by Joan Didion
“Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders,” he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: “ ‘I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”
That was Harry Victor.
My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.
They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the edge of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence, water as the end to which even the island will eventually come, and a certain restlessness prevails. Men like Dwight Christian watch the steam rise off their swimming pools and place more frequent calls to project sites in Taipei, Penang, Jedda. Women like Ruthie Christian take their furs out of storage, furs handed down from mother to daughter virtually unworn, the guard hairs still intact, and imagine trips to the mainland. It is during these days and nights when sheets of rain obscure the horizon and the surf rises on the north shore that the utter isolation of the place seems most profound, and it was on such a night, in 1952, that Jack Lovett first saw Inez Christian, and discerned in the grain of her predictable longings and adolescent vanities an eccentricity, a secretiveness, an emotional solitude to match his own. I see now.
I learned some of this from him.
January 1, 1952.
Intermission at the ballet, one of those third-string touring companies that afford the women and children and dutiful providers of small cities an annual look at “Afternoon of a Faun” and the Grand Pas de Deux from the “Nutcracker”; an occasion, a benefit, a reason to dress up after the general fretfulness of the season and the specific lassitude of the holiday and stand outside beneath an improvised canopy drinking champagne from paper cups. Subdued greetings. Attenuated attention. Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark glasses (wearing dark glasses because, after four hours of sleep, a fight with Janet, and telephone calls from Carol Christian in San Francisco and Paul Christian in Suva, she had spent most of the day crying in her room: one last throe of her adolescence), pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One glass won’t hurt you, Inez, it’s your birthday. Inez’s birthday. Inez is seventeen. Inez’s evening, really. Inez is our balletomane.
“Why are you wearing sunglasses,” Jack Lovett said.
Inez Christian, startled, touched her glasses as if to remove them and then, looking at Jack Lovett, brushed her hair back instead, loosening the pins that held the gardenia.
Inez Christian smiled.
The gardenia fell to the wet grass.
“I used to know all the generals at Schofield,” Cissy Christian said. “Great fun out there. Then.”
“I’m sure.” Jack Lovett did not take his eyes from Inez.
“Great polo players, some of them,” Cissy Christian said. “I don’t suppose you get much chance to play.”
“I don’t play,” Jack Lovett said.
Inez Christian closed her eyes.
Carla Lovett drained her paper cup and crushed it in her hand.
“Inez is seventeen,” Dwight Christian repeated.
“I think I want a real drink,” Carla Lovett said.
During the days which immediately followed this meeting the image of Inez Christian was never entirely absent from Jack Lovett’s mind, less a conscious presence than a shadow on the scan, an undertone. He would think of Inez Christian when he was just waking, or just going to sleep. He would summon up Inez Christian during lulls in the waning argument he and Carla Lovett were conducting that winter over when or how or why she would leave him. His interest in Inez was not, as he saw it, initially sexual: even at this most listless stage of his marriage he remained compelled by Carla, by Carla’s very lethargy, and could still be actively aroused by watching her brush out her hair or pull on a shirt or kick off the huaraches she wore instead of slippers.
What Jack Lovett believed he saw in Inez Christian was something else. The picture he had was of Inez listening to something he was telling her, listening gravely, and then giving him her hand. In this picture she was wearing the gardenia in her hair and the white dress she had worn to the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her, and the two of them were alone. In this picture the two of them were in fact the only people on earth.
“Pretty goddamn romantic.”
As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.
He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.
He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.
It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Saturday night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.
They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.
The boy’s name was Bobby Strudler.
Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.
The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler’s father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.
“The ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “You’re a regular Miss Manners.”
Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler’s father could arrange the tow.
She herself could arrange the tow.
In daylight.
Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett’s car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.
“I don’t care about your wife,” she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. “So it’s up to you. More or less.”
She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Gl
enn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “In point of fact.”
In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.
“Will you remember doing this,” Jack Lovett said.
“I suppose,” Inez Christian said.
Her refusal to engage in even this most unspecific and pro forma speculation had interested him, even nettled him, and he had found himself persisting: “You’ll go off to college and marry some squash player and forget we ever did any of it.”
She had said nothing.
“You’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. That about it?”
“I suppose we’ll run into each other,” Inez Christian said. “Here or there.”
By September of 1953, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia operation. By May of 1955, when Inez Christian walked out of a dance class at Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon and got in Harry Victor’s car and drove down to New York to marry him at City Hall, with a jersey practice skirt tied over her leotard and a bunch of daisies for a bouquet, Jack Lovett was already in Saigon, setting up lines of access to what in 1955 he was not yet calling the assistance effort. In 1955 he was still calling it the insurgency problem, but even then he saw its possibilities. He saw it as useful. I believe many people did, while it lasted. “NOT A SQUASH PLAYER,” Inez Christian wrote across the wedding announcement she eventually mailed to his address in Honolulu, but it was six months before he got it.
It occurs to me that for Harry Victor to have driven up to Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon in May and picked up Inez Christian in her leotard and married her at City Hall could be understood as impulsive, perhaps the only thing Harry Victor ever did that might be interpreted as a spring fancy, but this interpretation would be misleading. There were practical factors involved. Harry Victor was due to start work in Washington the following Monday, and Inez Christian was two months pregnant.
The afternoon of the wedding was warm and bright.
Billy Dillon was the witness.
After the ceremony Inez and Harry Victor and Billy Dillon and a girl Billy Dillon knew that year rode the ferry to Staten Island and back, had dinner at Luchow’s, and went uptown to hear Mabel Mercer at the RSVP.
In the spring of the year, Mabel Mercer sang, and this will be my shining hour.
Two months to the day after the wedding Inez miscarried, but by then Harry was learning the ropes at Justice and Inez had decorated the apartment in Georgetown (white walls, Harvard chairs, lithographs) and they were giving dinner parties, administrative assistants and suprêmes de volaille à l’estragon at the Danish teak table in the living room. When Jack Lovett finally got Inez’s announcement he sent her a wedding present he had won in a poker game in Saigon, a silver cigarette box engraved Résidence du Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine.
2
IN fact they did run into each other.
Here or there.
Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other’s presence or untoward interest in each other’s activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.
Quick, alive.
Something to think about late at night.
Something private.
She always looked for him.
She did not really expect to see him but she never got off a plane in certain parts of the world without wondering where he was, how he was, what he might be doing.
And once in a while he was there.
For example in Jakarta in 1969.
I learned this from her.
Official CODEL Mission, Dependents and Guests Accompanying, Inquiry into Status Human Rights in Developing (USAID Recipient) Nations.
One of many occasions on which Harry Victor descended on one tropic capital or another and set about obtaining official assurance that human rights remained inviolate in the developing (USAID Recipient) nation at hand.
One of several occasions, during those years after Harry Victor first got himself elected to Congress, on which Inez Victor got off the plane in one tropic capital or another and was met by Jack Lovett.
Temporarily attached to the embassy.
On special assignment to the military.
Performing an advisory function to the private sector.
“Just what we need here, a congressman,” Inez remembered Jack Lovett saying that night in the customs shed at the Jakarta airport. The customs shed had been crowded and steamy and it had occurred to Inez that there were too many Americans in it. There was Inez, there was Harry, there were Jessie and Adlai. There was Billy Dillon. There was Frances Landau, in the same meticulously pressed fatigues and French aviator glasses she had worn the year before in Havana. There was Janet, dressed entirely in pink, pink sandals, a pink straw hat, a pink linen dress with rickrack. “I thought pink was the navy blue of the Indies,” Janet had said in the Cathay Pacific lounge at Hong Kong.
“India,” Inez had said. “Not the Indies. India.”
“India, the Indies, whatever. Same look, n’est-ce pas?”
“Possibly to you,” Frances Landau said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t quite see why you decided to get yourself up like an English royal touring the colonies.”
Janet had assessed Frances Landau’s fatigues, washed and pressed to a silvery patina, loose and seductive against Frances Landau’s translucent skin.
“Because I didn’t bring my combat gear,” Janet had said then.
Inez did not remember exactly why Janet had been along (some domestic crisis, a ragged season with Dick Ziegler or a pique with Dwight Christian, a barrage of urgent telephone calls and a pro forma invitation), nor did she remember exactly under what pretext Frances Landau had been along (legislative assistant, official photographer, drafter of one preliminary report or another, the use of Bahasa Indonesian in elementary education on Sumatra, the effects of civil disturbance on the infrastructure left on Java by the Dutch), but there they had been, in the customs shed of the Jakarta airport, along with nineteen pieces of luggage and two book bags and two tennis rackets and the boogie boards that Janet had insisted on bringing from Honolulu as presents for Jessie and Adlai. Jack Lovett had picked up the tennis rackets and handed them to the embassy driver. “A tennis paradise here, you don’t mind the ballboys carry submachine guns.”
“Let’s get it clear at the outset, I don’t want this visit tainted,” Harry Victor had said.
“No embassy orchestration,” Billy Dillon said.
“No debriefing,” Harry Victor said.
“No reporting,” Billy Dillon said.
“I want it understood,” Harry Victor said, “I’m promising unconditional confidentiality.”
“Harry wants it understood,” Billy Dillon said, “he’s not representing the embassy.”
Jack Lovett opened the door of one of the embassy cars double-parked outside the customs shed. “You’re parading through town some night in one of these Detroit boats with the CD 12 plates and a van blocks you off, you just explain all that to the guys who jump out. You just tell them. They can stop waving their Uzis. You’re one American who doesn’t represent the embassy. That’ll impress them. They’ll back right off.”
“There’s a point that should be made here,” Frances Landau said.
“Trust you to make it,” Janet said.
Frances Landau ignored Janet. “Harry. Billy. See if you don’t agree. The point—”
“They’ll lay down their Uzis and back off saluting,” Jack Lovett said.
“This sounds like something Frances will be dressed for,” Janet said.
“—Point I want to make is this,” Frances Landau said. “Congressman Victor isn’t interested in confrontation.”
“That’s something else he can tell them.” Jack Lovett was looking at Inez. “Any points you want to make? Anything you want understood? Mrs. Victor?”
“About this friend of Inez’s,” Frances Landau had said later that night at the hotel.
Inez was lying on the bed in the suite that had finally been found for her and Harry and the twins. There had been a mix-up about whether they were to stay at the hotel or at the ambassador’s residence and when Harry had insisted on the hotel the bags had to be retrieved from the residence. “We always put Codels at the residence,” the junior political officer had kept saying. “This Codel doesn’t represent the embassy,” Jack Lovett had said, and the extra rooms had been arranged at the desk of the Hotel Borobudur and Jack Lovett had left and the junior political officer was waiting downstairs for the bags with a walkie-talkie and one of the ten autographed paperback copies of The View from the Street: Root Causes, Radical Solutions and a Modest Proposal that Frances Landau had thought to bring in her carry-on bag.
