Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

Let me clarify something.

When I said that Elena McMahon and Treat Morrison were equally remote I was shortcutting, jumping ahead to the core dislocation in the personality, overlooking the clearly different ways in which each had learned to deal with that dislocation.

Elena’s apparently impenetrable performances in the various roles assigned her were achieved (I see now) only with considerable effort and at considerable cost. All that reinvention, all those fast walks and clean starts, all that had cost something. It had cost something to grow up watching her father come and go and do his deals without ever noticing what it was he dealt. Father’s Occupation: Investor. It had cost something to talk to Melissa Simon on Westlake Career Day when all her attention was focused on the beam. You don’t feel anything, Arnie Stine said. The beam doesn’t feel like anything. Just between us nobody who hasn’t been on that table has any idea what the beam feels like, the technician said. It had cost something to remember the Fourth of July her father’s friend brought fireworks up from the border and to confine the picture to the fat little sizzler rockets she had not liked and the sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight.

To limit what she heard to half a margarita and I’m already flying, who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

To keep the name of her father’s friend just outside the frame of what she remembered.

Of course the name of her father’s friend was Max Epperson.

You knew it was.

Treat Morrison would not have needed to forget that detail.

Treat Morrison had built an entire career on remembering the details that might turn out to be wild cards, using them, playing them, sensing the opening and pressing the advantage. Unlike Elena, he had mastered his role, internalized it, perfected the performance until it betrayed no hint of the total disinterest at its core. He knew how to talk and he knew how to listen. He was widely assumed because he refused the use of translators to have a gift for languages, but in fact he communicated with nothing more than a kind of improvisational pidgin and very attentive listening. He could listen attentively in several languages, not excluding his own. Treat Morrison could listen attentively to a discussion in Tagalog about trade relations between the United States and Asia, and Treat Morrison could listen with the same exact calibration of attentiveness to a Houston bartender explaining how when the oil boom went belly up he zeroed in on bartending as an entrée to the private service sector. Once on the shuttle I sat across the aisle from Treat Morrison and watched him spend the entire flight, National to La Guardia, listening attentively to the stratagems employed by his seatmate in the course of commuting between his home in New Jersey and his office in Santa Ana.

“You have the Delta through Salt Lake,” I heard Treat Morrison prompt when the conversation showed signs of lagging.

“Actually I prefer the American through Dallas,” the seatmate said, confidence restored in the intrinsic interest of his subject.

“The American out of Newark.”

“Out of Newark, sure, except Newark has the short runways, so when the weather goes, scratch Newark.”

During the ride in from La Guardia I had asked Treat Morrison how he happened to have the Delta through Salt Lake at his fingertips.

“He’d already mentioned it,” Treat Morrison said. “Before we were off the ground at National. He took it last week and hit some pretty hairy turbulence over the Wasatch Range. I listen. That’s my business. Listening. That’s the difference between me and the Harvard guys. The Harvard guys don’t listen.”

I had heard before about “the Harvard guys,” also about “the guys who know how not to rattle their teacups” and “the guys with the killer serves and not too much else.” This was a vein in Treat Morrison that would surface only when exhaustion or a drink or two had lowered his guard, and remained the only visible suggestion of whatever it had meant to him to come out of the West and confront the established world.

This was another area he was not inclined to explore.

“What the hell, the last I heard this was still one country,” was what he said when I tried to pursue it. “Unless you people in the media have new information to the contrary.”

He regarded me in truculent silence for a full thirty seconds, then seemed to remember that truculent silence was not his most productive tack.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “There are two kinds of people who end up in the State Department. And believe me, I am by no means talking about where somebody came from, I’m talking about what kind of person he is.”

He hesitated.

A quick glance to assess my reaction, then the amendment: “And of course I mean what kind of person he is or she is. Male, female, space alien, whatever. I don’t want to read some PC crap about myself in the goddamn New York Times. Okay. State. Two kinds of individuals end up there. There’s the kind of individual who goes from post to post getting the place cards right and sending out the reminder cards on time. And there’s the other kind. I’m one of the other kind.”

I asked what kind that was.

“Crisis junkies,” he said. “I’m in this for the buzz, take it or leave it.”

This was Treat Morrison when his performance went off. When it was on he was flawless, talking as attentively as he listened, rendering opinions, offering advice, even volunteering surprisingly candid analyses of his own modus operandi. “There’s a trick to inserting yourself in a certain kind of situation,” he said when I once remarked on his ability to move from end game to end game without becoming inconveniently identified with any of them. “You can’t go all the way with it. You have to go back and write the report or whatever, give the briefings, then move on. You go in, you pull their irons out of the fire, you get a free period, maybe six months, no more, during which you’re allowed to lecture everybody who isn’t up to speed on this one little problem on the frivolity of whatever other damn thing they’ve been doing. After that you move past it. You know who the unreported casualties of Vietnam were? Reporters and policy guys who didn’t move past it.”

That was another difference between Treat Morrison and Elena.

Elena inserted herself in a certain kind of situation and went all the way with it.

Elena failed to move past it.

Which is why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the scene, Elena had already been caught in the pipeline, swept into the conduits.

Into the game.

Into the plot.

Into the setup.

Into whatever you wanted to call it.

One of the many questions that several teams of congressional investigators and Rand Corporation analysts would eventually fail to resolve was why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the island, almost six weeks after she had learned from the Miami Herald that her father was dead and more than a month after she had learned from the FBI that the passport she was using had a trick built into it, Elena McMahon was still there.

She could have left.

Just gone to the airport and gotten on a plane (there were still scheduled flights, not as many as there had been but the airport was open) and left the place.

She would have known since the initial FBI interview that the passport with the trick built into it would not be valid for reentry into the United States, but that in itself might well have seemed an argument to get off this island, go somewhere else, go anywhere else.