A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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couple,” one of the new FBI men said. It was almost time for lunch and Charlotte had not yet eaten breakfast and the house on California Street seemed to be filling with men who spoke to each other as if Charlotte were not there. “What Chinese couple.”
“The Chinese couple who come to the house,” Charlotte repeated. “And do the Peking duck.”
“I don’t quite follow what she’s talking about.”
“She’s talking about caterers, Eddie, it’s not a point.”
“Maybe if she could run through it again. Marin arrives from Berkeley. Start there. Day before yesterday. Approximately twenty hours prior to the bombing. Marin arrives from Berkeley to—”
“To borrow a windbreaker.” Charlotte spoke by rote. “To go skiing.”
“To borrow a windbreaker. But she doesn’t leave right away. She goes up to her room and she’s up there alone maybe three, four hours, ballpark figure, you aren’t sure which. Up in her room she—”
“You wanted her to tell it, Eddie, let her tell it.”
Charlotte raised her voice. “She went through some things in her drawers.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know what things. She’s eighteen years old, I don’t go through her drawers.”
“Mrs. Douglas mentioned a gold bracelet, Eddie, don’t forget the gold bracelet.”
“You mentioned a gold bracelet, Mrs. Douglas.”
“I said she found a gold bracelet she thought she’d lost.”
“In a drawer.”
“In a drawer, behind a drawer.” There was something about the gold bracelet Charlotte wanted not to think about. Marin had dropped the bracelet on the kitchen table and told Charlotte to keep it. Marin had called the bracelet “dead metal.” Charlotte wished suddenly that she had not mentioned the bracelet and she also wished suddenly that Leonard were not in Nicosia. Or Damascus. Or wherever he was. He had written out the cities and the hotels and the telephone numbers on a legal pad upstairs but Charlotte had not looked at it since he left. Her left temple was beginning to hurt and she resented the FBI men for remembering the gold bracelet.
“Now we get to the part where I call the Chinese couple and ask them to do the Peking duck.” She could hear the edge in her voice but could not control it. “All right?”
“We’re back to the Chinese couple, Eddie.”
“Caterers,” the man the others called Eddie said.
“Not exactly,” Charlotte said.
“They come to your house? They cook dinner?” Charlotte nodded.
“Then they’re caterers. Wasn’t that kind of an exceptional thing to do, Mrs. Douglas, telephoning these caterers?”
“I don’t quite see the exceptional part.” Charlotte wished that the FBI man would not insist on calling the Chinese couple “caterers.” They were not caterers, they were a couple. Under certain circumstances which had not yet arisen they might come to the house on California Street not as cooks but as guests. Charlotte knew a lot of couples like the Chinese couple who did the Peking duck. She knew the Algerian couple who did the couscous, she knew the Indonesian couple who did the rijsttafel, she knew the Mexican couple who were actually second-generation Chicano but who did the authentic Mexican dinner, not common enchiladas and refried beans but exquisite recipes they had learned while vacationing at the Hotel Inglaterra in Tampico. She knew the Filipino couple, she knew the Korean couple. She had recently uncovered the Vietnamese couple. In the kitchen of the house on California Street these and other couples regularly reproduced the menus of underdeveloped countries around the world, but usually for twelve or twenty-four people. Charlotte had never before called one of these couples to cook for fewer than twelve. This time she had. That might be the exceptional part. She began to see calling the Chinese couple to do Peking duck for herself and Marin in a different light, a light not necessarily more revealing but different.
In this light the gold bracelet she had made Marin take had been too loose on Marin’s wrist.
In this light Marin had been too thin and pale for a child who skied and played tennis and was supposed to have spent the week before celebrating Thanksgiving off Cabo San Lucas.
In this light Charlotte had lit the fire and turned on the record-player and called the Chinese couple for the same reason she had insisted that Marin take the bracelet: to keep Marin from the harm outside.
“I mean a catered dinner for two must be quite an expensive proposition,” the FBI man said.
“They’re quite reasonable.” Charlotte spoke automatically. “Considering.”
“Catered dinner for one,” the FBI man said. “Technically. Since Marin didn’t stay.”
“Marin had a paper to finish before she went skiing, I told you.” Charlotte avoided the blank gaze of the FBI men. “She had a paper to finish for her seminar in I think Moby Dick.”
The fat FBI man spoke for the first time since the arrival of the others. “She’s not registered as a student, Mrs. Douglas, I suppose you know that.”
“Actually you should try this couple.” Charlotte spoke very clearly to shut out his voice. She did not know why she had said it was a seminar in Moby Dick. Marin had never mentioned any seminar in Moby Dick.
“She hasn’t been registered for two quarters, and the quarter before that she took all incompletes, but I’m sure you know this.”
“I mean if you like Cantonese food at all.”
Moby Dick had something to do with Warren.
At nineteen Charlotte had written a paper on Melville and Warren had failed her. Warren had failed her and had rung her doorbell for the first time at midnight with the paper torn in half and a bag of cherries and a bottle of bourbon and they had not left the apartment for forty-eight hours. For the first three she called him Mr. Bogart and for the next forty-five she called him nothing at all and it was not until the third day, when he took her to his apartment and asked her to clean it up and she came across the letter from the department chairman advising him that his contract would not be renewed, that she ever called him Warren.
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