The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  But in fact, on this day, from the air, she appeared to be right. Semis were jackknifed and abandoned for miles up and down I-5. The whole state seemed to be in crisis. Truckers were protesting the price of gasoline and had deliberately blocked the freeway.

  In the Cessna, Didion sat on a small bench over oxygen canisters while the paramedics tended to her daughter. In a Kansas “cornfield,” where the plane stopped to refuel, the pilots asked a couple of teenagers who managed the airstrip to drive to a nearby McDonald’s for hamburgers. Didion took some air on the tarmac. Back in the Cessna, she tore pieces of meat from one of the hamburgers to hand-feed to her daughter. Quintana shook her head after only a few bites. “Am I going to make it?” she asked her mother. Didion chose to hear the question in its most limited sense. You mean New York? Are you going to make it to New York? “Definitely,” she said.

  That night, when Gerry met them at Rusk and asked how the flight had been, Didion said they’d shared a Big Mac. Quintana corrected her: “It was a Quarter Pounder.”

  From the first of May to mid-July, 2004, Quintana remained in the Rusk Institute on East Thirty-fourth Street, doing physical therapy eight hours a day, regaining her appetite, strengthening her right leg and arm, retraining the muscles around her right eye. On the weekends, Gerry would take her to lunch and a movie. Didion watered the plants in her apartment and visited in the afternoons, watching the koi in the institute’s lobby pond with her.

  The progress was slow but appeared to be steady. Didion began to imagine recovering a saner daily life. She could not yet concentrate well enough to write. But she could sort through her unopened mail. She could straighten the apartment. She could read.

  3

  That spring, Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the growing Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq gave her something besides medical texts on which to concentrate. As he had done in the case of the My Lai massacre, years earlier, Hersh got hold of official army documents never intended for public consumption. In the May 10, 2004, issue of The New Yorker, he reported that U.S. Army reservists, CIA personnel, and private contractors working secretly in the name of the United States government had committed “systematic … sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” on detainees at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were civilians held indefinitely on no specific charges. These abuses included

  [b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against a wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

  One of the prisoners had been punched so hard in the chest, he “almost went into cardiac arrest.”

  Hersh’s allegations were fully supported by graphic photographs of hooded prisoners manacled or standing spread-eagled with electrical wires attached to their genitals. These photographs had been broadcast on CBS’s 60 Minutes II. Didion had spent months among swollen, pallid faces in intensive care units, and now she wished for blessed relief, but such was the state of the nation in the spring of 2004 that citizens could not turn anywhere without being assaulted by images of American soldiers leering and grinning and flashing thumbs-up gestures behind human pyramids of beaten, naked Iraqis, Iraqi men forced to masturbate in front of American females, or made to simulate oral sex on one another. Newspapers printed a widely disseminated photograph of a dead, blood-soaked body packed in ice and wrapped in cellophane, and an empty room coated in blood.

  The military chain of command had fingered a handful of individuals at Abu Ghraib as bad apples, among them Spec. Charles A. Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England. Hersh reported that “senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole.” Yet even this early in the investigation, before the public learned that the Bush administration had legally sanctioned (by questionable means) the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the evidence was clear that there had been “collective wrong-doing and [a] failure of Army leadership at the highest levels.” The army’s own internal probe into events at Abu Ghraib turned up the fact that “Army intelligence officers, CIA agents, and private contractors ‘actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses’” (that is, that they create a dungeon).

  Gary Myers, a civilian lawyer who had been active in the My Lai prosecutions in the 1970s, signed on to defend one of the soldiers. He told Hersh, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?”

  Later, U.S. citizens would hear stories of black sites—secret American prisons—established all over the world. An e-mail trail would reveal that torture continued at Abu Ghraib over a year after the abuse photos had been made public and the United States government swore the aberrations had been corrected.

  From the outset, Hersh addressed what Vice President Dick Cheney would offer as justification for violating the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, holding prisoners without charges or legal representation, and subjecting them to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Torture doesn’t work, a thirty-six-year veteran of the intelligence community swore to Hersh. People will “tell you what you want to hear. You don’t get righteous information.”

  Faced with this allegation, Cheney said simply he didn’t believe waterboarding was torture.

  A caller to Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show said, What the hell, stacking beaten, naked men in a pile was merely a fraternity prank. Harmless fun.

  “The photographs are us,” Susan Sontag wrote.

  Said Elaine Scarry, who had spoken so eloquently against the torture practices in El Salvador in the 1980s, from now on history’s picture of America’s place in the world will be the “image of a frightened, naked man clutching his genitals to protect them from a lunging dog.”

  4

  Bob Silvers had asked Didion if she’d like to get back on the reporting trail and cover the national political conventions that summer. With Quintana steadily improving at Rusk, she said she’d give it a try.

  In June, Rosemary Breslin died at Columbia-Presbyterian of cardiac and renal failure associated with her blood disease. She was forty-seven years old.

  Around the first of July, Gerry Michael’s insurance stopped paying for Quintana’s rehab. Rusk made plans to discharge her. Doctors said a change of scene at this point would probably do her a world of good anyway. Didion didn’t believe that. Gerry’s erratic work schedule at the bar troubled her, in terms of Quintana’s care. Nevertheless, Quintana returned with Gerry to her apartment at Sutton Place.

  At the end of the month, Didion flew to Boston for the Democratic National Convention. At the Fleet Center, waiting in the security line to pick up her press credentials, then buying a hamburger at a McDonald’s, she found herself crying. It was July 26. Quintana’s wedding had been on July 26, a year ago. She remembered that the last time she’d attended a convention had been in 1992, at Madison Square Garden. That summer, her husband had always waited to eat dinner with her, even as late as eleven o’clock, when she’d returned from the Garden.

  She knew she had to get out of there, away from the Fleet Center. She could not do this. She was still too fragile to work. On her way out of the hall, she wrote later, she tried to pretend she was in a Hitchcock movie. It was all just a game. Her panic had been scripted—the “shadowy silhouettes moving on the high catwalks … the empty commuter trains frozen in place…”

  She watched the convention on television from her cozy room in the Parker House.

  * * *

  Over the next couple months, Quintana seemed to get better, and by October 4, Didion was sufficiently focused to begin draft
ing The Year of Magical Thinking, her “attempt,” she said, “to make sense of [a] period … that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

  If her husband had practiced magic in his writing by attempting to exorcise his health fears through direct address, Didion’s literary magic lay in the amount of control she believed language gave her—command through a balance of specificity and elision, through chronological rearrangement. For all her doubt about narrative, she placed enormous faith in word choice and syntax. “Life changes in the instant,” she wrote at the beginning of her new book. Not “in an instant,” the more natural way of phrasing this, but “the instant,” as if she could pin the very moment and, once she had it, shape it to different ends.

  The Year of Magical Thinking is not a confession or a memoir. It is not an expression of grief. It is an analysis of a particular period of grief in an individual’s life. As the critic Jeffrey Berman points out, Didion is indebted here to Freud’s Totem and Taboo, which says, “Primitive men and neurotics attach a high valuation … to psychical acts” and exhibit “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world.” Narcissism, according to Freud, is a key component of such thinking.

  And if Dunne remains a wispy figure in the book, almost a pretext for Didion’s discussions of herself, perhaps the cause can be traced to another work of Freud’s. Didion quotes “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud’s assertion that grief is a “pathological condition” requiring “medical treatment.” In lieu of such treatment (its unavailability is a major cultural failing in the West, said Freud), the bereft must relinquish all attachments to the dead.

  “Let them become the photograph on the table,” Didion wrote. “Let them become the name on the trust accounts.”

  As Quintana had told her mother, “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.”

  Move on. Leave the bodies behind on the trail.

  * * *

  She finished most of the work on The Year of Magical Thinking in December 2004, exactly a year after Dunne had slumped, head forward, at the dinner table. She did not want to complete the book because “as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen,” she wrote. “My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year.”

  She knew this needed to occur. She wanted it to occur, so she could get on with her life. But still.

  She had a seemingly unshakable cold. She told Susanna Moore she thought of it as a horseshoe crab lodged in her head. It would be such a relief to leave it somewhere—maybe Chinatown.

  A fire had ignited one night in part of Manhattan’s subway system, closing several stations. As she was wrapping up her book, she had an image of rats emerging from the underground entryways, taking over the city.

  Chapter Forty

  1

  The year began with hope and high spirits. The Year of Magical Thinking went into production, and a book tour was scheduled for the fall. Didion had asked Quintana to read the manuscript; after all, it concerned her father. Vaguely, Quintana said, “[V]ery good. Really interesting.”

  Didion started to venture out in public. Recently, she had attended a UN Association dinner honoring Oprah Winfrey (how’s that for misguided, she told Susanna Moore) and now Ahmet and Mica Ertegün, along with the editors of Alem, a Turkish fashion magazine, were hosting a gala in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum to promote East-West relations—Turkey sits on the borders of Iraq, Ertegün reminded the audience, prompting a few seconds of sober silence before drinks were poured and the laughter started up.

  A few days later, Didion walked through the snow in Central Park, gazing at Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, an art installation featuring over seven thousand passageways made of saffron-colored fabric, spaced throughout the park, fluttering in bright rivers through the bare limbs of the trees. Ultimately, Didion considered The Gates boring but thought she’d probably miss it when it was gone. She was intermittently teary these days, but getting outdoors felt good.

  Quintana, too, worked hard to feel normal. According to Susanna Moore, she threw a cocktail party in late February. Among clouds of cigarette smoke, Quintana looked a little dazed. For her thirty-ninth birthday, she wanted a small dinner in the Chinese restaurant Pig Heaven, on Third Avenue.

  All was not well despite these efforts at gaiety. While prepping for a routine colonoscopy, Didion nearly fainted at the funeral of Henry Grunwald, Time’s former editor in chief. And Quintana’s progress was hard to measure—steady one week, less so the next.

  Money became an increasing worry for Didion. Quintana and Gerry could not pay their bills. Quintana counted on her mother to cover the costs of doctors, therapists, day help, and living aides. Didion couldn’t seem to make her understand: Yes, from the movies and real-estate investments, they were well off, but eventually, the money would run out. She couldn’t get a job—that is, a screenwriting assignment. She complained to Susanna Moore that she’d spoiled Quintana. In trying to protect her, she’d really been protecting herself against Quintana’s loss, and her daughter had intuited she’d always clean up the mess. Why couldn’t children take care of their parents for a change? Didion wondered.

  Didion admitted she always felt she was going to fall these days; she feared she was on the verge of a stroke. She suspected she was experiencing a kind of vertigo associated with realizing, finally, she was really alone in the apartment.

  One day, Gerry irritated her by asking if she’d ever thought of writing and producing a movie on her own. She wanted to scream and cry, all at once.

  For the June 9, 2005, issue of The New York Review of Books, she wrote a consideration of the Terri Schiavo case, a remarkable task, given what she’d endured in the past eighteen months. Schiavo, who had lain in an unresponsive state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest, had become an ideological flash point. Her husband, claiming she never would have wanted to be kept alive through artificial means, had, over her parents’ objections, obtained a court order authorizing the removal of her feeding tube. Right-to-Lifers, catching an opportunity to promote their antiabortion agenda by declaring all life, including Schiavo’s, sacred, argued against the husband’s intervention; proponents of choice (abortion, assisted suicide) supported Mr. Schiavo’s decision. People on both sides of the debate, as well as several prominent politicians, appeared on television talk shows, shouting about whether “anybody” was at “home” in Terri Schiavo’s brain, and revealing the depths of their insensitivity to the family, as well as their medical ignorance. Drawing upon Quintana’s recent ordeal, and the death of Dominique, Didion wrote, “No one who has had even a passing exposure to brain injury can think of neurology as a field in which all questions are answerable.” She condemned the media fist wavers for pushing old, ill-considered polarizations at the expense of one family’s personal tragedy; for turning a complex, intimate situation into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down proposal (as cable news shows did with all American “issues”). Her sympathies lay not with political posturing, but with the parents’ “unassuageable grief,” the “fierce parental need to construe any abandonment of hope as a betrayal … of their child.”

  * * *

  At the end of April 2005, Didion had complained to Susanna Moore of feeling frail and of having stomach pains. Ten days later, she was diagnosed with pneumonia forty-eight hours after eating dinner with Quintana. She said she’d left her daughter’s apartment feeling unbelievably exhausted.

  It was only three or four weeks after she’d received her diagnosis that Quintana “entered the hospital” for the final time, in Didion’s words. She did not say in Blue Nights why Quintana entered the ICU at the New York–Presbyteria
n/Weill Cornell Medical Center on this specific occasion. In the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking, she said Quintana “had been at home with Gerry, Sunday lunch”—a “lazy afternoon,” the “Times half read”—when she experienced “sudden nausea, probably a stomach bug, it’s going around.” In Blue Nights, Didion said a doctor told her, “Your daughter wasn’t in great condition when she arrived here.” She underwent “five surgical interventions” while remaining “ventilated and sedated throughout.” She went into septic shock. She died on August 26, 2005, of acute pancreatitis, an inflammation and infection of the pancreas usually caused in young people by prolonged drug or alcohol abuse.

  Quintana’s friend Susan Traylor believed Quintana’s depressions and drinking were “probably intertwined” with her final illnesses.

  Of her daughter’s drinking, Didion said only, “Alcohol has its well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.”

  Didion left the hospital on the afternoon of August 26 with Gerry Michael. In Blue Nights, she wrote that she cried beneath an underpass in Central Park to the sound of a busker playing a “torchy” song on a saxophone. “The power of cheap music,” she thought Gerry said. Sean Michael told me she continued to walk with his father that day all the way to a pier or a clearing by the Hudson River on the Upper West Side. It was “an important moment” for them, he said, involving a “ritual of letting go.”

  A few months before she died, Quintana commissioned a painting from Sean, who liked to make abstractions in the manner of Gerhard Richter. “She asked specifically for the word ‘Ambivert’” to appear on the canvas, he said. She “explained its meaning to me as one who is both and neither an extrovert nor an introvert. I knew or felt I knew where she was coming from and why she loved the word. It’s because she knew some would see her as an extrovert, with her boisterous nature and her sparkle as well as her forceful opinions. And then—the polarity. The shy approach to all things [involving] love and true intimacy. The inward search for personal meaning as it applied to her place in the world beyond her family, friends, and career. To her, I believe, the interior was a whole galaxy under her skin … as she sat and talked and walked and laughed through the normal light of day.”