by Joan Didion
“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
IN 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 miserab
le unfortunate life.
Leaving him.
That was it.
She tried to put that other telephone call back out of her mind. It must have been after she left him, the other telephone call, because she had never exactly told him that she was leaving him. She had told him that she was going to her mother’s funeral. This was true but not the whole truth. Her mother had just died and she was going to have some money to take care of herself and Marin and she did not want to give the money to Warren and she took Marin and flew out of Idlewild and never went back.
“You hear me, Charlotte?”
She had cried all the way to San Francisco and Marin had been asleep on her lap and she remembered the landing and Marin’s pale hair damp and sticky with sleep and tears.
“Charlotte? They ever mention sins of omission in those wonderful Okie schools you went to?”
For the rest of that week when the telephone rang between one and four A.M. Charlotte would hang up as soon as she heard Warren’s voice. A few days later a copy of Time arrived with a photograph that showed Charlotte leaving the house on California Street with her hands over her face, and Charlotte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that the description of her as a “reclusive socialite” was a contradiction in terms. Leonard returned from Chicago and asked Charlotte not to mail the letter.
“I just remembered I never told Warren I was leaving him,” Charlotte said to Leonard.
“He’s had fifteen years, I guess he’s figured it out,” Leonard said to Charlotte.
“I mean I just kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and said I’d be back in a week and I knew I wouldn’t be.”
“I know it.”
“How could you know it.”
“Because that’s how you’ll leave me.”
“Fourteen years,” Charlotte said. “Not fifteen. Fourteen.”
Warren returned from Los Angeles and Leonard asked him to dinner but Warren did not arrive until eleven-thirty, accompanied by a 268-pound widow from Fort Worth he had met at Golden Gate Fields, the jockey who had that day ridden the woman’s three-year-old filly to defeat, and a shy girl with long legs who was introduced to Leonard by Warren as the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA. Warren had met the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel and had driven her Porsche north by way of Big Sur. She drank large quantities of apple juice and told Leonard that Marin could be located by sensitive programming of a Honeywell 782 solid-state computer. Charlotte had gone to bed with the book about the rose windows at Chartres and did not come downstairs. Charlotte had once taken Marin to see the glass at Chartres and Marin had cried because it was too beautiful.
Or so Charlotte said once.
Another time she told me that she herself had cried.
Still another time she told me that a British television crew had been filming inside the cathedral and she and Marin had been unable to see the glass at all because of the television lights.
I am now incapable of thinking about the glass at Chartres without seeing through every window the lights at the Tivoli Gardens.
12
“I’ve never been afraid of the dark.”
“Actually I’m never depressed. Actually I don’t believe in being depressed.”
“By the way. Marin and I are inseparable.”
Accept those as statements of how Charlotte wished it had been.
Charlotte also told me once that she and Warren Bogart were “inseparable.”
Charlotte also told me once that she and Leonard Douglas were “inseparable.”
Charlotte even told me once that she and her brother Dickie were “inseparable,” and adduced as evidence the fact that he had once given her a Christmas present no one else would have thought to give her: twenty-eight acres in southern Nevada.
Of course it had not been exactly that way at all.
Of course there had been the usual days and weeks and even months when Charlotte had been separated from everyone she knew by a grayness so dense that the brightness of even her own child in the house was galling, insupportable, a reproach to be avoided at breakfast and on the stairs. During such periods Charlotte endured the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal. During such periods Charlotte would rehearse cheerful dialogues she might need to have with Marin. For days at a time her answers to Marin’s questions would therefore strike the child as weird and unsettling, cheerful but not quite responsive. “Do you think I’ll get braces in fourth grade,” Marin would ask. “You’re going to love fourth grade,” Charlotte would answer. During such periods Charlotte suffered the usual dread when forced to visit Marin’s school and hear the doomed children celebrate all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
She would shut her ears.
She would watch Marin numbly, from the usual great distance.
She would hang on by the usual routines, fill in whole days by the usual numbers.
The problem was that Charlotte did not know that any of this was “usual.”
Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the “separateness.”
And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.
13
CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she went with Pete Wright to open the safe-deposit box.
“I’m not sure your daughter appreciates the legal bind she’s put you in, Char.”
Pete Wright was examining some stock certificates. Charlotte had known Pete Wright longer than she had known Leonard, he had roomed at Stanford with Dickie and he had handled her divorce from Warren and as Leonard’s junior partner he had paid a Christmas call every year with a suitable present for Marin, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street he had kept referring to Marin as “your daughter.” Charlotte did not want to hear about the legal bind she was in and she did not want Pete Wright to call her Char. Only Dickie called her Char. There was something else about Pete Wright that bothered her but she did not want to think about that either.
“You’re in a bit of a pickle here, Char.”
“That’s exactly what you said when I left Warren. And you took this enormous legal problem to Leonard and Leonard said I wasn’t.”
Charlotte took a gold pin of her grandmother’s from the safe-deposit box.
Charlotte imagined the gold pin attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
Pete Wright had come to New York once when she was married to Warren.
“And I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what.”
“I wasn’t in a bit of a pickle.”
“I have nothing but respect for Leonard as a lawyer, Charlotte, but as you know, Leonard leaves the estate work to me.” Pete Wright took a deep breath. “Now. What we have here are stock certificates worth X dollars a quarter in dividends—”
“Eight-hundred and seven. $807 a quarter. I looked it up when you called me.”
“What I’m saying, Charlotte, is that these particular certificates are in your and your daughter’s names as joint tenants. Her signature—”
“I can forge it, can’t I.”
“Not legally, no.”
“All right. I won’t cash the checks. It’s $807 a quarter, it’s nothing.”
The gold pin had a broken clasp. As Charlotte held the pin in her fingers she had an abrupt physical sense of eating chicken à la king and overdone biscuits at her grandmother’s house in Hollister.
Pete Wright.
Pete Wright had been in New York once and had taken her to the Palm for dinner.
“What may seem ‘nothing’ to you, Charlotte—”
“I suppose you’re about to tell me that $807 a quarter is the a
verage annual income for a grape picker. Is that what you’re about to tell me?”
“I’m about to overlook your hostility.”
“Leonard leaves the estate work to you, you leave the grape pickers to Leonard. Is that fair?”
“We used to be friends, Charlotte, and I like to think—”
She could taste the soft bits of pimento in the chicken à la king.
She could smell the biscuits burning in the oven.
She could also smell citronella, and calamine lotion, and the sweetened milky emulsion in prescription bottles that contained aureomycin. She could taste the acrid goat cheese her father used to get from the man who ran his cattle on the ranch. Her father had died. She could feel crushed and browning in her hand the camellias her mother used to braid into her hair for birthday parties. Her mother had died. She had erased burned biscuits and citronella when Warren came to her door in Berkeley, and she seemed to have been busy since, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street she was not so busy.
She had erased some other things too.
She had been too busy.
Charlotte closed her hand around the pin with the broken clasp and tried not to think how it could be attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
She had gotten drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.
“I gather by your silence you think Warren might oppose it.”
“Oppose what,” Charlotte said.
“Oppose declaring your daughter legally dead.”
Charlotte looked at Pete Wright.
“It’s a legality. It doesn’t mean anything, but it would enable you to cash these particular dividend checks. Or sell this particular stock. Or whatever.”
Charlotte picked up the certificates.
“As well as clarify the question of the ranch. Which I feel impelled to remind you is tied up in trust for her. A loose trust, granted, but—”
Charlotte tore the certificates in half.
Pete Wright gazed at the wall behind Charlotte and made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Warren’s quite disturbed, I don’t know if you realize that. He comes by the house, he drinks too much, he jumps all over Clarice about her hatha yoga class, he acts like—”