Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

She said nothing.

This one turns out the way it’s supposed to turn out, he said, I’ll be in a position to deal myself out, fold my hand, take the Kitty Rex down past Largo and stay there. Some life. Catching fish and bumming around the shallows. Not my original idea of a good time but it beats sitting here getting old.

Who exactly is running this one, she said carefully.

What do you care, he said, suddenly wary. What did you ever care who was running any of them.

I mean, she said, how did whoever is running this one happen to decide to work through you.

Why wouldn’t they work through me, he said. I still got my teeth. I’m not in the nursing home yet. No thanks to you.

Dick McMahon had closed his eyes, truculent, and had not woken until she took the glass from his hand and put a cotton blanket over his legs.

What do you hear from your mother, he had said then.

That was the morning, June 15, a Friday, when she should have known it was time to cut and run.

She knew how to cut and run.

She had done it often enough.

Cut and run, cut her losses, just walked away.

She had just walked away from her mother for example.

See where it got her.

She had flown to Laguna as soon as she got the call but there had been no funeral. Her connection into John Wayne was delayed and by the time she arrived in the cold May twilight her mother had already been cremated. You know how Kitty felt about funerals, Ward said repeatedly. Actually I never heard her mention funerals, Elena said finally, thinking only to hear more about what her mother had said or thought, but Ward had looked at her as if wounded. She was welcome, he said, to do what she wanted with the cremains, the remains, the ashes or whatever, the cremains was what they called them, but in case she had nothing specific in mind he had already arranged with the Neptune Society. You know how Kitty felt about open ocean, he said. Open ocean was something else Elena did not recall her mother mentioning. So if it’s all the same to you, Ward said, visibly relieved by her silence, I’ll go ahead with the arrangements as planned.

She found herself wondering how short a time she could reasonably stay.

There would be nothing out of John Wayne but she could get a redeye out of LAX.

Straight shot up the 405.

Ward’s daughter Belinda was in the bedroom, packing what she called the belongings. The belongings would go to the hospice thrift shop, Belinda said, but she knew that Kitty would want Elena to take what she wanted. Elena opened a drawer, aware of Belinda watching her.

Kitty never got tired of mentioning you, Belinda said. I’d be over here dealing with the Medicare forms or some other little detail and she’d find a way to mention you. It might be you’d just called from wherever.

The drawer seemed to be filled with turbans, snoods, shapeless head coverings of a kind Elena could not associate with her mother.

Or, Belinda said, it might be that you hadn’t. I got her those for the chemo.

Elena closed the drawer.

Moved by the dim wish to preserve something of her mother from consignment to the hospice thrift shop she tried to remember objects in which her mother had set special stock, but in the end took only an ivory bracelet she remembered her mother wearing and a creased snapshot, retrieved from a carton grease-penciled OUT, of her mother and father seated in folding metal lawn chairs on either side of a portable barbecue outside the house in Las Vegas. Before she left she stood in the kitchen watching Ward demonstrate his ability to microwave one of the several dozen individual casseroles stacked in the freezer. Your mother did those just before she went down, Belinda said, raising her voice over Jeopardy. Kitty would have aced that, Ward said when a contestant on-screen missed a question in the Famous Travelers category. See what he does, Belinda said as if Ward could not hear. He keeps working in Kitty’s name, same way Kitty used to work in yours. Two hours later Elena had been at LAX, trying to get cash from an ATM and unable to remember either her bank code or her mother’s maiden name.

It might be you’d just called from wherever.

In the deep nowhere safety of the United lounge she drank two glasses of water and tried to remember her calling card number.

Or it might be that you hadn’t.

Thirty-six hours after that she had been on the tarmac at Newark with the agent saying where’s the dog, we don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit.

She had cut and run from that too.

No more schedules, no more confetti, no more balloons floating free.

She had walked away from that the way she had walked away from the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She did not think Wynn, she thought the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Tile floors, white walls, tennis lunches on Sunday afternoons.

Men with even tans and recent manicures, women with killer serves and bodies minutely tuned against stretch marks; always an actor or two or three, often a player just off the circuit. The beauty part is, the Justice Department still gets its same take, Wynn would be saying on the telephone, and then, his hand over the receiver, Tell whoever you got in the kitchen it’s time to lay on the lunch. Nothing about those Sunday afternoons would have changed except this: Wynn’s office, not Elena, would now call the caterer who laid on the lunch.

The big Stellas would still flank the door.

Wynn would still wake at night when the tide reached ebb and the sea went silent.

Goddamn what’s the matter out there.

Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda, blue so intense you could drown in it.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

What exactly did you have in Malibu you don’t have now, she had asked Catherine, and Catherine had walked right into it, Catherine had never even seen it coming. You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach, Catherine said. Or the Jacuzzi. Or the pool.

Anything else, she had asked Catherine, her voice neutral.

The tennis court.

Is that all.

The three cars, Catherine said after a silence. We had three cars.

A Jacuzzi, she had said to Catherine. A pool. A tennis court. Three cars. Is that your idea of a real life?

Catherine, humiliated, outmaneuvered, had slammed down the phone.

Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda.

An equally indefensible idea of a real life.

She had been thinking that over when Catherine called back.

I had my father thank you very much.

She was even about to just walk away from Catherine.

She knew she was. She knew the signs. She was losing focus on Catherine. She was losing momentum on Catherine. If she could even consider walking away from Catherine she could certainly walk away from this house in Sweetwater. That she did not was the beginning of the story as some people in Miami came to see it.

“I have frequently stated that I did not intend to set down either autobiographical notes of any kind or any version of events as I have witnessed and affected them. It has been my firm and long-held conviction that events, for better or for worse, speak for themselves, work as it were toward their own ends. After reviewing published accounts of certain of these events, however, I find my own role in them to have been misrepresented. Therefore, on this August Sunday morning, with a tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia, I have determined to set forth as concisely as possible, and in as much detail as is consistent with national security, certain actions I took in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.”