The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  The big Stellas would still flank the door.

  Wynn would still wake at night when the tide reached ebb and the sea went silent.

  Goddamn what’s the matter out there.

  Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda, blue so intense you could drown in it.

  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.

  What exactly did you have in Malibu you don’t have now, she had asked Catherine, and Catherine had walked right into it, Catherine had never even seen it coming. You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach, Catherine said. Or the Jacuzzi. Or the pool.

  Anything else, she had asked Catherine, her voice neutral.

  The tennis court.

  Is that all.

  The three cars, Catherine said after a silence. We had three cars.

  A Jacuzzi, she had said to Catherine. A pool. A tennis court. Three cars. Is that your idea of a real life?

  Catherine, humiliated, outmaneuvered, had slammed down the phone.

  Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda.

  An equally indefensible idea of a real life.

  She had been thinking that over when Catherine called back.

  I had my father thank you very much.

  She was even about to just walk away from Catherine.

  She knew she was. She knew the signs. She was losing focus on Catherine. She was losing momentum on Catherine. If she could even consider walking away from Catherine she could certainly walk away from this house in Sweetwater. That she did not was the beginning of the story as some people in Miami came to see it.

  10

  “I have frequently stated that I did not intend to set down either autobiographical notes of any kind or any version of events as I have witnessed and affected them. It has been my firm and long-held conviction that events, for better or for worse, speak for themselves, work as it were toward their own ends. After reviewing published accounts of certain of these events, however, I find my own role in them to have been misrepresented. Therefore, on this August Sunday morning, with a tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia, I have determined to set forth as concisely as possible, and in as much detail as is consistent with national security, certain actions I took in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.”

  So begins the four-hundred-and-seventy-six-page transcript of the taped statement that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley with instructions that it be sealed to scholars until five years after his death.

  Those five years have now passed.

  As have, and this would have been his calculation, any lingering spasms of interest in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

  Or so it would seem.

  Since, seven years after Treat Morrison’s death and two years after the unsealing of the transcript, I remain the single person to have asked to see it.

  MORRISON, TREAT AUSTIN, ambassador-at-large; b. San Francisco Mar. 3, 1930; s. Francis J. and Margaret (Austin) M; B.A., U. of Calif. at Berkeley, 1951; grad. National War College 1956; m. Diane Waring, Dec. 5, 1953 (dec. 1983). Commissioned 2nd lt. U.S. Army 1951, served in Korea, Germany, mil. attaché Chile 1953-54; spec, asst to commander SHAPE Paris 1955; attaché to US Mission to E.C. Brussels 1956-57

  So Treat Morrison’s Who’s Who entry began.

  And continued.

  All the special postings enumerated, all the private-sector sojourns specified.

  All there.

  Right down to Office: Dept. of State, 2201 C St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20520.

  Without giving the slightest sense of what Treat Morrison actually did.

  Which was fix things.

  What was remarkable about those four hundred and seventy-six pages that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library was, as in his Who’s Who entry, less what was said than what was not said. What was said was predictable enough, globalism versus regionalism, full Boland, failed nations, correct interventions, multilateral approach, Directive 25, Resolution 427, criteria not followed, nothing Treat Morrison could not have said at the Council on Foreign Relations, nothing he had not said, up there in the paneled room with the portrait of David Rockefeller and the old guys nodding off and the young guys asking pinched textbook questions and the willowy young women who worked on the staff standing in the back of the room like geishas, shuttle up and hop a flight back down with one of the corporate guys, maybe learn something for a change, you’d be surprised, they’ve got their own projections, their own risk analysts, no bureaucracy, no commitments to stale ideologies, none of those pinched textbook questions, they can afford to keep out there ahead of the power curve, corporate guys are light-years ahead of us.

  Sometimes.

  Four hundred and seventy-six pages on correct interventions and no clue that a correct intervention was for Treat Morrison an intervention in which when you run out of options you can still get your people to the airport.

  Four hundred and seventy-six pages with only a veiled suggestion of Treat Morrison’s rather spectacular indifference to the conventional interests and concerns of his profession, only an oblique flash of his particular maladaption, which was to be a manipulator of abstracts whose exclusive interest was in the specific. You get just the slightest hint of that maladaption in tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling, just the barest lapse before the sonorous recovery of outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia.

  No hint at all of his long half-mad gaze.

  Wide spindrift gaze toward paradise, Elena McMahon said the first time she was alone with him.

  He said nothing.

  A poem, she said.

  Still he said nothing.

  Something galleons of Carib fire, she said, something something the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

  He studied her without speaking. Diane read poetry, he said then.

  There had been a silence.

  Diane was his wife.

  Diane was dead.

  Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness, survived by, in lieu of flowers.

  I wasn’t thinking about the Carib fire part, Elena had said finally.

  Yes you were, Treat Morrison had said.

  11

  What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds.

  No place you could not pass a hundred.

  There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida.

  Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón.

  Goddamn but we had some fun there.

  The music would give you the sweet heavy air, the music would give you Havana.

  Imagine what the music was as: Barry Sedlow folded the bills into his money clip without looking at them, kicked open the screen door, and walked down the dock, a little something in the walk, a definite projection of what a woman less wary than Elena might (might, could, would, did, wanted to, needed to) mistake for sex.

  Close on Elena. Watching Barry Sedlow.

  “Looks like you’re waiting for somebody,” Barry Sedlow said.

  “I think you,” Elena McMahon said.

  Her father had begun to run the fever dur
ing the evening of Saturday the sixteenth of June. She had known something was wrong because the drink he had made at seven remained untouched at ten, its color mottled by melted ice.

  “I don’t know what that foul ball expected to get out of showing up here,” he said about midnight.

  “What foul ball,” she said.

  “What’s his name, Epperson, Max Epperson, the guy you were cozying up with tonight.”

  She said nothing.

  “Come on,” he said. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “I don’t remember seeing anyone but you tonight,” she said finally.

  “Epperson. Not the guy with the mickey-mouse vest. The other one.”

  She had framed her response carefully. “I guess neither of them made an impression on me.”

  “Epperson made an impression on you all right.”

  She had thought this over. “Listen to me,” she had said then. “No one was here.”

  “Have it your way,” he said.

  She had driven to an all-night drugstore to buy a thermometer. His temperature, when she managed to take it, was 102. By morning it was 103.2, and she took him to the emergency room at Jackson Memorial. It was not the nearest hospital but it was the one she knew, a director she and Wynn knew had been shooting there, Catherine had been on spring vacation and they had taken her to visit the location. Nothing straight bourbon won’t fix, her father said in the emergency room when the triage nurse asked what was wrong with him. By noon he had been admitted and she had signed the forms and heard the difference between Medicare A and B and when she got back upstairs to the room he had already tried to yank out the IV line and there was blood all over the sheets and he was crying.

  “Get me out of here,” he said. “Goddamnit get me out of here.”

  The IV nurse was on another floor and by the time she got back and got the line running again the nurse with the narcotics keys was on another floor and it was close to five before they got him sedated. By dawn his temperature had dropped below 101 but he was focused exclusively on Max Epperson. Epperson was welshing on his word. Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per. Somebody had to talk reason to Epperson, Epperson could queer the whole deal, Epperson was off the reservation, didn’t know the first thing about the business he was in.

  “I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in,” she said.

  “Christ, what business are they all in,” her father said.

  They would need more blood work before they had a diagnosis, the resident said. The resident was wearing a pink polo shirt and kept his eyes fixed on the nurses’ station, as if to distance himself from the situation and from Elena. They would need a scan, an MRI, they would need something else she did not get the name of. They would of course order a psychiatric evaluation, although evidence of mental confusion would not in itself be a diagnostic criterion. Such mental confusion, if there was mental confusion, was incidental, a secondary complication. Whatever the diagnosis, it would not be uncommon to see a psychotic break with a fever this high in a patient this age.

  “He’s not that old,” she said. This was pointlessly argumentive but she disliked the resident. “He’s seventy-four.”

  “After retirement you have to expect a deficit.”

  “He’s not retired either.” She could not seem to stop herself. “He’s quite active.”

  The resident shrugged.

  At noon a second resident arrived to do the psychiatric evaluation. He too was wearing a polo shirt, mint green, and he too avoided Elena’s eyes. She had fixed her gaze on the signs posted in the room and tried not to listen, I/O. INFECTIOUS SHARPS ONLY. “This is just a little game,” the psychiatric resident said. “Can you tell me the name of the current president of the United States.”

  “Some game,” Dick McMahon said.

  “Take your time,” the psychiatric resident said. “Don’t let me rush you.”

  “Count on it.”

  There was a silence.

  “Daddy,” Elena said.

  “I get the game,” Dick McMahon said. “I’m supposed to say Herbert Hoover, then he puts me away in the home.” His eyes narrowed. “All right. Wheel of Fortune. Herbert Hoover.” He paused, watching the psychiatric resident. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S Truman. Dwight David Eisenhower. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lyndon Baines Johnson. Richard Milhous Nixon. Gerald whatever his name was, kept tripping over his feet. Jimmy something. The Christer. Then the one now. The one the old dummy’s not meant to remember. The other old dummy. Reagan.”

  “Really excellent, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said. “You deserve first prize.”

  “First prize is, you leave.” Dick McMahon turned with difficulty away from the resident and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he focused on Elena. “Funny coincidence, that asshole bringing up presidents, which brings us back to Epperson.” His voice was exhausted, matter-of-fact. “Because Epperson was involved in Dallas, that deal. I ever tell you that?”

  Elena looked at him. His gaze was trusting, his pale-blue eyes rimmed with red. It had not before occurred to her that he might have known who was involved in Dallas. Neither did it surprise her. She supposed if she thought about it that he might have known who was involved in a lot of things, but it was too late now, the processor was unreliable. An exploration of what Dick McMahon knew could now yield only corrupted files, crossed data, lost clusters in which the spectral Max Epperson would materialize not only at the Texas Book Depository but in a room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis with Sirhan Sirhan and Santos Trafficante and Fidel and one of the Murchisons.

  “What deal in Dallas is that, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said.

  “Just a cattle deal he did in Texas.” Elena guided the resident to the door. “He should sleep now. He’s too tired for this.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s still here,” Dick McMahon said without opening his eyes.

  “He just left.” Elena sat in the chair by the hospital bed and took her father’s hand. “It’s all right. Nobody’s here.”

  Several times during the next few hours her father woke and asked what time it was, what day it was, each time with an edge of panic in his voice.

  He had to be somewhere.

  He had some things to do, some people to see.

  Some people would be waiting for him to call.

  These things he had to do could not wait.

  These people he had to see had to be seen now.

  Late in the day the sky went dark and she opened the window to feel the air beginning to move. It was only then, while the lightning forking on the horizon and the sound of thunder created a screen, a safe zone in which things could be said that would have no consequences, that Dick McMahon began to tell Elena who it was he had to see, what it was he had to do. Tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling. That he could not do it was obvious. That she should undertake to do it for him would have been less obvious.

  12

  It is hard now to call up the particular luridity of 1984. I read back over the clips and want only to give you the period verbatim, the fever of it, the counterfeit machismo of it, the extent to which it was about striking and maintaining a certain kind of sentimental pose. Many people appear to have walked around the dead center of this period with parrots on their shoulders, or monkeys. Many people appear to have chosen during this period to identify themselves as something other than what they were, as “cargo specialists” or as “aircraft brokers” or as “rose importers” or, with what came to seem baffling frequency, as “Danish journalists.” This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over the Gulf coastline of the United States was low and slow, five hundred to a thousand feet, an effortless fade into the helicopter traffic off the Gulf rigs. This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over foreign coastlines was
with cash, to buy a window. This was a period during which a significant minority among the population at large appears to have understood how government funds earmarked for humanitarian aid might be diverted, even as the General Accounting Office monitored the accounts, to more pressing needs.

  Piece of cake, Barry Sedlow told Elena McMahon.

  This was not his personal line of work but he knew guys who did it.

  Pick a small retailer in any friendly, say Honduras or Costa Rica. Ask this retailer for an invoice showing a written estimate for the purchase of, say, a thousand pairs of green Lee jeans, a thousand green T-shirts, and a thousand pairs of green rubber boots. Specify that the word “estimate” not appear on the invoice. Present this invoice, bearing an estimated figure of say $25,870 but no indication that it is merely an estimate, to the agency responsible for disbursing said humanitarian aid, and ask that the $25,870 reimbursement due be transferred to your account at Citibank Panama. Instruct Citibank Panama to wire the $25,870 to one or another “broker” account, for example the account of a third-party company at the Consolidated Bank in Miami, an account the sole purpose of which is to receive the funds and make them available for whatever need presents itself.

  The need, say, to make a payment to Dick McMahon.

  There are people who understand this kind of transaction and there are people who do not. Those who understand it are at heart storytellers, weavers of conspiracy just to make the day come alive, and they see it in a flash, comprehend all its turns, get its possibilities. For anyone who could look at a storefront in Honduras or Costa Rica and see an opportunity to tap into the United States Treasury for $25,870, this was a period during which no information could be without interest. Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity. That Elena McMahon walked into this heightened life and for a brief period lived it is what interests me about her, because she was not one of those who saw in a flash how every moment could connect.