Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (4 page)

Serving as First Lady:

Giving tours

Ordering “the Nixon china,” as her predecessors had ordered “the Kennedy china,” et cetera.

Having spotlights installed to light the White House at night

Consulting curators about acquiring antiques, and repositioning existing furniture

Standing in receiving lines

Attending performances

Attending religious services

Inviting Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children back to the White House

Answering great quantities of mail written to her

Posing for her official portrait by Henriette Wyeth Hurd

Calling off production of “the Nixon china”

Leaving Washington for California when Mr. Nixon resigned

Reading Woodward and Bernstein’s
The Final Days,
which her husband felt hastened her death

Arranging a surprise party for her depressed husband

Having a stroke, whose effects she worked hard to reverse

C
hekhov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog” is known to every serious reader of the short story. It’s a love story, it’s eloquent, it’s about yearning and what the aftermath of yearning might be—though Chekhov ends his story before we see the exact repercussions. At Yalta, a beachside resort, a married man meets a married woman, and the two become lovers. She leaves, but he cannot forget her. He eventually follows her to Moscow. He appears at the theater, where she is watching a play,
The Geisha.
He says hello, she is startled but quickly responds to his presence, retreating into the theater and eventually kissing him. Are they to escape their mundane lives, and are we watching the beginning of this—act one? Two boys see them kiss. No more is made of this. Anna Sergeevna and Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov—if one thinks romantically—are meant to be together. At story’s end, at least for the moment, they are. They are, yet there is ambiguity: “And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.”
The
end
is ambiguous: the end of everything, death, or the way their relationship turns out? One interpretation haunts the other.

The idea of something beginning again, though, can weary one at this point. In any case, the reader can see that there is no more space and that the story will end with the paragraph. We have to imagine, but with imagining come effort and confusion, and what we envision is now tinged with portentousness: now that there is breathing room, the moralist (or at least the skeptic) in us can come out. It’s almost required. We have been swept up in the inevitability, the
necessity,
of their union for much of the story, but when we have no more information, we can only imagine, and to imagine means to reassess.

Thelma Ryan, a.k.a. Buddy or Patricia, found herself in such a situation when she met Richard Nixon. He was compelled to pursue her—to go to Moscow, in effect—but I’m not sure if she’d lost her own sense of credibility, as has Anna Sergeevna, who wants her lover to respect her even though she has lost respect for herself. Sex isn’t the issue: it has more to do with the idea of what one might become (and who’s to know?), versus settling for a status quo of stagnation and social approval. Such liminal moments involve our sense of a future that both beckons as limitless possibility and weighs on us as looming necessity. Knowing what the future holds would simplify our decisions, at the cost of exhausting us with the knowledge that we would have to actually play it out, to read our own story to the end.

But what, exactly, does Dmitri Dmitrich offer? Early in the story we have this information: “In his appearance, in his character, in his whole nature there was something attractive and elusive that disposed women towards him and enticed them; he knew that, and he himself was attracted to them by some force.” RN was hardly a lady-killer, but certainty—self-assurance—can be highly
attractive, even in a person unsure of his desirability. The important thing is to act. RN must have understood that Pat Ryan was drawn to him, however much she protested, however much he did not fit her scenario for her future life.

Chekhov does not write the way he does (“there was something attractive and elusive”) because he can’t grab hold of the character. He speaks about unnamed forces because certain things escape being expressed in words. Arguably, such forces don’t escape expression but rather hover as ephemeral realities that dominate by not being named. This is not some postmodern argument that all is, at its core, unknowable, that real communication is impossible. We can read everything touching on the life of Mrs. Nixon in a good-faith effort to see her from all available angles. We can research, empathize, let her coalesce in our minds as a believable character, and still not pin her like a butterfly on a specimen board. Rather than bringing her into sharper and sharper focus, we might see her from more and more angles, letting Chekhov advise us on reticence.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is this passage in “The Lady with the Little Dog”: “Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him.” Is Dmitri a realist, aware of himself in the larger context, or prideful and resigned to one of life’s little ironies: what women do, how they become disillusioned, yet “when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him.” It’s difficult to answer because we don’t know how he and his wife came to be together. If it’s an epiphany, it’s one he had earlier, not in this instant, and Dmitri seems to scuttle the possibility that life is full
of sometimes pleasant surprises when the narrative continues “and not one of them had been happy with him.” So: the women perceive one thing, find out it’s another, then love him anyway, though no one is ever happy with him (in spite of loving him). And
that’s
the status quo? Can Dmitri assume that
all
women see through him? Are we to believe that all women settle, in exactly this way? I question this not because of feminist sensibilities but because the assertion is at first strong and disarming, then perplexing, as a description of how relationships evolve. Again, we have nothing with which to judge this: not the testimony of his wife, not information from other lovers. The author leaves open the possibility that Dmitri tells himself self-serving stories that allow him to function.

Chekhov seems to write very directly, though his stories don’t hit you over the head with a log; instead, they’re more like persuading the reader to go gather wood. Chekhov tells us Dmitri “felt compassion for this life, [that of his lover] still so warm and beautiful, but probably already near the point where it would begin to fade and wither, like his own life.”

These are the stories, even the moral lessons, by which we live. Reading Chekhov’s story quickly, we might feel an intimate revelation has been made, and we should assimilate its wisdom. Read closely, there’s every possibility that the narrator is fallible, critical but self-justifying, even if unintentionally. We are still hoping that “The Lady with the Little Dog” will have a fairy-tale ending—children and wives and husbands be damned, as always—but when we have stasis at the end, we can judge the characters only in terms of their words and actions, which here are not necessarily the same. If the courtship of Pat and Dick was left at such a threshold, we could project our own optimism or dread onto their untold story. Or they could tell us, confidently or disingenuously,
what the future held in store, trying to control the stories of their lives.

Chekhov does not provide a moment of insight for Anna. Instead, she remains a character who does everything right, except for the one thing that she does “wrong.” She responds to her frustration and acts on her desires; she flees the object of them; she reenters her former life and sits in the theater with a lorgnette, the better to see how someone else (
The Geisha
) lives her life of subservience. The first time we observe the lorgnette in the story, it is one dropped from Anna’s hand; later, she has a “vulgar” lorgnette at the play (Dmitri’s phallic projection). Sight—what one can see—is very important to “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Anna’s husband urges her to return home from Yalta because of trouble with his eyes. But we are blocked from seeing for many reasons, including the fact that some things just cannot be seen. Abstractions defy vision. Yearning cannot be
seen,
love cannot, certainly the future cannot—except in our peripheral or subliminal vision, perhaps, by the details that provoke the same reaction in the reader as in the characters.

Chekhov, in a letter to his brother, writes: “In the area of mental states there are also particulars. May God save you from generalities. It is best to avoid descriptions of the mental states of your heroes; the effort should be to make these clear from their actions.” In the same letter, Chekhov writes: “In descriptions of nature, one should seize upon minutiae, grouping them so that when, having read the passage, you close your eyes, a picture is formed.” Raymond Carver, who for many years read Chekhov daily, understood this. He placed his characters amid details, revisiting objects until their essence conveyed their importance; he gave us sparse details about the characters themselves. We don’t think of a Carver character and envision that character vividly, as we do in Dickens. We
remember that a character was wearing a belt because even that ordinary belt might have been put to use in an awful way. Carver had also assimilated the famous maxim attributed to Chekhov that if a gun is introduced early on it will have to go off by story’s end. Details in Carver might be used or, more often, remain extraneous, like useless touchstones. Carver, of course, would never have a character offer an unexpected perspective on himself, as Dmitri does, with his ostensible explanation of how he acts, how others react to him, and what might therefore be expected. At the end of Chekhov’s story, one character clutches his head while the other cries. We are told “that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning,” which seems to unite the prescient writer with the character as perceiver. The author freeze-frames the ending but alarms us enough that we fear seeing things set in motion again. It is almost as if, in Chekhov and Carver, the story must end where it does for maximum scariness.

Those of us with vivid memories of the Nixon years might share just such a freeze-frame, remembering when Nixon stood in the door of the plane that would take him and his family away from the White House for the last time. Their actual departure, had it been a moment in literature, could have been a conventional conclusion—the end of something—seeded with some suggestions about how the future might turn out, but for me, this moment was interesting as it pertained not so much to the major character but to the minor. Whether we interpreted him as tragic, terrible, or any other number of things, for me, this moment provided a hyperawareness of Mrs. Nixon. What seemed mysterious was that a specific person had determined her fate—and how often does that happen? It was also done very publicly, calling attention to her in exactly the way she tried to avoid revealing herself. (This,
of course, is something fiction writers have to be aware of, being neither judgmental nor cruel toward their characters, but also not avoiding painful revelations.) Often, writers say that, while they are writing, a character suddenly seems to be out of control (usually a good thing), or that, while concentrating on the main character, they noticed a face in the crowd and couldn’t break eye contact—something like that. My eyes and my curiosity riveted themselves to Mrs. Nixon at her husband’s side. I had accepted her as relatively unimportant; she was the antithesis of a role model; sure, I felt sorry for her, but wait a minute: who was she?

RN told himself many stories about himself. Most of them—the lies included—he was willing to have carved in stone. He didn’t just read from a script that was written by his advisers or speech-writers; he worked on draft after draft of his speeches. For all I know, Mrs. Nixon might have been a storyteller, too, but I have my doubts because she rarely spoke for the record, let alone repeated herself, except in the most banal clichés. We’ll never know if she saw through her boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband but loved him anyway (and was never happy with him).

Dmitri’s last uttered words are a question. “‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. ‘How?’” The question echoes, catapulting the reader back to the point at which the lovers met, after which some inevitable force (perhaps only the writer) began to determine their story for them. At story’s end, we have much information, but not all: that lurks just outside, and foggily infiltrates the reader’s own life. The reader does a double take, imagining not the characters’ futures, as Dmitri’s question suggests we should, but the characters’ past, which we
saw
yet perhaps did not really understand.

We can easily imagine Nixon, and even Mrs. Nixon, in the days before the resignation, head in hand, muttering How? How?
How?, not obsessing about how to handle their future but projecting themselves back to the source, real or imagined, of their self-created tragedy. Certainly the appearance of Mr. Nixon became that point in Pat Ryan’s life, the mystery to which every question returned.

A
s the gals know, drinking a milk shake every now and then isn’t a bad idea, if you’ve dropped a little too much weight. Rushing around, traveling, volunteering, caring for our children . . . it can be a bit stressful, and sometimes you forget good nutrition. There’s just too much to do, and you forget about the importance of keeping up your strength. If you find yourself altering your dresses, it might be time to get on the scale, acknowledge how much weight you’ve lost, and try to do better.