Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“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.”

“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.”