“I detect just the slightest tinge of lime.”
“Positively chartreuse.”
“You find out fast enough who your friends are.”
In fact it would have been hard to say who Carol Christian’s friends were, since she had no friends at all who were not primarily Paul Christian’s friends or Cissy Christian’s friends or Dwight and Ruthie Christian’s friends. “Seems like a nice enough gal,” one of Paul Christian’s cousins said about her when she had lived in Honolulu for ten years. “Of course I haven’t known her that long.”
I had, curiously, only two photographs of Paul Christian, and neither suggested the apparent confidence and innocence with which his mother and his brother and even his wife met the camera. The first showed Paul Christian playing backgammon with John Huston in Cuernavaca in 1948. Paul Christian was barefoot and dark from the sun in this snapshot, which would have been taken at roughly the time arrangements were being made for his wife to leave Honolulu on the reconditioned Lurline. The second photograph was taken as Paul Christian left the Honolulu YMCA in handcuffs on March 25, 1975, some hours after he fired the shots that resulted in the immediate death of Wendell Omura and the eventual death of Janet Christian Ziegler. In this photograph Paul Christian was again barefoot, and had his cuffed hands raised above his head in a posture of theatrical submission, even crucifixion; a posture so arresting, so peculiarly suggestive, that the photograph was carried in newspapers in parts of the world where there could have been no interest in the Christians or in Wendell Omura or even in Harry Victor. In most parts of the United States there was of course an interest in Harry Victor. VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, the caption read in the New York Times.
You see the shards of the novel I am no longer writing, the island, the family, the situation. I lost patience with it. I lost nerve. Stilclass="underline" there is a certain hour between afternoon and evening when the sun strikes horizontally between the trees and that island and that situation are all I see. Some days at this time one aspect of the situation will seem to me to yield the point, other days another. I see Inez Christian Victor in the spring of 1975 walking on the narrow beach behind Janet’s house, the last sun ahead of her, refracted in the spray off Black Point. I see Jack Lovett watching her, a man in his sixties in a custom-made seersucker suit, his tie loosened but his bearing correct, military, suggestive of disciplines practiced for the sake of discipline; a man who is now, as he watches Inez Victor steady herself on the rocks down where the water meets the sea wall, smoking one of the five cigarettes he allows himself daily. I see Inez turn and walk back toward him, the sun behind her now, the water washing the rough coral sand over her bare feet.
I see Jack Lovett waiting for her.
I have not told you much about Jack Lovett.
Most often these days I find that my notes are about Jack Lovett, about those custom-made seersucker suits he wore, about the wide range of his interests and acquaintances and of the people to whom he routinely spoke (embassy drivers, oil riggers, airline stewardesses, assistant professors of English literature traveling on Fulbright fellowships, tropical agronomists traveling under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, desk clerks and ticket agents and salesmen of rice converters and coco dryers and Dutch pesticides and German pharmaceuticals) in Manila and in Jakarta and around the Malacca Strait.
About his view of information as an end in itself.
About his access to airplanes.
About the way he could put together an observation here and a conversation there and gauge when the time had come to lay hands on a 727 or a C-46.
About the way he waited for Inez.
I have been keeping notes for some time now about the way Jack Lovett waited for Inez Victor.
4
FIRST looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.
I wonder.
The first time I ever saw Jack Lovett was in a Vogue photographer’s studio on West 40th Street, where he had come to see Inez. Under different auspices and to different ends Inez Victor and I were both working for Vogue that year, 1960, and although she was in the fashion department and I was upstairs in the afterthought cubicle that constituted the feature department we occasionally had reason (when a playwright was to be photographed as part of a fashion layout, say, or an actress was to actually model the merchandise) to do a sitting together. I recall coming late to the studio on this particular morning and finding Inez already there, sitting at a wooden table apparently oblivious to the reflector propped against her knee, to Chubby Checker on the stereo at eighty decibels, and to the model for the sitting, a fading beauty named Kiki Watt, who was having a comb-out and trying to tell Inez about some “Stanley” they both seemed to know.
“The doorbell rings at midnight, who else,” Kiki screamed through the music. “Stanley.”
Inez said nothing. The table at which she sat was covered with take-out bags from the delicatessen downstairs, one of which was leaking coffee, but Inez seemed not to notice. Her attention was entirely fixed on the man who sat across the table, a stranger, considerably older than we were and notably uncomfortable in the rather louche camaraderie of the studio. I had not met Harry Victor but I doubted the man was Inez’s husband. I recall thinking he could be her father.
“Somebody strike the music,” Kiki screamed. “Now. You can hear me. So. I said I had this sitting at dawn, but you know Stanley, Stanley had to have a drink. Naturally.”
“Naturally.” Inez looked at me. “This is Jack Lovett. He just got off a plane.”
Jack Lovett stood up, trying to acknowledge me without looking at Kiki, who had dropped her wrapper and was working pieces of cotton into her brassiere.
“ ‘This place is a pigsty,’ Stanley announces halfway through his drink.” Kiki sat on the table between Inez and Jack Lovett and began rummaging through the take-out bags. “ ‘The maid didn’t come,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you own a vacuum,’ Stanley says, ho hum, sarcasm, so interesting. ‘Actually no,’ I say. ‘I don’t own a vacuum.’ As a matter of fact I don’t, I mean I did but Gus pawned it with my jewelry. ‘Listen,’ Stanley says. ‘As soon as Daisy leaves for Maine I’ll bring over our vacuum. For the summer,’ he says. Believe it?”
“Absolutely,” Inez said. She took a doughnut from one of the take-out bags and held it out to Jack Lovett. Jack Lovett shook his head.
“Stanley left, I thought about it, I wanted to kill myself, you know?”
“Absolutely.” Inez took a bite from the doughnut, then dropped it back into the bag.
“Wanted to take every red I had in the apartment, you know why?”
“Because you didn’t want to use Daisy’s vacuum,” Inez said, and then she looked at me. “He has two hours in New York and he came to see me.”