Toward four in the morning Inez got up from the bed and sat by the window and smoked a cigarette in the dark. The window was open and rain splashed on the balcony outside. Because it was still too soon to hear the American Service Radio announcer in Saigon say “Mother wants you to call home” Inez moved the dial back and forth and finally got what seemed to be a BBC correspondent interviewing former officials of the government of the Republic of Vietnam who had just been flown to Nakhon Phanom in Thailand.
“No more hopes from the American side,” one of them said.
“The Americans would not come back again,” another said. “En un mot bye-bye.”
Their voices were pleasant and formal.
The transmission faded in and out.
As she listened to the rain and to the voices fading in and out from Nakhon Phanom Inez thought about Harry in New York and Adlai at school and Jessie at B.J.’s and it occurred to her that for the first time in almost twenty years she was not particularly interested in any of them.
Responsible for them in a limited way, yes, but not interested in them.
They were definitely connected to her but she could no longer grasp her own or their uniqueness, her own or their difference, genius, special claim. What difference did it make in the long run what she thought, or Harry thought, or Jessie or Adlai did? What difference did it make in the long run whether any one person got the word, called home, dreamed of a white Christmas? The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out and there was no reason why she or Harry or Jessie or Adlai, or for that matter Jack Lovett or B.J. or the woman in Vientiane on whose balcony the rain now fell, should be exempted from the general movement.
Just because they believed they had a home to call.
Just because they were Americans.
No.
En un mot bye-bye.
Four
1
I SEE now that the state of rather eerie serenity in which I found Inez Victor in Kuala Lumpur had its genesis eight months before, during this period in Hong Kong when it came to her attention that her passport did not excuse her from what she characterized to me as “the long view.” By “the long view” I believe she meant history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez’s experience had tended to deny. She had spent her childhood immersed in the local conviction that the comfortable entrepreneurial life of an American colony in a tropic without rot represented a record of individual triumphs over a hostile environment. She had spent her adult life immersed in Harry Victor’s conviction that he could be president.
This period in Hong Kong during which Inez ceased to claim the American exemption was defined by no special revelation, no instant of epiphany, no dramatic event. She had arrived in Hong Kong on the first day of April and she left it on the first day of May. During those four or five weeks mention of Janet and of Wendell Omura and of Janet’s lanai gradually dropped out of even the Honolulu Advertiser, discarded copies of which Inez occasionally found in the lobbies of hotels frequented by flight crews.
Paul Christian was found incompetent to stand trial.
Adlai’s vigil for the liberation of Saigon was edited into a vigil for “peace in Asia” and commended by the governor of Massachusetts as an instance of responsible campus expression, another situation managed by Billy Dillon.
The combat-loaded C-141 onto which Jack Lovett finally shoved Jessie (literally shoved, put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her through the hatch, because somewhere between Gate One and the loading ramp at Tan Son Nhut that evening Jessie realized that the flight Jack Lovett had told her they were meeting was her own, and tried to bolt) landed without incident at Agana, Guam, as did the commercial 747 on which Jessie sulked from Agana to Los Angeles.
Harry Victor met Jessie in customs.
He and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s.
Inez knew that Harry and Jessie had dinner at Chasen’s because they called her in Hong Kong from their table, the front banquette inside the door. Jessie said that Jack Lovett had tricked her into going with him to Tan Son Nhut by saying that after he met this one flight they would go see the John Wayne movie playing at the Eden. Jessie said that she had not wanted to see the John Wayne movie in the first place but B.J. had gone back to the DAO after dinner which left nothing to do but see the John Wayne movie or sit there alone getting schitzy.
Jessie said that when she saw what was going down she asked Jack Lovett why she had to go on this flight and Jack Lovett had been rude.
Because I just shelled out a million piastres so you could, the fucker had said, and pushed her.
Hard.
She still had a bruise on her arm.
Forty-eight hours later.
“Tell the fucker I owe him a million piastres,” Harry said when he came on the phone.
According to Inez Jessie landed in Los Angeles on the fifteenth of April.
According to Inez it was the twenty-eighth when she found she could no longer call Saigon; the twenty-ninth when American Service Radio in Saigon played “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” twice, played “The Stars and Stripes Forever” more times than Inez had counted, and stopped transmitting; and the first of May when Jack Lovett called her from Subic Bay and told her to meet him in Manila.
At one point I tried to work out a chronology for what Inez remembered of this period, and made the chart that still hangs on my office wall. The accuracy of this chart is problematic, not only because Inez kept no record of events as they happened but also because of the date line.
For example I have no idea whether Inez meant that the day Jessie landed in Los Angeles was the fifteenth in Los Angeles or the fifteenth in Hong Kong.
In either case the fifteenth seems doubtful, because Jack Lovett had been with Jessie in Saigon forty-eight hours before, promising her a John Wayne movie and bruising her arm, and many people believe Jack Lovett to have been in Phnom Penh for a period of some days (more than one day but fewer than five) between the time the American embassy closed there on the twelfth and the time the Khmer Rouge entered the city on the seventeenth. The report placing Jack Lovett in Phnom Penh after the embassy closed was one of the things that caused the speculation later, and eventually the investigation.
2
WHEN novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact. Examine the picture. Find the beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet.
Context clues.
The reason why.
I have been examining this picture for some years now and still lack the reason why Inez Victor finally agreed to talk about what she “believed” had happened (“I believe we were in Jakarta,” Inez would say, or “let’s say it was May,” as if even the most straightforward details of place and date were intrinsically unknowable, open to various readings) during the spring and summer of 1975.
At first she did not agree.
At first I talked to Billy Dillon and to Harry Victor and to Dwight Christian and even briefly to Jessie and to Adlai and to Dick Ziegler, each of whom, as I have suggested, had at least a limited stake in his or her own version of events, but Inez remained inaccessible. In the first place the very fact of where she and Jack Lovett seemed to be ruled out any pretense of casual access. I could call Dwight Christian and say that I just happened to be in Honolulu, but I could not call Inez and say that I just happened to be in Kuala Lumpur. No one “happens to be” in Kuala Lumpur, no one “passes through” en route somewhere else: Kuala Lumpur is en route nowhere, and for me to see Inez there implied premeditation, a definite purpose on my part and a definite decision on hers.