A Book of Common Prayer (9 page)

“I know perfectly well what you’re doing. Even if you don’t.”

“Don’t talk about it. Don’t laugh. I just want it.”

“You don’t want it at all.”

Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the spread around herself. “I did.”

“You’re transparent, Charlotte. To everyone but yourself.”

Charlotte gazed out the window. “Somebody died,” she said after a while. “Somebody died at the Pacific Union Club. While you were talking. Downstairs.”

“How do you know.”

“The fire department came. The resuscitator squad. And then an ambulance. And they lowered the flag.”

Leonard sat on a chair facing the bed. “I know exactly what you’re trying to do.”

“Look. You can see the flag. Half mast. What do you mean, you got him a ride out?”

“Never mind Warren. It’s a lousy idea, Charlotte, trying to have a baby.”

“Who said anything about a baby? I say I want to fuck, you say I don’t. You say you got Warren a ride out, I say how, you say never mind Warren. I say somebody died at the Pacific Union Club, you start talking about having a baby. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Leonard kept his eyes on Charlotte but she did not meet them.

“Quite honestly I don’t.”

“Quite honestly I don’t think you do. Quite honestly I always know what you’re thinking before you do. What you’re thinking now is this: you get yourself pregnant, Warren can’t get to you. ABC. QED. Don’t ask me why. Where did you get that underwear.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“Has it ever occurred to you that your primary erogenous zone is your underwear?”

Charlotte had pulled the bedspread closer and smoked a cigarette without speaking and there had not seemed any point in staying in the cold room after that. In the elevator it occurred to her that he had been trying to make her laugh with him but that was another mood she could not remember. In fact she did want a baby.

“He apparently called the office and gave Suzy a lot of shit before he got me here.” Leonard nodded at the Fairmont doorman. “ ‘Your friend
Warren
,’ Suzy calls him.”

“I don’t want him to come out here.”

“It’s not up to you, Charlotte. Come out of your trance. He wants to come out.”

“Then why hasn’t he.”

“You know as well as I do
why hasn’t he
, Charlotte, he hasn’t been able to promote an airplane ticket, that’s
why hasn’t he.
”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Of course he didn’t say that. Wake up.”

Charlotte concentrated on trying to tie her scarf in the wind.

“So as soon as the Q-A was over I made a call and got him a ride out on Bashti Levant’s plane.”

“I can’t—” Charlotte broke off.

“You can’t what.”

Charlotte shrugged.

“You can’t what, Charlotte.”

“I can’t see Warren on a small plane with Bashti Levant for five hours.” She had just seized on this but it was true. Bashti Levant was in the music business. Bashti Levant had “labels,” and three-piece suits and large yellow teeth and obscure Balkan proclivities. “They won’t like each other.”

“No. They won’t. They will cordially dislike each other and they will entirely entertain each other. That’s not what you were going to say. You can’t what.”

Charlotte gave up on the scarf. “I can’t deal with Warren right now.”

“What’s to ‘deal with’? You were married to him, now you’re married to me. You think you’re the only two people in the world who used to fuck and don’t any more?”

“Not at all.” Another thing Charlotte could not deal with was Leonard’s essentially rational view of the sexual connection. “There’s also you and me.”

“Not bad. You’re waking up.” Leonard seemed pleased. “Here’s a taxi.”

“I think I’ll walk.”

“Then walk,” Leonard said as he got into the taxi.

Charlotte walked as far as Grace Cathedral and stood for a while just inside the nave in a particular pool of yellow light Marin had liked as a child. When the light shifted on the window and there was no more yellow Charlotte left the cathedral. She intended walking back to the Fairmont to get a taxi but there was one idling outside the cathedral, and Leonard was waiting in it, just as he had been waiting’ in a taxi outside the courthouse the morning she divorced Warren.

“She had a straw hat one Easter.” Charlotte had taken Leonard’s hand in the taxi but neither of them spoke until the house on California Street was in sight. “And a flowered lawn dress.”

“Don’t think you have to get yourself pregnant just to prove he doesn’t have you any more, Charlotte.”

“We took her to lunch at the Carlyle, I remember she was cold.”

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just run it back through the projector, Charlotte.”

“Warren gave her his coat.”

Upstairs in the house on California Street Charlotte took off her skirt and sweater and laid them on a chair. She took off the pieces of handmade navy-blue underwear and let them drop to the floor. At the bottom of a drawer she found a faded flannel nightgown and she pulled on the nightgown and she lay on the bed and watched the last light leave the windows.

“And we drank a lot of Ramos Fizzes. And in the middle of lunch Warren said he had an appointment downtown. And when the check came I didn’t have any money. I didn’t even have two dollars for a taxi, Marin and I walked home.” She turned to Leonard. “She was three. Everybody admired her hat. I think I was never so happy on a Sunday. Why are you bringing him out.”

“He’s her father, isn’t he.”

“I can’t handle it.”

Leonard sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the handmade pieces of navy-blue silk from the floor. They were very plain. They had no lace or embroidery. They had only the rows of infinitesimal stitches. “Maybe I want to see if you can. Somebody in the Azores went blind making these.”

“Why do you have to bring him out.”

“Because he gave her his coat,” Leonard said.

“Somebody in the Philippines,” Charlotte said. “Not the Azores. The Philippines.”

8

“T
HOSE WERE FOUR TRULY WONDERFUL SPECIMENS YOU
condemned me to fly out here with,” Warren said when he walked into the house on California Street at nine-thirty the next morning.

Charlotte stood perfectly still. Warren looked as if he had not slept in several days. His eyes were bloodshot, his chin stubbled. He was wearing sneakers and a muffler Charlotte recognized as one she had knit for herself the winter they lived in an unheated apartment on East 93rd Street, and he was carrying not a suitcase but two shopping bags stuffed with what appeared to be dirty laundry. He was also carrying one red rose, which he handed to Charlotte without looking at her.

“Four authentic gargoyles,” he said. “Some favor you did me. The four worst people in the world. Climbers. Vermin. Gargoyles. New York trash. Hogarth caricatures. 25,000 feet, no exit. Deliver me from favors. I need a drink.”

“You repeated gargoyles,” Leonard said. “Otherwise vintage.”

“The FBI is due at ten,” Charlotte said.

“What’s that got to do with your getting me a drink. Me no get FBI joke.”

“I haven’t heard that since it was still ‘me no get Indian joke,’ ” Leonard said. “Which I remember vividly from the night I introduced you to the Maharanee of wherever she was from.”

“Lower Pelham,” Warren said. “She was the Maharanee of Lower Pelham.” He dropped the shopping bags on the floor in front of the fireplace. An aerosol can of shaving cream and a balled seersucker suit stuffed with dirty socks rolled out. “Get somebody to wash and iron that, Charlotte, all right? The suit just needs pressing.”

“We don’t have any washers and ironers on the place today.” Charlotte retrieved the aerosol can before it hit the open fire. “Or any pressers.”

“I can see you’re in one of your interesting moods. Tell me what else you can’t do for me today, Charlotte. You think you can give me a drink? Or can’t you.”

Charlotte filled a glass with ice and splashed bourbon into it. Her hands were shaking. The veins on her arms were standing out and she did not want Warren to see them. When she finally spoke her voice was neutral. “Who exactly was on this plane?”

“All friends of yours, I have no doubt. Which reminds me, you look like hell, your veins show.” Warren took the glass and drained it. “This Levant creature, whoever he is.”

“Bashti Levant controls three out of five pop records sold in America.” Leonard seemed amused. “As you know perfectly well.”

“Yeah, well, I had some fun at his expense, I don’t mind telling you. I had a little fun with him and this fat castrato he had along to bray at his jokes. This pasty Palm Beach castrato. ‘P.L.U.,’ he kept saying. ‘People Like Us.’ I let him know what category that was, don’t think I didn’t. Fawning capon. French cuffs. Parasitical eunuch.”

“You didn’t like him,” Leonard said.

“Palm Beach trash hanger-on. I let the women alone.”

“The last Southern gentleman,” Leonard said.

“Not that they deserved it. Two terrible women. Terrible voices, terrible brays. The castrato only brayed when the Levant creature snapped his fingers, but the women brayed all the time. 3,000 miles of braying.
Le island. Le weekend. Les monkey-gland injections. Le
New York trash.” Warren held out his glass to Charlotte. “I believe one of them was married to the Levant creature. Whoever he is, I have no idea.”

“That surprises me. Since Leonard just told you.”

“That surprises you, does it.” Warren rattled the ice in his glass. “You surprise easier than you used to. I suppose this creature is a client of Leonard’s.”

“As a matter of fact he is.”

“Leonard’s got all the luck. Arabs. Jews. Indians. Bashti Levant.”

“Niggers,” Leonard said. “You forgot niggers.”

“How exactly did this creature come to your attention, Leonard? He rape an Arab? Or is that possible. Actually I believe that’s a solecism. Raping an Arab.”

“You’ve had that Arab in the wings, I can tell by your delivery.” Leonard took Warren’s glass and filled it. “I got involved with Bashti on a dope charge a few years ago. Involving certain of his artists.”

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing. Bashti’s artists.”

“There was a civil-liberties issue.”

“Of course there was.” Warren choked with laughter and slapped his knee. “I knew there was.”

“There was,” Charlotte said.

In the silence that followed she could hear her voice echo, harsh and ugly. She fixed her eyes on the ring Leonard had brought her from wherever he had gone to meet the man who financed the Tupamaros.

The square emerald ring.

The big square emerald from some capital she could not remember.

“Listen to that voice,” Warren said. “Let’s have that tone of voice again.”

Leonard looked at Charlotte and shook his head slightly.

Charlotte picked up a cigarette and lit it.

“No wonder your daughter left home,” Warren said.

The red rose Warren had given Charlotte fell from the table to the floor.

Charlotte said nothing.

“All I hold against your daughter is she didn’t catch Bashti Levant with that pipe bomb. Bashti and certain of his artists. That’s the only bone I want to pick with your daughter. Your daughter and mine.”

“He doesn’t mellow,” Leonard said finally.

“What did you expect, Leonard? You expect I’d hit forty-five and start applauding the family of man?” Warren drained his second drink. “It’s my birthday, Charlotte. You haven’t wished me happy birthday.”

“I’ll tell you something I expected, I expected—” Charlotte broke off. She did not know what she had expected. She concentrated on the emerald.

Bogotá.

Quito.

She had no idea where Leonard had met the man who financed the Tupamaros.

“Today’s not your birthday,” she said finally. “Your birthday was last month.”

“Your husband expected a humanist.”

“Leonard,” Leonard said.

“Pardon?”

“Her husband’s name is Leonard.”

“I stole that rose for you,” Warren said. “Off the flight of the living dead.”

Dwelling on the past leads to unsoundness and dementia
, my aunt also advised.

And,
Don’t cry over curdled milk, Grace, make cottage cheese of it
.

And to the same doubtful point:
Remember Lot’s Wife, avoid the backward glance
.

“Wish me happy birthday,” Warren said. “Have a drink on my forty-fifth birthday.”

“Your birthday was October 23rd,” Charlotte said.

“She doesn’t drink before breakfast,” Leonard said. “It’s hard and fast with her, she never does.”

“She did on my thirtieth,” Warren said.

“
Which was on October 23rd nineteen-hundred and
—oh shit.”

“Watch your language,” Warren said.

Avoid the backward glance
.

Until Marin disappeared Charlotte had arranged her days to do exactly that.

9

I
KNOW WHY CHARLOTTE LIKED TALKING TO THE FBI:
the agents would let her talk about Marin. Their devotion to Marin seemed total. They were pilgrims pledged to the collection of relics from Marin’s passion. During the days before Warren arrived in San Francisco the agents had taken Charlotte to see Marin’s apartment on Haste Street in Berkeley. The agents had taken Charlotte to see the house on Grove Street in Berkeley where they had found the cache of .30-caliber Browning automatic rifles and the translucent pink orthodontal retainer Marin was supposed to wear to correct her bite. In both those places the gray morning light fell through dusty windows onto worn hardwood floors and Charlotte had remembered for the first time how sad she herself had been at Berkeley before Warren came to her door.

“Let’s flop back to one of the theories you were espousing yesterday, Mrs. Douglas. When you—”

“Let’s flop back to all of them,” Warren said. Warren had been sitting in the same chair ever since he walked into the house and dropped his shopping bags. He had gotten up only to get himself drinks and once, perfunctorily, when the FBI men arrived and Leonard left. “I’m the felon’s father,” he had said to the FBI men. He seemed bent now in a fit of laughter. “I want to flop back to every one of these theories Mrs. Douglas has been espousing. In my absence. I’ve been out of touch, I didn’t know Mrs. Douglas had theories. To espouse.”