Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

To this post-office box in Washington Charlotte addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on the subject of Boca Grande.

She never received an answer but first Kasindorf and then Riley and finally Tuck Bradley received word that she was in the country.

In case they had missed her.

Nor did Charlotte receive answers from most of the other officials and agencies and writers and editors to whom she addressed her suggestions for factual or interpretive or other changes on a wide range of subjects.

I believe mainly “other” changes.

The only bad time of these days Charlotte spent at the Caribe was about four o’clock.

At about four o’clock the shine of plausibility would seem to go off her projects.

At about four o’clock she would find herself sitting in the room at the Caribe remembering something.

She would sometimes call me up at four o’clock and tell me what she was remembering.

For example.

Those crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room of the house on California Street.

Those crossed spots were too bright, or too exposed, she could not determine which.

Those spots had always been too bright, too exposed.

She should perhaps have them recessed in the ceiling.

What did I think.

At a certain point during each of these calls the possession would seem to fade from her voice, and by the time she hung up she would sound almost at peace. She would go downstairs then and sit by the pool and she would watch the peacocks hiding from the heat under the jacaranda trees and she would watch the blocks of ice being dragged across the concrete into the Caribe kitchen. She would imagine the various bacteria waiting in each block of ice. She counted bacteria instead of sheep. After a while a great lassitude would come over her and she would want to sleep, and sometimes she did sleep, there by the Caribe pool in the late afternoons, but at night in the apartment on the Avenida del Mar she did not sleep at all.

WE COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL OUR LIVES.

We should do this all our lives.

Tell her I said it’s all the same.

Tell her that for me.

Tell Charlotte she was wrong .

I never told Charlotte what Warren Bogart said.

I think she heard him say it every night.

She would get up some nights when Gerardo was asleep and she would pick up the half-filled glasses with which the strangers who came to her “evenings” had littered the empty rooms of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar and she would walk by herself to a theater downtown which showed dolorous Mexican movies all night, tales of betrayal and stolen babies and other sexual punishments. Other nights she would not leave the apartment but would only stand in the living room by the window and listen to the radio. Radio Boca Grande was allowed to broadcast only during restricted hours by that time but she could usually get Radio Jamaica and sometimes even Radio British Honduras and the Voice of the Caribbean from the Central American Mission in San José, Costa Rica. She thought she had New Orleans or Miami one night, dance music from some hotel or another in New Orleans or Miami, but it turned out to be only a pick-up from the Caribe. She recognized the accordionist.

Some nights when she could not even get Radio Jamaica she called San Francisco.

She did not call the number of the house on California Street in San Francisco.

She did not call the number of anyone she knew in San Francisco.

She called a number in San Francisco which gave, over and over again in a voice so monotonous as to seem to come from beyond the grave, the taped “road condition” report of the California Highway Patrol.

Interstate 80 Donner Pass was open.

U.S. 50 Echo Summit was closed.

State Route 88 Carson Pass was open.

State Route 89 Lassen Loop was closed, State Route 108 Sonora was closed, State Route 120 Tioga Pass was closed.

These calls were routed through Quito and Miami and took quite a long time to place.

By the end of May every road regularly reported upon by the California Highway Patrol was open.

According to Victor.

Who duly heard these calls and believed them coded.

“Quite frankly I don’t think the California Highway Patrol is hooked up with the guerrilleros ,” I said to Victor.

“Then give me one reason for these calls.”

“She’s lonely, Victor.” In fact “lonely” was never a word I would have used to characterize Charlotte Douglas but conversation with Victor requires broad strokes. “She’s ‘a woman alone.’ As I believe you used to call her.”

“She is no longer a woman alone. May I point out. On the occasion of all but one of these calls your son has been spending the night in this apartment. Where Bebe Chicago has been a frequent visitor.”

“If I were you I’d listen to Bebe Chicago’s calls and forget Charlotte’s.”

“Bebe Chicago’s calls. Spare me any more of Bebe Chicago’s calls.” Victor mimicked a whispery falsetto. “ ‘Ricardo? It’s me. C’est moi, chéri . Bebe.’ ”

“Actually you aren’t good at voices, Victor. What is it you want to know?”

“What I want to know, Grace, is what your son is doing while she makes these calls.”

“Sleeping.”

“ ‘Sleeping’?”

“ ‘Sleeping.’ Yes.”

Victor looked at me awhile, and then at his nails. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “What kind of man would be sleeping.”

I was tired of Victor that spring.

I was also tired of whatever game Gerardo was playing with Bebe Chicago and the guerrilleros and the strangers he invited to Charlotte’s “evenings” on the Avenida del Mar.

Charlotte’s “evenings.”

I would go sometimes.

There were always these strangers there, third-rate people Gerardo was using in his game, the object of which seemed to be to place his marker in Victor’s office in as few moves as possible. His marker that year happened to be Antonio, but who it was mattered not at all to Gerardo. Gerardo plays only for the action. Part of the action in this case was the artful manipulation of what passed for the intelligentsia in Boca Grande, the point being to create an illusion of support for the guerrilleros , and it was the members of this “intelligentsia” who littered the apartment on the Avenida del Mar with half-filled glasses two or three nights a week. Of course Bebe Chicago was usually there, and a few “poets” who had published verses in anthologies with titles like Fresh Wind in the Caribbean , and the usual complement of translators and teachers and film critics who supported themselves stringing for newspapers and playing at politics. I recall one who read out loud at Charlotte’s dinner table a paper he was writing called “The Singular Position of Intellectuals with Respect to the Crisis of the Underdeveloped World” and then read it again, over Charlotte’s telephone, to a friend in Tenerife. I recall another who made marionettes to perform the plays of Arnold Wesker in schoolyards.

I have no idea what Charlotte thought of these people.

She told me she found them “terribly stimulating to listen to,” but I never saw her “listen to” any one of them.

She had in the dining room of the apartment on the Avenida del Mar a large round table around which these people sat and talked about what they always called “the truly existential situation of the Central American,” and Charlotte would sit at this table in her gray chiffon dress, but she seemed not to be there at all. She only stared at the kerosene lamp in the center of the table and watched moths batter themselves against the glass chimney. As the moths fell stunned to the table she would brush them toward her with a napkin, like someone dreaming. At the end of such an evening there would be moths drifted beneath her chair and moth wings caught in her gray chiffon skirt and no trace in her mind of what had been said. So dimly did Charlotte appear to perceive the nature of her evenings that she would sometimes invite Victor, and Victor would sit stiffly and finger his pistol and say that he did not quite comprehend why the situation of the Central American was so truly existential.