Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

“I warned you,” John said. “I told you what working for Life would be like. Didn’t I tell you? It would be like being nibbled to death by ducks?”

I was brushing Quintana’s hair. The picture of Ginger Rogers.

I felt betrayed, humiliated. I should have listened to John.

I wrote the column letting the readers know who I was. It appeared. At the time it seemed an unexceptional enough eight hundred words in the assigned genre, but there was, at the end of the second paragraph, a line so out of synch with the entire Life mode of self-presentation that it might as well have suggested abduction by space aliens: “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.” A week later we happened to be in New York. “Did you know she was writing it,” many people asked John, sotto voce.

Did he know I was writing it?

He edited it.

He took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo so I could rewrite it.

He drove me to the Western Union office in downtown Honolulu so I could file it.

At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it. That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.

See where that particular vortex sucked me.

From the Dorothy Draper wallpaper border at Beth Israel North to Quintana at three and I should have listened to John.

I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.

The way you got sideswiped was by going back.

Isaw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John. This would require ingenuity. John and I had lived in Los Angeles County from 1964 until 1988. Between 1988 and the time he died we had spent significant amounts of time there, usually at the very hotel in which I was now staying, the Beverly Wilshire. Quintana was born in Los Angeles County, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She went to school there, first in Malibu and later at what was then still the Westlake School for Girls (the year after she left it became coeducational, and was called Harvard-Westlake) in Holmby Hills.

For reasons that remain unclear to me the Beverly Wilshire itself only rarely triggered the vortex effect. In theory its every corridor was permeated with the associations I was trying to avoid. When we were living in Malibu and had meetings in town we would bring Quintana and stay at the Beverly Wilshire. After we moved to New York and needed to be in Los Angeles for a picture we would stay there, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks at a time. We set up computers and printers there. We had meetings there. What if, someone was always saying in these meetings. We could work until eight or nine in the evening there and transmit the pages to whichever director or producer we were working with and then go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Melrose where we did not need a reservation. We always specified the old building. I knew the housekeepers. I knew the manicurists. I knew the doorman who would give John the bottled water when he came back from walking in the morning. I knew by reflex how to work the key and open the safe and adjust the shower head: I had stayed over the years in some dozens of rooms identical to the one in which I was now staying. I had last stayed in such a room in October 2003, alone, doing promotion, two months before John died. Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened.

What if.

Outside the exempt zone that was the Beverly Wilshire, I plotted my routes, I remained on guard.

Never once in five weeks did I drive into the part of Brentwood in which we had lived from 1978 until 1988. When I saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and street work forced me to pass within three blocks of our house in Brentwood, I did not look left or right. Never once in five weeks did I drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. When Jean Moore offered me the use of her house on the Pacific Coast Highway, three-eighths of a mile past the house in which we had lived from 1971 until 1978, I invented reasons why it was essential for me to stay instead at the Beverly Wilshire. I could avoid driving to UCLA on Sunset. I could avoid passing the intersection at Sunset and Beverly Glen where for six years I had turned off to the Westlake School for Girls. I could avoid passing any intersection I could not anticipate, control. I could avoid keeping the car radio tuned to the stations I used to drive by, avoid locating KRLA, an AM station that had called itself “the heart and soul of rock and roll” and was still in the early 1990s programming the top hits of 1962. I could avoid punching in the Christian call-in station to which I had switched whenever the top hits of 1962 lost their resonance.

Instead I listened to NPR, a sedate morning show called Morning Becomes Eclectic. Every morning at the Beverly Wilshire I ordered the same breakfast, huevos rancheros with one scrambled egg. Every morning when I left the Beverly Wilshire I drove the same way to UCLA: out Wilshire, right on Glendon, slip left to Westwood, right on Le Conte and left at Tiverton. Every morning I noted the same banners fluttering from the light standards along Wilshire: UCLA Medical Center—#1 in the West, #3 in the Nation. Every morning I wondered whose ranking this was. I never asked. Each morning I inserted my ticket into the gate mechanism and each morning, if I inserted it right, the same woman’s voice said “ Wel- come to U-C–L-A. ” Each morning, if I timed it right, I got a parking place outside, on the Plaza 4 level, against the hedge. Late each afternoon I would drive back to the Beverly Wilshire, pick up my messages, and return a few of them. After the first week Gerry was flying back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, trying to work at least a few days a week, and if he was in New York I would call to give him the day’s information or lack of it. I would lie down. I would watch the local news. I would stand in the shower for twenty minutes and go out to dinner.

I went out to dinner every night I was in Los Angeles. I had dinner with my brother and his wife whenever they were in town. I went to Connie Wald’s house in Beverly Hills. There were roses and nasturtiums and open fires in the big fireplaces, as there had been through all the years when John and I and Quintana would go there. Now Susan Traylor was there. I went to Susan’s own house in the Hollywood hills. I had known Susan since she was three and I had known her husband Jesse since he and Susan and Quintana were in the fourth grade at the Point Dume School, and now they were looking after me. I ate in many restaurants with many friends. I had dinner quite often with Earl McGrath, whose intuitive kindness in this situation was to ask me every morning what I was doing that night and, if the answer was in any way vague, to arrange an untaxing dinner for two or three or four at Orso or at Morton’s or at his house on Robertson Boulevard.

After dinner I would take a taxi back to the hotel and place my morning order for huevos rancheros. “One scrambled egg,” the voice on the phone would prompt. “Exactly,” I would say.

I plotted these evenings as carefully as I plotted the routes.

I left no time to dwell on promises I had no way of keeping.

You’re safe. I’m here.

In the deep hush of Morning Becomes Eclectic the next day I would congratulate myself.