“You don’t know what he wants.”
“Of course I know what he wants. He wants you back. You think I make my living being dense?”
“Then why did you ask?”
Leonard lifted a mass of Charlotte’s hair and let it drop through his fingers. “Because I was interested in whether you knew it. You don’t look so old.”
16
WHO CAN SAY WHY I CRAVE THE LIGHT IN BOCA GRANDE, who can say why my body grows cancers.
Who can say why Charlotte left Leonard Douglas.
Maybe she thought it was easier.
Maybe she believed herself loose in the world, maybe she was tired, maybe she had just remembered that people died. Maybe she thought that if she walked back into the Carlyle Hotel on Easter morning with Warren Bogart Marin would be there, in a flowered lawn dress.
“It’s too late,” she said to her gynecologist the morning he confirmed that she was carrying Leonard’s child. “It didn’t happen in time.”
Somebody cuts you.
Where it doesn’t show.
I have no way of knowing about the cuts that don’t show.
I know only that during the fifth week after the release of Marin’s tape Charlotte woke early every morning, dressed promptly, and immersed herself in the domestic maintenance of the house on California Street. She made inventories. She replaced worn sheets, chipped wine glasses, crazed plates. She paid an electrician time-and-a-half to rewire, on a Saturday, two crossed spots on the Jackson Pollock in the dining room. She was obsessed by errands, and she laid it to her pregnancy.
Leonard did not.
So entirely underwater did Charlotte live her life that she did not recognize her preoccupations as those of a woman about to abandon a temporary rental.
Leonard did.
17
PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE LAST EVENING CHARLOTTE SPENT with Leonard Douglas appeared a year later in Vogue, Charlotte showed them to me.
There was Leonard, standing with an actor at the party in Beverly Hills, standing with his head bent, listening to the actor but looking somewhere else.
There was Charlotte, sitting with an actress at the party in Beverly Hills, Charlotte smiling, her eyes wide and glazed and in the end as impenetrable as Marin’s.
She had not meant to go with Leonard to the party in Beverly Hills at all.
She had not even meant to go with Leonard to the airport.
But on the fifth day of the fifth week after the release of Marin’s tape she had opened the door of the house on California Street and found Warren standing there.
“I guess you can give me a drink.”
“Actually I’m just about to drive Leonard to the airport.” She followed his gaze to the limousine idling at the curb. She had not until the moment intended going to the airport. “I mean I’m not exactly driving him to the airport but I’m driving with him to the airport.”
“I guess there’s room for me.”
“Actually you don’t want to drive to the airport, it could take hours.” She had not in fact spoken to Warren since the nights he called from the Beverly Hills Hotel on Bashti Levant’s bill. “This time of day. The traffic.”
“I’ve got time.”
“Hours. Literally.”
“You’re swimming upstream, Charlotte.”
In the car Charlotte had sat on the jump seat and fixed her eyes on the driver’s pigtail.
“While you were upstairs Warren was telling me about this ninety-two-year-old Trotskyist he drinks with in New York,” Leonard said. “This Trotskyist lives at the Hotel Albert. Naturally.”
“Charlotte knows Benny,” Warren said. “You remember Benny, Charlotte.”
Charlotte had not remembered Benny. Charlotte had not even thought that she was meant to remember Benny, whoever Benny was. Benny was only Warren’s way of reminding her that he had a prior claim.
“This Trotskyist drinks Pisco Sours,” Leonard said.
“Sazeracs,” Warren said. “Not Pisco Sours. Sazeracs. Benny always asks about you, Charlotte. You ought to go see him, he’s not going to live forever.”
Charlotte kept her eyes on the driver’s pigtail.
“Neither is Porter,” Warren said. “In case you forgot.”
“Neither is Charlotte,” Leonard said. “You keep this up. Something I’ve never been able to understand is how you happen to know more Trotskyists than Trotsky did.”
“You know more Arabs, it evens out. What am I going to tell Porter, Charlotte?”
“All of them ninety-two-years old,” Leonard said.
“I said what am I going to tell Porter, Charlotte.”
“All of them sitting around the Hotel Albert drinking Pisco Sours,” Leonard said.
“Sazeracs. What do you want me to tell Porter on his deathbed, Charlotte.”
“Personally I want you to tell Porter about this ninety-two-year-old Trotskyist,” Leonard said. “You’re overplaying your hand, Warren. You’re pushing her too hard while she’s still got an ace. I’ll lay you odds, she’s going to see her ace. She’s going to say she’s coming with me.”
“But I am.” Charlotte looked at Leonard for the first time. “I am definitely coming with you. I always was.”
“No,” Leonard said. “You were not ‘always’ coming with me. You see, Warren? Bad hand. You didn’t pace your play.”
“But I always wanted to go with you,” Charlotte said.
“Definitely you always wanted to go with him,” Warren said. “You haven’t met enough Arabs.”
“He’s going to Los Angeles and Miami,” Charlotte said.
“Or enough Jews,” Warren said.
Because Charlotte had gotten on the plane with no bag and because Leonard’s presence was required at the party where the photographs were taken, a $250-a-ticket benefit in a tent behind someone’s house in Beverly Hills, Charlotte was wearing, at the time she was photographed, a dress borrowed from the wife of the record executive who had organized the evening, a dress made entirely of colored ribbons.
“You shouldn’t have told Warren to keep the car,” she had said as she put on the dress. “He’ll keep it all night. I look absurd.”
“You wouldn’t if you had a tambourine,” Leonard said. “He’ll keep it all week.”
Charlotte sat down. She was very tired. She did not think she had ever been so tired. She did not see how she could finish tying the ribbons on the dress.
“Sometimes I wish,” Leonard said after a while. He began tying the ribbons Charlotte had abandoned. “I don’t know.”
“Sometimes you wish what.”
“Sometimes I wish you could just fuck him and get it over with.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Charlotte. Shit. I know you don’t want to.”
A stage had been constructed over the swimming pool of the house in Beverly Hills and several entertainers auctioned their services, singing and dancing and placing surprise telephone calls to friends and relatives of high bidders. Leonard raised five hundred dollars by dancing the limbo under a pole held by the record executive’s wife, a young woman with pale blond hair like Marin’s and a Brahmin caste mark painted on her forehead, and, at Charlotte’s table, an actress who had visited Hanoi spoke of the superior health and beauty of the children there.
“It’s because they aren’t raised by their mothers,” the actress said. “They don’t have any of that bourgeois personal crap laid on them.”
Charlotte studied her wine glass and tried to think of something neutral to say to the actress. She wanted to get up but her chair was blocked by three men who seemed to be discussing the financing of a motion picture, or a war.