The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  He had checked all this out.

  He did not want his car seen in the Aero Sands parking lot, he did not want to be seen himself entering the exposed front door of her room.

  He wanted to approach the Aero Sands from where he could assess it, have ample time to pick up on any official presence, anyone who might recognize him, anything out of the ordinary.

  On the first of the nine days Treat Morrison came to the Aero Sands he brought the DIA agent, who took her statement and flew directly back to Washington, airport to Aero Sands to airport, no contact with the embassy.

  On the following days Treat Morrison came to the Aero Sands alone.

  At a few minutes before whatever time he told her he would be there she would leave open the sliding glass back door to her room and walk across the concrete pool area behind the motel. From a certain point just past the small pool it was possible to look north and get a partial view of the path on the bluff, and she always did, hoping he might be early, but he never was. She would nod at the woman who every evening pushed both an old man in a wheelchair and a baby in a stroller around the pool. Then she would continue on, down the dozen rickety wooden steps to what passed for the beach. There in the clear, there in the open space between the water and the bluff, Elena McMahon would wait in a place where Treat Morrison could see her as he approached.

  As he had told her to do.

  The point was that he believed he was protecting her.

  He believed this right up to the instant, at seven-twenty on the evening of the tenth day he had been on the island, a day in fact on which he had made the final arrangement to take her back to the United States with him, take her in black via DIA and get the whole goddamn situation worked out in Washington, when it happened.

  After it was over, after the flight to Miami during which he had been mostly incoherent and after the surgery and after the ICU, at some point when he was alone in a private room at Jackson Memorial, Treat Morrison remembered passing the man on the bluff as he walked from the shopping center to where he could already see her on the beach.

  There had been nothing out of the ordinary about seeing the man on the bluff.

  Nothing at all.

  Nothing about the man on the bluff to signal an official presence, nothing to suggest someone who by recognizing him could place her beyond his protection.

  Nothing.

  He had already been able to see her on the beach.

  She had been wearing the same white dress she was wearing in the Intercon coffee shop.

  She had been looking out across the tidal flat.

  She had been watching the bioluminescence on the water out by the reef.

  The man on the bluff had been leaning over, tying his shoe, his face obscured.

  There was a full moon but the man’s face had been obscured.

  That the man’s face had been obscured was of course something that did not occur to Treat Morrison until after the fact, by which time the man on the bluff was beside the point, since it had been immediately and incontrovertibly established, according to both the FBI and the local police, who had coincidentally been staking out the Aero Sands all that week on an unrelated drug matter, that the man on the bluff, if indeed there had been a man on the bluff, was not the would-be assassin.

  The reason this had been immediately and incontrovertibly established was that the local police who had been so fortuitously on hand had managed to kill the would-be assassin right there on the beach, her white dress red with blood before her clip was even emptied.

  What bothered Treat Morrison most was not just the man on the bluff.

  What bothered him more, what had begun to bother him even as the anesthesiologist was telling him to count backward from one hundred, what was bothering him so much by the time he was alone in the private room at Jackson Memorial that the doctor ordered sedation added to his IV line, was that over the preceding nine days he had checked out the Aero Sands at many different times of day and night, from every possible angle and with every possible eventuality in mind, and he did not recall having at any point during that week seen the local police.

  Who had been so fortuitously on hand.

  Suggesting that they had not been there at all.

  Suggesting that if they had been there at all they had been there only at a certain moment, only at the moment they were needed.

  A conclusion that could lead nowhere, since Elena McMahon was already dead.

  I mean you could add it up but where does it get you.

  This was Treat Morrison’s last word on the subject.

  I mean it’s not going to bring her back.

  5

  AMERICAN IMPLICATED IN ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION was the headline on the first AP story as it ran in the Miami Herald, the only paper in which I initially had occasion to see it. I recall reading it in the elevator of the hospital where Treat Morrison had finally been stabilized for the flight to Miami. It was that morning’s Herald, impossible to come by down there except at the embassy, abandoned in the waiting room by Alex Brokaw’s DCM when the helicopter arrived to take Treat Morrison to the airport.

  Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had also been in the waiting room, watching warily from a sagging sofa as the local police spokesman was interviewed by a San Juan television channel.

  The paper was lying on a molded plastic chair and was folded open to this story.

  As I picked it up I happened to look out the window behind Colonel Álvaro García Steiner and see the helicopter, just lifting off the lawn.

  I walked to the elevator and got on it and started to read the story as the elevator descended.

  The elevator had stopped to pick someone up on the third floor when I hit the name of the American implicated in the attempted assassination.

  Academy Award night, two and a half years before.

  Was the last time I saw her.

  Said to have been using the name Elise Meyer.

  Embassy sources confirmed however that her actual name was Elena McMahon.

  Reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua remain unconfirmed.

  Until the next day, when Bob Weir happened to find himself in a position to provide the manifests that detailed the shipments that happened to coincide with weapons recently seized in a raid against a Sandinista arms cache.

  Also fortuitously.

  Since the manifests confirmed the reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

  The reports that had been further corroborated by the discovery of Sandinista literature in two adjoining rooms at the Surfrider Hotel recently vacated by the would-be assassin.

  Immediately and incontrovertibly confirmed.

  Immediately and incontrovertibly corroborated.

  Which of course was the burden of the second AP story.

  6

  I magine how this went down.

  She would have come out of the Aero Sands.

  At the certain point just past the pool where it was possible to get a partial view of the path on the bluff she would have glanced up.

  She would not have seen Treat Morrison.

  She would have passed the woman who pushed the old man in the wheelchair and the baby in the stroller and she would have nodded at the three of them and the baby would have turned to look at her and the old man would have touched his hat and she would have reached the last of the rickety wooden steps onto the beach before she realized that there had been a man on the bluff and that she had seen the man before.

  She would have not even consciously registered seeing the man on the bluff, she would have registered only that she had seen him before.

  The man on the bluff with the ponytail.

  The man at the landing strip in Costa Rica.

  I could be overdue a night or two in Josie.

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

  Y
ou’re doing nothing. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.

  She had not registered seeing him but something about seeing him had slowed motion just perceptibly, twenty-four frames a second now reduced to twenty. The baby had turned too slowly.

  As in the hour before our death.

  The old man in the wheelchair had lifted his hand to his hat too slowly.

  As in the hour before our death.

  She did not want to look back but finally she did.

  When she heard the shots.

  When she saw Treat Morrison fall.

  When she saw the man on the bluff turn to her.

  You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.

  7

  After the two AP stories the story stopped, dropped into a vacuum.

  No mention.

  Off the screen.

  That the intended political consequences never materialized was evidence, in retrospect, that Treat Morrison had not entirely lost his game.

  “I mean it was just all wrong,” he said to me. “It would have been just plain bad for the country.”

  I suggested that he had not done it for the country.

  I suggested that he had done it for her.

  He did not look directly at me. “It was just all wrong,” he repeated.

  Only once, a year or so later, did Treat Morrison almost break down.

  Almost broke down in such a predictable way that I did not even bother recording what he said in my notes. I remember him talking again about being distracted and I remember him talking again about not concentrating and I recall him talking again about that dipshit kid never getting south of Dulles.

  Goddamn, he kept saying.

  You think you have it covered and you find out you don’t have it covered worth a goddamn.

  Because believe me this was just one hell of a bad outcome.

  The last outcome you would have wanted.

  If you’d been me in this deal.

  Which of course you weren’t.

  So you have no real way of understanding.

  I mean you could add it up but where does it get you.

  I mean it’s not going to bring her back.

  So Treat Morrison told me.

  The very last time we spoke.

  8

  Treat Morrison died four years later, at age fifty-nine, a cerebral hemorrhage on a ferry from Larnaca to Beirut. When I heard this I remembered a piece by J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times about a conference, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

  The hotel was pink.

  There was a winter storm off the Caribbean.

  Theodore Sorensen swam with the dolphins. Robert McNamara expressed surprise that CINCSAC had sent out the DEFCON 2 alert instructions uncoded, in the clear, so that the Soviets would pick them up. Meetings were scheduled to leave afternoon hours for tennis doubles. Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger ate together by candlelight in the main dining room. Communications were received from Maxwell Taylor and Dean Rusk, too ill to attend.

  When I read this piece I imagined the storm continuing.

  The power failing, the tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm.

  Imperfect memories.

  Time yet for a hundred indecisions.

  A hundred visions and revisions.

  When Treat Morrison died it occurred to me that I would like to have seen just such a reassessment of what he might have called (did in fact call) certain actions taken in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

  Imperfect memories of the certain incident that should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

  By any quantitative measurement.

  I would like to have seen such a reassessment take place at the same hotel in the Keys, the same weather, the same mangroves clattering, the same dolphins and the same tennis doubles, the same possibilities. I would like to have seen them all gathered there, old men in the tropics, old men in lime-colored pants and polo shirts and golf hats, old men at a pink hotel in a storm.

  Of course Treat Morrison would have been there.

  And when he went upstairs and opened the door to his room Elena McMahon would have been there.

  Sitting on the balcony in her nightgown.

  Watching the storm on the water.

  And if you are about to say that if Elena McMahon was upstairs in this pink hotel there would have been no reason for the conference, no incident, no subject, no reason at all: Just file and forget.

  As Mark Berquist would say.

  Because of course Elena would have been there.

  I want those two to have been together all their lives.

  23 January 1996

  Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.

  BOOKS BY JOAN DIDION

  WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

  THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

  WHERE I WAS FROM

  POLITICAL FICTIONS

  THE LAST THING HE WANTED

  AFTER HENRY

  MIAMI

  DEMOCRACY

  SALVADOR

  THE WHITE ALBUM

  A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

  SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

  RUN RIVER

  ALSO BY JOAN DIDION

  AFTER HENRY

  In After Henry, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer’s gargantuan “manor” to the racial battlefields of New York’s criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates, and gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst. A bracing amalgam of skepticism and sympathy, After Henry is further proof of Didion’s infallible radar for the true spirit of our age.

  Current Affairs/Essays/978-0-679-74539-6

  A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

  Writing with the telegraphic swiftness that has made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. Charlotte Douglas has come to the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande vaguely and vainly hoping to be reunited with her fugitive daughter. As imagined by Didion, her fate is at once utterly particular and fearfully emblematic of an age of conscienceless authority and unfathomable violence.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75486-2

  DEMOCRACY

  Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of the losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband’s handler would like the press to forget Inez’s father is a murderer. Moving deftly between romance, farce and tragedy, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75485-5

  THE LAST THING HE WANTED

  Joan Didion trains her eye on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine, where history dissolves into conspiracy (Dallas in 1963, Iran Contra in 1984), and fashions a moral thriller as hypnotic and provocative as any by Joseph Conra
d or Graham Greene. In that latter year Elena McMahon walks off the presidential campaign she has been covering for a major newspaper to do a favor for her father. Elena’s father does deals. And it is while acting as his agent in one such deal—a deal that shortly goes spectacularly wrong—that she finds herself on an island where tourism has been superseded by arms dealing, covert action, and assassination.

  Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-75285-1

  MIAMI

  No one has observed Miami’s pastel surfaces and murky intrigues more astutely than Joan Didion. As this unerring social commentator follows Miami’s drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion and hypocrisy—and of political violence turned as personal as a family feud.

  Current Affairs/Literature/978-0-679-78180-6

  POLITICAL FICTIONS

  In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion looks at the American political process and at “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.

  Essays/Political/978-0-375-71890-8

  RUN RIVER

  Joan Didion’s electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.