by Joan Didion
“What’s the trouble here,” Dick Ziegler said.
“About Wendell Omura,” Inez said.
“Ruthie’s on top of that.” Dwight Christian seemed to have slipped into an executive mode. “Flowers to the undertaker. Something to the house. Deepest condolences. Tragic accident, distinguished service. Et cetera. Ruthie?”
“Millie’s doing her crab thing.” Ruthie began spreading crackers with the shrimp paste. “To send to the house.”
“That’s not just what I meant,” Inez said.
“I hardly knew the guy, frankly,” Dick Ziegler said. “On a personal basis.”
“Somebody must have known him,” Inez said. “On a personal basis.”
Dwight Christian cleared his throat. “Adlai still a big Mets fan, Inez?”
Inez looked at Billy Dillon.
Billy Dillon stood up. “I think what Inez means—”
“Jessie still so horse crazy?” Ruthie Christian said.
“Horse crazy,” Billy Dillon repeated. “Yes. She is. You could say that. Now. If I read Inez correctly—amend this if I’m off base, Inez—Inez is still just a little unclear about—”
Billy Dillon trailed off.
Now Ruthie Christian was arranging the spread crackers to resemble a chrysanthemum.
“This is a delicate area,” Billy Dillon said finally.
Inez put down her glass. “Inez is still just a little unclear about what Wendell Omura was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai at seven in the morning,” she said. “Number one. Number two—”
“Tell Jessie we’ve got a new Arabian at the ranch,” Dwight Christian said. “Pereira blue mare, dynamite.”
“—Two, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai with a Magnum.”
“Your father wasn’t seen on the lanai,” Dick Ziegler said. “He was seen leaving the house. Let’s keep our facts straight.”
“Dick,” Inez said. “He said he was on the lanai. He said he fired the Magnum. You know that.”
There was a silence.
“You should get Inez to show you the ranch, Billy.” Ruthie Christian did not look up. “Ask Millie to pack you a lunch, make a day of it.”
“Number three,” Inez said, “although less crucial, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing at the YMCA.”
“If you drove around by the windward side you could see Dick’s new project,” Ruthie Christian said. “Sea Ranch? Sea Mountain? Whatever he calls it.”
“He calls it Sea Meadow,” Dwight Christian said. “Which suggests its drawback.”
“Let’s not get started on that,” Dick Ziegler said.
“Goddamn swamp, as it stands.”
“So was downtown Honolulu, Dwight. As it stood.”
“Sea Meadow. I call that real truth-in-labeling. Good grazing for shrimp.”
“Prime acreage, Dwight. As you know.”
“Prime swamp. Excuse me. Sacred prime swamp. Turns out Dick’s bought himself an old kahuna burial ground. Strictly kapu to developers.”
“Kapu my ass. Kapu only after you started playing footsie with Wendell Omura.”
“Speaking of Wendell Omura,” Inez said.
“If you went around the windward side you could also stop at Lanikai.” Ruthie Christian seemed oblivious, intent on her cracker chrysanthemum. “Give Billy a taste of how we really live down here.”
“I think he’s getting one now,” Inez said.
Dwight Christian extracted the lemon peel from his martini and studied it.
Dick Ziegler gazed at the ceiling.
“Let’s start by stipulating that Daddy was on the lanai,” Inez said.
“Inez,” Dwight Christian said. “I have thirty-two lawyers on salary. In house. If I wanted to hear somebody talk like a lawyer, I could call one up, ask him over. Give him a drink. Speaking of which—”
Dwight Christian held out his glass.
“Dwight’s point as I see it is this,” Ruthie Christian said. She filled Dwight Christian’s glass from the shaker on the table, raised it to her lips and made a moue of distaste. “Why air family linen?”
“Exactly,” Dwight Christian said. “Why accentuate the goddamn negative?”
“Kapu my ass,” Dick Ziegler said.
Since Billy Dillon’s filter tends to the comic his memory may be broad. What he said some months later about this first evening in Honolulu was that it had given him a “new angle” on the crisis-management techniques of the American business class. “They do it with crackers,” he said. “Old Occidental trick. All the sharks know it.” In his original account of that evening and of the four days that followed Billy Dillon failed to mention Jack Lovett, which was his own trick.
7
I ALSO have Inez’s account.
Inez’s account does not exactly conflict with Billy Dillon’s account but neither does it exactly coincide. Inez’s version of that first evening in Honolulu has less to do with those members of her family who were present than with those who were notably not.
Less to do with Dick Ziegler, say, than with Janet.
Less to do with Dwight and Ruthie Christian than with Paul Christian, and even Carol.
In Inez’s version for example she at least got it straight about Paul Christian’s room at the YMCA.
The room at the YMCA should have been an early warning, even Dick Ziegler and Dwight Christian could agree on that.
Surely one of them had told Inez before about her father’s room at the YMCA.
His famous single room at the Y.
Paul Christian had taken this room when he came back from Tunis. He had never to anyone’s knowledge spent an actual night there but he frequently mentioned it. “Back to my single room at the Y,” he would say as he left the dinner table at Dwight and Ruthie’s or at Dick and Janet’s or at one or another house in Honolulu, and at least one or two of the other guests would rise, predictably, with urgent offers: a gate cottage here, a separate entrance there, the beach shack, the children’s wing, absurd to leave it empty. Open the place up, give it some use. Doing us the favor, really. By way of assent Paul Christian would shrug and turn up his palms. “I’m afraid everyone knows my position,” he would murmur, yielding.
Paul Christian had spoken often that year of his “position.”
Surely Inez had heard her father speak of his position.
He conceived his position as “down,” or “on the bottom,” the passive victim of fortune’s turn and his family’s self-absorption (“Dwight’s on top now, he can’t appreciate my position,” he said to a number of people, including Dick Ziegler), and, some months before, he had obtained the use of a house so situated—within sight both of Janet and Dick’s house on Kahala Avenue and of the golf course on which Dwight Christian played every morning at dawn—as to exactly satisfy this conception.
“The irony is that I can watch Dwight teeing off while I’m making my instant coffee,” he would sometimes say.
“The irony is that I can see Janet giving orders to her gardeners while I’m eating my little lunch of canned tuna,” he would say at other times.
It was a location that ideally suited the prolonged mood of self-reflection in which Paul Christian arrived back from Tunis, and, during January and February, he had seemed to find less and less reason to leave the borrowed house. He had told several people that he was writing his autobiography. He had told others that he was gathering together certain papers that would constitute an indictment of the family’s history in the islands, what he called “the goods on the Christians, let the chips fall where they may.” He had declined invitations from those very hostesses (widows, divorcees, women from San Francisco who leased houses on Diamond Head and sat out behind them in white gauze caftans) at whose tables he was considered a vital ornament.
“I’m in no position to reciprocate,” he would say if pressed, and at least one woman to whom he said this had told Ruthie Christian that Paul had made her feel a
shamed, as if her very invitation had been presumptuous, an attempt to exploit the glamour of an impoverished noble. He had declined the dinner dance that Dwight and Ruthie Christian gave every February on the eve of the Hawaiian Open. He had declined at least two invitations that came complete with plane tickets (the first to a houseparty in Pebble Beach during the Crosby Pro-Am, the second to a masked ball at a new resort south of Acapulco), explaining that his sense of propriety would not allow him to accept first-class plane tickets when his position was such that he was reduced to eating canned tuna.
“Frankly, Daddy, everybody’s a little puzzled by this ‘canned tuna’ business,” Janet had apparently said one day in February.
“I’m sure I don’t know why. Since ‘everybody’ isn’t reduced to eating it.”
“But I mean neither are you. Dwight says—”
“I’m sure it must be embarrassing for Dwight.”
Janet had tried another approach.
“Daddy, maybe it’s the ‘canned’ part. I mean what other kind of tuna is there?”
“Fresh. As you know. But that’s not the point, is it.”
“What is the point?”
“I’d rather you and Dwight didn’t discuss my affairs, frankly. I’m surprised.”
Tears of frustration would spring to Janet’s eyes during these exchanges. “Canned tuna,” she had said finally, “isn’t even cheap.”
“Maybe you could suggest something cheaper,” Paul Christian had said. “For your father.”
That was when Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Janet.
“Send him a whole tuna,” Dwight Christian had advised when Janet reported this development. “Have it delivered. Packed in ice. Half a ton of bluefin. Goddamn, I’ll do it myself.”
Paul Christian had stopped speaking to Dwight a month before, after stopping by his office to say that the annual dinner dance on the eve of the Hawaiian Open seemed, from his point of view, a vulgar extravagance.
“ ‘Vulgar,’ ” Dwight Christian had repeated.
“Vulgar, yes. From my point of view.”
“Why don’t you say from the point of view of a Cambodian orphan?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I could see the point of view of a Cambodian orphan. I could appreciate this orphan’s position on dinner dances in Honolulu. I might not agree wholeheartedly but I could respect it, I could—”
“You could what?”
As Dwight Christian explained it to Inez he had realized in that instant that this particular encounter was no-win. This particular encounter had been no-win from the time Paul Christian hit on the strategy of coming not to the house but to the office. He had come unannounced, in the middle of the day, and had been cooling his heels in the reception room like some kind of drill-bit salesman when Dwight Christian came back from lunch.
“Your brother’s been waiting almost an hour,” the receptionist had said, and Dwight had read reproach in her voice.
As tactics went this one had been minor but effective, a step up from turning down invitations on the ground that they could not be reciprocated, and its impact on Dwight Christian had been hard to articulate. Dwight Christian did not believe that he had mentioned it even to Ruthie. In fact he had pushed it from his mind. It had seemed absurd. In that instant in the office Dwight Christian had realized that Paul Christian was no longer presenting himself as the casual victim of his family’s self-absorption. He was now presenting himself as the deliberate victim of his family’s malice.
“I could buy the orphan’s point of view,” Dwight Christian had said finally. “I can’t buy yours.”
“Revealing choice of words.”
Dwight Christian said nothing.
“Always trying to ‘buy,’ aren’t you, Dwight?”
Dwight Christian squared the papers on his desk before he spoke. “Ruthie will miss you,” he said then.
“I’m sure you can get one of your Oriental friends to fill out the table,” Paul Christian said.
Later that day the receptionist had mentioned to the most senior of Dwight Christian’s secretaries, who in due course mentioned it to him, that she found it “a little sad” that Mr. Christian’s brother had to live at the YMCA.
That was January.
At first Dwight Christian said February but Ruthie corrected him: it would have been January because the invitations to the dance had just gone out.
The dance itself was February.
The Open was February.
In February there had been the dance and the Open and the falling-out with Janet over the canned tuna. In February there had also been the Chriscorp annual meeting, at which Paul Christian had embarrassed everyone, most especially (according to Ruthie) himself, by introducing a resolution that called for the company to “explain itself.” Of course the newspapers had got hold of it. “Unspecified allegations flowed from one dissident family member but the votes were overwhelmingly with management at Chriscorp’s annual meeting yesterday,” the Honolulu Advertiser had read. “DISGRUNTLED CHRISTIAN SEEKS DISCLOSURE,” was the headline in the Star-Bulletin.
The Chriscorp meeting was the fifteenth of February.
On the first of March Paul Christian had surfaced a second time in the Advertiser, with a letter to the editor demanding the “retraction” of a photograph showing Janet presenting an Outdoor Circle Environmental Protection Award for Special Effort in Blocking Development to Rep. Wendell Omura (D-Hawaii). Paul Christian’s objection to the photograph did not appear to be based on the fact that the development Wendell Omura was then blocking was Dick Ziegler’s. His complaint was more general, and ended with the phrase “lest we forget.”
“I’m not sure they could actually ‘retract’ a photograph, Paul,” Ruthie Christian had said when he called, at an hour when he knew Dwight to be on the golf course, to ask if she had seen the letter.
“I just want Janet to know,” Paul Christian had said, “that in my eyes she’s hit bottom.”
He had said the same thing to Dick Ziegler. “An insult to you,” he had added on that call. “How dare she.”
“I respect your point,” Dick Ziegler had said carefully, “but I wonder if the Advertiser was the appropriate place to make it.”
“They’ve gone too far, Dickie.”
After the letter to the Advertiser Paul Christian had begun calling Dick Ziegler several times a day with one or another cryptic assurance. “Our day’s coming,” he would say, or “tough times, Dickie, hang in there.” Since it had been for Dick Ziegler a year of certain difficulties, certain reverses, certain differences with Dwight Christian (Dwight Christian’s refusal to break ground for the mall that was to have been the linch-pin of the windward development was just one example) and certain strains with Janet (Janet’s way of lining up with Dwight on the postponement of the windward mall had not helped matters), he could see in a general way that these calls from his father-in-law were intended as expressions of support.
Still, Dick Ziegler said to Inez, the calls troubled him.
He had found them in some way excessive.
He had found them peculiar.
“I may not be the most insightful guy in the world when it comes to human psychology,” Dick Ziegler said, “but I think your dad went off the deep end.”
“Fruit salad,” Dwight Christian said.
“That’s hindsight,” Ruthie Christian said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Dwight Christian had stopped drinking martinis and lapsed into a profound irritability. “Of course it’s hindsight. Jesus Christ. ‘Hindsight.’ ”
“Janet loves you, Inez,” Dick Ziegler said. “Don’t ever forget that. Janet loves you.”
8
DURING the time I spent talking to Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur she returned again and again to that first day in Honolulu. This account was not sequential. For example she told me initially, perhaps because I had told her what Billy Dillon said about the crackers, about talking to Dwight and Ruthie
Christian and to Dick Ziegler, but it had been late in the day when she talked to Dwight and Ruthie Christian and to Dick Ziegler.
First there had been the hospital.
She and Billy Dillon had gone directly from the airport to the hospital but Janet was being prepared for an emergency procedure to drain fluid from her brain and Inez had been able to see her only through the glass window of the intensive care unit.
They had gone then to the jail.
“I suppose Dwight’ll be breaking out the champagne tonight,” Paul Christian had said in the lawyers’ room at the jail.
Inez had looked at Billy Dillon. “Why,” she said finally.
“You know.” Paul Christian smiled. He seemed relaxed, even buoyant, tilting back his wooden chair and propping his bare heels on the Formica table in the lawyers’ room. His pants were rolled above his tanned ankles. His blue prison shirt was knotted jauntily at the waist. “You’ll be there. I’m here. You can celebrate. Why not.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Actually I’m glad you’re here.” Paul Christian was still smiling. “I’ve been wondering what happened to Leilani Thayer’s koa settee.”
Inez considered this. “I have it in Amagansett,” she said finally. “About Janet—”
“Strange, I didn’t notice it when I visited you.”
“You visited me in New York. The settee is in Amagansett. Daddy—”
“Not that I saw much of your apartment. The way I was rushed off to that so-called party.”
Inez closed her eyes. Paul Christian had stopped in New York without notice in 1972, on his way back to Honolulu with someone he had met on Sardinia, an actor who introduced himself only as “Mark.” I can’t fathom what you were thinking, Paul Christian had written later to Inez, when I brought a good friend to visit you and instead of welcoming the opportunity to know him better you dragged me off (altogether ignoring Mark’s offer to do a paella, by the way, which believe me did not go unremarked upon) to what was undoubtedly the worst party I’ve ever been to where nobody made the slightest effort to communicate whatsoever …
