Blue Nights by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

map called Quintana Roo was still not yet a state but a territory.
    The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still frequented mainly by archaeologists, herpetologists, and bandits. The institution that became spring break in Cancún did not yet exist. There were no bargain flights. There was no Club Med.
    The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still terra incognita.
    As was the infant in the nursery at St. John’s.
    L’adoptada , she came to be called in the household. The adopted one.
    M’ija she was also called. My daughter.
    Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.
    As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone “chose” you, what does that tell you?
    Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be “chosen”?
    Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world?
    The one who “chose” you?
    And the other who didn’t?
    Are we beginning to see how the word “abandonment” might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as “frantic”? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn’t one of those words “fear”? Isn’t another of those words “anxiety”?
    Terra incognita, as I had seen it until then, meant free of complications.
    That terra incognita could present its own complications had never occurred to me.

11
    O n the day her adoption became legal, a hot September afternoon in 1966, we took her from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to lunch at The Bistro in Beverly Hills. At the courthouse she had been the only baby up for adoption; the other prospective adoptees that day were all adults, petitioning to adopt one another for one or another tax advantage. At The Bistro, too, more predictably, she was the only baby. Qué hermosa , the waiters crooned. Qué chula . They gave us the corner banquette usually saved for Sidney Korshak, a gesture the import of which would be clear only to someone who had lived in that particular community at that particular time. “Let’s just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management,” the producer Robert Evans would later write by way of explaining who Sidney Korshak was. “A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.” The waiters placed her carrier on the table between us. She was wearing a blue-and-white dotted organdy dress. She was not quite seven months old. As far as I was concerned this lunch at Sidney Korshak’s banquette at The Bistro was the happy ending to the choice narrative. We had chosen, the beautiful baby girl had accepted our choice, no natural parent had stood up at the courthouse and exercised his or her absolute legal right under the California law covering private adoptions to simply say no, she’s mine, I want her back.
    The issue, as I preferred to see it, was now closed.
    The fear was now gone.
    She was ours.
    What I would not realize for another few years was that I had never been the only person in the house to feel the fear.
    What if you hadn’t answered the phone when Dr. Watson called , she would suddenly say. What if you hadn’t been home, what if you couldn’t meet him at the hospital, what if there’d been an accident on the freeway, what would happen to me then?
    Since I had no adequate answer to these questions, I refused to consider them.
    She considered them.
    She lived with them. And then she didn’t.
    “You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer