A Book of Common Prayer

by Joan Didion

  Before Antigua Charlotte had been in Mérida.

  Mérida was where she had taken the baby to die of complications, her baby, Leonard’s baby, the baby she was carrying when she left California with Warren, the baby born prematurely, hydrocephalic, and devoid of viable liver function in the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. The doctors had said the baby would die in the hospital but it did not. It took a long time to die even in Mérida. She had taken the baby to Mérida because she thought it would die faster there but it did not. Toward the beginning of the two weeks she waited for the baby to die she moistened its lips with tap water and told it about the places they would see together.

  They would of course see the Great Banyan at Calcutta.

  They would see the stone slabs in the conservatory at Bangalore.

  They would see the monkeys in the primeval garden at Singapore, they would see the Royal Palm Avenue at Peradeniya, due to reach its best appearance in the year 2050.

  They would not see the cacti at San Marino. Marin had not minded the cacti at San Marino but Charlotte had. San Marino had given Charlotte bad dreams. Cacti. Fungi. Fat dry spikes. San Marino would give the baby bad dreams too.

  “No San Marino,” Charlotte promised the baby. “Quite frankly you wouldn’t like it.”

  After a few days Charlotte exhausted her memory of botanical gardens around the world and began planning one for Mérida. She “named” everything around her. She asked the botanical names of all the plants outside the hotel in Mérida and listed them by genera and subgenera, made notations about color variation in seasonal blossoms, and engaged the manager of the hotel in an astonishing discussion of why he did not dedicate the parking lot to the cultivation of native flora; by the middle of the second week she had progressed from flora to fauna and was cataloguing the birds, the lizards, the insects that bred in the hotel plumbing and crawled from every drain in spite of daily flushings with Ortho-Muerte.

  Typhoid was epidemic in the Yucatán that year but still the baby did not die.

  By the end of the second week Charlotte was cataloguing the bacteria, the parasites, the sources of fever and intestinal infection: poinciana and poinsettia gave way to salmonella, another tropical flowering. The night in Mérida when the diarrhea finally came Charlotte held the small warm dehydrating creature in her arms all night. Toward midnight she weakened, tried to charter a plane to take her baby back to New Orleans or even to Miami, but no one answered the telephone at the airport, and when Charlotte went out there by taxi with the baby in her arms she found only the controller playing cards with a couple of Yucatair mechanics and they said there were no charters in Mérida that night.

  3

  LEONARD HAD NOT WANTED HER TO SEE THE BABY BUT she had.

  Leonard had wanted her to leave the baby to die in the Ochsner Clinic but she would not.

  There had been words about it.

  There had been words between Leonard and Warren about it in the room at the Ochsner Clinic but she could barely remember the words.

  There had been words in the room at the Ochsner Clinic and there had also been peonies. She could remember the peonies very clearly and she could remember the words only barely and mainly she remembered that she had not wanted the baby to die without her.

  The baby did not die at the Mérida airport but an hour later, in the parking lot of the Coca-Cola bottling plant on the road back into town. The baby had gone into convulsions and projectile vomiting in the taxi and Charlotte had made the driver stop in the parking lot. She walked with the baby on the dark asphalt. She sang to the baby out on the edge of the asphalt where the rushes grew and a few trailers were parked. By the time the baby died the taxi had left but it was only a mile or two to the Centro Médico de Yucatán and Charlotte walked there with the baby in her arms, trusting at last, its vomit spent. The doctor did not speak English but marked the death certificate in English: death by complications.

  “Complications of what,” Charlotte said.

  “Complications of dying,” the doctor said. “Her name in Christ?”

  The Louisiana birth certificate said Douglas, Baby Girl. The Mexican tourist card said Douglas, Infanta. Leonard said it. Charlotte said baby.

  “Charlotte,” Charlotte said. “Her name is Charlotte.”

  “Carlota,” the doctor said, and made the sign of the Cross before he signed the certificate.

  Carlota Douglas was buried in a short coffin which the doctor’s brother-in-law would not close until Charlotte had inspected his work. He was very proud of the work he had done on the baby. He was very grateful to have the job and he wanted Charlotte to be pleased. He had wrapped the baby in a lavender nylon shawl and put a bow in her hair and tiny red shoes on her feet. Charlotte had looked once and then away. She had paid the doctor and his brother-in-law in American ten-dollar bills. Before she left Mérida she called Leonard in San Francisco and told him that the baby was dead.

  “I’ll come get you if you want,” Leonard had said.

  “Whatever you want,” Charlotte had said.

  “You have to say.”

  “They put shoes on her feet. Red shoes.”

  “It’s over. Forget it. You never should have seen it. You never should have.”

  “Warren’s not responsible. For my coming down here. If that’s what you think.”

  “No,” Leonard had said. “That’s not what I think.”

  “I think I better call you back later,” Charlotte had said, but she had not called Leonard back later.

  She had not called Leonard back later and she had not called Warren at all.

  In the evening before the plane left for Antigua she had gone back to the cemetery and tried to find the baby’s grave but she could not. It was not a large cemetery but there seemed a large number of small fresh unmarked graves. She left the bougainvillea she had torn from the wall of the hotel on one of them.

  FOUR

  1

  FEVERS RELAPSE HERE.

  Bacteria proliferate.

  Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile.

  Twice a year the sun is exactly vertical, and nothing casts a shadow.

  The bite of one fly deposits an egg which in its pupal stage causes human flesh to suppurate.

  The bite of another deposits a larval worm which three years later surfaces on and roams the human eyeball.

  Everything here changes and nothing appears to. There is no perceptible wheeling of the stars in their courses, no seasonal wane in the length of the days or the temperature of air or earth or water, only the amniotic stillness in which transformations are constant. As elsewhere, certain phases in these transformations are called by certain names (“Olds-mobile,” say, and “rust”), but the emotional field of such names tends to weaken as one leaves the temperate zones. At the equator the names are noticeably arbitrary. A banana palm is no more or less “alive” than its rot.

  Is it.

  I tried to tell Charlotte this but once again Charlotte did not quite see my point.

  Charlotte did not take the equatorial view.

  Of anything that had happened.

  Charlotte did not even remember much of what had happened during the six months between leaving California with Warren and taking the baby to Mérida. She remembered certain days and nights very clearly but she did not remember their sequence. Someone had shuffled her memory. Certain cards were lost. She and Warren had been in the South. She knew that much. They had been in New Orleans a while in January and February, and then again when it was hot and raining and the baby was showing, she remembered that. She remembered arriving at the New Orleans airport. The airport must have been in January because the second time they arrived in New Orleans, the time it was hot and raining and the baby was showing and the girl was with them, they had not flown in but driven in, from Greenville. They had eaten some crab bisque once in Greenville. They had made that crab bisque in Greenville. She had bought the crabs and Warren had shown her how to make the bisqu
e.

  “You’re ruining it,” she had said. “You’re putting in too much salt.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Taste it, it’s brine.”

  “Taste it yourself,” Warren had said, and pushed the wooden spoon in her face. The soup had gone up her nose and she had choked and he had hit her between the shoulder blades until she stopped. “I never cared for anybody like I cared for you but you never knew your ass about food.”

  Everyone else had liked that crab bisque but they had stayed too long in Greenville, they had stayed too long everywhere. After-three-days-guests-like-fish-begin-to-stink. She had heard that all over the South with Warren. After three weeks of hearing it from Howard Hollerith in Greenville she and Warren had moved from Howard Hollerith’s place to a motel in town near the levee but Warren had kept on seeing Howard Hollerith’s wife. And Howard Hollerith’s girl too. The wife and the girl. “I want them to do it together,” Warren said to Charlotte. The girl went to New Orleans with them.

  But Greenville was May, June. She knew that Greenville was May or June because Birmingham was July.

  The Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was definitely July.

  The New Orleans airport had been January.

  Warren had been drunk and had twisted her arm behind her back at the Hertz counter.

  “I don’t have to be here,” she had said. “I’m going home.”

  “Go home,” Warren had said. “I’ll send you home. I’ll ask Porter for the fare, go into debt and send you home. How do you think you’re going home without sending me into debt.”

  “The way I came,” Charlotte said, and Warren had hit her.

  “It’s all right,” Charlotte kept saying to the Hertz girl, and “No. Don’t call. Please don’t.” The Hertz girl was calling the airport police and Warren was buying a postcard and mailing it to Leonard. The postcard showed a Confederate flag and a mule and the legend PUT YOUR HEART IN DIXIE OR GET YOUR ASS OUT. “It’s all right,” Charlotte said to the airport police. “It’s nothing, it’s personal, it’s all right.”

  Delta had lost her bags but it did not seem to matter.

  “You forgot your map,” the Hertz girl said.

  “Lower that white-trash voice,” Warren said.

  In the Hertz car they had driven from the airport to Porter’s new house in Metairie and it began to appear that Leonard had been right again. Porter did not appear to be dying but Warren did. Porter told her that. Porter told her that while Warren was upstairs calling a girl he knew in Savannah and telling her to come down. Porter hoped that Charlotte would understand why she and Warren could not stay with him. Porter hoped that she would not think it inhospitable for him to have made a reservation for her and Warren at the Pontchartrain. By the way the reservation would be in her name because the last time Warren had stayed at the Pontchartrain there had been a little unpleasantness, Porter would not say what.

  “Warren doesn’t show his best side as a houseguest, Charlotte, you recognize that. If Warren has to leave us, I want to recall his many virtues only.”

  “What do you mean, leave us.”

  “About time he came home, stopped catting around New York. ‘Dying Is But Going Home,’ am I right? Ever hear that?”

  “What are you talking about, dying.”

  “Used to see it on gravestones. ‘Dying Is But Going Home.’ ‘The Angels Called Him,’ that was popular too. At least around here it was popular. I don’t know about out there.”

  “You said if Warren ‘has to leave us,’ Porter, what did you mean?”

  “Don’t bother yourself, Charlotte. I’m going to persuade Warren to let Ping Walker have a look, you remember Ping, Lady Duvall’s boy? Lived up east a while? Came back down home around the time Lady married her fancy man?”

  “I don’t know any Ping Walker and I don’t know any Lady Duvall and I don’t see what they’ve got to do with Warren.”

  “Don’t raise your voice, Charlotte, your husband out there allow you to converse like a fishwife? Ping is a specialist. I should say, a specialist. Very fine training. Tulane, Hopkins, Harvard. His father didn’t pay for it, old Judge Duvall did.”

  “A specialist in what?”

  “Bad blood,” Warren said from the stairway, and both he and Porter laughed.

  “Bad blood between Warren here and Lady’s fancy man, if memory serves.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

  “Porter said you were sick.”

  She was standing at the window in the room at the Pontchartrain watching the first light on the windows of the houses across the avenue. She did not have a bag, she did not have an aspirin, she did not have a toothbrush. The skirt she had put on the morning before in Hollister was wrinkled from the long drive to the San Francisco airport and the long flight to New Orleans and the long night watching Warren and Porter drink in Metairie. In a few hours she could go out and buy what she needed. She tried to concentrate on what she needed and did not think about what she was doing in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. In the empty house on California Street in San Francisco it would be three o’clock in the morning. The night light in Marin’s bathroom would be burning just as she had left it. The crossed spots on the Pollock in the dining room would be burning just as she had left them. Leonard would have gone on by now from Miami to Havana via Mexico City. Leonard was in Havana and Marin was gone. Warren was either dying or not dying and Marin was gone.

  “Porter said you were sick and he wasn’t. At all.”

  “Porter’s an ass, don’t you be one.” Warren lay on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. “You got it wrong. As usual. Shut those curtains and come here.”

  We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren said.

  We should be doing this all our lives, Warren said.

  We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.

  The verb form made a difference and she could not get it straight what Warren had said. She could not remember. She could remember the New Orleans airport and she could remember the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham but she could not remember too much in between. There must have been about five months in between, about twenty weeks, about 140 days, simple arithmetic told her how many days there must have been between the New Orleans airport and the Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham, but someone had shuffled them. Everywhere she had been with him he wanted the curtains shut in the daylight, she did remember that. She remembered darkened rooms with the light cracking through where the curtains were skimpy and all she could not remember was where those rooms were, or why she and Warren had been in them.

  “You wanted to bring me home with you,” she remembered saying in one of them. “Didn’t you. You wanted to come home again.”

  “No,” Warren had said. “I just wanted to fuck you again.”

  Sometimes those months in the South seemed so shattered that she suspected the Ochsner Clinic of having administered electroshock while she was under the anaesthesia for delivery. This suspicion was unfounded.

  2

  I SAID BEFORE HE HAD THE LOOK OF A MAN WHO COULD drive a woman like Charlotte right off her head.

  His face had been coarsened by contempt.

  His mind had been coarsened by self-pity.

  As it happened he was quite often “right” to hold other people in contempt, and he was also “right” to regard himself with pity, but allow a dying woman a maxim or two.

  I have noticed that it is never enough to be right.

  I have noticed that it is necessary to be better.

  His favorite hand was outrageousness; in a fluid world like Leonard Douglas’s where no one could be outraged Warren Bogart was dimmed, confused, unable to operate. He could operate marginally in academe, and he maintained vague academic connections: a week at Yale, three days at Harvard, guest privileges at a number of Faculty Clubs where he never paid his bar bill. He could operate
marginally on the Upper East Side of New York. He could operate very well in the South. Like many Southerners and like some Catholics and unlike Charlotte he was raised to believe not in “hard work” or “self-reliance” but in the infinite power of the personal appeal, the request for a favor, the intervention of one or another merciful Virgin. He had an inchoate but definite conviction that access to the mysteries of good fortune was arranged in the same way as access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.

  He belonged to nothing.

  He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.

  His final hold on Charlotte was that he recognized in himself everything I have just told you about him, and said mea culpa.

  As another outsider I recognized that hand too.

  Outsider. De afuera.

  We were both de afuera, Warren Bogart and I. At the time I met him we were also both dying of cancer, Warren Bogart and I, which perhaps made us even more de afuera than usual, but that was a detail Charlotte had never made entirely clear.

  Charlotte had trouble with the word.

  Not the word “cancer.”

  The word “dying.”

  I met him only once, one evening in New Orleans four or five months after Charlotte first came to Boca Grande, one evening in the Garden District at the house of one of the fat brothers in white suits who factor our copra. I had flown to New Orleans that morning to receive cobalt and to renegotiate the copra contracts with Morgan Fayard; I was due to have dinner with Morgan and his wife and sister and to fly back to Boca Grande the next morning. I had not been invited to dinner to meet Warren Bogart, nor had Warren Bogart been invited at all. He was just there in Morgan and Lucy Fayard’s living room when I arrived. He was a visible thorn in Lucy Fayard’s plan for the evening. He seemed bent on embarrassing both Lucy and her sister-in-law Adele, as well as on humiliating the girl he had with him, but the central thrust of his visit seemed to be to see me. This girl he had with him was referred to as “Chrissie,” or “Miss Bailey,” or “our unexpected guest’s little friend from Tupelo,” depending on who referred to her, and she was thin and pale and spoke, when prodded, in sporadic and obscurely startling monologues. In fact she was not unlike Charlotte Douglas, give or take twenty years and the distinctions in cultural conditioning between Tupelo, Mississippi, and Hollister, California. Still I watched the two of them in the Fayards’ living room for several minutes before I understood that this “Warren” who had arrived uninvited for drinks and would stay unasked through dinner and who studied my every reaction was the Warren who figured in what I had come to regard as Charlotte Douglas’s hallucinations.