Blue Nights by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page B

Southern California does have seasons (it has for example “fire season” or “the season when the fire comes,” and it also has “the season when the rain comes,” but such Southern California seasons, arriving as they do so theatrically as to seem strokes of random fate, do not inexorably suggest the passage of time. Those other seasons, the ones so prized on the East Coast, do. Seasons in Southern California suggest violence, but not necessarily death. Seasons in New York—the relentless dropping of the leaves, the steady darkening of the days, the blue nights themselves—suggest only death. For my having a child there was a season. That season passed. I have not yet located the season in which I do not hear her crooning back to the eight-track.
    I still hear her crooning back to the eight-track.
    I wanna dance .
    The same way I still see the stephanotis in her braid, the plumeria tattoo through her veil.
    Something else I still see from that wedding day at St. John the Divine: the bright red soles on her shoes.
    She was wearing Christian Louboutin shoes, pale satin with bright red soles.
    You saw the red soles when she kneeled at the altar.

14
    B efore she was born we had been planning a trip to Saigon.
    We had assignments from magazines, we had credentials, we had everything we needed.
    Including, suddenly, a baby.
    That year, 1966, during which the American military presence in Vietnam would reach four hundred thousand and American B-52s had begun bombing the North, was not widely considered an ideal year to take an infant to Southeast Asia, yet it never occurred to me to abandon or even adjust the plan. I even went so far as to shop for what I imagined we would need: Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif .
    In the end this trip to Saigon did not take place, although its cancellation was by no means based on what might have seemed the obvious reason—we canceled, it turned out, because John had to finish the book he had contracted to write about César Chávez and his National Farm Workers Association and the DiGiorgio grape strike in Delano—and I mention Saigon at all only by way of suggesting the extent of my misconceptions about what having a child, let alone adopting one, might actually entail.
    How could I not have had misconceptions?
    I had been handed this perfect baby, out of the blue, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She could not have been more exactly the baby I wanted. In the first place she was beautiful. Hermosa, chula . Strangers stopped me on the street to tell me so. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” Blake Watson had said, and he did. Everyone sent dresses, an homage to the beautiful baby girl. There the dresses were in her closet, sixty of them (I counted them, again and again), immaculate little wisps of batiste and Liberty lawn on miniature wooden hangers. The miniature wooden hangers, too, were a gift to the beautiful baby girl, another homage from her instantly acquired relatives, besotted aunts and uncles and cousins in West Hartford (John’s family) and Sacramento (mine). I recall changing her dress four times on the afternoon the State of California social worker made her mandated visit to observe the candidate for adoption in the home environment.
    We sat on the lawn.
    The candidate for adoption played at our feet.
    I did not mention to the social worker that Saigon had until recently figured in the candidate’s future.
    Nor did I mention that current itineraries called for her to sojourn instead at the Starlight Motel in Delano.
    Arcelia, who cleaned the house and laundered the wisps of batiste, busied herself watering, as anticipated.
    “As anticipated” because I had prepped Arcelia for the visit.
    The thought of an unstructured encounter between Arcelia and a State of California social worker had presented