The Last Love Song (93 page)

And then he said,
“I don't think I'm up for this.”

Didion knew he meant dealing with Quintana's illness.
“You don't get a choice,”
she told him.

It was after eight o'clock when they reached home. Dunne tossed his scarf and jacket on a chair. Didion laid a fire (all the fires they'd shared! especially on those cold, cozy nights on the coast at Malibu). She got him a Scotch. Fitfully, in the last few days, he'd been reading a bound galley of David Fromkin's
Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?
He pushed the book aside, along with a copy of
The New Yorker,
and set down his drink. Didion walked into the kitchen to start dinner. She set a table in the living room, near the fire, and lit some candles. Dunne asked for a second drink. He was talking to her about World War I, how it had colored the entire twentieth century; he asked her if she'd used the same Scotch in his second drink, because he didn't think it was a good idea to mix two different kinds.

And then he wasn't talking anymore.

Didion looked up. He slumped, his left hand raised. She said,
“Don't do that.”
He didn't respond. She walked over and tried to lift him in his chair, thinking perhaps he had choked on some food. He tumbled forward, hitting his head on the table, and dropped to the floor.

*   *   *

Later, Didion said she remembered Quintana's dreams about the Broken Man—how she'd cling to the fence if he came for her. Somehow he'd gotten in. Into the apartment. Into the ICU at Beth Israel North. So far, Quintana kept hold of the fence. Her father had let go of it.

2

In contrast to her account of that evening in
The Year of Magical Thinking,
in which she said she didn't fully grasp what had happened until after the EMTs arrived from New York–Presbyterian, until after they had worked Dunne over on the living room floor with defibrillating paddles, until after they had transferred him to the hospital and she had followed in a second ambulance, to be met by a social worker, Nick said she told him on the phone, later that night, “The minute I got to him, I knew he was dead. The medics worked on him for fifteen minutes, but it was over.”

At the hospital, she had been escorted into a curtained cubicle, where Dunne lay on a gurney. His face was bruised and a tooth was chipped from when he'd hit the table. Someone asked her if she wanted a priest. She said yes. Someone else placed in her hand her husband's cell phone, watch, credit cards, and money clip.

The person who most needed to know what had happened lay intubated and unconscious in an intensive care unit several blocks away.

Didion took a taxi home and walked into the silent apartment. The fire's embers glowed. The dinner sat untouched. Syringes lay scattered on the floor, left by the EMTs. A little blood darkened the space beneath the table. Dunne's scarf and
Up Close & Personal
jacket still lay across the chair where he had tossed them. His blue terry-cloth robe lay across a sofa in the bedroom. She remembered she used to have, tacked to the bulletin board in her office, an index card listing, in connection with a movie she'd been working on, the amount of time the brain can be deprived of oxygen before damage or death results.

She stood absolutely still, wondering what to do.

She made calls to the family. Gerry offered to come right over, but she said there was no need. Her brother Jim would fly out from California the next day. Somehow, Lynn Nesbit got the news, apparently from someone Nick had called, and arrived to see what she could do. Didion was both rattled and relieved by her presence. Nesbit was swiftly competent and would know what matters needed tending. She said she would call Christopher Lehmann-Haupt about placing an obituary in the papers.

According to Didion, “magical thinking” is an elaborate form of denial, sometimes indistinguishable from dementia.

For example, to announce Dunne's death publicly in an obituary would be to officially sanction and ensure his death, thus barring him from returning.

In the year ahead, Didion would find numerous occasions on which to practice her magic.

Case in point: It was fine to okay an autopsy, because an autopsy would determine the cause of death, which could then be reversed.

She could not throw away his shoes, because he was going to need them when he came back.

Nesbit offered to stay the night, but Didion said she'd be all right alone. She wrote that, the following morning when she awoke, she wondered for a moment why the other half of the bed was empty, and she experienced the same sort of “leaden” feeling enveloping her as she had after she and Dunne had fought.

Nick, Tony Dunne, and Rosemary Breslin accompanied her to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home to identify the body. This was the funeral home Dunne used to pop by in the fifties to see if anybody famous had died, back in the days when he was first courting Didion. The bruises on his face were no longer apparent: the undertaker's form of magical thinking.

The obituary in
The New York Times
read: “Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion were probably America's best known writing couple”—as though she had died with him. They “were anointed as the First Family of Angst by
The Saturday Review
in 1982 for their unflinching explorations of the national soul, or often, the glaring lack of one.”

Of course, he had been felled by the massive coronary he had always expected.

“I knew he had heart trouble. It wasn't a secret. He was always having something done to his heart. Anyone else could have figured out in a flash that he'd die from it. But it came as a surprise to me. That was my fault,” Didion said.

“I couldn't help drawing a line from Q's condition to John's heart attack,” said Sean Michael. “The jeopardy relayed daily by doctors with different diagnoses and different prognoses of recovery … it was too stressful on John.”

As Didion was leaving the funeral home that day, her nephew Tony remarked to the undertaker that a clock in the main office, where they'd had to sign some papers, wasn't running. The undertaker replied in a rather mysteriously self-satisfied way that the clock hadn't run in many years.

3

Nearly three weeks after she'd been admitted to the ICU, Quintana was able to breathe without the aid of the breathing tube. Doctors decided to reduce the sedation so she could gradually awake. They advised Didion not to overload her with information in the first few days, as she would be intermittently and partially conscious, capable of absorbing only so much. The plan was for Gerry to be present with her when she opened her eyes. If she saw her mother, she'd wonder where her father was.

Quintana had other plans. On January 15, 2004, when she awoke, she learned from a nurse that Didion was sitting in a hallway just outside the room. “Then when is she coming in?” Quintana asked.

Didion approached her bed. “Where's Dad?” Quintana asked, her voice a raw whisper.

As calmly as she could, Didion told her what had happened, composing a narrative with the magical implication that, given her father's medical history, this was the way it was supposed to go. Quintana cried. Didion and Gerry held her until she dropped off to sleep again.

That evening, Quintana opened her eyes. “How's Dad?” she whispered.

Once more, Didion described the heart attack.

Quintana strained to make her voice louder. “But how is he
now
?”

 

Chapter Thirty-nine

1

Didion had been grieving, but she had not been able to mourn, to mark her husband's passing ceremonially so as to give it diurnal heft, the community's blessing. She'd had Dunne cremated, but she wanted to wait until Quintana had been released from the hospital before holding a memorial service. Closure was not the goal of the service. She did not believe in closure. The service was the celebration of a life. The lighting of a candle. One last chance, with some form of her husband's presence, to listen to Gregorian chant, a ritual he had always loved.

Grief was another matter entirely. Grief was a type of solitude. It was impolite to burden others with your grief too much or for too long. They expected you to “get over it in time”—for
their
sakes, if not for yours. She found herself standing alone in her kitchen, in the blue twilight, eating at the counter. At first, congee from Chinatown was all she could keep down. Calvin Trillin brought it to her; he seemed to be the one friend who knew how to help her grieve. He understood. He had lost his wife. She told him she wasn't hungry; he said he knew but that the body needed sustenance. He left the congee and withdrew.

Always go to the text.
That had been her default position, but the books she glanced at now, from the cheesiest self-help manuals recommended by friends to more nuanced accounts of psychology to academic studies of behavior, struck her as hollow. They failed to help her cope with what she was feeling. Only a copy of Emily Post's 1922 book on etiquette—which her mother had first showed her when they were snowbound together near the army base in Colorado Springs—soothed her, with its matter-of-fact approach to social necessities and social decorum, and its straightforward practicality: A “sunny room,” preferably next to a fire, is the ideal spot for the bereaved; “[c]old milk is bad for someone who is already over-chilled.”

She'd discovered she'd stopped dreaming. “Don't tell me your dream,” Dunne used to say to her in the mornings, but he'd always end up listening to her.

*   *   *

On January 22, 2004, Beth Israel North discharged Quintana. She was running a fever from an infection she'd acquired in the hospital and she was too weak to stand on her own. Didion and Gerry Michael took her to Didion's apartment. At one point, Quintana got out of bed to fetch an extra quilt and fell to the floor. Didion could not lift her and called for help from a member of the building's staff.

Three days later, Gerry rushed her to the Columbia-Presbyterian emergency room because she was suffering from chest pains and a rising fever.

Here is another clear instance of what happened to her: The doctors at Beth Israel North could have predicted that after her extended immobility she had a high chance of developing pulmonary emboli, but they failed to prepare adequately for this possibility before releasing her.

Columbia-Presbyterian gave “Q a very new-on-the-scene blood thinner” to prevent further clotting while the existing clots dissolved, Sean Michael recalls. “It was meant to create more unrestricted circulatory functions and increase the blood's abilities to fight toxins and win the battle against her system's weakened immune system. It was a super-blood.”

On February 3, she went home again. Along with her mother, Nick, and Tony, she began to plan her father's memorial service, which was to be held at Saint John the Divine. Didion told her she was thinking of reading W. H. Auden's “Funeral Blues,” because the poem so perfectly captured the anger and helplessness she'd felt: “For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Quintana begged her not to read the poem. Everything about it was “wrong,” she said. Didion acquiesced to her daughter's “vehement” request.

The memorial was scheduled for March 23 at four o'clock in the afternoon (Liz Smith announced in her newspaper gossip column that it would be the “place to be” in New York that day). In the weeks prior, Didion became a fierce and no-nonsense organizer. She arranged to have the marble plate on which her mother's name was inscribed recut to include her husband's. His ashes would rest next to Eduene's. She checked with friends who planned to speak, discussed what they were going to say, and offered suggestions. Susanna Moore was staying at the American Academy in Rome, but she adjusted her schedule to attend the service. Initially, Didion asked Moore to read a passage from
Henry V
that Dunne had always loved—all about reaching home safely. Finally, she decided the last section of Eliot's “East Coker” would be best, the part about mastering language when one no longer has anything to say.

Between e-mail discussions of poetry and grief, the women shared the horrors of osteoporosis, of Fosomax and exercise, the disgusting spectacle of aging. Later, in interviews, Didion would insist she never saw herself as old: “When John was alive, I saw myself through his eyes, and he saw me as how old I was when we got married.” Marriage, she would say, was a journey through time but it was also a denial of time.

She told Moore it was heartening to hear how much she'd fallen in love with the beauties of Rome (in contrast to dirty New York); Moore's Roman rhapsodies had helped Didion see the world's possibilities again.

Dunne's memorial was an afternoon of “literature, liturgy, and laughter,” said a
New York Times
reporter. “He understood the disastrous cardiovascular hand he'd been dealt, so he wasted nothing,” David Halberstam remarked in his eulogy. He talked about Dunne's final, unfinished project, a book on contemporary patriotism and the “ever-widening gap” between people in the Bush administration—like his old Princeton classmate Donald H. Rumsfeld—who'd managed to avoid military service but who were now making war decisions, and the young men and women on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moore read the “East Coker” passage and Nick read Catullus's “On His Brother's Death.” Calvin Trillin recalled Dunne's love of gossip. There were readings from Ogden Nash and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Quintana's old friend Susan Traylor shared memories of attending a prostitute's trial in Hawaii with Dunne—his idea of taking the girls on vacation—and of going to a party at Mick Jagger's with him (he thought it was okay for the girls to miss school the next day). Daniel Morrissey, a Roman Catholic priest, read from the Gospel of Luke and from Saint Thomas Aquinas. He spoke of the God Dunne “wrestled with.” Quintana had asked that the Gregorian chant be in Latin.