The Last Love Song (81 page)

There was no exaggerating the domestic mess crushing them now. When the Vikane sprayers came, the Dunnes moved into the Bel-Air Sands Motel, beside the San Diego Freeway, to make their final arrangements. Dunne would fly to New York and open up the new apartment. Didion would spend some time with her parents first. Frank and Eduene had moved to Carmel. (Sacramento had gotten too big, Eduene complained. Too much traffic. Fast food everywhere.)

Early one morning, before taking their separate flights, Didion and Dunne stopped by the empty Chadbourne house one last time. Silently, like ghosts of their former selves, they moved through the hallways, opening each door, running their hands through the cupboards, peering into every closet. They remembered the endless flat horizons at Malibu; the wisteria perfume pervading the vast back patio on Franklin Boulevard; the sea caves at Portuguese Bend and Dunne's shouted advice to his wife to ride the waves, just go with the change. They knew they'd visit Los Angeles many times, but they also understood it was unlikely they'd ever again live in California.

They circled the kitchen, stepped out into the garden. Like figures in a Hockney painting, they stood at the lip of the pool, staring into the shifting patterns of a strange other world. “You ready?” Dunne asked.

“Yes,” Didion said. She placed her head on his shoulder, and they wept.

*   *   *

Somehow, in scoping out the new place, she'd missed the fact that the morning sunlight didn't go all the way through the apartment. But she was pleased with the shade of the new wall paint she'd chosen—a combination of pale green and yellow, an “underwater color,” she said, “very restful.” It contrasted nicely with the white wooden trim and the white high-beamed ceilings.

All day, on moving day, the van clogged traffic on the street out front. “I just tried to ignore [the honking horns],” Didion said. “I tried to think, now what kind of people would do such a thing, not that we were the instigators.”

The first thing she did was unpack her hurricane lamps. “All ready in case of a storm,” she joked with her husband. She spread seashells on her fireplace mantel, hovered over the glass-topped coffee table, imagining it adorned with purple orchids. She placed the wicker-backed chair first here, then there. It took four men to haul Dunne's mother's old couch up the service stairwell. Didion arranged various pairs of sunglasses across a large pewter platter—what to do with them all? Framed pictures, posters, photos—if she didn't have a flat horizon to stare at on the wall, she knew she'd get really anxious.

St. James's bells reverberated through the open windows, sonorous and comforting. Reflections of the evening sun lifted off the tip of its spire like light from a star.

She set to work fixing up a bedroom for Quintana, who had asked if she could still be a “Californian.” Dunne said Quintana was too old now—she'd never again live at home.

Didion paused and said a girl couldn't
not
keep a room in her mother's house, even if she didn't sleep in it.

*   *   *

In the mornings, they walked through Central Park, sometimes in tandem with their dog, Casey (a “pain in the ass,” Dunne said), sometimes separately while the other was writing. In the evenings, they had their two drinks before dinner, then went to Elio's at Second and Eighty-fourth, where the waiters reserved a special table for them, brought Dunne a Scotch, Didion a bourbon, and an extra bucket of ice for both. They talked about what a good move this had been—in the past, on separate assignments, they'd not spent enough time together. Now, centrally located in New York, they could do more joint reporting. The movie business had gotten too bloated—so much cash, so much risk. It took a lifetime to get a picture made these days. Best to step away for a while. Besides: no brush fires here, no snakes in a pool.

After the vitello Milanese, they'd stroll up Madison, past some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the best shopping in the world: Tiffany, Prada, Ralph Lauren. Still, Didion could spot the aftershocks of the 1987 stock market crash. At Seventy-second Street, a building sat empty; eventually, Ralph Lauren would occupy that space as well, but for now, it was padlocked and dark. Rats scurried through it. Homeless men spread sleeping bags up and down the block.

Even in
this
neighborhood, Didion felt the “city's rage at being broke and being in another recession and not having a general comfort level.” This awareness slowly opened her to the “stories the city [told] itself to rationalize its class contradictions” and its byzantine economic networks, “the distortion and flattening of character,” reducing events to simple narratives: “Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city.” All of this, she figured—watching, reading, piecing it together—disguised the fact that New York did not exactly operate on a “market economy but on little deals, payoffs, accommodations,
baksheesh,
arrangements that circumvent the direct exchange of goods and services.” Hence, the self-congratulatory boast, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”'Cause ain't no one gettin' a fair shake on
this
corner, sister.

At street level, on the docks and in the warehouses, small-potatoes jefes hustled to protect what turf they could. The jewelry. The fish. The garments. You got garbage? Want it gone? Let's powwow.

Didion's
oh-no
-ing friends had it right. Manhattan
was
a vast criminal enterprise, wrapped in an ink-colored cloak of sentimental stories.
Small Town Girl Chases Lifelong Dream in the Heart of the Big Apple. The Lights of Broadway!

Meanwhile, and don't forget it, pal, all the produce lands in
my
pockets, got it?

How different the city looked to her now from the way it had when she'd last lived here, nearly a quarter of a century ago—then it was a dazzling procession of headlights reflecting off wet gray pavement, bare branches at dawn waving gently over the benches in Washington Square Park, billowing yellow curtains blowing through open windows, twining the rusty railings of the fire escapes.

How different from the City of Angels—there, it wasn't the media's job to mask existing crime, but to create the foundational narratives institutionalizing graft. Harrison Gray Otis wanted water in L.A., so the
Los Angeles Times
presented the Owens River swindle as manifest destiny. Anyone who opposed it was an “enemy of the city.” In New York, narratives were damage control. In Los Angeles, they were opportunistic slogans, the war cries of unchecked capital formation.

The criminalization of sentiment: the basis of all American politics.

This wasn't just an abstraction to Didion. In time, and for about ten years, she served as the president of her co-op board. She wrestled with the fine print of leases, of hiring and replacing supers, of contractual bids for repairing water damage in the elevator shafts. She was sued by a neighbor who felt she did not do enough, as board president, to settle a dispute between the neighbor and supermodel Cindy Crawford, who lived in the apartment upstairs, and who, the neighbor contended, made ungodly amounts of noise, subjecting her to “telephones ringing, closet doors opening and closing, toilets flushing and baths running”—all the “intimate sounds of daily life.”

But these were examples of the big and obvious politics of binding arbitration, sad human nature.

From her service on the board, Didion understood the more nefarious consequences of fantasy politics when they expanded, more generally, into the nation's complex business. When “social and economic phenomena” got “personalized,” they came to seem intractable, impervious to legislative solutions. They were
our
problems,
our
fault. Poverty, racism, infanticide? Mea culpa. Moreover, these character failings kept us blaming
one another
rather than officials.

Meanwhile, the political process—stumping, campaigns and balloons—was packaged as purely “electoral”: the coronation of leaders “who could in turn inspire the individual citizen to ‘participate,' or ‘make a difference.' ‘Will you help?'” Votes and money were what our leaders had in mind—not direct involvement: God knows you've got your
own
problems to work out; leave it to
me
to speak for the American people.

5

One Sunday morning in February 1989, Dunne pulled on a pair of black sweatpants—
Princeton
stitched across the left side—laced up his tennis shoes, and set off for a morning walk across the park. Traffic was light; he headed up Cedar Hill adjacent to the Met. His knees stiffened. His breath came hard. Sweat stung his eyes. He stopped and bent double, gasping. Joggers raced past him.

The next thing he was aware of, inches from his face, was the asphalt road.

 

Chapter Twenty-nine

1

In
Harp,
Dunne reported that as soon as he came to himself with the help of a Good Samaritan offering to call a cab to take him to the emergency room, he decided not to tell his wife he had passed out. He thanked the good man for his concern. He was fine now. He sat on a bench and focused on the back wall of the museum until his breathing returned to normal. Didion had made dinner plans for that night. It would be a shame to cancel … no need to worry anyone.

He got up to walk home and spied his wife with Casey on a leash. Right away, he softened and told her everything: “[W]e had not stayed married for twenty-five years by keeping secrets, however unpleasant, from one another.” In crisis times, he tended to fold, while she turned fierce.

The following day, a cardiologist informed him he had symptoms of aortic stenosis. Open-heart surgery would probably be necessary to replace the aortic valve—and while they were in there, they would do a bypass to finesse the job of the angioplasty.

The surgery was scheduled. At the last minute, it was scrubbed: An angiogram showed no aortic stenosis after all. Perhaps, doctors said, it was just a vasovagal response.

*   *   *

“I was quite desolate for about a year” in New York, Didion said. Worries about her husband's health, his undiminished restlessness; worries about her daughter, who had transferred in a haze of unhappiness to Barnard, where at least she had found a more welcoming community; worries about lost knickknacks or books (several boxes remained to be unpacked)—it all hampered her writing.

Not that she didn't have plenty of work. Almost as soon as they'd moved, she agreed to do “Letter from Los Angeles” pieces for Robert Gottlieb at
The New Yorker,
and she'd flown to California several times. Bob Silvers wondered if she might like to cover domestic political campaigns for
The New York Review of Books.
The idea would never have occurred to her. “Bob kept pushing me in that direction,” she said. It was his “trust. Nothing else.… He recognized it was a learning experience for me. Domestic politics … was something I simply knew nothing about. And I had no interest … [but he] is really good at ascertaining what might interest you at any given moment and then throwing a bunch of stuff at you that might or might not be related, and letting you go with it.”

Silvers arranged press credentials for her and so, one summer day in 1988, she arrived at the Butler Aviation terminal at Newark airport and awaited the contact from the Jesse Jackson campaign she'd been instructed to meet. The contact didn't show. Apparently, the woman was already in California, preparing her candidate for the primary. Didion was sent to Hangar 14 and then to Post J, an unmarked gate to the tarmac. At Post J, Secret Service agents kept asking members of the Jackson campaign, “Who's she? She hasn't been cleared … what's she doing here?” “All I know is, she's got the right names in Chicago,” said a campaign staffer, checking her papers. Her bags were swept for weapons. She was allowed to get on the plane. For a while, she sat alone in the cabin. The pilot poked his head out the cockpit door. “Give me a guesstimate how many people are flying,” he said to her, as if she should know. “None of this seemed promising,” Didion remarked in a journal she was keeping.

At LAX, she got on a bus for a Jackson rally in South Central. The afternoon sunlight was gorgeous. The freeway looked stunning. “I was just in tears the whole way,” Didion said. “I couldn't even deal with the rally because it was so beautiful. Los Angeles was so beautiful, and I had given it up. It took me a while to get sorted out,” which she needed to do in order to concentrate on the campaign.

She told her husband all this on the phone. Since she was going to be away, he had decided to fly to Ireland to investigate his family heritage for
Harp,
the memoir he was trying to figure out how to write.
Was
it a memoir? Or fiction? Or a reporter's notebook? He wasn't sure, a symptom of his restlessness. He'd forgotten how much he hated traveling alone. The
idea
of it appealed to him, but the reality was something else. Didion mentioned a speechwriter she had met at the rally. “He's a fucking snake,” Dunne warned her.
All
speechwriters were snakes. She knew this. Their mutual wariness—their protection against being surprised—was a bond they missed whenever they were apart. She mentioned an actress of their acquaintance, a “political groupie” who'd been tagging along on the campaign bus. “She still has that insane glitter in her eye,” Didion said. “It comes from trying to remember who she hasn't fucked,” Dunne quipped.

About this snake—Didion wondered how to
get him right
in her notes. “An artful presentation of a coherent untruth,” she said.
That's
the speechwriter's job. “Not bad,” Dunne told her. “How's it going?” she asked him. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said.