Goodbye Notes Toward a Blue Year

I had begun that decade on one coast and was ending it on another, standing alone in the exact middle of an airy prewar loft on loan to me from a screenwriter of some significance, toasting my glass of merlot with my bottle of champagne. I gathered the remnants of my past twenty years into a black Samsonite garment bag. The yellowing Kodak photographs, the thoughtfully blue Remington typewriter, the sandalwood-scented Moroccan cologne, a gift, from a stern yet childish sheik, to whom I had the distinct pleasure of telling, on a pearl-white yacht belonging to the last oldest Kennedy cousin, “no, I would not like a shrimp toast.”

There were days, too, that were like days, only darker, more mysterious and unformed, perceptible in their dimness and distinct in their lack of light; they were nights. The nights in our old, drafty pied-à-terre at the tip-top of Nob Hill were crowded ones. There were always guests, people coming, arriving, showing up, on time or fashionably not, to the house.

There were caustic political cartoonists and worrisome diplomat’s wives and overbearing lieutenant governors with attentive purebred Shiba Inus. And I was there, in the kitchen or at the veranda or in the parlor or under the coffee table or on the roof or around the corner, picking up more ice. I looked ridiculous, in pristine ballet flats and a deep navy cape, hobbling up Nob Hill with an impossibly, uncaringly cold bag of frozen water.

When guests left I would lean out against the onyx black wrought iron railing, or half-sit on the precarious marble balustrade, or fling open the unbearably creaky French doors, and look out onto the California below me. I recalled the grease splattered, moon cratered face of a man who once serviced my long black Buick Riviera when on assignment in the Central Valley. “The further west you go,” he remarked, “it just gets bluer.” He meant the ocean. But he meant me, too.

In the summer between the time I was 29 and the time I was 30, I became fatigued from having traveled to so many exotic countries. “You’re tired,” a Lacanian psychoanalyst told me. I paid him $3,500. I followed a sturdy, blonde Dartmouth dropout to a gathering in Joshua Tree where a crowd of short, beguiling girls drank a hallucinogenic tea that I was told had “healing qualities.”

The whole summer I had been looking to be mended, by self-help paperbacks purchased at international airports and plant-based suppers prepared by Japanese chefs, but I declined the tea. I set my Remington typewriter on a protruding boulder and took notes. “That was a trip,” one of the ingenues yawned the next morning. And she meant the drugs, but she also meant the era.

It seemed that the more things wound down, the more wound up I became. I began printing invitations to parties I did not intend to throw. I would wake up on Victorian daybeds in Malibu houses that were not my own. I was on a transatlantic flight, staring at myself in the toilet vestibule mirror, and I could not recognize my own Tiffany sapphire necklace. I clutched the collar of my jet black turtleneck and tried to rip the gold links off of my neck. It was time to slow down. The country was slowing down. The airplane was slowing down; we had landed; someone was knocking; they asked, “miss, you need to get off so the passengers can board.”

It was a metaphor for my life, but also, for the exhaustion of a certain class of specific people in a particular place at this exact moment. I had flown and rode and sailed to and from every port of cultural significance. I had been a sister, godmother, great-aunt, celebrated young author, named confidante of numerous moguls, and perpetual dignitary. I had burned out, or lost gas. That summer, they sprayed more napalm in Vietnam than they did pesticides in the Central Valley. That was told to me by a high-ranking officer on leave at a highrise hotel in Honolulu.

I was wearing a black blouse with batwing sleeves, and tucked inside, my Tiffany necklace. I touched the sapphire gemstone to my collarbone and considered what this meant. It was another link in the chain, like the sheik’s shrimp toast or a pillar on our Nob Hill balustrade or the overfull passport in my Chanel clutch, that made that time what it was. A summer, a season, a span of three or four months that was distinct for its specific weather patterns. And I was, still, myself, again, then.