The Last Love Song (94 page)

Weak but firmly composed, she read a poem she had written for her dad. Just eight months earlier, she had worn white in this cathedral for her wedding. Now she was clad in lusterless black.

“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,” the crowd recited.
“In paradisum deducant angeli.”

Wearing her sunglasses, Didion read a passage from
Harp,
a wry discussion of failing health. She said Dunne saw plainly what was coming while she had steered clear of it. “I thought I got it,” she said. “But I was afraid to look at it. He had a straighter view of his own mortality than I could afford to have.”

Later, in her “magical” delirium, she couldn't comprehend, emotionally, how she could have gone through the ritual of memorializing her husband and saying good-bye, and still he didn't return to her.

2

Quintana had arranged to take Gerry to California a day and a half after the memorial service to walk the beaches of her beloved Malibu and show him where she had grown up. “I had encouraged this,” Didion wrote. “I wanted to see Malibu color on her face and hair again.” Quintana was eager but anxious—packing for a trip always made her nervous, as though she'd lost control of all her things. She asked her mother if she'd be all right in California. Of course she'd be okay, Didion told her. It was a new beginning. She'd see the orchids at Zuma Canyon. She'd see the lifeguards' cozy hut. The hills would be full of wild mustard.

For Didion, too, perhaps the season had turned. The ice floes had melted in the rivers.

Just after seven o'clock on the evening of March 25, Didion's phone rang. It was her nephew Tony, saying he'd be right over. According to
The Year of Magical Thinking,
Didion knew his wife, Rosemary, had been weakened recently by a new experimental treatment for her blood disorder. She wondered if something had happened.

It wasn't Rosemary, Tony told her. It was Quintana.

At that very moment, doctors were performing emergency neurosurgery on her at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

After landing at LAX and retrieving her bag, Quintana had fallen and hit her head on her way out of the arrivals terminal. “[My dad] said she was fine walking one minute. And then fell the next,” Sean Michael said. “It was a fall anyone could have and barely remember a month later. But the blood rushed to the site of the impact in her head.”

Later, Internet gossipmongers spread reckless stories that Quintana had been drinking on the plane and that this was the cause of her fall. These rumors received some support from friends of Quintana's who spoke to a reporter I interviewed (he preferred to remain off the record), and from “reliable” folks who related the story to Claire Potter, a professor of history at the New School. These folks would not go public.

Sean Michael doesn't buy the stories. “Do I know if she was drinking on the airplane? No. No idea. Was not told that by my dad.” Even in her compromised state, given her past experience with alcohol, “she would have had to have had about twelve double Scotches to fall down.” She never got “stupid drunk.” Sean says the simple fact is that she was “light-headed from the blood thinner, her weakened immune system, and the flight itself.” And because of the experimental medication, her natural coagulants had “turned off.” When her head hit the ground, the blood “kept coming like a garden hose attached to your ear, creating almost instant brain damage.”

Forty-two minutes later, doctors drilled into her head “to give the blood an escape route,” Sean said. “At this point, she was considered lucky, as she had only been paralyzed on one side of her body. Her face was a heavy mask on one side—and lit with life on the other.”

*   *   *

The following day, Didion flew from Teterboro to Los Angeles on Harrison Ford's private plane, along with her friend Earl McGrath. Ford “happened to be in New York and heard about Q's condition … and called to offer to take Joan,” said Sean Michael. “I find that to be a beautiful thing,” he said. “A man you hire to build cabinets, thirty years later is flying you in his private jet to your daughter's hospital bedside.”

“You're safe,”
Didion whispered to Quintana in the intensive care unit at UCLA.
“I'm here. You're going to be all right.”

Part of Quintana's hair had been shaved and her skull had been stapled. Once again, she could breathe only with the aid of a tube. Doctors were not sure to what extent she might have suffered brain damage.

On the day the tube was removed, Quintana asked her mother, “When do you have to leave?” Didion said she would not leave until they left together.

For the next five weeks, Didion spent nights at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, reading medical texts, from which she would quote to Quintana's doctors, to keep them on track. Patiently, they tolerated her intrusions. Because she had left New York so quickly and had brought only heavy winter clothes, she bought several pairs of blue cotton medical scrubs to wear to the hospital. Only later did she realize that the doctors might view this as a “suspicious violation of boundaries.”

On April 1, Quintana's physicians inserted a tracheotomy tube to lessen the risk of windpipe damage and pneumonia once the breathing tube was removed. She was transferred from the ICU to an observation room. From the windows at UCLA, Didion said, she could look down into a swimming pool. It was always empty. One day, she remembered the night she had clogged the filter intake of the Brentwood pool with gardenias and floating candles in her misguided attempt to fancy up a party. This memory led her to an image of Dunne wading in the pool, reading
Sophie's Choice.
The trick was to avoid spinning back and back and back in one's mind … a cascade of memories that Didion termed the “vortex effect.” It was hard to stop during those weeks in L.A., driving from hotel to hospital. She wouldn't go near Brentwood. She mapped alternate routes so she wouldn't have to pass through the intersection at Sunset and Beverly Glen, where she used to drive Quintana to the Westlake School for Girls. She did not tune the car radio to her old standby, KRLA, or to the Christian talk station that used to amuse her.

In the evenings, old friends distracted her at dinner: Connie Wald, Susan Traylor and Jesse Dylan, Earl McGrath. They'd go to Orso or Morton's (an old favorite of Dunne's—the vortex whirled very near on those nights). Before going to bed, she'd phone room service and order the following morning's breakfast, always huevos rancheros, one scrambled egg. She kept a tight lid on her routines. Strict lines. A safe little box.

But then the jacaranda would bloom. The Santa Ana would blow. She found herself in tears.

What if she had refused to move to New York in 1988? Would Quintana have come back to California after graduating from Barnard? Could the narrative have been different? No pneumonia—just that healthy Malibu sunshine.

Was Didion responsible for all that had happened?

I'm here.
Maybe that was the problem, she thought.

I'm ready to die, but you and Jim need me
. Her mother had said this on her deathbed to her children, who had lived to be in their sixties.

You're safe. I'm here.
How thoroughly we delude ourselves.

*   *   *

On April 30, 2004, the UCLA doctors determined that Quintana was strong enough to fly cross-country on a Cessna with two paramedics and her mother to be admitted into the Rusk Institute at New York University Hospital for neuro rehab. Didion described the trip in
The Year of Magical Thinking
: They left on a morning when medical helicopters circled the roof at UCLA, “suggesting trauma all over Southern California,” remote scenes “of highway carnage, distant falling cranes, bad days ahead for the husband or wife or mother or father who had not yet … gotten the call.”
A globalizing impulse,
a therapist might have told her of this morose passage:
every depressive's fallback position
. It had always been a key component of Didion's literary sensibility.

But in fact, on this day, from the air, she appeared to be right. Semis were jackknifed and abandoned for miles up and down I-5. The whole state seemed to be in crisis. Truckers were protesting the price of gasoline and had deliberately blocked the freeway.

In the Cessna, Didion sat on a small bench over oxygen canisters while the paramedics tended to her daughter. In a Kansas “cornfield,” where the plane stopped to refuel, the pilots asked a couple of teenagers who managed the airstrip to drive to a nearby McDonald's for hamburgers. Didion took some air on the tarmac. Back in the Cessna, she tore pieces of meat from one of the hamburgers to hand-feed to her daughter. Quintana shook her head after only a few bites. “Am I going to make it?” she asked her mother. Didion chose to hear the question in its most limited sense.
You mean New York?
Are you going to make it to New York?
“Definitely,” she said.

That night, when Gerry met them at Rusk and asked how the flight had been, Didion said they'd shared a Big Mac. Quintana corrected her: “It was a Quarter Pounder.”

From the first of May to mid-July, 2004, Quintana remained in the Rusk Institute on East Thirty-fourth Street, doing physical therapy eight hours a day, regaining her appetite, strengthening her right leg and arm, retraining the muscles around her right eye. On the weekends, Gerry would take her to lunch and a movie. Didion watered the plants in her apartment and visited in the afternoons, watching the koi in the institute's lobby pond with her.

The progress was slow but appeared to be steady. Didion began to imagine recovering a saner daily life. She could not yet concentrate well enough to write. But she could sort through her unopened mail. She could straighten the apartment. She could read.

3

That spring, Seymour Hersh's coverage of the growing Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq gave her something besides medical texts on which to concentrate. As he had done in the case of the My Lai massacre, years earlier, Hersh got hold of official army documents never intended for public consumption. In the May 10, 2004, issue of
The New Yorker,
he reported that U.S. Army reservists, CIA personnel, and private contractors working secretly in the name of the United States government had committed “systematic … sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” on detainees at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were civilians held indefinitely on no specific charges. These abuses included

[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against a wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

One of the prisoners had been punched so hard in the chest, he “almost went into cardiac arrest.”

Hersh's allegations were fully supported by graphic photographs of hooded prisoners manacled or standing spread-eagled with electrical wires attached to their genitals. These photographs had been broadcast on CBS's
60 Minutes II.
Didion had spent months among swollen, pallid faces in intensive care units, and now she wished for blessed relief, but such was the state of the nation in the spring of 2004 that citizens could not turn anywhere without being assaulted by images of American soldiers leering and grinning and flashing thumbs-up gestures behind human pyramids of beaten, naked Iraqis, Iraqi men forced to masturbate in front of American females, or made to simulate oral sex on one another. Newspapers printed a widely disseminated photograph of a dead, blood-soaked body packed in ice and wrapped in cellophane, and an empty room coated in blood.

The military chain of command had fingered a handful of individuals at Abu Ghraib as bad apples, among them Spec. Charles A. Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England. Hersh reported that “senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole.” Yet even this early in the investigation, before the public learned that the Bush administration had legally sanctioned (by questionable means) the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the evidence was clear that there had been “collective wrong-doing and [a] failure of Army leadership at the highest levels.” The army's own internal probe into events at Abu Ghraib turned up the fact that “Army intelligence officers, CIA agents, and private contractors ‘actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses'” (that is, that they create a dungeon).

Gary Myers, a civilian lawyer who had been active in the My Lai prosecutions in the 1970s, signed on to defend one of the soldiers. He told Hersh, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?”

Later, U.S. citizens would hear stories of black sites—secret American prisons—established all over the world. An e-mail trail would reveal that torture continued at Abu Ghraib over a year after the abuse photos had been made public and the United States government swore the aberrations had been corrected.

From the outset, Hersh addressed what Vice President Dick Cheney would offer as justification for violating the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, holding prisoners without charges or legal representation, and subjecting them to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Torture doesn't work, a thirty-six-year veteran of the intelligence community swore to Hersh. People will “tell you what you want to hear. You don't get righteous information.”