Vernon would happily never have attended another party between any particular present moment and the day of his death, but Imogen now and then liked to get out of the shitbox, so one evening early in the summer of ’58 they hired a babysitter and drove in their recently acquired ’52 Chevy toward Hollywood, then up the winding roads of the canyon. The sun was still well up, the weather (of course) beautiful, and as the car gained height, glimpses of the Pacific sparkled in the crooks of the golden hills.
There were already two or three dozen people in attendance when they arrived, which made it easy for Vernon to wander off on his own. He grabbed a martini off a passing tray and filled a plate with canapés from a buffet table. He had long ago perfected the art of moving through a crowd of acquaintances with a smile and a regretful gesture onward, signaling that he would love to chat if only he wasn’t already committed somewhere else in the room. In this way he could just keep circulating, exploring every nook, leaving one plate here and picking up another there. Now and then someone he knew better might rope him into conversation, but that’s what jokes are for. He would tell one, and laughter works like applause—you can exit on it.
The house certainly was beautiful, if you liked living in a yacht: rooms so long they made the standard ceilings seem low, polished steel window frames, tube-steel banisters. The walls consisted predominantly of sliding glass doors. On the second-floor balcony you could look out over the hillside and imagine you were in the captain’s wheelhouse, with a commanding view of the calm seas of your prosperous voyage. Maybe that was the Navy man in Vernon. Whereas the engineer noted the cork walls, the acoustic-tile ceilings, and inferred that sounds carried all too well through the open floor plan. The weekend suburbanite judged the abstract lozenges of lawn to be awkward to mow, while the wet blanket rejected the built-in pool entirely as a nightmare of upkeep.
The only thing Vernon envied was Wohlstetter’s classical record collection, some thirty times the size of his own. He lingered by Imogen now and then, in case she was in an argument for which she would otherwise later say she’d looked in vain for his agreement. She was drinking gin and tonics and each time he circled back she was pinker in the face and pointier in the nose. She knew to be on good behavior with his colleagues, but after ninety minutes had gone by, he judged that pretty soon she would tell someone—who would richly deserve it, but still—that he had his head up his ass. Fortunately it was not unreasonable to plead the time, given the likelihood that Susan with every passing minute was back-talking herself out of a repeat visit from the babysitter, so he managed to get Imogen out the door and down the drive toward the gate.
In the deepening darkness the house blazed, a parallelepiped of light. “The House That Terror Built,” Imogen said. “No wonder he feels vulnerable. If the Big One gets dropped on LA, he’ll have a front row seat.”
“For a thousandth of a second.”
“Before the x-ray flash chars his silver hair.”
“I think the car’s this way.”
“I remember we drove past the gate.”
“Yes, but we were coming from the other direction.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, as though that were the point at issue. They walked down the dark road to where he knew the car was with 100 percent certainty.
Vernon drove. Imogen smoked and stared out the windshield. “Your colleagues trail after Wohlstetter like high school girls with a crush on the queen bee.”
“Some of them have started wearing suspenders.”
They descended into West Hollywood. Vernon was thinking about Bertrand Russell. Whenever Russell climbed up on his hobby horse about world government, he complained that people were so illogical, and if they would only listen to the reasoning force of his titanic mind, all these unnecessary political problems would vanish. Russell somehow failed to understand that if people were illogical, only fools made logical appeals to them.
“We only ever see ourselves,” Vernon mused.
“What?”
Vernon remembered a sketch he saw in Life magazine a few weeks after the end of the last war. It accompanied an article speculating about what the next war would be like. It showed men in radiation suits with Geiger counters on the steps of the New York Public Library. The lions were still there, but the building was rubble, the city beyond flattened, with only here and there a twisted steel structure half standing. It looked uncannily like photos of Hiroshima.
“Only seeing ourselves,” Vernon repeated. “Like Walt Kelly says, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’ I’ve wondered lately if Americans, more than other nationalities, fear nuclear attack because we’re the only ones to have dropped the bomb on anybody.”
“I don’t think Americans are capable of guilt.”
“I’m talking about projection.”
The neon lights of Santa Monica went by. So bright, this coastline in the dark, so clear the skies. The houses so lightly built. “Speaking of Japan,” Vernon went on. “One of our bibles at work is a study called Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack. Or course it’s about the Soviets. But if you look at Russia’s behavior in World War II, it was all defensive. The surprise attack that strategists like Wohlstetter fear most is the enemy managing to destroy our bombers on the ground. They’re thinking of Pearl Harbor.”
“So instead of worrying about Russia, maybe we should just nuke Japan for good. That would really be a surprise attack.”
“The funny thing is, do you know what Wohlstetter’s wife is famous for?”
“No.”
“She wrote the definitive study of Pearl Harbor.”
They laughed together until Vernon got wheezy.
Vernon turned onto their bungalow’s concrete parking pad. Susan’s bedroom window was dark. “Thank God,” they said simultaneously.
What Vernon couldn’t say to Imogen,
