Democracy: A Novel Part 6

Janet's hand had hovered over the sweetened pomegranate juice as if she expected it to metamorphose into a vodka martini.

Inez had watched Jack Lovett. She had never before seen Jack Lovett show dislike or irritation. Dislike and irritation were two of many emotions that Jack Lovett made a point of not showing, but he was showing them now.

"You people really interest me," Jack Lovett said. He said it to Billy Dillon but he was looking at Harry. "You don't actually see what's happening in front of you. You don't see it unless you read it. You have to read it in the New York Times, then you start talking about it. Give a speech. Call for an investigation. Maybe you can come down here in a year or two, investigate what's happening tonight."

"You don't understand," Inez had said.

"I understand he trots around the course wearing blinders, Inez."

Inez remembered: Jack Lovett coming to get them in the coffee shop of the Borobudur the next morning, after the grenade was lobbed into the emba.s.sy commissary. The amba.s.sador, he said, had a bungalow at Puncak. In the mountains. Inez and Janet and the children were to wait up there. Until the situation crystallized. A few hours, not far, above Bogor, a kind of resort, he would take them up.

"A hill station," Janet said. "Divine."

"Don't call it a hill station," Frances Landau said. " 'Hill station' is an imperialist term."

"Let's save the politics until we get up there," Jack Lovett said.

"I don't want to go," Frances Landau said.

"n.o.body gives a rat's a.s.s if you go or don't go," Jack Lovett said. "You're not a priority dependent."

"Isn't this a little alarmist," Harry Victor said. Harry was cracking a boiled egg. Jack Lovett watched him spoon out the egg before he answered.

"This was a swell choice for a family vacation," Jack Lovett said then. "A regular Waikiki. I wonder why the charters aren't onto it. I also wonder if you know what it would cost us to get a congressman's kid back."

Jack Lovett's voice was pleasant, and so was Harry's.

"Ah," Harry said. "No. Not unless it's been in the New York Times."

Inez remembered: The green lawn around the amba.s.sador's bungalow at Puncak, the gardenia hedges.

The faded chintz slipcovers in the bungalow at Puncak, the English primroses, the tangles of bamboo and orchids in the ravine.

The mists blowing in at Puncak.

Standing with Jack Lovett on the green lawn at Puncak with the mists blowing in over the cracked concrete of the empty swimming pool, over the ravine, over the tangles of bamboo and orchids, over the English primroses.

Standing with Jack Lovett.

Inez remembered that.

Inez also remembered that the only person killed when the grenade exploded in the emba.s.sy commissary was an Indonesian driver from the motor pool. The news had come in on the radio at Puncak while Inez and Jack Lovett sat in the dark on the porch waiting for word that it was safe to take the children back down to Jakarta. There had been fireflies, Inez remembered, and a whine of mosquitoes. Jessie and Adlai were inside the bungalow trying to get Singapore television and Janet was inside the bungalow trying to teach the houseman how to make coconut milk punches. The telephones were out. The radio transmission was mainly static. According to the radio other Indonesian and American personnel had sustained minor injuries but the area around the emba.s.sy was secure. The amba.s.sador was interviewed and expressed his conviction that the bombing of the emba.s.sy commissary was an isolated incident and did not reflect the mood of the country. Harry was interviewed and expressed his conviction that this isolated incident reflected only the normal turbulence of a nascent democracy.

Jack Lovett had switched off the radio.

For a while there had been only the whining of the mosquitoes.

Jack Lovett's arm was thrown over the back of his chair and in the light that came from inside the bungalow Inez could see the fine light hair on the back of his wrist. The hair was neither blond nor gray but was lighter than Jack Lovett's skin. "You don't understand him," Inez said finally.

"Oh yes I do," Jack Lovett said. "He's a congressman."

Inez said nothing.

The hair on the back of Jack Lovett's wrist was translucent, almost transparent, no color at all.

"Which means he's a radio actor," Jack Lovett said. "A civilian."

Inez could hear Janet talking to the houseman inside the bungalow. "I said coconut milk," Janet kept saying. "Not goat milk. I think you thought I said goat milk. I think you misunderstood."

Inez did not move.

"Who is Frances," Jack Lovett said.

Inez did not answer immediately. Inez had accepted early on exactly what Billy Dillon had told her: girls like Frances came with the life. Frances came with the life the way fundraisers came with the life. Sometimes fundraisers were large and in a hotel and sometimes fundraisers were small and at someone's house and sometimes the appeal was specific and sometimes the appeal was general but they were all the same. There was always the momentary drop in the noise level when Harry came in and there were always the young men who talked to Inez as a way of ingratiating themselves with Harry and there were always these very pretty women of a type who were excited by public life. There was always a Frances Landau or a Connie Willis. Frances Landau was a rich girl and Connie Willis was a singer but they were just alike. They listened to Harry the same way. They had the same way of deprecating their own claims to be heard.

It's just a means to an end, Frances said about her money.

I just do two lines of c.o.ke and scream, Connie said about her singing.

If there were neither a Frances nor a Connie there would be a Meredith or a Brooke or a Binky or a Lacey. Inez considered trying to explain this to Jack Lovett but decided against it. She knew about certain things that came with her life and Jack Lovett knew about certain things that came with his life and none of these things had any application to this moment on this porch. Jack Lovett reached for his seersucker jacket and put it on and Inez watched him. She could hear Janet telling Jessie and Adlai about the goat milk in the coconut milk punches. "It's part of the exaggerated politeness these people have," Janet said. "They'll never admit they didn't understand you. That would imply you didn't speak clearly, a no-no."

"Either that or he didn't have any coconut milk," Jack Lovett said.

Frances did not have any application to this moment on this porch and neither did Janet.

Inez closed her eyes.

"We should go back down," she said finally. "I think we should go back down."

"I bet you think that would be the 'correct thing,' " Jack Lovett said. "Don't you. Miss Manners."

Inez sat perfectly still. Through the open door she could see Janet coming toward the porch.

Jack Lovett stood up. "We've still got it," he said. "Don't we."

"Got what," Janet said as she came outside.

"Nothing," Inez said.

"Plenty of nothing," Jack Lovett said.

Janet looked from Jack Lovett to Inez.

Inez thought that Janet would tell her story about the coconut milk punches but Janet did not. "Don't you dare run off together and leave me in Jakarta with Frances," Janet said.

That was 1969. Inez Victor saw Jack Lovett only twice again between 1969 and 1975, once at a large party in Was.h.i.+ngton and once at Cissy Christian's funeral in Honolulu. For some months after the evening on the porch of the bungalow at Puncak it had seemed to Inez that she might actually leave Harry Victor, might at least separate herself from him in a provisional way-rent a small studio, say, or make a discreet point of not going down to Was.h.i.+ngton, and of being at Amagansett when he was in New York-and for a while she did, but only between campaigns.

Surely you remember Inez Victor campaigning.

Inez Victor smiling at a lunch counter in Manchester, New Hamps.h.i.+re, her fork poised over a plate of scrambled eggs and toast.

Inez Victor smiling at the dedication of a community center in Madison, Wisconsin, her eyes tearing in the bright sun because it had been decided that she looked insufficiently congenial in sungla.s.ses.

Inez Victor speaking her famous Spanish at a street festival in East Harlem. Buenos dias, Inez Victor said on this and other such occasions. Yo estoy muy contenta a estar aqui hoy con mi esposo. In twenty-eight states and at least four languages Inez Victor said that she was very happy to be here today with her husband. In twenty-eight states she also said, usually in English but in Spanish for La Opinion in Los Angeles and for La Prensa in Miami, that the period during which she and her husband were separated had been an important time of renewal and rededication for each of them (vida nueva, she said for La Opinion, which was not quite right but since the reporter was only humoring Inez by conducting the interview in Spanish he got the drift) and had left their marriage stronger than ever. Oh s.h.i.+t, Inez, Jack Lovett said to Inez Victor in Wahiawa on the thirtieth of March, 1975. Harry Victor's wife.

3.

AERIALISTS know that to look down is to fall.

Writers know it too.

Look down and that prolonged spell of suspended judgment in which a novel is written snaps, and recovery requires that we practice magic. We keep our attention fixed on the wire, plan long walks, solitary evenings, measured drinks at sundown and careful meals at careful hours. We avoid addressing the thing directly during the less propitious times of day. We straighten our offices, arrange and rearrange certain objects, talismans, props. Here are a few of the props I have rearranged this morning.

Object (1): An old copy of Who's Who, open to Harry Victor's entry.

Object (2): A framed cover from the April 21, 1975, issue of Newsweek, a black-and-white photograph showing the American amba.s.sador to Cambodia, John Gunther Dean, leaving Phnom Penh with the flag under his arm. The cover legend reads "GETTING OUT." There are several men visible in the background of this photograph, one of whom I believe to be (the background is indistinct) Jack Lovett. This photograph would have been taken during the period when Inez Victor was waiting for Jack Lovett in Hong Kong.

Objects (3) and (4): two faded Kodacolor snapshots, taken by me, both showing broken rainbows on the lawn of the house I was renting in Honolulu the year I began making notes about this situation.

Other totems: a crystal paperweight to throw color on the wall, not unlike the broken rainbows on the lawn (dense, springy Bermuda gra.s.s, I remember it spiky under my bare feet) outside that rented house in Honolulu. A map of Oahu, with an X marking the general location of the same house, in the Kahala district, and red push-pins to indicate the locations of Dwight and Ruthie Christian's house on Manoa Road and Janet and d.i.c.k Ziegler's house on Kahala Avenue. A postcard I bought the morning I flew up from Singapore to see Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur, showing what was then the new Kuala Lumpur International Airport at Subang. In this view of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport there are no airplanes visible but there is, suspended from the observation deck of the terminal, a banner reading "WELCOME PARTIc.i.p.aNTS OF THE THIRD WORLD CUP HOCKEY." The morning I bought this postcard was one of several mornings, not too many, four or five mornings over a period of some years, when I believed I held this novel in my hand.

A few notes about those years.

The year I rented the house in Honolulu was 1975, in the summer, when everyone except Janet was still alive and the thing had not yet congealed into a story on which the princ.i.p.als could decline comment. In the summer of 1975 each of the major and minor players still had a stake in his or her own version of recent events, and I spent the summer collecting and collating these versions, many of them conflicting, most of them self-serving; an essentially reportorial technique. The year I flew up to Kuala Lumpur to see Inez Victor was also 1975, after Christmas. I remember specifically that it was after Christmas because Inez devoted much of our first meeting to removing the silver tinsel from an artificial Christmas tree in the administrative office of the refugee camp where she then worked. She removed the tinsel one strand at a time, smoothing the silver foil with her thumbnail and laying the strands one by one in a shallow box, and as she did this she talked, in a low and largely uninflected voice, about certain problems Harry Victor was then having with the Alliance for Democratic Inst.i.tutions. The Alliance for Democratic Inst.i.tutions had originally been funded, Inez said, by people who wanted to keep current the particular framework of ideas, the particular political dynamic, that Harry Victor had come to represent (she said "Harry Victor," not "Harry," as if the public persona were an ent.i.ty distinct from the "Harry" she later described as having telephoned her every night for the past week), but there had recently been an ideological rift between certain of the major donors, and this internal dissension was threatening the survival of the Alliance per se.

Inez smoothed another strand of tinsel and laid it in the box. The walls of the office were covered with charts showing the flow of refugees through the camp (or rather the flow of refugees into the camp, since many came but few left) and through an open door I could see an Indian doctor in the next room preparing to examine one of several small children. All of the children had bright rashes on their cheeks, and the little boy on the examining table, a child about four wearing an oversized sweats.h.i.+rt printed OHIO WESLEYAN, intermittently cried and coughed, a harsh tubercular hack that cut through the sound of Inez's voice.

The Alliance qua Alliance.

Add to that the predictable difficulties of mobilizing broad-based support in the absence of the war.

Add further the usual IRS attempts to reverse the Alliance's tax-exempt status.

Add finally a definite perception that the idea of Harry Victor as once and future candidate had lost a certain momentum. Momentum was all in the perception of momentum. Any perception of momentum would naturally have suffered because of everything that happened.

I recall seizing on "everything that happened," thinking to guide Inez away from the Alliance for Democratic Inst.i.tutions, but Inez could not, that first afternoon, be deflected. When the momentum goes, she said, by then plucking the last broken bits of tinsel from the artificial needles, the money goes with it.

The child on the examining table let out a piercing wail.

The Indian doctor spoke sharply in French and withdrew a hypodermic syringe.

Inez never looked up, and it struck me that I had been watching a virtually impenetrable performance. It was possible to construe this performance as not quite attached, but it was equally possible to construe it as deliberate, a studied attempt to deflect any idea I might have that Inez Victor would ever talk about how she left Honolulu with Jack Lovett.

4.

I AM resisting narrative here.

Two doc.u.ments that apply.

I was given a copy of the first by Billy Dillon in August of 1975, not in Honolulu but in New York, during the several days I spent there and on Martha's Vineyard talking to him and to Harry Victor.

UNIT ARRIVED AT LOCATION 7:32 AM 25 MARCH 1975. AT LOCATION BUT EXTERIOR TO RESIDENCE, OFFICERS NOTED AUTOMATIC GATE IN "OPEN" POSITION, AUTOMATIC SPRINKLERS IN OPERATION, AUTOMATIC POOL CLEANER IN OPERATION. OFFICERS NOTED TWO VEHICLES IN DRIVEWAY: ONE 1975 FORD LTD SEDAN (COLOR BLACK) BEARING HDMV PLATE "OYL-644" WITH US GOVERNMENT STICKER AND ONE 1974 MERCEDES 230-SL (COLOR LT. TAN) BEARING HDMV PLATE "JANET."

OFFICERS ENTERED RESIDENCE VIA OPEN DOOR, NOTED NO EVIDENCE OF DISARRAY OR STRUGGLE, AND PROCEEDED ONTO LANAI, THEREBY LOCATING FEMALE VICTIM LATER IDENTIFIED AS JANET CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER LYING FACE-DOWN ON CARPET. FEMALE VICTIM WAS POSITIONED ON CARPET NEAR LAVA-ROCK WALL LEADING TO SHALLOW POOL IN WHICH OFFICERS OBSERVED a.s.sORTED PLANTINGS AND KOI-TYPE FISH. FEMALE VICTIM WAS CLOTHED IN LT. TAN SLACKS, WHITE BLOUSE, LT. TAN WIND-BREAKER TYPE JACKET, NO STOCKINGS AND LOAFER STYLE SHOES. A LEATHER SHOULDER STYLE PURSE POSITIONED ON LEDGE OF LAVA-ROCK POOL CONTAINED FEMALE VICTIM'S IDENTIFICATION, a.s.sORTED CREDIT CARDS, a.s.sORTED PERSONAL ITEMS, AND $94 CASH AND WAS APPARENTLY UNDISTURBED.

OFFICERS NOTED MALE VICTIM LATER IDENTIFIED AS WENDELL JUSTICE OMURA LYING ON BACK NEAR SOFA WITH APPARENT GUNSHOT WOUND UPPER ABDOMEN. MALE VICTIM WAS CLOTHED IN LT. TAN SLACKS, ALOHA TYPE s.h.i.+RT, COTTON SPORTS JACKET, WHITE SOCKS AND SNEAKER STYLE SHOES.

MALE VICTIM EXHIBITED NO PULSE RATE OR RESPIRATORY ACTIVITY.

FEMALE VICTIM EXHIBITED LOW PULSE RATE AND UNEVEN RESPIRATORY ACTIVITY.

AMBULANCE UNIT AND FIRE DEPARTMENT INHALATOR SQUAD ARRIVED CONCURRENTLY AT 7:56 AM, ALSO CONCURRENT WITH ARRIVAL OF MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA, 1173 21ST AVENUE, WHO IDENTIFIED SELF AS REGULAR PARTTIME HOUSEKEEPER AND STATED SHE LAST SAW FEMALE VICTIM PRECEDING DAY AT 1 PM WHEN FEMALE VICTIM APPEARED IN GOOD HEALTH AND SPIRITS. MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA STATED THAT SHE WAS FAMILIAR WITH MALE VICTIM ONLY AS SPEAKER AT RECENT NISEI DAY BANQUET HONORING ALL-OAHU HIGH-SCHOOL ATHLETES OF j.a.pANESE DESCENT INCLUDING INFORMANT'S SON DANIEL M. HAYAKAWA, SAME ADDRESS (NOT PRESENT AT LOCATION).

AMBULANCE CARRYING FEMALE VICTIM DISPATCHED TO QUEEN'S MEDICAL CENTER AT 8:04 AM.

APPARENT BLOODSTAINS REVEALED BY REMOVAL FEMALE VICTIM ALTERED SIGNIFICANTLY WHEN MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA ATTEMPTED TO APPLY COLD WATER TO CARPET. OFFICERS PERSUADED MRS. ROSE L. HAYAKAWA TO TERMINATE THIS ATTEMPT.

MALE VICTIM p.r.o.nOUNCED DEAD AT LOCATION AND RESUSCITATION ATTEMPT TERMINATED AFTER ARRIVAL DEPUTY MEDICAL EXAMINER FLOYD LIU, M.D., AT 8:25 AM. REMOVAL OF BODY PENDING ARRIVAL INVESTIGATING OFFICERS AND OTHER MEDICAL EXAMINERS AT APPROXIMATELY 9 AM.

COPY TO: CORONER.

COPY TO: HOMICIDE.

I was shown the second doc.u.ment, a cable transmitted from Honolulu on October 2, 1975, by its recipient, Inez Victor, when I saw her that December in Kuala Lumpur.

VICTORY STOP THINKING OF YOU IN OUR HOUR OF TRIUMPH STOP (SIGNATURE) DWIGHT.

Despite the signature this cable had been sent, Inez said, not by Dwight Christian but by her father, Paul Christian, on the morning he was formally committed in Honolulu to a state facility for the care and treatment of the insane.