Joan Didion - Democracy

“Not down,” Harry had added. “You talk down to the American people at your peril.”

The physicist had pressed his point, which was technical, and abstruse.

“Either Jefferson was right or he wasn’t,” Harry had said. “I happen to believe he was.”

In fact Inez had heard Harry say this a number of times before, usually when he had no facts at hand, and she might never have remarked on it had Harry not mentioned the physicist on the drive home.

“Hadn’t done his homework,” Harry had said. “Those guys get their Nobels and start coasting.”

Inez, who was driving, said nothing.

“Unless there’s something behind us I don’t know about,” Harry said as she turned into San Luis Road, “you might try lightening up the foot on the gas pedal.”

“Unless you’re running for something I don’t know about,” Inez heard herself say, “you might try lightening up the rhetoric at the dinner table.”

There had been a silence.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Harry said finally, his voice at first stiff and hurt, and then, marshalling for second strike: “I don’t really care if you take out your quite palpable unhappiness on me, but I’m glad the children are in New York.”

“Away from my quite palpable unhappiness I suppose you mean.”

“On the money.”

They had gone to bed in silence, and, the next morning, after Harry left for the campus without speaking, Inez took her coffee and a package of cigarettes out into the sun on the redwood deck and sat down to consider the phrase “quite palpable unhappiness.” It did not seem to her that she was palpably unhappy, but neither did it seem that she was palpably happy. “Happiness” and “unhappiness” did not even seem to be cards in the hand she normally played, and there on the deck in the thin morning sunlight she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.

She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges. There was a lunch in Paris that she remembered in detail: a late lunch with Harry and the twins at Pré Catelan in the rain. She remembered rain streaming down the big windows, rain blowing in the trees, the branches brushing the glass and the warm light inside. She remembered Jessie crowing with delight and pointing imperiously at a poodle seated on a gilt chair across the room. She remembered Harry unbuttoning Adlai’s wet sweater, kissing Jessie’s wet hair, pouring them each a half glass of white wine.

There was an entire day in Hong Kong that she managed to reconstruct, a day she had spent alone with Jessie in a borrowed house overlooking Repulse Bay. She and Harry had dropped Adlai in Honolulu with Janet and Dick Ziegler and they had bundled Jessie onto a plane to Hong Kong and when they landed at dawn they learned that Harry was expected in Saigon for a situation briefing. Harry had flown immediately down to Saigon and Inez had waited with Jessie in this house that belonged to the chief of the Time bureau in Hong Kong. The potted begonias outside that house had made Inez happy and the parched lawn made her happy and the particular cast of the sun on the sea made her happy and it even made her happy that the Time bureau chief had mentioned, as he gave her the keys at the airport, that baby cobras had recently been seen in the garden. This introduction of baby cobras into the day had lent Inez a sense of transcendent usefulness, a reason to carry Jessie wherever Jessie wanted to go. She had carried Jessie from the porch to the swing in the garden. She had carried Jessie from the swing in the garden to the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.

There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.

“Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”

The doctor came in a sweat suit.

“I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”

“I’m right here,” Harry said.

“Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.

“Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.

“It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.

“It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”

“This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.

The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”

Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.

She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.

“My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”

The therapist smiled.

Inez lit a cigarette.

It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”

“Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”

“Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”

“Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”

“Cynthia who?” Harry said.

“Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”

“At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”

“You always say her . Her name is Jessie.”

“ I know her goddamn name. ”

Strike Ann Arbor.

Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe ”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.

Strike Colorado Springs.