Joan Didion - Democracy

Paul Christian was found incompetent to stand trial.

Adlai’s vigil for the liberation of Saigon was edited into a vigil for “peace in Asia” and commended by the governor of Massachusetts as an instance of responsible campus expression, another situation managed by Billy Dillon.

The combat-loaded C-141 onto which Jack Lovett finally shoved Jessie (literally shoved, put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her through the hatch, because somewhere between Gate One and the loading ramp at Tan Son Nhut that evening Jessie realized that the flight Jack Lovett had told her they were meeting was her own, and tried to bolt) landed without incident at Agana, Guam, as did the commercial 747 on which Jessie sulked from Agana to Los Angeles.

Harry Victor met Jessie in customs.

He and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s.

Inez knew that Harry and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s because they called her in Hong Kong from their table, the front banquette inside the door. Jessie said that Jack Lovett had tricked her into going with him to Tan Son Nhut by saying that after he met this one flight they would go see the John Wayne movie playing at the Eden. Jessie said that she had not wanted to see the John Wayne movie in the first place but B.J. had gone back to the DAO after dinner which left nothing to do but see the John Wayne movie or sit there alone getting schitzy.

Jessie said that when she saw what was going down she asked Jack Lovett why she had to go on this flight and Jack Lovett had been rude.

Because I just shelled out a million piastres so you could, the fucker had said, and pushed her.

Hard.

She still had a bruise on her arm.

Forty-eight hours later.

“Tell the fucker I owe him a million piastres,” Harry said when he came on the phone.

According to Inez Jessie landed in Los Angeles on the fifteenth of April.

According to Inez it was the twenty-eighth when she found she could no longer call Saigon; the twenty-ninth when American Service Radio in Saigon played “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” twice, played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” more times than Inez had counted, and stopped transmitting; and the first of May when Jack Lovett called her from Subic Bay and told her to meet him in Manila.

At one point I tried to work out a chronology for what Inez remembered of this period, and made the chart that still hangs on my office wall. The accuracy of this chart is problematic, not only because Inez kept no record of events as they happened but also because of the date line.

For example I have no idea whether Inez meant that the day Jessie landed in Los Angeles was the fifteenth in Los Angeles or the fifteenth in Hong Kong.

In either case the fifteenth seems doubtful, because Jack Lovett had been with Jessie in Saigon forty-eight hours before, promising her a John Wayne movie and bruising her arm, and many people believe Jack Lovett to have been in Phnom Penh for a period of some days (more than one day but fewer than five) between the time the American embassy closed there on the twelfth and the time the Khmer Rouge entered the city on the seventeenth. The report placing Jack Lovett in Phnom Penh after the embassy closed was one of the things that caused the speculation later, and eventually the investigation.

WHEN novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact. Examine the picture. Find the beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet.

Context clues.

The reason why.

I have been examining this picture for some years now and still lack the reason why Inez Victor finally agreed to talk about what she “believed” had happened (“I believe we were in Jakarta,” Inez would say, or “let’s say it was May,” as if even the most straightforward details of place and date were intrinsically unknowable, open to various readings) during the spring and summer of 1975.

At first she did not agree.

At first I talked to Billy Dillon and to Harry Victor and to Dwight Christian and even briefly to Jessie and to Adlai and to Dick Ziegler, each of whom, as I have suggested, had at least a limited stake in his or her own version of events, but Inez remained inaccessible. In the first place the very fact of where she and Jack Lovett seemed to be ruled out any pretense of casual access. I could call Dwight Christian and say that I just happened to be in Honolulu, but I could not call Inez and say that I just happened to be in Kuala Lumpur. No one “happens to be” in Kuala Lumpur, no one “passes through” en route somewhere else: Kuala Lumpur is en route nowhere, and for me to see Inez there implied premeditation, a definite purpose on my part and a definite decision on hers.

In the second place Inez seemed, that summer and fall after she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett, emotionally inaccessible. She seemed to have renounced whatever stake in the story she might have had, and erected the baffle of her achieved serenity between herself and what had happened. It’s the summer monsoon and quite sticky, you don’t want to visit during the monsoon really but I’m sure Harry and Billy between them can sort out what you need to know. Excuse haste. Regards, Inez V .

This was the response, scrawled on a postcard showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur, to the letter I wrote from Honolulu in July of 1975 asking Inez if she would see me. Since the “summer monsoon” in Kuala Lumpur is followed immediately by the “winter monsoon,” which in turn lasts until the onset of the next “summer monsoon,” Inez’s response was even less equivocal than it might seem. In October, from Los Angeles, I wrote a second letter, and more or less promptly received a second postcard, again showing the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial, where incidentally Inez was not staying: What you mention is all in the past and frankly I’d rather look ahead. In other words a visit would be unproductive. I .

This card was postmarked the second of November and arrived in Los Angeles the fifteenth. Ten days later I received a third communication from Inez, a clipping of a book review, in which my name was mentioned in passing, from a month-old International Herald-Tribune . The note stapled to the clipping read Sorry if my note seemed abrupt but you see my point I’m sure, Inez . It was one week after that when Inez called my house in Los Angeles, having gone to some lengths to get the number, and asked me to come to Kuala Lumpur.

Actually she did not exactly “ask” me to come to Kuala Lumpur.

“When are you coming to K.L.,” was what she said exactly.

I considered this.

“I wouldn’t want to miss you,” she said. “I could show you around.”

At the time I thought that she had decided to talk to me only because Jack Lovett’s name was just beginning to leak out of the various investigations into arms and currency and technology dealings on the part of certain former or perhaps even current overt and covert agents of the United States government. There had even been hints about narcotics dealings, which, although they made good copy and were played large in the early coverage (I recall the phrase “Golden Triangle” in many headlines, and a photograph of two blurred figures leaving a house on Victoria Peak, one identified as a “sometime Lovett business associate” and the other as a “known Hong Kong Triad opium lord”), remained just that, hints, rumors that would never be substantiated, but the other allegations were solid enough, and not actually surprising to anyone who had bothered to think about what Jack Lovett was doing in that part of the world.