Democracy (2 page)

Last look through more than one door.

This is a hard story to tell.

2

C
ALL
me the author.

Let the reader be introduced to Joan Didion, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing table in her own room in her own house on Welbeck Street
.

So Trollope might begin this novel.

I have no unequivocal way of beginning it, although I do have certain things in mind. I have for example these lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens:

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Consider that.

I have: “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air,” Inez Victor’s fullest explanation of why she stayed on in Kuala Lumpur. Consider that too. I have those pink dawns of which Jack Lovett spoke. I have the dream, recurrent, in which my entire field of vision fills with rainbow, in which I open a door onto a growth of tropical green (I believe this to be a banana grove, the big glossy fronds heavy with rain, but since no bananas are seen on the palms symbolists may relax) and watch the spectrum separate into pure color. Consider any of these things long enough and you will see that they tend to deny the relevance not only of personality but of narrative, which makes them less than ideal images with which to begin a novel, but we go with what we have.

Cards on the table.

I began thinking about Inez Victor and Jack Lovett at a point in my life when I lacked certainty, lacked even that minimum level of ego which all writers recognize as essential to the writing of novels, lacked conviction, lacked patience with the past and interest in memory; lacked faith even in my own technique. A poignant (to me) assignment I came across recently in a textbook for students of composition: “
Didion begins with a rather ironic reference to her immediate reason to write this piece. Try using this ploy as the opening of an essay; you may want to copy the ironic-but-earnest tone of Didion, or you might try making your essay witty. Consider the broader question of the effect of setting: how does Didion use the scene as a rhetorical base? She returns again and again to different details of the scene: where and how and to what effect? Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How?
”

Water under the bridge.

As Jack Lovett would say.

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.

So I have no leper who comes to the door every morning at seven.

No Tropical Belt Coal Company, no unequivocal lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.

In fact no immutable hill: as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique. The very island to which Inez Victor returned in the spring of 1975—Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge—is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific. In this light it is difficult to maintain definite convictions about what happened down there in the spring of 1975, or before.

In fact I have already abandoned a great deal of what happened before.

Abandoned most of the stories that still dominate table talk down in that part of the world where Inez Victor was born and to which she returned in 1975.

Abandoned for example all stories about definite cases of typhoid contracted on sea voyages lasting the first ten months of 1856.

Abandoned all accounts of iridescence observed on the night sea off the Canaries, of guano rocks sighted southeast of the Falklands, of the billiards room at the old Hotel Estrella del Mar on the Chilean coast, of a particular boiled-beef lunch eaten on Tristan da Cunha in 1859; and of certain legendary poker games played on the Isthmus of Panama in 1860, with the losses and winnings (in gold) of every player.

Abandoned the bereaved widower who drowned himself at landfall.

Scuttled the festivities marking the completion of the first major irrigation ditch on the Nuannu ranch.

Jettisoned in fact those very stories with which most people I know in those islands confirm their place in the larger scheme, their foothold against the swell of the sea, the erosion of the reefs and the drowning of the valley systems and the glittering shallows left when islands vanish. Would it have been Inez Victor’s grandmother Cissy or Cissy’s best friend Tita Dowdell who wore the Highland Lassie costume to the Children’s Ball at the palace in 1892? If Cissy went as the Highland Lassie and Tita Dowdell as the Spanish Dancer (Inez’s grandfather definitely went as one of the Peasant Children of All Nationalities, that much was documented, that much Inez and her sister Janet knew from the photograph that hung on the landing of the house on Manoa Road), then how did the Highland Lassie costume end up with the Palace Restoration Committee on loan from Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? On the subject of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law, did her flat silver come to her through her father’s and Inez and Janet’s grandfather’s mutual Aunt Tru? Was it likely that Aunt Tru’s fire opal from the Great Barrier Reef (surrounded by diamond chips) would have been lost down a drain at the Outrigger Canoe Club if Janet or Inez or even their cousin Alice Campbell had been wearing it instead of Tita Dowdell’s daughter-in-law? Where were the calabashes Alice Campbell’s father got from Judge Thayer? Who had Leilani Thayer’s koa settee? When Inez and Janet’s mother left Honolulu on the reconditioned
Lurline
and never came back, did she or did she not have the right to take Tru’s yellow diamond? These are all important questions down there, suggestive details in the setting, but the setting is for another novel.

3

I
MAGINE
my mother dancing,” that novel began, in the first person. The first person was Inez, and was later abandoned in favor of the third:

“Inez imagined her mother dancing.

“Inez remembered her mother dancing.

“Brown-and-white spectator shoes, very smart. High-heeled sandals made of white silk twine, very beautiful. White gardenias in her hair on the beach at Lanikai. A white silk blouse with silver sequins shaped like stars. Shaped like new moons. Shaped like snowflakes. The sentimental things of life as time went by. Dancing under the camouflage net on the lawn at Kaneohe. Blue moon on the Nuannu ranch. Saw her standing alone. She smiled as she danced.

“Inez remembered no such thing.

“Inez remembered the shoes and the sequins like snowflakes but she only imagined her mother dancing, to make clear to herself that the story was one of romantic outline. You will notice that the daughters in romantic stories always remember their mothers dancing, or about to leave for the dance: these dance-bound mothers materialize in the darkened nursery (never a bedroom in these stories, always a ‘nursery,’ on the English model) in a cloud of perfume, a burst of light off a diamond hair clip. They glance in the mirror. They smile. They do not linger, for this is one of those moments in which the interests of mothers are seen to diverge sharply from the wishes of daughters. These mothers get on with it. These mothers lean for a kiss and leave for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left, but not for the dance. Inez and Janet’s mother left for San Francisco, on the
Lurline
, reconditioned. I specify ‘reconditioned’ because that was how Carol Christian’s departure was characterized for Inez and Janet, as a sudden but compelling opportunity to make the first postwar crossing on the reconditioned
Lurline
. ‘Just slightly irresistible,’ was the way Carol Christian put it exactly.”

What I had there was a study in provincial manners, in the acute tyrannies of class and privilege by which people assert themselves against the tropics; Honolulu during World War Two, martial law, submariners and fliers and a certain investor from Hong Kong with whom Carol Christian was said to drink brandy and Coca-Cola, a local scandal. I was interested more in Carol Christian than in her daughters, interested in the stubborn loneliness she had perfected during her marriage to Paul Christian, interested in her position as an outsider in the islands and in her compensatory yearning to be “talented,” not talented at anything in particular but just talented, a state of social grace denied her by the Christians. Carol Christian arrived in Honolulu as a bride in 1934. By 1946 she was sometimes moved so profoundly by the urge for company that she would keep Inez and Janet home from school on the pretext of teaching them how to do their nails. She read novels out loud to them on the beach at Lanikai, popular novels she checked out from the lending library at the drugstore in Kailua. “ ‘The random years were at an end,’ ” she would read, her voice rising to signal a dramatic effect, and then she would invent a flourish of her own: “ ‘Now, they could harvest them.’ Look there,
random harvest
, that explains the title, very poetic, a happy ending,
n’est-ce pas?
”

She was attracted to French phrases but knew only the several she had memorized during the semester of junior college in Stockton, California, that constituted her higher education. She was also attracted to happy endings, and located them for Inez and Janet wherever she could: in the Coke float that followed the skinned knee, in the rainbow after the rain, in magazine stories about furlough weddings and fortuitously misdelivered Dear John letters and, not least, in her own romance, which she dated from the day she left Stockton and got a job modeling at I. Magnin in San Francisco. “Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Chanel suit, the real McCoy,” she would say to Inez and Janet. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Mainbocher evening pajama, the genuine article. Eighteen years old and dressed to kill in a Patou tea gown, white satin cut on the bias, talk about drop dead, bare to
here
in back. The bias-cut Patou tea gown figured large in Carol Christian’s stories because this was the dress in which she had been sneaking a cigarette on the I. Magnin employees’ floor when Paul Christian stepped off the elevator by mistake (another fortuitous misdelivery) and brushed the shadows away, brought her happiest day, one look at him and she had found a world completely new, the sole peculiarity being that the world was an island in the middle of the Pacific and Paul Christian was rarely there. “When a man stays away from a woman it means he wants to keep their love alive,” Carol Christian advised Inez and Janet. She had an entire codex of these signals men and women supposedly sent to one another (when a woman blew smoke at a man it meant she was definitely interested, and when a man told a woman her dress was too revealing it meant he adored her), dreamy axioms she had heard or read or invented as a schoolgirl of romantic tendency and to which she clung in the face of considerable contrary evidence. That she had miscalculated when she married Paul Christian was a conclusion she seemed incapable of drawing. She made a love-knot of what she imagined to be her first gray hair and mailed it to him in Cuernavaca. “
Mon cher
Paul,” she wrote on the card to which she pinned the love-knot. Inez watched her tie the hair but did not see the card for some years, loose in one of the boxes of shed belongings that Paul Christian would periodically ship express collect from wherever he was to Inez and Janet. “Who do you f—— to get off this island? (Just kidding of course) XXXX, C.”

She left dark red lipstick marks on her cigarettes, smoked barely at all and then crushed out in coffee cups and Coke bottles and in the sand. She sat for hours at her dressing table, which was covered with the little paper parasols that came in drinks, yellow, turquoise, shocking pink, tissue parasols like a swarm of brittle butterflies. She sat at this dressing table and shaved her legs. She sat at this dressing table and smoothed Vaseline into her eyebrows. She sat at this dressing table and instructed her daughters in what she construed to be the language of love, a course she had notably failed. For a year or two after Carol Christian left Honolulu Janet would sit on the beach at Lanikai and sift the sand looking for cigarettes stained with her mother’s lipstick. She kept the few she found in a shoebox, along with the tissue parasols from Carol Christian’s dressing table and the postcards from San Francisco and Carmel and Lake Tahoe.

Of the daughters I was at first more interested in Janet, who was the younger, than in Inez. I was interested in the mark the mother had left on Janet, in Janet’s defensive veneer of provincial gentility, her startling and avid preoccupation with other people’s sexual arrangements; in her mercantile approach to emotional transactions, and her condescension to anyone less marketable than she perceived herself to be. As an adolescent Janet had always condescended, for example, to Inez, and became bewildered and rather sulky when it worked out, in her view, so well for Inez and so disappointingly for herself. I was interested in how Janet’s husband Dick Ziegler made a modest fortune in Hong Kong housing and lost it in the development of windward Oahu. I was interested in Inez and Janet’s grandmother, the late Sybil “Cissy” Christian, a woman remembered in Honolulu for the vehement whims and irritations that passed in that part of the world as opinions, as well as for the dispatch with which she had divested herself of her daughter-in-law.
Aloha oe
. “I believe your mother wants to go to night clubs,” Cissy Christian said to Inez and Janet by way of explaining Carol Christian’s departure. “But she’s coming back,” Janet said. “Now and then,” Cissy Christian said. This conversation took place at lunch at the Pacific Club, one hour after Inez and Janet and their uncle Dwight saw the reconditioned
Lurline
sail. Janet bolted from the table. “Happy now?” Dwight Christian asked his mother. “Somebody had to do it,” Cissy Christian said. “Not necessarily before lunch,” Dwight Christian said.