by Joan Didion
She was attracted to French phrases but knew only the several she had memorized during the semester of junior college in Stockton, California, that constituted her higher education. She was also attracted to happy endings, and located them for Inez and Janet wherever she could: in the Coke float that followed the skinned knee, in the rainbow after the rain, in magazine stories about furlough weddings and fortuitously misdelivered Dear John letters and, not least, in her own romance, which she dated from the day she left Stockton and got a job modeling at I. Magnin in San Francisco. “Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Chanel suit, the real McCoy,” she would say to Inez and Janet. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Mainbocher evening pajama, the genuine article. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Patou tea gown, white satin cut on the bias, talk about drop dead, bare to here in back. The bias-cut Patou tea gown figured large in Carol Christian’s stories because this was the dress in which she had been sneaking a cigarette on the I. Magnin employees’ floor when Paul Christian stepped off the elevator by mistake (another fortuitous misdelivery) and brushed the shadows away, brought her happiest day, one look at him and she had found a world completely new, the sole peculiarity being that the world was an island in the middle of the Pacific and Paul Christian was rarely there. “When a man stays away from a woman it means he wants to keep their love alive,” Carol Christian advised Inez and Janet. She had an entire codex of these signals men and women supposedly sent to one another (when a woman blew smoke at a man it meant she was definitely interested, and when a man told a woman her dress was too revealing it meant he adored her), dreamy axioms she had heard or read or invented as a schoolgirl of romantic tendency and to which she clung in the face of considerable contrary evidence. That she had miscalculated when she married Paul Christian was a conclusion she seemed incapable of drawing. She made a love-knot of what she imagined to be her first gray hair and mailed it to him in Cuernavaca. “Mon cher Paul,” she wrote on the card to which she pinned the love-knot. Inez watched her tie the hair but did not see the card for some years, loose in one of the boxes of shed belongings that Paul Christian would periodically ship express collect from wherever he was to Inez and Janet. “Who do you f—— to get off this island? (Just kidding of course) XXXX, C.”
She left dark red lipstick marks on her cigarettes, smoked barely at all and then crushed out in coffee cups and Coke bottles and in the sand. She sat for hours at her dressing table, which was covered with the little paper parasols that came in drinks, yellow, turquoise, shocking pink, tissue parasols like a swarm of brittle butterflies. She sat at this dressing table and shaved her legs. She sat at this dressing table and smoothed Vaseline into her eyebrows. She sat at this dressing table and instructed her daughters in what she construed to be the language of love, a course she had notably failed. For a year or two after Carol Christian left Honolulu Janet would sit on the beach at Lanikai and sift the sand looking for cigarettes stained with her mother’s lipstick. She kept the few she found in a shoebox, along with the tissue parasols from Carol Christian’s dressing table and the postcards from San Francisco and Carmel and Lake Tahoe.
Of the daughters I was at first more interested in Janet, who was the younger, than in Inez. I was interested in the mark the mother had left on Janet, in Janet’s defensive veneer of provincial gentility, her startling and avid preoccupation with other people’s sexual arrangements; in her mercantile approach to emotional transactions, and her condescension to anyone less marketable than she perceived herself to be. As an adolescent Janet had always condescended, for example, to Inez, and became bewildered and rather sulky when it worked out, in her view, so well for Inez and so disappointingly for herself. I was interested in how Janet’s husband Dick Ziegler made a modest fortune in Hong Kong housing and lost it in the development of windward Oahu. I was interested in Inez and Janet’s grandmother, the late Sybil “Cissy” Christian, a woman remembered in Honolulu for the vehement whims and irritations that passed in that part of the world as opinions, as well as for the dispatch with which she had divested herself of her daughter-in-law. Aloha oe. “I believe your mother wants to go to night clubs,” Cissy Christian said to Inez and Janet by way of explaining Carol Christian’s departure. “But she’s coming back,” Janet said. “Now and then,” Cissy Christian said. This conversation took place at lunch at the Pacific Club, one hour after Inez and Janet and their uncle Dwight saw the reconditioned Lurline sail. Janet bolted from the table. “Happy now?” Dwight Christian asked his mother. “Somebody had to do it,” Cissy Christian said. “Not necessarily before lunch,” Dwight Christian said.
I saw it as a family in which the colonial impulse had marked every member. I was interested in Inez and Janet’s father, Paul Christian, and in the way in which he had reinvented himself as a romantic outcast, a remittance man of the Pacific. “He’s going to end up a goddamn cargo cult,” Paul Christian’s brother Dwight once said about him. I was interested not only in Paul but in Dwight Christian, in his construction contracts at Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay, his claim to have played every Robert Trent Jones golf course in the world with the exception of the Royal in Rabat; the particular way in which he used Wendell Omura to squeeze Dick Ziegler out of windward Oahu and coincidentally out of the container business. “Let me give you a little piece of advice,” Dwight Christian said when Paul Christian took up Dick Ziegler’s side in this matter. “ ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Kierkegaard.” Dwight Christian had an actual file of such quotations, most of them torn from the “Thoughts on the Business of Life” page in Forbes and given to a secretary to be typed out on three-by-five index cards. The cards were his hedge against a profound shyness. “Recently I ran across a thought from Racine,” he would say on those occasions when he was called upon to chair a stockholders’ meeting or to keynote the Kick-off Dinner for Punahou School Annual Giving or to have his picture taken, wearing a silk suit tailored in Hong Kong and an aluminum hard hat stencilled “D.C.,” knee-deep in silica sand in the hold of a dry-bulk carrier.
That particular photograph appeared in Business Week, at the time Dwight Christian was trying (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to take over British Leyland.
I also had two photographs from Fortune, one showing Dwight Christian riding a crane over a cane field and the other showing him astride an eighteen-thousand-ton concrete dolos, with a Pan American Cargo Clipper overhead.
In fact I had a number of photographs of the Christians: in that prosperous and self-absorbed colony the Christians were sufficiently good-looking and sufficiently confident and, at least at the time Inez was growing up, sufficiently innocent not to mind getting their pictures in the paper. I had Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in a white jade holder as she presented the Christian Prize in Sugar Chemistry at the University of Hawaii in 1938. I had Dwight and Ruthie Christian tea-dancing at the Alexander Young Hotel in 1940. I had Carol Christian second-from-the-left in a group of young Honolulu matrons who met every Tuesday in 1942 to drink daiquiris and eat chicken salad and roll bandages for the Red Cross. In this photograph Carol Christian is wearing a Red Cross uniform, but in fact she was invited to join this group only twice, both times by Ruthie Christian. “Spend time around that crowd and you see how the green comes out,” she said when it became clear that she would not be included on a regular basis. “You see how the green comes out” was something Carol Christian said often. She said it whenever she divined a note of rejection or criticism or even suspended judgment in someone’s response to her, or, by extension, to Inez or Janet. She seemed to believe herself the object of considerable “envy,” a word Inez tried to avoid in later life, and perhaps she was.
“I detect just the slightest tinge of lime.”
“Positively chartreuse.”
“You find out fast enough who your friends are.”
In fact it would have been hard to say who Carol Christian’s friends were, since she had no friends at all who were
not primarily Paul Christian’s friends or Cissy Christian’s friends or Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s friends. “Seems like a nice enough gal,” one of Paul Christian’s cousins said about her when she had lived in Honolulu for ten years. “Of course I haven’t known her that long.”
I had, curiously, only two photographs of Paul Christian, and neither suggested the apparent confidence and innocence with which his mother and his brother and even his wife met the camera. The first showed Paul Christian playing backgammon with John Huston in Cuernavaca in 1948. Paul Christian was barefoot and dark from the sun in this snapshot, which would have been taken at roughly the time arrangements were being made for his wife to leave Honolulu on the reconditioned Lurline. The second photograph was taken as Paul Christian left the Honolulu YMCA in handcuffs on March 25, 1975, some hours after he fired the shots that resulted in the immediate death of Wendell Omura and the eventual death of Janet Christian Ziegler. In this photograph Paul Christian was again barefoot, and had his cuffed hands raised above his head in a posture of theatrical submission, even crucifixion; a posture so arresting, so peculiarly suggestive, that the photograph was carried in newspapers in parts of the world where there could have been no interest in the Christians or in Wendell Omura or even in Harry Victor. In most parts of the United States there was of course an interest in Harry Victor. VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, the caption read in the New York Times.
You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing, the island, the family, the situation. I lost patience with it. I lost nerve. Still: there is a certain hour between afternoon and evening when the sun strikes horizontally between the trees and that island and that situation are all I see. Some days at this time one aspect of the situation will seem to me to yield the point, other days another. I see Inez Christian Victor in the spring of 1975 walking on the narrow beach behind Janet’s house, the last sun ahead of her, refracted in the spray off Black Point. I see Jack Lovett watching her, a man in his sixties in a custom-made seersucker suit, his tie loosened but his bearing correct, military, suggestive of disciplines practiced for the sake of discipline; a man who is now, as he watches Inez Victor steady herself on the rocks down where the water meets the sea wall, smoking one of the five cigarettes he allows himself daily. I see Inez turn and walk back toward him, the sun behind her now, the water washing the rough coral sand over her bare feet.
I see Jack Lovett waiting for her.
I have not told you much about Jack Lovett.
Most often these days I find that my notes are about Jack Lovett, about those custom-made seersucker suits he wore, about the wide range of his interests and acquaintances and of the people to whom he routinely spoke (embassy drivers, oil riggers, airline stewardesses, assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships, tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals) in Manila and in Jakarta and around the Malacca Strait.
About his view of information as an end in itself.
About his access to airplanes.
About the way he could put together an observation here and a conversation there and gauge when the time had come to lay hands on a 727 or a C-46.
About the way he waited for Inez.
I have been keeping notes for some time now about the way Jack Lovett waited for Inez Victor.
4
FIRST looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.
I wonder.
The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer’s studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez. Under different auspices and to different ends Inez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960, and although she was in the fashion department and I was upstairs in the afterthought cubicle that constituted the feature department we occasionally had reason (when a playwright was to be photographed as part of a fashion layout, say, or an actress was to actually model the merchandise) to do a sitting together. I recall coming late to the studio on this particular morning and finding Inez already there, sitting at a wooden table apparently oblivious to the reflector propped against her knee, to Chubby Checker on the stereo at eighty decibels, and to the model for the sitting, a fading beauty named Kiki Watt, who was having a comb-out and trying to tell Inez about some “Stanley” they both seemed to know.
“The doorbell rings at midnight, who else,” Kiki screamed through the music. “Stanley.”
Inez said nothing. The table at which she sat was covered with take-out bags from the delicatessen downstairs, one of which was leaking coffee, but Inez seemed not to notice. Her attention was entirely fixed on the man who sat across the table, a stranger, considerably older than we were and notably uncomfortable in the rather louche camaraderie of the studio. I had not met Harry Victor but I doubted the man was Inez’s husband. I recall thinking he could be her father.
“Somebody strike the music,” Kiki screamed. “Now. You can hear me. So. I said I had this sitting at dawn, but you know Stanley, Stanley had to have a drink. Naturally.”
“Naturally.” Inez looked at me. “This is Jack Lovett. He just got off a plane.”
Jack Lovett stood up, trying to acknowledge me without looking at Kiki, who had dropped her wrapper and was working pieces of cotton into her brassiere.
“ ‘This place is a pigsty,’ Stanley announces halfway through his drink.” Kiki sat on the table between Inez and Jack Lovett and began rummaging through the take-out bags. “ ‘The maid didn’t come,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you own a vacuum,’ Stanley says, ho hum, sarcasm, so interesting. ‘Actually no,’ I say. ‘I don’t own a vacuum.’ As a matter of fact I don’t, I mean I did but Gus pawned it with my jewelry. ‘Listen,’ Stanley says. ‘As soon as Daisy leaves for Maine I’ll bring over our vacuum. For the summer,’ he says. Believe it?”
“Absolutely,” Inez said. She took a doughnut from one of the take-out bags and held it out to Jack Lovett. Jack Lovett shook his head.
“Stanley left, I thought about it, I wanted to kill myself, you know?”
“Absolutely.” Inez took a bite from the doughnut, then dropped it back into the bag.
“Wanted to take every red I had in the apartment, you know why?”
“Because you didn’t want to use Daisy’s vacuum,” Inez said, and then she looked at me. “He has two hours in New York and he came to see me.”
She turned back to Jack Lovett and smiled.
I had known Inez Victor for perhaps a year but I had never before seen her smile that way.
“He can’t stay,” she said then. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.”
There it is, the first look.
The instructiveness of the moment remains moot.
Actually I know a lot about Jack Lovett.
Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers. They are comfortable for example on airplanes. They buckle in, establish certain ground rules with the cabin crew (to be woken or not woken, extra ice or none, a reading light that works and a move after Singapore to the bulkhead seat); stake out blankets, pillows, territory. They are solaced by the menus with the Dong Kingman water colors on the cover, by the soothing repetition of the meal (Rôti au Vol, Legumes Garnis) at arbitrary intervals during flights that run eleven, twelve, twenty-two hours. A flight of fewer than eight hours is a hop, a trip these men barely recognize. On the ground they seem easy only in hotel lobbies and transit lounges,
in the Express Check-Ins and Clipper Clubs of the world, sealed environments in which they always remember the names of the attendants who make the drinks and arrange the connecting flights. Such men also recognize one another, and exchange desultory recollections of other travels, absent travelers.
“That joint venture in Dakar,” one hears them say.
“Frank was in Dakar.”
“I saw Frank in Hong Kong Friday, he’d come down out of China.”
“Frank and I were in a meeting in Surabaya with this gentleman who didn’t speak a word of English. He sat through this meeting nodding and smiling, you know, a regular buddha, and then he spoke the only English words I ever heard him speak. ‘Six hundred million sterling,’ he said.”
“They all speak sterling.”
“Frank takes it in stride, a real player, looks at his watch and stands up. ‘You decide you want to talk a reasonable number,’ Frank says to the buddha, in English you understand, ‘you can reach me tonight at the Hilton.’ No change of expression from the buddha. The buddha thinks Frank’s going to sweat out this call in Jakarta. ‘In Manila,’ Frank says then. ‘The Hilton in Manila.’ ”
They recall other Franks, other meetings, Hiltons around the world. They are reserved, wary, only professionally affable. Their responses seem pragmatic but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information. All information is seen as useful. Inaccurate information is in itself accurate information about the informant.
