by Joan Didion
In the second place Inez seemed, that summer and fall after she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett, emotionally inaccessible. She seemed to have renounced whatever stake in the story she might have had, and erected the baffle of her achieved serenity between herself and what had happened. It’s the summer monsoon and quite sticky, you don’t want to visit during the monsoon really but I’m sure Harry and Billy between them can sort out what you need to know. Excuse haste. Regards, Inez V.
This was the response, scrawled on a postcard showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur, to the letter I wrote from Honolulu in July of 1975 asking Inez if she would see me. Since the “summer monsoon” in Kuala Lumpur is followed immediately by the “winter monsoon,” which in turn lasts until the onset of the next “summer monsoon,” Inez’s response was even less equivocal than it might seem. In October, from Los Angeles, I wrote a second letter, and more or less promptly received a second postcard, again showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial, where incidentally Inez was not staying: What you mention is all in the past and frankly I’d rather look ahead. In other words a visit would be unproductive. I.
This card was postmarked the second of November and arrived in Los Angeles the fifteenth. Ten days later I received a third communication from Inez, a clipping of a book review, in which my name was mentioned in passing, from a month-old International Herald-Tribune. The note stapled to the clipping read Sorry if my note seemed abrupt but you see my point I’m sure, Inez. It was one week after that when Inez called my house in Los Angeles, having gone to some lengths to get the number, and asked me to come to Kuala Lumpur.
Actually she did not exactly “ask” me to come to Kuala Lumpur.
“When are you coming to K.L.,” was what she said exactly.
I considered this.
“I wouldn’t want to miss you,” she said. “I could show you around.”
At the time I thought that she had decided to talk to me only because Jack Lovett’s name was just beginning to leak out of the various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government. There had even been hints about narcotics dealings, which, although they made good copy and were played large in the early coverage (I recall the phrase “Golden Triangle” in many headlines, and a photograph of two blurred figures leaving a house on Victoria Peak, one identified as a “sometime Lovett business associate” and the other as a “known Hong Kong Triad opium lord”), remained just that, hints, rumors that would never be substantiated, but the other allegations were solid enough, and not actually surprising to anyone who had bothered to think about what Jack Lovett was doing in that part of the world.
There had been the affiliations with interlocking transport and air courier companies devoid of real assets. There had been the directorship of the bank in Vila that put the peculiarities of condominium government to such creative use. There had been all the special assignments and the special consultancies and the special relationships in a fluid world where the collection of information was indistinguishable from the use of information and where national and private interests (the interests of state and non-state actors, Jack Lovett would have said) did not collide but merged into a single pool of exchanged favors.
In order to understand what Jack Lovett did it was necessary only to understand how natural it was for him to do it, how at once entirely absorbing and supremely easy. There had always been that talent for putting the right people together, the right man at the Department of Defense, say, with the right man at Livermore or Los Alamos or Brookhaven, or, a more specific example with a more immediately calculable payout, the Director of Base Development for CINC-PAC/MACV with Dwight Christian.
There had always been something else as well.
There had been that emotional solitude, a detachment that extended to questions of national or political loyalty.
It would be inaccurate to call Jack Lovett disloyal, although I suppose some people did at the time.
It would be accurate only to say that he regarded the country on whose passport he traveled as an abstraction, a state actor, one of several to be factored into any given play.
In other words.
What Jack Lovett did was never black or white, and in the long run may even have been (since the principal gain to him was another abstraction, the pyramiding of further information) devoid of ethical content altogether, but since shades of gray tended not to reproduce in the newspapers the story was not looking good on a breaking basis. That Jack Lovett had reportedly made some elusive deals with the failed third force (or fourth force, or fifth force, this was a story on which the bottom kept dropping out) in Phnom Penh in those days after the embassy closed there did not look good. That the London dealer who was selling American arms abandoned in South Vietnam had received delivery from one of Jack Lovett’s cargo services did not look good. It seemed clear to me that the connection with Inez would surface quite soon (as it did, the week I came back from Kuala Lumpur, when the WNBC tape of Inez dancing with Harry Victor on the St. Regis Roof temporarily obliterated my actual memory of Inez), and I assumed that Inez wanted to see me only because Jack Lovett wanted to see me. I assumed that Jack Lovett would find during my visit a way of putting out his own information. I assumed that Inez was acting for him.
In short I thought I was going to Kuala Lumpur as part of a defensive strategy that Inez might or might not understand.
This was, it turned out, too easy a reading of Inez Victor.
3
ONE thing she wanted to tell me was that Jack Lovett was dead.
That Jack Lovett had died on the nineteenth of August at approximately eleven o’clock in the evening in the shallow end of the fifty-meter swimming pool at the Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta.
After swimming his usual thirty laps.
That she had taken Jack Lovett’s body to Honolulu and buried it on the twenty-first of August in the little graveyard at Schofield Barracks. Past where they buried the stillborn dependents. Beyond the Italian prisoners of war. Near a jacaranda tree, but the jacaranda had been out of bloom. When the jacaranda came into bloom and dropped its petals on the grass the pool of blue would just reach Jack Lovett’s headstone. The grave was that close to the jacaranda. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had at first suggested another site but he had understood her objection. The colonel who had been her contact at Schofield had been extremely helpful.
Extremely cooperative.
Extremely kind really.
As had her original contact.
Mr. Soebadio. In Jakarta. Mr. Soebadio was the representative for Java of the bank in Vila and it turned out to be his telephone number that Jack Lovett had given her to call if any problem arose during the four or five days they were to be in Jakarta.
Jack Lovett had not given her Mr. Soebadio’s name.
Only this telephone number.
To call. In case she was ill, or needed to reach him during the day, or he was in Solo or Surabaya and the rioting flared up again. In fact she had been thinking about this telephone number at the precise instant when she looked up and saw that Jack Lovett was lying face down in the very shallow end of the pool, the long stretch where the water was less than a foot deep and the little children with the Texas accents played all day.
It had been quite sudden.
She had watched him swimming toward the shallow end of the pool.
She had reached down to get him a towel.
She had thought at the exact moment of reaching for the towel about the telephone number he had given her, and wondered who would answer if she called it.
And then she had looked up.
There had been no one else at the pool that late. The last players had left the tennis courts, and the night lights had been turned off. Even the pool bar was shuttered, but there was a telephone on the outside wall, and it was from this telephone, twenty minutes later, that In
ez called the number Jack Lovett had given her. She had sat on the edge of the pool with Jack Lovett’s head in her lap until the Tamil doctor arrived. The Tamil doctor said that the twenty minutes she had spent giving Jack Lovett CPR had been beside the point. The Tamil doctor said that what happened had been instantaneous, circulatory, final. In the blood, he said, and simultaneously snapped his fingers and drew them across his throat, a short chop.
It was Mr. Soebadio who had brought the Tamil doctor to the pool.
It was Mr. Soebadio who worked Jack Lovett’s arms into his seersucker jacket and carried him to the service area where his car was parked.
It was Mr. Soebadio who advised Inez to tell anyone who approached the car that Mr. Lovett was drunk and it was Mr. Soebadio who went back upstairs for her passport and it was Mr. Soebadio who suggested that certain possible difficulties in getting Mr. Lovett out of Indonesia could be circumvented by obtaining a small aircraft, what he called a good aircraft for clearance, which he happened to know how to do. He happened to know that there was a good aircraft for clearance on its way from Denpasar to Halim. He happened to know that the pilot, a good friend, would be willing to take Mrs. Victor and Mr. Lovett wherever Mrs. Victor wanted to go.
Within the limits imposed by the aircraft’s range of course.
The aircraft being a seven-passenger Lear.
Halim to Manila, no problem.
Manila to Guam, no problem.
Honolulu, a definite problem, but with permission to refuel on certain atolls unavailable to commercial aircraft Mr. Soebadio believed that he could solve it.
Say Kwajalein.
Say Johnston.
Guam to Kwajalein, thirteen hundred miles approximately, well within range.
Kwajalein to Johnston, say eighteen hundred, adjust for drag since the prevailing winds were westward, still within range.
Johnston to Honolulu, seven hundred seventeen precisely and no problem whatsoever.
Mr. Soebadio had a pocket calculator and he stood on the tarmac at Halim working out the ratios for weight and lift and ground distance and wind velocity while Inez watched the Tamil doctor and the pilot lift Jack Lovett onto the back passenger seats in the Lear and get him into a body bag. Before he zipped the body bag closed the Tamil doctor went through the pockets of Jack Lovett’s seersucker jacket and handed the few cards he found to Mr. Soebadio. Mr. Soebadio glanced at the cards and dropped them into his own pocket, still intent on his calculator. Inez considered asking Mr. Soebadio for whatever had been in Jack Lovett’s pockets but decided against it. Somebody dies, you’d just as soon he didn’t have your card in his pocket, Jack Lovett had told her once. The zipper on the body bag caught on the lapel of the seersucker jacket and Mr. Soebadio helped the Tamil doctor work it loose. Another thing Inez decided not to ask Mr. Soebadio was where the body bag had come from.
The cotton dress she was wearing was soaked with pool water and cool against her skin.
She smelled the chlorine all night long.
At Manila she did not get out of the Lear.
At Guam she was half asleep but aware of the descent and the landing strobes and the American voices of the ground crew. The pilot checked into the operations room and brought back containers of coffee and a newspaper. WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS, the newspaper had worked into the eagle on its flag.
At Kwajalein she could see the missile emplacements from the air and was told on the ground that she did not have clearance to get out of the plane.
At Johnston she did get out, and walked by herself to the end of the long empty runway, where the asphalt met the lagoon. Jack Lovett had spent three weeks on Johnston. 1952. Waiting on the weather. Wonder Woman Two was the name of the shot. She remembered that. She even remembered him telling her he had been in Manila, and the souvenir he brought. A Filipino blouse. Starched white lace. The first summer she was married to Harry she had found it in a drawer and worn it at Rehoboth. The starched white lace against her bare skin had aroused both of them and later Harry had asked why she never wore the blouse again.
Souvenir of Manila.
Bought on Johnston from a reconnaissance pilot who had flown in from Clark.
She knew now.
She took off her sandals and waded into the lagoon and splashed the warm water on her face and soaked her bandana and then turned around and walked back to the Lear. While the pilot was talking to the mechanics about a minor circuit he believed to be malfunctioning Inez opened the body bag. She had intended to place the wet bandana in Jack Lovett’s hands but when she saw that rigor had set in she closed the body bag again. She left the bandana inside. Souvenir of Johnston. It occurred to her that Johnston would have been the right place to bury him but no one on Johnston had been told about the body on the Lear and the arrangement had already been made between Mr. Soebadio and the colonel at Schofield and so she went on, and did it at Schofield.
Which was fine.
Johnston would have been the right place but Schofield was fine.
Once she got the other site.
The site near the jacaranda.
The first site the colonel had suggested had been too near the hedge. The hedge that concealed the graves of the executed soldiers. There were seven of them. To indicate that they died in disgrace they were buried facing away from the flag, behind the hedge. She happened to know about the hedge because Jack Lovett had shown it to her, not long after they met. In fact they had argued about it. She had thought it cruel and unusual to brand the dead. Forever and ever. He had thought that it was not cruel and unusual at all, that it was merely pointless. That it was sentimental to think it mattered which side of the hedge they buried you on.
She remembered exactly what he had said.
The sun still rises and you still don’t see it, he had said.
Nevertheless.
All things being equal she did not want him buried anywhere near the hedge and the colonel had seen her point right away.
So it had worked out.
It had all been fine.
She had taken a commercial flight to Singapore that night and changed directly for Kuala Lumpur.
She had called no one.
We were sitting after dinner on the porch of the bungalow Inez was renting in Kuala Lumpur when she told me this. It was my first day there. All afternoon at the clinic she had talked about Harry Victor and the Alliance for Democratic Institutions, and when I asked at dinner where Jack Lovett was she had said only that he was not in Kuala Lumpur. After dinner we had sat on the porch without speaking for a while and then she had begun, abruptly.
“Something happened in August,” she had said.
Somewhere between Guam and Kwajalein she had asked if I wanted tea, and had brought it out to the porch in a chipped teapot painted with a cartoon that suggested the bungalow’s period: a cigar-smoking bulldog flanked by two rosebuds, one labeled “Lillibet” and the other “Margaret Rose.” Inez was barefoot. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing no makeup. There had been during the course of her account a sudden hard fall of rain, temporarily walling the porch with glassy sheets of water, and now after the rain termites swarmed around the light and dropped in our teacups, but Inez made no more note of the termites than she had of the rain or for that matter of the teapot. After she stopped talking we sat in silence a moment and then Inez poured me another cup of tea and flicked the termites from its surface with her fingernail. “What do you think about this,” she said.
I said nothing.
Inez was watching me closely.
I thought about this precisely what Inez must have thought about this, but it was irrelevant. I thought there had been papers shredded all over the Pacific the night she was flying Jack Lovett’s body from Jakarta to Schofield, but it was irrelevant. We were sitting in a swamp forest on the edge of Asia in a city that had barely existed a century before and existed now only as the flotsam of some territorial imperative and a woman who had once thought of living in the White House was fl
icking termites from her teacup and telling me about landing on a series of coral atolls in a seven-passenger plane with a man in a body bag.
An American in a body bag.
An American who, it was being said, had been doing business in situations where there were not supposed to be any Americans.
What did I think about this.
Finally I shrugged.
Inez watched me a moment longer, then shrugged herself.
“Anyway we were together,” she said. “We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it.”
Inside the bungalow the telephone was ringing.
Inez made no move to answer it.
Instead she stood up and leaned on the wooden porch railing and looked out into the wet tangle of liana and casuarina that surrounded the bungalow. Through the growth I could see occasional headlight beams from the cars on Ampang Road. If I stood I could see the lights of the Hilton on the hill. The telephone had stopped ringing before Inez spoke again.
“Not that it matters,” she said then. “I mean the sun still rises and he still won’t see it. That was Harry calling.”
4
JACK Lovett had caught lobsters in the lagoon off Johnston in 1952. Inez had soaked her bandana in the lagoon off Johnston in 1975. Jessie and Adlai had played Marco Polo in the fifty-meter pool at the Borobudur in Jakarta in 1969. Jack Lovett had died in the fifty-meter pool at the Borobudur in Jakarta in 1975. In 1952 Inez and Jack Lovett had walked in the graveyard at Schofield Barracks. He had shown her the graves of the stillborn dependents, the Italian prisoners of war. He had shown her the hedge and the graves that faced away from the flag. The stillborn dependents and the Italian prisoners of war and the executed soldiers had all been there in 1952. Even the jacaranda would have been there in 1952.