Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.

  Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century–Fox.

  “This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end.” So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. “I had to read it when my parents weren’t around as they didn’t think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.”

  As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.

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

  After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.

  I have to know about this.

  One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me.

  How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her?

  I used to ask that.

  Now I ask the reverse:

  How could she have even imagined that I could take care of her?

  She saw me as needing care myself.

  She saw me as frail.

  Was that her anxiety or mine?

  I learned about this fear when she was temporarily off the ventilator in one or another ICU, I have no memory which.

  I told you, they were all the same.

  The blue-and-white printed curtains. The gurgling through plastic tubing. The dripping from the IV line, the rales, the alarms.

  The codes. The crash cart.

  This was never supposed to happen to her.

  It must have been the ICU at UCLA.

  Only at UCLA was she off the ventilator long enough to have had this conversation.

  You have your wonderful memories.

  I do, but they blur.

  They fade into one another.

  They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, “all mudgy.”

  I tried to tell her: I too have trouble remembering.

  Languages mingle: do I need an abogado or do I need an avocat?

  Names vanish. The names for example of California counties, once so familiar that I recited them in alphabetized order (Alameda and Alpine and Amador, Calaveras and Colusa and Contra Costa, Madera and Marin and Mariposa) now elude me.

  The name of one county I do remember.

  The name of this single county I always remember.

  I had my own Broken Man.

  I had my own stories about which I had to know.

  Trinity.

  The name of the county in which Stephanie Bryan had been found buried in the shallow grave was Trinity.

  The name of the test site at Alamogordo that had led to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also Trinity.

  19

  “What we need here is a montage, music over.

  How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx—

  “xx,” he said.

  “xxx,” she said.

  “How she:

  “How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx—

  “How he, and also she—”

  The above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted. I offer them as a representation of how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than “xxx,” or “xxxx,” symbols that meant “copy tk,” or “copy to come,” but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single “x” differed from a double “xx,” “xxx” from “xxxx.” The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.

  The same passage, rewritten, which is to say “written” in any real sense at all, became more detailed: “What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds. No place you could not pass a hundred. There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón. Goddamn but we had some fun there.”

  More detailed, yes.

  “She” now has a name: Elena.

  “He” now has a name: Barry Sedlow.

  But again, do notice: it had all been there in the original notes. It had all been there in the symbols, the marks on the page. It had all been there in the “xxx” and the “xxxx.”

  I supposed this process to be like writing music.

  I have no idea whether or not this was an accurate assessment, since I neither wrote nor read music. All I know now is that I no longer write this way. All I know now is that writing, or whatever it was I was doing when I could proceed on no more than “xxx” and “xxxx,” whatever it was I was doing when I imagined myself hearing the music, no longer comes easily to me. For a while I laid this to a certain weariness with my own style, an impatience, a wish to be more direct. I encouraged the very difficulty I was having laying words on the page. I saw it as evidence of a new directness. I see it differently now. I see it now as frailty. I see it now as the very frailty Quintana feared.

  We are moving into another summer.

  I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty.

  I fear falling on the street, I imagine bicycle messengers knocking me to the ground. The approach of a child on a motorized scooter causes me to freeze mid-intersection, play dead. I no longer go for breakfast to Three Guys on Madison Avenue: what if I were to fall on the way?

  I feel unsteady, unbalanced, as if my nerves are misfiring, which may or may not be an exact description of what my nerves are in fact doing.

  I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasingly distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.

  As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.

  I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively.

  I frame the cheerful response.

  What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.

  Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

  I push-pin the index card to the corkboard on which I collect notes.

  “Struck by a train nine days before our wedding,” one note on the corkboard reads. “Left the house that morning and was killed that afternoon in the crash of a small plane,” another reads. “It was the second of January, 1931,” a third reads. “I ran a little coup. My brother became president. He was more mature. I went to Europe.”

  These notes I push-pin to the corkboard are intended at the time I make them to restore my ability to function, but have so far not done so. I study the notes again. Who was struck by the train nine days before her wedding? Or was it nine days before his wedding? Who left the house that morning and was killed that afternoon in the crash of the small plane? Who, above all, ran the little coup on the second of January, 1931? And in what country?

  I abandon the attempt to answer these questions.

  The telephone rings.

  Grateful for the interruption, I pic
k it up. I hear the voice of my nephew Griffin. He feels the need to report that he has been getting calls from “concerned friends.” The focus of their concern is my health, specifically my weight. I am no longer grateful. I point out that I have weighed the same amount since the early 1970s, when I picked up paratyphoid during a film festival on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and by the time I got home had dropped so much weight that my mother had to fly to Malibu to feed me. Griffin says that he recognizes this. He is aware that my weight has not fluctuated since he was old enough to notice it. He is reporting only what these “concerned friends” have mentioned to him.

  Griffin and I understand each other, which means in this case that we are able to change the subject. I consider asking him if he knows who it was who ran the little coup on the second of January, 1931, and in what country, but do not. In the absence of another subject I tell him about a taxi driver I recently encountered on my way from the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco to SFO. This taxi driver told me that he had been analyzing drill sites around Houston until the oil boom went belly up. His father had been a construction supervisor, he said, which meant that he had grown up on the construction sites of the big postwar high dams and power reactors. He mentioned Glen Canyon on the Colorado. He mentioned Rancho Seco outside Sacramento. He mentioned, when he learned that I was a writer, wanting himself to write a book about “intercourse between the United States and Japan.” He had proposed such a book to Simon & Schuster but Simon & Schuster, he now believed, had passed the proposal on to another writer.

  “Fellow by the name of Michael Crichton,” he said. “I’m not saying he stole it, I’m just saying they used my ideas. But hey. Ideas are free.”

  Around San Bruno he began mentioning Scientology.

  I tell you this true story just to prove that I can.

  That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

  Weeks pass, then months.

  I go to a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street to watch a run-through of a play, a new production of a Broadway musical for which two close friends wrote the lyrics in the 1970s.

  I sit on a folding metal chair. Behind me I hear voices I recognize (the two close friends and their collaborator, who wrote the book) but I feel too uncertain to turn around. The songs, some familiar and some new, continue. The reprises roll around. As I sit on the folding metal chair I begin to fear getting up. As the finale approaches, I experience outright panic. What if my feet no longer move? What if my muscles lock? What if this neuritis or neuropathy or neurological inflammation has evolved into a condition more malign? I once in my late twenties had an exclusionary diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, believed later by the neurologist who made the diagnosis to be in remission, but what if it is no longer in remission? What if it never was? What if it has returned? What if I stand up from this folding chair in this rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street and collapse, fall to the floor, the folding metal chair collapsing with me?

  Or what if—

  (Another series of dire possibilities occurs to me, this series even more alarming than the last—)

  What if the damage extends beyond the physical?

  What if the problem is now cognitive?

  What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point—the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated—what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?

  What if my new inability to summon the right word, the apt thought, the connection that enables the words to make sense, the rhythm, the music itself—

  What if this new inability is systemic?

  What if I can never again locate the words that work?

  20

  I see a new neurologist, at Columbia Presbyterian.

  The new neurologist has answers: all new neurologists have answers, usually wishful. New neurologists remain the last true believers in the power of wishful thinking. The answers offered by this particular new neurologist are for me to gain weight and devote a minimum of three hours a week to physical therapy.

  I have been through this catechism before.

  I happen to have been a remarkably small child. I say remarkably for a reason: something about my size was such that perfect strangers could always be relied upon to remark on it. “You’re not very thick,” I recall a French doctor saying when I went to see him in Paris for an antibiotic prescription. This was true enough, but I grew tired of hearing it. I grew particularly tired of hearing it when it was presented as something I might otherwise have missed. I was short, I was thin, I could circle my wrists with my thumb and index finger. My earliest memories involve being urged by my mother to gain weight, as if my failure to do so were willful, an act of rebellion. I was not allowed to get up from the table until I had eaten everything on my plate, a rule that led mainly to new and inventive ways of eating nothing on my plate. The “clean-plate club” was frequently mentioned. “Good eaters” were commended. “She’s not a human garbage can,” I recall my father exploding in my defense. As an adult I came to see this approach to food as more or less guaranteeing an eating disorder, but I never mentioned this theory to my mother.

  Nor do I mention it to the new neurologist.

  Actually the new neurologist offers, in addition to gaining weight and doing physical therapy, a third, although equally wishful, answer: the exclusionary diagnosis I received in my late twenties notwithstanding, I do not have multiple sclerosis. He is vehement on this point. There is no reason to believe that I have multiple sclerosis. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique not yet available when I was in my late twenties, conclusively demonstrates that I do not have multiple sclerosis.

  In that case, I ask, trying to summon an appearance of faith in whatever he chooses to answer, what is it that I do have?

  I have neuritis, a neuropathy, a neurological inflammation.

  I overlook the shrug.

  I ask what caused this neuritis, this neuropathy, this neurological inflammation.

  Not weighing enough, he answers.

  It does not escape me that the consensus on what is wrong with me has once again insinuated the ball into my court.

  I am referred to a dietitian on this matter of gaining weight.

  The dietitian makes (the inevitable) protein shakes, brings me freshly laid eggs (better) from a farm in New Jersey and perfect vanilla ice cream (better still) from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue.

  I drink the protein shakes.

  I eat the freshly laid eggs from the farm in New Jersey and the perfect vanilla ice cream from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue.

  Nonetheless.

  I do not gain weight.

  I have an uneasy sense that the consensus solution has already failed.

  I find, on the other hand, somewhat to my surprise, that I actively like physical therapy. I keep regular appointments at a Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility at Sixtieth and Madison. I am impressed by the strength and general tone of the other patients who turn up during the same hour. I study their balance, their proficiency with the various devices recommended by the therapist. The more I watch, the more encouraged I am: this stuff really works, I tell myself. The thought makes me cheerful, optimistic. I wonder how many appointments it will take to reach the apparently effortless control already achieved by my fellow patients. Only during my third week of physical therapy do I learn that these particular fellow patients are in fact the New York Yankees, loosening up between game days.

  21

  Today as I walk home from the Columbia Presbyterian sports medicine facility at Sixtieth and Madison I find the optimism engendered by proximity to the New York Yankees fading. In fact my physical confidence seems to be reaching a new ebb. My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether. Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.

  The tone needs to be direct.


  I need to talk to you directly, I need to address the subject as it were, but something stops me.

  Is this another kind of neuropathy, a new frailty, am I no longer able to talk directly?

  Was I ever?

  Did I lose it?

  Or is the subject in this case a matter I wish not to address?

  When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, of what am I really afraid?

  22

  What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called—

  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?

  All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to have been abandoned by their natural. They are programmed, by the unique circumstances of their introduction into the family structure, to see abandonment as their role, their fate, the destiny that will overtake them unless they outrun it.

  Quintana.

  All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them.

  Quintana.

  Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.

  I said early on that adoption is hard to get right but I did not tell you why.

  “Of course you won’t tell her she’s adopted,” many people said at the time she was born, most of these people the age of my parents, a generation, like that of Diana’s parents, for which adoption remained obscurely shameful, a secret to be kept at any cost. “You couldn’t possibly tell her.”

  Of course we could possibly tell her.

  In fact we had already told her. L’adoptada, m’ija. There was never any question of not telling her. What were the alternatives? Lie to her? Leave it to her agent to take her to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Before too many years passed I would write about her adoption, John would write about her adoption, Quintana herself would agree to be one of the children interviewed for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz called How It Feels to Be Adopted. Over those years we had received periodic communications from women who had seen these mentions of her adoption and believed her to be their own lost daughter, women who had themselves given up infants for adoption and were now haunted by the possibility that this child about whom they had read could be that missing child.