Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

“Lower that white-trash voice,” Warren said.

In the Hertz car they had driven from the airport to Porter’s new house in Metairie and it began to appear that Leonard had been right again. Porter did not appear to be dying but Warren did. Porter told her that. Porter told her that while Warren was upstairs calling a girl he knew in Savannah and telling her to come down. Porter hoped that Charlotte would understand why she and Warren could not stay with him. Porter hoped that she would not think it inhospitable for him to have made a reservation for her and Warren at the Pontchartrain. By the way the reservation would be in her name because the last time Warren had stayed at the Pontchartrain there had been a little unpleasantness, Porter would not say what.

“Warren doesn’t show his best side as a houseguest, Charlotte, you recognize that. If Warren has to leave us, I want to recall his many virtues only.”

“What do you mean, leave us.”

“About time he came home, stopped catting around New York. ‘Dying Is But Going Home,’ am I right? Ever hear that?”

“What are you talking about, dying.”

“Used to see it on gravestones. ‘Dying Is But Going Home.’ ‘The Angels Called Him,’ that was popular too. At least around here it was popular. I don’t know about out there.”

“You said if Warren ‘has to leave us,’ Porter, what did you mean?”

“Don’t bother yourself, Charlotte. I’m going to persuade Warren to let Ping Walker have a look, you remember Ping, Lady Duvall’s boy? Lived up east a while? Came back down home around the time Lady married her fancy man?”

“I don’t know any Ping Walker and I don’t know any Lady Duvall and I don’t see what they’ve got to do with Warren.”

“Don’t raise your voice, Charlotte, your husband out there allow you to converse like a fishwife? Ping is a specialist. I should say, a specialist. Very fine training. Tulane, Hopkins, Harvard. His father didn’t pay for it, old Judge Duvall did.”

“ A specialist in what? ”

“Bad blood,” Warren said from the stairway, and both he and Porter laughed.

“Bad blood between Warren here and Lady’s fancy man, if memory serves.”

“Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

“Porter said you were sick.”

She was standing at the window in the room at the Pontchartrain watching the first light on the windows of the houses across the avenue. She did not have a bag, she did not have an aspirin, she did not have a toothbrush. The skirt she had put on the morning before in Hollister was wrinkled from the long drive to the San Francisco airport and the long flight to New Orleans and the long night watching Warren and Porter drink in Metairie. In a few hours she could go out and buy what she needed. She tried to concentrate on what she needed and did not think about what she was doing in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. In the empty house on California Street in San Francisco it would be three o’clock in the morning. The night light in Marin’s bathroom would be burning just as she had left it. The crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room would be burning just as she had left them. Leonard would have gone on by now from Miami to Havana via Mexico City. Leonard was in Havana and Marin was gone. Warren was either dying or not dying and Marin was gone.

“Porter said you were sick and he wasn’t. At all.”

“Porter’s an ass, don’t you be one.” Warren lay on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. “You got it wrong. As usual. Shut those curtains and come here.”

We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should be doing this all our lives, Warren said.

We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

The verb form made a difference and she could not get it straight what Warren had said. She could not remember. She could remember the New Orleans airport and she could remember the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham but she could not remember too much in between. There must have been about five months in between, about twenty weeks, about 140 days, simple arithmetic told her how many days there must have been between the New Orleans airport and the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, but someone had shuffled them. Everywhere she had been with him he wanted the curtains shut in the daylight, she did remember that. She remembered darkened rooms with the light cracking through where the curtains were skimpy and all she could not remember was where those rooms were, or why she and Warren had been in them.

“You wanted to bring me home with you,” she remembered saying in one of them. “Didn’t you. You wanted to come home again.”

“No,” Warren had said. “I just wanted to fuck you again.”

Sometimes those months in the South seemed so shattered that she suspected the Ochsner Clinic of having administered electroshock while she was under the anaesthesia for delivery. This suspicion was unfounded.

I SAID BEFORE HE HAD THE LOOK OF A MAN WHO COULD drive a woman like Charlotte right off her head.

His face had been coarsened by contempt.

His mind had been coarsened by self-pity.

As it happened he was quite often “right” to hold other people in contempt, and he was also “right” to regard himself with pity, but allow a dying woman a maxim or two.

I have noticed that it is never enough to be right.

I have noticed that it is necessary to be better.

His favorite hand was outrageousness; in a fluid world like Leonard Douglas’s where no one could be outraged Warren Bogart was dimmed, confused, unable to operate. He could operate marginally in academe, and he maintained vague academic connections: a week at Yale, three days at Harvard, guest privileges at a number of Faculty Clubs where he never paid his bar bill. He could operate marginally on the Upper East Side of New York. He could operate very well in the South. Like many Southerners and like some Catholics and unlike Charlotte he was raised to believe not in “hard work” or “self-reliance” but in the infinite power of the personal appeal, the request for a favor, the intervention of one or another merciful Virgin. He had an inchoate but definite conviction that access to the mysteries of good fortune was arranged in the same way as access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.

He belonged to nothing.

He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

His final hold on Charlotte was that he recognized in himself everything I have just told you about him, and said mea culpa .

As another outsider I recognized that hand too.

Outsider. De afuera .

We were both de afuera , Warren Bogart and I. At the time I met him we were also both dying of cancer, Warren Bogart and I, which perhaps made us even more de afuera than usual, but that was a detail Charlotte had never made entirely clear.

Charlotte had trouble with the word.

Not the word “cancer.”

The word “dying.”

I met him only once, one evening in New Orleans four or five months after Charlotte first came to Boca Grande, one evening in the Garden District at the house of one of the fat brothers in white suits who factor our copra. I had flown to New Orleans that morning to receive cobalt and to renegotiate the copra contracts with Morgan Fayard; I was due to have dinner with Morgan and his wife and sister and to fly back to Boca Grande the next morning. I had not been invited to dinner to meet Warren Bogart, nor had Warren Bogart been invited at all. He was just there in Morgan and Lucy Fayard’s living room when I arrived. He was a visible thorn in Lucy Fayard’s plan for the evening. He seemed bent on embarrassing both Lucy and her sister-in-law Adele, as well as on humiliating the girl he had with him, but the central thrust of his visit seemed to be to see me. This girl he had with him was referred to as “Chrissie,” or “Miss Bailey,” or “our unexpected guest’s little friend from Tupelo,” depending on who referred to her, and she was thin and pale and spoke, when prodded, in sporadic and obscurely startling monologues. In fact she was not unlike Charlotte Douglas, give or take twenty years and the distinctions in cultural conditioning between Tupelo, Mississippi, and Hollister, California. Still I watched the two of them in the Fayards’ living room for several minutes before I understood that this “Warren” who had arrived uninvited for drinks and would stay unasked through dinner and who studied my every reaction was the Warren who figured in what I had come to regard as Charlotte Douglas’s hallucinations.