Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

I could have been in Cleveland.

Yet.

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.

The Santa Ana was back.

The jacaranda was back.

One afternoon I needed to see Gil Frank, at his office on Wilshire, several blocks east of the Beverly Wilshire. In this previously untested territory ( terra cognita for these purposes was west on Wilshire, not east) I caught sight, unprepared, of a movie theater in which John and I had in 1967 seen The Graduate. There had been no particular sense of moment about seeing The Graduate in 1967. I had been in Sacramento. John had picked me up at LAX. It had seemed too late to shop for dinner and too early to eat in a restaurant so we had gone to see The Graduate and then to dinner at Frascati’s. Frascati’s was gone but the theater was still there, if only to trap the unwary.

There were many such traps. One day I would notice a familiar stretch of coastal highway in a television commercial and realize it was outside the gate house, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula at Portuguese Bend, to which John and I had brought Quintana home from St. John’s Hospital.

She was three days old.

We had placed her bassinet next to the wisteria in the box garden.

You’re safe. I’m here.

Neither the house nor its gate could be seen in the commercial but I experienced a sudden rush of memories: getting out of the car on that highway to open the gate so that John could drive through; watching the tide come in and float a car that was sitting on our beach to be shot for a commercial; sterilizing bottles for Quintana’s formula while the gamecock that lived on the property followed me companionably from window to window. This gamecock, named “Buck” by the owner of the house, had been abandoned on the highway, in the colorful opinion of the owner by “Mexicans on the run.” Buck had a distinctive and surprisingly endearing personality, not unlike a Labrador. In addition to Buck this house also came equipped with peacocks, which were decorative but devoid of personality. Unlike Buck, the peacocks were fat and moved only as a last resort. At dusk they would scream and try to fly to their nests in the olive trees, a fraught moment because they would so often fall. Just before dawn they would scream again. One dawn I woke to the screaming and looked for John. I found him outside in the dark, tearing unripe peaches from a tree and hurling them at the peacocks, a characteristically straightforward if counterproductive approach to resolving an annoyance. When Quintana was a month old we were evicted. There was a clause in the lease that specified no children but the owner and his wife allowed that the baby was not the reason. The reason was that we had hired a pretty teenager named Jennifer to take care of her. The owner and his wife did not want strangers on the property, or as they said “behind the gate,” particularly pretty teenagers named Jennifer, who would presumably have dates. We took a few months’ lease on a house in town that belonged to Herman Mankiewicz’s widow, Sara, who was going to be traveling. She left everything in the house as it was except one object, the Oscar awarded to Herman Mankiewicz for the screenplay of Citizen Kane. “You’ll have parties, people will just get drunk and play with it,” she said when she put it away. On the day we moved John was traveling with the San Francisco Giants, doing a piece on Willie Mays for The Saturday Evening Post. I borrowed my sister-in-law’s station wagon, loaded it, put Quintana and Jennifer in the back seat, said goodbye to Buck, drove out, and let the totemic gate lock behind me for the last time.

All that and I had not even driven down there.

All I had done was catch sight of a commercial on television while I was dressing to go to the hospital.

Another day I would need to buy bottled water at the Rite Aid on Canon and remember that Canon was where The Bistro had been. In 1964 and 1965, when we were living in the gate house with the beach and the peacocks but could not afford even to tip the parking boys at restaurants, let alone eat in them, John and I used to park on the street on Canon and charge dinner at The Bistro. We took Quintana there on the day of her adoption, when she was not quite seven months old. They had given us Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette and placed her carrier on the table, a centerpiece. At the courthouse that morning she had been the only baby, even the only child; all the other adoptions that day had seemed to involve adults adopting one another for tax reasons. “ Qué bonita, qué hermosa, ” the busboys at The Bistro crooned when we brought her in at lunch. When she was six or seven we took her there for a birthday dinner. She was wearing a lime-green ruana I had bought for her in Bogotá. As we were about to leave the waiter had brought the ruana and she had flung it theatrically over her small shoulders.

Qué bonita, qué hermosa, the picture of Ginger Rogers.

John and I had been in Bogotá together. We had escaped from a film festival in Cartagena and gotten on an Avianca flight to Bogotá. An actor who had been at the film festival, George Montgomery, had also been on the flight to Bogotá. He had gone up to the cockpit. From where I was sitting I could see him chatting with the crew, then sliding into the pilot’s seat.

I had nudged John, who was sleeping. “They’re letting George Montgomery fly this plane over the Andes,” I had whispered.

“It beats Cartagena,” John said, and went back to sleep.

I did not that day on Canon get as far as the Rite Aid.

Sometime in June, after she had left UCLA and was in the sixth of what would be fifteen weeks as an inpatient at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center in New York, Quintana told me that her memory not only of UCLA but of her arrival at Rusk was “all mudgy.” She could remember some things about UCLA, yes, as she could not yet remember anything else since before Christmas (she did not for example remember speaking about her father at St. John the Divine, nor, when she first woke at UCLA, did she remember that he had died), but it was still “mudgy.” Later she corrected this to “smudgy,” but she did not need to: I knew exactly what she meant. On the neuro floors at UCLA they had called it “spotty,” as in “her orientation is improving but still spotty.” When I try to reconstruct those weeks at UCLA I recognize the mudginess in my own memory. There are parts of days that seem very clear and parts of days that do not. I clearly remember arguing with a doctor the day they decided to do the tracheostomy. She had by then been intubated for almost a week, the doctor said. UCLA did not leave tubes in for more than a week. I said that she had been intubated for three weeks at Beth Israel in New York. The doctor had looked away. “The rule at Duke was also a week,” he said, as if under the impression that mention of Duke would settle the question. Instead it enraged me: What is Duke to me, I wanted to say but did not. What is Duke to UCLA. Duke is North Carolina. UCLA is California. If I wanted the opinion of somebody in North Carolina I would call somebody in North Carolina.

Her husband is right now on a flight to New York, I said instead. Surely this can wait until he lands.

Not really, the doctor said. Since it’s already on the schedule.

The day they decided to do the tracheostomy was also the day they turned off the EEG.

“Everything’s looking good,” they kept saying. “She’s going to get better sooner once we do the trach. She’s already off the EEG, maybe you didn’t notice that.”