A Book of Common Prayer

1

THE WIND IS UP TONIGHT.

Palm fronds clatter.

Shutters bang against the sills but I cannot close the windows because the house smells of cancer. Gerardo is somewhere over the sea, due home on the midnight Air France. When I think of the sea here tonight I imagine the water abruptly receding, then swelling back in the tidal surge, la marejada, drowning the sea wall, silencing the dogs, softening my burning skin and rinsing my brittle hair and floating the Liberian tanker in the harbor across the submerged boulevards of Progreso primero.

Sand-strewn caverns cool and deep

Where the winds are all asleep.

Wishful thinking.

La marejada will not come tonight, nor will I die tonight.

All that will happen tonight is that the generator will fail as usual and I will sit in the dark reciting Matthew Arnold as usual and when Gerardo arrives from the airport I will pretend to be asleep.

Again as usual.

Since Charlotte’s death Gerardo and I have had to learn how to make conversation by day and avoid it in the dark, how to pretend together that my indifference to his presence derives from my being asleep, or in pain, or hallucinating. I am not in such pain that I hallucinate but other people prefer to think that I am. When I speak above a whisper Gerardo and Elena and Victor and Antonio avert their eyes. Even Isabel and Bianca avert their eyes. Even the dim Mendana cousin they brought in from Millonario to nurse me averts her eyes, and crosses herself every time I vomit or ask for a rum-and-quinine or suggest that she is repeating herself. This particularly tedious Mendana was trained as a Sister of Mercy, left the order in 1944 but continues to wear her full habit around Millonario and at family deathbeds, and fancies herself the dispatch-rider between the rest of us and heaven. When I interrupt her accounts of local miracles on the third telling she consoles herself by dismissing me as “de afuera,” an outsider. I am de afuera. I have been de afuera all my life. I was de afuera even at the Brown Palace Hotel. It is a little more than a year now since Charlotte Douglas’s death and almost two years since her arrival in Boca Grande.

Charlotte Douglas’s death.

Charlotte Douglas’s murder.

Neither word works.

Charlotte Douglas’s previous engagement.

Some of what I know about Marin Bogart’s disappearance I know from Charlotte. Some of it I know from Leonard Douglas. Some of it I know from having once seen Warren Bogart and some of it I know from having once seen Marin but most of what I know, the most reliable part of what I know, derives from my training in human behavior.

I do not mean my training under Kroeber at California, nor with Lévi-Strauss at São Paulo.

I mean my training in being de afuera.

Nothing I know about Marin’s disappearance comes from the “pages” Charlotte apparently wrote during her first weeks in Boca Grande, the pages she was heard typing at night in her room at the Caribe, the pages given to me with her other personal effects by the manager of the Caribe. On those pages she had tried only to rid herself of her dreams, and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life. We all have the same dreams.

2

THE MORNING THE FBI MEN FIRST CAME TO THE HOUSE on California Street Charlotte did not understand why. She had read newspaper accounts of the events they recited, she listened attentively to everything they said, but she could make no connection between the pitiless revolutionist they described and Marin, who at seven had stood on a chair to make her own breakfast and wept helplessly when asked to clean her closet.

Sweet Marin.

Who at sixteen had been photographed with her two best friends wearing the pink-and-white candy-striped pinafores of Children’s Hospital volunteers, and had later abandoned her Saturdays at the hospital as “too sad.”

Soft Marin.

Who at eighteen had been observed with her four best friends detonating a crude pipe bomb in the lobby of the Transamerica Building at 6:30 A.M., hijacking a P.S.A. L–1011 at San Francisco Airport and landing it at Wendover, Utah, where they burned it in time for the story to interrupt the network news and disappeared.

Marin.

Or so the two FBI men tried to tell Charlotte.

Marin who had eaten coconut ice beneath the Great Banyan at Calcutta.

Marin who had been flown to Copenhagen to see the lights at Tivoli.

Marin who was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard’s Barcelona chairs, even as the fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard’s porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte’s head at the 10′ by 16′ silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley.

Or so Charlotte tried to tell the fat FBI man.

The thin one did not seem to be listening.

I am talking here about a day in November one year before the day in November when Charlotte Douglas first appeared in Boca Grande.

One amplification. Some of what Charlotte said about the months which followed Marin’s disappearance she did not even say to me. She said it to Gerardo.

I would call that the least reliable part of what I know.

Three or four things I do know about Charlotte.

As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers the child Charlotte routinely asked that “it” turn out all right, “it” being unspecified and all-inclusive, and she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that “it” might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericana.

She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home to Hollister on weekends and slept a great deal during the week. In those two years she had entered the main library once, during a traveling exhibition of the glass flowers from Harvard. She recalled having liked the glass flowers. From books Warren Bogart gave her to read when she was twenty Charlotte learned for the first time about the Spanish Civil War, memorized the ideological distinctions among the various PSUC brigades and POUM militia, but until she was twenty-two and Warren Bogart divined and corrected her misapprehension she believed that World War II had begun at Pearl Harbor. From Leonard Douglas she had absorbed a passing fluency in Third World power, had learned what the initials meant in Algeria and Indochina and the Caribbean, but on a blank map of the world she could not actually place the countries where the initials were in conflict. She considered the conflict dubious in any case. She understood that something was always going on in the world but believed that it would turn out all right. She believed the world to be peopled with others like herself. She associated the word “revolution” with the Boston Tea Party, one of the few events in the history of the United States prior to the westward expansion to have come to her attention. She also associated it with events in France and Russia that had probably turned out all right, otherwise why had they happened.

A not atypical norteamericana.

Of her time and place.

It occurs to me tonight that give or take twenty years and a thousand miles Charlotte Douglas’s time and place and my time and place were not too different.

Some things about Charlotte I never understood. She was a woman who grew faint when she noticed the blue arterial veins in her wrists, could not swim in clouded water, and once suffered an attack of acute terror while wading in water where an artesian well churned up the sand. Yet during the time she was in Boca Grande I saw her perform a number of tasks with the same instinctive lack of squeamishness I had seen that day at Millonario. I once saw her skin an iguana for stew. I once saw her make the necessary incision in the trachea of an OAS field worker who was choking on a piece of steak at the Jockey Club. A doctor had been called but the OAS man was turning blue. Charlotte did it with a boning knife plunged first in a vat of boiling rice. A few nights later the OAS man caused a scene because Charlotte refused to fellate him on the Caribe terrace, but that, although suggestive of the ambiguous signals Charlotte tended to transmit, is neither here nor there. Similarly, during the cholera outbreak that year Charlotte volunteered to give inoculations, and she did, for thirty-four hours without sleeping, until the remaining Lederle vaccine was appropriated by one of Victor’s colonels. When the colonel suggested that as a norteamericana she might be in a position to buy back some of the vaccine Charlotte only smiled, took off the white smock she had borrowed from the clinic, and dropped it at the colonel’s feet. For the rest of that day Charlotte sat on the edge of the Caribe pool with her feet in the water and stared at the birds circling in the white sky. She did not wear dark glasses and by five o’clock the pale skin around her eyes was burned and puffy. For a few days Charlotte spoke to Gerardo about leaving Boca Grande, but within a week she had revised the incident to coincide with her own view of human behavior and assured me that the vaccine had been taken only so that the army could lend its resources to the inoculation program. I used to think that the only event in Charlotte Douglas’s life to resist her revisions and erasures was Marin’s disappearance.

“Interesting portrait there,” the thin FBI man said, his eyes still on the 10′ by 16′ silk screen given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three.

“Warhol,” Charlotte said.

“I would have guessed Mao.”

“Mao. Of course.” Charlotte had no idea how one of the Alameda Three had happened to come by a Warhol silk screen. Or maybe it had not been one of the Alameda Three at all, maybe it had been one of the Tacoma Eleven or some Indian or Panther or heir to a motion-picture studio, Charlotte could never keep Leonard’s clients straight. They came in packs and they ate and they asked for odd drinks and they went through her medicine cabinet and they borrowed and did not return her sweaters and they never addressed her directly and she could never remember their names. She wished that she could. She also wished that Marin would walk through the door of the house on California Street with a tow ticket tied to her windbreaker.

“You see you don’t know Marin,” she added finally. “I know her.”

The fat FBI man coughed. The other examined a matchbook he had picked up from a table.

“I mean I’m her mother.”

“Of course you are,” the fat FBI man said.

“I don’t quite follow what she’s saying about this Chinese couple,” one of the new FBI men said. It was almost time for lunch and Charlotte had not yet eaten breakfast and the house on California Street seemed to be filling with men who spoke to each other as if Charlotte were not there. “What Chinese couple.”

“The Chinese couple who come to the house,” Charlotte repeated. “And do the Peking duck.”

“I don’t quite follow what she’s talking about.”

“She’s talking about caterers, Eddie, it’s not a point.”

“Maybe if she could run through it again. Marin arrives from Berkeley. Start there. Day before yesterday. Approximately twenty hours prior to the bombing. Marin arrives from Berkeley to—”

“To borrow a windbreaker.” Charlotte spoke by rote. “To go skiing.”

“To borrow a windbreaker. But she doesn’t leave right away. She goes up to her room and she’s up there alone maybe three, four hours, ballpark figure, you aren’t sure which. Up in her room she—”

“You wanted her to tell it, Eddie, let her tell it.”

Charlotte raised her voice. “She went through some things in her drawers.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know what things. She’s eighteen years old, I don’t go through her drawers.”

“Mrs. Douglas mentioned a gold bracelet, Eddie, don’t forget the gold bracelet.”

“You mentioned a gold bracelet, Mrs. Douglas.”

“I said she found a gold bracelet she thought she’d lost.”

“In a drawer.”

“In a drawer, behind a drawer.” There was something about the gold bracelet Charlotte wanted not to think about. Marin had dropped the bracelet on the kitchen table and told Charlotte to keep it. Marin had called the bracelet “dead metal.” Charlotte wished suddenly that she had not mentioned the bracelet and she also wished suddenly that Leonard were not in Nicosia. Or Damascus. Or wherever he was. He had written out the cities and the hotels and the telephone numbers on a legal pad upstairs but Charlotte had not looked at it since he left. Her left temple was beginning to hurt and she resented the FBI men for remembering the gold bracelet.

“Now we get to the part where I call the Chinese couple and ask them to do the Peking duck.” She could hear the edge in her voice but could not control it. “All right?”

“We’re back to the Chinese couple, Eddie.”

“Caterers,” the man the others called Eddie said.

“Not exactly,” Charlotte said.

“They come to your house? They cook dinner?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Then they’re caterers. Wasn’t that kind of an exceptional thing to do, Mrs. Douglas, telephoning these caterers?”

“I don’t quite see the exceptional part.” Charlotte wished that the FBI man would not insist on calling the Chinese couple “caterers.” They were not caterers, they were a couple. Under certain circumstances which had not yet arisen they might come to the house on California Street not as cooks but as guests. Charlotte knew a lot of couples like the Chinese couple who did the Peking duck. She knew the Algerian couple who did the couscous, she knew the Indonesian couple who did the rijsttafel, she knew the Mexican couple who were actually second-generation Chicano but who did the authentic Mexican dinner, not common enchiladas and refried beans but exquisite recipes they had learned while vacationing at the Hotel Inglaterra in Tampico. She knew the Filipino couple, she knew the Korean couple. She had recently uncovered the Vietnamese couple. In the kitchen of the house on California Street these and other couples regularly reproduced the menus of underdeveloped countries around the world, but usually for twelve or twenty-four people. Charlotte had never before called one of these couples to cook for fewer than twelve. This time she had. That might be the exceptional part. She began to see calling the Chinese couple to do Peking duck for herself and Marin in a different light, a light not necessarily more revealing but different.

In this light the gold bracelet she had made Marin take had been too loose on Marin’s wrist.

In this light Marin had been too thin and pale for a child who skied and played tennis and was supposed to have spent the week before celebrating Thanksgiving off Cabo San Lucas.

In this light Charlotte had lit the fire and turned on the record-player and called the Chinese couple for the same reason she had insisted that Marin take the bracelet: to keep Marin from the harm outside.

“I mean a catered dinner for two must be quite an expensive proposition,” the FBI man said.

“They’re quite reasonable.” Charlotte spoke automatically. “Considering.”

“Catered dinner for one,” the FBI man said. “Technically. Since Marin didn’t stay.”

“Marin had a paper to finish before she went skiing, I told you.” Charlotte avoided the blank gaze of the FBI men. “She had a paper to finish for her seminar in I think Moby Dick.”

The fat FBI man spoke for the first time since the arrival of the others. “She’s not registered as a student, Mrs. Douglas, I suppose you know that.”

“Actually you should try this couple.” Charlotte spoke very clearly to shut out his voice. She did not know why she had said it was a seminar in Moby Dick. Marin had never mentioned any seminar in Moby Dick.

“She hasn’t been registered for two quarters, and the quarter before that she took all incompletes, but I’m sure you know this.”

“I mean if you like Cantonese food at all.”

Moby Dick had something to do with Warren.

At nineteen Charlotte had written a paper on Melville and Warren had failed her. Warren had failed her and had rung her doorbell for the first time at midnight with the paper torn in half and a bag of cherries and a bottle of bourbon and they had not left the apartment for forty-eight hours. For the first three she called him Mr. Bogart and for the next forty-five she called him nothing at all and it was not until the third day, when he took her to his apartment and asked her to clean it up and she came across the letter from the department chairman advising him that his contract would not be renewed, that she ever called him Warren.

Still not looking at the FBI man Charlotte stood up and began placing their coffee cups on a tray.

“They also do a marvelous Szechuan beef thing.”

The fat FBI man signaled the others to leave the room.

“Marin’s father taught a seminar in Moby Dick once,” Charlotte said before she broke.

After the FBI men left that morning Charlotte went upstairs to Marin’s room. The Raggedy Ann Warren had sent for Marin’s twelfth birthday was on its shelf. The teddy bear Warren had sent for Marin’s fourteenth Easter was on its chair. The guitar once used by Joan Baez was on the windowseat, where it had been since the night Leonard bought it for Marin at an ACLU auction. The embroidered Swiss organdy curtains were as pristine as they had been the day Marin picked them out. The old valentines beneath the glass on the dressing table were unchanged, the tray of silver bangles and bath oil and eye shadow untouched. All that Marin had removed from the room was every picture, every snapshot, every clipping or class photograph, which contained her own image.

3

ONE IMAGINES A SWEET INDOLENT GIRL, SOFT WITH BABY fat, her attention span low and her range of interests limited. Marin approved of infants and puppies. Marin disapproved of “meanness” and “showing off.” She appeared to approve equally of Leonard and Warren, and tailored her performance to please each of them. When Warren came to San Francisco she would appear instinctively in the navy-blue blazer no longer required by the progressive Episcopal day school she attended. For Leonard and his friends she would wear blue jeans, and a dashiki which scratched her skin. On principle she “adored madly” the presents Warren occasionally sent, although by her fifteenth birthday these presents still ran to the sporadic stuffed animal in a box bearing the charge-plate stamp of whatever woman he was living with at the time. In principle she was tolerant of Leonard’s efforts on the behalf of social justice, although in practice she often found the beneficiaries of these efforts “weird” and their predicaments “unnecessary.” That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim “the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude,” and it was characteristic of Charlotte that whenever the phrase “realistic but optimistic” appeared in a school communiqué she read it as “realistic and optimistic.”

That was Charlotte.

Not Marin.

Marin would never bother changing a phrase to suit herself because she perceived the meanings of words only dimly, and without interest. Perhaps because of her realistic but optimistic attitude Marin was easily confused by such moral questions as were raised by the sight of someone disfigured (would a good God make ugly people?) or the problem of dividing her Halloween candy with the Episcopal orphans (do six licorice balls for the orphans equal one Almond Hershey for Marin, if Marin dislikes licorice?), and when confused could turn sulky, and withdrawn.

What else do I know about Marin.

I know that her posture toward all adult women was agreeably patronizing.

I know that her posture toward all adult men, toward Leonard and toward Warren and toward any man at all who was not disfigured, was uncomplicatedly seductive. Her mind was empty of grudges and hurts and family malice. Her energies were simple and physical and in the summertime her blond hair had the cast of pale verdigris from the chlorine in swimming pools. Charlotte adored her, brushed her pale hair and licked the tears from her cheeks, held her hand crossing streets and wanted never to let go, believed that when she walked through the valley of the shadow she would be sustained by the taste of Marin’s salt tears, her body and blood. The night Charlotte was interrogated in the Estadio Nacional she cried not for God but for Marin. Gerardo told me that. I prefer not to know who told Gerardo.

4

“I SEE,” LEONARD KEPT SAYING FROM WHEREVER HE WAS on the day the FBI first came to the house on California Street. “I see.”

“I don’t see,” Charlotte said. “Frankly I don’t see at all.”

There was a silence. “You’re calling from the house.”

“What difference does it make.”

Charlotte could hear only the faint crackle on the cable. Actually she had forgotten that she was never supposed to call Leonard from the house if she had anything important to tell him. She was supposed to lose any possible surveillance and place the call on what Leonard called a neutral line. During the Mendoza trial in Cleveland she had called Leonard every day from a pay phone in Magnin’s and once she had taken a room in a motel on Van Ness just to call London and tell Leonard that she missed him, but now that she had to tell him that Marin was said to have bombed the Transamerica Building she was calling from the white Princess phone in Marin’s room.

“I mean what difference could it possibly make if they’re listening, since I’m only telling you what they told me in the first place.”

Still Leonard said nothing.

“I mean,” Charlotte said, “I can’t leave the house.”

“I want you to leave the house. I want you to stay with Polly Orben in Sausalito. I want you to call Polly Orben right away—”

“I don’t want to stay with Polly Orben.” Polly Orben had been Leonard’s analyst for eight years. Charlotte did not know what Polly Orben and Leonard had been talking about for eight years but Polly Orben frequently reported that they were within a year or so of “terminating,” or “ending.” She seemed to mean finishing the analysis. “I don’t want to leave the house.”

“It’s Wednesday, Polly counsels at Glide on Wednesday, call her at Glide—”

“I have to be here when Marin calls.”

“My point is this.” Leonard spoke very carefully. “You don’t know where Marin is.”

“That’s exactly why I have to be here.”

“And if you don’t know where Marin is, then you can’t tell anyone where Marin is. Under oath. Can you.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“If you see my point.”

Still Charlotte said nothing.

“Get in touch with Warren. Tell him exactly what I just told you. Tell him he doesn’t want to hear from her.”

“I guess I’ll just wait here and perjure myself,” Charlotte said finally. “And then hire you.”

Charlotte did not call Polly Orben at Glide. Charlotte did not get in touch with Warren. For the rest of that day Charlotte only lay on Marin’s bed, staring at the black-button eyes of the Raggedy Ann Warren had sent for Marin’s twelfth birthday. Charlotte did not see how Marin could have played any useful role in flying an L–1011 to Wendover, Utah. Marin could not even drive a car with a manual transmission.

Marin could not fly an L–1011 so Marin must be skiing at Squaw Valley.

Marin had called her great-grandmother’s wedding bracelet dead metal.

Marin had been in bed with the flu on her twelfth birthday and as if she were four instead of twelve had slept all night with Warren’s Raggedy Ann in her arms.

When it began to rain at six o’clock Charlotte wrapped herself in Marin’s blanket but did not close the windows. She went downstairs only once, when two of the FBI men came back to ask if she had a recent photograph of Marin.

“I don’t know.” In a drawer upstairs she had three recent photographs that Marin had overlooked but there was some quite definite reason why she did not want the FBI men to have them. She could not put her finger on the reason but she knew that there was one. “I’d have to look.”

She made no move to look.

She realized suddenly that she was still holding the Raggedy Ann, with its dress pulled up to show the red heart that said I LOVE YOU.

One of the FBI men cleared his throat.

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard from her,” he said finally.

“I’m sure you’d tell us if you had,” the other said.

She wanted to slide the Raggedy Ann behind a pillow but she was sitting in one of Leonard’s Barcelona chairs and there were no pillows.

“Actually I wouldn’t,” she said finally.

“Mrs. Douglas—”

“Actually I’d lie. I’d lie to you and I’d perjure myself in court. You know that. You heard me tell my husband that on the telephone.”

The two FBI men looked away from each other.

“Or if you didn’t hear me someone in your office certainly did, you should compare notes down there.” She did not want to talk to the FBI this way but she could hear her own voice and it sounded bright and social and it did not stop. “Someone down there’s been listening to me on the telephone for at least five years, you should know me by now. I’d lie.”

“I’m sure you know that under the law a parent has no special—”

The other FBI man held up his hand as if to silence his partner.

“Maybe you’d like someone to stay with you tonight, Mrs. Douglas. Keep an eye on things.”

“I have someone keeping an eye on things. I have all those people you moved into the apartment across the street. Haven’t I. I mean I didn’t see you move them in, but I know how you operate.” She could not seem to stop herself. It was the Raggedy Ann. She resented their catching her with the Raggedy Ann. “One thing I don’t know. I don’t know if you kept tapes of all those telephone calls.”

Neither man spoke.

“I mean it could be very useful if you did. If you could sit down now and listen to those telephone calls you’d probably know more about Marin and me and Leonard and Warren than I even remember. You could probably figure the whole thing out.”

One of the men closed his briefcase. The other reached for his raincoat.

“You must have six or seven hundred hours on Marin and Lisa Harper alone. Doing their algebra.” Charlotte smoothed the Raggedy Ann’s dress over its red heart and did not look at the FBI men. “Lisa’s at Stanford this year. In case you missed the installment when Lisa got into Stanford and Marin didn’t.”

“We’re not on opposing sides, Mrs. Douglas.”

“Marin cried when the letter came from Stanford. You probably remember that. Marin crying.”

The next morning when Charlotte woke in Marin’s bed the rain was streaming down Marin’s organdy curtains and puddling on the parquet floor. Charlotte knew as she woke why she could not give the FBI a recent photograph of Marin. She could not give the FBI a recent photograph of Marin because any photograph useful to them would show Marin’s eyes, and then Marin’s eyes would stare back at her from newspapers and television screens, and she was not yet ready to deliver her child to history.

Another day passed and still Charlotte did not place a call to Warren. It was not possible to actually “call” Warren: it was necessary instead to “place a call” to Warren, to leave messages at various offices and apartments he frequented around New York and wait for him to call back. Usually he called back between one and three A.M. San Francisco time, or four and six A.M. New York time.

“Where’s your interesting Jew husband,” Warren would say if Charlotte did place the call and he did call back. He would say this if Charlotte had placed the call to say that Marin had a cold and he would say this if Charlotte had placed the call to say that Marin was going to tennis camp and he would also say this if Charlotte were to place a call to say that Marin was wanted by the FBI.

“I’m calling about something important,” she would say.

She knew what she would say because she knew what he would say.

“I said where’s your interesting Jew husband,” he would say.

“Leonard is not Jewish. As you know. I’m calling—”

“There’s nothing wrong with being ‘Jewish.’ As you say. Has he made an anti-Semite out of you along with everything else?”

“I have to tell you—”

“All you ‘have to tell’ me is where the well-known radical lawyer is. Come on. Admit it. He’s at Bohemian Grove, isn’t he. He’s … let me get it right, he’s making the revolution at Bohemian Grove.”

She would not place a call to Warren just yet.

In any case Warren could not learn about Marin from the FBI because the FBI would not know how to place a call to Warren.

In any case there was no need to place a call to Warren because Marin was skiing at Squaw Valley.

In any case Leonard would place the call to Warren.

Charlotte settled many problems this way.

Leonard flew home immediately but because of an airport strike at Beirut and a demonstration at Orly it took him thirty-six hours to arrive in San Francisco, and by then they had sifted the debris and identified Marin’s gold bracelet attached like a charm to the firing pin of the bomb. They had also received the tape, and released Marin’s name to the press. Charlotte learned about the tape when she opened the door of the house on California Street and found a television crew already filming. On the six o’clock news there was film that showed Charlotte opening the door, turning from the camera and running upstairs as a young Negro pursued her with a microphone. When this film was repeated at eleven it was followed for the first time by the picture of Marin, the famous picture of Marin Bogart, the two-year-old newspaper picture of Marin in her pink-and-white candy-striped Children’s Hospital volunteer’s pinafore. The newspaper had apparently lost the negative and simply cropped and enlarged a newsprint reproduction in which Marin was almost indistinguishable, clearly a complaisant young girl in a pinafore but enigmatically expressionless, her eyes only smudges on the gravure screen. In the weeks that followed the appearance of the picture those two photogravure smudges would eradicate every other image Charlotte had of Marin’s eyes. The day I finally saw Marin I was surprised by her eyes. She has Charlotte’s eyes. She has nothing else of Charlotte’s but she has Charlotte’s eyes.

5

YOU NO DOUBT HEARD THE TAPE.

“This is not an isolated action. We ask no one’s permission to make the revolution.”

I heard only part of it, on a Radio Jamaica relay, but I read excerpts from it in Time and in Prensa Latina and in the Caracas Daily Journal, excerpts always illustrated by the impenetrable picture of the child in the candy-striped pinafore. I heard only part of the Radio Jamaica relay because Gerardo was at the house the night it was played, and he had arranged the evening as usual to annoy and discomfit everyone involved. I used to think the design of such evenings Gerardo’s only true amusement.

Or more accurately his only true vocation.

Since he was only fitfully amused by anything at all.

In the first place Gerardo had asked Elena to come for dinner that night. That Elena came was a tribute to Gerardo’s sexual power over her, because Elena was not speaking to me. Elena was not speaking to me because I had that morning advised her that she and Gerardo would be better off exhibiting their tedious interest in each other’s bodies in the Caribe ballroom than at political meetings under surveillance by both Victor and the Americans. I did not like hearing about Elena and Gerardo from Tuck Bradley. I did not like Tuck Bradley hearing about Elena and Gerardo from Kasindorf and Riley. As a matter of fact I had already heard about Elena and Gerardo, from Victor, and I did not like that either.

Elena said that Gerardo was the only person in the entire family who understood dancing or “fun.”

I said that this might be true but in this case Gerardo’s “fun” lay not in dancing but in embarrassing the family by parading the widow of a family presidente at meetings of people opposed to the family. It made no difference if Gerardo went to these meetings, because Gerardo’s image in the community, deserved or not, was that of someone “worthless,” and “young.” It did make a difference if she, Elena, went to these meetings, because her image in the community, again deserved or not, was that of someone “virtuous,” and “older.”

A national treasure as it were.

But Elena had stopped speaking. Elena did not even know that these events to which Gerardo took her were “meetings.” She believed them to be “parties.” I think she still does.

In any case.

In the second place.

Just asking Elena to dinner had not quite sated Gerardo’s craving for social piquancy. He had asked Elena and then he had proceeded to ask an extremely sullen girl he had been seeing off and on for years, an ambitious mestiza who had once gone to Paris with him and left him first for a minor Thyssen and then for an English rock-and-roll singer and had recently returned to Boca Grande to redeploy her resources. The girl was the daughter of the cashier at the Jockey Club and her name was Carmen Arrellano but she called herself Camilla de Arrellano y Bolívar and did not visit the Jockey Club. On this particular evening she was sulking because Gerardo was listening to the radio, and possibly also because I had told the cook to ignore her demand to be served a separate dinner of three boiled shrimp on a white plate with half a lemon wrapped in gauze. The cook had found this demand particularly offensive because her son was married to Carmen Arrellano’s cousin.

“All class enemies must suffer exemplary punishment.”

The voice on Radio Jamaica was sweetly instructive.

“When the fascist police think we are near we will be far away. When the fascist police think we are far away we will be near.”

“She lisps,” Gerardo said.

“She sounds like those Cubans at the party,” Elena said. Elena had several times mentioned this “party” to which she and Gerardo had gone the night before, apparently thinking to annoy me and Carmen Arrellano in a single stroke. “Doesn’t she, Gerardo. Those dreadful Cubans who came with Bebe Chicago. I don’t mean the lisp, I mean the words.”

“I’m only listening for the lisp,” Gerardo said. “I wouldn’t mention Bebe Chicago in front of Grace if I were you, she’ll cut off your clothes allowance.”

I said nothing. Bebe Chicago was a West Indian homosexual who after some years at the London School of Economics and a few more organizing Caribbean “liberation fronts” out of Mexico had turned up in Boca Grande to see what he could promote. His name was François Parmentier but everyone called him Bebe Chicago. I have no idea why. He was said to have connections with the guerrilleros. I heard about him frequently, from both Victor and Tuck Bradley. People like Bebe Chicago come and go in Boca Grande, and the main mark they leave is to have provided inadvertent employment for the many other people required to follow them around and tap their telephones.

“Grace thinks Bebe Chicago and I are using you,” Gerardo said.

“Delicious,” Elena said. “Do it.”

“Actually that’s not the dynamic.” Gerardo smiled at me and Elena. “Actually I’m using Bebe Chicago. Listen to this girl. I like the lisp and the pinafore together. Very nice.”

“All you think about is sex,” Elena said.

“You wish that were true,” Gerardo said. “But it’s not.”

“She bores me,” Carmen Arrellano said sullenly. Carmen had been arranged since dinner in a corner of the room where she could gaze at herself in a mirror. “It bores me.”

“Of course it bores you,” Gerardo said. “You don’t like sex. You can’t dress for it, there are never any photographers. Or is that what bores you?”

“The radio,” Carmen said sullenly.

“I didn’t dream you were listening,” Elena said. “I thought you were devising a new makeup. Have you ever thought of bleaching your eyebrows?”

“I said this is boring me,” Carmen said to Gerardo.

Gerardo held up a hand to silence her and moved closer to the radio.

“This was really a terribly amusing party you missed last night,” Elena said to Carmen.

Carmen picked up a magazine.

“Steel band,” Elena said. Actually Elena had not found the “party” amusing at all. Actually Elena had complained before she stopped speaking to me that Gerardo’s friends did not dance but sat around a filthy room watching a Cuban film about sugar production. Elena smiled at Carmen. “Lots of Dominicans and these frightful Cubans. We danced until five this morning. Are you still bored?”

“Carmen is always bored,” Gerardo said. “Excuse me. Camilla is always bored. I want to hear this lisp.”

“We shall reply to repression with liberation. We shall reply to the terrorism of the dictatorship with the terrorism of the revolution.”

Elena continued to smile benignly at Carmen.

Carmen dropped her magazine on the floor and stood up.

“We’re tiring your mother,” Carmen announced to Gerardo. “And your amusing aunt.”

“I should say,” Elena said. “It’s nearly nine.”

“I’ll take you home when this is over,” Gerardo said. “Meanwhile you might listen.”

“Pinched little parrot talking about capitalism,” Carmen said. “Who cares about capitalism.”

“That’s very interesting, Carmen.” Gerardo was turning the radio dials to keep the relay from fading. “It’s very interesting because there’s a body of thought that capitalism is precisely what ruined your character.”

There was a silence.

Elena giggled.

“Also yours,” Gerardo said to Elena. “Not that I agree entirely.”

I was relieved when the relay faded out.

I was equally tired of listening to Gerardo and Elena and Carmen Arrellano and the little girl on the tape.

I recall that none of the four had my sympathy that night.

6

THE NIGHT CHARLOTTE FIRST HEARD THE TAPE SHE apparently tried to transcribe it word for word, so that she could explain to Leonard and Warren what Marin had in mind. She got only as far as the part where Marin discussed what she called the revolutionary character of her organization. “Now I would like to discuss the revolutionary character of our organization,” Marin definitely said on the tape. “The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary.”

Charlotte read this sentence several times. She wondered if she had misheard Marin, or missed an important clause. The tape was still running and Marin could still be heard, talking about “expropriation” and “firepower” and “revolutionary justice” and about how the Transamerica Building was one of many symbols of imperialist latifundismo in San Francisco, but Charlotte was still fixed on that one sentence. The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary. She could parse the sentence but she could make no sense of it, could find no way to rephrase it so that Leonard and Warren would understand.

As it turned out she did not need to explain the sentence to Leonard because when he arrived from the airport at midnight he said that the sentence was not original with Marin but had been lifted from a handbook by a Brazilian guerrilla theorist named Marighela.

“I’ve got just one thing to say about the operation,” Leonard said.

Charlotte waited.

“I know where they got their rhetoric but I’d like to know where they got their hardware.”

As it turned out Charlotte did not need to explain the sentence to Warren either because when he called from New York at two that morning he had already heard the tape and, like Leonard, he had just one thing to say about the operation.

“Fuck Marin,” he said.

I think Warren Bogart would have had my sympathy that night.

7

WHEN I MARRIED EDGAR STRASSER-MENDANA I RECEIVED, from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the “Windsor Rose” pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband’s books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in these same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.

So in many ways did Charlotte.

As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.

Not Charlotte.

Never Charlotte.

I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo’s hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to “entertain” she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. “I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere, isn’t it,” she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?”

I keep those cuts that don’t show in mind when I think about Charlotte Douglas’s passage from the house on California Street to the Boca Grande airport. Charlotte Amelia Douglas. Charlotte Amelia Bogart. Born Charlotte Amelia Havemeyer. Charlotte. I am not even certain she was talking figuratively.

In the first week after the release of Marin’s tape these events occurred.

Charlotte received a call from a young woman in New York who said that Warren would arrive in San Francisco on a midnight plane. Warren did not.

Charlotte received a call from a spiritualist in the Netherlands who said that he perceived the aura of a girl in a pinafore selling tripe in the Belleville section of Paris. He would discuss his vision in detail upon receipt of a first-class airplane ticket to San Francisco, round-trip and refundable.

Leonard received a call from the sister of a convict at San Quentin who said that her brother had reason to know that Marin was working as an aide in a state mental hospital. He would name the state upon receipt of an unconditional parole.

The young woman in New York called back to say that Warren had missed the midnight plane but would arrive in San Francisco the next afternoon. Warren did not.

A pair of FBI men came for coffee every morning.

An apartment-court manager on the outskirts of Detroit told NBC that he had seen Marin and “two jumped-up coloreds” loading carbines into the trunk of a 1957 Pontiac at dawn in the Livonia Mall parking lot. By the time he appeared on CBS he described Marin’s companions as “possibly black or Indian” and the car as a 1957 Pontiac “or some later-model General Motors vehicle.” In the Detroit Free Press the story was headlined “A SEARCH FOR A NERVOUS INDIAN.”

Marin was said to be in Havana.

Marin was said to be in Hanoi.

Warren left two messages on the answering service that he would definitely arrive in San Francisco via TWA the following morning at 10:35 A.M. He did not.

“What have we here,” Leonard said when he finally walked into the room Charlotte had taken in the Fairmont Hotel. Leonard had addressed a bar luncheon on constitutional law at the Fairmont and a telephone had been brought to the dais and it was Warren calling from New York. Charlotte had watched Leonard take the call from Warren and then she had left the dais and gone to the desk and asked for a room and telephoned Leonard to meet her upstairs when he finished lunch. The room was cold and the radiator jammed off and the big windows overlooking the Pacific Union Club would not close. Yet for an hour and ten minutes Charlotte had been sitting barefoot in the gray afternoon light wearing only the handmade navy-blue silk underwear she had just bought in a shop in the lobby. She had been trying not to remember about Marin or Warren. She had been trying to remember a carnal mood.

“No. Don’t tell me,” Leonard said. “Let me guess. You decided the way to avoid seeing Warren was to move to the Fairmont.”

“I don’t want to talk about Warren,” Charlotte said.

“I got him a ride out.”

“Don’t talk about him,” Charlotte said. “Come here.”

“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

“THOSE 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.”

“When I what?” Charlotte said.

“Flip flop. We need ice, Charlotte.”

“When you—” The FBI man glanced uneasily at Warren. “When you said yesterday that Marin ‘might have been sad,’ what exactly did you mean? Normal everyday blues? Or something more, uh, out of the mainstream?”

“Just your normal everyday mainstream power-to-the-people latifundismo Berkeley blues.” Warren was still bent with laughter. “Just those old Amerikan blues. Spell that with a K.”

“I don’t know what I meant,” Charlotte said.

“Some theory,” Warren said. “Did you get the K? Did you spell it with a K?”

“To push on for a moment, Mrs. Douglas, the office raised one other question. Did your daughter ever mention a Russian, name of, uh, let’s see.”

The FBI man examined his notebook.

“Those old Amerikan blues didn’t come up the river from New Orleans, they K-O-M-E up the river from New Orleans. Get it? Charlotte? Did he get the K?”

“He got it.”

“Gurdjieff,” the FBI man said. “Russian, name of Gurdjieff. Marin ever mention him?”

“In the first place he was an Armenian,” Warren said. “Otherwise you’re on top of the case.”

“I’m not sure I get your meaning, Mr. Bogart.”

“Not at all. You’re doing fine.”

“Excuse me. The Gurdjieff I’m thinking of is a Russian.”

“Excuse me. The Gurdjieff you’re thinking of is Bashti Levant.”

“Warren. Please.”

“Don’t you think that’s funny, Charlotte? ‘Excuse me, the Gurdjieff you’re thinking of is Bashti Levant’?”

“It’s funny, Warren. Now—”

“You used to think I was funny.”

“Let me try to put this on track.” The FBI man cleared his throat. “Marin ever mention a Gurdjieff of any nationality? Ever mention reading about him?”

“No,” Charlotte said.

“Marin can’t read,” Warren said. “She plays a good game of tennis, she’s got a nice backhand, good strong hair and an IQ of about 103.”

Charlotte closed her eyes.

“Charlotte. Face facts. Credit where credit is due, you raised her. She’s boring.”

“I’m not sure this is a productive tack,” the FBI man said.

“Irving’s not sure this is a productive tack.” Warren rattled his ice. “Hear, hear, Charlotte. Listen to Irving.”

“Bruno,” the FBI man said. “The name is Bruno Furetta.”

“Don’t mind me, Irving, I’ve been drinking.”

“I happen to know you’re not all that drunk, Warren.” Charlotte did not open her eyes. “I happen to know you’re just amusing yourself. As usual.”

“You get the picture.”

Charlotte stood up. “And I want to tell you that I am not—”

“She’s overwrought,” Charlotte heard Warren say as she fled the room. “Let me give you some advice, Irving. Never mind the Armenians, cherchez le tennis pro.”

10

“BOO HOO,” WARREN SAID WHEN HE CAME UPSTAIRS AN hour later. “What happened to your sense of humor?”

Charlotte said nothing. Very deliberately she closed the book she had been trying to read since the day after the FBI first came to the house on California Street. The book was a detailed analysis of the three rose windows at Chartres, not illustrated, and every time Charlotte picked it up she began again on page one. She did not want Warren in the room. She did not want Warren to be in any room where she slept with Leonard, did not want him to see Leonard’s Seconal and her hand cream together on the table by the bed, did not want to see him examining the neckties that Leonard had that morning tried, rejected, and left on the bed. In fact she did not want him to see the bed at all.

“We don’t have anything in common any more.” Warren picked up a yellow silk tie and knotted it around his collar. “You and me. Leonard won’t miss this, he’s jaundiced enough. You ever noticed? He’s got bad color?”

“One thing we have in common is that we both agree that as far as having anything in common goes—” Charlotte broke off. She was watching a tube of KY jelly on the table by the bed. She did not see any way to move it into the drawer without attracting Warren’s attention. “As far as having anything in common goes we don’t have anything. In common.”

“You sound like you had a stroke. You had a stroke?”

“I happen to have a headache.”

“You mean I happen to give you a headache.”

“I mean I want you to leave this room.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave this room.” Warren sat on the bed, picked up the tube of KY jelly and put it in the drawer. “I don’t like this room.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“I only flew out here to see how you were.”

Still Charlotte said nothing.

“I don’t like your room, I don’t like your house, I don’t like your life.” Warren picked up a silver box from the table by the bed. The box held marijuana and played “Puff the Magic Dragon” when the lid was lifted. Warren lifted the lid and looked at Charlotte. “I bet the two of you talk about ‘turning on.’ See what I mean about your life?”

“Go away,” Charlotte whispered.

“Excuse me. I mean your ‘life-style.’ You don’t have a life, you have a ‘life-style.’ You still look good, though.”

“Go away.”

Warren looked at her for a while before he spoke.

“I want you to come to New Orleans with me.”

Charlotte tried to concentrate on meeting Leonard for lunch. Very soon she would walk out of this room and down the stairs. She would walk out of this house and she would take a taxi to the Tadich Grill, alone.

“I said I want you to come to New Orleans with me, are you deaf? Or just rude.”

She would go in the taxi alone to meet Leonard at the Tadich Grill.

“I want you to see Porter with me. Porter is dying. Porter wants to see you. Do this one thing for me.”

Charlotte tried to keep her mind on whether to order sand dabs or oysters at the Tadich Grill. Porter was a distant cousin of Warren’s. During the five years Charlotte and Warren were married Porter had invested $25,000 in an off-Broadway play that Warren never wrote, $30,000 in a political monthly that Warren never took beyond its dummy issue, and $2,653.84 in ransoming Warren’s and her furniture and Marin’s baby clothes from the Seven Santini Brothers Storage Company in Long Island City. Charlotte did not even like Porter.

Sand dabs.

No.

Oysters.

“If you won’t do it for me you’ll do it for Porter. Or you’re a worse human being than even I think.”

“I can’t just leave. Can I.”

“You’re not leaving, you’re paying a visit to Porter. Who is dying. Who loves you.”

“I can’t forgive Porter what he said to Leonard. At dinner out here. Two years ago. He behaved badly.” In fact Charlotte could not even recall what Porter had said to Leonard, but whenever she talked to Warren she fell helplessly into both his diction and his rosary of other people’s disloyalties. “I just can’t forgive Porter that at all.”

“Porter loves you.”

“Leonard had to ask him to leave the house.”

“What’s that got to do with you.”

There did not seem to Charlotte any ground on which this question could safely be met. She put it from her mind.

“I said what’s that got to do with you.”

Charlotte stood up, walked to the dressing room, and took a coat from the closet.

“Porter’s dying, Charlotte.”

Charlotte put the coat over her shoulders.

“Porter’s dying and you’re putting on your mink coat. You got Hadassah today? Mah-Jongg? You get the picture about your life?”

“It’s not mink. It’s sable. I have a lunch date.”

“Say that again.”

“I said: I have a lunch date. With Leonard.”

“Don’t let me keep you. Somebody who loves you is dying, your only child is lost, I’m asking you one last favor, and you’ve got a lunch date.” Warren opened the lid of the silver box again. The mechanism began to play. “You getting it? You getting the picture? You’re never going to see Marin again but never mind, you’ve got a lunch date? And maybe after your ‘lunch date’ you and your interesting husband can, what do you call it, ‘get stoned’?”

“You fuck,” Charlotte screamed.

Warren smiled.

Charlotte grabbed up a pair of scissors and clutched them, point out.

Charlotte’s sable coat fell to the floor.

“You walk into the house four hours ago, you haven’t said Marin’s name except to make fun of her. You try to use Marin on me, you don’t give a fuck about—”

Warren still smiled.

The music box still played “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Charlotte looked at her hand and opened it and the scissors fell to the floor. “About Marin,” she said.

“Time and fevers,” Warren said finally. His voice was tired. “Burn away.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m not saying, babe. I’m quoting. ‘And the grave proves the child ephemeral.’ Who am I quoting?”

“Shakespeare. Milton. I don’t know who you’re quoting. Make that thing stop playing.”

“Auden. W. H. Auden. You aren’t any better read than you ever were, I’ll give you that.” Warren closed the box and picked up Charlotte’s coat from the floor. “ ‘But in my arms till break of day let the living creature lie.’ Where’s your lunch?”

“I can’t go to lunch.” She stood like a child and let Warren put the coat on her shoulders. “I can’t go to lunch crying.”

“Where was your lunch.”

“Tadich’s.”

“Sure,” Warren said. “Let’s eat some fish.”

Warren entertained Leonard at lunch with news of an automotive heir they both knew who was devoting his fortune to Micronesian independence; excused himself five times to make telephone calls; canceled the oysters Leonard had ordered for Charlotte because Pacific oysters would not compare with Gulf oysters; ordered oysters himself, drank three gin martinis and a German beer, fed Charlotte with his own fork because she was too thin not to eat, left the restaurant before Leonard ordered coffee and did not reappear that afternoon or evening. In the morning Charlotte told Leonard that she could not stay in the same house with Warren. Leonard moved Warren to a motel in the Marina, and paid for the room a week in advance. Charlotte stayed upstairs until they were gone. I understand what Warren Bogart could do to Charlotte Douglas because I met him, later, once in New Orleans: he had the look of a man who could drive a woman like Charlotte right off her head.

I have no idea what I mean by “a woman like Charlotte.”

I suppose I mean only a woman so convinced of the danger that lies in the backward glance.

I might have said a woman so unstable, but I told you, Charlotte performed the tracheotomy, Charlotte dropped the clinic apron at the colonel’s feet. I am less and less convinced that the word “unstable” has any useful meaning except insofar as it describes a chemical compound.

11

IN THE SECOND WEEK AFTER THE RELEASE OF MARIN’S tape Leonard flew to Montreal to meet with leaders of a Greek liberation movement. A man who described himself as a disillusioned Scientologist called Charlotte to say that Marin was under the influence of a Clear in Shasta Lake. A masseuse at Elizabeth Arden called Charlotte to say that she had received definite word from Edgar Cayce via Mass Mind that Marin was with the Hunzas in the Himalayas. The partially decomposed body of a young woman was found in a shallow grave on the Bonneville Salt Flats but the young woman’s dental work differed conclusively from Marin’s.

Charlotte watched the rain blowing across California Street.

Leonard flew from Montreal to Chicago to speak at a Days of Rage memorial.

“You want to see bad teeth, get on down here,” Warren said to Charlotte the first night he telephoned. He was calling not from the motel in the Marina but from the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had flown with Bashti Levant and one of his English bands. “The algae on the genetic pool. They drink Mai Tais. Get it?”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing there.”

“I’m not screwing their women, if that’s what you think. Not even with yours, Basil. ‘Basil.’ ‘Ian.’ ‘Andrew.’

English Jews. You over your homicidal mood?”

Charlotte said nothing.

“The women all had lobotomies at fourteen, but the teeth stop me. Will you see Porter on his deathbed or won’t you?”

“What exactly is Porter dying of.”

“Porter is dying of that long disease his life. Alexander Pope, lost on you. Never mind what Porter’s dying of. Do it for me.”

“I don’t even believe Porter’s dying. If Porter were dying I wouldn’t think you’d be hanging around the Beverly Hills Hotel. With people you say you can’t stand.”

“I’m not ‘hanging around,’ Charlotte, I’m ‘hanging out.’ The phrase is ‘hanging out.’ You always did have a tin ear. Will you come to New Orleans or won’t you.”

“I won’t.”

“Why won’t you?”

“Because if I went to New Orleans with you,” Charlotte said, “I would end up murdering you. I would take a knife and murder you. In your sleep.”

“I don’t sleep anyway.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“It doesn’t matter to me what you do. Go, don’t go. Come, don’t come. Murder me, don’t murder me. I’m only telling you what you have to do for your own peace of mind.”

“I have had that shit,” Charlotte whispered, and hung up.

“I would bet my life on your having some character,” Warren said the second night he telephoned from the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Lucky for me I didn’t.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“Not that it matters. Not that it’s worth anything. My life.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“You’re going to remember this, Charlotte. I tried to tell you what to do. You’re going to lie awake and remember this for the rest of your miserable unfortunate life.”

Charlotte said nothing.

Charlotte believed that there was something familiar about this telephone call but for a moment she could not put her finger on what it was. There had been something else she was supposed to lie awake and remember for the rest of her miserable unfortunate life.

Leaving him.

That was it.

She tried to put that other telephone call back out of her mind. It must have been after she left him, the other telephone call, because she had never exactly told him that she was leaving him. She had told him that she was going to her mother’s funeral. This was true but not the whole truth. Her mother had just died and she was going to have some money to take care of herself and Marin and she did not want to give the money to Warren and she took Marin and flew out of Idlewild and never went back.

“You hear me, Charlotte?”

She had cried all the way to San Francisco and Marin had been asleep on her lap and she remembered the landing and Marin’s pale hair damp and sticky with sleep and tears.

“Charlotte? They ever mention sins of omission in those wonderful Okie schools you went to?”

For the rest of that week when the telephone rang between one and four A.M. Charlotte would hang up as soon as she heard Warren’s voice. A few days later a copy of Time arrived with a photograph that showed Charlotte leaving the house on California Street with her hands over her face, and Charlotte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that the description of her as a “reclusive socialite” was a contradiction in terms. Leonard returned from Chicago and asked Charlotte not to mail the letter.

“I just remembered I never told Warren I was leaving him,” Charlotte said to Leonard.

“He’s had fifteen years, I guess he’s figured it out,” Leonard said to Charlotte.

“I mean I just kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and said I’d be back in a week and I knew I wouldn’t be.”

“I know it.”

“How could you know it.”

“Because that’s how you’ll leave me.”

“Fourteen years,” Charlotte said. “Not fifteen. Fourteen.”

Warren returned from Los Angeles and Leonard asked him to dinner but Warren did not arrive until eleven-thirty, accompanied by a 268-pound widow from Fort Worth he had met at Golden Gate Fields, the jockey who had that day ridden the woman’s three-year-old filly to defeat, and a shy girl with long legs who was introduced to Leonard by Warren as the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA. Warren had met the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel and had driven her Porsche north by way of Big Sur. She drank large quantities of apple juice and told Leonard that Marin could be located by sensitive programming of a Honeywell 782 solid-state computer. Charlotte had gone to bed with the book about the rose windows at Chartres and did not come downstairs. Charlotte had once taken Marin to see the glass at Chartres and Marin had cried because it was too beautiful.

Or so Charlotte said once.

Another time she told me that she herself had cried.

Still another time she told me that a British television crew had been filming inside the cathedral and she and Marin had been unable to see the glass at all because of the television lights.

I am now incapable of thinking about the glass at Chartres without seeing through every window the lights at the Tivoli Gardens.

12

“I’ve never been afraid of the dark.”

“Actually I’m never depressed. Actually I don’t believe in being depressed.”

“By the way. Marin and I are inseparable.”

Accept those as statements of how Charlotte wished it had been.

Charlotte also told me once that she and Warren Bogart were “inseparable.”

Charlotte also told me once that she and Leonard Douglas were “inseparable.”

Charlotte even told me once that she and her brother Dickie were “inseparable,” and adduced as evidence the fact that he had once given her a Christmas present no one else would have thought to give her: twenty-eight acres in southern Nevada.

Of course it had not been exactly that way at all.

Of course there had been the usual days and weeks and even months when Charlotte had been separated from everyone she knew by a grayness so dense that the brightness of even her own child in the house was galling, insupportable, a reproach to be avoided at breakfast and on the stairs. During such periods Charlotte endured the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal. During such periods Charlotte would rehearse cheerful dialogues she might need to have with Marin. For days at a time her answers to Marin’s questions would therefore strike the child as weird and unsettling, cheerful but not quite responsive. “Do you think I’ll get braces in fourth grade,” Marin would ask. “You’re going to love fourth grade,” Charlotte would answer. During such periods Charlotte suffered the usual dread when forced to visit Marin’s school and hear the doomed children celebrate all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.

She would shut her ears.

She would watch Marin numbly, from the usual great distance.

She would hang on by the usual routines, fill in whole days by the usual numbers.

The problem was that Charlotte did not know that any of this was “usual.”

Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the “separateness.”

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.

13

CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she went with Pete Wright to open the safe-deposit box.

“I’m not sure your daughter appreciates the legal bind she’s put you in, Char.”

Pete Wright was examining some stock certificates. Charlotte had known Pete Wright longer than she had known Leonard, he had roomed at Stanford with Dickie and he had handled her divorce from Warren and as Leonard’s junior partner he had paid a Christmas call every year with a suitable present for Marin, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street he had kept referring to Marin as “your daughter.” Charlotte did not want to hear about the legal bind she was in and she did not want Pete Wright to call her Char. Only Dickie called her Char. There was something else about Pete Wright that bothered her but she did not want to think about that either.

“You’re in a bit of a pickle here, Char.”

“That’s exactly what you said when I left Warren. And you took this enormous legal problem to Leonard and Leonard said I wasn’t.”

Charlotte took a gold pin of her grandmother’s from the safe-deposit box.

Charlotte imagined the gold pin attached to the firing pin of a bomb.

Pete Wright had come to New York once when she was married to Warren.

“And I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t what.”

“I wasn’t in a bit of a pickle.”

“I have nothing but respect for Leonard as a lawyer, Charlotte, but as you know, Leonard leaves the estate work to me.” Pete Wright took a deep breath. “Now. What we have here are stock certificates worth X dollars a quarter in dividends—”

“Eight-hundred and seven. $807 a quarter. I looked it up when you called me.”

“What I’m saying, Charlotte, is that these particular certificates are in your and your daughter’s names as joint tenants. Her signature—”

“I can forge it, can’t I.”

“Not legally, no.”

“All right. I won’t cash the checks. It’s $807 a quarter, it’s nothing.”

The gold pin had a broken clasp. As Charlotte held the pin in her fingers she had an abrupt physical sense of eating chicken à la king and overdone biscuits at her grandmother’s house in Hollister.

Pete Wright.

Pete Wright had been in New York once and had taken her to the Palm for dinner.

“What may seem ‘nothing’ to you, Charlotte—”

“I suppose you’re about to tell me that $807 a quarter is the average annual income for a grape picker. Is that what you’re about to tell me?”

“I’m about to overlook your hostility.”

“Leonard leaves the estate work to you, you leave the grape pickers to Leonard. Is that fair?”

“We used to be friends, Charlotte, and I like to think—”

She could taste the soft bits of pimento in the chicken à la king.

She could smell the biscuits burning in the oven.

She could also smell citronella, and calamine lotion, and the sweetened milky emulsion in prescription bottles that contained aureomycin. She could taste the acrid goat cheese her father used to get from the man who ran his cattle on the ranch. Her father had died. She could feel crushed and browning in her hand the camellias her mother used to braid into her hair for birthday parties. Her mother had died. She had erased burned biscuits and citronella when Warren came to her door in Berkeley, and she seemed to have been busy since, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street she was not so busy.

She had erased some other things too.

She had been too busy.

Charlotte closed her hand around the pin with the broken clasp and tried not to think how it could be attached to the firing pin of a bomb.

She had gotten drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.

“I gather by your silence you think Warren might oppose it.”

“Oppose what,” Charlotte said.

“Oppose declaring your daughter legally dead.”

Charlotte looked at Pete Wright.

“It’s a legality. It doesn’t mean anything, but it would enable you to cash these particular dividend checks. Or sell this particular stock. Or whatever.”

Charlotte picked up the certificates.

“As well as clarify the question of the ranch. Which I feel impelled to remind you is tied up in trust for her. A loose trust, granted, but—”

Charlotte tore the certificates in half.

Pete Wright gazed at the wall behind Charlotte and made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Warren’s quite disturbed, I don’t know if you realize that. He comes by the house, he drinks too much, he jumps all over Clarice about her hatha yoga class, he acts like—”

Her mother had died.

Warren had not come home the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.

“You don’t need to tell me what Warren acts like.”

“I gather you and Warren have had some misunderstanding, the rights and wrongs of which are outside my purview, but—”

Her father had died.

Warren had called at four A.M. the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright and she had told him not to come home.

“—I must say I don’t think you’re solving anything by pretending there aren’t certain complications to—”

People did die. People were loose in the world and left it, and she had been too busy to notice.

The morning after she got drunk at the Palm she and Warren had taken Marin to lunch at the Carlyle. Marin was cold.

“I’m trying to talk to you like a Dutch uncle,” Pete Wright said.

Warren gave her his coat.

“I think I fucked you one Easter,” Charlotte said.

For the next several days Charlotte wanted only to eat the food she had eaten in Hollister but she had lost the recipes her mother had written out and Charlotte did not know the number of any couple who would come to the house on California Street and do chicken à la king and burned biscuits. When I think of Charlotte Douglas apprehending death at the age of thirty-nine in the safe-deposit vault of a bank in San Francisco it occurs to me that there was some advantage in having a mother who died when I was eight, a father who died when I was ten, before I was busy.

14

CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she met the woman named Enid Schrader.

“Mark spoke so very highly of you,” the woman had said on the telephone. There had been in Enid Schrader’s voice something Charlotte did not want to recognize: a forced gaiety, a haggard sprightliness, a separateness not unlike her own. “Of you and your beautiful home.”

Mark Schrader was said to have been on the L–1011 with Marin. Mark Schrader had on his face, in the pictures Charlotte had seen of him, a pronounced scar from a harelip operation. It did not seem plausible to Charlotte that she could have met a boy with such a scar and forgotten him, nor did it seem plausible that anyone on the L–1011 with Marin had ever spoken highly of the house on California Street, but maybe the boy’s mother was trying to tell her something. Maybe there was a code in that peculiar stilted diction. Maybe Enid Schrader knew where Marin was.

“I think we should meet,” Charlotte said guardedly. “Could you have lunch at all? Today? The St. Francis Grill?”

“Delightful. Why.”

“Why what?”

“Why the St. Francis Grill?”

“I just thought—” Charlotte did not know what she had just thought. She had rejected the house because it was watched. She had hit upon the St. Francis Grill as a place where all corners of the room could be seen. “Is there somewhere you’d rather go?”

“Not at all, I don’t keep up with where the beautiful people eat. Not to worry about my recognizing you, I’ve seen pictures of you.”

“I’ve seen pictures of you too.”

“Before,” the woman said. “I meant before. Pictures of you and your beautiful home.”

Charlotte had met the woman at one-thirty and at two-thirty the code remained impenetrable. The woman did not seem interested in talking about her son, or about Marin. The woman seemed interested instead in talking about a friend who had a decorator’s card.

“You’ll adore Ruthie.” The woman was drinking daiquiris and had refused lunch. “I’m getting you together soonest, that’s definite, a promise. Meanwhile I’ll borrow her card and we’ll do the trade-only places. How’s Tuesday?”

“How’s Tuesday for what?” Charlotte said faintly.

“Monday’s a no-no for me but if Tuesday’s bad for you, let’s say Wednesday. Earliest. Grab lunch where we find it.”

“Listen.” Charlotte glanced around the room before she spoke. “If there’s something to see I think we should — I mean could we see it now?”

“But I haven’t got Ruthie’s card. I mean unless you have a card—” The woman looked up. “What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about taking you shopping.” The woman’s eyes reddened and filled with tears. “Unless of course you’re too busy. But of course you are. Too busy.”

Charlotte touched the woman’s hand.

The last woman Charlotte had known to talk about “shopping” was her mother.

The last time Charlotte had been asked to go “shopping” it had been by her mother.

“Your ex-husband isn’t too busy. I heard him on the radio. He was blotto but he talked to me. I called in to chat, he wasn’t too busy to chat. Although blotto. On the radio. Whatever his name is.”

“Warren.” Charlotte did not want to hear about Warren on the radio. Leonard had once said that Warren could arrive in a town where he knew no one and within twenty-four hours he would have had dinner at the country club, been offered a temporary chair in Southern politics at the nearest college, and been on the radio. Charlotte did not want to think about Warren on the radio and she did not want to think why Enid Schrader was crying and she did not want to think about her mother shopping. Her mother had been shopping the day she died, at Ransohoff’s. “His name is Warren Bogart.”

“Whatever. The little whore’s father.”

The woman gave one last cathartic sob.

Charlotte reached for the check.

“My treat,” the woman cried, her voice again sprightly. “You do it next time.”

All the next day Charlotte could not erase from her mind the first newspaper picture she had seen of Enid Schrader’s son. “They’ll ditch the harelip,” Leonard had said when she showed him the picture. “The harelip’s the fresh meat they’ll throw on the trail, they can’t afford him, Marin’s not stupid.”

“I wouldn’t rely on that,” Warren had said.

Another picture Charlotte could not erase from her mind was her mother alone at Ransohoff’s.

I knew my mother was dead when I saw them carry out her bed to be burned, my father could not tell me. I knew my father was dead when the doorman at the Brown Palace would not let me go upstairs, he sent for a maid to tell me. She brought an éclair and cocoa. I waited for her on a red plush banquette. Unlike Charlotte I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed. The morning Edgar died I called Victor, signed the papers, walked out to Progreso as usual and ate lunch on the sea wall.

15

“I HAVE A LOUSY TRIP TO PHILADELPHIA, LOUSY FLIGHT back, I watch my own plane blow a tire on closed-circuit TV, I go to my office, I find Suzy in tears because Warren’s camped in her one-room apartment, I come home and I find my wife hasn’t gotten dressed in two days. I finish this call, Charlotte, I’m going to trot your ass over to Polly Orben’s office, this isn’t healthy.” Leonard uncupped the receiver and spoke into it. “Try the other line, Suzy, see if you can keep your finger off the disconnect this time.”

“Why don’t you trot Suzy’s ass over to Polly Orben’s office,” Charlotte said without turning around. She was watching the FBI man in the window of the apartment across the street. “Why don’t you trot Warren’s ass over to Polly Orben’s office.”

“Tell him we’re going to trade off the felony and plead the two misdemeanors,” Leonard said into the telephone.

“Warren and Polly Orben would be good,” Charlotte said.

“And tell him I don’t want any of that boom-boom shit at the hearing.” Leonard hung up the telephone. “Speaking of Warren he says you won’t see him. He says you misunderstand him.”

“The fuck I misunderstand him.”

“Felicitously put,” Leonard said after a while. “In any case I told him to come by.”

“Tell him I’m in Hollister. Tell him I’m in Hollister and about how there’s no telephone on the ranch.”

“There are eight telephones on the ranch. On three separate lines.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“For Christ’s sake, Charlotte, go to Hollister if you don’t want to see him. Go now. Go right now.”

“I can’t actually go to Hollister.”

“Why can’t you, besides the fact that it might entail getting dressed.”

She could not go to Hollister because she was afraid Warren might find her there, alone at the ranch. She could not go to Hollister because if Warren found her there alone at the ranch something bad would happen. This seemed so obvious to Charlotte that she could not bring herself to say it. “I can’t go to Hollister because you have people coming to the house for lunch tomorrow.”

“Tell me who I have coming to the house for lunch tomorrow.”

“Coming to the house for lunch tomorrow you have …” She could not think.

“Coming to the house for lunch tomorrow I have … the leaders of … two dissident factions within … the Haight-Divisadero Coalition. You got a whole lot you want to say to them?”

Charlotte picked up a brush and began attacking her hair in abrupt chops.

“On the subject of day-care versus guerrilla theater? Maybe we could get Dickie and Linda up from Hollister and get their thinking?”

“I don’t know why you put all those telephones on the ranch anyway.”

“I don’t know, Charlotte. Communication?”

“Nobody in my family ever found it necessary to keep three different calls going on that ranch.”

“Nobody in your family ever found it necessary to pay the taxes on that ranch, either. Tell me again why you can’t go to Hollister.”

The hair Charlotte pulled from her brush was dry and wiry and faded.

When Marin was small she had played a game with Charlotte’s hair and called it gold.

“I feel so old,” Charlotte said.

“Tell me why you can’t go to Hollister.”

“I keep remembering things.”

“Most of us do. Tell me why you won’t see Warren.”

“You don’t know what he wants.”

“Of course I know what he wants. He wants you back. You think I make my living being dense?”

“Then why did you ask?”

Leonard lifted a mass of Charlotte’s hair and let it drop through his fingers. “Because I was interested in whether you knew it. You don’t look so old.”

16

WHO CAN SAY WHY I CRAVE THE LIGHT IN BOCA GRANDE, who can say why my body grows cancers.

Who can say why Charlotte left Leonard Douglas.

Maybe she thought it was easier.

Maybe she believed herself loose in the world, maybe she was tired, maybe she had just remembered that people died. Maybe she thought that if she walked back into the Carlyle Hotel on Easter morning with Warren Bogart Marin would be there, in a flowered lawn dress.

“It’s too late,” she said to her gynecologist the morning he confirmed that she was carrying Leonard’s child. “It didn’t happen in time.”

Somebody cuts you.

Where it doesn’t show.

I have no way of knowing about the cuts that don’t show.

I know only that during the fifth week after the release of Marin’s tape Charlotte woke early every morning, dressed promptly, and immersed herself in the domestic maintenance of the house on California Street. She made inventories. She replaced worn sheets, chipped wine glasses, crazed plates. She paid an electrician time-and-a-half to rewire, on a Saturday, two crossed spots on the Jackson Pollock in the dining room. She was obsessed by errands, and she laid it to her pregnancy.

Leonard did not.

So entirely underwater did Charlotte live her life that she did not recognize her preoccupations as those of a woman about to abandon a temporary rental.

Leonard did.

17

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE LAST EVENING CHARLOTTE SPENT with Leonard Douglas appeared a year later in Vogue, Charlotte showed them to me.

There was Leonard, standing with an actor at the party in Beverly Hills, standing with his head bent, listening to the actor but looking somewhere else.

There was Charlotte, sitting with an actress at the party in Beverly Hills, Charlotte smiling, her eyes wide and glazed and in the end as impenetrable as Marin’s.

She had not meant to go with Leonard to the party in Beverly Hills at all.

She had not even meant to go with Leonard to the airport.

But on the fifth day of the fifth week after the release of Marin’s tape she had opened the door of the house on California Street and found Warren standing there.

“I guess you can give me a drink.”

“Actually I’m just about to drive Leonard to the airport.” She followed his gaze to the limousine idling at the curb. She had not until the moment intended going to the airport. “I mean I’m not exactly driving him to the airport but I’m driving with him to the airport.”

“I guess there’s room for me.”

“Actually you don’t want to drive to the airport, it could take hours.” She had not in fact spoken to Warren since the nights he called from the Beverly Hills Hotel on Bashti Levant’s bill. “This time of day. The traffic.”

“I’ve got time.”

“Hours. Literally.”

“You’re swimming upstream, Charlotte.”

In the car Charlotte had sat on the jump seat and fixed her eyes on the driver’s pigtail.

“While you were upstairs Warren was telling me about this ninety-two-year-old Trotskyist he drinks with in New York,” Leonard said. “This Trotskyist lives at the Hotel Albert. Naturally.”

“Charlotte knows Benny,” Warren said. “You remember Benny, Charlotte.”

Charlotte had not remembered Benny. Charlotte had not even thought that she was meant to remember Benny, whoever Benny was. Benny was only Warren’s way of reminding her that he had a prior claim.

“This Trotskyist drinks Pisco Sours,” Leonard said.

“Sazeracs,” Warren said. “Not Pisco Sours. Sazeracs. Benny always asks about you, Charlotte. You ought to go see him, he’s not going to live forever.”

Charlotte kept her eyes on the driver’s pigtail.

“Neither is Porter,” Warren said. “In case you forgot.”

“Neither is Charlotte,” Leonard said. “You keep this up. Something I’ve never been able to understand is how you happen to know more Trotskyists than Trotsky did.”

“You know more Arabs, it evens out. What am I going to tell Porter, Charlotte?”

“All of them ninety-two-years old,” Leonard said.

“I said what am I going to tell Porter, Charlotte.”

“All of them sitting around the Hotel Albert drinking Pisco Sours,” Leonard said.

“Sazeracs. What do you want me to tell Porter on his deathbed, Charlotte.”

“Personally I want you to tell Porter about this ninety-two-year-old Trotskyist,” Leonard said. “You’re overplaying your hand, Warren. You’re pushing her too hard while she’s still got an ace. I’ll lay you odds, she’s going to see her ace. She’s going to say she’s coming with me.”

“But I am.” Charlotte looked at Leonard for the first time. “I am definitely coming with you. I always was.”

“No,” Leonard said. “You were not ‘always’ coming with me. You see, Warren? Bad hand. You didn’t pace your play.”

“But I always wanted to go with you,” Charlotte said.

“Definitely you always wanted to go with him,” Warren said. “You haven’t met enough Arabs.”

“He’s going to Los Angeles and Miami,” Charlotte said.

“Or enough Jews,” Warren said.

Because Charlotte had gotten on the plane with no bag and because Leonard’s presence was required at the party where the photographs were taken, a $250-a-ticket benefit in a tent behind someone’s house in Beverly Hills, Charlotte was wearing, at the time she was photographed, a dress borrowed from the wife of the record executive who had organized the evening, a dress made entirely of colored ribbons.

“You shouldn’t have told Warren to keep the car,” she had said as she put on the dress. “He’ll keep it all night. I look absurd.”

“You wouldn’t if you had a tambourine,” Leonard said. “He’ll keep it all week.”

Charlotte sat down. She was very tired. She did not think she had ever been so tired. She did not see how she could finish tying the ribbons on the dress.

“Sometimes I wish,” Leonard said after a while. He began tying the ribbons Charlotte had abandoned. “I don’t know.”

“Sometimes you wish what.”

“Sometimes I wish you could just fuck him and get it over with.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Charlotte. Shit. I know you don’t want to.”

A stage had been constructed over the swimming pool of the house in Beverly Hills and several entertainers auctioned their services, singing and dancing and placing surprise telephone calls to friends and relatives of high bidders. Leonard raised five hundred dollars by dancing the limbo under a pole held by the record executive’s wife, a young woman with pale blond hair like Marin’s and a Brahmin caste mark painted on her forehead, and, at Charlotte’s table, an actress who had visited Hanoi spoke of the superior health and beauty of the children there.

“It’s because they aren’t raised by their mothers,” the actress said. “They don’t have any of that bourgeois personal crap laid on them.”

Charlotte studied her wine glass and tried to think of something neutral to say to the actress. She wanted to get up but her chair was blocked by three men who seemed to be discussing the financing of a motion picture, or a war.

“No mama-papa-baby-nuclear-family bullshit,” the actress said. “It’s beautiful.”

Charlotte concentrated on the details of the financing, the part to be played by the Canadians, the controls exerted by the Crédit Suisse.

“I know why you’re crying,” the actress said after a while.

Morocco would lend its army. Spain would not. Two-eight above the line.

“And I’m sorry, but that’s exactly the kind of personal crap I never saw in Hanoi.”

The flash bulb blazed.

Charlotte smiled.

The flash bulb dropped on the table.

“Did you know I spent a night once with Pete Wright,” Charlotte said to Leonard as he led her from the table. “Did you know I did that and forgot it.”

“You didn’t forget it at all, Leonard said. “You told me the first night I met you.”

“I am so tired. I am so tired of remembering things. Leonard. Tell me it’s because I’m pregnant.”

“I wish I could,” Leonard said.

Leonard took Charlotte back to the Beverly Wilshire but she continued crying so Leonard, because he was due in Miami the next day to assist in the sale of four French Mirages from one Caribbean independency to another, called the record executive and borrowed a company Lear to fly Charlotte home. $216,000 was raised that night to benefit some one of Leonard’s clients, Charlotte was unsure which until she saw the pictures in Vogue. She left the dress made entirely of colored ribbons on the floor of the suite at the Beverly Wilshire. I look at those pictures now and I see only Charlotte’s smile.

18

“IT’S CHARLOTTE,” SHE SAID TO HER BROTHER’S WIFE from a pay phone on the highway outside Hollister. “I wondered if you and Dickie were going to be home.”

“Richard and I play tennis every Saturday.” There was a pause. “You want to use the pool, come on by, of course the heater’s off.”

“I thought I might see the children.”

“They’re at the gym.”

There was a silence.

“Why exactly would I drive to Hollister to use your pool, Linda? I mean I get off a plane from Los Angeles and I sit in the airport all night and I rent a car and I’m out here on the highway and it’s raining?”

Linda said nothing.

“Listen,” Charlotte said finally. “Linda. Please ask me to dinner.”

Before and during dinner Charlotte’s brother drank steadily and did not mention Marin or Leonard or Warren. Linda sat at the table but refused to eat. She said that she had eaten macaroni and cheese with the children, who seemed to have come home from and returned to the gym before Charlotte’s arrival.

“They’re just wonderful normal kids,” Linda said after dinner. “Aren’t they, Richard. No matter what Warren says.”

“What’s Warren got to do with it,” Charlotte said.

“How would I know whether they’re wonderful normal kids.” Dickie opened another bottle of bourbon. “Maybe Warren’s right, maybe they’re boring, how would I know. They’re always at the goddamn gym.”

“Most people would consider that a definite plus. I believe your sister needs an ashtray.”

“What’s Warren got to do with it,” Charlotte repeated.

“Or eating goddamn Kraft Dinners with you at four o’clock.”

“Richard and I don’t smoke,” Linda said.

“We don’t fuck either,” Dickie said.

Charlotte put out her cigarette in an empty nut dish.

“Warren paid us a little visit,” Linda said. “Lasting eleven hours and a quart and a half of gin.”

“Charlotte’s not interested in that, Linda.”

“Tanqueray gin.”

“Linda. We enjoyed seeing him, Char.”

“He had this very interesting friend with him. He’d just run into this friend, they hadn’t seen each other since the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Where—”

“I’m warning you, Linda.”

“Where this friend of Warren’s tended bar. Which is what this friend still does, except at the Pacific Union Club.”

“I warned you, Linda. If Charlotte’s husband wants to bring a Negro to this house, this house is open. With bells on. All systems go.”

“Charlotte’s not married to Warren any more, Richard, you don’t have to pretend you like him.”

“Goddamnit Linda, he’s better than the Jew, isn’t he?”

Linda began plumping pillows.

Dickie avoided Charlotte’s eyes.

“Actually Leonard’s not a Jew,” Charlotte said. “Actually it just amuses Warren to say that Leonard’s a Jew. A private joke. If you follow.”

“Warren’s sense of humor is just a little bit twisted,” Linda said. “If you ask me.”

“I didn’t mean that about Leonard, Char. Hey. Char. I think Leonard is—”

“Not that anybody ever does ask me,” Linda said.

“—A very fine lawyer,” Dickie said.

“Listen,” Charlotte said finally. Linda was still plumping pillows with pointed energy. “Dickie. I’ve been remembering some things since Marin left.”

“That’s no good for you, Char, remembering. Remembering is shit. Forget her.”

“I’m not talking about Marin, I’m talking about—”

“Forget goddamn Marin. Forget goddamn Warren. You did your best. Forget the other one too.”

“He doesn’t want to talk about Marin, Charlotte.” Linda turned off a lamp. “He wants to believe your life is just pluperfect.”

“You turn off another plu-fucking-perfect light, Linda, I’m walking out of here with Charlotte and don’t wait up.”

“Lucky Charlotte.”

“I’m not talking about Marin,” Charlotte said. “I’m talking about when we lived on the ranch.”

“Don’t sell the ranch, Char.”

“I’m not. I’m talking about — do you remember how Nana would always burn the biscuits?”

“The ranch is the only home you’ve got, Char.”

“Oh fine,” Linda said. “Back to Tara. The Havemeyers are off to the races now. If you’re looking for your car keys they’re on the coffee table. Next to the ring from Massa Richard’s glass.”

“Remember the biscuits, Dickie? Halfway through dinner we’d smell them burning?”

“The only thing I remember your famous grandmother burning is every bed jacket I ever took her in the nursing home.” Linda handed Charlotte her car keys. “Smoking in bed. Little holes in every one.”

“You can’t have forgotten the biscuits, Dickie.”

“No good remembering, Char.”

“Of course your sister wasn’t here during that ordeal.”

“Dickie,” Charlotte said. “We used to laugh about it.”

“You and me, Char.” Dickie touched Charlotte’s hair uncertainly and turned away. “Forget goddamn Marin. I say give her a Kraft Dinner and I say the hell with her.”

Charlotte stayed that night in a motel off 101.

She tried to think about the biscuits but they kept fading out. She tried to think about the gold pin with the broken clasp but she kept seeing it on the bomb.

Her grandmother was dead and Marin was gone.

She had never gone shopping with her mother, she had never seen her father on Demerol, the ranch had eight telephones on three lines and Marin was gone.

It was Pete Wright who had told her that her father needed Demerol before he died.

The night she got drunk at the Palm.

She tried to think about Pete Wright in her bed that night but could not. She tried to think about Leonard in the bed of the house on California Street but she could see that bed only as it had been the day she picked up the scissors against Warren. She could see Warren sitting on that bed and she could also see Warren standing in front of her bed in New York the Easter morning after she got drunk at the Palm.

“Look at the slut on Easter morning.”

She had screamed.

Marin had screamed.

She had picked up Marin and when Warren hit her again his hand glanced off Marin’s temple.

She had picked up the kitchen knife.

She had thrown up.

She and Warren had taken Marin to the Carlyle and she had not had enough money to pay the bill. The beautiful principessa, the headwaiter had crooned over Marin. The beautiful principessa, the beautiful family. King of Crazy, Queen of Wrong. The headwaiter did not know that. The headwaiter would see to it that the bill was mailed. Charlotte lay on the motel bed and she thought about the beautiful principessa and about the beautiful family and about all the bills that had been mailed and never paid. She thought about all the unpaid bills and she thought about all the days and nights when she had promised Warren she would never leave.

There was another unpaid bill.

“You can’t drink,” Warren had said that Easter morning and held her shoulders as she threw up. “You can’t drink at all, you never could.” And then he washed her face and he took her to the Carlyle and she did not have enough money to pay the bill. Look at the slut on Easter morning. Marin had a straw hat one Easter, and a flowered lawn dress. Warren gave her his coat.

19

WHEN WARREN CAME THAT DAY TO THE DOOR OF THE house on California Street Charlotte did not answer.

When Warren telephoned Charlotte hung up.

When Warren stood on the sidewalk outside the house on California Street at two A.M. and threw stones at the windows Charlotte closed the shutters.

When Warren left the note reading “THIS IS THE WORST BEHAVIOR YET” in the mailbox of the house on California Street Charlotte tore the note in half and avoided those rooms which fronted on the street.

When the two FBI men came to tell Charlotte that the boy with the harelip scar had been apprehended on an unrelated charge in Nogales, Arizona, and had hanged himself in his cell Charlotte left the room without speaking. That was on the second day of the sixth week after the release of Marin’s tape.

On the morning of the third day of the sixth week after the release of Marin’s tape Dickie called from Hollister to say that Warren was at the ranch.

“Acting crazy. Irrational. He told Linda that he talked to Leonard in Miami and Leonard said he could stay.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“He yelled at Linda.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“Obscenities.”

Charlotte replaced the receiver and lay down on Marin’s bed.

“You’re aware Mark Schrader killed himself in Mexico,” the reporter said on the telephone.

“Arizona,” Charlotte said. She was still lying on Marin’s bed. The sound of the man’s voice hurt her ear and she held the receiver several inches away.

“About Mark and Marin—”

“Arizona. Not Mexico. He killed himself in Nogales, Arizona.”

“Absolutely. My slip. Would you say that Marin was romantically involved with Mark?”

“Romantically involved,” Charlotte repeated.

“Involved in a romantic way, yes.”

The harelip’s the fresh meat they’ll throw on the trail, they can’t afford him, Marin’s not stupid.

I wouldn’t rely on that.

“You see you’re thinking of Nogales, Sonora,” Charlotte said.

“Absolutely,” the reporter said. “Very good. About Mark and—”

“You don’t have to congratulate me. For knowing the difference between Arizona and Mexico.”

“About Marin and—”

This is the worst behavior yet.

“Fuck Marin,” Charlotte said.

“Because he was married to you,” Leonard said when she called him in Miami. “That’s why I told him he could stay at your fucking ranch. Because you kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and told him you’d be back in a week. Because he was Marin’s father. And because I don’t happen to believe it’s Porter who is dying.”

“Is Marin’s father, Is.”

“You didn’t hear what I said. I said I don’t happen to believe he’s talking about anybody but himself.”

There was a silence.

“I heard what you said,” Charlotte said finally. “Tell me—”

“Tell you what.”

“Tell me—”

“Tell you if you’re not there when I get back I’ll shoot myself?”

Charlotte said nothing.

“I won’t. That’s his game, not mine. I want you. I don’t need you.”

“If you think he’s dying he’s not,” Charlotte said after a while. “If you’re trying to say you think he’s dying you’re wrong.”

Leonard said nothing.

“Something else you were wrong about,” Charlotte said. “You said I’d leave you the same way I left him. I’m not. I’m leaving you. I’m telling you.”

The rain was light and the dark came early and the traffic moved. By the time she arrived at the turn-off to the Hollister ranch she was just ten months short of the Boca Grande airport. El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana. My brother-in-law. Deceased.