Blue Nights. Joan Didion
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who took so assiduously removed a view of our suburbia house in Brentwood had until then been able to look from her second-floor sitting-room windows. The termites, I was quite sure, would come back. The pink magnolia, I was also quite sure, would not.
We closed the deal and moved to New York.
Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married.
Where I have lived again since 1988.
Why then do I say I lived much of this time in California?
Why then did I feel so sharp a sense of betrayal when I exchanged my California driver’s license for one issued by New York? Wasn’t that actually a straight forward enough transaction? Your birthday comes around, your license needs renewing, what difference does it make where you renew it? What difference does it make that you have had this single number on your license since it was assigned to you at age fifteen-and-a-half by the state of California? Wasn’t there always an error on that driver’s license anyway? An error you knew about? Didn’t that license say you were five-foot-two? When you knew perfectly well you were at best—(max height, top height ever, height before you lost a half inch to age)—when you knew perfectly well you were at best five-foot-one-and-three-quarters?
Why did I make so much of the driver’s license?
What was that about?
Did giving up the California license say that I would never again be fifteen-and-a-half?
Would I want to be?
Or was the business with the license just one more case of “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event”?
I put “the apparent inadequacy of the precipitating event” in quotes because it is not my phrase.
Karl Menninger used it, in Man Against Himself, by way of describing the tendency to overreact to what might seem ordinary, even predictable, circumstances: a propensity, Dr. Menninger tells us, common among suicides. He cites the young woman who becomes depressed and kills herself after cutting her hair. He mentions the man who kills himself because he has been advised to stop playing golf, the child who commits suicide because his canary died, the woman who kills herself after missing two trains.
Notice: not one train, two trains.
Think that over.
Consider what special circumstances are required before this woman throws it all in.
“In these instances,” Dr. Menninger tells us, “the hair, the golf, and the canary had an exaggerated value, so that when they were lost or when there was even a threat that they might be lost, the recoil of severed emotional bonds was fatal.”
Yes, clearly, no argument.
“The hair, the golf, and the canary” had each been assigned an exaggerated value (as presumably had the second of those two missed trains), but why? Dr. Menninger himself asks this question, although only rhetorically: “But why should such extravagantly exaggerated over-estimations and incorrect evaluations exist?” Did he imagine that he had answered the question simply by raising it? Did he think that all he had to do was formulate the question and then retreat into a cloud of theoretical psychoanalytic references? Could I seriously have construed changing my driver’s license from California to New York as an experience involving “severed emotional bonds”?
Did I seriously see it as loss?
Did I truly see it as separation?
And before we leave this subject of “severed emotional bonds”:
The last time I saw the house in Brentwood Park before its title changed hands we stood outside watching the three-level Allied van pull away and turn onto Marlboro Street, everything we then owned, including a Volvo station wagon, already inside and on its way to New York. After the van moved out of sight we walked through the empty house and out across the terrace, a good-bye moment rendered less tender by the lingering reek of Vikane in the house and the stiff dead leaves where the pink magnolia and stephanotis had been. I smelled Vikane even in New York, every time I unpacked a carton. The next time I was in Los Angeles and drove past the house it was gone, a teardown, to be replaced a year or two later by a house marginally bigger (a new room over the garage, an additional foot or two in a kitchen already large enough to accommodate a square Chickering grand piano that remained mostly unnoticed) but lacking (for me) the resolute conventionality of the original. Some years later in a Washington bookstore I met the daughter, the one the buyer had said he could picture marrying in the garden. She was at school somewhere in Washington (Georgetown? George Washington?), I was there to give a reading at Politics and Prose. She introduced herself. I grew up in your house, she said. Not exactly, I refrained from saying.
John always said we moved “back” to New York.
I never did.
Brentwood Park was then, New York was now.
Brentwood Park before the Vikane had been a time, a period, a decade, during which everything had seemed to connect.
Our suburbia house in Brentwood.
It was exactly that. She called it.
There had been cars, a swimming pool, a garden.
There had been agapanthus, lilies of the Nile, intensely blue starbursts that floated on long stalks. There had been gaura, clouds of tiny white blossoms that became visible at eye level only as the daylight faded.
There had been English chintzes, chinoiserie toile.
There had been a Bouvier des Flandres motionless on the stair landing, one eye open, on guard.
Time passes.
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Even memory of the stephanotis in her braid, even memory of the plumeria tattoo showing through the tulle.
It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripedes said that.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
I said that.
I think now of that July day at St. John the Divine in 2003 and am struck by how young John and I appeared to be, how well. In actual fact neither of us was in the least well: John had that spring and summer undergone a series of cardiac procedures, most recently the implantation of a pacemaker, the efficacy of which remained in question; I had three weeks before the wedding collapsed on the street and spent the several nights following in a Columbia Presbyterian ICU being transfused for an unexplained gastrointestinal bleed. “You’re just going to swallow a little camera,” they said in the ICU when they were trying to demonstrate to themselves what was causing the bleed. I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera.
“Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.”
A pause. The attempt at briskness declined into wheedling:
“It’s really a very little camera.”
In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera. Similarly, in another less than entirely efficient use of high-tech medicine, John could hold a telephone to his heart, dial a number, and get a reading on the pacemaker, which proved, I was told, that at the given instant he dialed the number (although not necessarily before or after) the device was operating.
Medicine, I have had reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect