by Joan Didion
The homicide detectives looked away.
Inez looked at Jack Lovett.
Jack Lovett shrugged.
“Do it at two,” Inez said. “Or she goes someplace where they will do it at two.”
“Move the patient, you could confuse the cause of death.” The resident looked at the detectives for corroboration. “Cloud it. Legally.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the cause of death,” Inez said.
There was a silence.
“I’d say do it at two,” the older of the two homicide detectives said.
“I notice you’re still getting what you want,” Jack Lovett said to Inez.
They did it at two and again at ten in the morning and each time it was flat but the chief neurologist, after consultation with the homicide detectives and the hospital lawyers, said that a fourth flat reading would make everyone more comfortable. A fourth flat reading would guarantee that removal of support could not be argued as cause of death. A fourth flat reading would be something everyone could live with.
“Everybody except Janet,” Inez said, but she said it only to Jack Lovett.
Eight hours later they did it again and again it was flat and at 7:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 27, Janet Christian Ziegler was pronounced dead. During most of the almost twenty-four hours preceding this pronouncement Inez had waited on a large sofa in an empty surgical waiting room. During much of this time Jack Lovett was with her. Of whatever Jack Lovett said to Inez during those almost twenty-four hours she could distinctly remember later only a story he told her about a woman who cooked for him in Saigon in 1970. This woman had tried, over a period of some months, to poison selected dinner guests with oleander leaves. She had minced the leaves into certain soup bowls, very fine, a chiffonade of hemotoxins. Although none of these guests died at least two, a Reuters correspondent and an AID analyst, fell ill, but the cook was not suspected until her son-in-law, who believed himself cuckolded by the woman’s daughter, came to Jack Lovett with the story.
“What was the point,” Inez said.
“Whose point?”
“The cook’s.” Inez was drinking a bottle of beer that Jack Lovett had brought to the hospital. “What was the cook’s motive?”
“Her motive.” Jack Lovett seemed not interested in this part of the story. “Turned out she was just deluded. A strictly personal deal. Disappointing, actually. At first I thought I was onto something.”
Inez had finished the beer and studied Jack Lovett’s face. She considered asking him what he had thought he was onto but decided against it. After this little incident with the cook he had given up on housekeeping, he said. After this little incident with the cook he had gone back to staying at the Duc. Whenever he had to be in Saigon.
“You liked it there,” Inez said. The beer had relaxed her and she was beginning to fall asleep, holding Jack Lovett’s hand. “You loved it. Didn’t you.”
“Some days were better than others, I guess.” Jack Lovett let go of Inez’s hand and laid his jacket over her bare legs. “Oh sure,” he said then. “It was kind of the place to be.”
Occasionally during that night and day Dick Ziegler came to the hospital, but on the whole he seemed relieved to leave the details of the watch to Inez. “Janet doesn’t even know we’re here,” Dick Ziegler said each time he came to the hospital.
“I’m not here for Janet,” Inez said finally, but Dick Ziegler ignored her.
“Doesn’t even know we’re here,” he repeated.
Quite often during that night and day Billy Dillon came to the hospital. “Naturally you’re overwrought,” Billy Dillon said each time he came to the hospital. “Which is why I’m not taking this seriously. Ask me what I think about what Inez is doing, I’d say no comment. She’s overwrought.”
“Listen,” Billy Dillon said the last time he came to the hospital. “We’re picking up incoming on the King Crab flank. Harry takes the Warner’s plane to Seattle to pick up Jessie for the funeral, Jessie informs Harry she doesn’t go to funerals.”
Inez had looked at Billy Dillon.
“Well?” Billy Dillon said.
“Well what?”
“What should I tell Harry?”
“Tell him he should have advanced it better,” Inez Victor said.
13
I SHOULD tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark; she considered it a consumer decision. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch. She had been subjected repeatedly to the usual tests, and each battery showed her to be anxious, highly motivated, more, intelligent than Adlai, and not given to falsification. Perhaps because she lacked the bent for falsification she did not have a notable sense of humor. What she did have was a certain incandescent inscrutability, a kind of luminous gravity, and it was always startling to hear her dismiss someone, in that grave low voice that thrilled Inez as sharply when Jessie was eighteen as it had when Jessie was two, as “an asshole.” “You asshole” was what Jessie called Adlai, the night he and Harry Victor arrived in Seattle to pick her up for Janet’s funeral and Jessie declined to go. Jessie did agree to have dinner with them, while the Warner Communications G-2 was being refueled, but dinner had gone badly.
“The crux of it is finding a way to transfer anti-war sentiment to a multiple-issue program,” Adlai had said at dinner. He was telling Harry Victor about an article he proposed to write for the op-ed page of the New York Times. “It’s something we’ve been tossing back and forth in Cambridge.”
“Interesting,” Harry Victor said. “Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?”
“I think he shouldn’t say ‘Cambridge,’ ” Jessie said.
“Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there,” Adlai said, “but Cambridge happens to be where I go to school.”
“Maybe so,” Jessie said, “but you don’t happen to go to Harvard.”
“OK, guys. You both fouled.” Harry Victor turned to Adlai. “I could sound somebody out at the Times. If you’re serious.”
“I’m serious. It’s time. Bring my generation into the dialogue, if you see my point.”
“You asshole,” Jessie said.
“Well,” Harry Victor said after Adlai had left the table. “How are things otherwise?”
“I’m ready to leave.”
“You said you weren’t going. You have a principle. You don’t go to funerals. This is a new principle on me, but never mind, you made your case. I accept it. As a principle.”
“I don’t mean leave for Janet’s funeral. I mean actually leave. Period. This place. Seattle.”
“You haven’t finished the program.”
“The program,” Jessie said, “is for assholes.”
“Just a minute,” Harry said.
“I did the detox, I’m clean, I don’t see the point.”
“What do you mean you did the detox, the game plan here wasn’t detox, it was methadone.”
“I don’t like methadone.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Jessie had said patiently, “it doesn’t make me feel good.”
“It makes you feel bad?”
“It doesn’t make me feel bad, no.” Jessie had given this question her full attention. “It just doesn’t make me feel good.”
There had been a silence.
“What is it you want to do exactly?” Harry had said then.
“I want—” Jessie was studying a piece of bread that she seemed to have rolled into a ball. “To get on with my regular life. Make some headway, you know?”
“That’s fine. Good news. Admirable.”
“Get into my career.”
“Which is what exactly?”
Jessie was breaking the ball of bread into little pellets.
“Don’t misread me, Jessie. This is all admirable. My only point is that you need a program.” Harry Victor found himself warming to the idea of the projected program. “A plan. Two plans, actually. Which dove tail. A long-range plan and a short-term plan. What’s your long-range plan?”
“I’m not running for Congress,” Jessie said. “If that’s what you mean.”
There seemed to Harry so plaintive a note in this that he let it go. “Well then. All right. How about your immediate plan?”
Jessie picked up another piece of bread.
Something in Harry Victor snapped. He had been trying for the past hour to avoid any contemplation of why Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house the night before with Jack Lovett. Billy Dillon had told him. “You have to think she’s overwrought,” Billy Dillon had said. “I have to think she’s got loony timing,” Harry Victor had said. Early on in this dinner he had tried out the overwrought angle on Jessie and Adlai. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mother were a little overwrought,” he had said. Adlai had put down the menu and said that he wanted a shrimp cocktail and the New York stripper, medium bloody, sour cream and chives on the spud. Jessie had put down the menu and stared at him, he imagined fishily, from under the straw tennis visor she had worn to dinner.
Jessie had stared at him fishily from under her tennis visor and Adlai had wanted the New York stripper medium bloody and Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house with Jack Lovett and now Jessie was tearing her bread into little chicken-shit pellets.
“Could you do me a favor? Jessie? Could you either eat the bread or leave it alone?”
Jessie had put her hands in her lap.
“I’m still kind of working on the immediate plan part,” she said after a while. “Actually.”
In fact Jessie Victor did have an immediate plan that Thursday evening in Seattle, the same plan she had mentioned in its less immediate form to Inez at Christmas, the plan Inez had selectively neglected to mention when she described her visit with Jessie to Harry and Adlai: the plan, if the convergence of yearning and rumor and isolation on which Jessie was operating in Seattle could be called a plan, to get a job in Vietnam.
Inez had not mentioned this plan to Harry because she did not believe it within the range of the possible.
Jessie did not mention this plan to Harry because she did not believe it to be the kind of plan that Harry would understand.
I see Jessie’s point of view here. Harry would have talked specifics. Harry would have asked Jessie if she had read a newspaper lately. Harry would not have understood that specifics made no difference to Jessie. Getting a job in Vietnam seemed to Jessie a first step that had actually presented itself, a chance to put herself at last in opportunity’s way, and because she believed that whatever went on there was only politics and that politics was for assholes she would have remained undeflected, that March night in 1975, the same night as it happened that the American evacuation of Da Nang deteriorated into uncontrolled rioting, by anything she might have heard or seen or read in a newspaper.
If in fact Jessie ever read a newspaper.
Which seemed to both Inez and Harry Victor a doubtful proposition.
When word reached them in Honolulu on the following Sunday night, Easter Sunday night 1975, the night before Janet’s funeral, that three hours after the Warner Communications G-2 left Seattle, bringing Harry and Adlai Victor down to Honolulu, Jessie had walked out of the clinic that specialized in the treatment of adolescent chemical dependency and talked her way onto a C-5A transport that landed seventeen-and-one-half hours later (refueling twice in flight) at Tan Son Nhut, Saigon. “Maybe she heard she could score there,” Adlai said, and Inez slapped him.
14
SHE did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park West) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. This press card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the “reassessments” and the “calculated gambles” and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver’s license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver’s license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.
By the time Jack Lovett arrived at the house on Manoa Road that Easter Sunday night with the story about the American girl who appeared to be Jessie, the blond American girl who had left a New York driver’s license at Tan Son Nhut in lieu of a visa, Inez and Harry Victor were speaking to each other only in the presence of other people.
They had been civil at the required meals but avoided the optional.
They had slept in the same room but not the same bed.
“You’re overwrought,” Harry had said on Friday night. “You’re under a strain.”
“Actually I’m not in the least overwrought,” Inez had said. “I’m sad. Sad is different from overwrought.”
“Why not just have another drink,” Harry had said. “For a change.”
By Saturday morning the argument was smoldering one more time on the remote steppes of the 1972 campaign. By Saturday evening it had jumped the break and was burning uncontained. “Do you know what I particularly couldn’t stand,” Inez had said. “I particularly couldn’t stand it at Miami when you said you were the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago.”
“I’m amazed you were sober enough to notice. At Miami.”
“I’d drop that theme if I were you. I think you’ve gotten about all the mileage you’re going to get out of that.”
“Out of what?”
“Harry Victor’s Burden. I was sober enough to notice you didn’t start speaking for this generation until after the second caucus. You were only the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago after you knew you didn’t have the numbers. In addition to which. Moreover. Actually that was never your generation. Actually you were older.”
There had been a silence.
“Let me take a leap forward here,” Harry had said. “Speaking of ‘older.’ ”
Inez had waited.
“I don’t think you chose a particularly appropriate way to observe your sister’s death. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Inez had looked out the window for a long time before she spoke. “Add it up, you and I didn’t have such a bad time,” she said finally. “Net.”
“I’m supposed to notice the past tense. Is that it?”
Inez did not turn from the window. It was dark. She had lived in the north so long that she always forgot how fast the light went. She had gone late that afternoon to pick up the dress in which Dick Ziegler wanted Janet buried and the light had gone while she was still on Janet’s beach. “You pick a dress,” Dick Ziegler had said. “You go. I can’t look in her closet.” After Inez found a dress she had sat on Janet’s bed and called Jack Lovett on Janet’s antique telephone. Jack Lovett had told her to wait on Janet’s beach. “
Listen,” Inez had said when she saw him. “That pink dress she wore in Jakarta is in her closet. She has fourteen pink dresses. I counted them. Fourteen.” She had been talking through tears. “Fourteen pink dresses all hanging next to each other. Didn’t anybody ever tell her? She didn’t look good in pink?” There on the beach with Jack Lovett in the last light of the day Inez had cried for the first time that week, but back in the house on Manoa Road with Harry she had felt herself sealed off again, her damage control mechanism still intact.
“I think I deserve a little better than a change of tense,” Harry said.
“Don’t dramatize,” Inez said.
Or she did not.
She had either said “Don’t dramatize” to Harry that Saturday evening or she had said “I love him” to Harry that Saturday evening. It seemed more likely that she had said “Don’t dramatize” but she had wanted to say “I love him” and she did not remember which. She did remember that the actual words “Jack Lovett” remained unsaid by either of them until Sunday night.
“Your friend Lovett’s downstairs,” Harry had said then.
“Jack,” Inez said, but Harry had left the room.
Jack Lovett repeated the details of the story about the American girl at Tan Son Nhut twice, once for Inez and Harry and Billy Dillon and again when Dwight Christian and Adlai came in. The details sounded even less probable in the second telling. The C-5A, the press card. The tennis visor. The bus to Cholon.
“I see,” Harry kept saying. “Yes.”
Jack Lovett had first heard Jessie’s name that Sunday morning from one of the people to whom he regularly talked on the flight line at Tan Son Nhut. It had taken five further calls and the rest of the day to locate the New York driver’s license that had been left at immigration in lieu of a visa.
“I see,” Harry said. “Yes. Then you haven’t actually seen this license.”
“How could I have seen the license, Harry? The license is in Saigon.”
Inez watched Jack Lovett unfold an envelope covered with scratched notes. Lovett. Jack. Your friend Lovett.