The Last Love Song (82 page)

Alone in the Irish town of Roscommon, he felt dull, noticing nothing. If only his wife were here! He got drunk by himself in the bars. He tried to revive his old snooping habits. Randomly, he dropped in on a stranger's funeral Mass, just to see what was up. “Pat Curtin's ma,” a priest told him. “I see.” “The whole town was pulling for her to make a hundred years young.” “Of course.” “Tough as an old boot, she was. And just as mean, if truth be told.”

What the fuck am I—?

If Didion was slightly more focused and vigilant—once she'd recovered from her homesickness—it was because she had a specific assignment, though the story was depressing. Listening, observing, she came to think of her fellow reporters as part of a “small but highly visible group of people who, day by day and through administration after administration, relay Washington to the world, tell its story, agree among themselves upon and then disseminate its narrative.”

She wrote, “They report the stories. They write the op-ed pieces. They appear on the talk shows. They consult, they advise, they swap jobs, they travel with unmarked passports between the public and the private, the West Wing and the green room. They make up the nation's permanent professional political class.” They also moved through restricted landscapes, speaking obscure languages the rest of the country couldn't even begin to access.

*   *   *

While her mother ordered room service at the Hyatt Wilshire and her father sat in a Roscommon pub, Quintana flew to Guatemala and Nicaragua. Between her classes at Barnard, she had worked as a freelancer in the photo department at
Newsweek.
An editor there arranged for her to travel with the photographer Bill Gentile and other journalists covering Nicaragua's civil war and America's involvement in it. When she returned, she published pictures and an account of her experiences in the
Columbia Spectator.

She arrived first in Antigua, for a crash course in Spanish. While there, she stayed with a host family. “I don't know how good an idea it really is,” she wrote. “I can't stand living with a family … I don't know if it's this particular family or the whole idea of it. There's something about going into people's family in general. No matter what, it's always an invasion. You always feel like an imposition and an intrusion.”

She was “scared out of [her] mind” in the city. She'd never witnessed poverty up close, and her memories of New York now—“bankers and artists walk[ing] the streets with a specific intent, looking toward the next deal or lucky break”—seemed like mirages. She took discreet photographs of women carrying knapsacks of corn or wood, or women cooking and sewing by a fire. She “imagined these beautiful people being wiped out in an ambush.”

In Nicaragua, she was wary of eating the red beans, rice, and tough meats sold on the streets. To her fellow travelers, she explained her lack of appetite as a manifestation of dengue fever. “I was afraid and ashamed to tell my secret,” she wrote. “[A] little later, out came the Campbell's, bought at the Diplomat Store”—cream of mushroom, cream of asparagus. She hid chocolate in the drawer with her underwear in her hotel room. “Often, I found myself in the bathroom with the wood roaches and whatever else, just munching away on the creamy, delectable substance. I knew that if someone saw me they would either think I was crazy or just a pig.”

Her irregular eating and sleeping, her inexperience with the language, and her fear wore her down. “Everybody talks so loud,” she wrote at one point. They “scream … in Spanish, while you lay [
sic
] there in total nausea not knowing when next you're going to blow chow.” The vocabulary may not have been her mother's, but otherwise this was pure Didion. “I'm going out of my mind.”

One afternoon, she sat in the bed of a pickup truck with several sweating men, listening to a speech by Daniel Ortega. She was sunburned, exhausted, and hungry. “Tears streamed from beneath my sunglasses,” she said.

Also like her mother, she had a keen eye for striking details: the “dark brown feet in sandals” of a woman lying without a casket in an open grave, “the bottoms of the feet appearing much lighter than the rest: the wrinkles, the dirt, and the hardship.” In Managua, “everything was orange, yellow, dry, and cold,” she said. At a bullfight, when the “bull was lying worn out in the dirt … a man lean[ed] down and [bit] the bull's testicles off, screaming in celebration. He then proceeded to eat the testicles.”

Her photographs of mothers of the missing and dead in front of a Nicaraguan government office were sensitive and telling. On the women's faces, dignity, tough as tree bark, chipped away around the eyes, revealing a soft skin of pain underneath.

Near the end of her stay, she spoke to a boy named Danilo, the son of the woman who “developed and supervised the manufacture of all the uniforms for the Sandinista army.” He had been injured in battle, and still carried shrapnel in his brain. He sat and stared at the sky all day, smoking cigarettes. He told Quintana he could remember pleasant, peaceful years with his family—he “knew there was a time when he was healthy,” but that time belonged to a lost domain. He said, “Everything is different now, and I don't know why.”

Back in New York, she'd gone to work for Sipa USA, the U.S. bureau for Paris-based Sipa Press, a photo agency founded by a Turkish journalist in 1973. The agency distributed thousands of photographs per day to publications and media outlets in dozens of countries. In 1987 it opened its U.S. branch on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. It specialized in editorial news and entertainment content. Quintana was a talented, energetic photographer with field experience, and she had access to people in the entertainment business. While at Barnard, she had served as the photo editor for the
Spectator,
and this made her attractive to Sipa, as well. It had been unusual for a transfer student to enjoy such swift acceptance on the
Spectator
staff (though some of Quintana's classmates thought having famous writer parents didn't hurt); she did solid work. Overall, she was happier at Barnard than she had been at Bennington. During the day, she settled into productive routines, academically and professionally, but she remained intense—
too
intense for many of her acquaintances—and excessive in her partygoing.

She lived in an apartment on 116th Street but rarely stayed home in the evenings. She'd been coming to New York since she was a child: The city was
hers.
Sometimes she'd rent a limo with friends and drive around Manhattan all night, hoisting cocktails in the backseat. She could outdrink most of her peers, female and male, and she was impatient with people who couldn't keep up with her. For a while, she'd heap attention on someone and then drop them without warning.

MTV was just getting started in those days, shooting segments in New York studios. Quintana, who'd been hanging around rock stars since she was a kid, felt right at home with the hip young crowd.

Funny, pretty, and charismatic, she possessed her father's volubility and gregariousness, and her mother's bladelike wit, with no stammering shyness to keep it in check. She was deeply loyal to her family and quick to hold a grudge if she felt any of them had been slighted. All her life, she'd been exposed to heavy drinking and lavish parties, but whether these examples drove her to self-destructive behavior, whether she was truly trying to counter suicidal impulses (
Let me just be in the ground
) or whether she had inherited a tendency toward alcoholism from her birth family were questions Didion never could answer.

At Christmas 1989, once her mother had returned from her California sojourns and her father had finished with Ireland, Quintana joined her parents for a family trip to Barbados. In
Blue Nights,
Didion reported that her daughter “had gone immediately to bed” when they arrived, perhaps a way of saying she'd been drinking on the plane. Throughout
Blue Nights,
Didion remains adamantly indirect, yet nuanced, about Quintana. Didion sat up outside their rented house, listening to a radio, she says; she learned the United States had just invaded Panama. Early the next morning, she woke Quintana to tell her the news—Barbados might be threatened—and Quintana covered her head with the sheet. She didn't care. She said she knew “exactly yesterday” that the United States was going to invade. All the Sipa photographers had been stopping by the office to pick up their press credentials for the Panama story. Quintana burrowed deep into her bed. “I did not ask her why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour fight down,” Didion wrote.

Later Quintana snapped a photo of the ocean and gave the picture to her parents, with an inscription on the back:
“For Mom and Dad. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.”

2

All the travel, the family worries, and the chaos of resettling kept Didion off her feed for several months. She felt she just wasn't
getting
New York this time around.

She'd identified its self-congratulatory sentimentality, but how to talk about it? What to say? Then an incident occurred to sharpen her thinking.

On April 19, 1989, between 8:30 and 9:30
P.M.
, Trisha Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old white employee of the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers, went for her regular evening jog through Central Park. She was discovered four hours later, stripped of her clothing, beaten so badly that her left eye had dislodged from its socket. She had lost 75 percent of her blood, she was suffering from severe hypothermia, and, Didion wrote, “the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain” were “flattened.” Dirt and twigs “found in her vagina” suggested rape.

In 1989, 3,254 rapes were reported in New York City, but
this
was the one singled out by Governor Mario Cuomo as “the ultimate shriek of alarm.”

This was the one with all the requisite elements to fulfill New York's sentimental self-portrait.

“Teen Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path,” read one headline.

“One [assailant] shouted ‘hit the beat' and they all started rapping to ‘Wild Thing.'”

“[C]rimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept,” Didion wrote. The lesson here was that the city's recent economic downturn had nothing to do with the stock market or financial regulation or globalization, but with teen “wolves” (read: nonwhites) infiltrating “our” (read: whites) Edenic park, ruining everything, spreading crime and garbage, and attacking our dynamic young leaders (the victim was “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade”; “fun-loving,” though only “when time permitted”). Furthermore, she was a “Bacharach bride,” Didion said: hardworking, middle-class, and ethical—that is, virginal (metaphorically speaking) in contrast to the dark beasts who went after her on the path that night.

Most of the establishment press refused to announce her name, in order to “protect” her (a “magical” assumption, Didion wrote), while the names of the five boys arrested—one Latino, four African-American—remained on full and constant display, despite the fact that all were minors and they had not yet been arraigned. The journalistic convention of not naming a rape victim, as though rape were a violation of a “nature best kept secret,” Didion saw as further sentimentality—a refusal to acknowledge what had really happened, how
often
it happened in American culture and
why,
or to discuss the matter seriously.

DNA and other physical evidence indicated that none of the five boys was guilty of the rape. There was “no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching blood.” The boys claimed the cops had coerced them into confessing (denying them, in some instances, the presence of their parents or of lawyers)—and, in fact, as the office of the New York district attorney admitted, in retrospect, “The accounts given by the five defendants differed from one another on the specific details on virtually every major aspect of the crime … [and] some of what they said was simply contrary to established fact.” Nevertheless, all five were convicted and served significant jail time. Putting them away was an important step in “taking back” the city, in the city's self-fulfilling narrative.

Meanwhile, Meili, given scant odds of surviving, began to recover. The
New York Post
called her “Lady Courage.” The New York
Daily News
and
New York Newsday
made her “A Profile in Courage.”
The New York Times
said she was a symbol of “New York rising above the dirt.”

Didion bucked the mainstream trend in questioning the fairness of the criminal justice system and in wondering, in print, if the boys were really guilty. In part, she developed her contrariness by turning a disadvantage into a plus. She couldn't get a police pass into the courtroom, so she analyzed the trial
coverage,
the language of the headlines, the strategies of the legal teams
planting
rumors through the very act of denying them. She explained her methods later: “You're going to get it right if you tell yourself a story about it. If you go below the surface, you get it wrong. If you get the surface right, it will tell you the rest.” Once again, she learned it was the edges of a piece where she belonged.

In this case, the edges led her to
The City Sun
and the
Amsterdam News,
papers distributed in African-American neighborhoods. These outlets regularly named the victim, described the assault and its aftermath in detail, and openly questioned what they perceived to be a rush to judgment. As she had done in the 1960s, trolling the underground press for news she'd otherwise miss, Didion turned to alternative sources for narratives countering the dominant sentiment. For example, she heard a statement by the Reverend Calvin O. Butts of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church: “What you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here.” Of course, this was a familiar narrative, too, steeped in its own sentimentality, but like a tributary to a much larger river, it needed to be marked on the map.