Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  Twenty months during which she would be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all?

  Twenty months during which she would spend weeks at a time in the intensive care units of four different hospitals?

  In all of those intensive care units there were the same blue-and-white printed curtains. In all of those intensive care units there were the same sounds, the same gurgling through plastic tubing, the same dripping from the IV line, the same rales, the same alarms. In all of those intensive care units there were the same requirements to guard against further infections, the donning of the double gowns, the paper slippers, the surgical cap, the mask, the gloves that pulled on only with difficulty and left a rash that reddened and bled. In all of those intensive care units there was the same racing through the unit when a code was called, the feet hitting the floor, the rattle of the crash cart.

  This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking—outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption—in the third of those intensive care units.

  By the time she reached the fourth I was no longer invoking this special exemption.

  When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

  I just said that, but what does it mean?

  All right, of course I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent?

  Time passes.

  Yes, agreed, a banality, of course time passes.

  Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once?

  Have I been saying it the same way I say I have lived most of my life in California?

  Have I been saying it without hearing what I say?

  Could it be that I heard it more this way: Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even: Time passes, but not for me? Could it be that I did not figure in either the general nature or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? The way in which you live most of your life in California, and then you don’t? The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life?

  Time passes.

  Could it be that I never believed it?

  Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?

  3

  Last spring, 2009, I had some warnings, flags on the track, definite notices of darkening even before the blue nights came.

  L’heure bleue. The gloaming.

  Not even yet evident when that year’s darkening gave its first notices.

  The initial such notice was sudden, the ringing telephone you wish you had never answered, the news no one wants to get: someone to whom I had been close since her childhood, Natasha Richardson, had fallen on a ski slope outside Quebec (spring break, a family vacation, a bunny slope, this was never supposed to happen to her) and by the time she noticed that she did not feel entirely well she was dying, the victim of an epidural hematoma, a traumatic brain injury. She was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, who was one of our closest friends in Los Angeles. The first time I ever saw her she had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, not yet entirely comfortable in her own skin, an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings. She had come from London to visit her father at his house on Kings Road in Hollywood, an eccentrically leveled structure that had belonged to Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. Tony had bought the house and proceeded to fill it with light and parrots and whippets. When Tasha arrived from London he had brought her to dinner with us at La Scala. The dinner had not been planned as a party for her arrival but there had happened to be many people her father and we knew at La Scala that night and her father had made it feel like one. She had been pleased. A few years later Quintana had been at the same uncertain age and Tasha, by then seventeen, was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc, the village her father had invented, an entertainment of his own, a director’s conceit, in the hills of the Var above Saint-Tropez.

  To say that Tasha was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc fails to adequately suggest the situation. In fact, by the time John and I arrived in France that summer, Tasha was running Le Nid du Duc, the seventeen-year-old chatelaine of what amounted to a summer-long house party for a floating thirty people. Tasha was managing the provisioning of the several houses that made up the compound. Tasha was cooking and serving, entirely unaided, three meals a day for the basic thirty as well as for anyone else who happened up the hill and had a drink and waited for the long tables under the lime trees to be set—not only cooking and serving but, as Tony noted in his memoir The Long-Distance Runner, “completely unfazed when told that there’d be an extra twenty for lunch.”

  Most astonishingly, at seventeen, Tasha was undertaking the induction into adult life not only of her sisters Joely and Katharine but of two Los Angeles eighth-graders, one of them Quintana, the other Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s daughter Roxana, both avid to grow up, each determined to misbehave. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got to the correct spot on the beach at Saint-Tropez every afternoon, that summer’s correct spot of choice being the Aqua Club. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got a proper introduction to the Italian boys who trailed them on the beach, a “proper introduction” for Tasha entailing a meal at the long tables under the lime trees at Le Nid du Duc. Tasha came up from the Aqua Club and Tasha did a perfect beurre blanc for the fish Tony had bought that morning and Tasha watched Quintana and Roxana mesmerize the Italian boys into believing that they were dealing not with fourteen-year-olds last seen in the pastel cotton uniforms of the Westlake and Marlborough Schools for Girls in Los Angeles but with preternaturally sophisticated undergraduates from UCLA.

  And never ever, not once, not ever, did I hear Tasha blow the whistle on that or on any other of the summer’s romantic fables.

  Au contraire.

  Tasha devised the fables, Tasha wrote the romance.

  The last time I ever saw her was a few nights after she fell on the bunny slope outside Quebec, in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, lying as if about to wake.

  She was not about to wake.

  She had been flown down from Montreal while her family met in New York.

  When I left the hospital after seeing her there were photographers outside, waiting for clear camera lines on the family.

  I circled around them onto Park Avenue and walked on home.

  Her first marriage, to the producer Robert Fox, had taken place in my apartment. She had filled the rooms with quince blossoms for the ceremony. The blossoms had eventually fallen but the branches had remained, brittle and dusty, twigs breaking off, nonetheless still passing as decorative elements in the living room. When I walked in from Lenox Hill that night the apartment seemed full of photographs of Tasha and of her father and mother. Her father on location for The Border, riding a Panavision camera. Her father on location in Spain, wearing a red windbreaker, directing Melanie Griffith and James Woods on an HBO project he and John and I did together. Her mother backstage at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, the year she and I did a play together. Tasha herself, talking to John at one of the long tables she had arranged outside for the wedding dinner on her farm in Millbrook when she was married a second time, this time to Liam Neeson.

  She had managed that wedding on the farm as before and after she managed summers at Le Nid du Duc.

  She had managed even a priest, a wedding mass. She had kept referring to the priest as “Father Dan.” It
was only when he stood to actually do the ceremony that I realized that “Father Dan” was Daniel Berrigan, one of the activist Berrigan brothers. It seemed that Daniel Berrigan had been an advisor on Roland Joffé’s The Mission. It seemed that Liam had played a role in The Mission. Tasha had designed the entire event, in other words, as a piece of theater, the very kind of moment Tony liked best in the world. He particularly would have liked Tasha forgetting the wafers for the mass, tearing up long baguettes to pass in their place, but Tony was dead by the day of that wedding.

  Tasha died in March 2009.

  This was never supposed to happen to her.

  On her twenty-first birthday her father had made a film of the lunch he gave in her honor at Linda Lovelace’s former house on Kings Road. John had wished her happy birthday, on film. Quintana and Fiona Lewis and Tamara Asseyev had sung “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” on film. After lunch we had untied rafts of white balloons and watched them drift over the Hollywood hills, on film. These are the lines from W. H. Auden that Tony quoted that afternoon as “the best twenty-first birthday wish you can make for anyone”:

  So I wish you first a

  Sense of theatre; only

  Those who love illusion

  And know it will go far—

  Tasha and her father and John and Quintana and the whippets and the parrots and the white balloons, all still there, on film.

  I have a copy of the film.

  So I wish you first a sense of theatre—

  So her father would have said at the wedding in Millbrook.

  The second such warning, this one not at all sudden, came in April 2009.

  Because I had been showing symptoms of neuritis, or neuropathy, or neurological inflammation (there seemed no general agreement on what to call it), an MRI was done, then an MRA. Neither suggested a definitive reason for the symptoms at hand but images of the Circle of Willis showed evidence of a 4.2 mm by 3.4 mm aneurysm deep in that circle of arteries—the anterior cerebral, the anterior communicating, the internal carotid, the posterior cerebral, and the posterior communicating—at the base of my brain. This finding, the several neurologists who examined the images stressed, was “entirely incidental,” had “nothing to do with what we’re looking for,” and was not even necessarily significant. One of the neurologists ventured that this particular aneurysm “doesn’t look ready to blow”; another suggested that “if it does blow, you won’t live through it.”

  This seemed to be offered as encouraging news, and I accepted it as such. At that instant in April 2009 I realized that I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die, afraid that I might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living.

  Had there been an instant when Tasha was afraid not to die?

  Had there been an instant when Quintana was afraid not to die?

  Toward the very end, say, for example on the August morning when I walked into the ICU overlooking the river at New York-Cornell and one of what must have been twenty doctors in the unit happened to mention (a point of interest, a teachable moment, Grand Rounds for two students, the husband and the mother of the patient) that they were doing hand compression because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the ventilator? Only he did not say “the ventilator,” he said “the vent”? And I asked dutifully (the attentive student, up on the vernacular) how long it had been since the patient could get enough oxygen through the vent? And the doctor said it had been at least an hour?

  Did I get this all wrong?

  Did I misunderstand a key point?

  Could they have actually let an hour go by without mentioning to me that her brain had already been damaged by insufficient oxygen?

  Put the question another way: what if the attentive student had never asked?

  Would they have mentioned it at all?

  One further turn of the screw: if I had never asked would she still be alive?

  Warehoused somewhere?

  No longer sentient but alive, not dead?

  What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?

  Was there an instant when she knew what was in store for her that August morning in the ICU overlooking the river at New York–Cornell?

  Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying?

  Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was?

  4

  “When Quintana was a little girl, we moved to Malibu, to a house overlooking the Pacific.” So began the toast John delivered in the Cathedral house at St. John the Divine on the afternoon she wove the stephanotis into her braid and cut the peach-colored cake from Payard. There were aspects of living in that house overlooking the Pacific that he failed to mention—he failed to mention for example the way the wind would blow down through the canyons and whine under the eaves and lift the roof and coat the white walls with ash from the fireplace, he failed to mention for example the king snakes that dropped from the rafters of the garage into the open Corvette I parked below, he failed to mention for example that king snakes were locally considered a valuable asset because the presence of a king snake in your Corvette was understood to mean (I was never convinced that it did) that you didn’t have a rattlesnake in your Corvette—but the following is what he did mention. I can quote what he mentioned exactly because after he mentioned it he wrote it down. He wanted her to have it in his words, his exact memory, in his exact words, of her childhood:

  The house didn’t have any heat—it had old baseboard heaters, but we were always afraid they’d burn the place up—and so we heated it from this huge walk-in fireplace in the living room. In the morning I’d get up and bring in wood for the day—we used about a cord of wood a week—and then I’d get Q up and make her breakfast and get her ready for school. Joan was trying to finish a book that year, and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed. She always made Q’s lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox. You should have seen those lunches: they weren’t your basic peanut butter and jelly school-box lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces, kept fresh in Saran Wrap. Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar.

  So I’d take Q to school, and she’d walk down this steep hill. All the kids wore uniforms—Quintana wore a plaid jumper and a white sweater, and her hair—she was a towhead in that Malibu sun—her hair was in a ponytail. I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and I thought it was as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen. So I said to Joan, “You got to see this, babe.” The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry.

  Today Quintana is walking back up that hill. She’s not the towhead with the plaid jumper and the blue lunchbox and the ponytail. She’s the Princess Bride—and at the top of that hill stands her Prince. Will you join me please in toasting Gerry and Quintana.

  We did.

  We joined him in toasting Gerry and Quintana.

  We toasted Gerry and Quintana at St. John the Divine and a few hours later, in their absence, at a Chinese restaurant on West Sixty-fifth Street with my brother and his family, we toasted Gerry and Quintana again. We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way.

  Do notice:

  We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.”

  5

  Seven years later.

  July 26 2010.

  Laid out on a table in front of me today is a group of photographs sent to me only recently but all taken in 1971, summer or fall, in or around the unheated house
in Malibu mentioned in the wedding toast. We had moved into that house in January 1971, on a perfectly clear day which turned so foggy that by the time I drove back to the house from a late-day run to the Trancas Market, three-and-a-half miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, I could no longer find the driveway. Since sundown fogs in January and February and March turned out to be as much a given of that stretch of coast as wildfires would be in September and October and November, this disappearance of the driveway was by no means an unusual turn of events: the preferred method for finding it was to hold your breath, avert your mind from the unseeable cliff below, rising two-hundred-some feet from open ocean, and turn left.

  Neither the fogs nor the wildfires figure in the photographs.

  There are eighteen images.

  Each is of the same child at the same age, Quintana at five, her hair, as noted in the wedding toast, bleached by the beach sun. In some she is wearing her plaid uniform jumper, also noted in the toast. In a few she is wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater I brought her from London when we went that May to do promotion for the European release of The Panic in Needle Park. In a few she is wearing a checked gingham dress trimmed in eyelet, a little faded and a little too big for her, the look of a hand-me-down. In others she has on cutoff jeans and a denim Levi jacket with metal studs, a bamboo fishing pole against her shoulder, artfully arranged there (by her) in a spirit less of fishing than of styling, a prop to accessorize the outfit.