Joan Didion - Run River

Everett met her the week she enrolled, when they were assigned to debate the topic “John C. Frémont: Opportunist or Patriot?” She was wearing, he would remember always, a fuchsia-pink sweater with a harp embroidered in gilt threads over her left breast, a tight black gabardine skirt, and a coat which made Everett forever uneasy about Doris Jeanne, the coat about which Lily later said, when he told her about it one night in bed, “Didn’t it make you cry? Didn’t it make you want to cry for the world every time you looked at it?” Although he had laughed at Lily, there was little doubt in his mind that the coat had indeed lent his entire relationship with Doris Jeanne Coe certain aspects of a social passion play. A hand-me-down from someone for whom her father worked, it was a camel’s-hair polo coat with an I. Magnin label, and she let it out of her sight so rarely that two of the buttons were missing and the pocket bore a year-old Coca-Cola stain.

After class, Everett had stopped Doris Jeanne and asked her which position she preferred, a phrasing which afforded her a great deal of unconcealed delight. When Everett explained, blushing, that he meant did she want to argue John C. Frémont was a Patriot or did she want to argue John C. Frémont was an Opportunist, Doris Jeanne looked at him a long time, slipped the polo coat off her shoulders, removed from her large red shoulder bag a blue vial of Evening in Paris Eau de Cologne , and dabbed the stopper behind her ears and in the crooks of her elbows. Then she replaced the vial, snapped the bag closed, and asked Everett who John C. Frémont was. After he had told her, she smiled crookedly, arranged the bag on her shoulder, and said, “It don’t make me no never-mind, honey.”

Mostly because he would have preferred it himself, Everett offered Doris Jeanne the “Patriot” position, and she eventually stood up before the class with her polo coat on, daintily applied Evening in Paris to her wrists in full view of twenty-four entranced students and Mrs. Nalley, the English teacher, and presented an original defense in which Jessie Benton and John C. Frémont emerged curiously as refugees from some early-day phenomenon not unlike the Dust Bowl. Although she had taken a clear fancy to the Frémonts, she could not escape the impression that they had first entered California in a secondhand Ford, and the entire exercise left Mrs. Nalley so unnerved that she excused her classes for the rest of the day.

The debate was otherwise without incident, and Everett did not speak to Doris Jeanne again until the class picnic, when her brother, who played baseball with Everett, urged him to sneak off to the river and share a half-gallon of valley red with him and Doris Jeanne, who was included in the first place only because she had negotiated the purchase. After a while Alfred Coe went to sleep over beyond an Indian mound, and Doris Jeanne, with lifeless dispatch, took care of Everett. A few days later she cornered him in the hall at school, pressed up against him as he stood backed against his open locker, and began playing lovingly with his collar; she wanted to do it again out behind the backstop during seventh period, when there were no teams on the field, but Everett hesitated, and Doris Jeanne said he was strictly a drag and could stew in his own juice. Later that semester, after the intercession of her brother, Everett wrote a term paper for Doris Jeanne on the subject “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley.” Unhappily neither Mrs. Nalley nor the vice-principal who was called in as arbitrator could be persuaded that “Will Semple Green: Father of Irrigation in the Northern Valley” was entirely Doris Jeanne’s work, and in the pressure of this controversy Doris Jeanne quit school. That she never named Everett made him admire her, and feel obscurely guilty that he had failed to do a more convincing job for her. Several years later he saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Examiner; described as a “curvaceous model and sometime waitress at an El Camino Real supper club,” she had instituted a paternity suit against a football player with a Polish name. Although she had changed her name to Dori Lee, Everett recognized the picture, and wondered if she would remember him. He thought not.

After Doris Jeanne it had been nobody: necking in cars on hot summer nights with the back doors open so you could lie with your legs out and sometimes even lying almost naked and covered with sweat, but never doing it; once or twice or three times even lying in somebody’s bed at parties given by boys whose parents were away, lying naked under the sheet with girls who had been drinking bourbon and Seven-Up and wanted to go to sleep, lying there for hours and kissing girls who probably would have done it had anyone insisted, but Everett never insisted; it was not, as Lily would have said, much his style.

Then there had been, at Stanford, a couple of girls who required less insistence: Annis McMahon, whom everyone else called alternately “Annie” and “Pooh” but whom Everett always called Annis, wishing upon her the dignity implied by her tall, cold, blond good looks. He liked to watch her play tennis, and long before he knew her he developed the habit of walking back to the Deke house from his eleven o’clock class by way of the courts where she played every noon. When it reached a point where he thought he wanted to watch her play tennis for the rest of his life, he asked Clark McCormack to introduce him to her. Once introduced, he called her three times a day, played tennis with her every afternoon, took her to the movies every Sunday night, and in May of his sophomore year, still determined that she should be the girl he had hoped she would be in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, he drove Annis McMahon down to Santa Cruz on two successive weekends. (On the third, he found out later, Clark McCormack drove her down to Santa Cruz.) They lay in a motel room with a mission tile table and a framed color photograph of Bridal Veil Falls at Yosemite, and she told him in the high nasal voice which had been his first disappointment about the difficulty she was having arranging her courses to obtain her teaching credential at the same time she received her degree in physical education and therapy. She got up from the bed every time as if she were getting out of a shower, ready, in a companionable way he found dispiriting in the extreme, to discuss it; stretched her incredible golden arms, lit a cigarette, opened all the blinds, and wrapped herself in his shirt, a gambit which might have seemed more winning had his shirt not fit her almost perfectly.

The next year there was Naomi Kahn, a Jewish girl from Beverly Hills whose grades were good, whose clothes smelled always as if they had just come from Bullock’s-Wilshire boxes (as a matter of fact they had not: Naomi ordered all her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York), and whose mother and father were both, as she put it, in the Industry. She told Everett that her deepest wishes for her mother and father involved their abandoning screenwriting in favor of writing something like Winterset , and when that day came she would be more than happy, in answer to Everett’s query, to stop ordering her clothes from Bergdorf Goodman in New York, although for Everett’s information, Maxwell Anderson was not exactly on the relief rolls. Everett ought to get around more. Once the Kahns came up to Stanford to visit Naomi, and Mrs. Kahn later wrote that she considered Everett divine, an honest-to-Christ set piece, whereupon Naomi’s ardor for Everett began to cool. One night toward the end of their junior year she announced that she was driving to Reno the next day to marry a Berkeley graduate student who was active in the Young Communist League; the Kahns, after getting the marriage annulled, transferred Naomi to Sarah Lawrence. Although Everett never knew what happened to Naomi after that, he noticed the Kahns’ names from time to time among the credits on B comedies, and years later he read in Time that they were up before the Tenney Committee for having participated in the October 1943 Writers’ Congress at UCLA. They were listed as members of several oddly named organizations the function of which Everett did not entirely understand, were later indicted in Washington for contempt of Congress, and Everett reflected that Naomi, wherever she was, must have approved at last.