Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

November 22 1963.

Dick McMahon’s footnote to history.

Treat Morrison was in Indonesia the day that roll of toilet paper drifted down over the Keys.

On special assignment at the consulate in Surabaya.

They locked the consulate doors and did not open them for three days.

Treat Morrison’s own footnote to history.

I still believe in history.

Let me amend that.

I still believe in history to the extent that I believe history to be made exclusively and at random by people like Dick McMahon. There are still more people like Dick McMahon around than you might think, most of them old but still doing a little business, keeping a hand in, an oar in the water, the wolf from the door. They can still line up some jeeps in Shreveport, they can still lay hands on some slots in Beaumont, they can still handle the midnight call from the fellow who needs a couple or three hundred Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights. They may not remember all the names they used but they remember the names they did not use. They may have trouble sorting out the details of all they knew but they remember having known it.

They remember they ran some moves.

They remember they had personal knowledge of certain actions.

They remember they knew Carlos Prío, they remember they heard certain theories about his suicide. They remember they knew Johnny Roselli, they remember they heard certain theories about how he turned up in the oil drum in Biscayne Bay. They remember many situations in which certain fellows show up in the middle of the night asking for something and a couple or three days later these same identical fellows turn up in San Pedro Sula or Santo Domingo or Panama right in the goddamn thick of it.

Christ if I had a dollar for every time somebody came to me and said he was thinking about doing a move I’d be a rich man today, Elena McMahon’s father said the day she was going down to where he berthed the Kitty Rex.

For the first two weeks at the house in Sweetwater she conserved energy by not noticing anything. That was how she put it to herself, she was conserving energy, as if attention were a fossil fuel. She drove out to Key Biscayne and let her mind go fallow, absorbing only the bleached flatness of the place, the pale aquamarine water and the gray sky and the drifts of white coral sand and the skeletons of live oak and oleander broken when the storms rolled in. One day when it rained and the wind was blowing she walked across the lowest of the causeways, overcome by a need to feel the water lapping over her sandals. By then she had already shed her clothes, pared down to essentials, concentrated her needs, wrapped up her gabardine jacket and unopened packages of panty hose and dropped them, a tacit farewell to the distractions of the temperate zone, in a Goodwill box on Eighth Street.

There’s some question here what you’re doing, the desk had said when she called to say she was in Miami. Siegel’s been covering for you, but you understand we’ll need to move someone onto this on a through-November basis.

That would be fair, she had said.

She had not yet conserved enough energy to resume thinking on a through-November basis.

At a point late each day she would focus on finding something that her father would eat, something he would not immediately set aside in favor of another drink, and she would go downtown to a place she remembered he liked and ask for containers of black beans or shrimp in garlic sauce she could reheat later.

From the Floridita, she would say when her father looked without interest at his plate.

In Havana, he would say, doubtful.

The one here, she would say. The Floridita on Flagler Street. You used to take me there.

The Floridita your mother and I knew was in Havana, he would say.

Which would lead as if on replay to his telling her again about the night at the Floridita in he believed 1958 with her mother and Carlos Prío and Fidel and one of the Murchisons. The Floridita in Havana, he would specify each time. Havana was the Floridita your mother and I knew, goddamn but we had some fun there, just ask your mother, she’ll tell you.

Which would lead in the same replay mode to her telling him again that her mother was dead. On each retelling he would seem to take it in. Goddamn, he would say. Kitty’s gone. He would make her repeat certain details, as if to fix the flickering fact of it.

She had not known how sick Kitty was, no.

She had not seen Kitty before she died, no.

There had been no funeral, no.

Kitty had been cremated, yes.

Kitty’s last husband was named Ward, yes.

It was true that Ward used to sell pharmaceuticals, yes, but no, she would not describe it as dealing dope and no, she did not think there had been any funny business. In any case Ward was beside the point, which was this: her mother was dead.

Her father’s eyes would go red then, and he would turn away.

Pretty Kitty, he would say as if to himself. Kit-Cat.

Half an hour later he would again complain that he had tried to call Kitty a night or two before and the asshole dope dealer she lived with had refused to put her on the line.

Because he couldn’t, Elena would say again. Because she’s dead.

Sometimes when the telephone rang in the middle of the night she would wake, and hear the front door close and a car engine turning over, her father’s ’72 Cadillac Seville convertible, parked on the spiky grass outside the room in which she slept. The headlights would sweep the ceiling of the room as he backed out onto the street. Most nights she would get up and open a bottle of beer and sit in bed drinking it until she fell asleep again, but one night the beer did not work and she was still awake, standing barefoot in the kitchen watching a local telethon on which a West Palm Beach resident in a sequined dress seemed to be singing gospel, when her father came in at dawn.

What the hell, her father said.

I said to Satan get thee behind me, the woman in the sequined dress was singing on the television screen.

You shouldn’t be driving, Elena said.

Victory today is mine.

Right, I should take out my teeth and go to the nursing home, he said. Jesus Christ, you want to kill me too?

The woman in the sequined dress snapped her mike cord as she segued into “After You’ve Been There Ten Thousand Years,” and Dick McMahon transferred his flickering rage to the television screen. I been there ten thousand years I still won’t want to see you, honey, he shouted at the woman in the sequined dress. Because honey you are worthless, you are worse than worthless, you are trash. By the time he refocused on Elena he had softened, or forgotten. How about a drink, he said.

She got him a drink.

If you have any interest in what I’m doing, he said as she sat down at the table across from him, all I can say is it’s major.

She said nothing. She had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what her father was doing. This had been difficult only when she had to fill out a form that asked for Father’s Occupation. He did deals. Does deals? No. She had usually settled on Investor. If it came up in conversation she would say that her father bought and sold things, leaving open the possibility, in those parts of the country where she had lived until 1982, raw sunbelt cities riding high on land trades, that what he bought and sold was real estate. She had lost her scholarship at the University of Nevada because the administration had changed the basis for granting aid from merit to need and she had recognized that it would be a waste of time to ask her father to fill out a financial report.

Right from the top, he said. Top shelf.