A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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inevitable five-course lunch. In the inevitable Valerian Rybar dining room. Followed by the inevitable camel. I tried to postpone the camel part, I kept eating and eating, everything had this vile mint taste, I kept trying to distract the sheikh, I kept asking him what I could—”
She broke off abruptly and shrugged.
“What you could—”
“It was hilarious.” She was looking around the room as if unsure how she had gotten there. “I used to like mint but I don’t any more, do you?”
“You kept asking the sheikh what you could—?”
“I suppose it’s one of those abandoned tastes. As opposed to acquired. Mint.” She focused on Victor with difficulty. “I kept asking the sheikh what I could send him from America. Of course.”
“And then,” Victor prompted.
“He wanted eight-track cassettes and flowered sheets.” Her voice was absent. “They all do.”
“But after lunch?”
“After lunch?”
“The camel?”
“The camel.” She seemed relieved to be handed the thread to her story but had lost interest in telling it. “So Leonard rode the camel. Of course. Leonard had to ride the camel.”
“Leonard would be—”
“You know how the Kuwaiti are.”
“Your husband? Leonard would be your husband?”
“One of them.” Her voice was still absent. “I mean they lay on a camel, you have to ride the camel.”
“And he has occasion to travel a great deal.” Victor was not to be deflected. “Your husband. Leonard. He travels. For business. For pleasure. For whatever.”
“He runs guns,” Charlotte Douglas said. “I wish they had caviar.”
Victor stared at her.
She speared a shrimp, dipped it in mayonnaise and offered it to Victor. Victor made no response.
“I don’t mean literally.” She spoke with disinterested patience and still held out the shrimp to Victor. “I don’t mean he literally buys and sells the hardware.”
“The hardware,” Victor said.
She ate the shrimp herself and seemed about to drop the toothpick into the six-hundred-dollar handbag with the broken clasp when Tuck Bradley appeared. To my astonishment she handed Tuck Bradley the toothpick. To my further astonishment he stood there holding it, between two fingers, looking prissy and foolish. Beyond handing him the toothpick Charlotte seemed entirely unaware of Tuck Bradley’s presence. “He’s kind of a lawyer,” she said finally. “He’s kind of a lawyer in San Francisco.”
“If you’re talking about Leonard he’s a very well-known lawyer,” Tuck Bradley said.
“In a way,” Charlotte said.
“In San Francisco,” Tuck Bradley said.
“And in some other places,” Charlotte said.
And then, her animation returning, she again touched Victor’s arm in that way she had of physically touching strangers, of reaching out unconsciously and then drawing back as if she had just realized the gesture’s sexual freight; that mannerism, that tic, that way of barely suggesting impossible intimacy. She did this only to strangers but she did not do it to all strangers. I never saw her do it to a woman and I never saw her do it to Antonio. She never did it to Gerardo either but that was because Gerardo did it first, to her. Sexual freight was another area in which I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.
“You know what you need here,” she said to Victor, lifting her fingers from his arm as if burned. “You know what Boca Grande needs.”
“We’re making great headway with the People-to-People program,” Tuck Bradley said. “Leaps and bounds.”
Neither Charlotte nor Victor looked at him.
“I know what you need here,” Charlotte said.
“What do I need here,” Victor said. His voice was almost hoarse. “Say it.”
She studied the square emerald on the hand that had touched Victor and slid it up and down. She seemed aware of nothing she was doing. She was reflexively seductive. I did not want to watch this happening. I did not want to think of Victor and this woman in the apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio and I did not want to see the black Mercedes limousine with the BOCA GRANDE 2 plates parked outside the Caribe.
“Think of what made Acapulco,” she said finally. “Think of what turned Acapulco around overnight.”
Victor stared at the emerald as if transfixed.
Tuck Bradley snapped the toothpick in two.
I looked away.
“I’m not sure Mrs. Douglas realizes the problems,” Tuck Bradley said.
“Think,” Charlotte repeated.
“Say it,” Victor repeated.
“A film festival,” Charlotte Douglas said.
“You won’t want the details but it’s rather a tragic situation,” Ardis Bradley said. “Tuck could tell you better than I.”
“I won’t bore you with the details but it’s rather an interesting situation,” Tuck Bradley said. “Don’t ask her about her daughter.”
I could not have asked Charlotte Douglas about her daughter in any case because Charlotte Douglas had already left, with Victor. I went as planned to Victor’s and ate with Bianca, alone. The black Mercedes limousine with the BOCA GRANDE 2 plates was seen first at the Residencia Vista del Palacio and later at the Caribe. Bianca did not then and does not now go out, nor does she express interest in her husband’s arrivals and departures. That is another example of the genteel behavior Bianca was taught at Sacre Coeur in New Orleans.
The next afternoon when I saw Charlotte Douglas arguing with the pharmacist in the big drugstore on the Avenida Centrale she did not look at me. She looked disheveled and unwell, her eyes puffy beneath dark glasses, her bright hair unkempt and only partly covered by a bandana.
“You tell me chloromycetin.” The pharmacist slapped the counter with his palm. “I give you chloromycetin.”
“This is tincture of opium.”
“Different type chloromycetin.”
“I can smell it, it’s opium.”
“Same thing. Para la disentería.”
“But they’re not the same thing at all.” Even in her distress she seemed determined to instruct him on this point. “They’re both para la disentería, but they’re quite different. Chloromycetin is a—”
“I give you chloromycetin.”
“Forget the whole thing,” she said, her voice low and her eyes averted from where I stood.
Later that afternoon I sent a maid to the Caribe with twenty chloromycetin and a note asking Charlotte Douglas to have dinner when she was recovered.
8
“CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS IS ILL,” I SAID AFTER CHRISTMAS lunch in the courtyard at Victor and Bianca’s.
No one had spoken for twenty minutes. I had timed it. I had counted the minutes while I watched two mating flies try to extricate themselves from a melting chocolate shaving on the untouched Bûche de Noël. The children had already been trundled off quarreling to distribute nut cups to veterans, Gerardo had already made his filial call from St. Moritz, Elena had already been photographed in her Red Cross uniform and had changed back into magenta