There were blue-and-white checked gingham curtains in the windows of her room in Malibu.
I remember them blowing as she showed me the book.
She was showing me the photographs Margaret Bourke-White did for Life of the ovens at Buchenwald.
That was what she had to know.
Or ask the child who would not allow herself to fall asleep during most of 1946 because she feared the fate of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who on January seventh of that year had been kidnapped from her bed in Chicago, dissected in a sink, and disposed of in pieces in the sewers of the far north side. Six months after Suzanne Degnans disappearance a seventeen-year-old University of Chicago sophomore named William Heirens was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Or ask the child who nine years later followed the California search for fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan, who vanished while walking home from her Berkeley junior high school through the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel, her customary shortcut, and was next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in Californias most northern mountains. Five months after Stephanie Bryans disappearance a twenty-seven-year-old University of California accounting student was arrested, charged with her death, and within two years convicted and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Since the events surrounding the disappearances and deaths of both Suzanne Degnan and Stephanie Bryan occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered. The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous. To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did.
Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.
Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century Fox.
This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end. So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. I had to read it when my parents werent around as they didnt think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.
As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.
Hello, Quintana. Im going to lock you here in the garage.
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him.
I have to know about this.
One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me.
How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her?
I used to ask that.
Now I ask the reverse:
How could she have even imagined that I could take care of her?
She saw me as needing care myself.
She saw me as frail.
Was that her anxiety or mine?
I learned about this fear when she was temporarily off the ventilator in one or another ICU, I have no memory which.
I told you, they were all the same.
The blue-and-white printed curtains. The gurgling through plastic tubing. The dripping from the IV line, the rales, the alarms.
The codes. The crash cart.
This was never supposed to happen to her.
It must have been the ICU at UCLA.
Only at UCLA was she off the ventilator long enough to have had this conversation.
You have your wonderful memories.
I do, but they blur.
They fade into one another.
They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, all mudgy.
I tried to tell her: I too have trouble remembering.
Languages mingle: do I need an abogado or do I need an avocat?
Names vanish. The names for example of California counties, once so familiar that I recited them in alphabetized order (Alameda and Alpine and Amador, Calaveras and Colusa and Contra Costa, Madera and Marin and Mariposa) now elude me.
The name of one county I do remember.
The name of this single county I always remember.
I had my own Broken Man.
I had my own stories about which I had to know.
Trinity.
The name of the county in which Stephanie Bryan had been found buried in the shallow grave was Trinity.
The name of the test site at Alamogordo that had led to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also Trinity.
19
What we need here is a montage, music over.
How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx
xx, he said.
xxx, she said.
How she:
How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx
How he, and also she
The above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted. I offer them as a representation of how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than xxx, or xxxx, symbols that meant copy tk, or copy to come, but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single x differed from a double xx, xxx from xxxx. The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.
The same passage, rewritten, which is to say written in any real sense at all, became more detailed: What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds. No place you could not pass a hundred. There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón. Goddamn but we had some fun there.
How he, and also she
The above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted. I offer them as a representation of how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on the page were no more than xxx, or xxxx, symbols that meant copy tk, or copy to come, but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single x differed from a double xx, xxx from xxxx. The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.
The same passage, rewritten, which is to say written in any real sense at all, became more detailed: What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds. No place you could not pass a hundred. There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón. Goddamn but we had some fun there.
More detailed, yes.
She now has a name: Elena.
He now has a name: Barry Sedlow.
But again, do notice: it had all been there in the original notes. It had all been there in the symbols, the marks on the page. It had all been there in the xxx and the xxxx.
I supposed this process to be like writing music.
I have no idea whether or not this was an accurate assessment, since I neither wrote nor read music. All I know now is that I no longer write this way. All I know now is that writing, or whatever it was I was doing when I could proceed on no more than xxx and xxxx, whatever it was I was doing when I imagined myself hearing the music, no longer comes easily to me. For a while I laid this to a certain weariness with my own style, an impatience, a wish to be more direct. I encouraged the very difficulty I was having laying words on the page. I saw it as evidence of a new directness. I see it differently now. I see it now as frailty. I see it now as the very frailty Quintana feared.
We are moving into another summer.
I find myself increasingly focused on this issue of frailty.
I fear falling on the street, I imagine bicycle messengers knocking me to the ground. The approach of a child on a motorized scooter causes me to freeze mid-intersection, play dead. I no longer go for breakfast to Three Guys on Madison Avenue: what if I were to fall on the way?
I feel unsteady, unbalanced, as if my nerves are misfiring, which may or may not be an exact description of what my nerves are in fact doing.
I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasingly distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.
As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.
I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively.
I frame the cheerful response.
What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.
Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
I push-pin the index card to the corkboard on which I collect notes.
Struck by a train nine days before our wedding, one note on the corkboard reads. Left the house that morning and was killed that afternoon in the crash of a small plane, another reads. It was the second of January, 1931, a third reads. I ran a little coup. My brother became president. He was more mature. I went to Europe.