Joan Didion - Democracy

“You liked it there,” Inez said. The beer had relaxed her and she was beginning to fall asleep, holding Jack Lovett’s hand. “You loved it. Didn’t you.”

“Some days were better than others, I guess.” Jack Lovett let go of Inez’s hand and laid his jacket over her bare legs. “Oh sure,” he said then. “It was kind of the place to be.”

Occasionally during that night and day Dick Ziegler came to the hospital, but on the whole he seemed relieved to leave the details of the watch to Inez. “Janet doesn’t even know we’re here,” Dick Ziegler said each time he came to the hospital.

“I’m not here for Janet,” Inez said finally, but Dick Ziegler ignored her.

“Doesn’t even know we’re here,” he repeated.

Quite often during that night and day Billy Dillon came to the hospital. “Naturally you’re overwrought,” Billy Dillon said each time he came to the hospital. “Which is why I’m not taking this seriously. Ask me what I think about what Inez is doing, I’d say no comment. She’s overwrought.”

“Listen,” Billy Dillon said the last time he came to the hospital. “We’re picking up incoming on the King Crab flank. Harry takes the Warner’s plane to Seattle to pick up Jessie for the funeral, Jessie informs Harry she doesn’t go to funerals.”

Inez had looked at Billy Dillon.

“Well?” Billy Dillon said.

“Well what?”

“What should I tell Harry?”

“Tell him he should have advanced it better,” Inez Victor said.

I SHOULD tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark; she considered it a consumer decision. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch. She had been subjected repeatedly to the usual tests, and each battery showed her to be anxious, highly motivated, more, intelligent than Adlai, and not given to falsification. Perhaps because she lacked the bent for falsification she did not have a notable sense of humor. What she did have was a certain incandescent inscrutability, a kind of luminous gravity, and it was always startling to hear her dismiss someone, in that grave low voice that thrilled Inez as sharply when Jessie was eighteen as it had when Jessie was two, as “an asshole.” “You asshole” was what Jessie called Adlai, the night he and Harry Victor arrived in Seattle to pick her up for Janet’s funeral and Jessie declined to go. Jessie did agree to have dinner with them, while the Warner Communications G-2 was being refueled, but dinner had gone badly.

“The crux of it is finding a way to transfer anti-war sentiment to a multiple-issue program,” Adlai had said at dinner. He was telling Harry Victor about an article he proposed to write for the op-ed page of the New York Times . “It’s something we’ve been tossing back and forth in Cambridge.”

“Interesting,” Harry Victor said. “Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?”

“I think he shouldn’t say ‘Cambridge,’ ” Jessie said.

“Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there,” Adlai said, “but Cambridge happens to be where I go to school.”

“Maybe so,” Jessie said, “but you don’t happen to go to Harvard.”

“OK, guys. You both fouled.” Harry Victor turned to Adlai. “I could sound somebody out at the Times . If you’re serious.”

“I’m serious. It’s time. Bring my generation into the dialogue, if you see my point.”

“You asshole,” Jessie said.

“Well,” Harry Victor said after Adlai had left the table. “How are things otherwise?”

“I’m ready to leave.”

“You said you weren’t going. You have a principle. You don’t go to funerals. This is a new principle on me, but never mind, you made your case. I accept it. As a principle.”

“I don’t mean leave for Janet’s funeral. I mean actually leave. Period. This place. Seattle.”

“You haven’t finished the program.”

“The program,” Jessie said, “is for assholes.”

“Just a minute,” Harry said.

“I did the detox, I’m clean, I don’t see the point.”

“What do you mean you did the detox, the game plan here wasn’t detox, it was methadone.”

“I don’t like methadone.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Jessie had said patiently, “it doesn’t make me feel good.”

“It makes you feel bad?”

“It doesn’t make me feel bad, no.” Jessie had given this question her full attention. “It just doesn’t make me feel good.”

There had been a silence.

“What is it you want to do exactly?” Harry had said then.

“I want—” Jessie was studying a piece of bread that she seemed to have rolled into a ball. “To get on with my regular life. Make some headway, you know?”

“That’s fine. Good news. Admirable.”

“Get into my career.”

“Which is what exactly?”

Jessie was breaking the ball of bread into little pellets.

“Don’t misread me, Jessie. This is all admirable. My only point is that you need a program.” Harry Victor found himself warming to the idea of the projected program. “A plan. Two plans, actually. Which dove tail. A long-range plan and a short-term plan. What’s your long-range plan?”

“I’m not running for Congress,” Jessie said. “If that’s what you mean.”

There seemed to Harry so plaintive a note in this that he let it go. “Well then. All right. How about your immediate plan?”

Jessie picked up another piece of bread.

Something in Harry Victor snapped. He had been trying for the past hour to avoid any contemplation of why Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house the night before with Jack Lovett. Billy Dillon had told him. “You have to think she’s overwrought,” Billy Dillon had said. “I have to think she’s got loony timing,” Harry Victor had said. Early on in this dinner he had tried out the overwrought angle on Jessie and Adlai. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mother were a little overwrought,” he had said. Adlai had put down the menu and said that he wanted a shrimp cocktail and the New York stripper, medium bloody, sour cream and chives on the spud. Jessie had put down the menu and stared at him, he imagined fishily, from under the straw tennis visor she had worn to dinner.

Jessie had stared at him fishily from under her tennis visor and Adlai had wanted the New York stripper medium bloody and Inez had walked out of Dwight Christian’s house with Jack Lovett and now Jessie was tearing her bread into little chicken-shit pellets.

“Could you do me a favor? Jessie? Could you either eat the bread or leave it alone?”

Jessie had put her hands in her lap.

“I’m still kind of working on the immediate plan part,” she said after a while. “Actually.”

In fact Jessie Victor did have an immediate plan that Thursday evening in Seattle, the same plan she had mentioned in its less immediate form to Inez at Christmas, the plan Inez had selectively neglected to mention when she described her visit with Jessie to Harry and Adlai: the plan, if the convergence of yearning and rumor and isolation on which Jessie was operating in Seattle could be called a plan, to get a job in Vietnam.

Inez had not mentioned this plan to Harry because she did not believe it within the range of the possible.

Jessie did not mention this plan to Harry because she did not believe it to be the kind of plan that Harry would understand.