by Joan Didion
“You don’t know anything about Charlotte,” Warren said. Charlotte could smell bay rum. Bay rum and cigar smoke. Warren. “You never did.”
Charlotte tried to focus on the tight pink balls of peony blossom.
“He wants you to walk away,” Warren said.
The tight pink balls seemed to swell as she watched them. The baby’s head would swell if the baby lived but the baby could not live. They had told her so. The doctors. Leonard too. If Leonard had told her about the baby then Leonard had been in the room before, she had just forgotten.
“He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.”
“You hit that girl in the head. You don’t take care of anybody.”
“I’m taking care of you right now. I’m telling you not to walk away.”
“I never did,” Charlotte said.
“ ‘How could I leave you,’ ” Warren said. “The same way you left everybody. How-could-I-leave-you-let-me-count-the ways.”
She closed her eyes against the obscene peonies.
“Never mind whether I take care of you,” Warren said. “You can take care of me.”
“Cut her loose,” Leonard said.
“She doesn’t want to be loose,” Warren said.
The peonies were swelling behind her eyelids.
“It doesn’t matter whether you take care of somebody or somebody takes care of you,” Warren said. “It’s the same thing in the end. It’s all the same.”
“You had your shot,” Leonard said.
She kept her eyes closed and she heard their voices ugly and raised and by the time the voices were normal again the peonies had burst behind her eyelids and the warm drugs were pulling her back under and she knew what she was going to do. She was not going to do what they wanted her to do. She was not even sure what they wanted her to do but she was not going to do it.
“Tell her I said it’s all the same,” she heard Warren say to Leonard.
She was going to leave here alone with her baby.
“You want her to watch you die,” she heard Leonard say to Warren.
She was going to let her baby die with her.
“Never mind what I want,” she heard Warren say to Leonard. “Just tell her I said it’s all the same. Tell her that for me.”
4
WHEN I CONSIDER THE PATTERN OF THEIR DAYS AND nights during those five months I see again that nothing outside that pattern happened at the Mountain Brook Country Club.
I wonder again why Charlotte left that night and not some other.
Charlotte could never tell me.
“But I had to leave,” Charlotte would repeat, as if until ten minutes past eleven P.M. on the eighteenth of July there had been some imperative to her staying. “He’d been with this girl and he’d hurt her and he was acting crazy. After I left the Clarks took her to the hospital, she had a concussion. Mild.”
Had not other such evenings occurred during those five months?
Charlotte said that she could not remember.
Bear in mind that I am talking here about a woman I believe to have been in shock.
Everywhere they went during those five months they ended up staying in a motel. Charlotte did remember the motels. They had stayed a while with Howard Hollerith in Greenville and they had stayed a while with Billy Daikin in Clarksdale and they had stayed a while with other people in other places but after a certain kind of evening they would always move to a motel. Usually Warren would not be present during the early part of this certain kind of evening. Usually Warren would be upriver or downriver or across the county with their host’s wife or sister or recently divorced niece. Never daughter. Warren never went upriver or downriver or across the county with the daughter of a host.
Charlotte learned early to recognize the advent of such an evening.
For the day or two before such an evening Warren would announce his inability to sleep.
“I’m restless, I’m wired, I got the mean reds,” he would say.
“Don’t cross me,” he would say.
“Don’t mess with me,” he would say.
For the day or two before such an evening their host would announce his inability to provide minor but key aspects of his normal hospitality.
“Wouldn’t be surprised Warren’s used up all those Peychaud bitters he can’t take a drink without, what a shame, can’t buy them up here.”
“Damn that plumber, can’t get here before Tuesday, daresay you’ll be glad to get somewhere they’ve got the pipes in working order.”
A familiar drift would emerge. Not only toilets but guest-room telephones would go out of order. Men would arrive to drain the swimming pool. Suggestions would be made for traveling before the rain set in, or the heat, or the projected work on the Interstate. Reminders would be made about promises to visit Charlie Ferris in Oxford, or Miss Anne Clary on the Gulf.
Doors would be closed.
Voices would be raised.
The evening itself would begin uneasily and end badly.
“Hope Warren has the courtesy to leave a little something for old Jennie, all the extra picking up she’s done, you might remind him, Charlotte. Or isn’t that the custom where you come from.”
And: “Most interesting the way men where you come from allow their wives to traipse around as they please, must be very advanced thinkers in California.”
And then: “The idea, your friend Warren going off and leaving you here alone, might not matter to you but it matters to me, a man insults a lady in my house he insults me. You wouldn’t understand that, Mrs. Douglas, I’m certain it’s all free and easy where your people come from.”
And finally: “You say you’re going to bed ‘and fuck it,’ Mrs. Douglas, I believe that is your name, just what am I meant to conclude? Am I meant to conclude there’s a woman in my house who’s certifiable? Or did my ears deceive me.”
After Charlotte went to bed there would be silence for a few hours and then more raised voices, Warren’s among them, and Charlotte would bury her head in one pillow and put another over her belly so the baby could not hear and the next day she and Warren would move to a motel.
“I don’t like these people,” she said to Warren after one such evening. “I don’t like them and I don’t want to be beholden to them.”
“You’re not beholden to anybody. You’re too used to Arabs and Jews, you don’t know how normal people behave.”
“I can’t help noticing Arabs and Jews are rather less insulting to their houseguests.”
“Not to this houseguest they wouldn’t be, babe.” In the wreckage of these visits Warren seemed unfailingly cheerful. “You show me an Arab who’ll put up with me, I’ll show you an Arab doesn’t get the picture.”
In all those motels he wanted the curtains shut in the daytime.
In all those motels she would sit in the dark room a while and watch him sleep.
It seemed to her that toward the end of the five months they had spent more time in motels than toward the beginning of the five months but she could not be sure. Warren always paid for the rooms with crumpled bills fished from various of his pockets and she paid for meals, when they ate meals. She ate regularly, usually alone. She forced herself to eat, just as she forced herself to take her calcium and see an obstetrician in any town where they spent more than a day or two. There was no need for her to see an obstetrician that often but she wanted to have a number she could call in the middle of the night. An obstetrician would not question her reason for seeing him. An obstetrician was the logical doctor to see.
“You’re sick,” she had said the first time she saw Warren gray and sweating. He had swerved abruptly off the highway and stopped the car on the shoulder. “You’re sick and you need a doctor.”
“Not going running to any doctor.” His breathing was harsh and shallow and he did not seem to have strength to turn off the ignition. “Not sick. Ran over a moccasin is all.”
They sat in the
idling car until his breathing evened out. He did not speak again but took her hand. When he finally put the car into gear and drove on she glanced back at the highway but of course there was no moccasin. It was after that day when she began to find an obstetrician in every town, began to get the questions done with early and the telephone number in hand. Some night in some town she was going to need to call a doctor and ask him for something and she wanted that doctor to take her call. She did not let her mind form the word “cancer” and she did not let her mind form the word “dying” but the word Demerol was always in her mind. She had not been there when her father died but Pete Wright had told her about the Demerol, the night they had dinner at the Palm.
5
SOMETIMES SHE WOULD LEAVE THE MOTEL DURING THE day. She would leave Warren sleeping and take the car and drive down the main street of whatever town it was and look for somewhere to spend an hour. She remembered sitting in the library in Demopolis, Alabama, every afternoon for most of a week. She had read back newspapers in the Demopolis library. She had followed the progress in the newspapers of a Greene County murder trial which had taken place some months before. They left Demopolis before she got to the verdict and when she asked the woman at the motel desk if she recalled how the trial came out the woman said curiosity killed the cat. She remembered having her nails manicured in a pine town above Mobile by a child who looked like Marin but was fifteen and married to a logger and running her mother’s beauty shop in a trailer. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in Pass Christian and reading an Associated Press story about the continuing search for Marin Bogart and she remembered leaving the paper on the counter and staring out at the dark glare off the Gulf. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in a lot of towns. She remembered staring at the Gulf in a lot of towns. She remembered the Associated Press quoting Leonard as saying that she was “traveling with friends.”
On those days when she did leave the motel she would usually come back toward sundown and find Warren gone, the bed unmade, the towels wet on the floor of the room, the curtains still closed and the air sweet and heavy with the smell of bay rum. Warren never put the top back on the bottle of bay rum. She remembered that. She would put the top back on the bottle of bay rum and call the maid and stand outside on the walkway while the room was made up. The air would be chilly and wet and then later in the spring it would be warm and wet. Toward eight or nine on those evenings Warren would telephone the motel and tell her where to meet him.
“Warren appears to have his mood upon him,” someone would be saying wherever she met him.
“Warren is certainly himself tonight.”
“Warren is incorrigible.”
“Warren is without doubt the most incorrigible of anybody I know.”
So self-absorbed was the texture of life in these rooms where Charlotte went to meet Warren that the facts that she had been married to him for some years and that they were the parents of a child whose photograph appeared somewhere in every post office and gas station in the county appeared not to have penetrated.
She was Warren’s “friend from California.”
She was “visiting with Warren.”
Warren was “showing Mrs. Douglas the South.”
“Why do you lie?” Charlotte said after one such evening. “Why do you pretend I’m just this pregnant acquaintance you happen to be showing around Biloxi?”
“I’m not lying. You’re just here on a visit. You’ll leave.”
“That’s not what you make me say in bed.”
“Don’t talk about what I make you say in bed. Don’t talk about it, talk about it and you lose it, don’t you know anything.”
We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should be doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
“I don’t want to leave you ever,” Charlotte said.
“No,” Warren said. “But you will.”
After a while there were no more frosts at night and the wild carrot came out along all the roads and every night ended badly.
After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.
After a while there was Howard Hollerith’s girl.
“What do you suppose Marin did today,” Charlotte said one night in the car when she thought Howard Hollerith’s girl was asleep in the back seat.
“Played tennis,” Warren said. “Marin played tennis today.”
“Marin who?” Howard Hollerith’s girl said.
“See what you’re going to leave me to,” Warren said to Charlotte.
In the coffee shop of a Holiday Inn outside New Orleans one morning in May or June Charlotte read another Associated Press story in which Leonard was again quoted as saying that Charlotte was “traveling with friends.” This time Charlotte read the story several times and memorized the phrase. It occurred to her that possibly she had misunderstood the situation. Possibly Leonard and Warren and the Associated Press were right. She was simply traveling with friends, and Warren and Howard Hollerith’s girl,asleep in the bed behind the second door past the ice machine, were simply the friends with whom she was traveling. Soothed by this construction Charlotte had another cup of coffee and worked the crossword in the Picayune.
6
THE LAST THING CHARLOTTE REMEMBERED BEFORE THE Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was sitting and reading inside the cyclone fence around the swimming pool at a Howard Johnson’s in Meridian. The Howard Johnson’s was just off a curve on the Interstate between New York and New Orleans and all afternoon the big northern rigs would appear to hurtle toward the cyclone fence and then veer on south. The vibration made her teeth hurt. The shallow end of the pool was filled with prematurely thickened young girls celebrating a forthcoming marriage. They talked as if they were just a year or two out of high school but they were already matrons, careful not to splash one another’s blown and lacquered hair. After a while the bridegroom-to-be arrived with a friend from his office. The bridegroom and his friend were both fleshy young men in short-sleeved white shirts and they placed two six-packs of beer on a damp metal table and they opened all the cans and started drinking the beer. It seemed to be a town in which everyone thickened early. Out of some deference or indifference to their own women the men ignored the shrieks from the pool and instead watched Charlotte as they drank the beer. “Somebody’s gone and put a bun in that skinny little oven and I wouldn’t mind it had been me,” one of them said. “I never knew this Howard Johnson’s was X-rated,” the other one said. He held up one of the cans as if to offer it to Charlotte and the other one laughed. Charlotte felt old and awkward and dimly humiliated, a woman almost forty with a body that masqueraded as that of a young girl, a caricature of what they believed her to be. When she went back to the room Warren had the air-conditioning off and the windows closed and all the blankets and spreads from both beds piled over him. By Meridian he was having sweats and chills every day as he slept. By Meridian he did not sleep at night. By Meridian Howard Hollerith’s girl was no longer with them. Charlotte supposed there had been a fight somewhere but she did not particularly remember it.
“I can’t get it up,” Warren said when she tried to wake him. “Baby, baby, I can’t get it up.”
“I don’t want it,” she said. “That’s not what I want.”
“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me again.”
“How could I leave you. Don’t wake up.”
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
“You like it too much,” Warren said. “You like it more than anybody I ever knew. I know a girl in Birmingham likes it almost as much as you. We’ll go do it with her. I want to see you with Julia.”
“I didn’t like that before.”
“Did we do that before?”
&nb
sp; “With Howard’s girl. I didn’t like it.”
“You liked it all right.”
We could have been doing this all our lives.
We should be doing this all our lives.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
Talk about it and you lose it.
She was a woman almost forty whose fillings hurt when the highway vibrated. She was a woman almost forty waiting for the night she would call to get the Demerol. When Warren woke at sundown he took her to see a bike movie in a drive-in and drank a fifth of bourbon in the car and drove under the big pink arc lights with the rented car flat-out all the way to Birmingham. When the peonies swelled and broke behind her eyelids in the Ochsner Clinic they blazed like the big pink arc lights all the way to Birmingham. She could take care of somebody or somebody could take care of her and it was the same thing in the end.
Mérida.
Antigua.
Guadeloupe.
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.
Tell her I said it’s all the same.
El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana, deceased.
Tell her that for me.
FIVE
1
OIL WELLS ABOUT TO COME IN HAVE A SOUND THE ATTENTIVE ear can detect.
As do earthquakes.
Volcanoes about to erupt transmit for days or weeks before their convulsion a signal called “the harmonic tremor.”
Similarly I know for months before the fact when there is about to be a “transition” in Boca Grande. There is the occasional tank on the Avenida Centrale. Sentries with carbines appear on the roof of the presidential palace. For reasons I have never understood the postal rates begin to fluctuate mysteriously. There is a mounting mania for construction, for getting one’s cut while the government lasts: dummy corporations multiply, phantom payrolls metastasize. No one has an office but everyone has a mail drop. A game is underway, the “winner” being the player who lands his marker in the Ministry of Defense, and the play has certain ritual moves: whoever wants the Ministry that year must first get the guerrilleros into the game The guerrilleros seem always to believe that they are playing on their own, but they are actually a diversion, a disruptive element placed on the board only to be “quelled” by “stronger leadership.” Guns and money begin to reach the guerrilleros via the usual channels. Mimeographed communiqués begin to appear, and twenty people are detained for questioning. A few are reported as prison suicides and a few more reported in exile but months later, again mysteriously, the same twenty are detained for questioning.