I have no idea what I mean by a woman like Charlotte.
I suppose I mean only a woman so convinced of the danger that lies in the backward glance.
I might have said a woman so unstable, but I told you, Charlotte performed the tracheotomy, Charlotte dropped the clinic apron at the colonels feet. I am less and less convinced that the word unstable has any useful meaning except insofar as it describes a chemical compound.
11
IN THE SECOND WEEK AFTER THE RELEASE OF MARINS tape Leonard flew to Montreal to meet with leaders of a Greek liberation movement. A man who described himself as a disillusioned Scientologist called Charlotte to say that Marin was under the influence of a Clear in Shasta Lake. A masseuse at Elizabeth Arden called Charlotte to say that she had received definite word from Edgar Cayce via Mass Mind that Marin was with the Hunzas in the Himalayas. The partially decomposed body of a young woman was found in a shallow grave on the Bonneville Salt Flats but the young womans dental work differed conclusively from Marins.
Charlotte watched the rain blowing across California Street.
Leonard flew from Montreal to Chicago to speak at a Days of Rage memorial.
You want to see bad teeth, get on down here, Warren said to Charlotte the first night he telephoned. He was calling not from the motel in the Marina but from the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had flown with Bashti Levant and one of his English bands. The algae on the genetic pool. They drink Mai Tais. Get it?
I dont understand what youre doing there.
Im not screwing their women, if thats what you think. Not even with yours, Basil. Basil. Ian. Andrew.
English Jews. You over your homicidal mood?
Charlotte said nothing.
The women all had lobotomies at fourteen, but the teeth stop me. Will you see Porter on his deathbed or wont you?
What exactly is Porter dying of.
Porter is dying of that long disease his life. Alexander Pope, lost on you. Never mind what Porters dying of. Do it for me.
I dont even believe Porters dying. If Porter were dying I wouldnt think youd be hanging around the Beverly Hills Hotel. With people you say you cant stand.
Im not hanging around, Charlotte, Im hanging out. The phrase is hanging out. You always did have a tin ear. Will you come to New Orleans or wont you.
I wont.
Why wont you?
Because if I went to New Orleans with you, Charlotte said, I would end up murdering you. I would take a knife and murder you. In your sleep.
I dont sleep anyway.
Charlotte said nothing.
It doesnt matter to me what you do. Go, dont go. Come, dont come. Murder me, dont murder me. Im only telling you what you have to do for your own peace of mind.
I have had that shit, Charlotte whispered, and hung up.
I would bet my life on your having some character, Warren said the second night he telephoned from the Beverly Hills Hotel. Lucky for me I didnt.
Charlotte said nothing.
Not that it matters. Not that its worth anything. My life.
Charlotte said nothing.
Youre going to remember this, Charlotte. I tried to tell you what to do. Youre going to lie awake and remember this for the rest of your miserable unfortunate life.
Charlotte said nothing.
Charlotte believed that there was something familiar about this telephone call but for a moment she could not put her finger on what it was. There had been something else she was supposed to lie awake and remember for the rest of her miserable unfortunate life.
Leaving him.
That was it.
She tried to put that other telephone call back out of her mind. It must have been after she left him, the other telephone call, because she had never exactly told him that she was leaving him. She had told him that she was going to her mothers funeral. This was true but not the whole truth. Her mother had just died and she was going to have some money to take care of herself and Marin and she did not want to give the money to Warren and she took Marin and flew out of Idlewild and never went back.
You hear me, Charlotte?
She had cried all the way to San Francisco and Marin had been asleep on her lap and she remembered the landing and Marins pale hair damp and sticky with sleep and tears.
Charlotte? They ever mention sins of omission in those wonderful Okie schools you went to?
For the rest of that week when the telephone rang between one and four A.M. Charlotte would hang up as soon as she heard Warrens voice. A few days later a copy of Time arrived with a photograph that showed Charlotte leaving the house on California Street with her hands over her face, and Charlotte wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that the description of her as a reclusive socialite was a contradiction in terms. Leonard returned from Chicago and asked Charlotte not to mail the letter.
I just remembered I never told Warren I was leaving him, Charlotte said to Leonard.
Hes had fifteen years, I guess hes figured it out, Leonard said to Charlotte.
I mean I just kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and said Id be back in a week and I knew I wouldnt be.
I know it.
How could you know it.
Because thats how youll leave me.
Fourteen years, Charlotte said. Not fifteen. Fourteen.
Warren returned from Los Angeles and Leonard asked him to dinner but Warren did not arrive until eleven-thirty, accompanied by a 268-pound widow from Fort Worth he had met at Golden Gate Fields, the jockey who had that day ridden the womans three-year-old filly to defeat, and a shy girl with long legs who was introduced to Leonard by Warren as the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA. Warren had met the most brilliant mathematician at UCLA at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel and had driven her Porsche north by way of Big Sur. She drank large quantities of apple juice and told Leonard that Marin could be located by sensitive programming of a Honeywell 782 solid-state computer. Charlotte had gone to bed with the book about the rose windows at Chartres and did not come downstairs. Charlotte had once taken Marin to see the glass at Chartres and Marin had cried because it was too beautiful.
Or so Charlotte said once.
Another time she told me that she herself had cried.
Still another time she told me that a British television crew had been filming inside the cathedral and she and Marin had been unable to see the glass at all because of the television lights.
I am now incapable of thinking about the glass at Chartres without seeing through every window the lights at the Tivoli Gardens.
12
Ive never been afraid of the dark.
Actually Im never depressed. Actually I dont believe in being depressed.
By the way. Marin and I are inseparable.
Accept those as statements of how Charlotte wished it had been.
Charlotte also told me once that she and Warren Bogart were inseparable.
Charlotte also told me once that she and Leonard Douglas were inseparable.
Charlotte even told me once that she and her brother Dickie were inseparable, and adduced as evidence the fact that he had once given her a Christmas present no one else would have thought to give her: twenty-eight acres in southern Nevada.
Of course it had not been exactly that way at all.
Of course there had been the usual days and weeks and even months when Charlotte had been separated from everyone she knew by a grayness so dense that the brightness of even her own child in the house was galling, insupportable, a reproach to be avoided at breakfast and on the stairs. During such periods Charlotte endured the usual intimations of erratic cell multiplication, dust and dry wind, sexual dysaesthesia, sloth, flatulence, root canal. During such periods Charlotte would rehearse cheerful dialogues she might need to have with Marin. For days at a time her answers to Marins questions would therefore strike the child as weird and unsettling, cheerful but not quite responsive. Do you think Ill get braces in fourth grade, Marin would ask. Youre going to love fourth grade, Charlotte would answer. During such periods Charlotte suffered the usual dread when forced to visit Marins school and hear the doomed children celebrate all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
She would shut her ears.
She would watch Marin numbly, from the usual great distance.
She would hang on by the usual routines, fill in whole days by the usual numbers.
The problem was that Charlotte did not know that any of this was usual.
Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the separateness.
And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life.
13
CHARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER she went with Pete Wright to open the safe-deposit box.
Im not sure your daughter appreciates the legal bind shes put you in, Char.
Pete Wright was examining some stock certificates. Charlotte had known Pete Wright longer than she had known Leonard, he had roomed at Stanford with Dickie and he had handled her divorce from Warren and as Leonards junior partner he had paid a Christmas call every year with a suitable present for Marin, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street he had kept referring to Marin as your daughter. Charlotte did not want to hear about the legal bind she was in and she did not want Pete Wright to call her Char. Only Dickie called her Char. There was something else about Pete Wright that bothered her but she did not want to think about that either.
Pete Wright was examining some stock certificates. Charlotte had known Pete Wright longer than she had known Leonard, he had roomed at Stanford with Dickie and he had handled her divorce from Warren and as Leonards junior partner he had paid a Christmas call every year with a suitable present for Marin, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street he had kept referring to Marin as your daughter. Charlotte did not want to hear about the legal bind she was in and she did not want Pete Wright to call her Char. Only Dickie called her Char. There was something else about Pete Wright that bothered her but she did not want to think about that either.