Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life Read Free Page A

different from telling a story, but if we omit detail while things brew beneath the surface, the reader usually picks up a sense of what those missing details might be, and what they might mean, by the tone. In person, you can tell if a storyteller is excited and connected, or perplexed and removed. We have thebenefit of facial expressions, we often have a history that contextualizes the person speaking (as we come to have with writers whose fictional worlds we become familiar with), we’re more in the world of theater than the world of prose. But a writer like Carver isn’t going to stop to give you the character’s expression (monotonous movement or the lack of it creates its own dynamic; Carver got this, in part, from Beckett), and he isn’t going to jump to the point, either, the way our friend might lead up to a punch line. Carver is more interested in how one gets to that point, and he works like a camera, moving around his character, seeing from different angles. This technique is handled so subtly, though, that you don’t realize you’re moving with the camera’s eye. You’re in motion, and when you stop it’s because you’ve been stopped the way Wile E. Coyote stops, suspended over a canyon’s thin air.
    Mrs. Nixon’s remark about her mother’s corpse looking beautiful hardly has the complexity of Carver’s short story. As reported, it’s a one-liner that really consists of
only
the punch line, complete with implicit instructions from Julie Nixon Eisenhower on how we are to react to her mother. But I don’t hear it the way she has instructed me to, and I doubt many people would. You feel the tension, or even the terror underlying the emotion. She’s playing
against
emotion.
Breezy
was a word of the period. You don’t hear it much anymore. Mrs. Nixon was being a bit breezy when she phrased her statement as a question. She wanted to get away as quickly as possible—away from the people she addressed, as well as from the upsetting reality of the situation. Interesting that she married a man who could leave almost nothing untouched, rethinking everything, playing devil’s advocate with himself (or any angels who might be converted), always second-guessing both real and imaginary adversaries.
    She married a man who shared her anxiety about expressedemotion: he arrived at ideas and conclusions (those times he ever arrived) by dissembling, hypothesizing, imagining stories that would be told, rather than getting as close to the story as he could and elucidating its substance. He believed everything in the world could shift at any moment. This is not a little boy to whom you would have wanted to give an ant farm. When he had the power, he insisted upon being the camera, making his audience move. He used words to superimpose one story on top of another. By the time he had concluded his half thoughts and ellipses, his curses and his hypothetical scenarios, he’d shaped a ball of twine into a cat’s cradle so dense, even he could not escape. We needn’t make him analogous to Carver’s Leo, with his wife offstage, unable to witness his realization that he is willing to be dead. But in David Frost’s famous TV interview of March 1977, we find out that Nixon, forced by the press’s vigilance about the Watergate break-in and Americans’ increasing desire to lay the blame at someone’s feet to ask for Ehrlichman’s resignation, told his faithful subordinate he’d hoped he wouldn’t wake up that morning. If we trust this particular narrator, Nixon was willing himself to be dead.

The Faux Pas
    M rs. Nixon is quoted in Joe McGinniss’s book: “Our group used to get together often. Of course, none of us had much money at the time, so we would just meet at someone’s house after skating and have food, a spaghetti dinner or something of that type, and then we would sit around and tell stories and laugh. Dick was always the highlight of the party because he has a wonderful sense of humor. He would keep