them.

  I mean, she said, how did whoever is running this one happen to decide to work through you.

  Why wouldn’t they work through me, he said. I still got my teeth. I’m not in the nursing home yet. No thanks to you.

  Dick McMahon had closed his eyes, truculent, and had not woken until she took the glass from his hand and put a cotton blanket over his legs.

  What do you hear from your mother, he had said then.

  9

  That was the morning, June 15, a Friday, when she should have known it was time to cut and run.

  She knew how to cut and run.

  She had done it often enough.

  Cut and run, cut her losses, just walked away.

  She had just walked away from her mother for example.

  See where it got her.

  She had flown to Laguna as soon as she got the call but there had been no funeral. Her connection into John Wayne was delayed and by the time she arrived in the cold May twilight her mother had already been cremated. You know how Kitty felt about funerals, Ward said repeatedly. Actually I never heard her mention funerals, Elena said finally, thinking only to hear more about what her mother had said or thought, but Ward had looked at her as if wounded. She was welcome, he said, to do what she wanted with the cremains, the remains, the ashes or whatever, the cremains was what they called them, but in case she had nothing specific in mind he had already arranged with the Neptune Society. You know how Kitty felt about open ocean, he said. Open ocean was something else Elena did not recall her mother mentioning. So if it’s all the same to you, Ward said, visibly relieved by her silence, I’ll go ahead with the arrangements as planned.

  She found herself wondering how short a time she could reasonably stay.

  There would be nothing out of John Wayne but she could get a redeye out of LAX.

  Straight shot up the 405.

  Ward’s daughter Belinda was in the bedroom, packing what she called the belongings. The belongings would go to the hospice thrift shop, Belinda said, but she knew that Kitty would want Elena to take what she wanted. Elena opened a drawer, aware of Belinda watching her.

  Kitty never got tired of mentioning you, Belinda said. I’d be over here dealing with the Medicare forms or some other little detail and she’d find a way to mention you. It might be you’d just called from wherever.

  The drawer seemed to be filled with turbans, snoods, shapeless head coverings of a kind Elena could not associate with her mother.

  Or, Belinda said, it might be that you hadn’t. I got her those for the chemo.

  Elena closed the drawer.

  Moved by the dim wish to preserve something of her mother from consignment
to the hospice thrift shop she tried to remember objects in which her mother had set special stock, but in the end took only an ivory bracelet she remembered her mother wearing and a creased snapshot, retrieved from a carton grease-penciled OUT, of her mother and father seated in folding metal lawn chairs on either side of a portable barbecue outside the house in Las Vegas. Before she left she stood in the kitchen watching Ward demonstrate his ability to microwave one of the several dozen individual casseroles stacked in the freezer. Your mother did those just before she went down, Belinda said, raising her voice over Jeopardy. Kitty would have aced that, Ward said when a contestant on-screen missed a question in the Famous Travelers category. See what he does, Belinda said as if Ward could not hear. He keeps working in Kitty’s name, same way Kitty used to work in yours. Two hours later Elena had been at LAX, trying to get cash from an ATM and unable to remember either her bank code or her mother’s maiden name.

  It might be you’d just called from wherever.

  In the deep nowhere safety of the United lounge she drank two glasses of water and tried to remember her calling card number.

  Or it might be that you hadn’t.

  Thirty-six hours after that she had been on the tarmac at Newark with the agent saying where’s the dog, we don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit.

  She had cut and run from that too.

  No more schedules, no more confetti, no more balloons floating free.

  She had walked away from that the way she had walked away from the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She did not think Wynn, she thought the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Tile floors, white walls, tennis lunches on Sunday afternoons.

  Men with even tans and recent manicures, women with killer serves and bodies minutely tuned against stretch marks; always an actor or two or three, often a player just off the circuit. The beauty part is, the Justice Department still gets its same take, Wynn would be saying on the telephone, and then, his hand over the receiver, Tell whoever you got in the kitchen it’s time to lay on the lunch. Nothing about those Sunday afternoons would have changed except this: Wynn’s office, not Elena, would now call the caterer who laid on the lunch.