Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (42 page)

Then Dwight, as I think
l’équipe
has reported in some long-ago posting on Pam’s longest day, hurried over to greet me with the arms of a bear snuffing a forest fire. Understand, he wasn’t asking forgiveness for scorching
Glory Be
’s hash. I was
being
forgiven for sharing a name with the stranger whose book had provoked him.

“PAM!”
he explained. (Cribbed from Ring Lardner, and sorry.) “What was the last thing I saw you at? That sad Buñuel screening at MoMA?”

“Yes, and my God, what a memory.”

“He’s doing better these days. Have you seen
Belle du Jour
?”

“No, and don’t torture me, monster. The last I heard, us poor Americans won’t get our chance for months. I damn near hopped over to Paris when I saw that pic of Deneuve in her bra.”

Fortunately, Dwight never noticed confessions. I suspect Mrs. Macdonald could’ve remarked she’d just murdered a lover and gotten an hour’s cheery thoughts on Julien Sorel. Still, his next question did make me miss Manhattan: “You working on something these days?”

“Little itsy-bitsy something.” Fair description in prepublication preview of
Lucky for the Sun
,
mere plankton in the mouth of Dwight’s whale. “I know what you’ve been up to, though, and Dwight! I don’t see how you do it.”

“Don’t see how I do what?” he asked with a conjuror’s combined pleasure and wariness.

“Well, think how it looks from the outside. Here you spent the Forties trying rather heroically to keep us all reminded of radical politics. Now the revolution’s here, the barricades are going up as we speak—and you’re off in dark rooms reviewing movies for
Esquire
. I swear if you tried climbing Everest, you’d be on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro by sunset. Looking around in an interested way.”

“Let the last part be my epitaph, then.” And it should be: Dwight Macdonald, 1906–1982, mountaineer. “Pam, do you know—sorry, wrong pecking order. Norman, do you know Pam Buchanan?”

Wearing a three-piece pinstripe suit—not what I’d’ve picked to storm the Pentagon in, but I believe it’s the same one he has on in the photographs of his arrest two days later—he was nipping bourbon the way dogs only wish they could car tires. But his eyes were most blue and his handshake was pleasant: “No, I don’t think we’ve met.”

“I do know a friend of yours, though.”

“Oh, who?”

“Doc Selzer.” He was the Holt editor who’d proposed placing the Webster’s definition of “incongruous” in front of “The Gates of Hell” in
Nothing Like a Dame
days. Then he’d moved on to Putnam’s, where I’d gotten some funny letters from him about watching a bleary Norman show up with more revisions of
The Deer Park
.

“Oh, Doc! Of course. Wonderful guy. Really fabulous, super. How is he these days?”

“I thought you’d know better than me,” I admitted. “But I heard the booze got him.”

“Selzer’s an alkie? That’s not the destiny I’d have picked out for him.”

I decided against saying that from an existentialist—Norman’s chapeau of choice when mounting a hobbyhorse—talk of people’s destinies is an oxymoron. Of course they don’t think twice about that when it’s someone else. Before I could find a new topic, his eyes—not at all Bobby Kennedy’s Arctics, more the color of bourbon if bourbon were blue and had interested ice floating in it—grew alert and then pleased with themselves.

“Wait, wait.
Pamela
Buchanan, yes? Now I’ve got it. The
Dame
.”

“Yup. The naked, dead dame, you could say.”

He laughed. “Maybe I should’ve read it.”

“Well, maybe I shouldn’t have read
An American Dream
.
Honestly, Norman—I’ve got to ask, since I bet nobody else has the guts. What do you think your biographers’ll make of your mother being named Fanny?”

The joke’s too long to explain to a bikini girl, but it won me a real look of evaluation. I might be one of those ladies he loved to call “wicked”—not to mention “ladies”—and hence worthy of Normanic interest.

Or I might be a Washington broad with more frenzy than manners, and my guess why I got bumped to the lesser pigeonhole was the old brindle mop, now all gray. A wicked lady would’ve dyed hers. Callie Sherman’s is jet black at ninety.

“Oh, probably no more than they would’ve made of your mother being named whatever she was.” While there was no cruelty in the delivery, I knew I was being dismissed, and so what? There was always Vidal. But Dwight’s hand restrained me—or rather, since I hadn’t turned yet, vouched for me.

“Now,
Lyndon’s
mother,” he said, and believe me the way people said “Lyndon” by then was the opposite of singing “Hello, Lyndon” back in 1964, “was or is named Rebekah. In the Old Testament, that would make him Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Norman, don’t you think ‘Esau Baines Johnson’ has a touch of dark majesty?”

“Not for me. Maybe I just can’t picture him coming from any womb,” Norman said in a revving staccato. “Honestly, Dwight, I think it’s missing the boat to see a man like Johnson as altogether human. I think at some level he’s some kind of energumen, some frightening force glued together out of our darkest impulses in the shape of a President.”

“Oh, Norman,” Dwight said, but stouter critics than he had failed to play brakeman to the Mailer locomotive.

“Without any forethought! Be it said. Be it said,” he went on, free hand raised and voice now so far past staccato I swear Cagney would’ve sounded like NPR’s Diane Rehm next to it. “Try this, try this: the way you might idly mold bits of soap in the shower, mmm?” [Free hand twisting to demonstrate, bourbon glass in the other looking up sadly for Pop’s lost attention.] “We don’t want to step out, grab a towel, and hunt up a fresh bar. Too much bother, the hell with it. Gang, we’re in the shower already! Let’s
make
one.”

“Norman, what you do in the shower and what I do in the shower—”

“Ah! Ah. But you play God with soap at your peril, Dwight. Don’t you see? As we lathered and hummed one fine morning, scrubbing off—what? Ah, of course: Dallas—you could say some dark need had just made us produce an avatar of the national beast at its most demented, when the rider and bronco are one.” As he lowered his soap hand and refound his bourbon glass, its blue twins in his eyes waited for the Nobel or the hook.

“Holy shit, Norman,” I brayed. “You
talk
that way, too?”

He grinned like one of Rafael Sabatini’s pirates, plainly having heard that one before from Mailer virgins. “It’s called value for money, Buchanan, and my
father’s
an accountant with gambling debts. Make of that what you will.”

“Well, just for the hell of it, you might try a
leedle
bit of compassion for the President of these Yew-nited States.” A Lyndomaniac no more, I still missed my two years of inner squealing at the Great Society. “Don’t you realize how many people—not me, but many—would call ‘the rider and bronco are one’ a description of you?”

It was the second time I’d interested him. “Oh, I like that,” he congratulated us both. “It’s not too often I hear a theory of me I haven’t already tested out and discarded. Oh, yes! That’s good, Dwight, don’t you think? Lyndon and Norman. Two riders fused with two horses, galloping at cross purposes in the American night. We’re each trying to warn our fellow citizens the other is coming.”

And I might’ve been forty-seven, but for a lively bourbon-blue moment only undyed gray hair spared my haggard plum from prospective service to American literature. It passed; our hostess hovered. Trying to locate not only podium but tone.

“Can I
possibly
talk you two literary giants into tasting some of my food?” she said, resting her hands in the air above Dwight’s and Norman’s forearms. “Oh! And Pam, you too of course.”

“I’m afraid we dwarves need to go. All that kneeling around the glass coffin is just hell on our short little legs. No, I’m teasing you, silly! I’ve had a lovely time, but I’ve got to get home. Cadwaller’s waiting.” (I’m not sure what prompted that fib.) “Just tell me where you put my coat.”

“Oh, the back bedroom. I’ll—”

“Not at all. This place can’t be so big I won’t find it,” I said, since she was clearly pained by the thought of leaving her two Manhattan sequoias to go help a pine tree glue on some needles. “Thataway?”

The Picasso Quixote was on inevitable display midway down the hall. The Ben Shahn was a bit out of date, though. Then I came to what must be the right door, pushed it open, and stopped. Even to oldsters like me, that sweet smell needed no introduction. And no by-your-leave either, given place and occasion.

On the bed heaped with coats, mine included, knelt two of the flowerized
Vogue
models or
Vogue-
ified flower chickies I’d seen in the living room earlier. The one with the joint pooching her lips and her knee on my coat was nude to the waist with her arms framing her head. The other, bent with hair canted in a Kirstenish spill—not that her
semblable
had even been born yet, but memory plays hopscotch sometimes—was painting a daisy’s petals around the first one’s left nipple, having already finished her right.

“Oh, hi!” said the done and budding daisies’ new owner, lazily smiling. “I’m Claire. Are you doing yours too? She’s good at this, trust me. She does bullseyes too, but heck, at a protest I think that’s just asking for it.”

First thought, appallingly bourgeois:
my
coat. A knee not mine held my coat pinned. With one done and one budding daisy eyeing me like two periscopes, I could no more have gone in to retrieve my usurped coat than I could’ve accepted an invitation to shoot up.

To stand in the doorway explaining and pointing would’ve been not only humiliating but an insult to two girls who were fellow guests and not maidservants. Besides, Claire as my coat’s pinner would no doubt be its fetcher, one done and one budding daisy miming a waltz as she moved her knee, dipped, straightened back up, skipped off the bed, and came toward me with my coat held out and the waltz not yet done, and thank you but no.

Mumbling a handy Goldwynism—“Oh, no. Include me out”—I backed instead until I found the doorknob and pulled. Had an unpleasant memory of the Lotus Eater leaving her clothes and suitcases as she fled Provincetown forty years earlier. Heard a syrupy gurgle of giggles before Kirsten and Claire began quietly singing, but I’m fairly sure they weren’t singing “All You Need Is Love” to me.

The proof poor Pam was now antediluvian was that it hadn’t
been dramatic to them. No panic at all at what they evidently didn’t see—but how could they not?—as an even faintly sexualized, even mildly compromising situation. True, I was female, but their age combined and a stranger. Yet they’d just been happy with what they were doing, saw no need to explain it wasn’t what it looked like or even
was
what it looked like. Claire hadn’t shifted her knee and clapped on Pam’s coat, which would’ve been the coat’s former owner’s first instinct.

I’d liked that coat a lot. To my fleeting panic, so’d Hopsie, but I was calmed by one of the few ways my husband resembled most men. He’d be no more likely to ask what had become of it than I’d be to willingly dawdle in Georgetown Pipe and Tobacco, the one place in Washington where I was often reminded my Cadwaller’d told me that as a boy he’d loved train sets.

Knowing our hostess as slightly as I did, I’d have been reluctant to phone up next day with inquiries. My missing coat might have forced us to turn italicized friends. Since I couldn’t be there myself, something in me liked the idea of Claire going to the March on the Pentagon with one done and one budding daisy hidden in Pam Cadwaller’s hairy old coat. Rather liked the idea of swaying, enjambed, with arms framing my head as Kirsten gave me two bullseyes, too, but from anywhere but inside my mind it would’ve looked like farce and not
neiges d’antan
poetry.

Keen observer of humanity that he was, Norman made nothing of the fact that I’d vanished to retrieve a coat and reemerged coatless. Hell, he’d probably had to leave his
shoes
behind more than once. A fresh glass of bourbon nearby, he hailed me.

“Buchanan, you’re leaving us?” he called, handing off pen and a copy of that bum new novel of his to our hurt (she’d done the stuffed cream-cheese tomatoes herself) but bribable hostess. “Will you be marching on Saturday?”

This wasn’t the time, place, or man to explain about Cadwaller’s job. “I couldn’t for love or money.”

“Anyone can. LBJ could. Isn’t that the point of this insane country?”

“Once upon a time I would’ve. But these days for me it’s all Matthew Arnold.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, Norman! You must know: ‘Now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar retreating.’ And so on and whatever.”

Even though I hadn’t planned to advertise myself on my way out, I’d interested him a third time. “What is that from?”

“Mr. Mailer, do you mean to say you’ve never read ‘Dover Beach’?”

“Maybe in college. You know what they say, we all had a first wife.”

“I didn’t. Not really.”

Posted by: Pam

When the Finns came back from Germany, I saw first that Sean-pronounced-Seen now wore glasses redoodling him as less spooky than spooked, next that Nell had grown gawky and uncomfortably pubescent. A Berlin-born wiggle named Stacy had eyes too young to grasp the perils of augmenting a family we’d all thought was complete. There were times when the State Department’s magic carpet seemed to get stuck in the revolving door of Nagon’s
Palais du Président
.

Nan hadn’t changed much, since the whole point of being the glorious girl was to see how much life she could leap at without changing much. But Ned was forty and hated it, rabbit-punched by a clerical error at odds with Ned Finn-ness. Nan told me that when they last got invited to a costume party—waning custom in our crowd—he’d been eager to give himself Beatle bangs. Of course the Beatles themselves no longer had any.

“Oh, his work is still good. No doubt about that,” Cadwaller reported a month or so later. He didn’t have Ned in Policy Planning, but the Department wasn’t that huge. “But some cog’s getting stuck there. He’d still rather be promising: someone’s clever lieutenant. Not so happy when he’s where the buck stops on that part of the corridor.”

That winter on C Street, so many lights stayed on most nights that our big aircraft carrier for paper planes looked like the
Titanic
to Capitol Hill’s distant iceberg. Even on our way somewhere else, we’d all automatically check our husband’s floor. Night protests terrified Nan when she had to drive the Finns’ down-at-heels Fiat to collect hers, since even a few minutes’ delay might inspire restless, ruddy forty-year-old Ned to nip out for a drink.

Then a taxi the Finns couldn’t afford would lug the half burst suitcase he often resembled back from the District at some ungodly hour, and she had a hard time not blaming the caveman-haired wraiths in field jackets holding candlelight vigils when she was just trying to get across Memorial Bridge. Didn’t they know how all the bills scared her, didn’t they understand she hadn’t started this war? She told me long afterward that fighting down the impulse to honk sometimes drove her to tears.