Walk out.
Call a taxi.
Use her American Express card, get on a plane, order a drink.
While she was still being pleasantly astonished her water broke, and soaked the seat with amniotic fluid.
“You hurt that girl,” Charlotte said to Warren when he brought the peonies to the Ochsner Clinic. Leonard was in the room. Charlotte did not know how Leonard happened to be in the room and she knew that she should not say anything about the girl in front of Leonard but it did not seem to matter any more what she said in front of anyone. “You hit her in the head. Didn’t you.”
“She’s doped up,” Leonard said. “Stay neutral.”
“Don’t talk about things you don’t know about,” Warren said to Charlotte. “What are you going to do about the baby?”
“Just the note I had in mind,” Leonard said.
“How did you find me,” Charlotte said.
“Never mind how I found you. I always find you. What about the baby.”
“The baby is — you hit that girl in the head.”
“You’re on pills,” Warren said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t let that stop you,” Leonard said. “Pitch her another life decision.”
“He doesn’t want you to see the baby,” Warren said. “Does he.”
“No,” Leonard said. “I don’t. The topic is now closed. Now we’re going to limit our remarks to areas in which Charlotte has no immediate interest. Sex. Politics. Religion. All right?”
“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.