Didion

Play:

THERE WAS AT FIRST that spring an occasional faggot who would take her to parties. Never a famous faggot, never one of those committed months in advance to escorting the estranged wives of important directors, but a third-string faggot. At first she was even considered a modest asset by several of them: they liked her not only because she would listen to late-night monologues about how suicidal they fel but because the years she spent modeling had versed her in precisely the marginal distinctions which preoccupied them. She understood, for example, about shoes, and could always distinguish among the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy. Still, chere remained some fatal lack of conviction in her performance, some instant of flushed inattention that would provoke them finally to a defensive condescension. Eventually they would raise their eyebrows helplessly at one another when they were with her, and be oversolicitous. “Darling,” they would say, “nave another drink.” And she would. She was drinking a good deal in the evenings now because when she drank she did not dream. “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen,” a loudspeaker kept repeating in her dreams now, and she would be checking off names as the children filed past her, the little children in the green antechamber, she would be collecting their lockets and baby rings in a fine mesh basket. Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation, 

White:

Driving a Budget Rent-A-Car between Sacramento and San Francisco one rainy morning in November of 1968 I kept the radio on very loud. On this occasion I kept the radio on very loud not to find out what time it was but in an effort to erase six words from my mind, six words which had no significance for me but which seemed that year to signal the onset of anxety or fright. The words, a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” were these: Petals on a wet black bough. The radio played “Wichita Lineman” and “I Heard It on the Grapevine.” Petals on a wet black bough. Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations. 

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James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon. In 1950 James B. Douglas had opened Northgate, in Seattle, the first regional center to combine a pedestrian mall with an underground truck tunnel. In 1954 David D. Bohannon had opened Hillsdale, a forty-acre regional center on the peninsula south of San Francisco. That is the only solid bio I have on James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon to this day, but many of their opinions are engraved on my memory. David D. Bohannon believed in preserving the integrity of the shopping center by not cutting up the site with any dedicated roads. David D. Bohannon believed that architectural setbacks in a center looked “pretty on paper’ but caused ‘customer resistance.’”” James B. Douglas advised that a small-loan office could prosper in a center only if it were placed away from foot traffic, since people who want small loans do not want to be observed getting them. I do not now recall whether it was James B. Douglas or David D. Bohannon or someone else altogether who passed along this hint on how to paint the lines around the parking spaces (actually this is called “‘striping the lot,” and the spaces are “stalls’’): make each space a foot wider than it need be —ten feet, say, instead of nine—when the center first opens and business is slow. By this single stroke the developer achieves a couple of important objectives, the appearance of a popular center and the illusion of easy parking, and no one will really notice when business picks up and the spaces shrink. 

Nor do I recall who first solved what was once a crucial center dilemma: the placement of the major tenant vis-a-vis the parking lot. The dilemma was that the major tenant—the draw, the raison d’étre for the financing, the Sears, the Macy’s, the May Company wanted its customer to walk directly from car to store. The smaller tenants, on the other hand, wanted that same customer to pass their stores on the way from the car to, say, Macy’s. The solution to this conflict of interests was actually very simple: two major tenants, one at each end of a mall. This is called ‘’anchoring the mall,” and represents seminal work in shopping-center theory. One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me. 

A few aspects of shopping-center theory do in fact remain impenetrable to me. I have no idea why the Community Builders’ Council ranks ‘‘Restaurant’’ as deserving a Number One (or “‘Hot Spot’’) location but exiles ‘‘Chinese Restaurant’ to a Number Three, out there with ‘Power and Light Office’ and “Christian Science Reading Room.” Nor do I know why the Council approves of enlivening a mall with “‘small animals” but specifically, vehemently, and with no further explanation, excludes ‘‘monkeys.”’ If I had a center I would have monkeys, and Chinese restaurants, and Mylar kites and bands of small girls playing tambourine.