Democracy Read online

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 1995

  Copyright © 1984 by Joan Didion

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1984.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to include excerpts from the following works:

  Random Harvest by James Hilton, copyright 1943 by James Hilton. Published by Little, Brown and Company in association with The Atlantic Monthly Press.

  “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Reprinted from Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  “September 1, 1939” by W. H. Auden, copyright 1940 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted from The English Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, by permission of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Didion, Joan.

  Democracy: a novel/by Joan Didion. — 1st Vintage

  international ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78737-8

  I. Title.

  PS3554.I33D4 1994

  813′.54—dc20 94-40748

  Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne

  v3.1

  This book is for Dominique and Quintana.

  It is also for Elsie Giorgi.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  One

  1

  THE light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.

  Something to behold.

  Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.

  He said to her.

  Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor.

  Inez Victor who was born Inez Christian.

  He said: the sky was this pink no painter could approximate, one of the detonation theorists used to try, a pretty fair Sunday painter, he never got it. Just never captured it, never came close. The sky was this pink and the air was wet from the night rain, soft and wet and smelling like flowers, smelling like those flowers you used to pin in your hair when you drove out to Schofield, gardenias, the air in the morning smelled like gardenias, never mind there were not too many flowers around those shot islands.

  They were just atolls, most of them.

  Sand spits, actually.

  Two Quonsets and one of those landing strips they roll down, you know, the matting, just roll it down like a goddamn bathmat.

  It was kind of a Swiss Family Robinson deal down there, really. None of the observers would fly down until the technical guys had the shot set up, that’s all I was, an observer. Along for the ride. There for the show. You know me. Sometimes we’d get down there and the weather could go off and we’d wait days, just sit around cracking coconuts, there was one particular event at Johnston where it took three weeks to satisfy the weather people.

  Wonder Woman Two, that shot was.

  I remember I told you I was in Manila.

  I remember I brought you some little souvenir from Manila, actually I bought it on Johnston off a reconnaissance pilot who’d flown in from Clark.

  Three weeks sitting around goddamn Johnston Island waiting for the weather and then no yield to speak of.

  Meanwhile we lived in the water.

  Caught lobsters and boiled them on the beach.

  Played gin and slapped mosquitoes.

  Couldn’t walk. No place to walk. Couldn’t write anything down, the point of the pen would go right through the paper, one thing you got to understand down there was why not much got written down on those islands.

  What you could do was, you could talk. You got to hear everybody’s personal life story down there, believe me, you’re sitting on an island a mile and a half long and most of that is the landing strip.

  Those technical guys, some of them had been down there three months.

  Got pretty raunchy, believe me.

  Then the weather people would give the go and bingo, no more stories. Everybody would climb on a transport around three A.M. and go out a few miles and watch for first light.

  Watch for pink sky.

  And then the shot, naturally.

  Nevada, the Aleutians, those events were another situation altogether.

  Nobody had very pleasurable feelings about Nevada, although some humorous things did happen there at Mercury, like the time a Livermore device fizzled and the Los Alamos photographers started snapping away at that Livermore tower—still standing, you understand, a two-meg gadget and the tower’s still standing, which was the humorous part—and laughing like hell. The Aleutians were just dog duty, ass end of the universe, they give the world an enema they stick it in at Amchitka. Those shots up there did a job because by then they were using computers instead of analog for the diagnostics, but you would never recall an Aleutian event with any nostalgia whatsoever, nothing even humorous, you got a lot of congressmen up there with believe it or not their wives and daughters, big deal for the civilians but zero interest, zip, none.

  He said to her.

  Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor (who was born Inez Christian) in the spring of 1975.

  But those events in the Pacific, Jack Lovett said.

  Those shots around 1952, 1953.

  Christ they were sweet.

  You were still a little kid in high school when I was going down there, you were pinning flowers in your hair and driving out to Schofield, crazy little girl with island fever, I should have been put in jail. I’m surprised your Uncle Dwight didn’t show up out there with a warrant. I’m surprised the whole goddamn Christian Company wasn’t turned out for the lynching.

  Water under the bridge.

  Long time ago.

  You’ve been around the world a little bit since.

  You did all right.

  You filled your dance card, you saw the show.

  Interesting times.

  I told you when I saw you in Jakarta in 1969, you and I had the knack for interesting times.

  Jesus Christ, Jakarta.

  Ass end of the universe, southern tier.

  But I’ll tell you one thing about Jakarta in 1969, Jakarta in 1969 beat Bien Hoa in 1969.

  “Listen, Inez, get it while you can,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor in the spring of 197
5.

  “Listen, Inez, use it or lose it.”

  “Listen, Inez, un regard d’adieu, we used to say in Saigon, last look through the door.”

  “Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said one night in the spring of 1975, one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975, one night in the spring of 1975 when the C-130s and the C-141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon all night long, thirty-minute turnaround at Tan Son Nhut, touching down and loading and taxiing out on flight idle, bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants: “Oh shit, Inez,” Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor, “Harry Victor’s wife.”

  Last look through more than one door.

  This is a hard story to tell.

  2

  CALL 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

  IMAGINE 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 ‘n
ursery,’ 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?”