Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  This beautiful child, this perfect child.

  Qué hermosa, qué chula.

  We responded to each of these communications, we followed up, we explained how the facts did not coincide, the dates did not tally, why the perfect child could not be theirs.

  We considered our role fulfilled, the case closed.

  Still.

  The recommended choice narrative did not end, as I had imagined it would (hoped it would, dreamed it would), with the perfect child placed on the table between us for lunch at The Bistro (Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette, the blue-and-white dotted organdy dress) on the hot day in September 1966 when the adoption became final.

  Thirty-two years later, in 1998, on a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintana’s natural mother and father. At the time of Quintana’s birth the natural mother and father had not yet been married. At a point after her birth they married, had the two further children, Quintana’s full sister and brother, and then divorced. According to the letter from the young woman who identified herself as Quintana’s sister, the mother and sister lived now in Dallas. The brother, from whom the mother was estranged, lived in another city in Texas. The father, who had remarried and fathered another child, lived in Florida. The sister, who had learned from her mother only a few weeks before that Quintana existed, had determined immediately, against the initial instincts of her mother, to locate her.

  She had resorted to the internet.

  On the internet she had found a private detective who said that he could locate Quintana for two hundred dollars.

  Quintana had an unlisted telephone number.

  The two hundred dollars was for accessing her Con Ed account.

  The sister had agreed to the deal.

  It had taken the detective only ten further minutes to call the sister back with a street address and apartment number in New York.

  14 Sutton Place South. Apartment 11D.

  The sister had written the letter.

  She had sent it to Apartment 11D at 14 Sutton Place South via Federal Express.

  “Saturday delivery,” Quintana said when she showed us the letter, still in its Federal Express envelope. “The FedEx came Saturday delivery.” I remember her repeating these words, emphasizing them, Saturday delivery, the FedEx came Saturday delivery, as if maintaining focus on this one point could put her world back together.

  23

  I cannot easily express what I thought about this.

  On the one hand, I told myself, it could hardly be a surprise. We had spent thirty-two years considering just such a possibility. We had for many of those years seen such a possibility even as a probability. Quintana’s mother, through a bureaucratic error on the part of the social worker, had been told not only our names and Quintana’s name but the name under which I wrote. We did not lead an entirely private life. We gave lectures, we attended events, we got photographed. We could be easily found. We had discussed how it would happen. There would be a letter. There would be a phone call. The caller would say such and such. Whichever one of us took the call would say such and such and such. We would meet.

  It would be logical.

  It would all, when it happened, make sense.

  In an alternate scenario, Quintana herself would choose to undertake the search, initiate the contact. Should she wish to do so, the process would be simple. Through another bureaucratic error, a bill from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica had reached us without the mother’s name redacted. I had seen the name only once but it had remained imprinted on my memory. I had thought it a beautiful name.

  We had discussed this with our lawyer. We had authorized him, should Quintana ask, to give her whatever help she wanted or needed.

  This too would be logical.

  This too would all, when it happened, make sense.

  On the other hand, I told myself, it now seemed too late, not the right time.

  There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or for worse, finished.

  Yes. I just told you. Of course I had considered this possibility.

  Accepting it would be something else.

  A while back, to another point, I mentioned that we had taken her with us to Tucson while The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was shooting there.

  I mentioned the Hilton Inn and I mentioned the babysitter and I mentioned Dick Moore and I mentioned Paul Newman but there was a part of that trip that I did not mention.

  It happened on our first night in Tucson.

  We had left her with the babysitter. We had watched the dailies. We had met in the Hilton Inn dining room for dinner. Halfway through dinner—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise, just another working dinner on a motion picture on just another location—it had struck me: this was not, for me, just another location.

  This was Tucson.

  We had not been told much about her natural family but we had been told one thing: her mother was from Tucson. Her mother was from Tucson and I knew her mother’s name.

  I never considered not doing what I did next.

  I got up from dinner and found a pay phone with a Tucson telephone book.

  I looked up the name.

  I showed the name to John.

  Without discussion we went back to the crowded table in the dining room and told the producer of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean that we needed to speak to him. He followed us into the lobby. There in a corner of the lobby of the Hilton Inn we talked to him for three or four minutes. It was imperative, we said, that no one should know we were in Tucson. It was especially imperative, we said, that no one should know Quintana was in Tucson. I did not want to pick up the Tucson paper, I said, and see any cute items about children on the Judge Roy Bean location. I asked him to alert the unit publicity people. I stressed that under no condition should Quintana’s name appear in connection with the picture.

  There was no reason to think that it would but I had to be sure.

  I had to cover that base.

  I had to make that effort.

  I believed as I did so that I was protecting both Quintana and her mother.

  I tell you this now by way of suggesting the muddled impulses that can go hand in hand with adoption.

  A few months after the arrival of the FedEx Saturday delivery, Quintana and her sister met, first in New York and then in Dallas. In New York Quintana showed her visiting sister Chinatown. She took her shopping at Pearl River. She brought her to dinner with John and me at Da Silvano. She invited her friends and cousins to her apartment for drinks so that they and her sister could all meet. The two sisters looked like twins. When Griffin walked into Quintana’s apartment and saw the sister he inadvertently greeted her as “Q.” Margaritas were mixed. Guacamole was made. There was about this initial weekend meeting a spirit of willed excitement, determined camaraderie, resolute discovery.

  It would be a month or so later, in Dallas, before the will and the determination and the resolution all failed her.

  When she called after twenty-four hours in Dallas she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears.

  In Dallas she had been introduced for the first time not only to her mother but to many other members of what she was now calling her “biological family,” strangers who welcomed her as their long-missing child.

  In Dallas these strangers had shown her snapshots, remarked on her resemblance to one or another cousin or aunt or grandparent, seemingly taken for granted that she had chosen by her presence to be one of them.

  On her return to New York she had begun getting regular calls from her mother, whose initial resistance to the idea of a reunion (in the first place it wasn’t a reunion, her mother had punctiliously pointed out, since they had
never met in the first place) seemed to have given way to a need to discuss the events that had led to the adoption. These calls came in the morning, typically at a time when Quintana was just about to leave for work. She did not want to cut her mother short but neither did she want to be late for work, particularly because Elle Décor, the magazine for which she was at that time the photography editor, was undergoing a staff realignment and she felt her job to be in jeopardy. She discussed this conflict with a psychiatrist. After the discussion with the psychiatrist she wrote to her mother and sister saying that “being found” (“I was found” had evolved into her arrestingly equivocal way of referring to what had happened) was proving “too much to handle,” “too much and too soon,” that she needed to “step back,” “catch up for a while” with what she still considered her real life.

  In reply she received a letter from her mother saying that she did not want to be a burden and so had disconnected her telephone.

  This was the point at which it seemed clear that not one of us would escape those muddled impulses.

  Not Quintana’s mother, not Quintana’s sister, certainly not me.

  Not even Quintana.

  Quintana who referred to the shattering of her known world as “being found.”

  Quintana who had called Nicholas and Alexandra “Nicky and Sunny” and seen their story as “a big hit.”

  Quintana who had imagined The Broken Man in such convincing detail.

  Quintana who told me that after she became five she never ever dreamed about The Broken Man.

  A few weeks after her mother disconnected her telephone another message arrived, although not from her mother and not from her sister.

  She received a letter from her natural father in Florida.

  Over the time that passed between the time she knew herself to have been adopted and the time she was “found,” a period of some thirty years, she had many times mentioned her other mother. “My other mommy,” and later “my other mother,” had been from the time she first spoke the way she referred to her. She had wondered who and where this other mother was. She had wondered what she looked like. She had considered and ultimately rejected the possibility of finding out. John had once asked her, when she was small, what she would do if she met her “other mommy.” “I’d put one arm around Mom,” she had said, “and one arm around my other mommy, and I’d say ‘Hello, Mommies.’ ”

  She had never, not once, mentioned her other father.

  I have no idea why but the picture in her mind seemed not to include a father.

  “What a long strange journey this has been,” the letter from Florida read.

  She burst into tears as she read it to me.

  “On top of everything else,” she said through the tears, “my father has to be a Deadhead.”

  Three years later the final message arrived, this one from her sister.

  Her sister wanted her to know that their brother had died. The cause of death was unclear. His heart was mentioned.

  Quintana had never met him.

  I am not sure of the dates but I think he would have been born the year she was five.

  After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.

  This call to say that he had died may have been the last time the sisters spoke.

  When Quintana herself died, her sister sent flowers.

  24

  I find myself leafing today for the first time through a journal she kept in the spring of 1984, a daily assignment for an English class during her senior year at the Westlake School for Girls. “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats,” this volume of the journal begins, on a page dated March 7, 1984, the one-hundred-and-seventeenth entry since she had begun keeping the journal in September of 1983. “In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life: Pass into nothingness.”

  This March 7, 1984, entry continues, moves into a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger and their respective understandings of the abyss, but I am no longer following the argument: automatically, without thinking, appallingly, as if she were still at the Westlake School and had asked me to take a look at her paper, I am editing it.

  For example:

  Delete commas setting off title “Endymion.”

  “Tell,” as in “a line that seems to tell my present fear of life,” is of course wrong.

  “Describe” would be better.

  “Suggest” would be better still.

  On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it.

  I try it: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre.

  I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”

  Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984.

  Was that deliberate?

  Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man?

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

  After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

  Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?

  Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?

  Did it frighten me?

  I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning.

  What she said: My present fear of life.

  What she said: Pass into nothingness.

  What she was actually saying: The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying?

  Does it frighten me?

  25

  Let me again try to talk to you directly.

  On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old.

  Notice the odd construction there—I became seventy-five years old—do you hear the echo?

  I became seventy-five? I became five?

  After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

  Also notice—in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called Blue Nights for a reason, notes called Blue Nights because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days—how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were. Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as “wrinkly,” or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one.

  Quintana was born when I was thirty-one.

  Only yesterday Quintana was born.

  Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

  Enveloped in a silk-
lined cashmere wrapper.

  Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in.

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

  What would happen to me then?

  Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405.

  Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us.

  We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway.

  It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only yesterday when we still called the 10 the Santa Monica, it was only the day before yesterday when the Santa Monica did not yet exist.

  Only yesterday I could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which the brake.

  Only yesterday Quintana was alive.

  I disengage my feet from the pedals, first one, then the other.

  I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.

  I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

  26

  A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggests that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.

  Wrong, I want to say.

  In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.

  In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age.