by Joan Didion
“I wouldn’t say ‘privileged,’ no,” Janet had said on camera. She had seemed to be sitting barefoot on a catamaran in front of her beach house. “No. Off the mark. Not ‘privileged.’ I’d just call it a marvelous simple way of life that you might describe as gone with the wind.”
“I hope nobody twigs she’s talking about World War Two,” Billy Dillon said.
“Of course everybody had their marvelous Chinese amah then,” Janet was saying on camera. Her voice was high and breathy and nervous. The camera angle had changed to show Koko Head. Inez picked up a legal pad and began writing. “And then Nezzie and I had—oh, I suppose a sort of governess, a French governess, she was from Neuilly, needless to say Mademoiselle spoke flawless French, I remember Nezzie used to drive her wild by speaking pidgin.”
“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon said.
Inez did not look up from the legal pad.
“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon repeated, “and ‘Nezzie.’ ”
“I was never called ‘Nezzie.’ ”
“You are now,” Billy Dillon said.
“They pan left,” Harry Victor said, “they could pick up Janet’s private-property-no-trespassing-no-beach-access sign.” He reached under the table to pick up the telephone. “Also her Mercedes. This should be Mort.”
“Ask Mort how he thinks the governess from Neuilly tests out,” Billy Dillon said. “Possibly Janet could make Mademoiselle available to do some coffees in West Virginia.”
Inez said nothing.
She had never been called Nezzie.
She had never spoken pidgin.
The governess from Neuilly had not been a governess at all but the French wife of a transport pilot at Hickam who rented the studio over Cissy Christian’s garage for a period of six months between the Leyte Gulf and the end of the war.
Janet was telling CBS Reports how she and Inez had been taught to store table linens between sheets of blue tissue paper.
Harry was on his evening conference call with Mort Goldman at MIT and Perry Young at Harvard and the petrochemical people at Stanford.
No Nezzie.
No pidgin.
No governess from Neuilly.
“That tip about the blue tissue paper goes straight to the hearts and minds,” Billy Dillon said.
“Mort still sees solar as negative policy, Billy, maybe you better pick up,” Harry Victor said.
“Tell Mort we just kiss it,” Billy Dillon said. “Broad strokes only. Selected venues.” He watched as Inez tore the top sheet from the legal pad on which she had been writing. “Strictly for the blue-tissue-paper crowd.”
1) Shining Star, Inez had written on the piece of paper.
2) Twinkling Star
3) Morning Star
4) Evening Star
5) Southern Star
6) North Star
7) Celestial Star
8) Meridian Star
9) Day Star
10) ? ? ?
“Hey,” Billy Dillon said. “Inez. If you’re drafting a cable to Janet, tell her we’re retiring her number.”
“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”
Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the Lurline Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry. Aloha oe. I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been Night Star, but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.
11
IN the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.
What did this tell us, I asked my class.
Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.
Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.
Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:
Of my three-score years and ten
These twenty would not come again.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over
Twenty years and the spring is over.
This was the school in which we learned
That time was the fire in which we burned.
Sentimental sojourn.
Less time left for those visions and revisions.
In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.” Many of the students to whom I spoke said “being liberated.” “The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news,” one said, and when next we spoke I modified “falling” to “closing down.”
Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, and the Berkeley Gazette. Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.
I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in
Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.
I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repetitions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN HONOLULU, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the Chronicle and a separate sidebar in the New York Times, VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, were Inez and Harry Victor.
That was March 26, 1975.
A Wednesday morning.
I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.
12
SEE it this way.
See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.
From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.
The warm rain down on the runways.
The smell of jet fuel.
The military charters, Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, clustered around the service hangars.
The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land masses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.
The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.
Five-thirty-seven A.M.
The ground crew in thin yellow slickers.
The steps wheeled into place.
The passenger service representative waiting at the bottom of the steps, carrying an umbrella, a passenger manifest in a protective vinyl envelope and, over his left arm, one plumeria lei.
The woman for whom both the passenger service representative and Jack Lovett are watching (Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport is not the same as Jack Lovett’s reason for being in the operations room at the airport) will be the next-to-last passenger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another glass of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and lustreless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark glasses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the passenger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.
The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.
She looks up, smiles at the passenger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.
Aloha, he would be saying.
So kind.
Tragic circumstances.
Anything we as a company or I personally can do.
Facilitate arrangements.
When the senator arrives.
So kind.
As the passenger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a glass window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen’s Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.
This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.
Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.
Jack Lovett watching her.
“Get her in out of the goddamn rain,” Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.
Two
1
ON the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. “No trick to heat a pool,” Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. “Trick is to cool one down.”
It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.
“Haven’t spent time in the Gulf, I see.” Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. “In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco. Cost-efficient. Used it there and in Dubai. Had to. Otherwise we’d have sizzled our personnel.”
A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.
That was Dwight Christian.
“Visited DWIGHT and Ruthie (Mills College ’33) CHRISTIAN at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our classmates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front,” as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.
On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. “Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists,” he said, over rijstaffel on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as “a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States.” The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent e
cho of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.
“What they want, in other words,” Frances Landau said. “From the United States.”
“Which is usually nuclear fuel,” Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau’s rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. “I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean,” he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.