by Joan Didion
10.
I had first noticed what I came to know as “the vortex effect” in January, when I was watching the ice floes form on the East River from a window at Beth Israel North. At the join between the walls and the ceiling of the room from which I was watching the ice floes there happened to be a rose-patterned wallpaper border, a Dorothy Draper touch, left I supposed from the period when what was then Beth Israel North had been Doctors’ Hospital. I myself had never been in Doctors’ Hospital, but when I was in my twenties and working for Vogue it had figured in many conversations. It had been the hospital favored by Vogue editors for uncomplicated deliveries and for “resting,” a kind of medical Maine Chance.
This had seemed a good line of thinking.
This had seemed better than thinking about why I was at Beth Israel North.
I had ventured further:
Doctors’ Hospital was where X had the abortion that was bought and paid for by the district attorney’s office. “X” was a woman with whom I had worked at Vogue. Seductive clouds of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5 and imminent disaster had trailed her through the Condé Nast offices, which were then in the Graybar Building. On a single morning, while I was attempting to put together a particularly trying Vogue feature called “People Are Talking About,” she had found both that she needed an abortion and that her name had turned up in the files of a party girl operation under investigation by the district attorney’s office. She had been cheerful about these two pieces of (what had seemed to me) devastating news. A deal had been struck. She had agreed to testify that she had been approached by the operation, and the district attorney’s office had in turn arranged a D&C at Doctors’ Hospital, no inconsiderable favor at a time when getting an abortion meant making a clandestine and potentially lethal appointment with someone whose first instinct in a crisis would be to vacate the premises.
The party girl operation and the arranged abortion and the years in which I had spent mornings putting together “People Are Talking About” still seemed a good line of thinking.
I remembered having used such an incident in my second novel, Play It As It Lays. The protagonist, a former model named Maria, had recently had an abortion, which was troubling her.
Once a long time before Maria had worked a week in Ocho Rios with a girl who had just had an abortion. She could remember the girl telling her about it while they sat huddled next to a waterfall waiting for the photographer to decide the sun was high enough to shoot. It seemed that it was a hard time for abortions in New York, there had been arrests, no one wanted to do it. Finally the girl, her name was Ceci Delano, had asked a friend in the district attorney’s office if he knew of anyone. “Quid pro quo,” he had said, and, late the same day that Ceci Delano testified to a blue-ribbon jury that she had been approached by a party girl operation, she was admitted to Doctors’ Hospital for a legal D&C, arranged and paid for by the district attorney’s office.
It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning at the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what had happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano’s situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.
This seemed to be working.
I had avoided thinking for at least two minutes about why I was at Beth Israel North.
I had moved on, into the period during which I was writing Play It As It Lays. The rented wreck of a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. The votive candles on the sills of the big windows in the living room. The té de limón grass and aloe that grew by the kitchen door. The rats that ate the avocados. The sun porch on which I worked. Watching from the windows of the sun porch as Quintana ran through a sprinkler on the lawn.
I recall recognizing that I had hit more dangerous water but there had seemed no turning back.
I had been writing that book when Quintana was three.
When Quintana was three.
There it was, the vortex.
Quintana at three. The night she had put a seed pod from the garden up her nose and I had driven her to Children’s Hospital. The pediatrician who specialized in seed pods had arrived in his dinner jacket. The next night she had put another seed pod up her nose, wanting to repeat the interesting adventure. John and I walking with her around the lake in MacArthur Park. The old man lurching from a bench. “That child is the picture of Ginger Rogers,” the old man cried. I finished the novel, I was under contract to begin a column for Life, we took Quintana to Honolulu. Life’s idea for the first column was that I should introduce myself, “let the readers know who you are.” I planned to write it from Honolulu, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, we used to get a lanai suite on the press rate for twenty-seven dollars a night. While we were there the news of My Lai broke. I thought about the first column. It seemed to me that given this news I should write it from Saigon. By then it was a Sunday. Life had given me a printed card with the home numbers of its editors and also of lawyers in cities around the world. I took out the card and called my editor, Loudon Wainwright, to say I was going to Saigon. His wife answered the phone. She said he would have to call me back.
“He’s watching the NFL game,” John said when I hung up. “He’ll call you at halftime.”
He did. He said that I should stay where I was and introduce myself, that as far as Saigon went “some of the guys are going out.” The topic did not seem open to further discussion. “There’s a world in revolution out there and we can put you in it,” George Hunt had said when he was still the managing editor of Life and offering me the job. By the time I finished Play It As It Lays George Hunt had retired and some of the guys were going out.
“I warned you,” John said. “I told you what working for Life would be like. Didn’t I tell you? It would be like being nibbled to death by ducks?”
I was brushing Quintana’s hair. The picture of Ginger Rogers.
I felt betrayed, humiliated. I should have listened to John.
I wrote the column letting the readers know who I was. It appeared. At the time it seemed an unexceptional enough eight hundred words in the assigned genre, but there was, at the end of the second paragraph, a line so out of synch with the entire Life mode of self-presentation that it might as well have suggested abduction by space aliens: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” A week later we happened to be in New York. “Did you know she was writing it,” many people asked John, sotto voce.
Did he know I was writing it?
He edited it.
He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.
He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.
At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it. That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.
See where that particular vortex sucked me.
From the Dorothy Draper wallpaper border at Beth Israel North to Quintana at three and I should have listened to John.
I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.
The way you got sideswiped was by going back.
I saw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John. This would require ingenuity. John and I had lived in Los Angeles County from 1964 until 1988. Between 1988 and the time he died we had spent significant amounts of time there, usually at the very hotel in which I was now staying, the Beverly Wilshire. Quintana was born in Los Angeles County, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She went to school there, first in Malibu and later at what was then still the Westlake School for Girls (the year after she left it became coeducational, and was called Harvard-Westlake) in Holmby Hills.
For reasons that remain unclear to me the Beverly Wilshire itself only ra
rely triggered the vortex effect. In theory its every corridor was permeated with the associations I was trying to avoid. When we were living in Malibu and had meetings in town we would bring Quintana and stay at the Beverly Wilshire. After we moved to New York and needed to be in Los Angeles for a picture we would stay there, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks at a time. We set up computers and printers there. We had meetings there. What if, someone was always saying in these meetings. We could work until eight or nine in the evening there and transmit the pages to whichever director or producer we were working with and then go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Melrose where we did not need a reservation. We always specified the old building. I knew the housekeepers. I knew the manicurists. I knew the doorman who would give John the bottled water when he came back from walking in the morning. I knew by reflex how to work the key and open the safe and adjust the shower head: I had stayed over the years in some dozens of rooms identical to the one in which I was now staying. I had last stayed in such a room in October 2003, alone, doing promotion, two months before John died. Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.
What if.
Outside the exempt zone that was the Beverly Wilshire, I plotted my routes, I remained on guard.
Never once in five weeks did I drive into the part of Brentwood in which we had lived from 1978 until 1988. When I saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and street work forced me to pass within three blocks of our house in Brentwood, I did not look left or right. Never once in five weeks did I drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. When Jean Moore offered me the use of her house on the Pacific Coast Highway, three-eighths of a mile past the house in which we had lived from 1971 until 1978, I invented reasons why it was essential for me to stay instead at the Beverly Wilshire. I could avoid driving to UCLA on Sunset. I could avoid passing the intersection at Sunset and Beverly Glen where for six years I had turned off to the Westlake School for Girls. I could avoid passing any intersection I could not anticipate, control. I could avoid keeping the car radio tuned to the stations I used to drive by, avoid locating KRLA, an AM station that had called itself “the heart and soul of rock and roll” and was still in the early 1990s programming the top hits of 1962. I could avoid punching in the Christian call-in station to which I had switched whenever the top hits of 1962 lost their resonance.
Instead I listened to NPR, a sedate morning show called Morning Becomes Eclectic. Every morning at the Beverly Wilshire I ordered the same breakfast, huevos rancheros with one scrambled egg. Every morning when I left the Beverly Wilshire I drove the same way to UCLA: out Wilshire, right on Glendon, slip left to Westwood, right on Le Conte and left at Tiverton. Every morning I noted the same banners fluttering from the light standards along Wilshire: UCLA Medical Center—#1 in the West, #3 in the Nation. Every morning I wondered whose ranking this was. I never asked. Each morning I inserted my ticket into the gate mechanism and each morning, if I inserted it right, the same woman’s voice said “Wel-come to U-C-L-A.” Each morning, if I timed it right, I got a parking place outside, on the Plaza 4 level, against the hedge. Late each afternoon I would drive back to the Beverly Wilshire, pick up my messages, and return a few of them. After the first week Gerry was flying back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, trying to work at least a few days a week, and if he was in New York I would call to give him the day’s information or lack of it. I would lie down. I would watch the local news. I would stand in the shower for twenty minutes and go out to dinner.
I went out to dinner every night I was in Los Angeles. I had dinner with my brother and his wife whenever they were in town. I went to Connie Wald’s house in Beverly Hills. There were roses and nasturtiums and open fires in the big fireplaces, as there had been through all the years when John and I and Quintana would go there. Now Susan Traylor was there. I went to Susan’s own house in the Hollywood hills. I had known Susan since she was three and I had known her husband Jesse since he and Susan and Quintana were in the fourth grade at the Point Dume School, and now they were looking after me. I ate in many restaurants with many friends. I had dinner quite often with Earl McGrath, whose intuitive kindness in this situation was to ask me every morning what I was doing that night and, if the answer was in any way vague, to arrange an untaxing dinner for two or three or four at Orso or at Morton’s or at his house on Robertson Boulevard.
After dinner I would take a taxi back to the hotel and place my morning order for huevos rancheros. “One scrambled egg,” the voice on the phone would prompt. “Exactly,” I would say.
I plotted these evenings as carefully as I plotted the routes.
I left no time to dwell on promises I had no way of keeping.
You’re safe. I’m here.
In the deep hush of Morning Becomes Eclectic the next day I would congratulate myself.
I could have been in Cleveland.
Yet.
I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
The Santa Ana was back.
The jacaranda was back.
One afternoon I needed to see Gil Frank, at his office on Wilshire, several blocks east of the Beverly Wilshire. In this previously untested territory (terra cognita for these purposes was west on Wilshire, not east) I caught sight, unprepared, of a movie theater in which John and I had in 1967 seen The Graduate. There had been no particular sense of moment about seeing The Graduate in 1967. I had been in Sacramento. John had picked me up at LAX. It had seemed too late to shop for dinner and too early to eat in a restaurant so we had gone to see The Graduate and then to dinner at Frascati’s. Frascati’s was gone but the theater was still there, if only to trap the unwary.
There were many such traps. One day I would notice a familiar stretch of coastal highway in a television commercial and realize it was outside the gate house, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at Portuguese Bend, to which John and I had brought Quintana home from St. John’s Hospital.
She was three days old.
We had placed her bassinet next to the wisteria in the box garden.
You’re safe. I’m here.
Neither the house nor its gate could be seen in the commercial but I experienced a sudden rush of memories: getting out of the car on that highway to open the gate so that John could drive through; watching the tide come in and float a car that was sitting on our beach to be shot for a commercial; sterilizing bottles for Quintana’s formula while the gamecock that lived on the property followed me companionably from window to window. This gamecock, named “Buck” by the owner of the house, had been abandoned on the highway, in the colorful opinion of the owner by “Mexicans on the run.” Buck had a distinctive and surprisingly endearing personality, not unlike a Labrador. In addition to Buck this house also came equipped with peacocks, which were decorative but devoid of personality. Unlike Buck, the peacocks were fat and moved only as a last resort. At dusk they would scream and try to fly to their nests in the olive trees, a fraught moment because they would so often fall. Just before dawn they would scream again. One dawn I woke to the screaming and looked for John. I found him outside in the dark, tearing unripe peaches from a tree and hurling them at the peacocks, a characteristically straightforward if counterproductive approach to resolving an annoyance. When Quintana was a month old we were evicted. There was a clause in the lease that specified no children but the owner and his wife allowed that the baby was not the reason. The reason was that we had hired a pretty teenager named Jennifer to take care of her. The owner and his wife did not want strangers on the property, or as they said “behind the gate,” particularly pretty teenagers named Jennifer, who would presumably have dates. We took a few months’ lease on a house in town that belonged to Herman Mankiewicz’s widow, Sara, who was going to
be traveling. She left everything in the house as it was except one object, the Oscar awarded to Herman Mankiewicz for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. “You’ll have parties, people will just get drunk and play with it,” she said when she put it away. On the day we moved John was traveling with the San Francisco Giants, doing a piece on Willie Mays for The Saturday Evening Post. I borrowed my sister-in-law’s station wagon, loaded it, put Quintana and Jennifer in the back seat, said goodbye to Buck, drove out, and let the totemic gate lock behind me for the last time.
All that and I had not even driven down there.
All I had done was catch sight of a commercial on television while I was dressing to go to the hospital.
Another day I would need to buy bottled water at the Rite Aid on Canon and remember that Canon was where The Bistro had been. In 1964 and 1965, when we were living in the gate house with the beach and the peacocks but could not afford even to tip the parking boys at restaurants, let alone eat in them, John and I used to park on the street on Canon and charge dinner at The Bistro. We took Quintana there on the day of her adoption, when she was not quite seven months old. They had given us Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette and placed her carrier on the table, a centerpiece. At the courthouse that morning she had been the only baby, even the only child; all the other adoptions that day had seemed to involve adults adopting one another for tax reasons. “Qué bonita, qué hermosa,” the busboys at The Bistro crooned when we brought her in at lunch. When she was six or seven we took her there for a birthday dinner. She was wearing a lime-green ruana I had bought for her in Bogotá. As we were about to leave the waiter had brought the ruana and she had flung it theatrically over her small shoulders.