Joan Didion
Run River
for my family and for N
“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive …”
“… the real Eldorado is still further on. ”
Acknowledgments
TEA FOR TWO
Copyright 1924 by Harms, Inc.
Copyright Renewed
Reprinted by Permission
OF THEE I SING
Copyright 1931 by New World Music Corporation
Copyright Renewed
Reprinted by Permission
BLUE ROOM
Copyright 1926 by Harms, Inc.
Copyright Renewed
Reprinted by Permission
DON’T FENCE ME IN
Copyright 1944 by Harms, Inc.
Reprinted by Permission
“TEMPTATION”
Lyric by Arthur Freed.
Melody by Nacio Herb Brown
The quotation from the poem “Man and Wife” from LIFE STUDIES by Robert Lowell, is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Company, Inc. Copyright
1
Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.
She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp on the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.When she could wind the watch no further she stood up, still barefoot from the shower, picked up from her dressing table a bottle of
Her eyes fixed not on the windows but upon the framed snapshots of the children which hung above her dressing table (Knight at eight, standing very straight in a Cub Scout uniform; Julie at seven, the same summer), Lily held her hand inside her dress until all the
Nine hours before, at four o’clock that afternoon, Lily had decided that she would not go at all to the Templetons’ party. It was entirely too hot. She had been upstairs all afternoon, lying on the bed in her slip, the shutters closed and the electric fan on. Everett was out in the hops, showing the new irrigation system to a grower from down the river; Knight had driven into town; Julie, she supposed, was somewhere with one of the Templeton twins. She did not really know.