The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Quintana told Cooper she’d developed a “new thing” to keep herself occupied during her leisure hours: She’d buy blank journals and “paste a bunch of random funny magazine photos to the front and back.” Cooper shared with me one of Quintana’s collages: On a journal’s small front page, a tiny nude woman dangles from a tree limb above an outsized ape; the word Bombay and a lemon twist adorn the ape’s head; in the sky float a pair of male and female lips. It’s a hasty creation, just for fun, but it’s visually dazzling, ample proof that Quintana had earned her place at Elle Décor with a unique and genuine talent.

  “I remember Quintana talking about meeting her biological family and being nervous about it,” Cooper said. “I seem to recall her saying that they were very nice.”

  Didion reported in Blue Nights that Quintana met her sister, first in New York and then in Dallas, a few months after receiving her letter. Griffin met the sister in Quintana’s apartment and mistook her for Quintana, they looked so much alike. Didion said “[m]argaritas were mixed” on this occasion, but she did not say whether Quintana was drinking. Didion and Dunne met the young woman at dinner at a restaurant. Strained smiles were the order of the evening.

  A month later, Quintana called Didion from Dallas, where she had gone to meet her natural mother and other members of the extended family. On the phone “she had seemed distraught, on the edge of tears,” Didion wrote. Quintana’s cousins had shared family snapshots with her and remarked on her close resemblance to grandmothers and aunts; they assumed she was ready to be fully embraced by them, when, after all, they were strangers to her.

  Shortly after this, her birth father wrote to her from Florida. “What a long strange journey this has been,” said the letter with the postmark from Neverland.

  Didion said her daughter began to cry as she read the letter aloud to her.

  Whatever genetic dispositions Quintana had inherited from her natural parents, her wit had been fired in her adopted mother’s crucible. “On top of everything else,” Quintana said, “my father has to be a Deadhead.”

  PART NINE

  Chapter Thirty-four

  1

  On September 11, 2001, Didion’s Political Fictions appeared in bookstores. In it, she declared that “half the nation’s citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our own country only an ideality” and that this had “come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application.”

  That same morning, two hijacked American passenger jets slammed into the World Trade Center towers, and another one destroyed a portion of the Pentagon. Thousands of U.S. citizens lay dead in the smoking rubble.

  In the days that followed, television and newspaper reporters claimed that among the attacks’ casualties were humor and irony. No one felt like laughing or skewering political leaders. Dissent, critiques of the president, antiwar sentiments—these were widely discouraged. The political class seemed to say, We know what is just and unjust. Patriotism. Unity. We must speak with one voice. All happy families are alike. In this atmosphere, Didion’s Political Fictions—her writing in general—was not openly embraced by the commentariat.

  For example, in The New York Times, Edward Rothstein accused “postmodern” writers of fostering terrorism by spreading relativistic thought. What we needed instead was “moral clarity.”

  “One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony,” said Roger Rosenblatt in Time.

  Yet Michiko Kakutani admitted ours was a “frightened and fragmented world”: Irony could be a “potent weapon” for dissecting our worries. Certainly, the disorientations Didion had dismantled in her writing remained viral across the globe, and they were hard to ignore. For example, rereading in Miami about John Singlaub’s fund-raising events for the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s—five-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners at which the “mujaheddin in Afghanistan … would [also] be among the freedom fighters to benefit.” Or rereading in Political Fictions about Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1986 passing up a Jordanian photo op because there was “nothing to be gained from showing him schmoozing with Arabs.” Or rereading in After Henry that a preference for “broad strokes” is “not new in New York … [it] has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city presents itself … heroes … broken hearts … [obscuring] not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.”

  * * *

  And what of the conspiracy theories? The view of history Kakutani found so hard to “buy” in Didion’s work? Was it paranoia or a glimpse of the true narrative of our times to note that in 1974 an out-of-work tire salesman named Samuel Byck, jittery with unspecified rage at Richard Nixon, wrote to Jack Anderson, a columnist for The Washington Post, “I will try to get [a] plane aloft and fly it toward the target area, which will be Washington, D.C. I will shoot the pilot and then in the last few minutes try to steer the plane into the target, which is the White House.”

  At the time, Nixon was grappling with the Watergate fallout.

  And in fact, Byck did try to hijack a plane, on February 22, 1974, at the Baltimore/Washington International Airport, killing one pilot and wounding another before being corralled by police and shooting himself.

  Was it paranoia or a glimpse of the true narrative of our times to note that one of the biggest investors in George W. Bush’s first business venture, Arbusto Energy in Midland, Texas, was a man named James R. Bath, whom Time magazine described as a “deal broker”? Said Time, Bath’s “alleged associations run from the CIA to a major shareholder and director of the Bank of Credit & Commerce,” which eventually shut down amid allegations of drug-money laundering and arms dealing. Reports said Bath made his fortune investing money for a man named Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz and another Saudi linked to the Bank of Credit & Commerce, Sheikh Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother.

  Was it paranoia or a glimpse of the true narrative of our times to note that President Bush, in the midst of ordering the bombing of Afghanistan, signed Executive Order 13223, placing severe restrictions on writers, scholars, journalists, and other citizens wishing to request presidential documents, past, present, and future—in effect, limiting access to archives and halls of records?

  Was it paranoia or a glimpse of the true narrative of our times to note that among the largest beneficiaries of the 9/11 attacks were security-support service companies such as R. L. Oatman and Associates, “specializing in personal and corporation executive protection, training … consulting and investigation,” and employing Mr. Theodore Shackley to speak on such topics as “Threat Assessment,” “Domestic and International Travel,” and “Choreography of Protection.”

  * * *

  In Why Buildings Fall Down, the architects Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori write, “Humanity learned how to destroy before it learned to build; to this day people often destroy what others have built. This paradoxical behavior can be historically followed along an exponentially increasing curve of violence and destruction, reaching its inconceivable climax in our own time.”

  Rising action: a linchpin of every successful narrative.

  “Everyone’s … talking about how” the terrorism story “plays,” Didion told an L.A. Weekly interviewer a month after the events. “At one level, for the political class, it seemed not to have actually happened, or not to have penetrated. I was amazed by how rapidly everybody slipped this event into their previous agendas.… [P]eople seem to find lessons [in the attack] that have very much reflected their underlying preoccupations. I was unable to find any lessons in it.”

  She implied, though, that narrative’s verities might provide some “useful context.” It might be a good idea, she said, to “read Conrad’s The Secret Agent again.”

  2 />
  Four months before the towers toppled, Didion held her final conversation with her mother. From her apartment in New York, she spoke by telephone to Eduene, ninety now, in the care of nurses at her home in Monterey, who kept her on oxygen and administered morphine and Ativan as needed. Always frugal, Eduene had never liked lengthy long-distance phone calls, and she’d often get off the line so fast, she’d leave a discussion dangling. On this afternoon in May, she hung up on her daughter mid-sentence, but this seemed so typical of her, it was not until the following day, when Jim called with news of her death, that Didion realized Eduene “had been just too frail to keep the connection.” Or maybe “not just too frail.” Perhaps “too aware of what could be the import of this particular goodbye.”

  Didion’s last physical encounter with her had occurred eight weeks earlier. Eduene had gone into the hospital due to congestive heart failure. Didion and Quintana flew to Monterey to help arrange home care and to oversee the transfer of equipment. Eduene told Didion she feared Jim wouldn’t want to bother with family heirlooms, furniture, and other household items, and “when she died she wanted to make sure he didn’t put everything into a dumpster and get rid of it. She wanted certain things to go to certain children, grandchildren, nephews,” Didion said. “[S]he wanted me to take care of that.” The only snag was, Didion was in denial about the state of her mother’s health (after all, Eduene had survived chemotherapy twice in her seventies, when she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer). One morning, Eduene asked Quintana to bring her a small painted metal box from her bedroom table. Quintana set the box on the bed. Eduene took from it “two pieces of silver flatware,” Didion said, “a small ladle and a small serving spoon, each wrapped in smoothed scraps of used tissue paper.” She gave Quintana the spoon and Didion the ladle. She pointed out to Didion how satisfying the ladle’s curved handle felt in the hand. That’s why she’d set it aside. “I said that since it gave her pleasure she should continue to keep it,” Didion wrote in Where I Was From. “‘Take it,’ she said, her voice urgent. ‘I don’t want it lost.’ I was still pretending that she would get through the Sierra before the snows fell. She was not.”

  * * *

  In the past, on flights back to California, following the setting sun, Didion had felt a “lightening of spirit as the land below opened up … home, there, where I was from, me, California,” she wrote. This time, returning for her mother’s memorial service, she said she wondered, “who will look out for me now.”

  She recalled the only two times she’d seen her mother cry: in wartime, outside a crowded military housing office, when she struggled to find space for her two small, uprooted children, and, years later, after her own mother’s death, when she talked about stopping to eat someplace on a Good Friday; the restaurant had no fish on the menu, and she’d been taught that Fridays were not meat days. “I took one bite [of the meat] and I thought of Mother and I wanted to throw up,” she told Didion. But then she said, “What difference does it make.”

  Didion recalled Eduene’s delight the year Dunne gave her batches of John Birch “call-to-action” pamphlets for Christmas. It was clear where Didion’s contrary nature was rooted.

  She recalled her mother’s growing irritation over tiny matters—her plain discomfort at dinners or family weddings, having to endure the loud conversations, her dizziness one day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium when the jellyfishes’ dartings gave her vertigo.

  She was detaching from the world. Didion saw that now.

  “[W]ho will remember me as I was,” Didion thought on the flight to California, on her way to what was once-upon-a-time her home, to say good-bye to her mother, “who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.”

  * * *

  Didion and her brother held their mother’s memorial service at Saint John’s Episcopal Chapel in Monterey, despite the fact that Eduene had rarely attended it, having declared some years before that she didn’t really believe Christ was the son of God. (“[I]t’s fine,” her own mother had told her. “[N]obody has to believe all that.”)

  In general, the family was averse not to rituals but to the sentimentality at their core. Jim Didion was deeply offended by the undertaker, who had left a plastic rose on the bed where Eduene died.

  In the chapel, Didion sat and listened to the litany from the Book of Common Prayer.

  Eventually, she would take her mother’s ashes back to New York and place them in a vault at Saint John the Divine (after all, the family cemetery in California had been sold, and the chapel in Monterey had failed to build a promised mausoleum).

  After the service, she said, “I insisted to my brother … [that] we were going to divide up her furniture and so on, [and] he was so unwilling to do this that I ended up sending most of the stuff to [my] apartment.” A small piecrust table, a teak chest, an angora cape. Quintana took a marble-topped Victorian table, oval in shape. Among Eduene’s letters and clippings, Didion found a yellowed dance program from when she was a girl: “Joan Didion and Nancy Kennedy,” it read, “‘Les Petites.’”

  In New York, in a locked sanctuary just off the main altar in Saint John the Divine, behind a black-and-ocher marble door—the swirls in the stone tracing time’s steady geologic movements—Didion set her mother’s urn. For weeks afterward, she dreamed that she had an apartment in Saint John the Divine. Each day, promptly at 6:00 P.M., the church’s doors would be locked, so Didion needed to be snug inside by then.

  3

  “When my father died I kept moving. When my mother died I could not,” she wrote.

  She did follow through with a multi-city book tour, a week after 9/11, to promote Political Fictions. Her first stop was San Francisco, where she was glad not to be staying in the Mandarin, usually one of her favorite hotels; from the Mandarin, she would have been seeing the top of the Transamerica Building and probably couldn’t have helped but imagine airplanes slamming into it.

  Nor, being back now, could she forget her days in the Haight. For all the city’s changes in three decades, it seemed to her that the political polarizations so apparent in the Vietnam era were still rippling just beneath the surface of American public life. In the wake of 9/11, the same old rhetoric—variations of “love it or leave it,” “hawks and doves”—appeared to be hardening. In Berkeley, just days before she’d landed, an antiwar demonstration (students reacting to President Bush’s vague bellicosity) had deteriorated into a flag-waving contest: “I dare you to spit on my flag!”

  In her City Arts and Lectures appearance at the Herbst Theatre, Didion read, as a tribute to New York, a selection from “Goodbye to All That.” When she got to the line describing the city as “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power—the shining and perishable dream itself,” she paused.

  “The last of the sentence nearly snagged inside her, then made its way out in a quaver,” said a Chronicle reporter. “And then for just a few seconds Joan Didion wept.”

  On September 24, in Portland, Oregon, at the First Congregational Church, Didion, on the verge of tears again, seemed genuinely intrigued by what she would later call her “encounter with an America apparently immune to conventional wisdom.” In San Francisco and now in Portland, the people she talked to recognized that a “good deal of opportunistic ground” had been seized by the Bush administration, using 9/11 as cover: As she would write later in The New York Review of Books, in an essay entitled “Fixed Ideas,” “[T]he words ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘national unity’ had come to mean acquiescence to the administration’s preexisting agenda—for example, the imperative for further tax cuts, the necessity for Arctic drilling, the systematic elimination of regulatory and union protections, even the funding for the missile shield—as if we had somehow missed noticing the recent demonstration of how limited, given a few box cutters and the willingness to die, superior technology can be.”

  Leave it to Westerners—here on the Left Coast, the people she met understood that “Washington
was still talking about the protection and perpetuation of its own interests,” proving more forcefully than ever the central thesis of Political Fictions. First the planes had been hijacked. Now the political class was hijacking the nation, veering it into policies, maybe even wars, most citizens didn’t want. “These people got it,” Didion said of her audiences. “They didn’t like it. They stood up in public and they talked about it.”

  It happened again in Seattle, and in Los Angeles. Dear old L.A.… its long, beautiful, sweeping on-ramps where the San Diego intersected the Santa Monica, its searing sunsets glancing off the palm trees and the stark white wall of the Carnation Milk Building on Wilshire, its ocean breakers full of fluorescence …

  The people got it in L.A.

  “Bush says the country needs to be reborn,” a journalist said to her, incredulously.

  “They’re all saying stuff like that.”

  “Do you think this event has sort of played right into—”

  “Plays right into that, doesn’t it? Yeah,” Didion said. “That cleansing event that precedes the Rapture.”

  “Now I suppose we have to think about the Rapture.”

  “We kind of had the Rapture, didn’t we?”

  Occasionally, on the road, she had to defend herself against charges that she’d seen the light of the Left and been blinded by it, that her formerly conservative outlook, her contrarian spirit, had been replaced by liberal orthodoxies.