by Joan Didion
Nobody even knew what “it” was.
That was what he was telling her.
She brushed her hair harder. “I don’t know how an evacuation is run.”
“Not this way.”
“She’s not on anybody’s list, is she.” Inez found that she could not say Jessie’s name. “She’s not on the map.”
Jack Lovett got up and opened the shutters wide. For a while the rain had stopped but now it was falling hard again, falling through the patchy sunlight, glistening on the palms outside the window and flooding the broken fountain in front of the hotel.
“Not unless she happened to join the Cercle Sportif,” Jack Lovett said. “No.” He closed the shutters again and turned back toward Inez. “Put down the hairbrush and look at me,” he said. “Do you think I’d leave her there?”
“You might not find her.”
“I always found you,” Jack Lovett said. “I guess I can find your daughter.”
2
IN fact Jack Lovett did find Inez Victor’s daughter.
In fact Jack Lovett found Inez Victor’s daughter that very day, found her by what he called dumb luck, just got on the regular Air Vietnam flight from Hong Kong to Saigon and landed at Tan Son Nhut and half an hour later he was looking at Jessie Victor.
Jack Lovett called this dumb luck but you or I might not have had the same dumb luck.
You or I for example might not have struck up the connection with the helicopter maintenance instructor who happened to be one of the other two passengers on the Air Vietnam 707 to Saigon that day.
Jack Lovett did.
Jack Lovett struck up a connection with this helicopter maintenance instructor the same way he had struck up connections with all those embassy drivers and oil riggers and airline stewardesses and assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships and tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation and desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals.
By reflex.
The helicopter maintenance instructor who happened to be one of the two other passengers on the Air Vietnam 707 that day had last been in Saigon in 1973, when his contract was terminated. He had been in Los Angeles working for Hughes but now he was coming back to look for the wife and little girl he had left in 1973. The wife had been with her family in Pleiku and he had gotten a call from her saying that the little girl had been blinded on a C-130 during the evacuation south when a leaking hydraulic line overhead sprayed liquid into her face. The wife said Saigon was still safe but he thought it was time to come find her. He had the address she had given him but according to a buddy he had contacted this address did not check out. The helicopter maintenance instructor had seemed cheerful at the beginning of the flight but after two Seagram Sevens his mood had darkened.
What had she done to get on the C-130 in the first place?
Didn’t everybody else walk out of Pleiku?
What about the fucking address?
Jack Lovett had offered him a ride into Saigon and the helicopter maintenance instructor had wanted to make one stop, to check the address with a bartender he used to know at the Legion club.
Which was where Jack Lovett found Jessie Victor.
Serving drinks and French fries at the American Legion club on the main road between Tan Son Nhut and Saigon.
Still wearing her tennis visor.
An ao dai and her tennis visor.
“Hey, no sweat, I’m staying,” Jessie had said to Jack Lovett when he told her to sign off her shift and get in the car. “This dude who comes in has a friend at the embassy, he’ll get the word when they pull the plug.”
Jessie had insisted she was staying but Jack Lovett had said a few words to the bartender.
The words Jack Lovett said were Harry goddamn Victor’s daughter.
“You know this plug you were talking about,” Jack Lovett said then to Jessie. “I just pulled it.”
3
“YOU’RE looking for a guy in the woodwork, the Legion club is where you’d look,” Jack Lovett said when he finally got through to Inez in Hong Kong. “Christ almighty. The Legion club. I covered Mimi’s, I don’t know how I missed the Legion club.”
He was calling from the Due.
He had left Jessie for the night at the apartment of a woman he referred to only as “B.J.,” an intelligence analyst at the Defense Attaché Office.
B.J. would put Jessie up until he could get her out.
B.J. would take fine care of Jessie.
B.J. was even that night sounding out the air lift supervisor at Tiger Ops about the possibility of placing Jessie on a flight to Travis as an orphan escort. These orphans all had escorts, sure they did, that was the trick, the trick was to melt out as many nonessentials as possible without calling it an evacuation. They might or might not be orphans, these orphans, but they sure as hell had escorts. The whole goddamn DAO was trying to melt out with the orphans.
Which was what they didn’t know at the Legion club.
Which was where you looked if you were looking for a guy in the woodwork.
“About these flights to Travis,” Inez said.
“Looking, hell, look no further.” Jack Lovett could not seem to get over the obviousness of finding Jessie at the Legion club. “This is it. This is the woodwork. American Legion Post No. 34. Through These Portals Pass America’s Proudest Fighting Men, it says over the door to the can. Through those portals pass every AWOL and contract cowboy in Southeast Asia. Guys who came over with the Air Cav in ’66. Guys who evacuated China in ’49. Dudes. Dudes who think they’ve got a friend at the embassy.”
“That was an orphan flight to Travis that crashed,” Inez said. The connection was going and she had trouble hearing him. “Last week.”
“There are other options,” Jack Lovett said.
“Other options to crashing?”
“Other flights, Inez. Other kinds of flights. She’s fine with B.J., there’s no immediate problem. I’ll check it out. I’ll get her on a good flight.”
Inez said nothing.
“Inez,” Jack Lovett said. “This kid of yours is one of the world’s great survivors. I take her kicking and screaming to B.J.’s, half an hour later they’re splitting a bucket of Kentucky fried and comparing eye makeup. The lights go off, Jessie tells B.J. she knows where they could liberate a Signal Corps generator. ‘Liberate’ is what she says. She got here any earlier, she’d be running the rackets.”
Inez said nothing. The connection was now crossed with another call, and she could hear laughter, and sharp bursts of Cantonese.
“She’s as tough as you are,” Jack Lovett said.
“That never stopped any plane from crashing,” Inez said just before the line went to dial tone.
After Inez hung up she tried to call Harry at the apartment on Central Park West. Harry’s private line rang busy and when she tried one of the other numbers Billy Dillon answered.
“This is pretty funny,” Billy Dillon said when she told him about Jessie. “This is actually funny as hell.”
“What’s actually funny about it?”
“I don’t know, Inez. You don’t find it funny we’re sending bar girls to Saigon, I can’t help you. Hey. Inez. Do us all a favor? Tell Harry yourself?”
Inez had told Harry herself.
“I see,” Harry said. “Yes.”
There had been a silence.
“So,” Inez said. “There it is.”
“Serving drinks. Yes. I’ll get hold of Adlai at school.”
“What’s he doing at school?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’s he doing at school’? You think Adlai should be serving drinks too?”
“I mean I thought he was doing this internship with you. I thought he didn’t have to be back until May.”
“He wanted to organize something,” Harry said. “But that’s not the point.”
“Organi
ze what?”
“Some kind of event.”
“What kind of event?”
Harry had hesitated. “A vigil for the liberation of Saigon,” he said finally.
Inez had said nothing.
“He’s eighteen years old, Inez.” Harry had sounded defensive. “He wanted to make a statement.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Very eloquent. Your silence.”
Inez said nothing.
“Jessie’s tramping around Saigon, you’re off with your war-lover, Adlai tries to make a statement and you’ve got nothing to say.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
“Fine then,” Harry said. “Pretend what you want.”
All that night Inez lay awake in the apartment that belonged to somebody in Vientiane and listened to the short-wave radio that Jack Lovett had left there. On the short-wave radio she could get Saigon and Bangkok. Jack Lovett had told her what to listen for. Jack Lovett had also told her that it was too soon to hear what he had told her to listen for but she listened anyway, whenever she could not sleep or wanted to hear a human voice.
“Mother wants you to call home,” the American Service Radio announcer in Saigon would say when it was time for the final phase of the evacuation, and then a certain record would be played.
The record to be played was Bing Crosby singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.”
“I could do better than that,” Inez had said when Jack Lovett told her what to listen for. “I mean in the middle of April. Out of the blue in the middle of April. I could do considerably better than ‘Mother wants you to call home’ and ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’ ”
“What’s your point,” Jack Lovett said.
“It’s not just the best secret signal I ever heard about.”
“It’s not going to be just the best evacuation you ever heard about either,” Jack Lovett had said. “You want to get down to fine strokes.”
Toward four in the morning Inez got up from the bed and sat by the window and smoked a cigarette in the dark. The window was open and rain splashed on the balcony outside. Because it was still too soon to hear the American Service Radio announcer in Saigon say “Mother wants you to call home” Inez moved the dial back and forth and finally got what seemed to be a BBC correspondent interviewing former officials of the government of the Republic of Vietnam who had just been flown to Nakhon Phanom in Thailand.
“No more hopes from the American side,” one of them said.
“The Americans would not come back again,” another said. “En un mot bye-bye.”
Their voices were pleasant and formal.
The transmission faded in and out.
As she listened to the rain and to the voices fading in and out from Nakhon Phanom Inez thought about Harry in New York and Adlai at school and Jessie at B.J.’s and it occurred to her that for the first time in almost twenty years she was not particularly interested in any of them.
Responsible for them in a limited way, yes, but not interested in them.
They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference, genius, special claim. What difference did it make in the long run what she thought, or Harry thought, or Jessie or Adlai did? What difference did it make in the long run whether any one person got the word, called home, dreamed of a white Christmas? The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or Harry or Jessie or Adlai, or for that matter Jack Lovett or B.J. or the woman in Vientiane on whose balcony the rain now fell, should be exempted from the general movement.
Just because they believed they had a home to call.
Just because they were Americans.
No.
En un mot bye-bye.
Four
1
I SEE now that the state of rather eerie serenity in which I found Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur had its genesis eight months before, during this period in Hong Kong when it came to her attention that her passport did not excuse her from what she characterized to me as “the long view.” By “the long view” I believe she meant history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez’s experience had tended to deny. She had spent her childhood immersed in the local conviction that the comfortable entrepreneurial life of an American colony in a tropic without rot represented a record of individual triumphs over a hostile environment. She had spent her adult life immersed in Harry Victor’s conviction that he could be president.
This period in Hong Kong during which Inez ceased to claim the American exemption was defined by no special revelation, no instant of epiphany, no dramatic event. She had arrived in Hong Kong on the first day of April and she left it on the first day of May. During those four or five weeks mention of Janet and of Wendell Omura and of Janet’s lanai gradually dropped out of even the Honolulu Advertiser, discarded copies of which Inez occasionally found in the lobbies of hotels frequented by flight crews.
Paul Christian was found incompetent to stand trial.
Adlai’s vigil for the liberation of Saigon was edited into a vigil for “peace in Asia” and commended by the governor of Massachusetts as an instance of responsible campus expression, another situation managed by Billy Dillon.
The combat-loaded C-141 onto which Jack Lovett finally shoved Jessie (literally shoved, put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her through the hatch, because somewhere between Gate One and the loading ramp at Tan Son Nhut that evening Jessie realized that the flight Jack Lovett had told her they were meeting was her own, and tried to bolt) landed without incident at Agana, Guam, as did the commercial 747 on which Jessie sulked from Agana to Los Angeles.
Harry Victor met Jessie in customs.
He and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s.
Inez knew that Harry and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s because they called her in Hong Kong from their table, the front banquette inside the door. Jessie said that Jack Lovett had tricked her into going with him to Tan Son Nhut by saying that after he met this one flight they would go see the John Wayne movie playing at the Eden. Jessie said that she had not wanted to see the John Wayne movie in the first place but B.J. had gone back to the DAO after dinner which left nothing to do but see the John Wayne movie or sit there alone getting schitzy.
Jessie said that when she saw what was going down she asked Jack Lovett why she had to go on this flight and Jack Lovett had been rude.
Because I just shelled out a million piastres so you could, the fucker had said, and pushed her.
Hard.
She still had a bruise on her arm.
Forty-eight hours later.
“Tell the fucker I owe him a million piastres,” Harry said when he came on the phone.
According to Inez Jessie landed in Los Angeles on the fifteenth of April.
According to Inez it was the twenty-eighth when she found she could no longer call Saigon; the twenty-ninth when American Service Radio in Saigon played “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” twice, played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” more times than Inez had counted, and stopped transmitting; and the first of May when Jack Lovett called her from Subic Bay and told her to meet him in Manila.
At one point I tried to work out a chronology for what Inez remembered of this period, and made the chart that still hangs on my office wall. The accuracy of this chart is problematic, not only because Inez kept no record of events as they happened but also because of the date line.
For example I have no idea whether Inez meant that the day Jessie landed in Los Angeles was the fifteenth in Los Angeles or the fifteenth in Hong Kong.
In either case the fifteenth seems doubtful, because Jack Lovett had been with Jessie in Saigon forty-eight hours before, promising her a John Wayne movie and bruising her arm, and many people believe Jack Lovett t
o have been in Phnom Penh for a period of some days (more than one day but fewer than five) between the time the American embassy closed there on the twelfth and the time the Khmer Rouge entered the city on the seventeenth. The report placing Jack Lovett in Phnom Penh after the embassy closed was one of the things that caused the speculation later, and eventually the investigation.
2
WHEN novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact. Examine the picture. Find the beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet.
Context clues.
The reason why.
I have been examining this picture for some years now and still lack the reason why Inez Victor finally agreed to talk about what she “believed” had happened (“I believe we were in Jakarta,” Inez would say, or “let’s say it was May,” as if even the most straightforward details of place and date were intrinsically unknowable, open to various readings) during the spring and summer of 1975.
At first she did not agree.
At first I talked to Billy Dillon and to Harry Victor and to Dwight Christian and even briefly to Jessie and to Adlai and to Dick Ziegler, each of whom, as I have suggested, had at least a limited stake in his or her own version of events, but Inez remained inaccessible. In the first place the very fact of where she and Jack Lovett seemed to be ruled out any pretense of casual access. I could call Dwight Christian and say that I just happened to be in Honolulu, but I could not call Inez and say that I just happened to be in Kuala Lumpur. No one “happens to be” in Kuala Lumpur, no one “passes through” en route somewhere else: Kuala Lumpur is en route nowhere, and for me to see Inez there implied premeditation, a definite purpose on my part and a definite decision on hers.