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 miserable 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.