Joan Didion - Democracy

“Tell Jessie we’ve got a new Arabian at the ranch,” Dwight Christian said. “Pereira blue mare, dynamite.”

“—Two, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing on Janet and Dick’s lanai with a Magnum.”

“Your father wasn’t seen on the lanai,” Dick Ziegler said. “He was seen leaving the house. Let’s keep our facts straight.”

“Dick,” Inez said. “He said he was on the lanai. He said he fired the Magnum. You know that.”

There was a silence.

“You should get Inez to show you the ranch, Billy.” Ruthie Christian did not look up. “Ask Millie to pack you a lunch, make a day of it.”

“Number three,” Inez said, “although less crucial, Inez is still just a little unclear about what Daddy was doing at the YMCA.”

“If you drove around by the windward side you could see Dick’s new project,” Ruthie Christian said. “Sea Ranch? Sea Mountain? Whatever he calls it.”

“He calls it Sea Meadow,” Dwight Christian said. “Which suggests its drawback.”

“Let’s not get started on that,” Dick Ziegler said.

“Goddamn swamp, as it stands.”

“So was downtown Honolulu, Dwight. As it stood.”

“Sea Meadow. I call that real truth-in-labeling. Good grazing for shrimp.”

“Prime acreage, Dwight. As you know.”

“Prime swamp. Excuse me. Sacred prime swamp. Turns out Dick’s bought himself an old kahuna burial ground. Strictly kapu to developers.”

“ Kapu my ass. Kapu only after you started playing footsie with Wendell Omura.”

“Speaking of Wendell Omura,” Inez said.

“If you went around the windward side you could also stop at Lanikai.” Ruthie Christian seemed oblivious, intent on her cracker chrysanthemum. “Give Billy a taste of how we really live down here.”

“I think he’s getting one now,” Inez said.

Dwight Christian extracted the lemon peel from his martini and studied it.

Dick Ziegler gazed at the ceiling.

“Let’s start by stipulating that Daddy was on the lanai,” Inez said.

“Inez,” Dwight Christian said. “I have thirty-two lawyers on salary. In house. If I wanted to hear somebody talk like a lawyer, I could call one up, ask him over. Give him a drink. Speaking of which—”

Dwight Christian held out his glass.

“Dwight’s point as I see it is this,” Ruthie Christian said. She filled Dwight Christian’s glass from the shaker on the table, raised it to her lips and made a moue of distaste. “Why air family linen?”

“Exactly,” Dwight Christian said. “Why accentuate the goddamn negative?”

“ Kapu my ass,” Dick Ziegler said.

Since Billy Dillon’s filter tends to the comic his memory may be broad. What he said some months later about this first evening in Honolulu was that it had given him a “new angle” on the crisis-management techniques of the American business class. “They do it with crackers,” he said. “Old Occidental trick. All the sharks know it.” In his original account of that evening and of the four days that followed Billy Dillon failed to mention Jack Lovett, which was his own trick.

I ALSO have Inez’s account.

Inez’s account does not exactly conflict with Billy Dillon’s account but neither does it exactly coincide. Inez’s version of that first evening in Honolulu has less to do with those members of her family who were present than with those who were notably not.

Less to do with Dick Ziegler, say, than with Janet.

Less to do with Dwight and Ruthie Christian than with Paul Christian, and even Carol.

In Inez’s version for example she at least got it straight about Paul Christian’s room at the YMCA.

The room at the YMCA should have been an early warning, even Dick Ziegler and Dwight Christian could agree on that.

Surely one of them had told Inez before about her father’s room at the YMCA.

His famous single room at the Y.

Paul Christian had taken this room when he came back from Tunis. He had never to anyone’s knowledge spent an actual night there but he frequently mentioned it. “Back to my single room at the Y,” he would say as he left the dinner table at Dwight and Ruthie’s or at Dick and Janet’s or at one or another house in Honolulu, and at least one or two of the other guests would rise, predictably, with urgent offers: a gate cottage here, a separate entrance there, the beach shack, the children’s wing, absurd to leave it empty. Open the place up, give it some use. Doing us the favor, really. By way of assent Paul Christian would shrug and turn up his palms. “I’m afraid everyone knows my position,” he would murmur, yielding.

Paul Christian had spoken often that year of his “position.”

Surely Inez had heard her father speak of his position.

He conceived his position as “down,” or “on the bottom,” the passive victim of fortune’s turn and his family’s self-absorption (“Dwight’s on top now, he can’t appreciate my position,” he said to a number of people, including Dick Ziegler), and, some months before, he had obtained the use of a house so situated — within sight both of Janet and Dick’s house on Kahala Avenue and of the golf course on which Dwight Christian played every morning at dawn — as to exactly satisfy this conception.

“The irony is that I can watch Dwight teeing off while I’m making my instant coffee,” he would sometimes say.

“The irony is that I can see Janet giving orders to her gardeners while I’m eating my little lunch of canned tuna,” he would say at other times.

It was a location that ideally suited the prolonged mood of self-reflection in which Paul Christian arrived back from Tunis, and, during January and February, he had seemed to find less and less reason to leave the borrowed house. He had told several people that he was writing his autobiography. He had told others that he was gathering together certain papers that would constitute an indictment of the family’s history in the islands, what he called “the goods on the Christians, let the chips fall where they may.” He had declined invitations from those very hostesses (widows, divorcees, women from San Francisco who leased houses on Diamond Head and sat out behind them in white gauze caftans) at whose tables he was considered a vital ornament.

“I’m in no position to reciprocate,” he would say if pressed, and at least one woman to whom he said this had told Ruthie Christian that Paul had made her feel ashamed, as if her very invitation had been presumptuous, an attempt to exploit the glamour of an impoverished noble. He had declined the dinner dance that Dwight and Ruthie Christian gave every February on the eve of the Hawaiian Open. He had declined at least two invitations that came complete with plane tickets (the first to a houseparty in Pebble Beach during the Crosby Pro-Am, the second to a masked ball at a new resort south of Acapulco), explaining that his sense of propriety would not allow him to accept first-class plane tickets when his position was such that he was reduced to eating canned tuna.

“Frankly, Daddy, everybody’s a little puzzled by this ‘canned tuna’ business,” Janet had apparently said one day in February.

“I’m sure I don’t know why. Since ‘everybody’ isn’t reduced to eating it.”

“But I mean neither are you. Dwight says—”

“I’m sure it must be embarrassing for Dwight.”

Janet had tried another approach.

“Daddy, maybe it’s the ‘canned’ part. I mean what other kind of tuna is there?”

“Fresh. As you know. But that’s not the point, is it.”

“What is the point?”

“I’d rather you and Dwight didn’t discuss my affairs, frankly. I’m surprised.”