A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  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

  “CHARLOTTE 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.”

  Antonio fired twice at the lizard.

  The lizard darted away.

  Two porcelain wise men shattered.

  “Eating yoghurt in the sunset I presume,” Elena said.

  “Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns,” Isabel said.

  “What do you mean exactly, Isabel, ‘Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns’?” Antonio thrust the pistol into Isabel’s line of sight. “Does Dr. Schiff not believe in the ‘existence’ of guns? Look at it. Touch it. It’s there. What does Dr. Schiff mean exactly?”

  Isabel closed her eyes.

  Elena closed the copy of Paris-Match.

  Bianca began to gather up the fragments of porcelain.

  Victor looked at me and spoke very deliberately. “There’s no longer any need for you to see the norteamericana, Grace. An extremely silly woman.”

  “But then so is your manicurist,” Elena murmured.

  “If I could live on the eleventh floor I think I’d take an interest again,” Bianca said.

  “Quite frankly it’s better when you don’t,” Isabel said, abruptly and unsettlingly lucid, and in the silence that followed she stood up and put her arms around Bianca.

  For a moment two of my three sisters-in-law stood there in the courtyard with the guard at the gate on Christmas afternoon and buried their faces in each other’s shoulders and stroked each other’s hair. Only their silence suggested their tears. They were little sisters crying.

  Elena rubbed at a drop of champagne on her magenta crepe de chine pajamas.

  Antonio drummed his nails on the table.

  “It might be better if you left,” Victor said to Antonio.

  “Maybe I’ll go get your norteamericana to sit on my face,” Antonio said to Victor.

  Victor smoked his cigar and looked at me. “Feliz Navidad,” he said after a while.

  Here is what Charlotte Douglas was said by Elena to have done with the twenty-four white roses Victor sent her on Christmas Eve: left them untouched in their box and laid the box in the hallway for the night maid.

  9

  “IT’S DEPRESSING TO BE SICK IN A HOTEL.”

  “I don’t mind it.” She said it as a child might, and she said nothing more.

  “At Christmas.”

  “I didn’t mind.”

  I tried again. “You’re at the mercy of the maids.”

  “They’re very nice here.”

  I watched Charlotte Douglas unwrap a cracker and fold the cellophane into a neat packet. She had insisted that we meet not at my house but at the Capilla del Mar, that I be her guest.

  “Actually I’m never depressed.” The act of saying this seemed to convince her that it was so, and she picked up the wine list in a show of resolute conviviality. “Actually I don’t believe in being depressed. It’s hard to keep wine in this climate, isn’t it? Wine and crackers?”

  Through two courses of that difficult dinner she never mentioned Victor.

  She guided every topic to its most general application.

  She talked as if she had no specific history of her own.

  No Leonard.

  No Warren.

  As dessert was served she mentioned Marin for the first
time: she said that she preferred the Capilla del Mar to the Jockey Club because the colored lights strung outside the Capilla del Mar reminded her of the Tivoli Gardens, where she had once flown with Marin for the weekend. Her face came alive with pleasure as she described this adult’s dream of a weekend a child might like, described the puppet shows, the watermills, the picnics with the child. They had made dinners of salami and petits fours. They had scarcely slept. They had wandered beneath the colored lights until Marin’s heels blistered, and then they had taken off their shoes and wandered barefoot.

  “And when we got back to the hotel we ordered cocoa from room service.” Charlotte Douglas leaned across the table. “And I let Marin place the order and tip the waiter and I taught her how to wash out her underwear at night.”

  I asked if her husband had gone to Copenhagen on business, but she said no. Her husband had not gone to Copenhagen at all. She had just woken up one morning in the house on California Street and decided to fly Marin to Copenhagen. “To see Tivoli. I mean before she was too old to like it.”

  Her eyes were fixed on the colored lights strung over our table on the porch at the Capilla del Mar. The lights at the Capilla del Mar were not Christmas lights but souvenirs of the season I married Edgar in São Paulo, the season a deranged Haitian dentist convinced the Minister of Health to string the entire city of Boca Grande with a web of colored lights as a specific against typhoid. The red and blue strings mostly shorted out in the first rain, leaving the city in the evening bathed in a necrotic yellow. So it was the night Edgar and I first arrived in Boca Grande from São Paulo. Edgar took me directly to Millonario and left me there until the epidemic waned. When I next saw the city many people had died and the rest seemed immune and the only lights left were at the Capilla del Mar.

  I mentioned this to Charlotte.

  “That’s very interesting,” Charlotte said politely, her eyes still on the lights. She had been smoking a cigarette as I talked and there was no ashtray and now, instead of just tossing the cigarette over the porch railing, she flicked off the lighted head with her fingernail, stripped the paper with the same fingernail and crumbled the tobacco neatly into the loam of a potted plant. I had seen men do this often and I had seen women do it in the field but I had never before seen a woman in a beige silk St. Laurent dress do it in a restaurant which passed for fashionable, and the casual dispatch with which Charlotte Douglas did it seemed at distinct odds with her rather demented account of the trip to Copenhagen. “By the way,” she said then. “Marin and I are inseparable.”