Democracy (6 page)

“Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”

The doctor came in a sweat suit.

“I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”

“I’m right here,” Harry said.

“Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.

“It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.

“It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”

“This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.

The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”

Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.

She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

“My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”

The therapist smiled.

Inez lit a cigarette.

It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”

“Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”

“Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”

“Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”

“Cynthia who?” Harry said.

“Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”

“At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”

“You always say
her
. Her name is Jessie.”

“
I know her goddamn name.
”

Strike Ann Arbor.

Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of
awe
”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.

Strike Colorado Springs.

Adlai already had his agenda.

Jessie looked up from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and smiled fleetingly at the glass partition.

“The ‘problem at hand,’ as you put it, is substance habituation.” The therapist opened a drawer and extracted an ashtray and slid it across the desk toward Inez. She was still smiling. “I notice you smoke.”

“I do, yes.” Inez crushed out the cigarette and stood up. Jessie’s complexion was clear and her hair was like honey and there was no way of telling that beneath the sleeves of the Dalton School sweatshirt there were needle tracks visible on her smooth tanned arms. “I also drink coffee.”

The therapist’s expression did not change.

Let me die and get it over with.

Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.

Don’t tell Daddy.

Inez picked up her jacket.

On the other side of the glass partition Jessie took a pocket mirror from her shoulder bag and began lining her eyes with the IBM testing pencil.

“What I don’t do is shoot heroin,” Inez said.

The second therapist believed that the answer lay in a closer examination of the sibling gestalt. The third employed a technique incorporating elements of aversion therapy. At the clinic in Seattle to which Jessie was finally sent in the fall of 1974, a private facility specializing in the treatment of what the fourth therapist called adolescent chemical dependency, the staff referred to the patients as clients, maintained them on methadone, and obtained for them part-time jobs “suited to the character structure and particular skills of the individual client.” Jessie’s job was as a waitress in a place on Puget Sound called King Crab’s Castle. “Pretty cinchy,” Jessie said on the telephone, “if you can keep the pickled beet slice from running into the crab louis.”

The bright effort in Jessie’s voice had constricted Inez’s throat.

“It’s all experience,” Inez said finally, and Jessie giggled.

“Really,” Jessie said, emphasizing the word to suggest agreement. She was not yet eighteen.

10

O
THER COSTS
.

Inez had stopped staying alone in the apartment on Central Park West after the superintendent told a reporter from
Newsday
that he had let himself in to drain a radiator and Mrs. Victor had asked him to fix her a double vodka. She took fingernail scissors and scratched the label off empty prescription bottles before she threw them in the trash. She stopped patronizing a bookstore on Madison Avenue after she noticed the names, addresses, and delivery instructions for all the customers, including herself (“doorman-Lloyd, maid lvs at 4”) in an open account book by the cash register. She would not allow letters that came unsolicited from strangers to be opened inside the apartment, or packages that came from anyone. She had spoken to Billy Dillon about the possibility of suing
People
for including Adlai’s accidents in an article on the problems of celebrity children, and also of enjoining
Who
’
s Who
to delete mention of herself and Jessie and Adlai from Harry Victor’s entry. “I don’t quite see the significance, Inez,” Billy Dillon had said. “Since I see your name in the paper two, three times a week minimum.”

“The significance is,” Inez said, “that some stranger might be sitting in a library somewhere reading
Who
’
s Who.
”

“Consider this stranger your bread and butter, an interested citizen,” Billy Dillon said, but Inez never could. Strangers remembered. Strangers suffered disappointments, and became confused. A stranger might suffer a disappointment too deep to be lanced by a talk with
Newsday
, and become confused. Life outside camera range, life as it was lived by (Inez imagined then) her father and her Uncle Dwight and her sister Janet, had become for Inez only a remote idea, something she knew about but did not entirely comprehend. She did not for example comprehend how her father could give her telephone number to strangers he met on airplanes, and then call to remonstrate with her when he heard she had been short on the telephone. “I think you might have spared ten minutes,” Paul Christian had said on one such call. “This young man you hung up on happens to have a quite interesting grassy-knoll slant on Sal Mineo’s murder, he very much wanted Harry to hear it.” She did not for example comprehend what moved Dwight to send her a clipping of every story in the Honolulu
Advertiser
in which her or Harry’s name appeared. These clippings came in bundles, with Dwight’s card attached. “Nice going,” he sometimes pencilled on the card. Nor did she comprehend how Janet could have agreed, during the 1972 campaign, to be interviewed on
CBS Reports
about her and Inez’s childhood. This particular
CBS Reports
had been devoted to capsule biographies of the candidates’ wives and Inez had watched it with Harry and Billy Dillon in the library of the apartment on Central Park West. There had been a clip of Harry talking about Inez’s very special loyalty and there had been a clip of Billy Dillon talking about Inez’s very special feeling for the arts and there had been a clip of the headmaster at the Dalton School talking about the very special interest Inez took in education, but Janet’s appearance on the program was a surprise.

“I wouldn’t say ‘privileged,’ no,” Janet had said on camera. She had seemed to be sitting barefoot on a catamaran in front of her beach house. “No. Off the mark. Not ‘privileged.’ I’d just call it a marvelous simple way of life that you might describe as gone with the wind.”

“I hope nobody twigs she’s talking about World War Two,” Billy Dillon said.

“Of course everybody had their marvelous Chinese amah then,” Janet was saying on camera. Her voice was high and breathy and nervous. The camera angle had changed to show Koko Head. Inez picked up a legal pad and began writing. “And then Nezzie and I had—oh, I suppose a sort of governess, a French governess, she was from Neuilly, needless to say Mademoiselle spoke flawless French, I remember Nezzie used to drive her wild by speaking pidgin.”

“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon said.

Inez did not look up from the legal pad.

“ ‘Mademoiselle,’ ” Billy Dillon repeated, “and ‘Nezzie.’ ”

“I was never called ‘Nezzie.’ ”

“You are now,” Billy Dillon said.

“They pan left,” Harry Victor said, “they could pick up Janet’s private-property-no-trespassing-no-beach-access sign.” He reached under the table to pick up the telephone. “Also her Mercedes. This should be Mort.”

“Ask Mort how he thinks the governess from Neuilly tests out,” Billy Dillon said. “Possibly Janet could make Mademoiselle available to do some coffees in West Virginia.”

Inez said nothing.

She had never been called Nezzie.

She had never spoken pidgin.

The governess from Neuilly had not been a governess at all but the French wife of a transport pilot at Hickam who rented the studio over Cissy Christian’s garage for a period of six months between the Leyte Gulf and the end of the war.

Janet was telling
CBS Reports
how she and Inez had been taught to store table linens between sheets of blue tissue paper.

Harry was on his evening conference call with Mort Goldman at MIT and Perry Young at Harvard and the petrochemical people at Stanford.

No Nezzie.

No pidgin.

No governess from Neuilly.

“That tip about the blue tissue paper goes straight to the hearts and minds,” Billy Dillon said.

“Mort still sees solar as negative policy, Billy, maybe you better pick up,” Harry Victor said.

“Tell Mort we just kiss it,” Billy Dillon said. “Broad strokes only. Selected venues.” He watched as Inez tore the top sheet from the legal pad on which she had been writing. “Strictly for the blue-tissue-paper crowd.”

1) Shining Star
, Inez had written on the piece of paper.

2) Twinkling Star

3) Morning Star

4) Evening Star

5) Southern Star

6) North Star

7) Celestial Star

8) Meridian Star

9) Day Star

10) ? ? ?

“Hey,” Billy Dillon said. “Inez. If you’re drafting a cable to Janet, tell her we’re retiring her number.”

“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”

Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the
Lurline
Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry.
Aloha oe
. I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been
Night Star
, but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.

11

I
N
the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.

What did this tell us, I asked my class.

Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.

Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.

Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How?
It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz: