Blue Nights

by Joan Didion

  “Shingles”: it sounded minor, even mildly comical, something about which a great-aunt might complain, or an elderly neighbor; an amusing story tomorrow.

  Tomorrow. When I will be fine. Restored. Well.

  Telling the amusing story.

  You’ll never guess what it turned out to be. “Shingles,” imagine.

  Nothing to worry about then, I remember saying to the doctor who made the diagnosis.

  Zoster can be a pretty nasty virus, the doctor said, guarded.

  Still in the mode for maintaining momentum, and still oblivious to the extent to which maintaining momentum was precisely what had led me to the doctor’s office, I did not ask in what ways zoster could be a pretty nasty virus.

  Instead I went home, smoothed some translucent foundation over what had now been established as not a staph infection, took one of the antiviral tablets the doctor had given me, and left for West Forty-fifth Street. I left for West Forty-fifth Street not because I felt any better (in fact I felt worse) but because going to the theater had been my plan for the day, going to the theater was that day’s momentum: get to the Booth in time for the 3:30 understudy rehearsal, walk across West Forty-fifth Street during the break and pick up fried chicken and greens to eat backstage, stay for the performance and have a drink afterwards with Vanessa and whoever else was around. “Direct, engaging, well-tempered,” the stage manager’s performance notes for the evening read. “Ms. Redgrave nervous pre-show. Vortex very clear. Rapt audience. Cell phone at very top of show. In attendance: Joan Didion (piece o’ chicken at the café, show, and ladies’ cocktail hour). Hot humid day; stage temp: comfortable.”

  I have no memory of Ms. Redgrave nervous preshow.

  I have no memory of the ladies’ cocktail hour. I am told that it featured daiquiris, blended backstage by Vanessa’s dresser, and that I had one.

  I remember only that the hot humid day with the comfortable stage temperature was followed, for me, by a week of 103-degree fever, three weeks of acute pain in the nerves on the left side of my head and face (including, inconveniently, those nerves that trigger headaches, earaches, and toothaches), and after that by a condition the neurologist described as “postviral ataxia” but I could describe only as “not knowing where my body starts and stops.”

  I can only think that this may have been what Ntozake Shange meant by “corporeal ineptness.”

  I no longer had any balance.

  I dropped whatever I tried to pick up.

  I could not tie my shoes, I could not button a sweater or clip my hair off my face, the simplest acts of fastening and unfastening were now beyond me.

  I could no longer catch a ball.

  I mention the ball only because (I do not in fact normally catch balls during the course of the day) the single accurate description I would hear or read of these symptoms I was just then beginning to experience was that provided by a professional tennis player, James Blake, who, after a season of considerable stress—he had fractured a vertebra in his neck before the French Open and by the time he was healing his father was dying—woke one morning in his early twenties with similar symptoms. “Instantly, I realized just how many things were wrong,” he later wrote, in Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life, about his initial attempt to return to what had been his life. “Not only was my balance off, but my vision was messed up as well—I had a hard time tracking the ball from Brian’s and Evan’s rackets to my own. I could see them hit it, I’d sort of lose it for a moment, then suddenly it would register much closer to me. This was especially disconcerting because neither Brian nor Evan hit anywhere near as hard as the average tour player.”

  He tries to run right for a shot, and finds that his coordination has gone wherever his vision went.

  He tries to volley, just hit a few balls, and finds that the balls now hit him.

  He asks the neurotologist to whom he has been referred at Yale–New Haven how long he should expect these symptoms to last.

  “At least three months,” the neurotologist says. “Or it could take four years.”

  This is not what the professional tennis player wants to hear, nor is it what I want to hear.

  Still.

  I maintain faith (another word for momentum) that my own symptoms, which have continued to recur in slightly altered incarnations and have so far lasted closer to four years than to three months, will improve, lessen, even resolve.

  I do what I can to encourage this resolution, I follow instructions.

  I regularly report to Sixtieth and Madison for physical therapy.

  I keep the freezer stocked with Maison du Chocolat vanilla ice cream.

  I collect encouraging news, even focus on it. For example:

  James Blake has since returned to the tour. I fix on this fact.

  Meanwhile, like Ntozake Shange, I memorize my child’s face.

  34

  I find myself studying, in a copy of The New York Review of Books, a Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren taken during a Christian Dior fashion show in Paris in 1968. In this photograph Sophia Loren is sitting on a gilt chair, wearing a silk turban and smoking a cigarette, achingly polished, forever soignée as she watches “the bride,” the traditional end of the show. It occurs to me that this Magnum photograph would have been taken not long after Sophia Loren herself had been “the bride,” in fact twice the bride, married in France to Carlo Ponti for the second time after the annulment of their original Mexican marriage, the marriage for which he had been charged with bigamy and threatened with excommunication in Italy.

  A “scandal” of the time.

  It has become hard to remember how reliably “scandal” once came our way.

  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a scandal.

  Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, a scandal.

  Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, a scandal.

  I continue studying the photograph.

  I imagine the object of this particular scandal leaving Dior and going to lunch in the courtyard of the Plaza Athénée.

  I imagine her sitting with Carlo Ponti in the courtyard, eating an éclair with a fork, the vines that line the courtyard blowing slightly, ivy, lierre, sunlight glowing pink through the red canvas canopies over the windows. I imagine the sound of the little birds that flock in the lierre, a twittering, a constant presence and an occasional—when, say, a metal shutter is opened, or when, say, Sophia Loren rises from her table to cross the courtyard—swelling of birdsong.

  I imagine her leaving the Plaza Athénée, photographers flashing around her as she slides into a waiting car on the Avenue Montaigne.

  The cigarette, the silk turban.

  It strikes me that she looks in this photograph not unlike the women in the photographs Nick took at Quintana’s christening.

  Quintana’s christening was in 1966, this Christian Dior show was two years later, 1968: 1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States but they were for women who presented themselves a certain way the same time. It was a way of looking, it was a way of being. It was a period. What became of that way of looking, that way of being, that time, that period? What became of the women smoking cigarettes in their Chanel suits and their David Webb bracelets, what became of Diana holding the champagne flute and one of Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates? What became of Sara Mankiewicz’s Minton plates? What became of the clay tennis court at the house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, the court I watched Quintana weed on her fat baby knees? What gave Quintana the idea that weeding a court on which no one ever played—even the net was down, punched through during years of neglect, dragging in the weeds and the dust that got scuffed off the clay—was a necessary task, her assignment, her duty? Was weeding the unused tennis court at the house on Franklin Avenue something like equipping the projection room in the doll’s house in Malibu? Was weeding the unused tennis court something like writing a novel? Was it one more way of assuming an adult role? Why did she so need
to assume an adult role? Whatever became of those fat baby knees, whatever became of Bunny Rabbit?

  As it happens I know what became of Bunny Rabbit.

  She left Bunny Rabbit in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.

  I learned this halfway across the Pacific, when she was sitting next to me in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am flight back to Los Angeles.

  There was still a Pan Am then.

  There was still a TWA then.

  There was still a Pan Am and there was still a TWA and Bendel’s was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and it still had Holly’s Harp chiffons and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two.

  Sitting next to me on that evening flight back to Los Angeles my child mourned Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate: Bunny Rabbit was lost, Bunny Rabbit was left behind, Bunny Rabbit had been abandoned. Yet by the time we taxied into the gate at LAX she had successfully translated Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate into Bunny Rabbit’s good luck: the Royal Hawaiian, the suite, the room-service breakfasts. Where did the morning went. The white sand, the swimming pool. Walking to the reef. Swimming off the raft. Bunny Rabbit was even now, we could be certain, swimming off the raft.

  Swim off the raft, walk to the reef.

  Imagine a five-year-old walking to the reef.

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

  How could I not still need that child with me?

  I feel impelled to locate, by way of establishing at least one survivor of the period, a recent photograph of Sophia Loren.

  I type her name into Google Images.

  I find such a photograph: Sophia Loren arriving at some kind of publicity event, one of those red-carpet arrivals during which the PR people hover close, alerting the photographers to the approach of the celebrity. As I check the caption on the photograph I notice in passing that Sophia Loren was born in 1934, the same year in which I myself was born. I am spellbound: Sophia Loren, too, is seventy-five years old. Sophia Loren is seventy-five years old and no one on that red carpet, to my knowledge, is yet suggesting that she is making an inadequate adjustment to aging. This entirely meaningless discovery floods me with restored hope, a revived sense of the possible.

  35

  When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

  One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. One day we are turning the pages of whatever has arrived in the day’s mail with real enthusiasm—maybe it is Vogue, maybe it is Foreign Affairs, whatever it is we are intensely interested, pleased to have this handbook to keeping up, this key to staying alive—yet the next day we are walking uptown on Madison past Barney’s and Armani or on Park past the Council on Foreign Relations and we are not even glancing at their windows. One day we are looking at the Magnum photograph of Sophia Loren at the Christian Dior show in Paris in 1968 and thinking yes, it could be me, I could wear that dress, I was in Paris that year; a blink of the eye later we are in one or another doctor’s office being told what has already gone wrong, why we will never again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels, never again wear the gold hoop earrings, the enameled beads, never now wear the dress Sophia Loren is wearing. The sun damage inflicted when we swam off the raft in our twenties against all advice is only now surfacing (we were told not to burn, we were told what would happen, we were told to wear sunscreen, we ignored all warnings): melanoma, squamous cell, long hours now spent watching the dermatologist carve out the carcinomas with the names we do not want to hear.

  Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions of the medication that promises to replace the bone lost to aging.

  Long hours now spent getting the intravenous infusions and wondering why the Vitamin D we thought we were accumulating by not wearing sunscreen failed to realize its bone-building potential.

  Long hours now spent waiting for the scans, waiting for the EEGs, sitting in frigid waiting rooms turning the pages of The Wall Street Journal and AARP The Magazine and Neurology Today and the alumnae magazines of the Columbia and Cornell medical schools.

  Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again producing the insurance cards, once again explaining why, the provider’s preference notwithstanding, the Writers Guild-Industry Health Plan needs to be the primary and Medicare the secondary, not, despite my age—my age is now an issue in every waiting room—vice versa.

  Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again filling out the New York–Presbyterian questionnaires.

  Sitting in frigid waiting rooms once again listing the medications and the symptoms and the descriptions and dates of previous hospitalizations: just make up the dates, just take a guess and stand by it, for some reason “1982” always comes to mind, well, fine, “1982” it is, “1982” will have to do, there can be no way to get the answer to this question right.

  Sitting in frigid waiting rooms trying to think of the name and telephone number of the person I want notified in case of emergency.

  Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?

  I think it over. I do not want even to consider “in case of emergency.”

  Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.

  I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.

  I mean, think back: what about that business with the folding metal chair in the rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street? What exactly was I afraid of there? What did I fear in that rehearsal room if not an “emergency”? Or what about walking home after an early dinner on Third Avenue and waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor? Might not waking up in a pool of blood on my own bedroom floor qualify as an “emergency”?

  All right. Accepted. “In case of emergency” could apply.

  Who to notify. I try harder.

  Still, no name comes to mind.

  I could give the name of my brother, but my brother lives three thousand miles from what might be defined in New York as an emergency. I could give Griffin’s name, but Griffin is shooting a picture. Griffin is on location. Griffin is sitting in the dining room of one or another Hilton Inn—a few too many people at the table, a little too much noise—and Griffin is not picking up his cell. I could give the name of whichever close friend in New York comes first to mind, but the close friend in New York who comes first to mind is actually, on reflection, not even in New York, out of town, out of the country, away, certainly unreachable in the best case, possibly unwilling in the worst.

  As I consider the word “unwilling” my lagging cognition kicks in.

  The familiar phrase “need to know” surfaces.

  The phrase “need to know” has been the problem all along.

  Only one person needs to know.

  She is of course the one person who needs to know.

  Let me just be in the ground.

  Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

  I imagine telling her.

  I am able to imagine telling her because I still see her.

  Hello, Mommies.

  The same way I still see her weeding the clay court on Franklin Avenue.

  The same way I still see her sitting on the bare floor crooning back to the eight-track.

  Do you wanna dance. I wanna dance.

  The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the same way I still see the plumeria tattoo through her veil. The same way I still see the bright-red soles on her shoes as she kneels at the altar. The same way I still see her, in the darkened upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, inventing the unforeseen uptick in Bunny Rabbit’s fortunes.

  I know that I can no longer reach her.

  I know that, should I try to reach her—should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her th
e song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in—she will fade from my touch.

  Vanish.

  Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.

  Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.

  Go back into the blue.

  I myself placed her ashes in the wall.

  I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

  I know what it is I am now experiencing.

  I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

  The fear is not for what is lost.

  What is lost is already in the wall.

  What is lost is already behind the locked doors.

  The fear is for what is still to be lost.

  You may see nothing still to be lost.

  Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York.

  She is the author of five novels, eight previous books of

  nonfiction, and a play.