Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  Quintana’s “recovery.”

  We had no idea then how rare recovery can be.

  No idea that “recovery,” like “adoption,” remains one of those concepts that sounds more plausible than it turns out to be.

  Colin sur la banquise.

  The wheelchair.

  The detritus of the bleed, the neurosurgery.

  In summertime and wintertime.

  I wonder if in those revised circumstances she remembered The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, what it meant to her then.

  She did not want to talk about those revised circumstances.

  She wanted to believe that if she did not “dwell” on them she would wake one morning and find them corrected.

  “Like when someone dies,” she once said by way of explaining her approach, “don’t dwell on it.”

  29

  Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

  Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

  Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

  Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

  Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

  Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

  Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

  The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  So go W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” sixteen lines that, during the days and weeks immediately after John died, spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling. I later showed “Funeral Blues” to Quintana. I told her that I was thinking of reading it at the memorial service she and I were then planning for John. She implored me not to do so. She said she liked nothing about the poem. She said it was “wrong.” She was vehement on this point. At the time I thought she was upset by the tone of the poem, its raw rhythms, the harshness with which it rejects the world, the sense it gives off of a speaker about to explode. I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it.

  On the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season.

  This routine seemed for a while to bring luck.

  It was a period when the doctors in the ICU did not seem uniformly discouraging.

  It was a period when improvement seemed possible.

  There was even mention of a step-down unit, although the step-down unit never exactly materialized.

  Then one night, leaving the ICU and pausing as usual by the AIG portraits, I realized: there would be no step-down unit.

  The light outside had already changed.

  The light outside was no longer blue.

  She had so far since entering this ICU undergone five surgical interventions. She had remained ventilated and sedated throughout. The original surgical incision had never been closed. I had asked her surgeon how long he could continue doing this. He had mentioned a surgeon at Cornell who had done eighteen such interventions on a single patient.

  “And that patient lived,” the surgeon had said.

  In what condition, I had asked.

  “Your daughter wasn’t in great condition when she arrived here,” the surgeon had said.

  So that was where we were. The light outside was already darkening. The summer was already ending and she was still upstairs in the ICU overlooking the river and the surgeon was saying she wasn’t in great condition when they put her there.

  In other words she was dying.

  I now knew she was dying.

  There was now no way to avoid knowing it. There would now be no way to believe the doctors when they tried not to seem discouraging. There would now be no way to pretend to myself that the spirit of the AIG founders would pull this one out. She would die. She would not necessarily die that night, she would not necessarily die the next day, but we were now on track to the day she would die.

  August 26 was the day she would die.

  August 26 was the day Gerry and I would leave the ICU overlooking the river and walk into Central Park.

  I see as I write this that there is no uniformity in the way I refer to Gerry. Sometimes I call him “Gerry,” sometimes I call him “her husband.” She liked the sound of that. Her husband. My husband.

  She would say it again and again.

  When she could still speak.

  Which, as the days continued to shorten and the track to narrow, was by no means every day.

  You notice we’re doing hand compression.

  Because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the vent.

  For at least an hour now.

  In an underpass beneath one of the bridges in Central Park that day someone was playing a saxophone. I do not remember what song he was playing but I remember that it was torchy and I remember stopping under the bridge, turning aside, eyes on the fading leaves, unable to hold back tears.

  “The power of cheap music,” Gerry said, or maybe I only thought it.

  Gerry. Her husband.

  The day she cut the peach-colored cake from Payard.

  The day she wore the shoes with the bright-red soles.

  The day the plumeria tattoo showed through her veil.

  In fact I was not even crying for the saxophone.

  I was crying for the tiles, the Minton tiles in the arcade south of Bethesda Fountain, Sara Mankiewicz’s pattern, Quintana’s christening. I was crying for Connie Wald walking her dog through Boulder City and across Hoover Dam. I was crying for Diana holding the champagne flute and smoking the cigarette in Sara Mankiewicz’s living room. I was crying for Diana who had talked to Blake Watson so that I could bring the beautiful baby girl he had delivered home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

  Diana who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles.

  Dominique who would die in the ICU at Cedars in Los Angeles.

  The beautiful baby girl who would die in the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion at New York Cornell.

  You notice we’re doing hand compression.

  Because the patient can no longer get enough oxygen through the vent.

  For at least an hour now.

  Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

  30

  Six weeks after she died we had a service for her, at the Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue. Gregorian chant was sung. A movement from Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat was played. Her cousin Griffin read a few paragraphs John had written about her in Quintana & Friends: “Quintana will be eleven this week. She approaches adolescence with what I can only describe as panache, but then watching her journey from infancy has always
been like watching Sandy Koufax pitch or Bill Russell play basketball.” Her cousin Kelley read a poem she had written as a child in Malibu about the Santa Ana winds:

  Gardens are dead

  Animals not fed

  Flowers don’t smell

  Dry is the well

  People’s careers slide right down

  Brain in the pan turns around

  People mumble as leaves crumble

  Fire ashes tumble.

  Susan Traylor, her best friend since they met at nursery school in Malibu, read a letter from her. Calvin Trillin spoke about her. Gerry read a Galway Kinnell poem that she had liked, Patti Smith sang her a lullaby that she had written for her own son. I read the poems by Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, “Domination of Black” and “New Hampshire,” with which I had put her to sleep when she was a baby. “Do the peacocks,” she would say once she could talk. “Do the peacocks,” or “do the apple trees.”

  “Domination of Black” had peacocks in it.

  “New Hampshire” had apple trees in it.

  I think of “Domination of Black” every time I see the peacocks at St. John the Divine.

  I did the peacocks that day at St. Vincent Ferrer.

  I did the apple trees.

  The following day her husband and my brother and his family and Griffin and his father and I went up to St. John the Divine and placed her ashes in a marble wall in St. Ansgar’s Chapel along with those of my mother and John.

  My mother’s name was already on the marble wall at St. John the Divine.

  EDUENE JERRETT DIDION

  MAY 30 1910—MAY 15 2001

  John’s name was already on it.

  JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

  MAY 25 1932—DECEMBER 30 2003

  There had been two spaces remaining, the names not yet engraved.

  Now there was one.

  During the month or so after placing first my mother’s and then John’s ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine I had the same dream, repeated again and again. In the dream it was always six in the afternoon, the hour at which the evensong bells are rung and the cathedral doors are closed and locked.

  In the dream I hear the six o’clock bells.

  In the dream I see the cathedral darkening, the doors locking.

  You can imagine the dream from there.

  When I left the cathedral after placing her ashes in the marble wall I avoided thinking about the dream.

  I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.

  “Maintain momentum” was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.

  In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.

  In fact I had no idea what it was.

  I assumed, incorrectly, that it had something to do with movement, traveling, checking in and out of hotels, going to and from the airport.

  I tried this.

  A week after placing the ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine, I flew to Boston and back to New York and then to Dallas and back to New York and then to Minneapolis and back to New York, doing promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. The following week, again doing promotion and still under the misapprehension that momentum was about traveling, I flew to Washington and back and then to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver and Seattle and Chicago and Toronto and finally to Palm Springs, where I was to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his family. From various points on this itinerary, over the course of which I began to grasp that just going to and from the airport might be insufficient, that some further effort might be required, I spoke by telephone to Scott Rudin, and agreed that I should write and he should produce and David Hare should direct a one-character play, intended for Broadway, based on The Year of Magical Thinking.

  The three of us, Scott, David, and I, met for the first time on this project a month after Christmas.

  A week before Easter, in a tiny theater on West Forty-second Street, we watched the first readings of the play.

  A year later it opened, starring Vanessa Redgrave in its single role, at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street.

  As ways of maintaining momentum go this one turned out to be better than most: I remember liking the entire process a good deal. I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and electricians, I liked the way the ushers gathered for instructions downstairs just before the half-hour call. I liked the presence of Shubert security outside, I liked the weight of the stage door as I opened it against the wind through Shubert Alley, I liked the secret passages to and from the stage. I liked that Amanda, who ran the stage door at night, kept on her desk a tin of the cookies she baked. I liked that Lauri, who managed the Booth for the Shubert Organization and was doing graduate work in medieval literature, became our ultimate authority on a few lines in the play that involved Gawain. I liked the fried chicken and cornbread and potato salad and greens we brought in from Piece o’ Chicken, a kitchen storefront near Ninth Avenue. I liked the matzo-ball soup we brought in from the Hotel Edison coffee shop. I liked the place to sit we set up backstage, the little improvised table with the checked tablecloth and the electrified candle and the menu that read “Café Didion.”

  I liked watching the performance from a balcony above the lights.

  I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play.

  I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead.

  During which the question remained open.

  During which the denouement had yet to play out.

  During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River.

  During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six.

  During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent.

  Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

  31

  On the evening late in August when the play closed Vanessa took the yellow roses provided for her curtain calls and laid them on the stage, beneath the photograph of John and Quintana on the deck in Malibu that was the closing drop of the set Bob Crowley had designed for the production.

  The theater cleared.

  I was gratified to see how slowly it cleared, as if the audience shared my wish not to leave John and Quintana alone.

  We stood in the wings and drank champagne.

  Before I left that evening someone pointed out the yellow roses Vanessa had laid on the stage floor and asked if I wanted to take them.

  I did not want to take the yellow roses.

  I did not want the yellow roses touched.

  I wanted the yellow roses right there, where Vanessa had left them, with John and Quintana on the stage of the Booth, lying there on the stage all night, lit only by the ghost light, still there on the stage right down to the inevitable instant of the morning’s eight-a.m. load-out. “Performance 144 + 23 Previews + 1 Actors Fund,” the stage manager’s performance notes read for that night. “Magical evening. Lovely final show. Call from the director pre-show. Roses at the call. Champagne toast. Guests included Griffin Dunne and daughter Hannah and Marian Seldes. Café Didion served up its final Piece o’ Chicken and sides.” By that evening when the play closed it seemed clear that I had in fact maintained momentum, but it also seemed clear that maintaining momentum had been at a certain cost. This cost had always been predictable but I only that night began to put it into words. One phrase that came to mind that night was “pushing yourself.” Another was “beyond endurance.”

  32

  “I fell prey to water intoxication or low sodium, which is characterized by hallucination, memory loss, and corporeal ineptness; a veritable cornucopia of psychoses. I could hear voices, see four different images on the television at one time, read a book in which each word cd separate to fill t
he page. I’d ask people on the phone who they thought they were talking to cause i certainly didn’t know. & I fell constantly. On top of this phantasmagoric experience, I had a stroke.” So wrote the playwright Ntozake Shange, in In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life After 50, about the maladies that struck her from the blue in her fifties. “The stroke put an end to nanoseconds of images & left a body with diminished vision, no strength, immobile legs, slurred speech, and no recollection of how to read.”

  She learned to remember how to read.

  She learned to remember how to write.

  She learned to remember how to walk, how to talk.

  She became the person Quintana dreamed of becoming, the person who, by not dwelling on it, wakes one morning and finds her revised circumstances corrected. “I am not dead, I am older,” she tells us from this improved perspective. “But I can still memorize a stanza or two. What I have memorized is my child’s face at different points in her life.”

  33

  Ill health, which is another way of describing what it can cost to maintain momentum, overtakes us when we can imagine no reason to expect it. I can tell you to the hour when it overtook me—a Thursday morning, August 2, 2007—when I woke with what seemed to be an earache and a reddened area on my face that I mistook for a staph infection.

  I remember thinking of this as trying, time-consuming, the waste of a morning I could not afford.

  Because I had what I mistook for an earache I would need that morning to see an otolaryngologist.

  Because I had what I mistook for a staph infection I would need that morning to see a dermatologist.

  Before noon I had been diagnosed: not an earache, not a staph infection, but herpes zoster, shingles, an inflammation of the nervous system, an adult recurrence, generally thought to have been triggered or heightened by stress, of the virus responsible for childhood chickenpox.