A Book of Common Prayer (4 page)

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.

7

L
A 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.

“You know what you need here,” she said to Victor, lifting her fingers from his arm as if burned. “You know what Boca Grande needs.”

“We’re making great headway with the People-to-People program,” Tuck Bradley said. “Leaps and bounds.”

Neither Charlotte nor Victor looked at him.

“I know what you need here,” Charlotte said.

“What do I need here,” Victor said. His voice was almost hoarse. “Say it.”

She studied the square emerald on the hand that had touched Victor and slid it up and down. She seemed aware of nothing she was doing. She was reflexively seductive. I did not want to watch this happening. I did not want to think of Victor and this woman in the apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio and I did not want to see the black Mercedes limousine with the
BOCA GRANDE 2
plates parked outside the Caribe.

“Think of what made Acapulco,” she said finally. “Think of what turned Acapulco around overnight.”

Victor stared at the emerald as if transfixed.

Tuck Bradley snapped the toothpick in two.

I looked away.

“I’m not sure Mrs. Douglas realizes the problems,” Tuck Bradley said.

“Think,” Charlotte repeated.

“Say it,” Victor repeated.

“A film festival,” Charlotte Douglas said.

“You won’t want the details but it’s rather a tragic situation,” Ardis Bradley said. “Tuck could tell you better than I.”

“I won’t bore you with the details but it’s rather an interesting situation,” Tuck Bradley said. “Don’t ask her about her daughter.”

I could not have asked Charlotte Douglas about her daughter in any case because Charlotte Douglas had already left, with Victor. I went as planned to Victor’s and ate with Bianca, alone. The black Mercedes limousine with the
BOCA GRANDE 2
plates was seen first at the Residencia Vista del Palacio and later at the Caribe. Bianca did not then and docs not now go out, nor does she express interest in her husband’s arrivals and departures. That is another example of the genteel behavior Bianca was taught at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans.

The next afternoon when I saw Charlotte Douglas arguing with the pharmacist in the big drugstore on the Avenida Centrale she did not look at me. She looked disheveled and unwell, her eyes puffy beneath dark glasses, her bright hair unkempt and only partly covered by a bandana.

“You tell me chloromycetin.” The pharmacist slapped the counter with his palm. “I give you chloromycetin.”

“This is tincture of opium.”

“Different type chloromycetin.”

“I can smell it, it’s opium.”

“Same thing.
Para la disentería.
”

“But they’re not the same thing at all.” Even in her distress she seemed determined to instruct him on this point. “They’re both
para la disentería
, but they’re quite different. Chloromycetin is a—”

“I give you chloromycetin.”

“Forget the whole thing,” she said, her voice low and her eyes averted from where I stood.

Later that afternoon I sent a maid to the Caribe with twenty chloromycetin and a note asking Charlotte Douglas to have dinner when she was recovered.

8

“C
HARLOTTE DOUGLAS IS ILL
,”
I SAID AFTER CHRISTMAS
lunch in the courtyard at Victor and Bianca’s.

No one had spoken for twenty minutes. I had timed it. I had counted the minutes while I watched two mating flies try to extricate themselves from a melting chocolate shaving on the untouched Bûche de Noël. The children had already been trundled off quarreling to distribute nut cups to veterans, Gerardo had already made his filial call from St. Moritz, Elena had already been photographed in her Red Cross uniform and had changed back into magenta crepe de chine pajamas. Isabel had drunk enough champagne to begin crying softly. Antonio had grown irritable enough with Isabel’s mournful hiccups to borrow a pistol from the guard at the gate and take aim at a lizard in the creche behind Bianca’s fountain. Antonio was always handling guns, or smashing plates. As a gesture toward the spirit of Christmas he had refrained from smashing any plates at lunch, but the effort seemed to have exhausted his capacity for congeniality. Had Antonio been born in other circumstances he would have been put away early as a sociopath.

Bianca remained oblivious.

Bianca remained immersed in the floor plan for an apartment she wanted Victor to take for her in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. Bianca had never been apprised of the fact that Victor already had an apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. For five of these twenty minutes it had seemed to me up in the air whether Antonio was about to shoot up Bianca’s creche or tell Bianca about the Residencia Vista del Palacio.

“I said
la norteamericana
is sick.”

“Send her to Dr. Schiff,” Antonio muttered. Dr. Schiff was Isabel’s doctor in Arizona. “Let the great healer tell
la norteamericana
who’s making her sick.”

Victor only gazed at the sky. I did not know whether Victor had seen Charlotte Douglas since the night he took her from the Embassy to the Residencia but I did know that a Ministry courier had delivered twenty-four white roses to the Caribe on Christmas Eve.

“So is Jackie Onassis sick,” Elena said. Elena was leafing fretfully through a back issue of
Paris-Match
. “Or she was in September.”

“So am I sick,” Isabel said. “I need complete quiet.”

“I should think that’s what you have,” Elena said.

“Not like Arizona,” Isabel said. “I should have stayed through December, Dr. Schiff begged me. The air. The solitude. The long walks, the simple meals. Yoghurt at sunset. You can’t imagine the sunsets.”

“Sounds very lively,” Elena said without looking up. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jackie Onassis.”

“If that’s the
norteamericana
Grace is talking about I think she had every right to marry the Greek,” Bianca said. “Not that I would ever care to live in Athens. I wonder about the view from the Residencia.”

“Grace was talking about a different
norteamericana
, Bianca.” Victor leaned back and clipped a cigar. “Of no interest to you. Or Grace.”

“This
norteamericana
is of interest only to Victor.” Antonio seemed to be having trouble drawing a bead on the lizard. “But she could tell you about the view from the Residencia. She’s an expert on the view from the Residencia. Victor should introduce you to her.”

“I don’t meet strangers,” Bianca said. “As you know. I take no interest. Look here, the plan for the eleventh floor. If we lived up that high we’d have clear air. No fevers.”

“Almost like Arizona,” Elena said. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jacqueline de Ribes.”

“Arizona,” Isabel said. “I wonder what Dr. Schiff is doing today.”