“You sound like you had a stroke. You had a stroke?”
“I happen to have a headache.”
“You mean I happen to give you a headache.”
“I mean I want you to leave this room.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll leave this room.” Warren sat on the bed, picked up the tube of KY jelly and put it in the drawer. “I don’t like this room.”
Charlotte said nothing.
“I only flew out here to see how you were.”
Still Charlotte said nothing.
“I don’t like your room, I don’t like your house, I don’t like your life.” Warren picked up a silver box from the table by the bed. The box held marijuana and played “Puff the Magic Dragon” when the lid was lifted. Warren lifted the lid and looked at Charlotte. “I bet the two of you talk about ‘turning on.’ See what I mean about your life?”
“Go away,” Charlotte whispered.
“Excuse me. I mean your ‘life-style.’ You don’t have a life, you have a ‘life-style.’ You still look good, though.”
“Go away.”
Warren looked at her for a while before he spoke.
“I want you to come to New Orleans with me.”
Charlotte tried to concentrate on meeting Leonard for lunch. Very soon she would walk out of this room and down the stairs. She would walk out of this house and she would take a taxi to the Tadich Grill, alone.
“I said I want you to come to New Orleans with me, are you deaf? Or just rude.”
She would go in the taxi alone to meet Leonard at the Tadich Grill.
“I want you to see Porter with me. Porter is dying. Porter wants to see you. Do this one thing for me.”
Charlotte tried to keep her mind on whether to order sand dabs or oysters at the Tadich Grill. Porter was a distant cousin of Warren’s. During the five years Charlotte and Warren were married Porter had invested $25,000 in an off-Broadway play that Warren never wrote, $30,000 in a political monthly that Warren never took beyond its dummy issue, and $2,653.84 in ransoming Warren’s and her furniture and Marin’s baby clothes from the Seven Santini Brothers Storage Company in Long Island City. Charlotte did not even like Porter.
Sand dabs.
No.
Oysters.
“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.