The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  47:17. A pause on the tape.

  “So that was a lesson,” he says then.

  Actually I knew immediately what the lesson would have been.

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

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

  I knew all that.

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

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

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

  Another pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Ho Ho / Ho Chi Minh

  The war Mister Morrison / Will not win

  Was what they chanted outside the Claremont that night.

  Something else I found on microfiche.

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

  “Why did she do it,” Elena said.

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

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

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

  “I read you too,” she said.

  Of course she did, of course he did.

  Of course they read each other.

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

  They were the same person.

  They were equally remote.

  2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  DREAM, the next two entries nonetheless begin.

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

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

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

  The linear accelerator, the mevatron, the bevatron.

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

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

  Photons? Or “protons”???

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

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

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

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

  The beam is my alpha and my omega

  I finished this morning

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

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

  3

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

  Elena’s dreams were about dying.

  Elena’s dreams were about getting old.

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

  We all know that.

  The point is that Elena didn’t.

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

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

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

  Relocated to the East Coast, as she put it.

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

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

  She had been away, yes.

  Always good to get back, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Let me clarify something.

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

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

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

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

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

  You knew it was.

  Treat Morrison would not have needed to forget that detail.

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