A Book of Common Prayer. Joan Didion
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Antonio was always handling guns, or smashing plates. As a gesture toward the spirit of Christmas he had refrained from smashing any plates at lunch, but the effort seemed to have exhausted his capacity for congeniality. Had Antonio been born in other circumstances he would have been put away early as a sociopath.
Bianca remained oblivious.
Bianca remained immersed in the floor plan for an apartment she wanted Victor to take for her in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. Bianca had never been apprised of the fact that Victor already had an apartment in the Residencia Vista del Palacio. For five of these twenty minutes it had seemed to me up in the air whether Antonio was about to shoot up Bianca’s creche or tell Bianca about the Residencia Vista del Palacio.
“I said la norteamericana is sick.”
“Send her to Dr. Schiff,” Antonio muttered. Dr. Schiff was Isabel’s doctor in Arizona. “Let the great healer tell la norteamericana who’s making her sick.”
Victor only gazed at the sky. I did not know whether Victor had seen Charlotte Douglas since the night he took her from the Embassy to the Residencia but I did know that a Ministry courier had delivered twenty-four white roses to the Caribe on Christmas Eve.
“So is Jackie Onassis sick,” Elena said. Elena was leafing fretfully through a back issue of Paris-Match. “Or she was in September.”
“So am I sick,” Isabel said. “I need complete quiet.”
“I should think that’s what you have,” Elena said.
“Not like Arizona,” Isabel said. “I should have stayed through December, Dr. Schiff begged me. The air. The solitude. The long walks, the simple meals. Yoghurt at sunset. You can’t imagine the sunsets.”
“Sounds very lively,” Elena said without looking up. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jackie Onassis.”
“If that’s the norteamericana Grace is talking about I think she had every right to marry the Greek,” Bianca said. “Not that I would ever care to live in Athens. I wonder about the view from the Residencia.”
“Grace was talking about a different norteamericana, Bianca.” Victor leaned back and clipped a cigar. “Of no interest to you. Or Grace.”
“This norteamericana is of interest only to Victor.” Antonio seemed to be having trouble drawing a bead on the lizard. “But she could tell you about the view from the Residencia. She’s an expert on the view from the Residencia. Victor should introduce you to her.”
“I don’t meet strangers,” Bianca said. “As you know. I take no interest. Look here, the plan for the eleventh floor. If we lived up that high we’d have clear air. No fevers.”
“Almost like Arizona,” Elena said. “I wonder if Gerardo knows Jacqueline de Ribes.”
“Arizona,” Isabel said. “I wonder what Dr. Schiff is doing today.”
Antonio fired twice at the lizard.
The lizard darted away.
Two porcelain wise men shattered.
“Eating yoghurt in the sunset I presume,” Elena said.
“Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns,” Isabel said.
“What do you mean exactly, Isabel, ‘Dr. Schiff doesn’t believe in guns’?” Antonio thrust the pistol into Isabel’s line of sight. “Does Dr. Schiff not believe in the ‘existence’ of guns? Look at it. Touch it. It’s there. What does Dr. Schiff mean exactly?”
Isabel closed her eyes.
Elena closed the copy of Paris-Match.
Bianca began to gather up the fragments of porcelain.
Victor looked at me and spoke very deliberately. “There’s no longer any need for you to see the norteamericana, Grace. An extremely silly woman.”
“But then so is your manicurist,” Elena murmured.
“If I could live on the eleventh floor I think I’d take an interest again,” Bianca said.
“Quite frankly it’s better when you don’t,” Isabel said, abruptly and unsettlingly lucid, and in the silence that followed she stood up and put her arms around Bianca.
For a moment two of my three sisters-in-law stood there in the courtyard with the guard at the gate on Christmas afternoon and buried their faces in each other’s shoulders and stroked each other’s hair. Only their silence suggested their tears. They were little sisters crying.
Elena rubbed at a drop of champagne on her magenta crepe de chine pajamas.
Antonio drummed his nails on the table.
“It might be better if you left,” Victor said to Antonio.
“Maybe I’ll go get your norteamericana to sit on my face,” Antonio said to Victor.
Victor smoked his cigar and looked at me. “Feliz Navidad,” he said after a while.
Here is what Charlotte Douglas was said by Elena to have done with the twenty-four white roses Victor sent her on Christmas Eve: left them untouched in their box and laid the box in the hallway for the night maid.
9
“IT’S DEPRESSING TO BE SICK IN A HOTEL.”
“I don’t mind it.” She said it as a child might, and she said nothing more.
“At Christmas.”
“I didn’t mind.”
I tried again. “You’re at the mercy of the maids.”
“They’re very nice here.”
I watched Charlotte Douglas unwrap a cracker and fold the cellophane into a neat packet. She had insisted that we meet not at my house but at the Capilla del Mar, that I be her guest.
“Actually I’m never depressed.” The act of saying this seemed to convince her that it was so, and she picked up the wine list in a show of resolute conviviality. “Actually I don’t believe in being depressed. It’s hard to keep wine in this climate, isn’t it? Wine and crackers?”
Through two courses of that difficult dinner she never mentioned Victor.
She guided every topic to its most general application.
She talked as if she had no specific history of her own.
No Leonard.
No Warren.
As dessert was served she mentioned Marin for the first time: she said that she preferred the Capilla del Mar to the Jockey Club because the colored lights strung outside the Capilla del Mar reminded her of the Tivoli Gardens, where she had once flown with Marin for the weekend. Her face came alive with pleasure as she described this adult’s dream of a weekend a child might like, described the puppet shows, the watermills, the picnics with the child. They had made dinners of salami and petits fours. They had scarcely slept. They had wandered beneath the colored lights until Marin’s heels blistered, and then they had taken off their shoes and wandered barefoot.
“And when we got back to the hotel we ordered cocoa from room service.” Charlotte Douglas leaned across the table. “And I let Marin place the order and tip the waiter and I taught her how to wash out her underwear at night.”
I asked if her husband had gone to Copenhagen on business, but she said no. Her husband had not gone to Copenhagen at all. She had just woken up one morning in the house on California Street and decided to fly Marin to Copenhagen. “To see Tivoli. I mean before she was too old to like it.”
Her eyes were fixed on the colored lights strung over our table on the porch at the Capilla del Mar. The lights at the Capilla del Mar were not Christmas lights but souvenirs of the season I married Edgar in São Paulo, the season a deranged Haitian dentist convinced the Minister