The Past Is Another State

One of the things I love about New York City is all the authors. There are readings going on every night of the year. When I first moved here I was very assiduous about looking for announcements and going to readings. I went to hear P.D. James at the now defunct Endicott bookstore, and attended the panel discussion in the Time-Life auditorium for the release of the New American Library's Raymond Chandler series. At the old West Side Shakespeare & Co. I bought D. an autographed copy of Patti Smith's book about Robert Mapplethorpe in the afterlife. And most of all I sauntered over to the Barnes & Noble on Broadway to listen to Anna Quindlen and Joyce Carol Oates and any number of wonderful writers who appeared there. Then they opened the bigger, glitzier B & N down by Lincoln Center, and all the "name" authors went down there. I stopped watching so closely for the announcements, so it was a miracle last week that I happened to see the notice for Joan Didion at my own neighborhood book shop.

Since the gubernatorial recall, I have been overwhelmed by the realization that I am no longer a Californian. People would ask me my opinion and I had no idea what the real issues were, just the sickening realization that there was no way to stop Schwarzenegger from being elected. So I found myself enchanted by reviews of Didion's new book, Where I Was From, in which she reexamines her own California mythology through the lens of her mother's death. I can't actually talk about the book, since I have not read it yet, but I went to see her tonight, right there on Broadway, and my heart opened wide as she read.

She read about her mother, her daughter, her own arrival in New York, and the lines in the sand drawn by those who came first to the Promised Land. She included what is surely the most quoted passage from the book, in which she is driving from Monterey to Berkeley with her mother in 1992, and her mother cannot recognize the suburbanized landscape of the Central Coast. "California had become, she said then, 'all San Jose.'"

As she read, it seemed she spun time through her fingers, winding up fat bobbins of Cal in the 1950s and Colorado Air Forces bases during World War II. So many of my ideas about these places come, of course from her books about them. Her words are layered on my own impressions so that whenever I drive through the serpentine interchanges of downtown L.A. I always imagine Maria Wyeth of Play It As It Lays cracking her hard-boiled egg on the steering wheel of her Corvette. When I had my first migraine at the age of 33, I immediately recognized it from her impassively detailed descriptions of the throbbing aura that she got through by reciting Pound's line, "Petals on a wet, black bough" until she had crossed the Carquinez Straits.

Her description tonight of her Charter Day speech of 1992 sent me back in my mind to her Charter Day speech of 1980, when she was named Cal's Alumna of the Year. I remembered climbing up the steps of the Greek Theater with Tom, wearing my madras shirtwaist and squinting down into the afternoon sun at the dais, though it was Didion who wore enormous sunglasses throughout her speech. Tom loved Joan Didion, loved her love of California, and we studied and discussed The White Album and A Book of Common Prayer, and on that day we drank her in, communing in our nativity, all golden Blues under the thin spring sunshine.

She gave the same physical impression tonight, a tiny woman with fine, chin-length hair and oversized horn rims, her bony arm overwhelmed by a strap watch that slid halfway to her elbow. She had on a fluffy black sweater, a yellow flowered skirt, and enormous furry boots against the rainy night. But her voice was strong and clear, perhaps protected by her usual flatness of affect. She spoke of deeply intimate things, of her mother's illness and family photographs and the telegram that announced she had won Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris, yet she remained a bit apart, reading about them, not speaking them directly to us.

But for me, it was dizzying. All those layers of California are now far in the past. Both she and I are living in New York, though she proudly notes she still carries a California driver's license. She's peeling away the layers of the place I thought I knew best, and showing me how little I know it anymore, and how many of the things I think I remember are colored by what others have said and written about them. After she finished speaking, I was too stunned to join the crush of autograph seekers. I wandered to a dark corner behind the greeting card section to simply breathe deeply and absorb all I had heard her say, much as I had to sit quietly for half an hour after the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective at the Whitney.

California is haunting me lately, but maybe, in the words of another displaced not-quite-native daughter, "There is no there there." #

A slice of life in the big city.