by Joan Didion
I remember tears coming to my eyes.
I feel them now.
In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me.
He had twenty-five nights left to live.
14.
There came a time in the summer when I began feeling fragile, unstable. A sandal would catch on a sidewalk and I would need to run a few steps to avoid the fall. What if I didn’t? What if I fell? What would break, who would see the blood streaming down my leg, who would get the taxi, who would be with me in the emergency room? Who would be with me once I came home?
I stopped wearing sandals. I bought two pairs of Puma sneakers and wore them exclusively.
I started leaving lights on through the night. If the house was dark I could not get up to make a note or look for a book or check to make sure I had turned off the stove. If the house was dark I would lie there immobilized, entertaining visions of household peril, the books that could slide from the shelf and knock me down, the rug that could slip in the hallway, the washing machine hose that could have flooded the kitchen unseen in the dark, the better to electrocute whoever turned on a light to check the stove. That this was something more than prudent caution first came to my attention one afternoon when an acquaintance, a young writer, came by to ask if he could write a profile about me. I heard myself say, too urgent, that I could not possibly be written about. I was in no shape to be written about. I heard myself overstressing this, fighting to regain balance, avert the fall.
I thought about this later.
I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.
Some days later I was stacking some copies of Daedalus that were lying around the house. Stacking magazines seemed at that point the limit of what I could do by way of organizing my life. Careful not to push this limit too far, I opened one of the copies of Daedalus. There was a story by Roxana Robinson, called “Blind Man.” In this story, a man is driving in the rain at night to deliver a lecture. The reader picks up danger signals: the man cannot immediately recall the subject of his lecture, he takes his small rented car into the fast lane oblivious to an approaching SUV; there are references to someone, “Juliet,” to whom something troubling has happened. Gradually we learn that Juliet was the man’s daughter, who, on her first night alone after a college suspension and rehab and a restorative few weeks in the country with her mother and father and sister, had done enough cocaine to burst an artery in her brain and die.
One of the several levels on which the story disturbed me (the most obvious being the burst artery in the child’s brain) was this: the father has been rendered fragile, unstable. The father is me.
In fact I know Roxana Robinson slightly. I think of calling her. She knows something I am just beginning to learn. But it would be unusual, intrusive, to call her: I have met her only once, at a cocktail party on a roof. Instead I think about people I know who have lost a husband or wife or child. I think particularly about how these people looked when I saw them unexpectedly—on the street, say, or entering a room—during the year or so after the death. What struck me in each instance was how exposed they seemed, how raw.
How fragile, I understand now.
How unstable.
I open another issue of Daedalus, this one devoted to the concept of “happiness.” One piece on happiness, the joint work of Robert Biswas-Diener of the University of Oregon and Ed Diener and Maya Tamir of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, noted that although “research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.” Unemployment was one such event. “We also find,” the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”
Was I “the average widow”? What in fact would have been my “former level of life satisfaction”?
I see a doctor, a routine follow-up. He asks how I am. This should not be, in a doctor’s office, an unforeseeable question. Yet I find myself in sudden tears. This doctor is a friend. John and I went to his wedding. He married the daughter of friends who lived across the street from us in Brentwood Park. The ceremony took place under their jacaranda tree. In the first days after John died this doctor had come by the house. When Quintana was at Beth Israel North he had gone up with me on a Sunday afternoon and talked to the doctors on the unit. When Quintana was at Columbia-Presbyterian, his own hospital although she was not his patient, he had stopped in to see her every evening. When Quintana was at UCLA and he happened to be in California he had taken an afternoon to come by the neuroscience unit and talk to the doctors there. He had talked to them and then he had talked to the neuro people at Columbia and then he had explained it all to me. He had been kind, helpful, encouraging, a true friend. In return I was crying in his office because he asked how I was.
“I just can’t see the upside in this,” I heard myself say by way of explanation.
Later he said that if John had been sitting in the office he would have found this funny, as he himself had found it. “Of course I knew what you meant to say, and John would have known too, you meant to say you couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
I agreed, but this was not in fact the case.
I had meant pretty much exactly what I said: I couldn’t see the upside in this.
As I thought about the difference between the two sentences I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. They were the songs, and the logic, of the generation or two that preceded my own. The score for my generation was Les Paul and Mary Ford, “How High the Moon,” a different logic altogether. It also occurs to me, not an original thought but novel to me, that the logic of those earlier songs was based on self-pity. The singer of the song about looking for the silver lining believes that clouds have come her way. The singer of the song about walking on through the storm assumes that the storm could otherwise take her down.
I kept saying to myself that I had been lucky all my life. The point, as I saw it, was that this gave me no right to think of myself as unlucky now.
This was what passed for staying on top of the self-pity question.
I even believed it.
Only at a later point did I begin to wonder: what exactly did “luck” have to do with it? I could not on examination locate any actual instances of “luck” in my history. (“That was lucky,” I once said to a doctor after a test revealed a soluble problem that would have been, untreated, less soluble. “I wouldn’t call it lucky,” she said, “I’d call it the game plan.”) Nor did I believe that “bad luck” had killed John and struck Quintana. Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequable distribution of bad news. In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide. In the eleventh grade she had been woken at Susan’s at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered. “Most people I know at Westlake don’t even know anyone who died,” she said, “and just since I’ve been there I’ve had a murder and a suicide in my family.”
“It all evens out in the end,” John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn’t he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.
Several years later, after Susan’s mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end. I said I remembered.
“He was right,” Susan said. “It did.”
I recall being shocked. It had never occurred to me that John meant that ba
d news will come to each of us. Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood. I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news.
“That’s not what I meant at all,” John said.
“I knew what he meant,” Susan said.
Had I understood nothing?
Consider this matter of “luck.”
Not only did I not believe that “bad luck” had killed John and struck Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent whatever happened. Only after the dream about being left on the tarmac at the Santa Monica Airport did it occur to me that there was a level on which I was not actually holding myself responsible. I was holding John and Quintana responsible, a significant difference but not one that took me anywhere I needed to be. For once in your life just let it go.
15.
A few months after John died, in the late winter of 2004, after Beth Israel and Presbyterian but before UCLA, I was asked by Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books if I wanted him to submit my name for credentials to cover the Democratic and Republican summer conventions. I had looked at the dates: late July in Boston for the Democratic convention, the week before Labor Day in New York for the Republican convention. I had said yes. At the time it had seemed a way of committing to a normal life without needing actually to live it for another season or two, until spring had come and summer had come and fall was near.
Spring had come and gone, largely at UCLA.
In the middle of July Quintana was discharged from the Rusk Institute.
Ten days later I went to Boston for the Democratic convention. I had not anticipated that my new fragility would travel to Boston, a city devoid, I thought, of potentially tricky associations. I had been with Quintana in Boston only once, on a book tour. We had stayed at the Ritz. Her favorite stop on this tour had been Dallas. She had found Boston “all white.” “You mean you didn’t see many black people in Boston,” Susan Traylor’s mother had said when Quintana got back to Malibu and reported on her trip. “No,” Quintana had said. “I mean it’s not in color.” The last several times I had needed to be in Boston I had gone alone, and in each case arranged the day so as to get the last shuttle back; the single time I could remember being there with John was for a preview of True Confessions, and all I remembered of that was having lunch at the Ritz and walking with John to Brooks Brothers to pick up a shirt and hearing, after the picture was shown and the response evaluated, this disheartening assessment of its commercial prospects: True Confessions could do very well, the market researcher said, among adults with sixteen-plus years of education.
I would not be staying at the Ritz.
There would be no need to go to Brooks Brothers.
There would be market researchers, but what bad news they delivered would not be mine.
I did not realize that there was still room for error until I was walking to the Fleet Center for the opening of the convention and found myself in tears. The first day of the Democratic convention was July 26, 2004. The day of Quintana’s wedding had been July 26, 2003. Even as I waited in the security line, even as I picked up releases in the press center, even as I located my seat and stood for the national anthem, even as I bought a hamburger at the McDonald’s in the Fleet Center and sat on the lowest step of a barricaded stairway to eat it, the details sprang back. “In another world” was the phrase that would not leave my mind. Quintana sitting in the sunlight in the living room having her hair braided. John asking me which of two ties I preferred. Opening the boxes of flowers on the grass outside the cathedral and shaking the water off the leis. John giving a toast before Quintana cut the cake. The pleasure he took in the day and the party and her transparent happiness. “More than one more day,” he had whispered to her before he walked her to the altar.
“More than one more day,” he had whispered to her on the five days and nights he saw her in the Beth Israel North ICU.
“More than one more day,” I had whispered to her in his absence on the days and nights that followed.
As you used to say to me, she had said when she stood in her black dress at St. John the Divine on the day we committed his ashes.
I recall being seized by the overwhelming conviction that I needed to get out of the Fleet Center, now. I have only rarely experienced panic but what set in next was recognizably panic. I remember trying to calm myself by seeing it as a Hitchcock movie, every shot planned to terrify but ultimately artifice, a game. There was the proximity of my assigned section to the netting that held the balloons for the balloon drop. There were the shadowy silhouettes moving on the high catwalks. There was the steam or smoke leaking from a vent over the sky boxes. There were, once I fled my seat, the corridors that seemed to go nowhere, mysteriously emptied, the walls slanted and distorted (the Hitchcock movie I was seeing would have to be Spellbound) ahead of me. There were the immobilized escalators. There were the elevators that did not respond to the push of the button. There were, once I managed to get downstairs, the empty commuter trains frozen in place beyond the locked glass wall (again, slanted and distorted as I approached it) that opened to the North Station tracks.
I got out of the Fleet Center.
I watched the end of that night’s session on television in my room at the Parker House. There had seemed about this room at the Parker House when I first walked into it the day before something déjà vu, which I had put from my mind. Only now, as I was watching C-SPAN and listening to the air conditioner cycle on and off on its own schedule, did I remember: I had stayed in just such a room at the Parker House for a few nights between my junior and senior years at Berkeley. I had been in New York for a college promotion Mademoiselle then ran (the “Guest Editor” program, memorialized by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar) and was returning to California via Boston and Quebec, an “educational” itinerary arranged, in retrospect dreamily, by my mother. The air conditioner had been cycling on and off on its own schedule even in 1955. I could remember sleeping until afternoon, miserable, then taking a subway to Cambridge, where I must have walked around aimlessly and taken the subway back.
These shards from 1955 were coming to me in such shredded (or “spotty,” or even “mudgy”) form (what did I do in Cambridge, what possibly could I have done in Cambridge?) that I had trouble holding them, but I tried, because for so long as I was thinking about the summer of 1955 I would not be thinking about John or Quintana.
In the summer of 1955 I had taken a train from New York to Boston.
In the summer of 1955 I had taken another train from Boston to Quebec. I stayed in a room at the Château Frontenac that did not have its own bathtub.
Did mothers always try to press on their daughters the itineraries of which they themselves had dreamed?
Did I?
This was not working.
I tried going further back, earlier than 1955, to Sacramento, high school dances at Christmastime. This felt safe. I thought about the way we danced, close. I thought about the places on the river we went after the dances. I thought about the fog on the levee driving home.
I fell asleep maintaining focus on the fog on the levee.
I woke at four a.m. The point about the fog on the levee was that you couldn’t see the white line, someone had to walk ahead to guide the driver. Unfortunately there had been another place in my life where the fog got so thick that I had to walk ahead of the car.
The house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
The one to which we brought Quintana when she was three days old.
When you came off the Harbor Freeway and through San Pedro and onto the drive above the sea you hit the fog.
You (I) got out of the car to walk the white line.
The driver of the car was John.
I did not risk waiting for the panic to follow. I got a taxi to Logan. I avoided looking, as I bought a coffee at the Starbucks franchise outside the Delta s
huttle, at its decorative garland of red-white-and-blue foil strips, presumably conceived as a festive “convention” touch but instead glittering forlornly, Christmas in the tropics. Mele Kalikimaka. Merry Christmas in Hawaiian. The little black alarm clock I could not throw away. The dried-out Buffalo pens I could not throw away. On the flight to LaGuardia I remember thinking that the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes. The way the American west opens up. The way in which, on a polar flight across the Arctic, the islands in the sea give way imperceptibly to lakes on the land. The sea between Greece and Cyprus in the morning. The Alps on the way to Milan. I saw all those things with John.
How could I go back to Paris without him, how could I go back to Milan, Honolulu, Bogotá?
I couldn’t even go to Boston.
A week or so before the Democratic convention, Dennis Overbye of The New York Times had reported a story involving Stephen W. Hawking. At a conference in Dublin, according to the Times, Dr. Hawking said that he had been wrong thirty years before when he asserted that information swallowed by a black hole could never be retrieved from it. This change of mind was “of great consequence to science,” according to the Times, “because if Dr. Hawking had been right, it would have violated a basic tenet of modern physics: that it is always possible to reverse time, run the proverbial film backward and reconstruct what happened in, say, the collision of two cars or the collapse of a dead star into a black hole.”
