“And I don’t guess she ever will,” Charlotte said finally. Her voice was devoid of expression. “I guess he got that wish.”
There was a silence.
“Now you can see her,” I said.
“No,” Charlotte said. “I can’t exactly.”
“But you know how to reach her.”
“She’s always known how to reach me,” Charlotte said. “If you want to look at it that way.”
I said nothing.
“So in the first place it’s not even Marin.”
I think she meant that it was not the Marin she remembered.
There was nothing to say.
“Marin would have found Warren. Marin would have found me.”
Tell Marin she was wrong. Tell her that for me.
Goddamn you all.
She remembers she bled.
15
ON THE AFTERNOON I WENT TO THE CARIBE TO TELL Charlotte that she and I were leaving for New Orleans, that the last planes were getting out, that Tuck Bradley was closing the Embassy, Charlotte only shook her head.
“Not just yet,” she said.
She was sitting in the lobby of the Caribe staring at a television screen which for days had shown only the emblem of La República de Boca Grande, with military music played over the emblem.
“Charlotte. Look at me. You plan to wait until they announce it on television?”
“I just want to see what happens.”
“All that happens is that people get hurt. People get killed. You’re maybe going to get killed if you stay here.”
“Don’t be operatic, Grace, I’m not staying here. I’m just not leaving tonight.”
I said nothing.
“In the first place I don’t like New Orleans. In the second place, take my word for it, it’s going to be a very tedious flight with Tuck Bradley aboard. Carrying his flag.”
“Charlotte. I’m going tonight.”
“Of course you are. Remember to tell Tuck when you land, he’s supposed to get off with the flag showing. Folded. Under his arm. But showing.”
“I promised Leonard I’d take you out with me.”
“I promised Leonard.” Her voice was all gentle reproach and I never heard the steel in it until after she was dead. “I promised I’d see him very soon. There was no call for him to worry you. We talked about it.”
She was still gazing at the television screen.
“In any case you’re not to worry,” she said without looking up. “I told Leonard what I was going to do.”
I had asked Victor to make her leave and Victor had said he had no authority.
I had asked Gerardo to make her leave and Gerardo had said he would get her out.
I had asked Antonio to make her leave and Antonio had said norteamericana cunt.
Before I left for the airport that night Charlotte came to the house with presents for my trip: a travel-sized vial of Grès perfume, a gardenia for my dress, and all the latest magazines and papers. She was on her way to the Jockey Club for dinner.
16
IN FACT SHE HAD.
Told Leonard what she was going to do.
She was going to stay.
Not “stay” precisely.
“Not leave” is more like it.
“I walked away from places all my life and I’m not going to walk away from here,” is exactly what she said to him.
She had said it to him at the clinic and she had said it to him at the Caribe and she had said it to him for the last time the night he left, while they waited for his flight to get clearance out.
I did not know the exact words until after she was dead.
I walked away from places all my life and I’m not going to walk away from here.
“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from,” Leonard had said that night at the airport. The waiting room was empty and the runways were lit up with crossfire from the hardware that the guerrilleros were not supposed to have had. “This isn’t one of those places. It’s the wrong place, Charlotte.”
“I think that’s a song,” Charlotte had said. “ ‘The wrong place, the right face’? Is that how it goes?”
“Charlotte—”
“Sing it for me. No.” She touched his lips with her fingers. “You have a terrible voice. Tell me about the terrific dinner we’re going to have the next time we’re in Paris.”
“What about Marin.”
“Get that big suite at the Plaza Athénée.”
“Marin wants to see you.”
“And get — she didn’t say that. Did she.”
Leonard said nothing.
Charlotte took Leonard’s hand and she kissed each finger, very lightly, very precisely.
“I knew she didn’t say that,” she said then. “Another thing I knew, I knew you wouldn’t lie to me. You lie for a living but you never lie to me.”
“You don’t get any real points for staying here, Charlotte.”
“I can’t seem to tell what you do get the real points for,” Charlotte said. “So I guess I’ll stick around here awhile.”
And when his plane was cleared to leave she had walked out to the gate with him and he had said again don’t you want to see Marin and she had said I don’t have to see Marin because I have Marin in my mind and Marin has me in her mind and they closed the gate and that was the last time Leonard Douglas ever saw Charlotte alive.
The last time I ever saw Charlotte alive was the night two weeks later when I left for New Orleans.
When she pinned her gardenia on my dress.
When she dabbed her Grès perfume on my wrists.
Like a child helping her mother dress for a party.
17
I don’t have to see Marin because I have Marin in my mind.
I don’t have to see Marin because Marin has me in her mind.
In that dirty room in Buffalo those seemed increasingly ambiguous propositions.
“All right,” I said finally to Marin Bogart. “You tell me. You tell me what you think your mother did in Boca Grande.”
“I think she played tennis all day,” Marin Bogart said.
“She didn’t ever play tennis,” I said.
“All day. Every day. I only remember her in a tennis dress.”
“I never saw her in a tennis dress.”
As a matter of fact Charlotte had told me that she and Marin once modeled matching tennis dresses in a fashion show at the Burlingame Country Club and that because she did not play tennis she had needed to ask Marin how to hold the racquet correctly.
“I’m quite sure your mother didn’t play tennis,” I said.
“She always wore a tennis dress,” Marin Bogart said.
“More than once?”
“Always.”
“Didn’t you play tennis?”
“Tennis,” Marin Bogart said, “is just one more mode of teaching an elitest strategy. If you subject it to a revolutionary analysis you’ll see that. Not that I think you will.”