Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

She had been admitted to the ICU on Christmas night.

She was in a hospital, we had kept telling each other on Christmas night. She was being taken care of. She would be safe where she was.

Everything else had seemed normal.

We had a fire. She would be safe.

Five days later everything outside the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North still seemed normal: this was the part neither of us (although only John admitted it) could get past, one more case of maintaining a fixed focus on the clear blue sky from which the plane fell. There were still in the living room of the apartment the presents John and I had opened on Christmas night. There were still under and on a table in Quintana’s old room the presents she had been unable to open on Christmas night because she was in the ICU. There were still on a table in the dining room the stacked plates and silver we had used on Christmas Eve. There were still on an American Express bill that came that day charges from the November trip we had made to Paris. When we left for Paris Quintana and Gerry had been planning their first Thanksgiving dinner. They had invited his mother and sister and brother-in-law. They were using their wedding china. Quintana had come by to get my mother’s ruby crystal glasses. We had called them on Thanksgiving Day from Paris. They were roasting a turkey and pureeing turnips.

“And then — gone.”

How does “flu” morph into whole-body infection?

I see the question now as the equivalent of a cry of helpless rage, another way of saying How could this have happened when everything was normal. In the cubicle where Quintana lay in the ICU, her fingers and face swollen with fluid, her lips cracked by fever around the breathing tube, her hair matted and soaked with sweat, the numbers on the respirator that night indicated that she was now receiving only 45 percent of her oxygen through the tube. John had kissed her swollen face. “More than one more day,” he had whispered, another part of our family shorthand. The reference was to a line from a movie, Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian. “I love you more than even one more day,” Audrey Hepburn as Maid Marian says to Sean Connery as Robin Hood after she has given them both the fatal potion. John had whispered this every time he left the ICU. On our way out we managed to maneuver a doctor into talking to us. We asked if the decrease in delivered oxygen meant that she was getting better.

There was a pause.

This was when the ICU doctor said it: “We’re still not sure which way this is going.”

The way this is going is up, I remember thinking.

The ICU doctor was still talking. “She’s really very sick,” he was saying.

I recognized this as a coded way of saying that she was expected to die but I persisted: The way this is going is up. It’s going up because it has to go up.

I believe in Cat.

I believe in God.

“I love you more than one more day,” Quintana said three months later standing in the black dress at St. John the Divine. “As you used to say to me.”

We were married on the afternoon of January 30, 1964, a Thursday, at the Catholic Mission of San Juan Bautista in San Benito County, California. John wore a navy blue suit from Chipp. I wore a short white silk dress I had bought at Ransohoff’s in San Francisco on the day John Kennedy was killed. Twelve-thirty p.m. in Dallas was still morning in California. My mother and I learned what happened only when we were leaving Ransohoff’s for lunch and ran into someone from Sacramento. Since there were only thirty or forty people at San Juan Bautista on the afternoon of the wedding (John’s mother, his younger brother Stephen, his brother Nick and Nick’s wife Lenny and their four-year-old daughter, my mother and father and brother and sister-in-law and grandfather and aunt and a few cousins and family friends from Sacramento, John’s roommate from Princeton, maybe one or two others), my intention for the ceremony had been to have no entrance, no “procession,” to just stand up there and do it. “Principals emerge,” I remember Nick saying helpfully: Nick got the plan, but the organist who had materialized did not, and suddenly I found myself on my father’s arm, walking up the aisle and weeping behind my dark glasses. When the ceremony was over we drove to the lodge at Pebble Beach. There were little things to eat, champagne, a terrace that opened onto the Pacific, very simple. By way of a honeymoon we spent a few nights in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito and then, bored, fled to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

I had thought about that wedding on the day of Quintana’s wedding.

Her wedding was simple too. She wore a long white dress and a veil and expensive shoes but her hair was in a thick braid down her back, as it had been when she was a child.

We sat in the choir at St. John the Divine. Her father walked her to the altar. There at the altar was Susan, her best friend in California since age three. There at the altar was her best friend in New York. There at the altar was her cousin Hannah. There was her cousin Kelley from California, reading a part of the service. There were the children of Gerry’s stepdaughter, reading another part. There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. “Wasn’t that just about perfect,” she said when she called that evening. Her father and I allowed that it was. She and Gerry flew to St. Barth’s. John and I flew to Honolulu.

July 26, 2003.

Four months and 29 days before she was admitted to the ICU at Beth Israel North.

Five months and four days before her father died.

During the first week or two after he died, at night, when the protective exhaustion would hit me and I would leave the relatives and friends talking in the living room and dining room and kitchen of the apartment and walk down the corridor to the bedroom and shut the door, I would avoid looking at the reminders of our early marriage that hung on the corridor walls. In fact I did not need to look, nor could I avoid them by not looking: I knew them by heart. There was a photograph of John and me taken on a location for The Panic in Needle Park. It was our first picture. We went with it to the Cannes festival. It was the first time I had ever been to Europe and we were traveling first-class on Twentieth Century — Fox and I boarded the plane barefoot, it was that period, 1971. There was a photograph of John and me and Quintana at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park in 1970, John and Quintana, age four, eating ice cream bars. We were in New York all that fall working on a picture with Otto Preminger. “She’s in the office of Mr. Preminger who has no hair,” Quintana advised a pediatrician who had asked where her mother was. There was a photograph of John and me and Quintana on the deck of the house we had in Malibu in the 1970s. The photograph appeared in People. When I saw it I realized that Quintana had taken advantage of a break in the day’s shooting to apply, for the first time, eyeliner. There was a photograph Barry Farrell had taken of his wife, Marcia, sitting in a rattan chair in the house in Malibu and holding their then-baby daughter, Joan Didion Farrell.

Barry Farrell was now dead.

There was a photograph of Katharine Ross, taken by Conrad Hall during the Malibu period when she taught Quintana to swim by throwing a Tahitian shell in a neighbor’s pool and telling Quintana the shell would be hers if she brought it up. This was a time, the early 1970s, when Katharine and Conrad and Jean and Brian Moore and John and I traded plants and dogs and favors and recipes and would have dinner at one or another of our houses a couple of times a week.