A Book of Common Prayer (20 page)

I gave inoculations with Charlotte, but only for a few hours the first morning, because I had no patience with the fact that almost no one in Boca Grande would cross the street to be inoculated. They were all
fatalistas
about cholera. Cholera was an opportunity for God to prove His love.

“Then let Him prove it,” I said to Charlotte at the end of the first morning.

“We have to make it attractive,” Charlotte said. “Obviously.”

And she did.

She set out to make each inoculation seem to the inoculee not a hedge against the hereafter but an occasion of mild profit in the here and now. She left the clinic for an hour and she bought chocolates wrapped in pink tinfoil from the Caribe kitchen and she made a deal for whisky miniatures with an unemployed Braniff steward who had access to the airport catering trucks and, until the remaining vaccine was appropriated by a colonel named Rafael Higuera, she dispensed these favors with every 1.5 cc. shot of Lederle Cholera Strains Ogawa-Inaba.

“Why didn’t she just lie down and open her legs for them,” Antonio said to Gerardo in my living room. It was the evening of the day the vaccine had been appropriated and Antonio had already expressed his conviction that Higuera had performed a public service by preventing Charlotte from further contaminating the populace with her American vaccine. I have never known why Antonio was so particularly enraged by everything Charlotte did. I suppose she was a
norteamericana
, she was a woman, she was an unpredictable element. I suppose she was a version of me at whom he could vent his rage. “Ask the great lady why she didn’t just do that. Higuera didn’t go far
enough.
”

“How far should he have gone,” Gerardo said, and smiled slightly at me.

“She’d throw her apron on my feet once,” Antonio said. “Just once.”

“What would you do,” Gerardo said.

“Drop her,” Antonio said.

“Drop her,” Gerardo said.

“Between the eyes.”

“Seems extreme,” Gerardo said.

“How can you be entertained by this?” I said to Gerardo.

“How can you not be?” Gerardo said to me.

During the week after the appropriation of the vaccine Charlotte spoke not at all to me, spoke only in a glazed and distracted way to Gerardo, and was known to have placed two telephone calls to Leonard Douglas, neither of them completed. At the end of the week she gave me her revised version of the appropriation of the vaccine, the version in which the army was lending its resources to the inoculation program, the version in which she had simply misunderstood Higuera, the version in which he had never offered to sell her the vaccine but had simply expressed concern as to whether she herself had been inoculated; once she had arrived at this version Charlotte never mentioned cholera again, although people continued dying from it for several weeks.

After the cholera epidemic she appeared for a while that May and June to retreat into unspecified gastrointestinal infection less often, and she perfected that frenetic public energy which made many people, particularly Elena, suspect her of a reliance on major amphetamines. Even after she had moved most of her things into the apartment on the Avenida del Mar, even after she had with her own hands whitewashed all the walls and filled the empty rooms with flowers and begun to have what she called her “evenings” there, she kept her room at the Caribe, and she would go there every day for breakfast and to spend most of the day.

She began her “writing” during these days she spent alone at the Caribe.

She remembered her “film festival,” and she drew up endless lists of names: actors, directors, agents, former agents who were then studio executives, former studio executives who were then independent producers, and what I once heard her call “other movers and shakers.” She had met many of these people with Leonard and she was certain that they would be delighted to lend their names and films, once she put it to them.

Which she intended to do as soon as she completed the lists.

She got the idea for her “boutique,” and she planned her projected inventory: needlepoint canvases of her own design and Porthault linens, the market for which in Boca Grande would have seemed to be limited to Elena, Bianca, Isabel, and me. She had enlisted Gerardo’s help in finding a storefront to rent and she was certain that the boutique would pick up the character of the entire neighborhood, once she got it in shape for the opening.

Which she intended to do as soon as Bebe Chicago got his Dominicans out of the storefront.

“Imagine cymbidiums,” she said on the afternoon she showed me her storefront. “Masses of them. In hemp baskets. The illusion of the tropics. That’s the effect to strive for.”

As a matter of fact the illusion of the tropics seemed to me an odd effect to strive for in a city rotting on the equator, but the actual condition of the storefront was such that I could only nod. The room was cramped and grimy and the single window was blacked out. Outside the afternoon sun was blazing but inside there was only the light from two bare bulbs. In the room, besides Charlotte and me, there were several sleeping bags, a hot plate, an open and unflushed toilet, a cheap dinette chair in which Bebe Chicago sat talking on the telephone, and a table at which a man whom Charlotte had introduced as “Mr. Sanchez” seemed to be translating a United States Army arms manual into Spanish.

Charlotte appeared oblivious.

“Lighten, brighten, open it up. The perfect creamy white on the walls, maybe the
palest
robin’s-egg on the ceiling. And lattice. Lots of lattice. Mr. Sanchez is doing the lattice for me.” Charlotte smiled fondly at the man at the table. He did not smile back. “Aren’t you.”

“Mr. Sanchez” stared at Charlotte as if she were a moth he had never before observed and turned to Bebe Chicago. “Are we interested in the AR–16?” he said in Spanish.

“AR–15 only.” Bebe Chicago hung up the telephone and smiled at me. “Gerardo’s mama naturally speaks Spanish,
mon chéri.
”

“Think of a lath-house crossed with a Givenchy perfume box,” Charlotte said.

“Can I offer Gerardo’s mama a
café-filtre
,” Bebe Chicago said. He stood up with a magician’s flourish and placed the dinette chair in front of me. “Can I offer Gerardo’s mama this superb example of post-industrial craftsmanship.”

I remained standing.

“Possibly gardenias,” Charlotte said. “No. Cymbidiums.”

Bebe Chicago smiled and sat in the chair himself.

“Then can I tell Gerardo’s mama how much I admire her shoes,” he said. “Can I at least tell her that.”

“You can tell her what that Bren gun is doing behind the toilet,” I said.

“That’s not a Bren at all,” Bebe Chicago said after only the slightest beat, his voice still silky. “That’s a Kalashnikov. Russian. Out of Syria. The Chinese make one too, but it’s inferior to the Russian. The Russian is the best. A really super weapon.”

“Don’t talk about guns,” Charlotte said, and her voice was low and abrupt, and after that day she seemed to lose interest in her boutique.

During this period Charlotte also had her “research.”

She had her “paperwork.”

In other words she would sit alone in her room at the Caribe and she would try to read books and she would try to write letters. She tried to read a book about illiteracy in Latin America, but in lieu of finishing it she wrote a letter to
Prensa Latina
offering her services as author of a daily “literacy lesson.” She tried to read Alberto Masferrer’s
El Minimum Vital
but she still had difficulty reading Spanish, and she had read a hundred pages of
El Minimum Vital
before she learned from Gerardo that it was about the progressive tax. She borrowed from Ardis Bradley a volume that was obviously a CIA-sponsored “handbook” on Boca Grande, and she discovered in the introduction to this handbook an invitation to address her suggestions “for factual or interpretive or other changes” to a post-office box in Washington.

To this post-office box in Washington Charlotte addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on the subject of Boca Grande.

She never received an answer but first Kasindorf and then Riley and finally Tuck Bradley received word that she was in the country.

In case they had missed her.

Nor did Charlotte receive answers from most of the other officials and agencies and writers and editors to whom she addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on a wide range of subjects.

I believe mainly “other” changes.

The only bad time of these days Charlotte spent at the Caribe was about four o’clock.

At about four o’clock the shine of plausibility would seem to go off her projects.

At about four o’clock she would find herself sitting in the room at the Caribe remembering something.

She would sometimes call me up at four o’clock and tell me what she was remembering.

For example.

Those crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room of the house on California Street.

Those crossed spots were too bright, or too exposed, she could not determine which.

Those spots had always been too bright, too exposed.

She should perhaps have them recessed in the ceiling.

What did I think.

At a certain point during each of these calls the possession would seem to fade from her voice, and by the time she hung up she would sound almost at peace. She would go downstairs then and sit by the pool and she would watch the peacocks hiding from the heat under the jacaranda trees and she would watch the blocks of ice being dragged across the concrete into the Caribe kitchen. She would imagine the various bacteria waiting in each block of ice. She counted bacteria instead of sheep. After a while a great lassitude would come over her and she would want to sleep, and sometimes she did sleep, there by the Caribe pool in the late afternoons, but at night in the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she did not sleep at all.

8

W
E COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL OUR LIVES
.

We should do this all our lives.

Tell her I said it’s all the same.

Tell her that for me.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong
.

I never told Charlotte what Warren Bogart said.

I think she heard him say it every night.

She would get up some nights when Gerardo was asleep and she would pick up the half-filled glasses with which the strangers who came to her “evenings” had littered the empty rooms of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar and she would walk by herself to a theater downtown which showed dolorous Mexican movies all night, tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments. Other nights she would not leave the apartment but would only stand in the living room by the window and listen to the radio. Radio Boca Grande was allowed to broadcast only during restricted hours by that time but she could usually get Radio Jamaica and sometimes even Radio British Honduras and the Voice of the Caribbean from the Central American Mission in San José, Costa Rica. She thought she had New Orleans or Miami one night, dance music from some hotel or another in New Orleans or Miami, but it turned out to be only a pick-up from the Caribe. She recognized the accordionist.

Some nights when she could not even get Radio Jamaica she called San Francisco.

She did not call the number of the house on California Street in San Francisco.

She did not call the number of anyone she knew in San Francisco.

She called a number in San Francisco which gave, over and over again in a voice so monotonous as to seem to come from beyond the grave, the taped “road condition” report of the California Highway Patrol.

Interstate 80 Donner Pass was open.

U.S. 50 Echo Summit was closed.

State Route 88 Carson Pass was open.

State Route 89 Lassen Loop was closed, State Route 108 Sonora was closed, State Route 120 Tioga Pass was closed.

These calls were routed through Quito and Miami and took quite a long time to place.

By the end of May every road regularly reported upon by the California Highway Patrol was open.

According to Victor.

Who duly heard these calls and believed them coded.

“Quite frankly I don’t think the California Highway Patrol is hooked up with the
guerrilleros
,” I said to Victor.

“Then give me one reason for these calls.”

“She’s lonely, Victor.” In fact “lonely” was never a word I would have used to characterize Charlotte Douglas but conversation with Victor requires broad strokes. “She’s ‘a woman alone.’ As I believe you used to call her.”

“She is no longer a woman alone. May I point out. On the occasion of all but one of these calls your son has been spending the night in this apartment. Where Bebe Chicago has been a frequent visitor.”

“If I were you I’d listen to Bebe Chicago’s calls and forget Charlotte’s.”

“Bebe Chicago’s calls. Spare me any more of Bebe Chicago’s calls.” Victor mimicked a whispery falsetto. “ ‘Ricardo? It’s me.
C’est moi, chéri
. Bebe.’ ”

“Actually you aren’t good at voices, Victor. What is it you want to know?”

“What I want to know, Grace, is what your son is doing while she makes these calls.”

“Sleeping.”

“ ‘Sleeping’?”

“ ‘Sleeping.’ Yes.”

Victor looked at me awhile, and then at his nails. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “What kind of man would be sleeping.”

I was tired of Victor that spring.

I was also tired of whatever game Gerardo was playing with Bebe Chicago and the
guerrilleros
and the strangers he invited to Charlotte’s “evenings” on the Avenida del Mar.

Charlotte’s “evenings.”

I would go sometimes.

There were always these strangers there, third-rate people Gerardo was using in his game, the object of which seemed to be to place his marker in Victor’s office in as few moves as possible. His marker that year happened to be Antonio, but who it was mattered not at all to Gerardo. Gerardo plays only for the action. Part of the action in this case was the artful manipulation of what passed for the intelligentsia in Boca Grande, the point being to create an illusion of support for the
guerrilleros
, and it was the members of this “intelligentsia” who littered the apartment on the Avenida del Mar with half-filled glasses two or three nights a week. Of course Bebe Chicago was usually there, and a few “poets” who had published verses in anthologies with titles like
Fresh Wind in the Caribbean
, and the usual complement of translators and teachers and film critics who supported themselves stringing for newspapers and playing at politics. I recall one who read out loud at Charlotte’s dinner table a paper he was writing called “The Singular Position of Intellectuals with Respect to the Crisis of the Underdeveloped World” and then read it again, over Charlotte’s telephone, to a friend in Tenerife. I recall another who made marionettes to perform the plays of Arnold Wesker in schoolyards.