“I don’t like these people,” she said to Warren after one such evening. “I don’t like them and I don’t want to be beholden to them.”
“You’re not beholden to anybody. You’re too used to Arabs and Jews, you don’t know how normal people behave.”
“I can’t help noticing Arabs and Jews are rather less insulting to their houseguests.”
“Not to this houseguest they wouldn’t be, babe.” In the wreckage of these visits Warren seemed unfailingly cheerful. “You show me an Arab who’ll put up with me, I’ll show you an Arab doesn’t get the picture.”
In all those motels he wanted the curtains shut in the daytime.
In all those motels she would sit in the dark room a while and watch him sleep.
It seemed to her that toward the end of the five months they had spent more time in motels than toward the beginning of the five months but she could not be sure. Warren always paid for the rooms with crumpled bills fished from various of his pockets and she paid for meals, when they ate meals. She ate regularly, usually alone. She forced herself to eat, just as she forced herself to take her calcium and see an obstetrician in any town where they spent more than a day or two. There was no need for her to see an obstetrician that often but she wanted to have a number she could call in the middle of the night. An obstetrician would not question her reason for seeing him. An obstetrician was the logical doctor to see.
“You’re sick,” she had said the first time she saw Warren gray and sweating. He had swerved abruptly off the highway and stopped the car on the shoulder. “You’re sick and you need a doctor.”
“Not going running to any doctor.” His breathing was harsh and shallow and he did not seem to have strength to turn off the ignition. “Not sick. Ran over a moccasin is all.”
They sat in the idling car until his breathing evened out. He did not speak again but took her hand. When he finally put the car into gear and drove on she glanced back at the highway but of course there was no moccasin. It was after that day when she began to find an obstetrician in every town, began to get the questions done with early and the telephone number in hand. Some night in some town she was going to need to call a doctor and ask him for something and she wanted that doctor to take her call. She did not let her mind form the word “cancer” and she did not let her mind form the word “dying” but the word Demerol was always in her mind. She had not been there when her father died but Pete Wright had told her about the Demerol, the night they had dinner at the Palm.
5
SOMETIMES SHE WOULD LEAVE THE MOTEL DURING THE day. She would leave Warren sleeping and take the car and drive down the main street of whatever town it was and look for somewhere to spend an hour. She remembered sitting in the library in Demopolis, Alabama, every afternoon for most of a week. She had read back newspapers in the Demopolis library. She had followed the progress in the newspapers of a Greene County murder trial which had taken place some months before. They left Demopolis before she got to the verdict and when she asked the woman at the motel desk if she recalled how the trial came out the woman said curiosity killed the cat. She remembered having her nails manicured in a pine town above Mobile by a child who looked like Marin but was fifteen and married to a logger and running her mother’s beauty shop in a trailer. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in Pass Christian and reading an Associated Press story about the continuing search for Marin Bogart and she remembered leaving the paper on the counter and staring out at the dark glare off the Gulf. She remembered drinking chocolate Cokes at the counter of the Trailways station in a lot of towns. She remembered staring at the Gulf in a lot of towns. She remembered the Associated Press quoting Leonard as saying that she was “traveling with friends.”
On those days when she did leave the motel she would usually come back toward sundown and find Warren gone, the bed unmade, the towels wet on the floor of the room, the curtains still closed and the air sweet and heavy with the smell of bay rum. Warren never put the top back on the bottle of bay rum. She remembered that. She would put the top back on the bottle of bay rum and call the maid and stand outside on the walkway while the room was made up. The air would be chilly and wet and then later in the spring it would be warm and wet. Toward eight or nine on those evenings Warren would telephone the motel and tell her where to meet him.
“Warren appears to have his mood upon him,” someone would be saying wherever she met him.
“Warren is certainly himself tonight.”
“Warren is incorrigible.”
“Warren is without doubt the most incorrigible of anybody I know.”
So self-absorbed was the texture of life in these rooms where Charlotte went to meet Warren that the facts that she had been married to him for some years and that they were the parents of a child whose photograph appeared somewhere in every post office and gas station in the county appeared not to have penetrated.
She was Warren’s “friend from California.”
She was “visiting with Warren.”
Warren was “showing Mrs. Douglas the South.”
“Why do you lie?” Charlotte said after one such evening. “Why do you pretend I’m just this pregnant acquaintance you happen to be showing around Biloxi?”
“I’m not lying. You’re just here on a visit. You’ll leave.”
“That’s not what you make me say in bed.”
“Don’t talk about what I make you say in bed. Don’t talk about it, talk about it and you lose it, don’t you know anything.”
We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should be doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
“I don’t want to leave you ever,” Charlotte said.
“No,” Warren said. “But you will.”
After a while there were no more frosts at night and the wild carrot came out along all the roads and every night ended badly.
After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.
After a while there was Howard Hollerith’s girl.
“What do you suppose Marin did today,” Charlotte said one night in the car when she thought Howard Hollerith’s girl was asleep in the back seat.
“Played tennis,” Warren said. “Marin played tennis today.”
“Marin who?” Howard Hollerith’s girl said.
“See what you’re going to leave me to,” Warren said to Charlotte.
In the coffee shop of a Holiday Inn outside New Orleans one morning in May or June Charlotte read another Associated Press story in which Leonard was again quoted as saying that Charlotte was “traveling with friends.” This time Charlotte read the story several times and memorized the phrase. It occurred to her that possibly she had misunderstood the situation. Possibly Leonard and Warren and the Associated Press were right. She was simply traveling with friends, and Warren and Howard Hollerith’s girl,asleep in the bed behind the second door past the ice machine, were simply the friends with whom she was traveling. Soothed by this construction Charlotte had another cup of coffee and worked the crossword in the Picayune.
6
THE LAST THING CHARLOTTE REMEMBERED BEFORE THE Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was sitting and reading inside the cyclone fence around the swimming pool at a Howard Johnson’s in Meridian. The Howard Johnson’s was just off a curve on the Interstate between New York and New Orleans and all afternoon the big northern rigs would appear to hurtle toward the cyclone fence and then veer on south. The vibration made her teeth hurt. The shallow end of the pool was filled with prematurely thickened young girls celebrating a forthcoming marriage. They talked as if they were just a year or two out of high school but they were already matrons, careful not to splash one another’s blown and lacquered hair. After a while the bridegroom-to-be arrived with a friend from his office. The bridegroom and his friend were both fleshy young men in short-sleeved white shirts and they placed two six-packs of beer on a damp metal table and they opened all the cans and started drinking the beer. It seemed to be a town in which everyone thickened early. Out of some deference or indifference to their own women the men ignored the shrieks from the pool and instead watched Charlotte as they drank the beer. “Somebody’s gone and put a bun in that skinny little oven and I wouldn’t mind it had been me,” one of them said. “I never knew this Howard Johnson’s was X-rated,” the other one said. He held up one of the cans as if to offer it to Charlotte and the other one laughed. Charlotte felt old and awkward and dimly humiliated, a woman almost forty with a body that masqueraded as that of a young girl, a caricature of what they believed her to be. When she went back to the room Warren had the air-conditioning off and the windows closed and all the blankets and spreads from both beds piled over him. By Meridian he was having sweats and chills every day as he slept. By Meridian he did not sleep at night. By Meridian Howard Hollerith’s girl was no longer with them. Charlotte supposed there had been a fight somewhere but she did not particularly remember it.