Joan Didion - Run River

When she arrived at the ranch not long after two A.M. Everett was sitting in the chair by their bedroom window, drinking a beer and looking at an old copy of Life . Although she tried to tell him who had been at Molly Bee’s wedding he did not seem interested, and after he had picked up the pink silk dress she had dropped on the bed and looked first at the indelible wrinkles in the skirt and then at her and had dropped the dress on the floor and gone downstairs, she lay on the bedspread in her slip and turned out the lights: she had gone and lost him again and not for any reason, not for any good reason at all. After a while, because she had a headache from the champagne and from the gin she had been drinking in the car with Molly Bee’s cousin and because she thought Everett would have to come if she told him she was sick, she went to the landing and called him. “Go back to sleep,” he said without moving.

On the following Monday a letter had arrived for Martha from the television station, but Martha shoved it unopened into the back of a drawer where Lily found it after her death. It contained only a note from Sidell expressing concern for her illness and a check for the eight days she had worked.

At ten-thirty on the morning of December 18, 1948, while she was having a fourth cup of coffee and wishing that she had not already worked the crossword puzzle, Martha saw in the social pages of the San Francisco Chronicle the announcement of Ryder Channing’s engagement to a Miss Nancy Dupree of Piedmont. After tearing the notice out of the Chronicle and securing it in the pocket of her jumper, Martha wrapped with her calling card— Miss Martha Currier McClellan, McClellan’s Landing , let Miss Nancy Dupree figure out who it was — a silver dish which Channing had once admired. It was a small dish which had been her mother’s, made to Mildred McClellan’s order at Shreve’s in San Francisco and marked M.C.McC . In a smaller box she placed another calling card, with her key to Channing’s apartment in Sacramento Scotch-taped over her name.

She had both packages ready to mail by early afternoon, driving in to the main post office in Sacramento and stopping first at the library to look up the Piedmont address in an Oakland telephone book. In the library she located as well several photographs of Nancy Dupree in a University of California yearbook, Class of 1947. A member of Kappa Kappa Gamma and Senior Class Council, she had one year been chosen not only Soph Doll but Sweetheart of Sigma Chi Attendant. Her major was listed as General Curriculum. She appeared to be somewhat less blond than Martha, with prettier features, and as Martha studied first one and then another picture she remembered that she had met the girl at a party in Piedmont to which Ryder had taken her. She had simply not remembered her name. It had been one of those parties at which she drank too much and became depressed, a party at which she had known none of the people Channing seemed to know; as she once explained to Everett, Ryder’s only real vocation was for remembering and being remembered by all the people he went out of his way to meet. At some point during the evening she had locked herself in the bathroom and stared at her reflection in the mirror for a long time and not looked like herself ( Your name is Martha McClellan , she said again and again to the mirror, and then cried because it did not seem to be the Martha McClellan she had wanted to be), and when she came downstairs again she had told two strangers, a pretty girl and her husband who had made a perfunctory attempt to include her in a controversy over whether or not Ernie Heckscher had played for the hostess’s debut, that she was sick. “Come sit down a minute,” the pretty girl said, looking at Martha and then at her husband, but then Martha saw Ryder, standing by the piano singing “As Time Goes By” with his arm around a girl in Bermuda shorts and a Liberty lawn blouse, and she ran into the bedroom, pulled her sweater from beneath a pile of navy-blue and red and forest-green blazers, and walked out of the house. Go ahead , she screamed at Ryder when he followed her out to the car. You go on back in there and play whatever games you want to play. Just don’t think I don’t see . She could not now remember what she thought she saw, except that she had accidentally for once been right, because the girl at the piano singing “As Time Goes By,” the girl in the Liberty lawn blouse who had earlier asked Ryder if she could count on him for a Scotch foursome Sunday at Claremont Country Club, had been Nancy Dupree. Don’t think I don’t know , Martha had screamed there in the driveway as Ryder tried to take the car keys from her. Although she had not screamed loudly, he shoved her into the car and slapped her. Her first thought had been that it was Everett’s car and Ryder had no right to slap her in Everett’s car, but then she had remembered that Everett surely cared as little for her as Ryder did, and all during the two-hour drive to Sacramento she sat rigid against the door, trying to think how to hurt them both. What she had done finally was spend the night in Ryder’s apartment, an injury to Everett which, because he had assumed she was staying all night in Piedmont anyway, escaped him.

The more she remembered of the evening (“You’re Ryder’s best girl in the Valley,” the girl had said, taking Martha’s hand and smiling up at Ryder, “I’ve heard so much about you”), the more she resented Ryder now, and it was with a palpable knot of hatred in her stomach that she returned the yearbook to the librarian, crossed the street to the post office, and waited in line ten minutes to see that the clerk gave immediate attention to the key for Ryder, the silver dish for Nancy Dupree.

Rid of the boxes, she started back across the Plaza to the car, but because she felt both dizzy and a little silly, she stopped and sat on the edge of the fountain long enough to smoke two cigarettes and to chew, since an old man lay passed out at the foot of the water fountain, one of the phenobarbital tablets the doctor had told her to take three times a day. There were lighted Christmas wreaths strung across J Street and as the phenobarbital began to work she forgot about Ryder and began to wish, suddenly, that her father were alive, that Sarah could come home for Christmas. There was something about Christmas as managed by Lily that was not quite Christmas, although everyone tried very hard to pretend it was and although Edith Knight always came to stay on the ranch for a few days, decorating everything in sight, hanging stockings for Knight and Julie, and helping China Mary make quantities of eggnog which no one ever dropped by to drink.

A few minutes after she got back to the ranch, Ryder called her from a bar. She knew he was in a bar because she could hear the juke box.

Well, what a surprise. She wanted to offer him all her congratulations.

Oh, he said. He had called to see if she was home. He had planned to drive out and tell her himself. He had not thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers.

No, of course he would not have thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers. He had been on the ranch not more than a thousand, fourteen hundred times during the past four and a half years, and no one could have expected him to notice that they got the San Francisco papers. It wasn’t a bit nice to think about how life went on — papers got delivered, papers got read, that kind of thing — when one wasn’t counting on it, was it. But never mind. It was all very, very nice and she had only an hour before sent off her blessings to that most fortunate girl, Miss Nancy Dupree. Who was, she believed, the same Miss Nancy Dupree known to her friends in the East Bay Junior Assistance League as “Bugsy”? Just so. Nicknames. Cute as a bug’s ear. You knew that any girl who’d call herself Bugsy had a sense of fun. There was one little thing. She did think, couldn’t help thinking, that since his plans must have been more or less settled last night, he might have told her his surprise then. Of course they had been pretty busy last night, sorting his laundry, wondering where she had put the razor blades she had brought the day before, typing out his application for an extension on his personal loan at the Wells Fargo. There had been scarcely a minute for surprises, had there. Or possibly he had not known then. Possibly he and Bugsy had just decided late last night on the long-distance telephone and Bugsy had thrown on her forest-green blazer and rushed the news right over to the Chronicle . What a stroke of luck, deciding in time for the Valley Edition.