The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (Vintage International) by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion [Didion, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature, Authors, Professionals & Academics, Journalists, Literature & Fiction, Dramas & Plays, United States, Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages), Drama & Plays
Amazon: B0024CEYTU
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2009-04-02T05:00:00+00:00

5

JOHN AND I WERE MARRIED on the afternoon of January 30, 1964, a Thursday, at the Catholic Mission of San Juan Bautista in San Benito County, California. John wore a navy blue suit from Chipp. I wore a short white silk dress I bought at Ransohoff 's in San Francisco the day John Kennedy was killed. My plan for San Juan Bautista was to have no entrance, no “procession,” just stand up there and do it. It never occurred to me to take off my dark glasses.

I thought about that wedding on the day of Quintana's wedding.

She wore a long dress and a veil and expensive shoes but her hair was in a thick braid down her back, as it had been when she was a child in Malibu. We sat in the choir at St. John the Divine. There were small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. “Wasn't that just about perfect,” she said when she called that evening.

July 26, 2003.

All gone.

Over.

In another world.

I cannot think of what is gone.

If I think of what is gone the difference between then and now will take me.

I won't be there when she needs me.

“When do you have to leave,” she asked me at UCLA the day she could finally speak.

I promised I would not leave until we could leave together.

It occurred to me that this had been, since the day she was born, my basic promise to her. I would not leave.

The neurologists who ask her what day it is also ask her what city it is.

One day she gets it, although not the next.

I report this limited advance to a friend who calls.

There is a silence.

He asks for “the prognosis.”

I notice his uneasiness when I have none to offer.

That doesn't matter to me.

If I can keep her alive John will come back.

He and I will go to Paris again.

She and Gerry will have Thanksgiving again.

I am keeping her alive.

To keep her alive I need to focus.

I need to avoid noticing anything that might lead me back into the past.

Going back has trick currents, unrevealed eddies, you can be skimming along on what looks like clear water and suddenly go under.

Get sucked down.

Get caught in the vortex and let go of her hand.

Lose control.

Lose her.

Feel the water take her.

I first identified this vortex effect when I was watching the ice floes from Beth Israel North. There happened to be a rose-patterned wallpaper border left from the period when Beth Israel North was Doctors' Hospital. Doctors' Hospital led directly to someone I knew when I was working for Vogue, a woman who moved through the Condé Nast offices trailing clouds of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5 and imminent disaster.

This seems a safe line of thinking.

Clear water.

I sail on.

I should see it coming but I don't.

I used a version of this character in Play It As It Lays.

Because there was a snake on the jacket of Play It As It Lays Quintana called it “Mommy's snake book.

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