“Everybody except Janet,” Inez said, but she said it only to Jack Lovett.
Eight hours later they did it again and again it was flat and at 7:40 P.M. on Thursday, March 27, Janet Christian Ziegler was pronounced dead. During most of the almost twenty-four hours preceding this pronouncement Inez had waited on a large sofa in an empty surgical waiting room. During much of this time Jack Lovett was with her. Of whatever Jack Lovett said to Inez during those almost twenty-four hours she could distinctly remember later only a story he told her about a woman who cooked for him in Saigon in 1970. This woman had tried, over a period of some months, to poison selected dinner guests with oleander leaves. She had minced the leaves into certain soup bowls, very fine, a chiffonade of hemotoxins. Although none of these guests died at least two, a Reuters correspondent and an AID analyst, fell ill, but the cook was not suspected until her son-in-law, who believed himself cuckolded by the woman’s daughter, came to Jack Lovett with the story.
“What was the point,” Inez said.
“Whose point?”
“The cook’s.” Inez was drinking a bottle of beer that Jack Lovett had brought to the hospital. “What was the cook’s motive?”
“Her motive.” Jack Lovett seemed not interested in this part of the story. “Turned out she was just deluded. A strictly personal deal. Disappointing, actually. At first I thought I was onto something.”
Inez had finished the beer and studied Jack Lovett’s face. She considered asking him what he had thought he was onto but decided against it. After this little incident with the cook he had given up on housekeeping, he said. After this little incident with the cook he had gone back to staying at the Duc. Whenever he had to be in Saigon.
“You liked it there,” Inez said. The beer had relaxed her and she was beginning to fall asleep, holding Jack Lovett’s hand. “You loved it. Didn’t you.”
“Some days were better than others, I guess.” Jack Lovett let go of Inez’s hand and laid his jacket over her bare legs. “Oh sure,” he said then. “It was kind of the place to be.”
Occasionally during that night and day Dick Ziegler came to the hospital, but on the whole he seemed relieved to leave the details of the watch to Inez. “Janet doesn’t even know we’re here,” Dick Ziegler said each time he came to the hospital.
“I’m not here for Janet,” Inez said finally, but Dick Ziegler ignored her.
“Doesn’t even know we’re here,” he repeated.
Quite often during that night and day Billy Dillon came to the hospital. “Naturally you’re overwrought,” Billy Dillon said each time he came to the hospital. “Which is why I’m not taking this seriously. Ask me what I think about what Inez is doing, I’d say no comment. She’s overwrought.”
“Listen,” Billy Dillon said the last time he came to the hospital. “We’re picking up incoming on the King Crab flank. Harry takes the Warner’s plane to Seattle to pick up Jessie for the funeral, Jessie informs Harry she doesn’t go to funerals.”
Inez had looked at Billy Dillon.
“Well?” Billy Dillon said.
“Well what?”
“What should I tell Harry?”
“Tell him he should have advanced it better,” Inez Victor said.
13
I SHOULD tell you something about Jessie Victor that very few people understood. Harry Victor for example never understood it. Inez understood it only dimly. Here it is: Jessie never thought of herself as a problem. She never considered her use of heroin an act of rebellion, or a way of life, or even a bad habit of particular remark; she considered it a consumer decision. Jessie Victor used heroin simply because she preferred heroin to coffee, aspirin, and cigarettes, as well as to movies, records, cosmetics, clothes, and lunch. She had been subjected repeatedly to the usual tests, and each battery showed her to be anxious, highly motivated, more, intelligent than Adlai, and not given to falsification. Perhaps because she lacked the bent for falsification she did not have a notable sense of humor. What she did have was a certain incandescent inscrutability, a kind of luminous gravity, and it was always startling to hear her dismiss someone, in that grave low voice that thrilled Inez as sharply when Jessie was eighteen as it had when Jessie was two, as “an asshole.” “You asshole” was what Jessie called Adlai, the night he and Harry Victor arrived in Seattle to pick her up for Janet’s funeral and Jessie declined to go. Jessie did agree to have dinner with them, while the Warner Communications G-2 was being refueled, but dinner had gone badly.
“The crux of it is finding a way to transfer anti-war sentiment to a multiple-issue program,” Adlai had said at dinner. He was telling Harry Victor about an article he proposed to write for the op-ed page of the New York Times. “It’s something we’ve been tossing back and forth in Cambridge.”
“Interesting,” Harry Victor said. “Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?”
“I think he shouldn’t say ‘Cambridge,’ ” Jessie said.
“Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there,” Adlai said, “but Cambridge happens to be where I go to school.”
“Maybe so,” Jessie said, “but you don’t happen to go to Harvard.”
“OK, guys. You both fouled.” Harry Victor turned to Adlai. “I could sound somebody out at the Times. If you’re serious.”
“I’m serious. It’s time. Bring my generation into the dialogue, if you see my point.”
“You asshole,” Jessie said.
“Well,” Harry Victor said after Adlai had left the table. “How are things otherwise?”
“I’m ready to leave.”
“You said you weren’t going. You have a principle. You don’t go to funerals. This is a new principle on me, but never mind, you made your case. I accept it. As a principle.”
“I don’t mean leave for Janet’s funeral. I mean actually leave. Period. This place. Seattle.”
“You haven’t finished the program.”
“The program,” Jessie said, “is for assholes.”
“Just a minute,” Harry said.
“I did the detox, I’m clean, I don’t see the point.”
“What do you mean you did the detox, the game plan here wasn’t detox, it was methadone.”
“I don’t like methadone.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Jessie had said patiently, “it doesn’t make me feel good.”
“It makes you feel bad?”
“It doesn’t make me feel bad, no.” Jessie had given this question her full attention. “It just doesn’t make me feel good.”
There had been a silence.
“What is it you want to do exactly?” Harry had said then.
“I want—” Jessie was studying a piece of bread that she seemed to have rolled into a ball. “To get on with my regular life. Make some headway, you know?”
“That’s fine. Good news. Admirable.”
“Get into my career.”
“Which is what exactly?”
Jessie was breaking the ball of bread into little pellets.
“Don’t misread me, Jessie. This is all admirable. My only point is that you need a program.” Harry Victor found himself warming to the idea of the projected program. “A plan. Two plans, actually. Which dove tail. A long-range plan and a short-term plan. What’s your long-range plan?”
“I’m not running for Congress,” Jessie said. “If that’s what you mean.”
There seemed to Harry so plaintive a note in this that he let it go. “Well then. All right. How about your immediate plan?”