Free Democracy by Joan Didion

May of 1955, when Inez Christian walked out of a dance class at Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon and got in Harry Victor’s car and drove down to New York to marry him at City Hall, with a jersey practice skirt tied over her leotard and a bunch of daisies for a bouquet, Jack Lovett was already in Saigon, setting up lines of access to what in 1955 he was not yet calling the assistance effort. In 1955 he was still calling it the insurgency problem, but even then he saw its possibilities. He saw it as useful. I believe many people did, while it lasted. “NOT A SQUASH PLAYER ,” Inez Christian wrote across the wedding announcement she eventually mailed to his address in Honolulu, but it was six months before he got it.
    It occurs to me that for Harry Victor to have driven up to Sarah Lawrence on a Tuesday afternoon in May and picked up Inez Christian in her leotard and married her at City Hall could be understood as impulsive, perhaps the only thing Harry Victor ever did that might be interpreted as a spring fancy, but this interpretation would be misleading. There were practical factors involved. Harry Victor was due to start work in Washington the following Monday, and Inez Christian was two months pregnant.
    The afternoon of the wedding was warm and bright.
    Billy Dillon was the witness.
    After the ceremony Inez and Harry Victor and Billy Dillon and a girl Billy Dillon knew that year rode the ferry to Staten Island and back, had dinner at Luchow’s, and went uptown to hear Mabel Mercer at the RSVP.
    In the spring of the year , Mabel Mercer sang, and this will be my shining hour .
    Two months to the day after the wedding Inez miscarried, but by then Harry was learning the ropes at Justice and Inez had decorated the apartment in Georgetown (white walls, Harvard chairs, lithographs) and they were giving dinner parties, administrative assistants and suprêmes de volaille à l’estragon at the Danish teak table in the living room. When Jack Lovett finally got Inez’s announcement he sent her a wedding present he had won in a poker game in Saigon, a silver cigarette box engraved Résidence du Gouverneur Général de l’Indo-Chine .

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    I N fact they did run into each other.
    Here or there.
    Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other’s presence or untoward interest in each other’s activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.
    Quick, alive.
    Something to think about late at night.
    Something private.
    She always looked for him.
    She did not really expect to see him but she never got off a plane in certain parts of the world without wondering where he was, how he was, what he might be doing.
    And once in a while he was there.
    For example in Jakarta in 1969.
    I learned this from her.
    Official CODEL Mission, Dependents and Guests Accompanying, Inquiry into Status Human Rights in Developing (USAID Recipient) Nations.
    One of many occasions on which Harry Victor descended on one tropic capital or another and set about obtaining official assurance that human rights remained inviolate in the developing (USAID Recipient) nation at hand.
    One of several occasions, during those years after Harry Victor first got himself elected to Congress, on which Inez Victor got off the plane in one tropic capital or another and was met by Jack Lovett.
    Temporarily attached to the embassy.
    On special assignment to the military.
    Performing an advisory function to the private sector.
    “Just what we need here, a congressman,” Inez remembered Jack Lovett saying that night in the customs shed at the Jakarta airport. The customs shed had been crowded and steamy and it had occurred to Inez that there were too many Americans in it. There was Inez, there was Harry, there were Jessie and Adlai. There was Billy Dillon. There was Frances Landau, in the same