Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  At this point the fragment skids to an abrupt close: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.”

  So ended the novel she was writing just to show us.

  Show us what?

  Show us that she could write a novel?

  Show us why and how she would die?

  Show us what she believed our reaction would be?

  Now, they didn’t even care any more.

  No.

  She had no idea how much we needed her.

  How could we have so misunderstood one another?

  Had she chosen to write a novel because we wrote novels? Had it been one more obligation pressed on her? Had she felt it as a fear? Had we?

  What follows are notes I made about a figure who at an earlier point had populated her nightmares, a fantast she called The Broken Man and described so often and with such troubling specificity that I was frequently moved to check for him on the terrace outside her second-floor windows. “He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man,” she repeatedly told me. “Short sleeves. He has his name always on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage. After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.”

  David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names?

  Name always on his shirt? On the right-hand side?

  Cap like a Dodger cap, navy blue, GULF on it?

  After she became five she never ever dreamed about him?

  It was when she said “I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine” that I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own.

  9

  On this question of fear.

  When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their most casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

  The ways in which for example we write novels “just to show” each other.

  The ways in which our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear.

  The ways in which neither we nor they can bear to contemplate the death or the illness or even the aging of the other.

  As the pages progressed it occurred to me that their actual subject was not children after all, at least not children per se, at least not children qua children: their actual subject was this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, death.

  This fear.

  Only as the pages progressed further did I understand that the two subjects were the same.

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

  Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.

  After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.

  Once she was born I was never not afraid.

  I was afraid of swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet, The Broken Man himself. I was afraid of rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides, strangers who appeared at the door, unexplained fevers, elevators without operators and empty hotel corridors. The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?

  10

  She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day, March third, when Blake Watson, the obstetrician who delivered her, called the house at Portuguese Bend in which we then lived, forty-some miles down the coast from Santa Monica. I was taking a shower and burst into tears when John came into the bathroom to report what Blake Watson had said. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” is what he had said. “I need to know if you want her.” The baby’s mother, he had said, was from Tucson. She had been staying with relatives in California for the birth of the baby. An hour later we stood outside the window of the nursery at St. John’s looking at an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features. The beads on her wrist spelled out not her name but “N.I.,” for “No Information,” which was the hospital’s response to any questions that might be asked about a baby being placed for adoption. One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby … that baby. The baby with the ribbon.”

  “Do that baby,” she would repeat in return, a gift to us, an endorsement of our wisdom in opting to follow the recommended choice narrative. The choice narrative is no longer universally favored by professionals of child care, but it was in 1966. “Do it again. Do the baby with the ribbon.”

  And later: “Do the part about Dr. Watson calling.” Blake Watson was already a folk figure in this recital.

  And then: “Tell the part about the shower.”

  Even the shower had become part of the recommended choice narrative.

  March 3, 1966.

  After we left St. John’s that night we stopped in Beverly Hills to tell John’s brother Nick and his wife, Lenny. Lenny offered to meet me at Saks in the morning to buy a layette. She was taking ice from a crystal bucket, making celebratory drinks. Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter any usual, occasion. In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink but this did not occur to any of us in 1966. Only when I read my early fiction, in which someone was always downstairs making a drink and singing “Big Noise blew in from Winnetka,” did I realize how much we all drank and how little thought we gave to it. Lenny added more ice to my glass and took the crystal bucket to the kitchen for a refill. “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinette,” she added as she went.

  I took the glass and put it down.

  I had not considered the need for a bassinette.

  I had not considered the need for a layette.

  The baby with the fierce dark hair stayed that night and the next two in the nursery at St. John’s and at some point during each of those nights I woke in the house at Portuguese Bend to the same chill, hearing the surf break on the rocks below, dreaming that I had forgotten her, left her asleep in a drawer, gone into town for dinner or a movie and made no provision for the infant who could even then be waking alone and hungry in the drawer in Portuguese Bend.

  Dreaming in other words that I had failed.

  Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe.

  When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect.

  We omit the instant of the sudden chill, the “what-if,” the free fall into certain failure.

  What if I fail to take care of this baby?

  What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?

  And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

  March 3, 1966.

  Until that instant when Lenny mentioned the bassinette it had all happened very fast. Until the bassinette it had all seemed casual, even blithe, not different in spirit from the Jax jerseys and printed cotton Lilly Pulitzer shifts we were all wearing that year: on New Year
’s weekend 1966 John and I had gone to Cat Harbor, on the far side of Catalina Island, on Morty Hall’s boat. Morty Hall was married to Diana Lynn. Diana was a close friend of Lenny’s. At some point on the boat that weekend (presumably at a point, given the drift of the excursion, when we were having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink) I had mentioned to Diana that I was trying to have a baby. Diana had said I should talk to Blake Watson. Blake Watson had delivered her and Morty’s four children. Blake Watson had also delivered the adopted daughter of Howard and Lou Erskine, old friends of Nick and Lenny’s (Howard had gone to Williams with Nick) who happened to be on the boat that weekend. Maybe because the Erskines were there or maybe because I had mentioned wanting a baby or maybe because we had all had the drink we were thinking about having, the topic of adoption had entered the ether. Diana herself, it seemed, had been adopted, but this information had been withheld from her until she was twenty-one and it had become necessary for some financial reason that she know. Her adoptive parents had handled the situation by revealing the secret to (this had not seemed unusual at the time) Diana’s agent. Diana’s agent had handled the situation by taking Diana to lunch at (nor at the time had this) the Beverly Hills Hotel. Diana got the news in the Polo Lounge. She could remember fleeing into the bougainvillea around the bungalows, screaming.

  That was all.

  Yet the next week I was meeting Blake Watson.

  When he called us from the hospital and asked if we wanted the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we wanted her. When they asked us at the hospital what we would call the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we would call her Quintana Roo. We had seen the name on a map when we were in Mexico a few months before and promised each other that if ever we had a daughter (dreamy speculation, no daughter had been in the offing) Quintana Roo would be her name. The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still not yet a state but a territory.

  The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still frequented mainly by archaeologists, herpetologists, and bandits. The institution that became spring break in Cancún did not yet exist. There were no bargain flights. There was no Club Med.

  The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still terra incognita.

  As was the infant in the nursery at St. John’s.

  L’adoptada, she came to be called in the household. The adopted one.

  M’ija she was also called. My daughter.

  Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.

  As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone “chose” you, what does that tell you?

  Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be “chosen”?

  Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world?

  The one who “chose” you?

  And the other who didn’t?

  Are we beginning to see how the word “abandonment” might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as “frantic”? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn’t one of those words “fear”? Isn’t another of those words “anxiety”?

  Terra incognita, as I had seen it until then, meant free of complications.

  That terra incognita could present its own complications had never occurred to me.

  11

  On the day her adoption became legal, a hot September afternoon in 1966, we took her from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to lunch at The Bistro in Beverly Hills. At the courthouse she had been the only baby up for adoption; the other prospective adoptees that day were all adults, petitioning to adopt one another for one or another tax advantage. At The Bistro, too, more predictably, she was the only baby. Qué hermosa, the waiters crooned. Qué chula. They gave us the corner banquette usually saved for Sidney Korshak, a gesture the import of which would be clear only to someone who had lived in that particular community at that particular time. “Let’s just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management,” the producer Robert Evans would later write by way of explaining who Sidney Korshak was. “A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.” The waiters placed her carrier on the table between us. She was wearing a blue-and-white dotted organdy dress. She was not quite seven months old. As far as I was concerned this lunch at Sidney Korshak’s banquette at The Bistro was the happy ending to the choice narrative. We had chosen, the beautiful baby girl had accepted our choice, no natural parent had stood up at the courthouse and exercised his or her absolute legal right under the California law covering private adoptions to simply say no, she’s mine, I want her back.

  The issue, as I preferred to see it, was now closed.

  The fear was now gone.

  She was ours.

  What I would not realize for another few years was that I had never been the only person in the house to feel the fear.

  What if you hadn’t answered the phone when Dr. Watson called, she would suddenly say. What if you hadn’t been home, what if you couldn’t meet him at the hospital, what if there’d been an accident on the freeway, what would happen to me then?

  Since I had no adequate answer to these questions, I refused to consider them.

  She considered them.

  She lived with them. And then she didn’t.

  “You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

  12

  Sidney Korshak, 88, Dies; Fabled Fixer for the Chicago Mob:

  So read the headline on Sidney Korshak’s obituary, when he died in 1996, in The New York Times. “It was a tribute to Sidney Korshak’s success that he was never indicted, despite repeated Federal and state investigations,” the obituary continued. “And the widespread belief that he had in fact committed the very crimes the authorities could never prove made him an indispensable ally of leading Hollywood producers, corporate executives and politicians.”

  Thirty years before Morty Hall had declared on principle that he and Diana would refuse to go to any party given by Sidney Korshak.

  I remember Morty and Diana arguing heatedly at dinner one night over this entirely hypothetical point.

  Morty and Diana and the heated argument at dinner about whether or not to refuse to go to a party given by Sidney Korshak are, I have to conclude, what people mean when they mention my wonderful memories.

  I recently saw Diana in an old commercial, one of those curiosities that turn up on YouTube. She is wearing a pale mink stole, draping herself over the hood of an Olds 88. In her smoky voice, she introduces the Olds 88 as “the hottest number I know.” The Olds 88 at this point begins to talk to Diana, mentioning its own “rocket engine” and “hydra-matic drive.” Diana wraps herself in the pale mink stole. “This is great,” she replies to the Olds 88, again in the smoky voice.

  It occurs to me that Diana does not sound in this Olds 88 commercial as if she would necessarily refuse to go to a party given by Sidney Korshak.

  It also occurs to me that no one who now comes across this Olds 88 commercial on YouTube would know who Sidney Korshak was, or for that matter who Diana was, or even what an Olds 88 was.

  Time passes.

  Diana is dead now. She died in 1971, at age forty-five, of a cerebral bleed.

  She had collapsed after a wardrobe fitting for a picture she was due to start in a few days, the third lead, after Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, in Play It As It Lays, for which John and I had written the screenplay and in which she was replaced by T
ammy Grimes. The last time I saw her was in an ICU at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. Lenny and I had gone together to Cedars to see her. The next time Lenny and I were in an ICU at Cedars together it was to see her and Nick’s daughter Dominique, who had been strangled outside her house in Hollywood. “She looks even worse than Diana did,” Lenny whispered when she saw Dominique, her intake of breath so sudden that I could barely hear her. I knew what Lenny was saying. Lenny was saying that Diana had not lived. Lenny was saying that Dominique was not going to live. I knew this—I suppose I had known it from the time the police officer who called identified himself as “Homicide”—but did not want to hear anyone say it. I ran into one of Diana’s daughters a few months ago, in New York. We had lunch in the neighborhood. Diana’s daughter remembered that we had last seen each other when Diana was still alive and living in New York and I had brought Quintana to play with her daughters. We promised to keep in touch. It occurred to me as I walked home that I had seen too many people for the last time in one or another ICU.