A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  “I know why you’re crying,” the actress said after a while.

  Morocco would lend its army. Spain would not. Two-eight above the line.

  “And I’m sorry, but that’s exactly the kind of personal crap I never saw in Hanoi.”

  The flash bulb blazed.

  Charlotte smiled.

  The flash bulb dropped on the table.

  “Did you know I spent a night once with Pete Wright,” Charlotte said to Leonard as he led her from the table. “Did you know I did that and forgot it.”

  “You didn’t forget it at all, Leonard said. “You told me the first night I met you.”

  “I am so tired. I am so tired of remembering things. Leonard. Tell me it’s because I’m pregnant.”

  “I wish I could,” Leonard said.

  Leonard took Charlotte back to the Beverly Wilshire but she continued crying so Leonard, because he was due in Miami the next day to assist in the sale of four French Mirages from one Caribbean independency to another, called the record executive and borrowed a company Lear to fly Charlotte home. $216,000 was raised that night to benefit some one of Leonard’s clients, Charlotte was unsure which until she saw the pictures in Vogue. She left the dress made entirely of colored ribbons on the floor of the suite at the Beverly Wilshire. I look at those pictures now and I see only Charlotte’s smile.

  18

  “IT’S CHARLOTTE,” SHE SAID TO HER BROTHER’S WIFE from a pay phone on the highway outside Hollister. “I wondered if you and Dickie were going to be home.”

  “Richard and I play tennis every Saturday.” There was a pause. “You want to use the pool, come on by, of course the heater’s off.”

  “I thought I might see the children.”

  “They’re at the gym.”

  There was a silence.

  “Why exactly would I drive to Hollister to use your pool, Linda? I mean I get off a plane from Los Angeles and I sit in the airport all night and I rent a car and I’m out here on the highway and it’s raining?”

  Linda said nothing.

  “Listen,” Charlotte said finally. “Linda. Please ask me to dinner.”

  Before and during dinner Charlotte’s brother drank steadily and did not mention Marin or Leonard or Warren. Linda sat at the table but refused to eat. She said that she had eaten macaroni and cheese with the children, who seemed to have come home from and returned to the gym before Charlotte’s arrival.

  “They’re just wonderful normal kids,” Linda said after dinner. “Aren’t they, Richard. No matter what Warren says.”

  “What’s Warren got to do with it,” Charlotte said.

  “How would I know whether they’re wonderful normal kids.” Dickie opened another bottle of bourbon. “Maybe Warren’s right, maybe they’re boring, how would I know. They’re always at the goddamn gym.”

  “Most people would consider that a definite plus. I believe your sister needs an ashtray.”

  “What’s Warren got to do with it,” Charlotte repeated.

  “Or eating goddamn Kraft Dinners with you at four o’clock.”

  “Richard and I don’t smoke,” Linda said.

  “We don’t fuck either,” Dickie said.

  Charlotte put out her cigarette in an empty nut dish.

  “Warren paid us a little visit,” Linda said. “Lasting eleven hours and a quart and a half of gin.”

  “Charlotte’s not interested in that, Linda.”

  “Tanqueray gin.”

  “Linda. We enjoyed seeing him, Char.”

  “He had this very interesting friend with him. He’d just run into this friend, they hadn’t seen each other since the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Where—”

  “I’m warning you, Linda.”

  “Where this friend of Warren’s tended bar. Which is what this friend still does, except at the Pacific Union Club.”

  “I warned you, Linda. If Charlotte’s husband wants to bring a Negro to this house, this house is open. With bells on. All systems go.”

  “Charlotte’s not married to Warren any more, Richard, you don’t have to pretend you like him.”

  “Goddamnit Linda, he’s better than the Jew, isn’t he?”

  Linda began plumping pillows.

  Dickie avoided Charlotte’s eyes.

  “Actually Leonard’s not a Jew,” Charlotte said. “Actually it just amuses Warren to say that Leonard’s a Jew. A private joke. If you follow.”

  “Warren’s sense of humor is just a little bit twisted,” Linda said. “If you ask me.”

  “I didn’t mean that about Leonard, Char. Hey. Char. I think Leonard is—”

  “Not that anybody ever does ask me,” Linda said.

  “—A very fine lawyer,” Dickie said.

  “Listen,” Charlotte said finally. Linda was still plumping pillows with pointed energy. “Dickie. I’ve been remembering some things since Marin left.”

  “That’s no good for you, Char, remembering. Remembering is shit. Forget her.”

  “I’m not talking about Marin, I’m talking about—”

  “Forget goddamn Marin. Forget goddamn Warren. You did your best. Forget the other one too.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk about Marin, Charlotte.” Linda turned off a lamp. “He wants to believe your life is just pluperfect.”

  “You turn off another plu-fucking-perfect light, Linda, I’m walking out of here with Charlotte and don’t wait up.”

  “Lucky Charlotte.”

  “I’m not talking about Marin,” Charlotte said. “I’m talking about when we lived on the ranch.”

  “Don’t sell the ranch, Char.”

  “I’m not. I’m talking about—do you remember how Nana would always burn the biscuits?”

  “The ranch is the only home you’ve got, Char.”

  “Oh fine,” Linda said. “Back to Tara. The Havemeyers are off to the races now. If you’re looking for your car keys they’re on the coffee table. Next to the ring from Massa Richard’s glass.”

  “Remember the biscuits, Dickie? Halfway through dinner we’d smell them burning?”

  “The only thing I remember your famous grandmother burning is every bed jacket I ever took her in the nursing home.” Linda handed Charlotte her car keys. “Smoking in bed. Little holes in every one.”

  “You can’t have forgotten the biscuits, Dickie.”

  “No good remembering, Char.”

  “Of course your sister wasn’t here during that ordeal.”

  “Dickie,” Charlotte said. “We used to laugh about it.”

  “You and me, Char.” Dickie touched Charlotte’s hair uncertainly and turned away. “Forget goddamn Marin. I say give her a Kraft Dinner and I say the hell with her.”

  Charlotte stayed that night in a motel off 101.

  She tried to think about the biscuits but they kept fading out. She tried to think about the gold pin with the broken clasp but she kept seeing it on the bomb.

  Her grandmother was dead and Marin was gone.

  She had never gone shopping with her mother, she had never seen her father on Demerol, the ranch had eight telephones on three lines and Marin was gone.

  It was Pete Wright who had told her that her father needed Demerol before he died.

  The night she got drunk at the Palm.

  She tried to think about Pete Wright in her bed that night but could not. She tried to think about Leonard in the bed of the house on California Street but she could see that bed only as it had been the day she picked up the scissors against Warren. She could see Warren sitting on that bed and she could also see Warren standing in front of her bed in New York the Easter morning after she got drunk at the Palm.

  “Look at the slut on Easter morning.”

  She had screamed.

  Marin had screamed.

  She had picked up Marin and when Warren hit her again his hand glanced off Marin’s temple.

  She had picked up the kitchen knife.

  She had thrown up.

  She and Warren had
taken Marin to the Carlyle and she had not had enough money to pay the bill. The beautiful principessa, the headwaiter had crooned over Marin. The beautiful principessa, the beautiful family. King of Crazy, Queen of Wrong. The headwaiter did not know that. The headwaiter would see to it that the bill was mailed. Charlotte lay on the motel bed and she thought about the beautiful principessa and about the beautiful family and about all the bills that had been mailed and never paid. She thought about all the unpaid bills and she thought about all the days and nights when she had promised Warren she would never leave.

  There was another unpaid bill.

  “You can’t drink,” Warren had said that Easter morning and held her shoulders as she threw up. “You can’t drink at all, you never could.” And then he washed her face and he took her to the Carlyle and she did not have enough money to pay the bill. Look at the slut on Easter morning. Marin had a straw hat one Easter, and a flowered lawn dress. Warren gave her his coat.

  19

  WHEN WARREN CAME THAT DAY TO THE DOOR OF THE house on California Street Charlotte did not answer.

  When Warren telephoned Charlotte hung up.

  When Warren stood on the sidewalk outside the house on California Street at two A.M. and threw stones at the windows Charlotte closed the shutters.

  When Warren left the note reading “THIS IS THE WORST BEHAVIOR YET” in the mailbox of the house on California Street Charlotte tore the note in half and avoided those rooms which fronted on the street.

  When the two FBI men came to tell Charlotte that the boy with the harelip scar had been apprehended on an unrelated charge in Nogales, Arizona, and had hanged himself in his cell Charlotte left the room without speaking. That was on the second day of the sixth week after the release of Marin’s tape.

  On the morning of the third day of the sixth week after the release of Marin’s tape Dickie called from Hollister to say that Warren was at the ranch.

  “Acting crazy. Irrational. He told Linda that he talked to Leonard in Miami and Leonard said he could stay.”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  “He yelled at Linda.”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  “Obscenities.”

  Charlotte replaced the receiver and lay down on Marin’s bed.

  “You’re aware Mark Schrader killed himself in Mexico,” the reporter said on the telephone.

  “Arizona,” Charlotte said. She was still lying on Marin’s bed. The sound of the man’s voice hurt her ear and she held the receiver several inches away.

  “About Mark and Marin—”

  “Arizona. Not Mexico. He killed himself in Nogales, Arizona.”

  “Absolutely. My slip. Would you say that Marin was romantically involved with Mark?”

  “Romantically involved,” Charlotte repeated.

  “Involved in a romantic way, yes.”

  The harelip’s the fresh meat they’ll throw on the trail, they can’t afford him, Marin’s not stupid.

  I wouldn’t rely on that.

  “You see you’re thinking of Nogales, Sonora,” Charlotte said.

  “Absolutely,” the reporter said. “Very good. About Mark and—”

  “You don’t have to congratulate me. For knowing the difference between Arizona and Mexico.”

  “About Marin and—”

  This is the worst behavior yet.

  “Fuck Marin,” Charlotte said.

  “Because he was married to you,” Leonard said when she called him in Miami. “That’s why I told him he could stay at your fucking ranch. Because you kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and told him you’d be back in a week. Because he was Marin’s father. And because I don’t happen to believe it’s Porter who is dying.”

  “Is Marin’s father, Is.”

  “You didn’t hear what I said. I said I don’t happen to believe he’s talking about anybody but himself.”

  There was a silence.

  “I heard what you said,” Charlotte said finally. “Tell me—”

  “Tell you what.”

  “Tell me—”

  “Tell you if you’re not there when I get back I’ll shoot myself?”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  “I won’t. That’s his game, not mine. I want you. I don’t need you.”

  “If you think he’s dying he’s not,” Charlotte said after a while. “If you’re trying to say you think he’s dying you’re wrong.”

  Leonard said nothing.

  “Something else you were wrong about,” Charlotte said. “You said I’d leave you the same way I left him. I’m not. I’m leaving you. I’m telling you.”

  The rain was light and the dark came early and the traffic moved. By the time she arrived at the turn-off to the Hollister ranch she was just ten months short of the Boca Grande airport. El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana. My brother-in-law. Deceased.

  THREE

  1

  SHE HAD BEEN GOING TO ONE AIRPORT OR ANOTHER FOR four months, one could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas’s passport had been stamped would have looked alike. Sometimes the sign on the tower would say “Bienvenidos” and sometimes the sign on the tower would say “Bienvenue,” some places were wet and hot and others dry and hot, but at each of those airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the runway would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F–227’s and the water would need boiling.

  I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not.

  I knew about airports.

  People who go to the airport first invent some business to conduct there, a ticket to be adjusted, a query about cargo rates, a newspaper unavailable elsewhere. Then they convince themselves that the airport is cooler than the hotel, or has superior chicken salad. Then one day they see a plane, “their” plane, one plane of many but somehow marked, a mirage on the tarmac.

  They pay the lunch check.

  They buy the ticket, they glance at the clock above the counter.

  Quite as if they were ordinary travelers.

  Quite as if they traveled on ordinary timetables.

  I supposed that one day Charlotte Douglas would be sitting in the Boca Grande airport and would see her plane and get on it, just as she had clearly gotten on her plane from New Orleans to Mérida and Mérida to Antigua and Antigua to Guadeloupe and Guadeloupe to Boca Grande, supposed that she would maintain that blind course south, but she never did.

  2

  LOOK AT THE VISAS. TRACE BACK THE COURSE.

  Before Boca Grande she had been on Guadeloupe.

  A few tourists had been killed by terrorists on Guadeloupe that year and until the Air France crash Charlotte was the only guest at the hotel, which had been built just before the trouble and was very large with open terraces where the rain splashed. Her clothes mildewed. The untouched butter in the little crocks went rancid by noon and by dinner was dusted with the fine volcanic ash still falling from an eruption two years before. One of the killings had taken place on the dining terrace of the hotel, and there was a stubborn bloodstain on the concrete at which a busboy scrubbed desultorily every afternoon.

  After the Paris–Lima flight hit the volcano there was another woman at the hotel, the wife of the Air France investigator, but she and Charlotte did not speak. The woman was very small and tanned and she played backgammon all day with the beach boys, cheating and winning. Charlotte rented a Peugeot to drive up the volcano but at the first turn she came upon a large black plastic tarpaulin on which lay fragments of metal and one teddy bear. As she drove back to the hotel it occurred to Charlotte that Marin could have been on that plane under a different name.

  Marin could also have been on the Delta flight that crashed at Dulles.

  Marin could have been on the Alitalia that exploded over the North Atlantic.

  Marin was loose in the world and could leave it any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing.

  Befor
e Guadeloupe Charlotte had been on Antigua.

  Winds blew on Antigua and she rarely left the hotel. She was uncertain where the hotel even was, except that it was a long way from the airport: she recalled taxi rides through the cane and a small one-story hotel on the water. Her skin burned in the wind and in the odd glare off the opaque clouded sea and after the first week she did not go outside. In the evenings Charlotte and the other off-season guests, two Lesbians from Toronto and for a while a man and a woman, Seventh-Day Adventists from Newport Beach, California, were served conch stew at a single table by the swimming pool. Perhaps because the man and the woman from Newport Beach were not married to each other or perhaps because as Seventh-Day Adventists they did not approve of drinking they would appear each night only when the plates were set on the table and vanish directly after the Key Lime pie. For the rest of the evening Charlotte would sit by the pool and look at the illustrated books the manager pressed on her, cheaply bound books with mildewed pages and titles like The Funeral of King George VI and The Marriage of Princess Margaret, and the Lesbians would get drunk on rum punches and dance to the Mabel Mercer records they had brought from Toronto. They had made a new life in Toronto and they were thinking about making another new life on Antigua but they were both Americans and they had both gone to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut.

  “Not together,” the younger one said. “Not at the same time we didn’t.”

  “We were both at Farmington,” the older one said.

  “At different times.” The younger one took Charlotte’s hand and studied it. “You have a beautiful life-line.”

  The older one wept.

  Mabel Mercer sang “My Shining Hour.”

  Charlotte put down The Marriage of Princess Margaret and stared at the sea. She had the sense that she could swim from where she was to somewhere else, but she had no idea what lay out there, or in which direction she was staring. In any case she could not swim at night because she could not see the bottom. She remembered swimming at night with Marin on the reef off Waikiki and screaming when Marin’s leg brushed hers.