Run River Read online

  JOAN DIDION

  Run River

  Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. She has written four novels and is a current contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker .

  Books by JOAN DIDION

  After Henry

  Miami

  Democracy

  Salvador

  The White Album

  A Book of Common Prayer

  Play It As It Lays

  Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  Run River

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1994

  Copyright © 1963 by Joan Didion

  Copyright renewed 1991 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 Ivan Obolensky, Inc., New York, in 1963.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Didion, Joan.

  Run River / Joan Didion.—1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  Previously published: New York: I. Obolensky, © 1963.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78775-0

  I. Title.

  PS3554.I33R86 1994

  813′.54—dc20 93-45274

  Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne

  v3.1

  for my family and for N

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TEA FOR TWO Copyright 1924 by Harms, Inc.

  Copyright Renewed

  Reprinted by Permission

  OF THEE I SING Copyright 1931 by New World Music Corporation

  Copyright Renewed

  Reprinted by Permission

  BLUE ROOM Copyright 1926 by Harms, Inc.

  Copyright Renewed

  Reprinted by Permission

  DON’T FENCE ME IN Copyright 1944 by Harms, Inc.

  Reprinted by Permission

  “TEMPTATION” Lyric by Arthur Freed.

  Melody by Nacio Herb Brown

  © Copyright 1933/Copyright Renewal 1961 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., New York, N. Y. Rights throughout the world controlled by ROBBINS MUSIC CORPORATION, New York, N. Y. Reprinted by Permission.

  The quotation from the poem “Man and Wife” from LIFE STUDIES by Robert Lowell, is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Also by Joan Didion

  “All night I’ve held your hand,

  as if you had

  a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—

  its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—

  and dragged me home alive …”

  —ROBERT LOWELL

  “… the real Eldorado is still further on.”

  —Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West

  August 1959

  1

  Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one. She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp on the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.

  When she could wind the watch no further she stood up, still barefoot from the shower, picked up from her dressing table a bottle of Joy, splashed a large amount of it onto her hand, and reached down the neckline of her dress to spread it, a kind of amulet, across her small bare breasts: on the untroubled pages of those magazines where Joy was periodically proclaimed The Costliest Perfume in the World, nobody sat in her bedroom and heard shots on her dock.

  Her eyes fixed not on the windows but upon the framed snapshots of the children which hung above her dressing table (Knight at eight, standing very straight in a Cub Scout uniform; Julie at seven, the same summer), Lily held her hand inside her dress until all the Joy had evaporated and there was nothing left to do but open the drawer where the .38 had been since the day Everett killed the rattlesnake on the lawn: the drawer in the table by their bed where the .38 should be still and where it was not. She had known it would not be.

  Nine hours before, at four o’clock that afternoon, Lily had decided that she would not go at all to the Templetons’ party. It was entirely too hot. She had been upstairs all afternoon, lying on the bed in her slip, the shutters closed and the electric fan on. Everett was out in the hops, showing the new irrigation system to a grower from down the river; Knight had driven into town; Julie, she supposed, was somewhere with one of the Templeton twins. She did not really know.

  The afternoons always settled down this way. Late in June, after all the trouble, she had begun insisting that everyone lie down after lunch. Although on three afternoons everyone had gone upstairs, on the fourth she had heard Julie talking on the telephone downstairs (“You couldn’t mean it. He swore they broke up months ago”), and on the fifth she was, as usual, alone in the house. Everett and the children had been, nonetheless, extravagantly agreeable about the plan: if there was one word to describe what everyone had been about everything since June, that word was agreeable. It had been all summer as if a single difference among them might tear it apart again; as if one unpremeditated word could bring the house down around them for good.

  She got up and opened a shutter. The heat still shimmered in the air, so concentrated as to seem incendiary. After dinner she would take another shower and throw the windows open and read one of Knight’s books. The floor of his room was stacked with books. It seemed to her that Knight had spent the entire summer packing, unpacking, arranging and rearranging the things he planned to take East to Princeton: he had already packed so many books to ship East that Everett had finally asked if he had reason to believe the Princeton library off-limits to freshmen. “Why leave them here,” Knight had shrugged, and for a few seconds Lily had hated him, had read malice into his bland voice as she watched Everett’s face take on that look of elaborate unconcern.

  At any rate, she would try to read tonight, although she found concentration increasingly difficult; lately she had been able to read only books about Chicago gangsters or by oceanographers. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Mindanao Deep seemed, in their equidistance from her, equally absorbing. She had asked Knight, last week when he was driving to Berkeley, to pick up some new books in one of the paperback bookstores along Telegraph Avenue. The books could no doubt be found, Knight had informed her, right downtown in Sacramento. She did not seem to realize that there were now paperback bookstores in Sacramento. She and his father would never seem to get it through their heads that things were changing in Sacramento, that Aerojet General and Douglas Aircraft and even the State College were bringing in a whole new class of people, people who
had lived back East, people who read things. She and his father were going to be pretty surprised if and when they ever woke up to the fact that nobody in Sacramento any more had even heard of the McClellans. Or the Knights. Not that he thought they ever would wake up. They’d just go right along dedicating their grubby goddamn camellia trees in Capitol Park to the memory of their grubby goddamn pioneers.

  Although she did not suppose that Knight would have brought any new books about either Columbus Iselin or Mad Dog Coll, even to simply sit in the dark and watch the lights on the levee road would be better than going to Francie Templeton’s, where everyone would be hot and someone would drink too much and say something with a familiar edge to it; going to river parties had become unpleasantly like watching reel after reel of badly focused home movies, the prints a little frayed by wear. Here’s the kitchen and there’s Joe Templeton, trying to pour Francie’s drink down the sink; look, Francie’s stamping her foot and it’s not even midnight yet; watch now, here comes little Jennie Mason, looking in the garden for Bud Mason; remember that, because next you’ll see Jennie Mason (who, in a sequence spliced out of this reel, unfortunately but naturally misinterpreted Bud Mason’s presence in the garden with Lily McClellan) being comforted by Everett McClellan; that’s Everett, there in the long-suffering suit. You did not even need audio. You could count on little Jennie somebody, could count on all the same faces, all the same games; at one of Francie’s parties last year, when Ryder Channing had announced belligerently that he owed money to five of the ten men in the room, it had occurred to Lily that she had been to bed with seven, and in four cases could not remember exactly when or where. They were all, now, one error in taste. Although she had not been to a river party since June, she could remember what had happened after that one with the same distorted clarity that hung about the whole of June: it had not been the first party she had deserted for a hotel room, but it had been the first party she had deserted for a room at the Senator, which she thought of, still, as her father’s hotel. Her father had liked the Senator bar, and several times when she was small he had taken her there for lemonade with grenadine. (The morning after that party, clutching Everett’s pillow to her stomach, she had dug her fingernails into her arm until the skin bruised, but by noon, driving to the lake by herself, she had begun again to see it all as Everett’s fault. It would not have happened had Everett been at the party instead of home brooding about his sister; none of it would ever have happened had Everett been there.)

  You better cut it out, Ryder Channing had said in June, that day at the lake which had been part of the trouble, and although Ryder was the last one to have said it, Ryder was right. A party could begin it all again—two drinks, someone from out of town, Everett ignoring her, that was all it would take—and when Everett came upstairs at four-thirty she told him that she did not want to go to Francie Templeton’s.

  “It’s too hot. You go if you want.”

  She was brushing her hair, pulling it down over her face, trying to find the gray Julie had claimed to see among the dark. Lily could not imagine herself with gray hair: in the first place she was not yet thirty-seven and in the second place she had always imagined her style to be striking frailty. You could not, with graying hair, look strikingly frail; you could only look frail.

  “Knight and Julie are going,” she added.

  Everett sat down by the window. Both his face and his khaki shirt were splotched with dust and sweat. “I think you should go. They’re expecting you.”

  “I have a headache,” she said mildly. “I can’t help that, can I. I mean that’s what anybody’d have to call an act of God, isn’t it. Even Francie Templeton. You’ll catch cold if you sit by the fan in a wet shirt.”

  “You and your mother.”

  “It’s congenital. I read it in the Reader’s Digest. Five New York doctors. How to Make Headaches Work for You. Anyway. You go.”

  “All right,” he said without interest. “All right.”

  Everett began whistling tunelessly through his teeth. Only that and the whine of the electric fan broke the silence. Lily was aware that he did not take his eyes from her bare arms as she brushed her hair.

  “We could go away this winter,” he said abruptly.

  “Go away,” she repeated. “Go away where?”

  “We could take a trip. We could take one of those boats that keeps going for forty-one days or something. We could go to Alaska or Australia or Europe or someplace.”

  “Not Alaska, baby. I mean it couldn’t be much fun to go to Alaska in the winter.”

  “Somewhere,” he insisted.

  “Australia. Imagine.”

  “Listen,” Everett said. “I’d like it. We’ve never done that, gone away together. For a long trip. It’ll be good for you.”

  It was unlike Everett to want to go away. Since the war he had left the ranches only for occasional weekends, growers’ meetings, funerals down the Valley; one might have thought him some agrarian Ivar Kreuger, guardian of an ephemeral empire in need of constant control, split-second manipulation. Although she had wanted him to go abroad with her and the children when they went the summer of 1957 (There’s no point if you don’t go, Everett, baby, there’s no use in sending me off alone, it’ll only be the same when I come back, please, Everett), he had refused.

  “Could you get away?” she asked now.

  “I think so.” He stood up and opened a shutter. “Anyway,” he added. “You and Julie could go.”

  “She can’t leave school. She has to study for her College Boards and besides she thinks she’s in love. She thinks she’s going to get pinned to that Beta from Berkeley. I doubt that she could tear herself away long enough to see us off at the boat.”

  “You don’t mean that boy she had up here.”

  “That’s right. That very one.”

  “I didn’t like him. You know I didn’t like him.” Everett paused. “He looked like a little wop in that jacket he wore up here.”

  Lily said nothing. The boy was six foot two, an inch taller than Everett; was almost as blond as Everett had been at his age and as Knight was now; and had worn, one day in July when he drove up to see Julie, a madras jacket identical to one hanging in Knight’s closet. Everett had not liked him because he had made a drink for himself and offered one to Julie.

  “Anyway,” Lily said finally. “That’s not the point, for me to go with Julie. I mean is it?”

  “A trip would be good for you,” Everett repeated without looking at her.

  “It would be just like before.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “A long vacation.”

  She leaned back against the walnut headboard of the bed until the carved leaves cut into her back. A long vacation.

  Sitting down beside her, Everett took the hairbrush from her hand and began to brush her hair. When she let her head drop against his arm he put the brush down and began massaging her shoulders.

  “Julie said she saw gray,” Lily said.

  “That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “She thinks it would be distinguished. She thinks it’s very distinguished of you to be getting gray. Very distinguished and about time. I told her forty was not generally considered the other side of the mountain, and she just looked at me.”

  Everett kneaded the muscles in her neck. “There’s nothing wrong with Julie.”

  “I never said there was. That helps my headache.”

  “Get in bed,” he said, still holding her shoulders.

  She pulled back the sheet with one hand, slid the straps of her slip down with the other, and kicked off her straw sandals. Lying on the sheet, she watched Everett close the shutters again and take off his clothes. She had always liked the rangy way he looked without his clothes. He was the only man she had ever seen whose bones looked right to her.

  “Oh, Christ,” she whispered as she reached for him. “Everett, baby, we’re so tired.”

  Before he was finished she began to cry, a tearless weeping compounded in p
art of pleasure, in part of weariness, and long after it was over she still clung to him, her shoulders moving in faint convulsive sobs, her legs caught around him. (They could lie together now only in the afternoons or in the middle of the night, after both had been asleep; not since the first years of their marriage had they been able to turn out the lights and turn to each other. Some pride overcame them instead, some reticence or aversion. Each, over the years, had read a great deal.) Nerveless, Lily lay listening to the fan, to the mosquitoes, to Knight’s car outside the house; listening without moving to the persistent ring of the telephone and finally to the knocking on the bedroom door.

  “Your ma’s sleeping, Knight,” China Mary called up from the kitchen; “she don’t want no telephone callers now. You tell him he can call back.”

  “Call back, hell,” Everett murmured, half asleep. “Why’d they answer it at all. Why don’t they turn it down so they don’t hear it ring.”

  “Why don’t you go to sleep,” Lily whispered, kissing his cheek. Everett’s aversion to answering the telephone had seemed, when they were first married, a great compliment: we won’t have it known, dear, that we own a tel-e-pho-own. It had taken her almost two years to see that it had nothing to do with her, that Everett was about the telephone exactly the way he was about the mail, as wary as if he were investigating night noises at the basement door.

  “You lie still a minute,” she added, “and I’ll get you a drink.”

  Although she would just as soon have sat on the bed whispering with Everett and drinking bourbon for another hour (the telephone rang twice again), they did, eventually, go downstairs for dinner. Julie was late, coming in some time after the artichokes with her face flushed and her eyes bright, a cotton shirt pulled over her swimming suit and a faded pink grosgrain ribbon tied around her wet blond hair (she had driven Mrs. Templeton’s T-Bird and talk about power on the pullout—not automatic, a straight-stick T-Bird if you can imagine), and somewhere between the artichokes and Julie’s arrival Lily took the telephone call, told Ryder Channing that she could be home, later on, which could have been easy enough but count on her. Everett did not ask who had called (he knew, he always knew) and as she saw the heat and tension tightening the vein on his forehead she knew that she had to say something. What she said, elaborately casual in that rush of confused guilt and love, was that she might go to the Templetons’ after all. Count on her. Never mind. Some of the tension left Everett’s face and it would be all right. She could take her own car, leave early (she did, Everett knew, have the headache), meet Ryder on the dock but only for a few minutes; figure out, later, some way to make it all right, make everyone happy. Dinner, at least, had been saved. Nonetheless, she began to wish immediately that she had never answered the telephone at all, began to wish that she and Everett could have stayed in bed while the sun gradually left the room and the crickets began and the night wind came up off the river (they had done that sometimes the first year they were married, stayed in bed in the falling dark, not talking, drinking a little now and then from the bottle of bourbon Everett always kept by the bed); began to regret that they could not have lain inviolable on that walnut bed from five o’clock until the following morning.