Democracy (20 page)

At Kwajalein she could see the missile emplacements from the air and was told on the ground that she did not have clearance to get out of the plane.

At Johnston she did get out, and walked by herself to the end of the long empty runway, where the asphalt met the lagoon. Jack Lovett had spent three weeks on Johnston. 1952. Waiting on the weather. Wonder Woman Two was the name of the shot. She remembered that. She even remembered him telling her he had been in Manila, and the souvenir he brought. A Filipino blouse. Starched white lace. The first summer she was married to Harry she had found it in a drawer and worn it at Rehoboth. The starched white lace against her bare skin had aroused both of them and later Harry had asked why she never wore the blouse again.

Souvenir of Manila.

Bought on Johnston from a reconnaissance pilot who had flown in from Clark.

She knew now.

She took off her sandals and waded into the lagoon and splashed the warm water on her face and soaked her bandana and then turned around and walked back to the Lear. While the pilot was talking to the mechanics about a minor circuit he believed to be malfunctioning Inez opened the body bag. She had intended to place the wet bandana in Jack Lovett’s hands but when she saw that rigor had set in she closed the body bag again. She left the bandana inside. Souvenir of Johnston. It occurred to her that Johnston would have been the right place to bury him but no one on Johnston had been told about the body on the Lear and the arrangement had already been made between Mr. Soebadio and the colonel at Schofield and so she went on, and did it at Schofield.

Which was fine.

Johnston would have been the right place but Schofield was fine.

Once she got the other site.

The site near the jacaranda.

The first site the colonel had suggested had been too near the hedge. The hedge that concealed the graves of the executed soldiers. There were seven of them. To indicate that they died in disgrace they were buried facing away from the flag, behind the hedge. She happened to know about the hedge because Jack Lovett had shown it to her, not long after they met. In fact they had argued about it. She had thought it cruel and unusual to brand the dead. Forever and ever. He had thought that it was not cruel and unusual at all, that it was merely pointless. That it was sentimental to think it mattered which side of the hedge they buried you on.

She remembered exactly what he had said.

The sun still rises and you still don’t see it, he had said.

Nevertheless.

All things being equal she did not want him buried anywhere near the hedge and the colonel had seen her point right away.

So it had worked out.

It had all been fine.

She had taken a commercial flight to Singapore that night and changed directly for Kuala Lumpur.

She had called no one.

We were sitting after dinner on the porch of the bungalow Inez was renting in Kuala Lumpur when she told me this. It was my first day there. All afternoon at the clinic she had talked about Harry Victor and the Alliance for Democratic Institutions, and when I asked at dinner where Jack Lovett was she had said only that he was not in Kuala Lumpur. After dinner we had sat on the porch without speaking for a while and then she had begun, abruptly.

“Something happened in August,” she had said.

Somewhere between Guam and Kwajalein she had asked if I wanted tea, and had brought it out to the porch in a chipped teapot painted with a cartoon that suggested the bungalow’s period: a cigar-smoking bulldog flanked by two rosebuds, one labeled “Lillibet” and the other “Margaret Rose.” Inez was barefoot. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing no makeup. There had been during the course of her account a sudden hard fall of rain, temporarily walling the porch with glassy sheets of water, and now after the rain termites swarmed around the light and dropped in our teacups, but Inez made no more note of the termites than she had of the rain or for that matter of the teapot. After she stopped talking we sat in silence a moment and then Inez poured me another cup of tea and flicked the termites from its surface with her fingernail. “What do you think about this,” she said.

I said nothing.

Inez was watching me closely.

I thought about this precisely what Inez must have thought about this, but it was irrelevant. I thought there had been papers shredded all over the Pacific the night she was flying Jack Lovett’s body from Jakarta to Schofield, but it was irrelevant. We were sitting in a swamp forest on the edge of Asia in a city that had barely existed a century before and existed now only as the flotsam of some territorial imperative and a woman who had once thought of living in the White House was flicking termites from her teacup and telling me about landing on a series of coral atolls in a seven-passenger plane with a man in a body bag.

An American in a body bag.

An American who, it was being said, had been doing business in situations where there were not supposed to be any Americans.

What did I think about this.

Finally I shrugged.

Inez watched me a moment longer, then shrugged herself.

“Anyway we were together,” she said. “We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it.”

Inside the bungalow the telephone was ringing.

Inez made no move to answer it.

Instead she stood up and leaned on the wooden porch railing and looked out into the wet tangle of liana and casuarina that surrounded the bungalow. Through the growth I could see occasional headlight beams from the cars on Ampang Road. If I stood I could see the lights of the Hilton on the hill. The telephone had stopped ringing before Inez spoke again.

“Not that it matters,” she said then. “I mean the sun still rises and he still won’t see it. That was Harry calling.”

4

J
ACK
Lovett had caught lobsters in the lagoon off Johnston in 1952. Inez had soaked her bandana in the lagoon off Johnston in 1975. Jessie and Adlai had played Marco Polo in the fifty-meter pool at the Borobudur in Jakarta in 1969. Jack Lovett had died in the fifty-meter pool at the Borobudur in Jakarta in 1975. In 1952 Inez and Jack Lovett had walked in the graveyard at Schofield Barracks. He had shown her the graves of the stillborn dependents, the Italian prisoners of war. He had shown her the hedge and the graves that faced away from the flag. The stillborn dependents and the Italian prisoners of war and the executed soldiers had all been there in 1952. Even the jacaranda would have been there in 1952.

During the five days I spent in Kuala Lumpur Inez mentioned such “correspondences,” her word, a number of times, as if they were messages intended specifically for her, evidence of a narrative she had not suspected. She seemed to find these tenuous connections extraordinary. Given a life in which the major cost was memory I suppose they were.

By the time I got back to Los Angeles a congressional subpoena had been issued for Jack Lovett and the clip of Inez dancing on the St. Regis Roof had made its first network appearance. I have no idea why this particular clip was the single most repeated image of a life as exhaustively documented as Inez Victor’s, but it was, and over those few days in January of 1976 this tape took on a life quite independent of the rather unexceptional moment it recorded, sometimes running for only a second or two, cut so short that it might have been only a still photograph; other times presenting itself as an extended playlet, reaching a dramatic curtain as the aide said “Hold two elevators” and Harry Victor said “I’m just a private citizen” and Inez said “Marvelous” and the band played “Isn’t It Romantic.”

I suppose one reason the tape was played again and again was simply that it remained the most recent film available on Inez Victor.

I suspect another reason was that the hat with the red cherries and “Just a private citizen” and “Marvelous” and “Isn’t It Romantic” offered an irony accessible to even the most literal viewer.

Three weeks later a Washington
Post
reporter happened to discover in the Pentagon bureau of records that the reason Jack Lovett had not answered his congressional subpoena was that he had been dead since August, buried in fact on government property, and that the signature on the government forms authorizing his burial on government property was Inez Victor’s.

That night the tape ran twice more, and then not again.

At any rate not again that I knew about, not even when NBC located Inez Victor at the refugee administration office in Kuala Lumpur and Inez Victor declined to be interviewed.

In March of 1976 Billy Dillon showed me the thirteen-word reply he got to a letter he had written Inez. He had resorted to writing the letter because calling Inez had been, he said, unsatisfactory.

“Raise anything substantive on the telephone,” Billy Dillon said when he showed me Inez’s reply, “Mother Teresa out there says she’s wanted in the clinic. So I write. I give her the news, a little gossip, a long thought or two, I slip in one question. One. I ask if she can give me one fucking reason she’s in goddamn K.L., and this is what I get. Thirteen words.”

He handed me the sheet of lined paper on which, in Inez’s characteristic scrawl, the thirteen words appeared: “
Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air. Four fucking reasons. Love, Inez.
”

Colors, moisture, heat.

Enough blue in the air.

I told you the essence of that early on but not the context, which has been, you will note, the way I tried to stay on the wire in this novel of fitful glimpses. It has not been the novel I set out to write, nor am I exactly the person who set out to write it. Nor have I experienced the rush of narrative inevitability that usually propels a novel toward its end, the momentum that sets in as events overtake their shadows and the cards all fall in on one another and the options decrease to zero.

Perhaps because nothing in this situation encourages the basic narrative assumption, which is that the past is prologue to the present, the options remain open here.

Anything could happen.

As you may or may not know Billy Dillon has a new candidate, a congressman out of NASA who believes that his age and training put him on the right side of what he calls “the idea lag,” and occasionally when Billy Dillon is in California to raise money I have dinner with him. In some ways I have replaced Inez as the woman Billy Dillon imagines he wishes he had married. Again as you may or may not know Harry Victor is in Brussels, special envoy to the Common Market. Adlai and Jessie are both well, Adlai in San Francisco, where he clerks for a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit; Jessie in Mexico City, where she is, curiously enough, writing a novel, and living with a
Newsweek
stringer who is trying to log in enough time in various troubled capitals to come back to New York and go on staff. When and if he does I suspect that Jessie will not come up with him, since her weakness is for troubled capitals.
Imagine my mother dancing
, I had hoped that Jessie’s novel would begin, but according to a recent letter I had from her this particular novel is an historical romance about Maximilian and Carlota.

Inez of course is still in Kuala Lumpur.

She writes once a week to Jessie, somewhat less often to Adlai, and scarcely at all now to Harry. She sends an occasional postcard to Billy Dillon, and the odd clipping to me. One evening a week she teaches a course in American literature at the University of Malaysia and has dinner afterwards at the Lake Club, but most of her evenings as well as her days are spent on the administration of what are by now the dozen refugee camps around Kuala Lumpur.

A year ago when I was in London the
Guardian
ran a piece about Southeast Asian refugees, and Inez was quoted.

She said that although she still considered herself an American national (an odd locution, but there it was) she would be in Kuala Lumpur until the last refugee was dispatched.

Since Kuala Lumpur is not likely to dispatch its last refugee in Inez’s or my lifetime I would guess she means to stay on, but I have been surprised before. When I read this piece in London I had a sudden sense of Inez and of the office in the camp and of how it feels to fly into that part of the world, of the dense greens and translucent blues and the shallows where islands once were, but so far I have not been back.

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including
The Year of Magical Thinking
. Her collected nonfiction,
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.

B
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J
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