A Book of Common Prayer (10 page)

“When I what?” Charlotte said.

“Flip flop. We need ice, Charlotte.”

“When you—” The FBI man glanced uneasily at Warren. “When you said yesterday that Marin ‘might have been sad,’ what exactly did you mean? Normal everyday blues? Or something more, uh, out of the mainstream?”

“Just your normal everyday mainstream power-to-the-people
latifundismo
Berkeley blues.” Warren was still bent with laughter. “Just those old Amerikan blues. Spell that with a K.”

“I don’t know what I meant,” Charlotte said.

“Some theory,” Warren said. “Did you get the K? Did you spell it with a K?”

“To push on for a moment, Mrs. Douglas, the office raised one other question. Did your daughter ever mention a Russian, name of, uh, let’s see.”

The FBI man examined his notebook.

“Those old Amerikan blues didn’t
come
up the river from New Orleans, they K-O-M-E up the river from New Orleans. Get it? Charlotte? Did he get the K?”

“He got it.”

“Gurdjieff,” the FBI man said. “Russian, name of Gurdjieff. Marin ever mention him?”

“In the first place he was an Armenian,” Warren said. “Otherwise you’re on top of the case.”

“I’m not sure I get your meaning, Mr. Bogart.”

“Not at all. You’re doing fine.”

“Excuse me. The Gurdjieff I’m thinking of is a Russian.”

“Excuse me. The Gurdjieff you’re thinking of is Bashti Levant.”

“Warren. Please.”

“Don’t you think that’s funny, Charlotte? ‘Excuse me, the Gurdjieff you’re thinking of is Bashti Levant’?”

“It’s funny, Warren. Now—”

“You used to think I was funny.”

“Let me try to put this on track.” The FBI man cleared his throat. “Marin ever mention a Gurdjieff of
any
nationality? Ever mention reading about him?”

“No,” Charlotte said.

“Marin can’t read,” Warren said. “She plays a good game of tennis, she’s got a nice backhand, good strong hair and an IQ of about 103.”

Charlotte closed her eyes.

“Charlotte. Face facts. Credit where credit is due, you raised her. She’s boring.”

“I’m not sure this is a productive tack,” the FBI man said.

“Irving’s not sure this is a productive tack.” Warren rattled his ice. “Hear, hear, Charlotte. Listen to Irving.”

“Bruno,” the FBI man said. “The name is Bruno Furetta.”

“Don’t mind me, Irving, I’ve been drinking.”

“I happen to know you’re not all that drunk, Warren.” Charlotte did not open her eyes. “I happen to know you’re just amusing yourself. As usual.”

“You get the picture.”

Charlotte stood up. “And I want to tell you that I
am not—
”

“She’s overwrought,” Charlotte heard Warren say as she fled the room. “Let me give you some advice, Irving. Never mind the Armenians,
cherchez le tennis pro.
”

10

“B
OO HOO,” WARREN SAID WHEN HE CAME UPSTAIRS AN
hour later. “What happened to your sense of humor?”

Charlotte said nothing. Very deliberately she closed the book she had been trying to read since the day after the FBI first came to the house on California Street. The book was a detailed analysis of the three rose windows at Chartres, not illustrated, and every time Charlotte picked it up she began again on page one. She did not want Warren in the room. She did not want Warren to be in any room where she slept with Leonard, did not want him to see Leonard’s Seconal and her hand cream together on the table by the bed, did not want to see him examining the neckties that Leonard had that morning tried, rejected, and left on the bed. In fact she did not want him to see the bed at all.

“We don’t have anything in common any more.” Warren picked up a yellow silk tie and knotted it around his collar. “You and me. Leonard won’t miss this, he’s jaundiced enough. You ever noticed? He’s got bad color?”

“One thing we have in common is that we both agree that as far as having anything in common goes—” Charlotte broke off. She was watching a tube of KY jelly on the table by the bed. She did not see any way to move it into the drawer without attracting Warren’s attention. “As far as having anything in common goes we don’t have anything. In common.”

“You sound like you had a stroke. You had a stroke?”

“I happen to have a headache.”

“You mean I happen to give you a headache.”

“I mean I want you to leave this room.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll leave this room.” Warren sat on the bed, picked up the tube of KY jelly and put it in the drawer. “I don’t like this room.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“I only flew out here to see how you were.”

Still Charlotte said nothing.

“I don’t like your room, I don’t like your house, I don’t like your life.” Warren picked up a silver box from the table by the bed. The box held marijuana and played “Puff the Magic Dragon” when the lid was lifted. Warren lifted the lid and looked at Charlotte. “I bet the two of you talk about ‘turning on.’ See what I mean about your life?”

“Go away,” Charlotte whispered.

“Excuse me. I mean your ‘life-style.’ You don’t have a life, you have a ‘life-style.’ You still look good, though.”

“Go away.”

Warren looked at her for a while before he spoke.

“I want you to come to New Orleans with me.”

Charlotte tried to concentrate on meeting Leonard for lunch. Very soon she would walk out of this room and down the stairs. She would walk out of this house and she would take a taxi to the Tadich Grill, alone.

“I said I want you to come to New Orleans with me, are you deaf? Or just rude.”

She would go in the taxi alone to meet Leonard at the Tadich Grill.

“I want you to see Porter with me. Porter is dying. Porter wants to see you. Do this one thing for me.”

Charlotte tried to keep her mind on whether to order sand dabs or oysters at the Tadich Grill. Porter was a distant cousin of Warren’s. During the five years Charlotte and Warren were married Porter had invested $25,000 in an off-Broadway play that Warren never wrote, $30,000 in a political monthly that Warren never took beyond its dummy issue, and $2,653.84 in ransoming Warren’s and her furniture and Marin’s baby clothes from the Seven Santini Brothers Storage Company in Long Island City. Charlotte did not even like Porter.

Sand dabs.

No.

Oysters.

“If you won’t do it for me you’ll do it for Porter. Or you’re a worse human being than even I think.”

“I can’t just leave. Can I.”

“You’re not leaving, you’re paying a visit to Porter. Who is dying. Who loves you.”

“I can’t forgive Porter what he said to Leonard. At dinner out here. Two years ago. He behaved badly.” In fact Charlotte could not even recall what Porter had said to Leonard, but whenever she talked to Warren she fell helplessly into both his diction and his rosary of other people’s disloyalties. “I just can’t forgive Porter that at all.”

“Porter loves you.”

“Leonard had to ask him to leave the house.”

“What’s that got to do with you.”

There did not seem to Charlotte any ground on which this question could safely be met. She put it from her mind.

“I said what’s that got to do with you.”

Charlotte stood up, walked to the dressing room, and took a coat from the closet.

“Porter’s dying, Charlotte.”

Charlotte put the coat over her shoulders.

“Porter’s dying and you’re putting on your mink coat. You got Hadassah today? Mah-Jongg? You get the picture about your life?”

“It’s not mink. It’s sable. I have a lunch date.”

“Say that again.”

“I said:
I have a lunch date
. With Leonard.”

“Don’t let me keep you. Somebody who loves you is dying, your only child is lost, I’m asking you one last favor, and you’ve got a lunch date.” Warren opened the lid of the silver box again. The mechanism began to play. “You getting it? You getting the picture? You’re never going to see Marin again but never mind, you’ve got a lunch date? And maybe after your ‘lunch date’ you and your interesting husband can, what do you call it, ‘get stoned’?”

“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.

11

I
N 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.