Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“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.

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.”