A Book of Common Prayer Page 6

  Or more accurately his only true vocation.

  Since he was only fitfully amused by anything at all.

  In the first place Gerardo had asked Elena to come for dinner that night. That Elena came was a tribute to Gerardo’s sexual power over her, because Elena was not speaking to me. Elena was not speaking to me because I had that morning advised her that she and Gerardo would be better off exhibiting their tedious interest in each other’s bodies in the Caribe ballroom than at political meetings under surveillance by both Victor and the Americans. I did not like hearing about Elena and Gerardo from Tuck Bradley. I did not like Tuck Bradley hearing about Elena and Gerardo from Kasindorf and Riley. As a matter of fact I had already heard about Elena and Gerardo, from Victor, and I did not like that either.

  Elena said that Gerardo was the only person in the entire family who understood dancing or “fun.”

  I said that this might be true but in this case Gerardo’s “fun” lay not in dancing but in embarrassing the family by parading the widow of a family presidente at meetings of people opposed to the family. It made no difference if Gerardo went to these meetings, because Gerardo’s image in the community, deserved or not, was that of someone “worthless,” and “young.” It did make a difference if she, Elena, went to these meetings, because her image in the community, again deserved or not, was that of someone “virtuous,” and “older.”

  A national treasure as it were.

  But Elena had stopped speaking. Elena did not even know that these events to which Gerardo took her were “meetings.” She believed them to be “parties.” I think she still does.

  In any case.

  In the second place.

  Just asking Elena to dinner had not quite sated Gerardo’s craving for social piquancy. He had asked Elena and then he had proceeded to ask an extremely sullen girl he had been seeing off and on for years, an ambitious mestiza who had once gone to Paris with him and left him first for a minor Thyssen and then for an English rock-and-roll singer and had recently returned to Boca Grande to redeploy her resources. The girl was the daughter of the cashier at the Jockey Club and her name was Carmen Arrellano but she called herself Camilla de Arrellano y Bolívar and did not visit the Jockey Club. On this particular evening she was sulking because Gerardo was listening to the radio, and possibly also because I had told the cook to ignore her demand to be served a separate dinner of three boiled shrimp on a white plate with half a lemon wrapped in gauze. The cook had found this demand particularly offensive because her son was married to Carmen Arrellano’s cousin.

  “All class enemies must suffer exemplary punishment.”

  The voice on Radio Jamaica was sweetly instructive.

  “When the fascist police think we are near we will be far away. When the fascist police think we are far away we will be near.”

  “She lisps,” Gerardo said.

  “She sounds like those Cubans at the party,” Elena said. Elena had several times mentioned this “party” to which she and Gerardo had gone the night before, apparently thinking to annoy me and Carmen Arrellano in a single stroke. “Doesn’t she, Gerardo. Those dreadful Cubans who came with Bebe Chicago. I don’t mean the lisp, I mean the words.”

  “I’m only listening for the lisp,” Gerardo said. “I wouldn’t mention Bebe Chicago in front of Grace if I were you, she’ll cut off your clothes allowance.”

  I said nothing. Bebe Chicago was a West Indian homosexual who after some years at the London School of Economics and a few more organizing Caribbean “liberation fronts” out of Mexico had turned up in Boca Grande to see what he could promote. His name was François Parmentier but everyone called him Bebe Chicago. I have no idea why. He was said to have connections with the guerrilleros. I heard about him frequently, from both Victor and Tuck Bradley. People like Bebe Chicago come and go in Boca Grande, and the main mark they leave is to have provided inadvertent employment for the many other people required to follow them around and tap their telephones.

  “Grace thinks Bebe Chicago and I are using you,” Gerardo said.

  “Delicious,” Elena said. “Do it.”

  “Actually that’s not the dynamic.” Gerardo smiled at me and Elena. “Actually I’m using Bebe Chicago. Listen to this girl. I like the lisp and the pinafore together. Very nice.”

  “All you think about is sex,” Elena said.

  “You wish that were true,” Gerardo said. “But it’s not.”

  “She bores me,” Carmen Arrellano said sullenly. Carmen had been arranged since dinner in a corner of the room where she could gaze at herself in a mirror. “It bores me.”

  “Of course it bores you,” Gerardo said. “You don’t like sex. You can’t dress for it, there are never any photographers. Or is that what bores you?”

  “The radio,” Carmen said sullenly.

  “I didn’t dream you were listening,” Elena said. “I thought you were devising a new makeup. Have you ever thought of bleaching your eyebrows?”

  “I said this is boring me,” Carmen said to Gerardo.

  Gerardo held up a hand to silence her and moved closer to the radio.

  “This was really a terribly amusing party you missed last night,” Elena said to Carmen.

  Carmen picked up a magazine.

  “Steel band,” Elena said. Actually Elena had not found the “party” amusing at all. Actually Elena had complained before she stopped speaking to me that Gerardo’s friends did not dance but sat around a filthy room watching a Cuban film about sugar production. Elena smiled at Carmen. “Lots of Dominicans and these frightful Cubans. We danced until five this morning. Are you still bored?”

  “Carmen is always bored,” Gerardo said. “Excuse me. Camilla is always bored. I want to hear this lisp.”

  “We shall reply to repression with liberation. We shall reply to the terrorism of the dictatorship with the terrorism of the revolution.”

  Elena continued to smile benignly at Carmen.

  Carmen dropped her magazine on the floor and stood up.

  “We’re tiring your mother,” Carmen announced to Gerardo. “And your amusing aunt.”

  “I should say,” Elena said. “It’s nearly nine.”

  “I’ll take you home when this is over,” Gerardo said. “Meanwhile you might listen.”

  “Pinched little parrot talking about capitalism,” Carmen said. “Who cares about capitalism.”

  “That’s very interesting, Carmen.” Gerardo was turning the radio dials to keep the relay from fading. “It’s very interesting because there’s a body of thought that capitalism is precisely what ruined your character.”

  There was a silence.

  Elena giggled.

  “Also yours,” Gerardo said to Elena. “Not that I agree entirely.”

  I was relieved when the relay faded out.

  I was equally tired of listening to Gerardo and Elena and Carmen Arrellano and the little girl on the tape.

  I recall that none of the four had my sympathy that night.

  6

  THE NIGHT CHARLOTTE FIRST HEARD THE TAPE SHE apparently tried to transcribe it word for word, so that she could explain to Leonard and Warren what Marin had in mind. She got only as far as the part where Marin discussed what she called the revolutionary character of her organization. “Now I would like to discuss the revolutionary character of our organization,” Marin definitely said on the tape. “The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary.”

  Charlotte read this sentence several times. She wondered if she had misheard Marin, or missed an important clause. The tape was still running and Marin could still be heard, talking about “expropriation” and “firepower” and “revolutionary justice” and about how the Transamerica Building was one of many symbols of imperialist latifundismo in San Francisco, but Charlotte was still fixed on that one sentence. The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that
all our activity is defined as revolutionary. She could parse the sentence but she could make no sense of it, could find no way to rephrase it so that Leonard and Warren would understand.

  As it turned out she did not need to explain the sentence to Leonard because when he arrived from the airport at midnight he said that the sentence was not original with Marin but had been lifted from a handbook by a Brazilian guerrilla theorist named Marighela.

  “I’ve got just one thing to say about the operation,” Leonard said.

  Charlotte waited.

  “I know where they got their rhetoric but I’d like to know where they got their hardware.”

  As it turned out Charlotte did not need to explain the sentence to Warren either because when he called from New York at two that morning he had already heard the tape and, like Leonard, he had just one thing to say about the operation.

  “Fuck Marin,” he said.

  I think Warren Bogart would have had my sympathy that night.

  7

  WHEN I MARRIED EDGAR STRASSER-MENDANA I RECEIVED, from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the “Windsor Rose” pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband’s books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in these same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.

  So in many ways did Charlotte.

  As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.

  Not Charlotte.

  Never Charlotte.

  I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo’s hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to “entertain” she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. “I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere, isn’t it,” she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?”

  I keep those cuts that don’t show in mind when I think about Charlotte Douglas’s passage from the house on California Street to the Boca Grande airport. Charlotte Amelia Douglas. Charlotte Amelia Bogart. Born Charlotte Amelia Havemeyer. Charlotte. I am not even certain she was talking figuratively.

  In the first week after the release of Marin’s tape these events occurred.

  Charlotte received a call from a young woman in New York who said that Warren would arrive in San Francisco on a midnight plane. Warren did not.

  Charlotte received a call from a spiritualist in the Netherlands who said that he perceived the aura of a girl in a pinafore selling tripe in the Belleville section of Paris. He would discuss his vision in detail upon receipt of a first-class airplane ticket to San Francisco, round-trip and refundable.

  Leonard received a call from the sister of a convict at San Quentin who said that her brother had reason to know that Marin was working as an aide in a state mental hospital. He would name the state upon receipt of an unconditional parole.

  The young woman in New York called back to say that Warren had missed the midnight plane but would arrive in San Francisco the next afternoon. Warren did not.

  A pair of FBI men came for coffee every morning.

  An apartment-court manager on the outskirts of Detroit told NBC that he had seen Marin and “two jumped-up coloreds” loading carbines into the trunk of a 1957 Pontiac at dawn in the Livonia Mall parking lot. By the time he appeared on CBS he described Marin’s companions as “possibly black or Indian” and the car as a 1957 Pontiac “or some later-model General Motors vehicle.” In the Detroit Free Press the story was headlined “A SEARCH FOR A NERVOUS INDIAN.”

  Marin was said to be in Havana.

  Marin was said to be in Hanoi.

  Warren left two messages on the answering service that he would definitely arrive in San Francisco via TWA the following morning at 10:35 A.M. He did not.

  “What have we here,” Leonard said when he finally walked into the room Charlotte had taken in the Fairmont Hotel. Leonard had addressed a bar luncheon on constitutional law at the Fairmont and a telephone had been brought to the dais and it was Warren calling from New York. Charlotte had watched Leonard take the call from Warren and then she had left the dais and gone to the desk and asked for a room and telephoned Leonard to meet her upstairs when he finished lunch. The room was cold and the radiator jammed off and the big windows overlooking the Pacific Union Club would not close. Yet for an hour and ten minutes Charlotte had been sitting barefoot in the gray afternoon light wearing only the handmade navy-blue silk underwear she had just bought in a shop in the lobby. She had been trying not to remember about Marin or Warren. She had been trying to remember a carnal mood.

  “No. Don’t tell me,” Leonard said. “Let me guess. You decided the way to avoid seeing Warren was to move to the Fairmont.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Warren,” Charlotte said.

  “I got him a ride out.”

  “Don’t talk about him,” Charlotte said. “Come here.”

  “I know perfectly well what you’re doing. Even if you don’t.”

  “Don’t talk about it. Don’t laugh. I just want it.”

  “You don’t want it at all.”

  Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the spread around herself. “I did.”

  “You’re transparent, Charlotte. To everyone but yourself.”

  Charlotte gazed out the window. “Somebody died,” she said after a while. “Somebody died at the Pacific Union Club. While you were talking. Downstairs.”

  “How do you know.”

  “The fire department came. The resuscitator squad. And then an ambulance. And they lowered the flag.”

  Leonard sat on a chair facing the bed. “I know exactly what you’re trying to do.”

  “Look. You can see the flag. Half mast. What do you mean, you got him a ride out?”

  “Never mind Warren. It’s a lousy idea, Charlotte, trying to have a baby.”

  “Who said anything about a baby? I say I want to fuck, you say I don’t. You say you got Warren a ride out, I say how, you say never mind Warren. I say somebody died at the Pacific Union Club, you start talking about having a baby. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Leonard kept his eyes on Charlotte but she did not meet them.

  “Quite honestly I don’t.
”

  “Quite honestly I don’t think you do. Quite honestly I always know what you’re thinking before you do. What you’re thinking now is this: you get yourself pregnant, Warren can’t get to you. ABC. QED. Don’t ask me why. Where did you get that underwear.”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that your primary erogenous zone is your underwear?”

  Charlotte had pulled the bedspread closer and smoked a cigarette without speaking and there had not seemed any point in staying in the cold room after that. In the elevator it occurred to her that he had been trying to make her laugh with him but that was another mood she could not remember. In fact she did want a baby.

  “He apparently called the office and gave Suzy a lot of shit before he got me here.” Leonard nodded at the Fairmont doorman. “ ‘Your friend Warren,’ Suzy calls him.”

  “I don’t want him to come out here.”

  “It’s not up to you, Charlotte. Come out of your trance. He wants to come out.”

  “Then why hasn’t he.”

  “You know as well as I do why hasn’t he, Charlotte, he hasn’t been able to promote an airplane ticket, that’s why hasn’t he.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “Of course he didn’t say that. Wake up.”

  Charlotte concentrated on trying to tie her scarf in the wind.

  “So as soon as the Q-A was over I made a call and got him a ride out on Bashti Levant’s plane.”

  “I can’t—” Charlotte broke off.

  “You can’t what.”

  Charlotte shrugged.

  “You can’t what, Charlotte.”

  “I can’t see Warren on a small plane with Bashti Levant for five hours.” She had just seized on this but it was true. Bashti Levant was in the music business. Bashti Levant had “labels,” and three-piece suits and large yellow teeth and obscure Balkan proclivities. “They won’t like each other.”

  “No. They won’t. They will cordially dislike each other and they will entirely entertain each other. That’s not what you were going to say. You can’t what.”