Democracy: A Novel Part 4

That time was the fire in which we burned.

Sentimental sojourn.

Less time left for those visions and revisions.

In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said "falling." Many of the students to whom I spoke said "being liberated." "The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news," one said, and when next we spoke I modified "falling" to "closing down."

Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, and the Berkeley Gazette. Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.

I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American emba.s.sy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.

I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repet.i.tions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN HONOLULU, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the Chronicle and a separate sidebar in the New York Times, VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, were Inez and Harry Victor.

That was March 26, 1975.

A Wednesday morning.

I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.

12.

SEE it this way.

See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

The warm rain down on the runways.

The smell of jet fuel.

The military charters, Jack Lovett's excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, cl.u.s.tered around the service hangars.

The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land ma.s.ses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.

The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.

Five-thirty-seven A.M.

The ground crew in thin yellow slickers.

The steps wheeled into place.

The pa.s.senger service representative waiting at the bottom of the steps, carrying an umbrella, a pa.s.senger manifest in a protective vinyl envelope and, over his left arm, one plumeria lei.

The woman for whom both the pa.s.senger service representative and Jack Lovett are watching (Jack Lovett's excuse for being in the operations room at the airport is not the same as Jack Lovett's reason for being in the operations room at the airport) will be the next-to-last pa.s.senger off the plane. She is a woman at that age (a few months over forty in her case) when it is possible to look very good at certain times of day (Sunday lunch in the summertime is a good time of day for such women, particularly if they wear straw hats that shade their eyes and silk shirts that cover their elbows and if they resist the inclination to another gla.s.s of white wine after lunch) and not so good at other times of day. Five-thirty-seven A.M. is not a good time of day for this woman about to deplane the Pan American 747. She is bare-legged, pale despite one of those year-round suntans common among American women of some means, and she is wearing sling-heeled pumps, one of which has loosened and slipped down on her heel. Her dark hair, clearly brushed by habit to minimize the graying streak at her left temple, is dry and l.u.s.treless from the night spent on the airplane. She is wearing no makeup. She is wearing dark gla.s.ses. She is wearing a short knitted skirt and jacket, with a cotton jersey beneath the jacket, and at the moment she steps from the cabin of the plane into the moist warmth of the rainy tropical morning she takes off the jacket and leans to adjust the heel strap of her shoe. As the pa.s.senger service representative starts up the steps with the umbrella she straightens and glances back, apparently confused.

The man behind her on the steps, the man whose name appears on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., leans toward her and murmurs briefly.

She looks up, smiles at the pa.s.senger service representative, and leans forward, docile, while he attempts to simultaneously shield her with the umbrella and place the plumeria lei on her shoulders.

Aloha, he would be saying.

So kind.

Tragic circ.u.mstances.

Anything we as a company or I personally can do.

Facilitate arrangements.

When the senator arrives.

So kind.

As the pa.s.senger service representative speaks to the man listed on the manifest as DILLON, R.W., clearly a consultation about cars, baggage, facilitating arrangements, when the senator arrives, the woman stands slightly apart, still smiling dutifully. She has stepped beyond the protection of the umbrella and the rain runs down her face and hair. Absently she fingers the flowers of the lei, lifts them to her face, presses the petals against her cheek and crushes them. She will still be wearing the short knitted skirt and the crushed lei when she sees, two hours later, through a gla.s.s window in the third-floor intensive care unit at Queen's Medical Center, the unconscious body of her sister Janet.

This scene is my leper at the door, my Tropical Belt Coal Company, my lone figure on the crest of the immutable hill.

Inez Victor at 5:47 A.M. on the morning of March 26, 1975, crushing her lei in the rain on the runway.

Jack Lovett watching her.

"Get her in out of the G.o.dd.a.m.n rain," Jack Lovett said to no one in particular.

Two.

1.

ON the occasion when Dwight Christian seemed to me most explicitly himself he was smoking a long Havana cigar and gazing with evident satisfaction at the steam rising off the lighted swimming pool behind the house on Manoa Road. The rising steam and the underwater lights combined to produce an unearthly glow on the surface of the pool, bubbling luridly around the filter outflow; since the air that evening was warm the water temperature must have been, to give off steam, over one hundred. I recall asking Dwight Christian how (meaning why) he happened to keep the pool so hot. "No trick to heat a pool," Dwight Christian said, as if I had congratulated him. In fact Dwight Christian tended to interpret anything said to him by a woman as congratulation. "Trick is to cool one down."

It had not occurred to me, I said, that a swimming pool might need cooling down.

"Haven't spent time in the Gulf, I see." Dwight Christian rocked on his heels. "In the Gulf you have to cool them down, we developed the technology at Dhahran. Pioneered it for Aramco. Cost-efficient. Used it there and in Dubai. Had to. Otherwise we'd have sizzled our personnel."

A certain dreaminess entered his gaze for an instant, an involuntary softening at the evocation of Dhahran, Dubai, cost-efficient technology for Aramco, and then, quite abruptly, he made a harsh guttural noise, apparently intended as the sound of sizzling personnel, and laughed.

That was Dwight Christian.

"Visited DWIGHT and Ruthie (Mills College '33) CHRISTIAN at their very gracious island outpost, he has changed the least of our cla.s.smates over the years and is still Top Pineapple on the hospitality front," as an item I saw recently in the Stanford alumni notes had it.

On the occasion when Harry Victor seemed to me most explicitly himself he was patronizing the governments of western Europe at a dinner table on Tregunter Road in London. "Sooner or later they all show up with their shopping lists," he said, over rijstaffel on blue willow plates and the weak Scotch and soda he was nursing through dinner. He had arrived at dinner that evening not with Inez but with a young woman he identified repeatedly as "a grand-niece of the first Jew on the Supreme Court of the United States." The young woman was Frances Landau. Frances Landau listened to everything Harry Victor said with studied attention, breaking her gaze only to provide glosses for the less attentive, her slightly hyperthyroid face sharp in the candlelight and her voice intense, definite, an insistent echo of every opinion she had ever heard expressed.

"What they want, in other words," Frances Landau said. "From the United States."

"Which is usually nuclear fuel," Harry Victor said, picking up a dessert spoon and studying the marking. He seemed to find Frances Landau's rapt interpolation suddenly wearing. He was not an insensitive man but he had the obtuse confidence, the implacable ethnocentricity, of many people who have spent time in Washington. "I slept last night on a carrier in the Indian Ocean," he had said several times before dinner. The implication seemed to be that he had slept on the carrier so that London might sleep free, and I was struck by the extent to which he seemed to perceive the Indian Ocean, the carrier, and even himself as abstracts, incorporeal extensions of policy.

"Nuclear fuel to start up their breeders," he added now, and then, quite inexplicably to the other guests, he launched as if by reflex into the lines from an Auden poem that he had been incorporating that year into all his public utterances: " 'I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.' W.H. Auden. But I don't have to tell you that." He paused. "The English poet."

That was Harry Victor.

My point is this: I can remember a moment in which Harry Victor seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember a moment in which Dwight Christian seemed to present himself precisely as he was and I can remember such moments about most people I have known, so ingrained by now is the impulse to define the personality, show the character, but I have no memory of any one moment in which either Inez Victor or Jack Lovett seemed to spring out, defined. They were equally evanescent, in some way emotionally invisible; unattached, wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive. They seemed not to belong anywhere at all, except, oddly, together.

They had met in Honolulu during the winter of 1952. I can define exactly how winter comes to Honolulu: a kona wind comes up and the season changes. Kona means leeward, and this particular wind comes off the leeward side of the island, muddying the reef, littering the beaches with orange peels and prophylactics and bits of Styrofoam cups, knocking blossoms from the plumeria trees and dry fronds from the palms. The sea goes milky. Termites swarm on wooden roofs. The temperature has changed only slightly, but only tourists swim. At the edge of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence, water as the end to which even the island will eventually come, and a certain restlessness prevails. Men like Dwight Christian watch the steam rise off their swimming pools and place more frequent calls to project sites in Taipei, Penang, Jedda. Women like Ruthie Christian take their furs out of storage, furs handed down from mother to daughter virtually unworn, the guard hairs still intact, and imagine trips to the mainland. It is during these days and nights when sheets of rain obscure the horizon and the surf rises on the north sh.o.r.e that the utter isolation of the place seems most profound, and it was on such a night, in 1952, that Jack Lovett first saw Inez Christian, and discerned in the grain of her predictable longings and adolescent vanities an eccentricity, a secretiveness, an emotional solitude to match his own. I see now.

I learned some of this from him.

January 1, 1952.

Intermission at the ballet, one of those third-string touring companies that afford the women and children and dutiful providers of small cities an annual look at "Afternoon of a Faun" and the Grand Pas de Deux from the "Nutcracker"; an occasion, a benefit, a reason to dress up after the general fretfulness of the season and the specific la.s.situde of the holiday and stand outside beneath an improvised canopy drinking champagne from paper cups. Subdued greetings. Attenuated attention. Cissy Christian smoking a cigarette in her white jade holder. Inez, wearing dark gla.s.ses (wearing dark gla.s.ses because, after four hours of sleep, a fight with Janet, and telephone calls from Carol Christian in San Francisco and Paul Christian in Suva, she had spent most of the day crying in her room: one last throe of her adolescence), pinning and repinning a gardenia in her damp hair. This is our niece, Inez, Dwight Christian said. Inez, Major Lovett. Jack. Inez, Mrs. Lovett. Carla. A breath of air, a cigarette. This champagne is lukewarm. One gla.s.s won't hurt you, Inez, it's your birthday. Inez's birthday. Inez is seventeen. Inez's evening, really. Inez is our balletomane.

"Why are you wearing sungla.s.ses," Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian, startled, touched her gla.s.ses as if to remove them and then, looking at Jack Lovett, brushed her hair back instead, loosening the pins that held the gardenia.

Inez Christian smiled.

The gardenia fell to the wet gra.s.s.

"I used to know all the generals at Schofield," Cissy Christian said. "Great fun out there. Then."

"I'm sure." Jack Lovett did not take his eyes from Inez.

"Great polo players, some of them," Cissy Christian said. "I don't suppose you get much chance to play."

"I don't play," Jack Lovett said.

Inez Christian closed her eyes.

Carla Lovett drained her paper cup and crushed it in her hand.

"Inez is seventeen," Dwight Christian repeated.

"I think I want a real drink," Carla Lovett said.

During the days which immediately followed this meeting the image of Inez Christian was never entirely absent from Jack Lovett's mind, less a conscious presence than a shadow on the scan, an undertone. He would think of Inez Christian when he was just waking, or just going to sleep. He would summon up Inez Christian during lulls in the waning argument he and Carla Lovett were conducting that winter over when or how or why she would leave him. His interest in Inez was not, as he saw it, initially s.e.xual: even at this most listless stage of his marriage he remained compelled by Carla, by Carla's very lethargy, and could still be actively aroused by watching her brush out her hair or pull on a shirt or kick off the huaraches she wore instead of slippers.

What Jack Lovett believed he saw in Inez Christian was something else. The picture he had was of Inez listening to something he was telling her, listening gravely, and then giving him her hand. In this picture she was wearing the gardenia in her hair and the white dress she had worn to the ballet, the only dress in which he had ever seen her, and the two of them were alone. In this picture the two of them were in fact the only people on earth.

"Pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n romantic."

As Jack Lovett said to me on the Garuda 727 with the jammed landing gear.

He remembered that her fingernails were blunt and unpolished.

He remembered a scar on her left wrist, and how he had wondered briefly if she had done it deliberately. He thought not.

It had occurred to him that he might never see her again (given his situation, given her situation, given the island and the fact that from her point of view he was a stranger on it) but one Sat.u.r.day night in February he found her, literally, in the middle of a cane-field; stopped to avoid hitting a stalled Buick on the narrow road between Ewa and Schofield and there she was, Inez Christian, age seventeen, flooding the big Buick engine while her date, a boy in a pink Oxford-cloth shirt, crouched in the cane vomiting.

They had been drinking beer, Inez Christian said, at a carnival in Wahiawa. There had been these soldiers, a bottle of rum, an argument over how many plush dogs had been won at the shooting gallery, the MPs had come and now this had happened.

The boy's name was Bobby Strudler.

Immediately she amended this: Robert Strudler.

The Buick belonged to Robert Strudler's father, she believed that the correct thing to do was to push the Buick onto a cane road and come out in daylight with a tow.

"The 'correct thing,' " Jack Lovett said. "You're a regular Miss Manners."

Inez Christian ignored this. Robert Strudler's father could arrange the tow.

She herself could arrange the tow.

In daylight.

Her feet were bare and she spoke even more precisely, as if to counter any suggestion that she might herself be drunk, and it was not until later, sitting in the front seat of Jack Lovett's car on the drive into town, Robert Strudler asleep in the back with his arms around the prize plush dogs, that Inez Christian gave any indication that she remembered him.

"I don't care about your wife," she said. She sat very straight and kept her eyes on the highway as she spoke. "So it's up to you. More or less."

She smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream. The next time they met she had with her a key to the house on the Nuannu ranch. They had met a number of times before he told her that Carla Lovett had in fact already left him, had slept until noon on the last day of January and then, in an uncharacteristic seizure of hormonal energy, packed her huaraches and her shorty nightgowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis, and when he did tell her she only shrugged.

"It doesn't change anything," she said. "In point of fact."

In point of fact it did not, and it struck Jack Lovett then that what he had first read in Inez Christian as an extreme recklessness could also be construed as an extreme practicality, a temperamental refusal to deal with the merely problematic. The clandestine nature of their meetings was never questioned. The absence of any foreseeable future to these meetings was questioned only once, and that once by him.