Joan Didion - Democracy

I see Jack Lovett waiting for her.

I have not told you much about Jack Lovett.

Most often these days I find that my notes are about Jack Lovett, about those custom-made seersucker suits he wore, about the wide range of his interests and acquaintances and of the people to whom he routinely spoke (embassy drivers, oil riggers, airline stewardesses, assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships, tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals) in Manila and in Jakarta and around the Malacca Strait.

About his view of information as an end in itself.

About his access to airplanes.

About the way he could put together an observation here and a conversation there and gauge when the time had come to lay hands on a 727 or a C-46.

About the way he waited for Inez.

I have been keeping notes for some time now about the way Jack Lovett waited for Inez Victor.

FIRST looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.

I wonder.

The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer’s studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez. Under different auspices and to different ends Inez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960, and although she was in the fashion department and I was upstairs in the afterthought cubicle that constituted the feature department we occasionally had reason (when a playwright was to be photographed as part of a fashion layout, say, or an actress was to actually model the merchandise) to do a sitting together. I recall coming late to the studio on this particular morning and finding Inez already there, sitting at a wooden table apparently oblivious to the reflector propped against her knee, to Chubby Checker on the stereo at eighty decibels, and to the model for the sitting, a fading beauty named Kiki Watt, who was having a comb-out and trying to tell Inez about some “Stanley” they both seemed to know.

“The doorbell rings at midnight, who else,” Kiki screamed through the music. “Stanley.”

Inez said nothing. The table at which she sat was covered with take-out bags from the delicatessen downstairs, one of which was leaking coffee, but Inez seemed not to notice. Her attention was entirely fixed on the man who sat across the table, a stranger, considerably older than we were and notably uncomfortable in the rather louche camaraderie of the studio. I had not met Harry Victor but I doubted the man was Inez’s husband. I recall thinking he could be her father.

“Somebody strike the music,” Kiki screamed. “Now. You can hear me. So. I said I had this sitting at dawn, but you know Stanley, Stanley had to have a drink. Naturally.”

“Naturally.” Inez looked at me. “This is Jack Lovett. He just got off a plane.”

Jack Lovett stood up, trying to acknowledge me without looking at Kiki, who had dropped her wrapper and was working pieces of cotton into her brassiere.

“ ‘This place is a pigsty,’ Stanley announces halfway through his drink.” Kiki sat on the table between Inez and Jack Lovett and began rummaging through the take-out bags. “ ‘The maid didn’t come,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you own a vacuum,’ Stanley says, ho hum, sarcasm, so interesting. ‘Actually no,’ I say. ‘I don’t own a vacuum.’ As a matter of fact I don’t, I mean I did but Gus pawned it with my jewelry. ‘Listen,’ Stanley says. ‘As soon as Daisy leaves for Maine I’ll bring over our vacuum. For the summer,’ he says. Believe it?”

“Absolutely,” Inez said. She took a doughnut from one of the take-out bags and held it out to Jack Lovett. Jack Lovett shook his head.

“Stanley left, I thought about it, I wanted to kill myself, you know?”

“Absolutely.” Inez took a bite from the doughnut, then dropped it back into the bag.

“Wanted to take every red I had in the apartment, you know why?”

“Because you didn’t want to use Daisy’s vacuum,” Inez said, and then she looked at me. “He has two hours in New York and he came to see me.”

She turned back to Jack Lovett and smiled.

I had known Inez Victor for perhaps a year but I had never before seen her smile that way.

“He can’t stay,” she said then. “Because he’s running a little coup somewhere. I just bet.”

There it is, the first look.

The instructiveness of the moment remains moot.

Actually I know a lot about Jack Lovett.

Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers. They are comfortable for example on airplanes. They buckle in, establish certain ground rules with the cabin crew (to be woken or not woken, extra ice or none, a reading light that works and a move after Singapore to the bulkhead seat); stake out blankets, pillows, territory. They are solaced by the menus with the Dong Kingman water colors on the cover, by the soothing repetition of the meal ( Rôti au Vol, Legumes Garnis ) at arbitrary intervals during flights that run eleven, twelve, twenty-two hours. A flight of fewer than eight hours is a hop, a trip these men barely recognize. On the ground they seem easy only in hotel lobbies and transit lounges, in the Express Check-Ins and Clipper Clubs of the world, sealed environments in which they always remember the names of the attendants who make the drinks and arrange the connecting flights. Such men also recognize one another, and exchange desultory recollections of other travels, absent travelers.

“That joint venture in Dakar,” one hears them say.

“Frank was in Dakar.”

“I saw Frank in Hong Kong Friday, he’d come down out of China.”

“Frank and I were in a meeting in Surabaya with this gentleman who didn’t speak a word of English. He sat through this meeting nodding and smiling, you know, a regular buddha, and then he spoke the only English words I ever heard him speak. ‘Six hundred million sterling,’ he said.”

“They all speak sterling.”

“Frank takes it in stride, a real player, looks at his watch and stands up. ‘You decide you want to talk a reasonable number,’ Frank says to the buddha, in English you understand, ‘you can reach me tonight at the Hilton.’ No change of expression from the buddha. The buddha thinks Frank’s going to sweat out this call in Jakarta. ‘In Manila,’ Frank says then. ‘The Hilton in Manila.’ ”

They recall other Franks, other meetings, Hiltons around the world. They are reserved, wary, only professionally affable. Their responses seem pragmatic but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information. All information is seen as useful. Inaccurate information is in itself accurate information about the informant.

I said that Jack Lovett was one of those men for whom information was an end in itself.

He was also a man for whom the accidental did not figure.

Many people are intolerant of the accidental, but this was something more: Jack Lovett did not believe that accidents happen. In Jack Lovett’s system all behavior was purposeful, and the purpose could be divined by whoever attracted the best information and read it most correctly. A Laotian village indicated on one map and omitted on another suggested not a reconnaissance oversight but a population annihilated, x number of men, women, and children lined up one morning between the maps and bulldozed into a common ditch. A shipment of laser mirrors from Long Beach to a firm in Hong Kong that did no laser work suggested not a wrong invoice but transshipment, re-export, the diversion of technology to unfriendly actors. All nations, to Jack Lovett, were “actors,” specifically “state actors” (“non-state actors” were the real wild cards here, but in Jack Lovett’s extensive experience the average non-state actor was less interested in laser mirrors than in M-16s, AK-47s, FN-FALs, the everyday implements of short-view power, and when the inductive leap to the long view was made it would probably be straight to weapons-grade uranium), and he viewed such actors abstractly, as friendly or unfriendly, committed or uncommitted; as assemblies of armaments on a large board. Asia was ten thousand tanks here, three hundred Phantoms there. The heart of Africa was an enrichment facility.