There was an entire day in Hong Kong that she managed to reconstruct, a day she had spent alone with Jessie in a borrowed house overlooking Repulse Bay. She and Harry had dropped Adlai in Honolulu with Janet and Dick Ziegler and they had bundled Jessie onto a plane to Hong Kong and when they landed at dawn they learned that Harry was expected in Saigon for a situation briefing. Harry had flown immediately down to Saigon and Inez had waited with Jessie in this house that belonged to the chief of the Time bureau in Hong Kong. The potted begonias outside that house had made Inez happy and the parched lawn made her happy and the particular cast of the sun on the sea made her happy and it even made her happy that the Time bureau chief had mentioned, as he gave her the keys at the airport, that baby cobras had recently been seen in the garden. This introduction of baby cobras into the day had lent Inez a sense of transcendent usefulness, a reason to carry Jessie wherever Jessie wanted to go. She had carried Jessie from the porch to the swing in the garden. She had carried Jessie from the swing in the garden to the bench from which they could watch the sun on the sea. She had carried Jessie even from the house to the government car that returned at sundown to take them to the hotel where Harry was due at midnight.
There in the sun on the redwood deck on San Luis Road Inez began to think of Berkeley as another place in which she might later remember being extremely happy, another borrowed house, and she resolved to keep this in mind, but by June of that year, back in New York, she was already losing the details. That was the June during which Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left eye and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June, 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.
“Let me die and get it over with,” Jessie said. “Let me be in the ground and go to sleep.”
The doctor came in a sweat suit.
“I got a D in history,” Jessie said. “Nobody sits with me at lunch. Don’t tell Daddy.”
“I’m right here,” Harry said.
“Daddy’s right here,” Inez said.
“Don’t tell Daddy,” Jessie said.
“It might be useful to talk about therapy,” the doctor said.
“It might also be useful to assign some narcs to the Dalton School,” Harry said. “No. Strike that. Don’t quote me.”
“This is a stressful time,” the doctor said.
The first therapist the doctor recommended was a young woman attached to a clinic on East 61st Street that specialized in the treatment of what the therapist called adolescent substance abuse. “It might be useful to talk about you,” the therapist said. “Your own life, how you perceive it.”
Inez remembered that the therapist was wearing a silver ankh.
She remembered that she could see Jessie through a glass partition, chewing on a strand of her long blond hair, bent over the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
“My life isn’t really the problem at hand,” she remembered saying. “Is it?”
The therapist smiled.
Inez lit a cigarette.
It occurred to her that if she just walked into the next room and took Jessie by the hand and got her on a plane somewhere, still wearing her Dalton School sweat shirt, the whole thing might blow over. They could go meet Adlai in Colorado Springs. Adlai had gone back to Colorado Springs the day before, for summer session at the school where he was trying to accumulate enough units to get into a college accredited for draft deferment. They could go meet Harry in Ann Arbor. Harry had left for Ann Arbor that morning, to deliver his lecture on the uses and misuses of civil disobedience. “I can’t get through to her,” Harry had said before he left for Ann Arbor. “Adlai may be a fuck-up, but I can talk to Adlai. I talk to her, I’m talking to a UFO.”
“Adlai,” Inez had said, “happens to believe that he can satisfy his American History requirement with a three-unit course called History of American Film.”
“Very good, Inez. Broad, but good.”
“Broad, but true. In addition to which. Moreover. I asked Adlai to make a point of going to the hospital to see Cynthia. Here’s what he said.”
“Cynthia who?” Harry said.
“Cynthia who he almost killed in the accident. ‘She’s definitely on the agenda.’ Is what he said.”
“At least he said something. All you’d get from her is the stare.”
“You always say her. Her name is Jessie.”
“I know her goddamn name.”
Strike Ann Arbor.
Harry would be sitting around in his shirtsleeves expressing admiration (“Admiration, Christ no, what I feel when I see you guys is a kind of awe”) for the most socially responsible generation ever to hit American campuses.
Strike Colorado Springs.
Adlai already had his agenda.
Jessie looked up from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and smiled fleetingly at the glass partition.
“The ‘problem 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
OTHER 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.”