The Last Love Song (22 page)

“In ‘Goodbye to All That,' she says she stayed up all night with Noel—he's unnamed in the piece—and called on a friend at four in the morning to go to the White Rose Bar. That was me,” Dan Wakefield said. “They knew I was always up for that.”

Maybe afterward, Noel wouldn't show for days.

The stories “Coming Home,” “The Welfare Island Ferry,” and “When Did Music Come This Way? Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?” document a vexed dynamic.

She would press a suit coat he'd left in her closet—a kind of magical gesture to draw him back to her, or she'd have his dirty shirts and the striped bedsheets laundered. He'd
have
to come back for his shirts. Late one evening, he'd call to say he was someplace uptown, an important appointment, and he'd be there in forty minutes—no, fifty … maybe a couple hours—or maybe she could meet him in a bar down in the Village. She'd throw her raincoat over her nightgown and rush into the streets. Over beers, he'd tell her she needed more color in her face. She needed to
see
people. She only wanted to see him. A little later,
she'd
be the one suggesting they stop at a party. He could use a mood lift, the excitement of new people, she said. New people? He'd
met
all the new people. He'd already slept with most of them. He owed them money.

The story about sleeping with all the “new people” got “attached to me,” Parmentel admitted, because “Oleg Cassini—he was always with Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy—made a joke once that he went to a party and realized he'd slept with everybody in the room. I was repeating that story.”

Some mornings, walking to work, Didion would spot young mothers coming from the Donnell Library, wheeling home Winnie-the-Pooh books in baby carriages. She tried to imagine the women's lives. Cut daffodils in vases on dining room tables, lacquer trays, checkbook registers perfectly up-to-date. And the babies. It was hard to believe any of the
femmes du monde
at Condé Nast would ever have babies. Most of them were trying
not
to.

Throughout the day, every day, there was sobbing in the ladies' rooms. There were “rumors of abortions, all of which seemed to have been performed in Hoboken,” Mary Cantwell said. “Fetuses were swimming in the sewers of New Jersey.” Sometimes, after miscarriages, fetuses were quietly disposed of by doctors in the old Doctors Hospital, which was also pegged as a drying-out center for many editors when word got out that if you didn't catch them early in the day, they wouldn't be able to hold a coherent conversation with you.

One morning, one of Didion's colleagues told her she needed an abortion
and
she'd heard the district attorney's office had found her name on a “party girl” list making its way around town. She made a deal to rat out the good-time racket in exchange for the DA's arranging a legal D & C at Doctors Hospital. Didion would use this incident in a scene in
Play It As It Lays.

It wasn't Doctors Hospital, but at Columbia-Presbyterian on East Sixty-seventh Street where Didion took
her
anxieties. An internist there whose mother-in-law had once been editor in chief at
Vogue
calmed her whenever she came to him frantic because her period was a day late.
Blue Nights
mentions the day he told her she'd need a ticket to Havana, his way of saying her rabbit test indicated an abortion might be in the cards and he would arrange it.

But there's a revolution in Cuba, Didion protested, uncomprehending.

The doctor misted plants on the bookshelves in his office. There's
always
a revolution in Cuba, he told her. Within days, she started bleeding. All night she cried—from relief, she thought. Then she realized she
wanted
a child.

In the mornings, now, the baby carriages near Donnell Library made her ache. On the evenings when Parmentel didn't arrive, she'd cut baby-food ads out of the paper and tack them to the wall beside her bed. In
Blue Nights,
she calls her sudden longing for a child a “tidal surge.” She'd stare at the babies' eyes and imagine the children were hers. She'd burrow into blankets and squeeze her pillow.

*   *   *

It was clear. She needed not to attend more parties but to assert control, the control of a woman who could keep a checkbook.

Maybe they'd
feel
better if they got married, made some plans, she said to Parmentel. He demurred. Or he'd turn the talk from babies to sex.

What if she got pregnant? she asked him. He made it plain she'd be on her own.

(The question, “
Did
Didion ever get pregnant in New York?”—relevant because abortion became a central subject in her first three novels—her friends politely chose not to answer.)

She imagined being done with Parmentel, saying to him from now on they'd just be buddies.

What if the Queens tunnel started to crack one day while she was in it? What if a gas main exploded beneath her feet?

She thought of men she suspected of wanting her, men who liked her. Greg Dunne. They met for lunch occasionally, talked about writing. She enjoyed the affected way he greeted her with “Howdy,” more like a Texan than an Eastern Irish Catholic (in fact, he said “Howdy” because he'd been a stutterer as a boy and still tripped on the word
hello
). They were comfortable together. They had a fine time, even if he
had
voted for JFK. One afternoon, he confessed to her that he loved poking around mailboxes in brownstone lobbies to discover who lived where. Serendipitously, he had located Tammy Grimes and Henry Fonda. She joined him for a round of snooping. They laughed a lot, and he told her he looked forward to their next lunch.

She wasn't eating much these days. Her stomach was usually upset. She had a yeast infection and often ran a fever. Sometimes she'd stare at a plate of pasta and it would look like a nest of snakes.

Nicky Haslam, an interior designer hired by
Vogue
's Art Department, said that, in the office, Didion “spent most of every morning in tears following a disastrous evening, but by afternoon had put on lipstick and Fleurs de Rocaille, transforming herself into the most desirable, delicious, funny, and perceptive dinner date.”

*   *   *

On visits to her parents in Sacramento, she'd sit in her old bedroom, remembering fireworks in the summer skies during the state fair; the marbled columns in old San Francisco hotels; her mother's warning, “All the fruit's going,” during a flood when Didion was a girl; drinking beer or vodka and orange juice in the desert as a teenager, smelling of chlorine, sweat, and Lava soap, snuggling into a boy's shirt stiff with dirt and starch. She couldn't stand to stay in Sacramento, but she didn't want to return to New York. Her father told her it was okay to go back. He'd remind her she had to sit at the table to play. Years later, her mother told her she'd acted so listless on these visits, Eduene feared she was dying and just didn't want to tell them.

Always, it seemed, she got a run in her stockings on the flights back east. Her neck would hurt from sleeping against the window. She feared the landing gear wouldn't work. Invariably, New York was cold upon arrival, but then within days the heat would top ninety and people would pull ice cubes from tumblers of bourbon and run them along their arms.

One day, she found herself standing in the rain near Grand Central Terminal, trying to flag a taxi. It seemed she'd been standing there for hours without realizing it. A man came up and spoke to her. She started to cry. She feared she would never move from that spot.

Another day, she had thrown up after lunch. Once she got home, she emptied an ice tray into her bed. Maybe she could
freeze
the damn migraine.

3

“One incident I remember was very shocking to me,” Parmentel recalled. “I said [to Joan], ‘You ought to do a piece on the grand old hotels. She did and sent it to, I think,
American Heritage.
They sent it back, and she cried and cried and cried. I couldn't believe how hard she was taking it. She said this made her feel like when she hadn't been admitted to Stanford. I felt so bad for her that I sent the piece to somebody I'd met at
Esquire
and said, ‘For Christ's sake, publish this thing—it's breaking her heart.' And they did.”

A little later, during the excitement surrounding the founding of
The New York Review of Books,
he recommended Didion to Jason Epstein. “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for Buckley?” Epstein responded.

Throughout this period, to cheer her up (and perhaps to take some pressure off himself), Parmentel urged her to take short trips, eat a little, put on weight, get a bit of color into her skin. In the fall of 1962, she flew to California to vote in the Republican primary for a man named Joe Shell who was running against Richard Nixon. Nixon was too liberal for her. “Those Okies she grew up with were getting educated and taking over, and she was contemptuous of them,” Parmentel said.

This act of pioneer citizenship gave her a glow, but soon it was gone. Off and on, she'd figured things were stalled with Parmentel, and the job at
Vogue
had “tapped into a certain vein of discontent,” she said, “a definite sense that I was marking time, not doing what I thought I should be doing, which was finishing a novel that then existed only in pieces Scotch-taped to the walls of my … apartment.”

Could she start over? Do something different?

Despite her ambition and drive, she had refused to believe she was locked into the consequences of her decisions. Like a gambler, she liked to keep her options open. Another way of saying this, she realized, was that she didn't want to grow up.

When she'd first got to New York, she had taken a correspondence course through the University of California Extension on shopping-center theory, a gesture in the direction of staying flexible—staying young—and
having it all.
She wanted to write fiction, but she was not deluded into thinking literature would pay the bills; if she could collect the capital and develop a series of regional centers in the West, lining up a department store as a mall's major tenant, or maybe even a neighborhood center or two with a supermarket chain as the anchor, she could fund her writing habit—she
was
her father's daughter! (As she dreamed of this, she recalled summer days in California with her brother, Jim, building model villages with matchboxes along the banks of irrigation ditches, planning the tiny cities' growth, watching them crumble into the ravines.) In her early days at
Vogue,
she'd sit on Irving Penn's studio floor reading
The Community Builder's Handbook.
Her colleagues didn't see the beauty of her plan—all those tasteless prefab buildings (beloved of the West, with so much space to fill). But she understood the value of malls: They were the same everywhere, “equalizers” in the “sedation of anxiety.” The problem with her plan was not tastelessness or the difficulty of raising the scratch. A few months in New York taught her there were challenges unaccounted for by theory: government regulations, unions, the mob.

So she sought another direction. “I was bored … and I was having trouble with the novel … and I was tired of living this way, and so I decided to become an oceanographer,” she recalled. She had always been fascinated by marine geography and “how deep things are.” “So I went out to Scripps Institute to try to find out how to implement this and, of course, I learned that I was so lacking in basic science that I would have to go back to the seventh grade and start over.”

Going back to seventh grade would certainly be a way of not growing up, but it was impractical. What she'd been avoiding was this: The desire to remain a child, untouched by consequences, was the real problem, a difficulty none of her New York friends seemed willing to face. It turned out that her body was ahead of her mind in grasping at least one practical course of action.

She tacked another baby-food ad to her wall.

*   *   *

On the “bad afternoon” when her break from Parmentel became official, she understood the terror of adult life: It was the need to make promises against an “amoral vacuum.” “Making anything at all matter has never been easy,” she wrote years later, recalling that day.

“Goodbye to All That” suggests
she
made the break. Dan Wakefield remembered it differently. “Noel came over to my place the day he convinced her he was never going to get married and have children,” he told me.

In any case, she hoped she and Noel could stay friends. He was certainly a boon to her professionally.

She didn't comprehend how he could just stand there, listening to her so unmoved. He told her a lot had happened to him before he knew her, and “nothing much touched him anymore.” She said she never wanted to get the way he was. “Nobody wants to,” he said. “But you will.”

4

Greg Dunne's apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, in a block of flats built in the late 1930s, faced south and overlooked an identical building across the street managed by the same property owner. From his window he could see into an apartment just like his, with a decorative fireplace and the same number of light fixtures (four bulbs in the living room, three in the bedroom, and two in the kitchen). In
Vegas
(1974), a book Dunne described as a “memoir” as well as a “fiction which recalls a time … real and imagined,” he said that while living in this apartment he discovered he had a “capacity for voyeurism” similar to a “virus lodged in [his] upper respiratory system.” (In a letter to journalist Jane Howard, he admitted the phrase “real and imagined” was a ruse, designed to hide the book's autobiographical core.)