The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  What’s that supposed to mean, he had said.

  The names they use like you use Gary Barnett, she had said.

  I’m not authorized to give you that information, he had said. Somebody’s supposed to meet you. Your need-to-know stops there.

  Somebody was supposed to meet her but somebody did not meet her.

  Somebody was supposed to make the payment and somebody had not made the payment.

  She was aware as she watched the man turn over cards of a sudden darkening outside, then of lightning. There was a map of Costa Rica on the wall of the concrete structure, reinforcing the impression that this was Costa Rica but offering no clue as to where in Costa Rica. The overhead light flickered and went out. The electric fan fluttered to a stop. In the absence of background noise she realized that she had been hearing the whine of an overworked refrigerator, now silent.

  The man with the ponytail got up, opened the refrigerator, and took another beer from its darkened interior. He did not offer one to Elena. Instead he sat down and turned over another card, whistling softly between his teeth, as if Elena were invisible.

  Who is.

  I think you know who.

  Give me a name.

  “Epperson,” she said. She seized the name from the ether of the past ten days. “Max Epperson.”

  The man with the ponytail looked at her, then shuffled the cards and got up. “I could be overdue a night or two in Josie,” the man said.

  2

  When I am away from this I tend to elongate the time sequence, which was in fact quite short. It was early on the morning of June 26 1984 when Elena McMahon left Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on the L-100, and late the same morning when the L-100 landed somewhere in Costa Rica. It was close to midnight of the same day (first there had been a bridge washed out, then a two-hour stop parked outside what seemed to be a military installation) when Elena McMahon got to San José. You’re doing nothing, the man with the ponytail had said when she asked what they were doing at the military installation. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.

  He had gotten out of the truck.

  Anyone asks, he had said, tell them you’re waiting for Mr. Jones.

  From the time he reappeared two hours later until they reached San José he had not spoken. He had instead sung to himself, repeated fragments of what appeared to be the same song, so inaudibly that she knew he was singing only by the periodic spasms of pounding on the steering wheel as he exhaled the words “great balls of fire.” In San José he had driven directly to a hotel on what appeared to be a downtown side street. Free ride ends here, he had said. Seen from the unlit street the hotel had an impressive glass porte cochere and polished brass letters reading HOTEL COLONIAL but once she was inside the small lobby the promise faded. There was no air-conditioning. An industrial fluorescent light flickered overhead, casting a sickly light on the stained velour upholstery of the single chair. As she waited for the desk clerk to finish a telephone call she had begun to find it inauspicious that the man with the ponytail had brought her to this hotel without ever asking where she wanted to go (in fact she would have had no idea where to go, she had never before been in San José), just pulled directly under the porte cochere and stopped, letting the engine idle as he waited for her to get out.

  Why here, she had asked.

  Why not here. He had flicked his headlights off and on several times. I thought you wanted to run into people you know.

  There was a pay telephone on the wall by the elevator.

  She would call Barry Sedlow.

  The first thing to do was get in touch with Barry Sedlow.

  As she opened her bag and tried to locate the card on which he had written the 800 number for his beeper she became aware of the desk clerk watching her.

  She would tell the desk clerk she needed a drugstore, a doctor, a clínica.

  She would get out of this place.

  She had seen a bus station on the way to the hotel, the bus station would be open, she could make the call from the bus station.

  She did not bother to remember the directions the desk clerk gave her to the clínica but as it happened she passed it on her way to the bus station. That at least was good. This could be going her way. In case anyone was watching she had been walking toward the clínica.

  The bus station was almost deserted.

  The dispatcher was sleeping noisily in a metal cage above the concourse.

  The public telephones in the waiting room had rotary dials and could not be used to leave a message on a beeper, which was the only number she had for Barry Sedlow. Emergencia, she said over and over when she managed to wake the dispatcher. She held out a ten-dollar bill and the KROME GUN CLUB card on which Barry Sedlow had written the 800 number. La clínica. Mi padre. The dispatcher examined the bill and the card, then dialed the number on his pushbutton phone and left as a callback number one of the public phones in the waiting room.

  She sat on a molded plastic bench and drank a local cola, sweet and warm and flat, and waited for the phone to ring.

  Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Barry Sedlow said when she picked up the phone. You made the delivery, you’ll get the payment. Sometimes these things take a little longer, you got a whole bureaucracy you’re dealing with, they got requisitions, regulations, paperwork, special ways they have to do things, they don’t just peel off cash like guys on the street. Be smart. Stay put. I’ll make a few calls, get back to you. You cool?

  All right, she had said finally.

  By the way, he had said then. I wouldn’t call your dad. I’m keeping him in the picture about where you are and what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t call him.

  It would not have occurred to her to call her father but she asked why not.

  Because it wouldn’t be smart, he had said. I’ll get back to you at the Colonial.

  It was almost dawn, after she had gone back to the Hotel Colonial and let the desk clerk take her passport and run her credit card, after she had gone upstairs to the single room on the third floor and sat on the edge of the metal bed and abandoned the idea of sleep, before it occurred to her that during the call to Barry Sedlow she had never once mentioned the name of the hotel.

  So what, Barry Sedlow said when he finally called back and she put this to him.

  Big fucking deal. Where else would you be.

  This second conversation with Barry Sedlow took place on the afternoon of June 28. It was the evening of July 1 when Barry Sedlow called the third time. It was the morning of July 2 when, using the commercial ticket provided her, a one-way nonexchangeable ticket to a designated destination, Elena McMahon left San José for the island where the incident occurred that should not have occurred.

  Should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

  By any quantitative measurement.

  3

  You will have noticed that I am not giving you the name of this island.

  This is deliberate, a decision on my part, and not a decision (other writers have in fact named the island, for example, the authors of the Rand study) based on classification.

  The name would get in the way.

  If you knew the name you might recall days or nights spent on this island en route to or in lieu of more desirable islands, the metallic taste of tinned juice in rum punches, the mosquitoes under the net at night, the rented villa where the septic tank backed up, the unpleasantness over the Jet Ski misunderstanding, the hours spent waiting in the jammed airport when the scheduled Windward Air or BIWI flights failed to materialize, the piece of needlepoint you meant to finish and instead spotted with coconut oil, the book you meant to read and distractedly set aside, the tedium of all forlorn tropical places.

  The determined resistance to gravity, the uneasy reduction of the postcolonial dilemma to the Jet Ski misunderstanding.

  The guilty pleasure of buckling in and clearing the ground and knowing that you will step off this plane in the developed world.

  Li
ttle guessing that the pleasant life of the plantations was about to disappear, as the history of the island you dutifully bought at the airport puts it. Paradisaical as the sight of land must have been after the long voyage from the Cape Verdes. Not to overlook the contribution made by early Jewish settlers after the construction of their historic crushed-coral synagogue, so situated as to offer a noteworthy view of Rum Cay. Signalling a resounding defeat for the Party that had spearheaded the movement toward The Independence.

  Face it.

  You did not, during your sojourns on this island, want to know its history. (High points: Arawaks, hurricane, sugar, Middle Passage, the abandonment known as The Independence.) You did not, if you had planned well, have reason to frequent its major city. (Must see: that historic crushed-coral synagogue, its noteworthy view of Rum Cay.) You had no need to venture beyond the rust-stained but still daunting (school of Edward Durell Stone) facade of our embassy there. Had you discovered such need (bad planning, trouble, a lost passport), you would have found it a larger embassy than extant American interests on the island would seem to require, a relic of the period when Washington had been gripped by the notion that the emergence of independent nations on single-crop islands with annual per capita incomes in three digits offered the exact optimum conditions under which private capital could be siphoned off the Asian rim and into mare nostrum.

  Many phantom investment schemes had been encouraged on this island. Many training sessions had been planned, many promotional tours staged. Many pilot programs had been undertaken, each cited at its inception as a flawless model of how a responsible superpower could help bring an LDC, or Lesser Developed Country, into the roster of the self-sufficient NICs, or New Industrializing Countries. On an island where most human concerns were obliterated by weather, this was an embassy in which tropical doubts had been held at bay via the mastery of acronyms.

  It was still in 1984 possible to hear in this embassy about “CBMs,” or Confidence Building Measures.

  It was still in 1984 possible to hear about “BHN,” or Basic Human Needs.

  What could not be obfuscated by acronym tended to be reduced to its most cryptic diminutive. I recall hearing at this embassy a good deal about “the Del” before I learned that it referred to a formula for predicting events developed by the Rand Corporation and less jauntily known as the Delphi Method (that which should not have happened and could not have been predicted by any quantitative measurement had presumably not been predicted by employment of the Del), and I sat through an entire study group session on “Ap Tech—Uses and Misuses” before I divined that the topic at hand was something called the Appropriate Technology movement, proponents of which apparently did not believe that technology developed in the first world was appropriate for transfer to the third. I recall heated discussion on whether the introduction of data processing into the island’s literacy program either could or could not be construed as Ap Tech. Tech skills are in a different basket, an economic attaché kept repeating. Tech skills are a basket-two priority. A series of political appointees, retired contributors from the intermountain West, had passed in and out of the official residence without ever finding need to master the particular dialect spoken in this embassy.

  Alexander Brokaw was of course not a political appointee.

  Alex Brokaw was career, with a c.v. of sensitive postings.

  Alex Brokaw had arrived on this island six months before to do a specific job.

  A job that entailed bringing in the pros.

  Because, as Alex Brokaw often said, if and when this switches gear into a full-scale effort, we’ll be rotating troops in and out, which is good for home-front morale but not good for construction continuity. So we damn well better bring the pros in up front.

  The pros and of course the Special Forces guys.

  A job that entailed establishing the presence on the island of this selected group of Americans, and discouraging the presence of all others.

  Which is why Alex Brokaw mentioned to his DCM, after the incident at the embassy’s Fourth of July picnic, that it might be useful to run a background on Elise Meyer, which was the name on the passport Elena McMahon was by then using.

  4

  When I try to understand how Elena McMahon could have assimilated with no perceptible beat the logic of traveling on a passport not her own to a place she had no previous intention of going, could have accepted so readily that radical revision of who she was, could have walked into a life not her own and lived it, I consider the last time I actually saw her.

  Academy Award night, 1982.

  When she was still living in the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

  It was five months later when she walked out of that house and enrolled Catherine at an Episcopal boarding school in Rhode Island and got herself hired (on the basis not of her long-gone four-year career at the Herald Examiner but of an editorial hunch that Wynn Janklow’s scrupulously bilateral campaign contributions might still buy his estranged wife some access) at the Washington Post.

  All that happened very fast.

  All that happened so fast that the first I knew of it was when I got home from France in September of 1982 and began to go through the accumulated mail and was about to discard unopened, because it looked like one or another plea in support of or opposition to one or another issue, a plain white envelope with metered postage and a Washington D.C. return address. Had I not been distracted by a phone call I would never have opened the envelope, but I was, and I did, and there it was: a handwritten note, signed Elena, saying that of course I already knew that she and Catherine had relocated to the East Coast but now she was settled and just getting around to sending out her address. The printed name on the change-of-address card clipped to the note was Elena McMahon.

  “Relocated” was the word she used.

  As if leaving Wynn Janklow had been a corporate transfer.

  I had not already known that she and Catherine had relocated to the East Coast.

  I had known nothing.

  All I knew was that on Academy Award night that year Elena McMahon had still been Elena Janklow, sitting in front of a plate of untouched cassoulet at the party that was in our rather insular community at that time the single event approaching a command performance, absently twining a Mylar ribbon torn from a balloon into the rhinestone strap of her dress. I never once saw her look at the big television screens mounted at every eye line, not even at those moments when a local favorite was up for an award and the party fell momentarily silent. Nor did she observe the other core tribal custom of the evening, which was to spring up and move toward the bar as soon as the awards ended, allowing the tables to be cleared while applauding both the triumphant arrivals of the winners and the inspirational sportsmanship of the losers.

  Elena never got up at all.

  Elena stayed seated, idly picking apart a table decoration to remove the miniature Oscar at its center, oblivious to winners and losers alike, oblivious even to the busboys changing the tablecloth in front of her. Only when I sat down across the table did she even look up.

  “I promised Catherine,” she said about the miniature Oscar.

  What she said next that Academy Award night was something I interpreted at the time to mean only that she was tired of the event’s structural festivity, that she had been dressed up in rhinestones in broad daylight since four in the afternoon and sitting at this table since five and now she wanted to go home.

  I was wrong about what she said next.

  As I would be wrong later to wonder how she could so readily assimilate the logic of walking into a life not her own and living it.

  What she said next that Academy Award night was this: “I can’t fake this anymore.”

  Suggesting that she had assimilated that logic a long time before.

  5

  “Somebody’s going to let you know the move they want you to make,” Barry Sedlow had said the last time he called her in San José.

  “When,” she had said
.

  “By the way. I saw your dad. He says hi. I’m keeping him in the picture.”

  Saying “hi” was not in her father’s vocabulary but she let this go. “I asked when.”

  “Just stay put.”

  In the six days since her arrival in San José she had left the room at the Colonial only twice, once to buy a toothbrush and a tin of aspirin, the second time to buy a T-shirt and cotton pants so that she could wash the black silk shift. She had given the maid American dollars to bring back sandwiches, coffee, once in a while a Big Mac from the McDonald’s across from the bus station.

  “That’s what you told me the night I got here. I’ve been staying put. I need to know when.”

  “Hard to say. Maybe tonight.” There had been a silence. “They may want you to take payment in another venue. Who knows.”

  “Where.”

  “They’ll let you know where.”

  An hour later the envelope containing the passport and plane ticket had begun to appear, emerging at such barely perceptible speed that she was finally forced to breathe, under the locked door of her room at the Colonial.

  She did not know why she had happened to look at the door at the very moment the envelope began to appear.

  There had been no giveaway sound, no rustle of paper on carpet, no fumbling in the corridor.

  The envelope had been clear of the door and lying motionless inside the room for a full five minutes before, still frozen, she moved to approach it. The ticket bearing the name Elise Meyer had been written by American Airlines in Miami on June 30 1984. The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami.

  In the photograph affixed to this passport she was smiling.

  In the photograph affixed to her own passport she was not.

  She could not compare the two because her own passport was downstairs in the hotel safe, but she was quite certain that the photographs were otherwise similar.