Joan Didion - Democracy

They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the edge of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence, water as the end to which even the island will eventually come, and a certain restlessness prevails. Men like Dwight Christian watch the steam rise off their swimming pools and place more frequent calls to project sites in Taipei, Penang, Jedda. Women like Ruthie Christian take their furs out of storage, furs handed down from mother to daughter virtually unworn, the guard hairs still intact, and imagine trips to the mainland. It is during these days and nights when sheets of rain obscure the horizon and the surf rises on the north shore that the utter isolation of the place seems most profound, and it was on such a night, in 1952, that Jack Lovett first saw Inez Christian, and discerned in the grain of her predictable longings and adolescent vanities an eccentricity, a secretiveness, an emotional solitude to match his own. I see now.

I learned some of this from him.

January 1, 1952.

Intermission at the ballet, one of those third-string touring companies that afford the women and children and dutiful providers of small cities an annual look at “Afternoon of a Faun” and the Grand Pas de Deux from the “Nutcracker”; an occasion, a benefit, a reason to dress up after the general fretfulness of the season and the specific lassitude of the holiday and stand outside beneath an improvised canopy drinking champagne from paper cups. Subdued greetings. Attenuated attention. Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark glasses (wearing dark glasses because, after four hours of sleep, a fight with Janet, and telephone calls from Carol Christian in San Francisco and Paul Christian in Suva, she had spent most of the day crying in her room: one last throe of her adolescence), pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One glass won’t hurt you, Inez, it’s your birthday. Inez’s birthday. Inez is seventeen. Inez’s evening, really. Inez is our balletomane.

“Why are you wearing sunglasses,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian, startled, touched her glasses as if to remove them and then, looking at Jack Lovett, brushed her hair back instead, loosening the pins that held the gardenia.

Inez Christian smiled.

The gardenia fell to the wet grass.

“I used to know all the generals at Schofield,” Cissy Christian said. “Great fun out there. Then.”

“I’m sure.” Jack Lovett did not take his eyes from Inez.

“Great polo players, some of them,” Cissy Christian said. “I don’t suppose you get much chance to play.”

“I don’t play,” Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian closed her eyes.

Carla Lovett drained her paper cup and crushed it in her hand.

“Inez is seventeen,” Dwight Christian repeated.

“I think I want a real drink,” Carla Lovett said.

During the days which immediately followed this meeting the image of Inez Christian was never entirely absent from Jack Lovett’s mind, less a conscious presence than a shadow on the scan, an undertone. He would think of Inez Christian when he was just waking, or just going to sleep. He would summon up Inez Christian during lulls in the waning argument he and Carla Lovett were conducting that winter over when or how or why she would leave him. His interest in Inez was not, as he saw it, initially sexual: even at this most listless stage of his marriage he remained compelled by Carla, by Carla’s very lethargy, and could still be actively aroused by watching her brush out her hair or pull on a shirt or kick off the huaraches she wore instead of slippers.

What Jack Lovett believed he saw in Inez Christian was something else. The picture he had was of Inez listening to something he was telling her, listening gravely, and then giving him her hand. In this picture she was wearing the gardenia in her hair and the white dress she had worn to the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her, and the two of them were alone. In this picture the two of them were in fact the only people on earth.

“Pretty goddamn romantic.”

As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.

He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.

He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.

It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Saturday night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.

They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.

The boy’s name was Bobby Strudler.

Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.

The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler’s father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.

“The ‘correct thing,’ ” Jack Lovett said. “You’re a regular Miss Manners.”

Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler’s father could arrange the tow.

She herself could arrange the tow.

In daylight.

Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett’s car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.

“I don’t care about your wife,” she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. “So it’s up to you. More or less.”

She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she said. “In point of fact.”

In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.

“Will you remember doing this,” Jack Lovett said.