Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

I mean it’s not going to bring her back.

So Treat Morrison told me.

The very last time we spoke.

Treat Morrison died four years later, at age fifty-nine, a cerebral hemorrhage on a ferry from Larnaca to Beirut. When I heard this I remembered a piece by J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times about a conference, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, at which eight members of the Kennedy administration gathered at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys to reassess the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The hotel was pink.

There was a winter storm off the Caribbean.

Theodore Sorensen swam with the dolphins. Robert McNamara expressed surprise that CINCSAC had sent out the DEFCON 2 alert instructions uncoded, in the clear, so that the Soviets would pick them up. Meetings were scheduled to leave afternoon hours for tennis doubles. Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger ate together by candlelight in the main dining room. Communications were received from Maxwell Taylor and Dean Rusk, too ill to attend.

When I read this piece I imagined the storm continuing.

The power failing, the tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm.

Imperfect memories.

Time yet for a hundred indecisions.

A hundred visions and revisions.

When Treat Morrison died it occurred to me that I would like to have seen just such a reassessment of what he might have called (did in fact call) certain actions taken in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

Imperfect memories of the certain incident that should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

By any quantitative measurement.

I would like to have seen such a reassessment take place at the same hotel in the Keys, the same weather, the same mangroves clattering, the same dolphins and the same tennis doubles, the same possibilities. I would like to have seen them all gathered there, old men in the tropics, old men in lime-colored pants and polo shirts and golf hats, old men at a pink hotel in a storm.

Of course Treat Morrison would have been there.

And when he went upstairs and opened the door to his room Elena McMahon would have been there.

Sitting on the balcony in her nightgown.

Watching the storm on the water.

And if you are about to say that if Elena McMahon was upstairs in this pink hotel there would have been no reason for the conference, no incident, no subject, no reason at all: Just file and forget.

As Mark Berquist would say.

Because of course Elena would have been there.

I want those two to have been together all their lives.

23 January 1996

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking . Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live , was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.