by Joan Didion
There was a silence. Billy Dillon cradled the telephone against his shoulder and mimed a backhand volley. “It’s a game, Inez, it’s tennis,” Billy Dillon always said to Inez about interviews. It was a routine between them. I had seen him do it that morning, when Inez said that since I had come especially to see her she did not want to do the AP interview. “Sure you do,” Billy Dillon had said. “It’s only going to last x minutes. Finite time. For those x minutes you’re here to play. You’re going to place the ball”—here Billy Dillon had paused, and executed a shadow serve—“inside the lines. The major cost of public life is privacy, Inez, that’s an easy shot. The hardest part about Washington life is finding a sitter for the Gridiron Dinner. The fun part about Washington life is taking friends from home to the Senate cafeteria for navy-bean soup. You’ve tried the recipe at home but it never tastes the same. Yes, you do collect recipes. Yes, you do worry about the rising cost of feeding a family. Ninety-nine per cent of the people you know in Washington are basically concerned with the rising cost of feeding a family. Schools. Mortgages. Programs. You’ve always viewed victory as a mandate not for a man but for his programs. Now: you view defeat with mixed emotions. Why: because you’ve learned to treasure the private moments.”
“Private moments,” Billy Dillon mouthed silently in the suite at the Hotel Doral.
Inez looked deliberately away from Billy Dillon.
“Here’s an example.” She lit a match, watched it burn, and blew it out. “You looked up the clips on me before you came here.”
“I did a little homework, yes.” The woman’s finger hovered over the stop button on her tape recorder. Now it was she who looked to me for help. I looked out the window. “Naturally. That’s my business. We all do.”
“That’s my point.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”
“Things that might or might not be true get repeated in the clips until you can’t tell the difference.”
“But that’s why I’m here. I’m not writing a piece from the clips. I’m writing a piece based on what you tell me.”
“You might as well write it from the clips,” Inez said. Her voice was reasonable. “Because I’ve lost track. Which is what I said in the first place.”
INEZ VICTOR CLAIMS SHE IS OFTEN MISQUOTED, is the way that went out on the Associated Press wire. “Somebody up there likes you, it doesn’t say INEZ VICTOR DENIES SHOCK TREATMENT,” Billy Dillon said when he read it.
8
I HAVE never been sure what Inez thought about how her days were passed during those years she spent in Washington and New York. The idea of “expressing” herself seems not to have occurred to her. She held the occasional job but pursued no particular work. Even the details of running a household did not engage her unduly. Her houses were professionally kept and, for all the framed snapshots and studied clutter, entirely impersonal, expressive not of some individual style but only of the conventions then current among the people she saw. Nothing of the remote world in which she had grown up intruded on the world in which she later found herself: the Christians, like many island families, had surrounded themselves with the mementos of their accomplishments, with water colors and painted tea cups and evidence of languages mastered and instruments played, framed recital programs and letters of commendation and the souvenirs of wedding trips and horse shows and trips to China, and it was the absence of any such jetsam that was eccentric in Inez’s houses, as if she had buckled her seat belt and the island had dematerialized beneath her.
Of course there were rumors about her. She liked painters, and usually had a table or two of them at her big parties, and a predictable number of people said that she had had an affair with this one or that one or all of them. According to Inez she never had. I know for a fact that she never had what was called a “problem about drinking,” another rumor, but the story that she did persisted, partly because Harry Victor did so little to discourage it. At a crowded restaurant in the East Fifties for example Harry Victor was heard asking Inez if she intended to drink her dinner. In that piece of WNBC film shot on the St. Regis Roof, another example, Harry Victor is seen taking a glass of champagne from Inez’s hand and passing it out of camera range.
Inez remained indifferent. She seemed to dwell as little on the rest of her life as she did on her jobs, which she tried and abandoned like seasonal clothes. When Harry Victor was in the Justice Department Inez worked, until the twins were born, in a docent capacity at the National Gallery. When Harry Victor left the Justice Department and came up to New York Inez turned up at Vogue, and was given one of those jobs that fashion magazines then kept for well-connected young women in unsettled circumstances, women who needed a place to pass the time between houses or marriages or lunches. Later she did a year at Parke-Bernet. She served on the usual boards, benefit committees, commissions for the preservation of wilderness and the enhancement of opportunity; when it became clear that Harry Victor would be making the run for the nomination and that Inez would need what Billy Dillon called a special interest, she insisted, unexpectedly and with considerable vehemence, that she wanted to work with refugees, but it was decided that refugees were an often controversial and therefore inappropriate special interest.
Instead, because Inez was conventionally interested in and by that time moderately knowledgeable about painting, she was named a consultant for the collection of paintings that hung in American embassies and residences around the world. In theory the wives of new ambassadors would bring Inez the measurements, furnished by the State Department, of the walls they needed to fill, and Inez would offer advice on which paintings best suited not only the wall space but the mood of the post. “Well, for example, I wouldn’t necessarily think of sending a Sargent to Zaire,” she explained to an interviewer, but she was hard put to say why. In any case only two new ambassadors were named during Inez’s tenure as consultant, which made this special interest less than entirely absorbing. As for wanting to work with refugees, she finally did, in Kuala Lumpur, and it occurred to me when I saw her there that Inez Victor had herself been a kind of refugee. She had the protective instincts of a successful refugee. She never looked back.
9
OR at least almost never.
I know of one occasion on which Inez Victor did in fact try to look back.
A try, an actual effort.
This effort was, for Inez, uncharacteristically systematic, and took place on the redwood deck of the borrowed house in which Harry and Inez Victor stayed the spring he lectured at Berkeley, between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions. It had begun with a quarrel after a faculty dinner in Harry’s honor. “I’ve always tried to talk up to the American people,” Harry had said when a physicist at the table questioned his approach to one or another energy program, and it had seemed to Inez that a dispirited pall fell over what had been, given the circumstances, a lively and pleasant evening.
“Not down,” Harry had added. “You talk down to the American people at your peril.”
The physicist had pressed his point, which was technical, and abstruse.
“Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t,” Harry had said. “I happen to believe he was.”
In fact Inez had heard Harry say this a number of times before, usually when he had no facts at hand, and she might never have remarked on it had Harry not mentioned the physicist on the drive home.
“Hadn’t done his homework,” Harry had said. “Those guys get their Nobels and start coasting.”
Inez, who was driving, said nothing.
“Unless there’s something behind us I don’t know about,” Harry said as she turned into San Luis Road, “you might try lightening up the foot on the gas pedal.”
“Unless you’re running for something I don’t know about,” Inez heard herself say, “you might try lightening up the rhetoric at the dinner table.”
There had been a silence.
“That wasn’t necessary,” Harry s
aid finally, his voice at first stiff and hurt, and then, marshalling for second strike: “I don’t really care if you take out your quite palpable unhappiness on me, but I’m glad the children are in New York.”
“Away from my quite palpable unhappiness I suppose you mean.”
“On the money.”
They had gone to bed in silence, and, the next morning, after Harry left for the campus without speaking, Inez took her coffee and a package of cigarettes out into the sun on the redwood deck and sat down to consider the phrase “quite palpable unhappiness.” It did not seem to her that she was palpably unhappy, but neither did it seem that she was palpably happy. “Happiness” and “unhappiness” did not even seem to be cards in the hand she normally played, and there on the deck in the thin morning sunlight she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.
She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges. There was a lunch in Paris that she remembered in detail: a late lunch with Harry and the twins at Pré Catelan in the rain. She remembered rain streaming down the big windows, rain blowing in the trees, the branches brushing the glass and the warm light inside. She remembered Jessie crowing with delight and pointing imperiously at a poodle seated on a gilt chair across the room. She remembered Harry unbuttoning Adlai’s wet sweater, kissing Jessie’s wet hair, pouring them each a half glass of white wine.
There was an entire day in Hong Kong that she managed to reconstruct, a day she had spent alone with Jessie in a borrowed house overlooking Repulse Bay. She and Harry had dropped Adlai in Honolulu with Janet and Dick Ziegler and they had bundled Jessie onto a plane to Hong Kong and when they landed at dawn they learned that Harry was expected in Saigon for a situation briefing. Harry had flown immediately down to Saigon and Inez had waited with Jessie in this house that belonged to the chief of the Time bureau in Hong Kong. The potted begonias outside that house had made Inez happy and the parched lawn made her happy and the particular cast of the sun on the sea made her happy and it even made her happy that the Time bureau chief had mentioned, as he gave her the keys at the airport, that baby cobras had recently been seen in the garden. This introduction of baby cobras into the day had lent Inez a sense of transcendent usefulness, a reason to carry Jessie wherever Jessie wanted to go. She had carried Jessie from the porch to the swing in the garden. She had carried Jessie from the swing in the garden to the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.
There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.
“Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”
The doctor came in a sweat suit.
“I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”
“I’m right here,” Harry said.
“Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.
“Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.
“It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.
“It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”
“This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.
The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”
Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.
She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
“My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”
The therapist smiled.
Inez lit a cigarette.
It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”
“Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”
“Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”
“Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”
“Cynthia who?” Harry said.
“Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”
“At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”
“You always say her. Her name is Jessie.”
“I know her goddamn name.”
Strike Ann Arbor.
Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.
Strike Colorado Springs.
Adlai already had his agenda.
Jessie looked up from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and smiled fleetingly at the glass partition.
“The ‘problem at hand,’ as you put it, is substance habituation.” The therapist opened a drawer and extracted an ashtray and slid it across the desk toward Inez. She was still smiling. “I notice you smoke.”
“I do, yes.” Inez crushed out the cigarette and stood up. Jessie’s complexion was clear and her hair was like honey and there was no way of telling that beneath the sleeves of the Dalton School sweatshirt there were needle tracks visible on her smooth tanned arms. “I also drink coffee.”
The therapist’s expression did not change.
Let me die and get it over with.
Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.
Don’t tell Daddy.
Inez picked up her jacket.
On the other side of the glass partition Jessie took a pocket mirror from her shoulder bag and began lining her eyes with the IBM testing pencil.
“What I don’t do is shoot heroin,” Inez said.
The second therapist believed that the answer lay in a closer examination of the sibling gestalt. The third employed a technique incorporating elements of aversion therapy. At the clinic in Seattle to which Jessie was finally sent in the fall of 1974, a private facility specializing in the treatment of what the fourth therapist called adolescent chemical dependency, the staff referred to the patients as clients,
maintained them on methadone, and obtained for them part-time jobs “suited to the character structure and particular skills of the individual client.” Jessie’s job was as a waitress in a place on Puget Sound called King Crab’s Castle. “Pretty cinchy,” Jessie said on the telephone, “if you can keep the pickled beet slice from running into the crab louis.”
The bright effort in Jessie’s voice had constricted Inez’s throat.
“It’s all experience,” Inez said finally, and Jessie giggled.
“Really,” Jessie said, emphasizing the word to suggest agreement. She was not yet eighteen.
10
OTHER COSTS.
Inez had stopped staying alone in the apartment on Central Park West after the superintendent told a reporter from Newsday that he had let himself in to drain a radiator and Mrs. Victor had asked him to fix her a double vodka. She took fingernail scissors and scratched the label off empty prescription bottles before she threw them in the trash. She stopped patronizing a bookstore on Madison Avenue after she noticed the names, addresses, and delivery instructions for all the customers, including herself (“doorman-Lloyd, maid lvs at 4”) in an open account book by the cash register. She would not allow letters that came unsolicited from strangers to be opened inside the apartment, or packages that came from anyone. She had spoken to Billy Dillon about the possibility of suing People for including Adlai’s accidents in an article on the problems of celebrity children, and also of enjoining Who’s Who to delete mention of herself and Jessie and Adlai from Harry Victor’s entry. “I don’t quite see the significance, Inez,” Billy Dillon had said. “Since I see your name in the paper two, three times a week minimum.”
“The significance is,” Inez said, “that some stranger might be sitting in a library somewhere reading Who’s Who.”
“Consider this stranger your bread and butter, an interested citizen,” Billy Dillon said, but Inez never could. Strangers remembered. Strangers suffered disappointments, and became confused. A stranger might suffer a disappointment too deep to be lanced by a talk with Newsday, and become confused. Life outside camera range, life as it was lived by (Inez imagined then) her father and her Uncle Dwight and her sister Janet, had become for Inez only a remote idea, something she knew about but did not entirely comprehend. She did not for example comprehend how her father could give her telephone number to strangers he met on airplanes, and then call to remonstrate with her when he heard she had been short on the telephone. “I think you might have spared ten minutes,” Paul Christian had said on one such call. “This young man you hung up on happens to have a quite interesting grassy-knoll slant on Sal Mineo’s murder, he very much wanted Harry to hear it.” She did not for example comprehend what moved Dwight to send her a clipping of every story in the Honolulu Advertiser in which her or Harry’s name appeared. These clippings came in bundles, with Dwight’s card attached. “Nice going,” he sometimes pencilled on the card. Nor did she comprehend how Janet could have agreed, during the 1972 campaign, to be interviewed on CBS Reports about her and Inez’s childhood. This particular CBS Reports had been devoted to capsule biographies of the candidates’ wives and Inez had watched it with Harry and Billy Dillon in the library of the apartment on Central Park West. There had been a clip of Harry talking about Inez’s very special loyalty and there had been a clip of Billy Dillon talking about Inez’s very special feeling for the arts and there had been a clip of the headmaster at the Dalton School talking about the very special interest Inez took in education, but Janet’s appearance on the program was a surprise.