Joan Didion - Democracy

I see Jessie’s point of view here. Harry would have talked specifics. Harry would have asked Jessie if she had read a newspaper lately. Harry would not have understood that specifics made no difference to Jessie. Getting a job in Vietnam seemed to Jessie a first step that had actually presented itself, a chance to put herself at last in opportunity’s way, and because she believed that whatever went on there was only politics and that politics was for assholes she would have remained undeflected, that March night in 1975, the same night as it happened that the American evacuation of Da Nang deteriorated into uncontrolled rioting, by anything she might have heard or seen or read in a newspaper.

If in fact Jessie ever read a newspaper.

Which seemed to both Inez and Harry Victor a doubtful proposition.

When word reached them in Honolulu on the following Sunday night, Easter Sunday night 1975, the night before Janet’s funeral, that three hours after the Warner Communications G-2 left Seattle, bringing Harry and Adlai Victor down to Honolulu, Jessie had walked out of the clinic that specialized in the treatment of adolescent chemical dependency and talked her way onto a C-5A transport that landed seventeen-and-one-half hours later (refueling twice in flight) at Tan Son Nhut, Saigon. “Maybe she heard she could score there,” Adlai said, and Inez slapped him.

SHE did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park West) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. This press card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the “reassessments” and the “calculated gambles” and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver’s license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver’s license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.

By the time Jack Lovett arrived at the house on Manoa Road that Easter Sunday night with the story about the American girl who appeared to be Jessie, the blond American girl who had left a New York driver’s license at Tan Son Nhut in lieu of a visa, Inez and Harry Victor were speaking to each other only in the presence of other people.

They had been civil at the required meals but avoided the optional.

They had slept in the same room but not the same bed.

“You’re overwrought,” Harry had said on Friday night. “You’re under a strain.”

“Actually I’m not in the least overwrought,” Inez had said. “I’m sad. Sad is different from overwrought.”

“Why not just have another drink,” Harry had said. “For a change.”

By Saturday morning the argument was smoldering one more time on the remote steppes of the 1972 campaign. By Saturday evening it had jumped the break and was burning uncontained. “Do you know what I particularly couldn’t stand,” Inez had said. “I particularly couldn’t stand it at Miami when you said you were the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago.”

“I’m amazed you were sober enough to notice. At Miami.”

“I’d drop that theme if I were you. I think you’ve gotten about all the mileage you’re going to get out of that.”

“Out of what?”

“Harry Victor’s Burden. I was sober enough to notice you didn’t start speaking for this generation until after the second caucus. You were only the voice of a generation that had taken fire on the battlefields of Vietnam and Chicago after you knew you didn’t have the numbers. In addition to which. Moreover. Actually that was never your generation. Actually you were older.”

There had been a silence.

“Let me take a leap forward here,” Harry had said. “Speaking of ‘older.’ ”

Inez had waited.

“I don’t think you chose a particularly appropriate way to observe your sister’s death. Maybe I’m wrong.”

Inez had looked out the window for a long time before she spoke. “Add it up, you and I didn’t have such a bad time,” she said finally. “Net.”

“I’m supposed to notice the past tense. Is that it?”

Inez did not turn from the window. It was dark. She had lived in the north so long that she always forgot how fast the light went. She had gone late that afternoon to pick up the dress in which Dick Ziegler wanted Janet buried and the light had gone while she was still on Janet’s beach. “You pick a dress,” Dick Ziegler had said. “You go. I can’t look in her closet.” After Inez found a dress she had sat on Janet’s bed and called Jack Lovett on Janet’s antique telephone. Jack Lovett had told her to wait on Janet’s beach. “Listen,” Inez had said when she saw him. “That pink dress she wore in Jakarta is in her closet. She has fourteen pink dresses. I counted them. Fourteen.” She had been talking through tears. “Fourteen pink dresses all hanging next to each other. Didn’t anybody ever tell her? She didn’t look good in pink?” There on the beach with Jack Lovett in the last light of the day Inez had cried for the first time that week, but back in the house on Manoa Road with Harry she had felt herself sealed off again, her damage control mechanism still intact.

“I think I deserve a little better than a change of tense,” Harry said.

“Don’t dramatize,” Inez said.

Or she did not.

She had either said “Don’t dramatize” to Harry that Saturday evening or she had said “I love him” to Harry that Saturday evening. It seemed more likely that she had said “Don’t dramatize” but she had wanted to say “I love him” and she did not remember which. She did remember that the actual words “Jack Lovett” remained unsaid by either of them until Sunday night.

“Your friend Lovett’s downstairs,” Harry had said then.

“Jack,” Inez said, but Harry had left the room.

Jack Lovett repeated the details of the story about the American girl at Tan Son Nhut twice, once for Inez and Harry and Billy Dillon and again when Dwight Christian and Adlai came in. The details sounded even less probable in the second telling. The C-5A, the press card. The tennis visor. The bus to Cholon.

“I see,” Harry kept saying. “Yes.”

Jack Lovett had first heard Jessie’s name that Sunday morning from one of the people to whom he regularly talked on the flight line at Tan Son Nhut. It had taken five further calls and the rest of the day to locate the New York driver’s license that had been left at immigration in lieu of a visa.

“I see,” Harry said. “Yes. Then you haven’t actually seen this license.”

“How could I have seen the license, Harry? The license is in Saigon.”

Inez watched Jack Lovett unfold an envelope covered with scratched notes. Lovett. Jack. Your friend Lovett.