Democracy by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online Page A

at hand,’ as you put it, is substance habituation.” The therapist opened a drawer and extracted an ashtray and slid it across the desk toward Inez. She was still smiling. “I notice you smoke.”
    “I do, yes.” Inez crushed out the cigarette and stood up. Jessie’s complexion was clear and her hair was like honey and there was no way of telling that beneath the sleeves of the Dalton School sweatshirt there were needle tracks visible on her smooth tanned arms. “I also drink coffee.”
    The therapist’s expression did not change.
    Let me die and get it over with.
    Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.
    Don’t tell Daddy.
    Inez picked up her jacket.
    On the other side of the glass partition Jessie took a pocket mirror from her shoulder bag and began lining her eyes with the IBM testing pencil.
    “What I don’t do is shoot heroin,” Inez said.
    The second therapist believed that the answer lay in a closer examination of the sibling gestalt. The third employed a technique incorporating elements of aversion therapy. At the clinic in Seattle to which Jessie was finally sent in the fall of 1974, a private facility specializing in the treatment of what the fourth therapist called adolescent chemical dependency, the staff referred to the patients as clients, maintained them on methadone, and obtained for them part-time jobs “suited to the character structure and particular skills of the individual client.” Jessie’s job was as a waitress in a place on Puget Sound called King Crab’s Castle. “Pretty cinchy,” Jessie said on the telephone, “if you can keep the pickled beet slice from running into the crab louis.”
    The bright effort in Jessie’s voice had constricted Inez’s throat.
    “It’s all experience,” Inez said finally, and Jessie giggled.
    “Really,” Jessie said, emphasizing the word to suggest agreement. She was not yet eighteen.

10
    O THER COSTS .
    Inez had stopped staying alone in the apartment on Central Park West after the superintendent told a reporter from Newsday that he had let himself in to drain a radiator and Mrs. Victor had asked him to fix her a double vodka. She took fingernail scissors and scratched the label off empty prescription bottles before she threw them in the trash. She stopped patronizing a bookstore on Madison Avenue after she noticed the names, addresses, and delivery instructions for all the customers, including herself (“doorman-Lloyd, maid lvs at 4”) in an open account book by the cash register. She would not allow letters that came unsolicited from strangers to be opened inside the apartment, or packages that came from anyone. She had spoken to Billy Dillon about the possibility of suing People for including Adlai’s accidents in an article on the problems of celebrity children, and also of enjoining Who ’ s Who to delete mention of herself and Jessie and Adlai from Harry Victor’s entry. “I don’t quite see the significance, Inez,” Billy Dillon had said. “Since I see your name in the paper two, three times a week minimum.”
    “The significance is,” Inez said, “that some stranger might be sitting in a library somewhere reading Who ’ s Who. ”
    “Consider this stranger your bread and butter, an interested citizen,” Billy Dillon said, but Inez never could. Strangers remembered. Strangers suffered disappointments, and became confused. A stranger might suffer a disappointment too deep to be lanced by a talk with Newsday , and become confused. Life outside camera range, life as it was lived by (Inez imagined then) her father and her Uncle Dwight and her sister Janet, had become for Inez only a remote idea, something she knew about but did not entirely comprehend. She did not for example comprehend how her father could give her telephone number to strangers he met on airplanes, and then call to remonstrate with her when he heard she had been short on the telephone. “I think you might have spared ten minutes,” Paul Christian had said