Joan Didion - A Book of Common Prayer

When it was reported to Victor that Charlotte Douglas went to the airport every day he construed immediately that her presence on the list had to do with Kasindorf and Riley. Kasindorf was Bradley’s cultural attaché at the Embassy and Riley was a young man who ran an OAS “educational” office called “Operación Simpático” downtown. The connection with Charlotte Douglas, transparent to Victor, was that Kasindorf and Riley also went to the airport every day, met there for coffee at precisely seven-thirty A.M., a time which coincided with the arrival of the night Braniff from Mexico.

In fact Kasindorf and Riley went to the airport not because of the night Braniff from Mexico but because they assumed correctly that Victor had microphones in their offices.

In fact Charlotte Douglas just went to the airport.

LA NORTEAMERICANA TOLD A STORY ABOUT PLAYING hide-and-seek with Marin among the thousand trunks of the Great Banyan at the Calcutta Botanical Garden. It had been “the most lyrical” day. She and Marin had “devoured” coconut ice for lunch. She and Marin had wandered be-beneath the Great Banyan at noon and stayed until after dark.

She leaned toward Victor and me as if the end of the story were a secret never before revealed. “And when Leonard finished his meeting and couldn’t find us at the Hilton he was wild, he had people combing Calcutta for us, it was hilarious.”

The absence of banyan trees at the American Embassy reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.

She told a story about sitting in the rain in a limousine at Lod Airport eating caviar with an Israeli general. They had “devoured” the caviar from the tin with their fingers and pieces of unsalted matzoh. The Israeli and Leonard could meet only between planes and the Israeli had brought the caviar.

Again she leaned toward us. “And when Leonard saw the Iranian seal on the tin he wouldn’t eat the caviar, and the general said ‘don’t be a fool, don’t make me go to war for it,’ it was hilarious.”

The absence of caviar at the American Embassy Christmas party reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.

She talked constantly. She talked feverishly. She talked as if Victor had released her from vows of silence by walking up to where she stood with Ardis Bradley and offering her a crab puff. Every memory was “lyrical,” every denouement “hilarious,” and sometimes “ironic” as well. Her face was flushed but she was not drunk: she stood very straight and refused even the weak rum punches the Bradleys favored for general entertainments. She seemed to be receiving these pointless but bizarrely arresting stories out of some deep vacuum of nervous exhaustion, transmitting them dutifully in a voice soft and clear and oddly confidential. She used words as a seven-year-old might, as if she had heard them and liked their adult sound but had only the haziest idea of their meaning, and she also mentioned names as a seven-year-old might, with a bewildering disregard for who was listening. “Leonard,” she would say, as if we would naturally know who Leonard was, as if the Minister of Defense of a Central American republic and his norteamericana sister-in-law, acquaintances of an hour in the crush of an official reception, were of course privy to all the people and places in her life.

There was “Leonard.”

There was “Warren.”

There was “Marin.”

There was the house on California Street in San Francisco and there were the meetings in Calcutta and La Paz and in limousines at Lod Airport.

There were the hotel suites, always “flooded with flowers.”

There was the missed plane and its happy ending: Air Force One.

“Imagine Leonard on Air Force One.” She had one of those odd intimate laughs that seemed simultaneously to include everyone within hearing and to exclude all possibility of inquiry. “Ardis. Tell them. You know Leonard.”

“Actually I don’t quite,” Ardis Bradley said.

“For that matter imagine Leonard on a camel,” Charlotte Douglas said.

“Leonard,” Victor said tentatively, looking at Ardis Bradley. “Leonard would be her—”

“Actually I think Tuck might know him,” Ardis Bradley said. Ardis had spent twenty years in places like Sierra Leone and Boca Grande and Chevy Chase learning to go look for Tuck when she did not want to answer a question. “Actually I don’t want Tuck to miss this.”

“Leonard on that camel.” Still laughing Charlotte Douglas touched Victor’s arm. “After lunch one day in Kuwait.”

Victor had the look of someone who had waded out too far. Ardis Bradley had vanished. I was myself unclear as to why this Leonard declined Iranian caviar in one story and lunched in Kuwait in another.

“The inevitable five-course lunch. In the inevitable Valerian Rybar dining room. Followed by the inevitable camel. I tried to postpone the camel part, I kept eating and eating, everything had this vile mint taste, I kept trying to distract the sheikh, I kept asking him what I could—”

She broke off abruptly and shrugged.

“What you could—?”

“It was hilarious.” She was looking around the room as if unsure how she had gotten there. “I used to like mint but I don’t any more, do you?”

“You kept asking the sheikh what you could—?”

“I suppose it’s one of those abandoned tastes. As opposed to acquired. Mint.” She focused on Victor with difficulty. “I kept asking the sheikh what I could send him from America. Of course.”

“And then,” Victor prompted.

“He wanted eight-track cassettes and flowered sheets.” Her voice was absent. “They all do.”

“But after lunch?”

“After lunch?”

“The camel?”

“The camel .” She seemed relieved to be handed the thread to her story but had lost interest in telling it. “So Leonard rode the camel. Of course. Leonard had to ride the camel.”

“Leonard would be—”

“You know how the Kuwaiti are.”

“Your husband? Leonard would be your husband?”

“One of them.” Her voice was still absent. “I mean they lay on a camel, you have to ride the camel.”

“And he has occasion to travel a great deal.” Victor was not to be deflected. “Your husband. Leonard. He travels. For business. For pleasure. For whatever.”

“He runs guns,” Charlotte Douglas said. “I wish they had caviar.”

Victor stared at her.

She speared a shrimp, dipped it in mayonnaise and offered it to Victor. Victor made no response.

“I don’t mean literally.” She spoke with disinterested patience and still held out the shrimp to Victor. “I don’t mean he literally buys and sells the hardware.”

“The hardware,” Victor said.

She ate the shrimp herself and seemed about to drop the toothpick into the six-hundred-dollar handbag with the broken clasp when Tuck Bradley appeared. To my astonishment she handed Tuck Bradley the toothpick. To my further astonishment he stood there holding it, between two fingers, looking prissy and foolish. Beyond handing him the toothpick Charlotte seemed entirely unaware of Tuck Bradley’s presence. “He’s kind of a lawyer,” she said finally. “He’s kind of a lawyer in San Francisco.”

“If you’re talking about Leonard he’s a very well-known lawyer,” Tuck Bradley said.

“In a way,” Charlotte said.

“In San Francisco,” Tuck Bradley said.

“And in some other places,” Charlotte said.

And then, her animation returning, she again touched Victor’s arm in that way she had of physically touching strangers, of reaching out unconsciously and then drawing back as if she had just realized the gesture’s sexual freight; that mannerism, that tic, that way of barely suggesting impossible intimacy. She did this only to strangers but she did not do it to all strangers. I never saw her do it to a woman and I never saw her do it to Antonio. She never did it to Gerardo either but that was because Gerardo did it first, to her. Sexual freight was another area in which I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.