Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

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.

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.

“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—”