The problem was that Charlotte did not know that any of this was “usual.”
Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the “separateness.”
And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.
13
CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she went with Pete Wright to open the safe-deposit box.
“I’m not sure your daughter appreciates the legal bind she’s put you in, Char.”
Pete Wright was examining some stock certificates. Charlotte had known Pete Wright longer than she had known Leonard, he had roomed at Stanford with Dickie and he had handled her divorce from Warren and as Leonard’s junior partner he had paid a Christmas call every year with a suitable present for Marin, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street he had kept referring to Marin as “your daughter.” Charlotte did not want to hear about the legal bind she was in and she did not want Pete Wright to call her Char. Only Dickie called her Char. There was something else about Pete Wright that bothered her but she did not want to think about that either.
“You’re in a bit of a pickle here, Char.”
“That’s exactly what you said when I left Warren. And you took this enormous legal problem to Leonard and Leonard said I wasn’t.”
Charlotte took a gold pin of her grandmother’s from the safe-deposit box.
Charlotte imagined the gold pin attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
Pete Wright had come to New York once when she was married to Warren.
“And I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what.”
“I wasn’t in a bit of a pickle.”
“I have nothing but respect for Leonard as a lawyer, Charlotte, but as you know, Leonard leaves the estate work to me.” Pete Wright took a deep breath. “Now. What we have here are stock certificates worth X dollars a quarter in dividends—”
“Eight-hundred and seven. $807 a quarter. I looked it up when you called me.”
“What I’m saying, Charlotte, is that these particular certificates are in your and your daughter’s names as joint tenants. Her signature—”
“I can forge it, can’t I.”
“Not legally, no.”
“All right. I won’t cash the checks. It’s $807 a quarter, it’s nothing.”
The gold pin had a broken clasp. As Charlotte held the pin in her fingers she had an abrupt physical sense of eating chicken à la king and overdone biscuits at her grandmother’s house in Hollister.
Pete Wright.
Pete Wright had been in New York once and had taken her to the Palm for dinner.
“What may seem ‘nothing’ to you, Charlotte—”
“I suppose you’re about to tell me that $807 a quarter is the average annual income for a grape picker. Is that what you’re about to tell me?”
“I’m about to overlook your hostility.”
“Leonard leaves the estate work to you, you leave the grape pickers to Leonard. Is that fair?”
“We used to be friends, Charlotte, and I like to think—”
She could taste the soft bits of pimento in the chicken à la king.
She could smell the biscuits burning in the oven.
She could also smell citronella, and calamine lotion, and the sweetened milky emulsion in prescription bottles that contained aureomycin. She could taste the acrid goat cheese her father used to get from the man who ran his cattle on the ranch. Her father had died. She could feel crushed and browning in her hand the camellias her mother used to braid into her hair for birthday parties. Her mother had died. She had erased burned biscuits and citronella when Warren came to her door in Berkeley, and she seemed to have been busy since, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street she was not so busy.
She had erased some other things too.
She had been too busy.
Charlotte closed her hand around the pin with the broken clasp and tried not to think how it could be attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
She had gotten drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.
“I gather by your silence you think Warren might oppose it.”
“Oppose what,” Charlotte said.
“Oppose declaring your daughter legally dead.”
Charlotte looked at Pete Wright.
“It’s a legality. It doesn’t mean anything, but it would enable you to cash these particular dividend checks. Or sell this particular stock. Or whatever.”
Charlotte picked up the certificates.
“As well as clarify the question of the ranch. Which I feel impelled to remind you is tied up in trust for her. A loose trust, granted, but—”
Charlotte tore the certificates in half.
Pete Wright gazed at the wall behind Charlotte and made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Warren’s quite disturbed, I don’t know if you realize that. He comes by the house, he drinks too much, he jumps all over Clarice about her hatha yoga class, he acts like—”
Her mother had died.
Warren had not come home the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.
“You don’t need to tell me what Warren acts like.”
“I gather you and Warren have had some misunderstanding, the rights and wrongs of which are outside my purview, but—”
Her father had died.
Warren had called at four A.M. the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright and she had told him not to come home.
“—I must say I don’t think you’re solving anything by pretending there aren’t certain complications to—”
People did die. People were loose in the world and left it, and she had been too busy to notice.
The morning after she got drunk at the Palm she and Warren had taken Marin to lunch at the Carlyle. Marin was cold.
“I’m trying to talk to you like a Dutch uncle,” Pete Wright said.
Warren gave her his coat.
“I think I fucked you one Easter,” Charlotte said.
For the next several days Charlotte wanted only to eat the food she had eaten in Hollister but she had lost the recipes her mother had written out and Charlotte did not know the number of any couple who would come to the house on California Street and do chicken à la king and burned biscuits. When I think of Charlotte Douglas apprehending death at the age of thirty-nine in the safe-deposit vault of a bank in San Francisco it occurs to me that there was some advantage in having a mother who died when I was eight, a father who died when I was ten, before I was busy.
14
CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she met the woman named Enid Schrader.
“Mark spoke so very highly of you,” the woman had said on the telephone. There had been in Enid Schrader’s voice something Charlotte did not want to recognize: a forced gaiety, a haggard sprightliness, a separateness not unlike her own. “Of you and your beautiful home.”
Mark Schrader was said to have been on the L–1011 with Marin. Mark Schrader had on his face, in the pictures Charlotte had seen of him, a pronounced scar from a harelip operation. It did not seem plausible to Charlotte that she could have met a boy with such a scar and forgotten him, nor did it seem plausible that anyone on the L–1011 with Marin had ever spoken highly of the house on California Street, but maybe the boy’s mother was trying to tell her something. Maybe there was a code in that peculiar stilted diction. Maybe Enid Schrader knew where Marin was.
“I think we should meet,” Charlotte said guardedly. “Could you have lunch at all? Today? The St. Francis Grill?”