Her intention for this book was that it be "raw,"
"exposed," which is how she felt. She wrote it fast--in
less than three months--to capture that state. "It was like sitting
down at the typewriter and bleeding," she says. "Some days
I'd sit with tears running down my face."
When I visit her six months after she completed the
book, on a hot July day, the air conditioner is running and the windows
are open because they're too heavy for her to move up and down. She's
dressed for comfort in a sleeveless sweater, sweatpants, and athletic
shoes, sitting in a rattan chair with her back close to the fireplace
where she'd built a fire the night John died. Fires were important
to them, she says. Fires meant "we were home, we had drawn the
circle, we were safe through the night." When I ask why she hadn't
told me how raw she was feeling, Joan makes a circling motion with
two fingers, round and round. It's a moment when John might have answered
the question for her. "It's easier for me to write than talk,"
she says, "to express the way I actually feel at any time. I
don't ever want to talk about that."
Joan once said in a lecture that she writes to learn
what she thinks. Known for her irony, her insights--which startle
with their rightness--and the exalted musicality of her prose, Joan
has published eight books of nonfiction and five novels in a style
The New York Times Book Review called "one of the most recognizable--and
brilliant--to emerge in America during the past four decades."
John also was acclaimed for his essays and novels (the most well-known
is True Confessions), and together the couple wrote movies like Up
Close & Personal and A Star Is Born.
They worked at home, spent all their time together,
read each other's work, finished each other's sentences, and carried
on a continuous conversation.
They met in the early sixties; he was a friend of
the man Joan was dating when she worked at Vogue and John was on staff
at Time.
"Do you remember your first impression of John?"
I ask.
"I thought he was smart and funny," Joan
says. "He made me laugh and we thought the same way about lots
of things." A few years later, when Joan had broken up with the
mutual friend, they had dinner by themselves. John said he was going
to visit his mother in Hartford, Connecticut, for the weekend and
invited her to come. "The minute I got into this house of great
calm and order and peace and well-being, I thought, I want to marry
him."
She says there was more order in the house than she'd
had in her life for a while.
What kind of order?
"There were meals." She laughs. "There
was a closet full of organdy tablecloths on long rollers--the way
they came back from the French laundry, under tissue."
She and John were married nine months later. She was
29, which in 1964 was "as old as you got" without being
considered an old maid, and John was 31. During their wedding at the
Catholic mission church in San Juan Bautista, California, Joan cried
behind dark glasses, and they promised each other that if they wanted,
they would release each other "before death did us part."
Joan recalls, "You aren't sure if you're making the right decision--about
anything, ever."
"As marriages go," I say, "I think
you had a pretty great one. Do you feel that?"
"Yeah, I do. Finally it was, which is not to
say we thought it was great at every given moment. Each of us was
mad at the other half the time."
Half?
"Maybe a quarter." She shrugs. "A tenth
of the time. In the early years, you fight because you don't understand
each other. In later years, you fight because you do." She laughs.
"What I came to love later was different from what I loved in
the beginning. Later we had so much history, we had a life together
and we were the only people in it."
I tell her that I've wondered how the two of them
could work and be together around the clock.
"It's a mystery to everyone," Joan says.
"I can't imagine being married to somebody who wasn't a writer."
When she was younger, she says, she'd be lonely and wouldn't know
how to structure her day unless somebody else was in the house. "Now,
I can't describe what I am as lonely. It's that--I really miss him."
She knits her brow. "I'm furious I can't talk to him."
Throughout the day, they would walk into each other's
study or buzz on the intercom and talk about something they'd just
heard, or say, "I'm having trouble. Would you read this?"
It's been challenging for her to write without John because he edited
her work before it left the house. "I wish John could have read
this book."
I imagine he would have been dispassionate and constructive
even when reading about his own death. That was how they worked with
each other—not responding emotionally but checking structure,
style, logic, and accuracy. They did not seem to feel competitive
or have jealous twinges. "That's because we were one person,"
Joan says. "We were the other. What was good for him was good
for me."
She believes marriage is a decision, not a matter
of luck or fate. "We had each made a decision to be totally part
of the other's life."
"Don't you think you were well suited, well matched?"
"We wanted that to happen. If you want to be
attracted to someone, you will be."
I'm not sure I agree.
"Why are people in fairy tales always falling
in love with frogs?" she asks.
"Because… they feel some inexplicable attraction?"
"They wanted a prince charming, so they saw one,
even in a frog."
We laugh, but I tell her, "I thought the point
of fables like "The Frog Prince" and "Beauty and the
Beast" was to teach children to look beneath the surface."
"I generally miss the point of most fables,"
Joan says.
She believes that romantic love is different from
marriage. "Romantic love goes away. Gone. It can't last your
entire life." She doesn't find romantic love interesting, because
"it has a sameness. Marriage is something else. It's a determination
and it grows, rather than going away. The more investment you have
in it, the more you get out of it."
Then why do so many end in divorce?
"It takes two people who are willing to put in
the time," she says. "If I sensed anything about John when
I first knew him, it was that he was willing to do that."
She used to travel on her own to write magazine pieces,
but later, she says, "we went with each other. The reason is
we didn't have enough time together."
I start to laugh, thinking she's joking. "How
could you not have enough time?" I ask. "You were together
around the clock."
"There wasn't enough time in the world,"
Joan says.
When her husband died, Joan had a contract to write
a book about Kobe Bryant but couldn't focus on it and began making
notes on "the strongest thing going on in my life." When
starting a book, she says, "you know how you look for something
that's obsessing you, that you don't know the answer to?" Writing
about John's death helped her work through the shock and grief, which
was not what she'd imagined it would be. "Crying all the time.
That's not what happens. You become crazy. I found quotes from Freud
and Melanie Klein where they call grief a form of psychosis we don't
treat. We let it run its course." Joan says it came to her that
everybody she'd known who'd lost a husband, wife, or child looked
the same. "Exposed. Like they ought to be wearing dark glasses,
not because they've been crying but because they look too open to
the world." It was this rawness that shocked her, she says. "I
had spent so much of my life guarding against being raw."
Her understanding of self-pity also changed. Before
John's death she had thought, as many do, that "wallowing"
in self-pity was the most abhorrent of character defects, a failure
to "manage the situation." One of the first things she feared
after John died was "having a house full of people all feeling
sorry for me because I'm feeling sorry for myself." It was only
while writing the book that "this started to look silly. At this
particular moment you have reason to feel sorry for yourself."
I bring up something I've been brooding on: Is it
more painful if someone you love dies, or if he rejects you and leaves?
I'd thought the latter was more taxing because you're wounded and
he's still around, allowing you to cling to slender threads of hope
that he could come back, change his mind, and then you hear he's marrying
someone else. If he dies, on the other hand, the love was intact;
it was never withdrawn. But after reading Joan's book, I saw that
having a husband die pushes you up against the maw--the extinction
of life itself.
Joan nods. "That's the issue nobody wants to
face. The finality." I ask if she thinks the brain is capable
of conceiving of its own demise. She says, "I know I'm going
to die, but not really. John's death made me look at it for John but
not for myself. There's almost nothing that can make me accept the
fact that death will occur to me."
She looks down at her hands. "Naturally there's
a strong wish to believe in life after death. I don't happen to believe
in life after death."
I tell her most religions assert the soul is eternal.
"I can't believe that," Joan says. "I was brought up
on the American rationalist tradition." She gives a soft, breathy
laugh that makes me laugh with her. "Don't tell Oprah,"
she says. I ask if she prays. She says the ritual of reciting prayers
is part of her life, but "I don't believe in a personal God who's
interested in the problems of one person." Nor does she believe
in fate. "I believe in geology."
"You mean the inevitable forces of nature?"
"Yes. I believe in randomness. It's not random
in the larger scheme but the larger scheme doesn't necessarily involve
good things happening to good people."
"Control," I say, "has always been
important to you…"
"I don't have any control," she interrupts,
making a chopping gesture with her thin, expressive hands. "I
didn't know that until John died. I thought John was in total control
of his health." She also realized she's had no control over the
health and life of her daughter, Quintana Dunne Michael. "I could
get the better doctor and nag at the hospital, but I couldn't fix
things." Quintana, 39, had contracted flu that became pneumonia
that became septic shock, causing the hospital team to sedate her
to the point of unconsciousness in December of 2003. When the doctors
awakened her three weeks later, Joan told her that her father had
died. John's funeral was held in March, after which Quintana flew
with her husband to Los Angeles, collapsed at the airport with a massive
cranial bleed, and had emergency surgery during which it was uncertain
whether she would "leave the table." She did, and Joan joined
her in L.A. for five weeks of recuperation. At the time of our interview
in 2005, we did not know what changes would occur in the following
month.
I ask if the successive tragedies made her think of
people in Iraq…
"I didn't need to go to Iraq!" Joan says.
"I thought about my own family burying children on the way to
California." Joan's ancestors on both sides traveled by covered
wagon to Sacramento in the 1800s. Her great-great-grandmother had
to bury a 2-year-old who died of fever on the trail, fast, "because
the train of wagons was going right on," and she gave birth to
another child on the plains. "That's the persona I prefer: I'm
strong, I can handle it. I can cross the plains. Bury that baby."
While she often writes about people acquainted with
despair, Joan's default state is sunny and optimistic. She trained
herself to be optimistic because she saw that "pessimism didn't
lead anywhere." It's hard for her to stay in a dark mood because
"I know how self-defeating it is and how much it can feed itself."
"Where do you get the strength?"
"I don't call it strength," she says. "I
call it pragmatism."
"How do you go to sleep in New York," I
ask, "when you've just been told your daughter is having brain
surgery in L.A. and may not survive?"
"You just do. You've got to get through what
you've got to get through."
She tried to impart this to John, shortly before he
died, when they were riding home in a taxi after leaving Quintana
unconscious in the ICU. "I don't think I'm up for this,"
John told her.
"You don't get a choice," Joan said.
I ask if she plans to stay in the apartment, which
has bookshelves covering almost every wall and books piled on tables
along with photos of Joan, John, and their daughter at different stages:
Quintana as a baby next to Quintana as a bride. "I can't imagine
moving," Joan says. Every few days she thinks about hanging pictures
that are stacked on the floor, but to do that, "I'd have to move
something that was here."
She shakes her head.
"I just want everything the same."
She says she's waiting and watching to see how her
feelings, her state, her place in the world evolve. "I'm certainly
not totally adjusted to the situation I'm in. There's a lot I haven't
tried on my own yet, like traveling." A bell tolls from St. James's
Church across the street, whose spires can be seen from her windows.
"On the other hand, I no longer think of John as coming back."
His voice still speaks on the phone answering machine.
“I don’t hear it,” Joan says, “except when I call
home for messages. If I do… It’s a pleasant surprise.”
When I leave her apartment, Joan is on her way to
the hospital where her daughter, after multiple surgeries, is being
treated for abdominal infections, and once again has been sedated
to the point of unconsciousness. Joan is taking along her needlepoint,
her willed optimism, and the knowledge that she will get through what
she has to get through.
On August 26, 2005, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael dies
of acute pancreatitis.
..
