The Last Love Song (69 page)

Truly: a print-world angel.

3

From the vantage point of the heavens—if not quite from the windows of Didion's house—Trancas Canyon narrowed from mountainous parklands to gentle slopes to grassy tableland at its mouth. The creek, draining a vast watershed, once ran the length of the canyon but now funneled into a concrete flood-control channel, culminating in a disturbed coastal lagoon near a shopping center. A garden-supply outfit occupied one of the few discernible mounds in the flatlands, the hump the last remnant of a Chumash burial site. Most striking, from an aerial view, was the small number of roads for such a densely developed region, restricting evacuation routes and fire department access. Commercial and political interests seemed to have combined to enforce the coast's permanent “disaster area” status, guaranteeing periodic infusions of government money.

On October 23, 1978, the face of doom belonged to a fifteen-year-old boy from Agoura. That day, just for the hell of it (spurred by Lord knows what scary temptation), he took a lit cigarette and wrapped it inside a matchbook until the matchbook began to burn. Then he tossed the matches into clumps of mountain chaparral and coastal sage scrub.

At 12:11
P.M.
, the Agoura fire alarms rang. Just over two hours later—faster than anyone had ever seen—flames jumped the Pacific Coast Highway, melting a stretch of its asphalt, and reached the sea, powered by fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Six engine companies, twenty-eight camp crews, eight bulldozers, six five-hundred-gallon-capacity helicopters, and six fixed-wing tankers with a two-thousand-gallon capacity finally brought the fires under control, but not before they had destroyed 25,000 acres of watershed, 230 homes, and over 250 other structures.

Just three months earlier, the Dunnes had finally left their house by the sea and moved to Brentwood Park, where they had purchased a two-story Colonial resembling “a house in West Hartford,” Didion said, “a house [John's] mother might have lived in.”

Quintana, who had fiercely resisted the move, referred to it as her parents' “suburbia house.”

Early one October morning, Didion stood at an upstairs window of her new home, overlooking her swimming pool, watching the not-so-distant smoke in the hills. Either as a gesture of irony or California stoicism, the radio played James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain.” Announcers warned listeners that the fire's final stand might be made at Sunset Boulevard. Didion startled, as a “house on a hill above Sunset implode[d]” in front of her eyes, “its oxygen sucked out by the force of the fire.” Palm fronds ignited—an eerie echo of the SLA shoot-out.

Throughout the day, radio reports said cedar houses snapped like popcorn and fireballs rained upon tidal pools. Intrepid surfers rode the waves in defiance of the ashen skies. Power lines tangled by the winds broke and sent forth bolts of lightning. Wild rabbits sparked into flame, starting hundreds of brush fires wherever they hopped. Several area families raised Arabian horses; mares turned to char in the fields. Some of the animals had to be shot on the beach.

There were reports of wealthy matrons loading boxes of jewels into kayaks and paddling out to the breakers. When rescued by lifeguards, they admitted they had left their maids behind.

A few days later, around the first of November, the Pacific Coast Highway reopened. Grieving in advance, Didion drove out to Arthur Freed Orchids. She found Amado Vazquez standing amid cracked glass and melted metal in what had been the main greenhouse. “I lost three years,” he said softly, indicating shards of beakers that had once held seedlings.

“I thought we both would cry,” Didion said.

The good news was, Vazquez was on the verge of opening his new nursery, Zuma Canyon Orchids. That acreage had survived. “You want today to see flowers, we go down to the other place,” he told Didion.

She thanked him and said she did not need to see the flowers. She wished him good luck and went to observe the spot where she had lived only three months ago. “The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which,” she said. “In any case it was no longer our house.”

She stared out over the sea to her beloved flat horizon and then turned to survey the hills where, days earlier, as winds teased the flames into grotesque, writhing arms, a hawk had flown over the highway and exploded in midair.

 

PART SEVEN

 

Chapter Twenty-five

1

“Poor dope. He always wanted a pool … in the end he got himself a pool: only the price turned out to be a little high,” says the two-bit screenwriter Joe Gillis, speaking from beyond his watery grave. As his voice addresses us (really, it's William Holden's), we witness his fully clothed body floating facedown in a silent-film star's deep end.

The famous opening of Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard
portrays L.A. swimming pools as traps—deadly pits hollowed out by 1950s decadence. Between the movie and the news of Rodney King's death in a backyard pool, in 2012, lies a series of images defining California through its best-known private luxury: Dustin Hoffman in
The Graduate
as an alienated sixties kid pulling on scuba gear and hiding from his parents at the bottom of their pool; punked-out skateboarders swarming concrete canyons emptied of water by drought and the escalating housing prices of the 1970s.

In 1978, the year Didion and Dunne moved to Brentwood Park and Didion owned, for the first time, a backyard swimming pool, her friend the painter David Hockney created twenty-nine images out of pressed paper pulp, freezing the movement of light on chlorinated water and blue rain needles pattering placid surfaces. Previously, Hockney had painted the violence of a splash; bodies elongated by the aquatic refraction of light. He had rendered swimmers in an atmosphere so thick, they may as well have been torn from their earthly companions—those left grieving, searching for their lost ones in a cloudless crystal ball.

“Water in a swimming pool is different from, say, water in a river, which is mostly reflection because the water isn't clear,” Hockney said. “A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent, and drawing transparency is an interesting problem.”

Of course, Hockney's transparency was unnatural, formed by chemicals, maintenance, and what Didion called “control of the uncontrollable.” A “pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order,” she once wrote. “[W]ater … made available and useful … infinitely soothing to the western eye.” But this was peace bought by a terrible knowledge: our estrangement from the land.

We inhabit a desert. Yet on lot after densely packed lot, we form artificial oases, kidney-shaped and heated. We suffer through drought. Yet annually over twenty thousand gallons of water evaporate from an uncovered pool. An unholy accommodation, with alienation the only possible result.

Thus, Didion's certainty that the “apparent ease of California life is an illusion,” even for those who can afford a backyard pool. Thus, the “interesting problem” of drawing, or freezing in writing, this particular “transparency,” which, like the California sunlight, conveys a certain pitilessness in its vibrancy.

The Dunnes lived in the “apparent ease” of Brentwood for ten years, from June 1978 to the summer of 1988, at 202 Chadbourne Avenue, on the corner of Chadbourne and Marlboro. In the midafternoons one summer, just after four o'clock, Dunne liked to wade out into the shallow water, rereading William Styron's novel
Sophie's Choice
to study its structure. Didion would work in the garden, tending her roses, thyme, santolina, and feverfew—for which she had convinced Dunne to pay landscapers to tear out the back lawn—and then together they would retire into their library, wrapped in towels, make drinks, and watch a BBC television series called
Tenko,
about several English women imprisoned in Malaya during World War II. In
The Year of Magical Thinking,
Didion says they would work for a couple hours after the show ended each night, “John in his office at the top of the stairs, me in the glassed-in porch across the hall that had become my office.” Afterward, at around seven-thirty, they'd go out for dinner—often chicken or shrimp quesadillas at Morton's, where the “room was cool and polished and dark inside but you could see the twilight outside.”

For a while, they may have believed—certainly, they
wanted
to believe—that their rituals and daily cleansings enclosed them, like orchids in a greenhouse, protected from change and disturbance, as they'd tried to be in Malibu. Here in Brentwood—where “we'll have a better life,” Didion assured Sara Davidson—the community felt just as insulated as Trancas had on its very best days. All the neighbors knew one another and recognized one another's illegal Mexican help. Few African-Americans lived in the area, the most prominent being O. J. Simpson, about whom “white Americans could congratulate themselves with the spurious notion that they were colorblind, a conclusion made possible by Simpson's conversion of himself into a white man's idea of an acceptable black man,” Dunne wrote. Simpson was the “quintessential intimate stranger, the person we think we know because of his celebrity” (a condition the Dunnes knew something about). The retired football player, “famous for formerly being famous,” lived about a minute, by car, from Chadbourne Avenue, near the mayor, Richard Riordan, and the president of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz, in those days enjoying his fifteen minutes as “the most powerful man in Hollywood.” Dunne often saw Simpson at the Brentwood Mart, a series of one-story boutique stores where Dunne bought his books, newspapers, and magazines, got his hair cut, and sometimes ate ribs at the drugstore. Simpson's appearance here—always wearing tennis outfits, always browsing
USA Today
—seemed an indicator of the transparency of affluence in L.A. society. But perhaps, like an artificial pool in the desert, it reflected a forced accommodation, an exception casting into greater relief the illusion of racial mobility.

Rodney King, who had learned to swim as a child in the irrigation canals near his grandmother's house in Sacramento, and who bought a house with a pool after receiving $3.8 million from the city of Los Angeles in a civil suit following his beating at the hands of five cops near the Children's Museum, once said, “If you don't know Los Angeles, it's hard to explain how different it is from the pictures you see on television and in movies. No pretty palm trees and manicured lawns or any of that. No fancy boutiques or pretty buildings with shiny windows. All the big houses and Beverly Hills”—and Brentwood—“may only be about ten miles north, and the beautiful beach houses on the ocean in Malibu only about ten miles to the west, but those places may as well be a million miles away.”

2

It was a tough year to try to give up smoking.

The house needed plenty of work: potting the orchids on the mantelpiece, placing the porcelain end tables and the lavender love seats just so in the den, angling the small wooden breakfast table exactly right, next to the Chickering piano. Above the piano Didion hung a framed aerial photo of Delano Vineyards. (Poor Cesar! Workers' wages had dipped, and reports said he'd become quite paranoid, looking for scapegoats in his ranks.) She draped chintz over the black leather sofa her husband loved so much, an old gift from his mother; he felt almost mystical about it because one night, at a party in Malibu, a pair of guests, a man and a woman, former AP reporters who'd covered Vietnam in its worst period, and who hadn't run into each other since their days together in Southeast Asia, sat on that sofa, staring into each other's eyes and saying nothing all evening.

The dining room curtains had to go: such strict, regular pleats! Didion was certain this geometric pattern set off migraines, the way the monotony of cookbook recipes could mess with her alpha waves. If only she'd been big-boned and five ten, she could have stopped the pains in her body and strong-armed the furniture until she felt more at ease in her surroundings. “All the time we were living at the beach I wanted a house like this,” she admitted to Michiko Kakutani. “I wanted a house with a center-hall plan with the living room on your right and the dining hall on your left when you come in. I imagined if I had this house, a piece of order and peace would fall into my life, but order and peace did not fall into my life. Living in a two-story house doesn't take away the risks.”

On the other hand, she liked the sloppy and even slightly dangerous placement of the child's chair in the den, out in the middle of everything, covered with Quintana's cheery old sun hats.

She stuck her tennis racket in a closet: The lessons hadn't taken.

She scrambled through boxes to find the snapshot of Donner Pass she simply
had
to see on her study desk. While Dunne paneled his larger room with wood, she neatened her work space (so many books!—she couldn't stand the
weight
of other people's opinions staring down at her from the shelves).

She arranged cut-glass bowls in the kitchen (where she
did
have a marble slab for rolling pastry dough), vases, settings of china and silver, reserving a special place for the Craftsman dinner knife she'd found among ice plants below her Malibu deck when county officials had come to conduct a geological inspection. The inspection was required before the Dunnes could sell the house and move to Brentwood. Apparently, the knife had slipped through the deck's redwood slats one night. It was dull and scratched, its wooden handle pitted. Didion thought she might give it to Quintana when her daughter was older, a memento of her childhood at the beach—along with her baby teeth, saved in a satin jeweler's box.

Didion lined a room with her hurricane lamps, as though expecting domestic storms.