A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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won’t show me the list, how should I know ‘what.’ Ask Bradley.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I’m not the American ambassador, Victor, Bradley is.”
Victor sucked at his teeth and drummed his glossy fingernails on a Steuben paperweight Bradley had given him as a gesture of ambassadorial good will. Victor believed the pale moons of his fingernails to be evidence of noble blood and had a manicurist meet him every day at noon to shape his cuticles and perform other services characterized by Elena as beyond Bianca’s range. Elena’s faith in the sexual virtuosity of working women was touching and childlike. If I did not completely misapprehend Victor the cuticles came first.
“Ask Bradley,” I repeated. “Call the Embassy and ask Bradley.”
“We don’t run this country at Bradley’s convenience.”
Put a Strasser-Mendana behind a desk and you have a tableau vivant of the famous touchiness of command. Antonio once urinated on the foot of an Italian newspaper-woman who suggested that Boca Grande was perhaps not ready to join the nuclear club. Victor was displeased with Bradley because the week before Bradley had allowed his wife to leave one of Victor’s official lunches in the courtyard at three-thirty, before the food was served, pleading faintness from the heat. Victor felt insulted by Americans who grew faint before lunch, even Americans who were, as Ardis Bradley was, forty-four years old and seven months pregnant.
“In any case.” Victor studied his nails. “In fact. Bradley is in Caracas.”
In any case in fact Bradley was not in Caracas, I had seen him the night before, but it was a theme of Victor’s that Tuck Bradley neglected Boca Grande for livelier capitals.
“About those four o’clock lunches in the courtyard,” I said.
“I wasn’t aware we were talking about any four o’clock lunches in the courtyard.”
“Just one detail. While I think of it. Pass it on to Bianca. I don’t think the baba au rhum should be out in the sun from twelve-thirty on.”
Victor said that he had not called me into his office for advice on serving baba au rhum.
I asked if he had called me into his office to admire the new 380 Mauser automatic pistol mounted on his desk.
Victor snapped his fingers. The aide at the door sprang to my chair and bowed.
“As another norteamericana you could meet her,” Victor said as I got up. He did not look at me. That he continued this conversation at all confirmed his obsession with the list, because it was past noon. At noon exactly his car always took him to meet his manicurist at the apartment he kept in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. The Residencia was only a block and a half from the Ministry but Victor fancied that his car, a black Mercedes limousine with the license BOCA GRANDE 2 (Victor always allowed El Presidente the BOCA GRANDE 1 plate), was the discreet way to go. “In the most natural way you could meet this woman. You could ask her for a coffee. Or a drink.”
“Or a baba au rhum.”
Victor swiveled his chair to face the window. Many of my visits to Victor’s office at the Ministry ended this way, and still do, although the office is now Antonio’s. I suppose Isabel is pleased that the office is finally Antonio’s but Isabel is spending her usual season at the private hospital her doctor operates in Arizona.
When it was reported to Victor that Charlotte Douglas went to the airport every day he construed immediately that her presence on the list had to do with Kasindorf and Riley. Kasindorf was Bradley’s cultural attaché at the Embassy and Riley was a young man who ran an OAS “educational” office called “Operación Simpático” downtown. The connection with Charlotte Douglas, transparent to Victor, was that Kasindorf and Riley also went to the airport every day, met there for coffee at precisely seven-thirty A.M., a time which coincided with the arrival of the night Braniff from Mexico.
In fact Kasindorf and Riley went to the airport not because of the night Braniff from Mexico but because they assumed correctly that Victor had microphones in their offices.
In fact Charlotte Douglas just went to the airport.
7
LA NORTEAMERICANA TOLD A STORY ABOUT PLAYING hide-and-seek with Marin among the thousand trunks of the Great Banyan at the Calcutta Botanical Garden. It had been “the most lyrical” day. She and Marin had “devoured” coconut ice for lunch. She and Marin had wandered beneath the Great Banyan at noon and stayed until after dark.
She leaned toward Victor and me as if the end of the story were a secret never before revealed. “And when Leonard finished his meeting and couldn’t find us at the Hilton he was wild, he had people combing Calcutta for us, it was hilarious.”
The absence of banyan trees at the American Embassy reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.
She told a story about sitting in the rain in a limousine at Lod Airport eating caviar with an Israeli general. They had “devoured” the caviar from the tin with their fingers and pieces of unsalted matzoh. The Israeli and Leonard could meet only between planes and the Israeli had brought the caviar.
Again she leaned toward us. “And when Leonard saw the Iranian seal on the tin he wouldn’t eat the caviar, and the general said ‘don’t be a fool, don’t make me go to war for it,’ it was hilarious.”
The absence of caviar at the American Embassy Christmas party reminded Charlotte Douglas of this story.
She talked constantly. She talked feverishly. She talked as if Victor had released her from vows of silence by walking up to where she stood with Ardis Bradley and offering her a crab puff. Every memory was “lyrical,” every denouement “hilarious,” and sometimes “ironic” as well. Her face was flushed but she was not drunk: she stood very straight and refused even the weak rum punches the Bradleys favored for general entertainments. She seemed to be receiving these pointless but bizarrely arresting stories out of some deep vacuum of nervous exhaustion, transmitting them dutifully in a voice soft and clear and oddly confidential. She used words as a seven-year-old might, as if she had heard them and liked their adult sound but had only the haziest idea of their meaning, and she also mentioned names as a seven-year-old might, with a bewildering disregard for who was listening. “Leonard,” she would say, as if we would naturally know who Leonard was, as if the Minister of Defense of a Central American republic and his norteamericana sister-in-law, acquaintances of an hour in the crush of an official reception, were of course privy to all the people and places in her life.
There was “Leonard.”
There was “Warren.”
There was “Marin.”
There was the house on California Street in San Francisco and there were the meetings in Calcutta and La Paz and in limousines at Lod Airport.
There were the hotel suites, always “flooded with flowers.”
There was the missed plane and its happy ending: Air Force One.
“Imagine Leonard on Air Force One.” She had one of those odd intimate laughs that seemed simultaneously to include everyone within hearing and to exclude all possibility of inquiry. “Ardis. Tell them. You know Leonard.”
“Actually I don’t quite,” Ardis Bradley said.
“For that matter imagine Leonard on a camel,” Charlotte Douglas said.
“Leonard,” Victor said tentatively, looking at Ardis Bradley. “Leonard would be her—”
“Actually I think Tuck might know him,” Ardis Bradley said. Ardis had spent twenty years in places like Sierra Leone and Boca Grande and Chevy Chase learning to go look for Tuck when she did not want to answer a question. “Actually I don’t want Tuck to miss this.”
“Leonard on that camel.” Still laughing Charlotte Douglas touched Victor’s arm. “After