Plausible

I read Blue Nights by Joan Didion in 2 nights. Rapt, I was. As if there was a mystery to be uncovered, a bit of chocolate on the inside of the mint that I needed to pointedly suck through and find. Except the mint was the best part, and it was good - rough-edged and harsh and true and sweet. The mint was the story of Joan Didion losing Quintana Roo. Quintana. Q. Her daughter, who was born in 1966 and died of something, at age 39 or so.  Somewhere in the book, Joan Didion tells us when her daughter dies, and how (oxygen depletion, ultimately, but the root cause was neurological - a brain bleed? Pancreatitis? And there is something more, too, an insinuation of a suicide attempt? Alcoholism? Borderline Personality Disorder.  All of these things are said and unsaid and threaded through the pages that I turned too hungrily to really taste. Why?

Because she says the things no one should say and everyone craves hearing, to feel less alone. Because she doesn’t say them, exactly. Not like that.  Like this, when she describes the peculiar stress associated with a visit from a social worker checking on the “placement of the candidate” who is Q, who has already taken form as “daughter” and the reality that the housemaid who will raise Q does not speak English, and is present, gardening, during the interview, and meant to - but will not - stay mute.  We already know by then about the famous friends and film sets and the caviar and the hotel stays.

I wanted to lay this on the table.
“Ordinary” childhoods in Los Angeles often involve someone speaking Spanish, but I will not make that argument.
Nor will I even argue that she had an “ordinary” childhood, although I remain unsure exactly about who does.
“Privilege” is something else.
“Privilege” is a judgment.
“Privilege” is an opinion.
“Privilege” is an accusation.
“Privilege” remains an area to which - when I think of what she endured - when I consider what came later - I will not easily cop.

I think about Dennis Lehane’s comments on empathy. Dennis, who keeps close his rough hewn childhood friends because they are the only people whose motives for friendship he trusts. Dennis who may very well drive a Maserati by now, and hold those buds at arm’s length -  Dennis said, “We feel less bad when it’s a BMW on the side of the road, cracked up. Maybe even like to see it.  But someone’s kid is just as dead, and whether they are rich or poor, they mourn the same.”

Did he say the same? Do I think “the same?” I don’t. I don’t think it’s the same.  I think privileged people are surrounded by  a mucous membrane that insulates and deprives them of the minutiae of human contact.  They feel less deeply and well, and they suffer for it.  [What do the simple folk do?]   I believe this, and I don’t. I have been among them, and I haven't.

Richard Cory put a bullet through his head.

For 188 pages, I see now, I actually thought I could walk in Joan Didion’s shoes.  My friends are not so different from hers, whether their works earn Academy statues that need to be tucked away when their houses are rented, or not.  We are not so far apart.  She aches as a mother and recognizes her own flaws.  Our paths even almost nearly crossed. I sat at a table in a high-ceiling dark precept room at Princeton and interviewed her husband 24 years ago.  A table,  yes, not their table.  I didn’t particularly like him.  Turns out, Q and I were only months apart , so maybe he looked at us and saw his daughter. Or maybe he never saw his daughter.

That’s not true. I know better.   I read a single thread of their story and think perhaps her illness killed him.  For her part, Q didn’t recover well enough to find out that her father was dead.  She had to be told 3 times, because she kept not knowing. For Joan Didion, the following is true, despite being unspeakable:

Quintana’s “recovery”
We had no idea then how rare recovery can be.
No idea that “recovery” like “adoption” remains one of those concepts that sounds more plausible than it turns out to be.

Here is where Joan Didion slips, I think. Although she bravely peels back the tissue, she too narrowly covers it.  Adoptions (this I do know) build families as true and real as blood does. But we do not own our children, regardless of how they come to us, and cannot shield them from demons or chance, no matter how much of the world they see, no matter their brands of dress or penchant for caviar.

That said, are there lives lived from beginning to end that are not plausible?  If so, do we peel open books, one after another, for proof that ours is not one of them?