Run River

by Joan Didion

  Perhaps ten minutes after they had left Idlewild, when the lights had been turned off and the engines had settled to a low roar, the incredible thing happened, only it did not seem incredible until later, on the ground, in the light: the man began a low, loving, brutally obscene monologue. Did she know what he wanted to do to her. Did she know what he was going to do to her as soon as they reached San Francisco. How would she like that. He guessed she’d like that all right. Be quiet, she whispered from time to time, lulled almost unconscious by the dark, the moan of the engines, the slight vibration of the cold window next to her cheek, the void beyond the window; don’t talk that way. There was, however, something about being at 25,000 feet in the dark that drained her voice of urgency. Occasionally she would even drop into sleep, waking each time to the quiet, unthinkable monotone; he never touched her and stopped talking only once, for about an hour, between the lights of Denver and the lights of Salt Lake, when he fell into deep sleep. She rather missed the sound of his voice. He woke not only with his imaginative powers still intact but with, for the first time, a definite program: You’re going to love it, baby, you’re just going to give me three hours and you’re going to love it and then you’ll walk out that door and never see me again. He saw this tryst as taking place in the airport hotel in San Francisco. It seemed he did not have to be into town until two o’clock in the afternoon. Just three hours, baby. I can’t, she heard herself saying again and again, and when he demanded to know why not she heard herself, absurdly, making up reasons: she had to be here, there, her time was committed. Three hours wouldn’t matter, he declared, if she wanted it: Do you want it or don’t you. I don’t want it, she said finally, almost inaudibly, trying to cover herself entirely with the blanket the stewardess had given her.

  You want it all right baby, you want it. Three hours of it.

  She said nothing. What held her in trance was his total lack of interest in anything else about her, his promise of being what she had looked for over and over: the point beyond which she could not go, the unambiguous undiluted article, the place where the battle would be on her terms. There could be no question of whether he liked her or disliked her, no question of approval or disapproval, no rôles at all: three hours he said and three hours he meant.

  And if he had not passed out shortly before the plane landed in San Francisco, and if Everett had not driven down unexpectedly to meet her (given the second, she could thank God for the first), three hours it would probably, she knew with a blend of distaste and interest, have been. A few days later the incident had seemed so improbable as to be of obsessive interest, and she mentioned, tentatively, that she had sat next to a drunk on the plane. She had, Everett supposed, moved. Yes, she said. Of course I moved. She could not see then why she had not, and was moved, a few weeks later, to describe the flight in relentless detail to Ryder. Clearly impatient with her unresponsiveness to the details of a venture he had recently conceived (a chain of espresso shops, see Lily, it’s a natural), Ryder said only that it could have happened to anyone. (“I’m not sure a chain of espresso shops would go, Ryder”: that was all she said, but it occurred to her that Ryder found her as tiresome as she sometimes found him, and she reflected admiringly upon people in movies—and it was not only people in movies—who when they could not talk to each other said goodbye, had renunciations, made decisions: started fresh, apparently lobotomized. If there was one thing that she and Everett and Ryder all had in common, it was that none of their decisions ever came to much; they seemed afflicted with memory.)

  24

  Lily knew that she should not have been in town at all. Let alone sitting in the bar at the Capitol Tamale for two hours. Sarah and her new husband had arrived the day before on their way to the Islands; Knight had called up a San Francisco boy who would be in his class at Princeton and invited him up for dinner; China Mary had declared it unseasonably hot for June and gone to bed. Lily should be home. She had told Ryder half an hour ago that she was leaving; now she repeated it.

  “Just finish your drink,” Ryder said. “I want to talk to you.”

  “What about.”

  “For Christ’s sake I haven’t seen you in six weeks.”

  “That’s not my fault,” Lily said automatically. She had not particularly wanted to see Ryder anyway, but it had not in fact been her doing: he had spent all of May and part of June in Phoenix, trying to raise money for a project she did not entirely understand. After a while all of Ryder’s projects tended to look alike, and whenever she had not seen him for a period of weeks or months she was struck, when she did see him, not only by that but by his appearance: his features seemed constantly heavier, his eyes less focused. Looking directly into his eyes this afternoon, she had felt that she was looking right through them: You depress me, Ryder, she had said, you’re acting like everything you do is reflex. But then he had ordered another drink and she had taken a Miltown and they had both laughed. So you think I’m a shadow of my former self, he had said, making fun of her, and she had kissed her finger and pressed it against his cheek.

  “Anyway,” she said now, looking at her watch and trying to finish a story she had begun before. “There Knight was, shouting that his grandmother reminded him more every day of something out of The Cherry Orchard. ‘By Anton Chekhov,’ he said. ‘If anybody on this ranch has even heard of Anton Chekhov.’ Which he supposed was asking too much. And there I was, trying to point out that Mother’s passion for turning her particular orchard into Paradise Valley All-Electric Homes was not exactly what I would call Chekhovian. And so Knight said, straight-faced—I swear, Ryder, he meant it—why didn’t she tear down the big house and move into one? It would save on electricity.”

  Although Ryder laughed she could see that he was not much interested by the story.

  Dampened, she added: “And that’s pretty much all we’ve been doing.”

  “Except for Everett’s sister,” Ryder corrected her.

  “That’s right.” Lily had only had three drinks but felt a little reckless. “Except for the arrival of the prodigal sister.”

  “I saw them at the airport. Everett introduced me.” He paused. “I would have recognized her anyway.”

  “Everett thinks she looks tired.”

  “She looks like Martha.” Ryder paused. “She looks the way Martha might have looked at that age if she hadn’t been Martha.”

  Lily said nothing.

  “Listen,” Ryder said at last, taking her hand. “You look good. You look a hell of a lot better than you did when I went away.”

  “I’m tired.” Lily stood up and reached for the packages she had bought before she met Ryder. “I’m tired and I look terrible.”

  When she walked into the house, obscurely pleased that she had diverted Ryder from asking her to meet him somewhere more private than the Capitol Tamale, it occurred to her that no one had moved since noon, with the single exception of Sarah’s husband, who appeared to have gone upstairs. Knight still lay on the verandah reading, Julie was still out by the pool, completely in shadow now; Everett and Sarah still sat in the living room. Not even the level of their drinks appeared to have changed appreciably in seven hours.

  Sarah smiled uncertainly at Lily. “I was just telling Everett that I recognize how you both feel about it.”

  “About what,” Lily said, taking off her gloves; she knew perfectly well about what. Sarah had been talking about selling since breakfast.

  Ignoring Lily, Sarah turned back to Everett. “Surely we’ve had offers.”

  “We’ve had offers, all right. You know we’ve had offers.”

  “How would I know what we’ve had. Lily never writes about anything but the weather. How would I know about anything.” Sarah paused. “I do know that what’s-his-name, that man we ran into at the baggage counter last night, mentioned some Honolulu interest.”

  “Honolulu interests,” Everett said. “That means Chinese investors. That’s what they call Chinese money now. Honolulu interests. That guy’s a
lways got a deal going. I wouldn’t bank on the money.” Everett turned to Lily. “Channing,” he added. “We saw Channing at the airport.”

  “Channing,” Sarah repeated. “That’s his name. Wasn’t he a beau of Martha’s?”

  “No,” Everett said.

  “Ryder Channing was married for a while to one of Larry Dupree’s daughters,” Lily added hurriedly. She did not want Sarah moved to dwell again upon either Ryder or Martha; last night, going on about Martha, she had so upset Everett that he had not slept at all.

  “Dupree Development,” she added.

  “As a matter of fact,” Everett said, “Dupree has expressed some interest in the Cosumnes ranch.”

  “I don’t care so much about the Cosumnes,” Sarah said. “The Cosumnes at least brings in a little cash.”

  “I’ve been telling you for fifteen years, Sarah, a lot of the Cosumnes expenses come out of the riverfront’s operating budget.” Everett paused. “You thinking I’m bleeding the riverfront?”

  “Everett, sweet,” Sarah laughed. She stood up and walked over to the window. “The pool kills me. It looks like Pickfair.”

  Everett said nothing.

  Sarah wandered around the room, picking up a silver platter and reading the inscription on the bottom, studying the photograph of her mother on the piano, returning to the window and looking out into the sunset, picking out, in the silence, a few notes on the piano.

  When she sat down again her vivacity seemed suddenly exhausted. “Nothing’s very different, is it,” she said to no one in particular.

  She smiled then at Everett but Everett did not smile back. “ ‘And it will not be a very jolly corner,’ ” she quoted. “T.S. Eliot. The Family Reunion.”

  On the fourth Wednesday in June, exactly one week after they had put Sarah and her husband on the plane for the Islands, Knight had the accident with the Ford. Although the accident was neither serious nor entirely Knight’s fault, he would almost certainly have his driver’s license suspended for six weeks; he had admitted two beers to the Highway Patrol. “You’re too honest for your own good,” Julie observed with disgust. “They never could’ve proved two beers.” “That’s no way to talk,” Lily said, but by lunch on Thursday she had begun to wish, if only for Everett’s sake, that Knight had been less straightforward with the Highway Patrol.

  It was 102° outside and Knight was not speaking to her. He talked only to Everett; except for yes and no and please, he had not spoken to her since Sunday, when he had seen her in Harrah’s Club at the lake with Ryder. She had gone up alone to her cousin’s house on Saturday morning (I can’t stand it, she had told Everett, I can’t stand one more minute of your taking it out on me about Sarah, I can’t stand your brooding, I can’t stand any more scenes, and I can’t stand the heat, and she had walked out of the house—resolutely not thinking about the three hours she had spent with somebody’s houseguest in a room at the Senator Hotel the night before—and driven straight to the lake); she had not even known Ryder was there until she ran into him outside Harrah’s Club on Sunday. For once she had been totally blameless, but she could scarcely explain this small irony to Knight. She did not know what Knight had been doing in Harrah’s Club in the first place. When she saw him she had called out and made her way past two crap tables to talk to him, but he had walked away.

  “Just this one thing,” Knight pleaded now. He wanted Everett to talk to someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles. “It’d be so easy. All you’ve got to say is you need me to drive the trucks. Can’t you just do this one thing for me.”

  “It won’t hurt you,” Everett said.

  “You might just talk to them,” Lily said, mostly, she realized with shame, to ingratiate herself with Knight.

  Knight looked at her coldly.

  “It won’t hurt him,” Everett repeated.

  She tried again. “Nobody said it would hurt him, Everett. But it might be nice if he could drive this summer.”

  “This is between my father and me,” Knight said distantly.

  “Apologize to your mother.”

  “I’m sorry.” Knight turned back to Everett. “Just one little phone call.”

  Everett said nothing.

  “All right. Don’t do it. I didn’t expect you to do it. Nobody expects you to do anything.”

  Knight pushed back his chair and watched Everett expectantly, but Everett did not respond.

  “You just sit here,” Knight added, his voice rising. “Just sit here like you’ve always done and don’t pay any attention to what’s going on. Just pretend we don’t exist. Just sit here while your son gets his license lifted and your daughter lets anybody on the river get her drunk and goes swimming nude—”

  “Shut up,” Everett said.

  Knight stood up. “Last Saturday night with both the Templeton twins. That’s last Saturday night while your wife was shacked up at Lake Tahoe.”

  Lily looked first at Everett, then at Knight; neither looked at her.

  “Get out,” Everett said. “You want to say every trashy thing you hear, you get off this place to say it.”

  “You think I want to stay on this place? You think I want one lousy acre of it?”

  “Get off now.”

  “It’s not what I hear, it’s what I know. Nobody says it out loud, not around here. But you know what they call her? You know how they think of her still? They call her Lily Knight, not McClellan, Knight. Like she was never married at all. So I guess you didn’t count for much.”

  When Julie asked that night where her brother was, Lily said that he had gone out. “He’s not coming back,” Everett said. “He’s disloyal.” Julie looked at her father and then at her mother and her large eyes filled with tears: “I don’t believe that,” she said in her steady voice. “I wouldn’t believe Knight could be disloyal.” “I wouldn’t believe you could go swimming without any clothes on, either,” Everett said flatly.

  After Julie had gone to sleep Lily sat down in the dark by her bed. She wanted to hold Julie’s hand, flung out from the striped lavender and white sheets, but was afraid that she would wake her. Instead she sat with her hands in her lap listening to Julie’s even breathing, and when Julie woke and looked at her with the tears beginning in her eyes again, Lily only smoothed her hair. “Go to sleep, baby,” she said, unable to explain to Julie, any more than she could explain to herself, just where the trouble had begun. “It’s all right.”

  When Knight came home two days later (“That was absurd,” Lily heard Julie telling him, “running away in your mother’s car. That’s childish”), Lily prevailed upon Everett to accept, as she had done, his inarticulate, embarrassed apology. He brought Lily a dozen white roses, but was ashamed to tell her that he had bought them (“This guy gave them to me,” he explained. “This guy I know in a florist’s shop had them left over”); he asked Everett, carefully casual, if Everett minded if he stuck around and listened when the hop broker came at four o’clock. That was the day they began to be very polite to one another, dimly aware that they had been, more than they had ever been before, vis-à-vis the complexities, the downright complicity, of family love. (It had nothing to do with you, she tried to explain to Ryder, talking to him about it night after night. He did not understand what she was talking about, but it was better than talking to herself.)

  August 1959

  25

  Everett loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. Exhausted, he remembered for the first time that the gun still lay on the dock.

  “Sit down,” Lily said. “Sit down, baby.”

  He let her lead him to a chair. The house looked no different than it had earlier in the evening; he could not think why he had expected it to.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

  “What time is it?”

  Lily looked at her wrist. She was wearing the watch he had given her the September of 1957, when she and the children came home from abroad. He had bought it the week she left and
saved it until she came home in September, telling her then, embarrassed, that she could count it an anniversary present. Once he had seen it on her thin wrist, he had seen how wrong the heavy diamonds were for Lily, but in the jeweler’s that afternoon he had so wanted something which would make irrevocable his love and determination that if the jeweler could have worked the Cullinan Diamond into a wrist watch (the point of a wrist watch being that she could wear it every day) he would have borrowed on the ranches and bought it. Although he was quite sure that Lily did not like the watch, she wore it not only every day but so frequently in the shower and in the swimming pool that the parts were rusted and it seldom ran.

  “One-thirty,” she said. “One-twenty-five.”

  He looked at her. “The children,” he said finally.

  “They’ll be a while. We have time.”

  She poured some bourbon into two glasses and handed him one.

  “I meant to,” he said. “I came here and got the gun. If I hadn’t meant to I wouldn’t have come here and gotten the gun. Would I.”

  “I don’t know. That’s not the point.”

  He said nothing.

  “Listen,” she said. “We’re going to make it all right. I’m going to tell McGrath what happened.”

  “That didn’t happen.”

  “It could have happened.”

  “It didn’t.”