On those days when she did leave the motel she would usually come back toward sundown and find Warren gone, the bed unmade, the towels wet on the floor of the room, the curtains still closed and the air sweet and heavy with the smell of bay rum. Warren never put the top back on the bottle of bay rum. She remembered that. She would put the top back on the bottle of bay rum and call the maid and stand outside on the walkway while the room was made up. The air would be chilly and wet and then later in the spring it would be warm and wet. Toward eight or nine on those evenings Warren would telephone the motel and tell her where to meet him.
Warren appears to have his mood upon him, someone would be saying wherever she met him.
Warren is certainly himself tonight.
Warren is incorrigible.
Warren is without doubt the most incorrigible of anybody I know.
So self-absorbed was the texture of life in these rooms where Charlotte went to meet Warren that the facts that she had been married to him for some years and that they were the parents of a child whose photograph appeared somewhere in every post office and gas station in the county appeared not to have penetrated.
She was Warrens friend from California.
She was visiting with Warren.
Warren was showing Mrs. Douglas the South.
Why do you lie? Charlotte said after one such evening. Why do you pretend Im just this pregnant acquaintance you happen to be showing around Biloxi?
Im not lying. Youre just here on a visit. Youll leave.
Thats not what you make me say in bed.
Dont talk about what I make you say in bed. Dont talk about it, talk about it and you lose it, dont you know anything.
We could have been doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should be doing this all our lives, Warren had said.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
I dont want to leave you ever, Charlotte said.
No, Warren said. But you will.
After a while there were no more frosts at night and the wild carrot came out along all the roads and every night ended badly.
After a while there were no more tule fogs at dawn and all Charlotte wanted was one night that did not end badly.
After a while there was Howard Holleriths girl.
What do you suppose Marin did today, Charlotte said one night in the car when she thought Howard Holleriths girl was asleep in the back seat.
Played tennis, Warren said. Marin played tennis today.
Marin who? Howard Holleriths girl said.
See what youre going to leave me to, Warren said to Charlotte.
In the coffee shop of a Holiday Inn outside New Orleans one morning in May or June Charlotte read another Associated Press story in which Leonard was again quoted as saying that Charlotte was traveling with friends. This time Charlotte read the story several times and memorized the phrase. It occurred to her that possibly she had misunderstood the situation. Possibly Leonard and Warren and the Associated Press were right. She was simply traveling with friends, and Warren and Howard Holleriths girl,asleep in the bed behind the second door past the ice machine, were simply the friends with whom she was traveling. Soothed by this construction Charlotte had another cup of coffee and worked the crossword in the Picayune.
6
THE LAST THING CHARLOTTE REMEMBERED BEFORE THE Mountain Brook Country Club in Birmingham was sitting and reading inside the cyclone fence around the swimming pool at a Howard Johnsons in Meridian. The Howard Johnsons was just off a curve on the Interstate between New York and New Orleans and all afternoon the big northern rigs would appear to hurtle toward the cyclone fence and then veer on south. The vibration made her teeth hurt. The shallow end of the pool was filled with prematurely thickened young girls celebrating a forthcoming marriage. They talked as if they were just a year or two out of high school but they were already matrons, careful not to splash one anothers blown and lacquered hair. After a while the bridegroom-to-be arrived with a friend from his office. The bridegroom and his friend were both fleshy young men in short-sleeved white shirts and they placed two six-packs of beer on a damp metal table and they opened all the cans and started drinking the beer. It seemed to be a town in which everyone thickened early. Out of some deference or indifference to their own women the men ignored the shrieks from the pool and instead watched Charlotte as they drank the beer. Somebodys gone and put a bun in that skinny little oven and I wouldnt mind it had been me, one of them said. I never knew this Howard Johnsons was X-rated, the other one said. He held up one of the cans as if to offer it to Charlotte and the other one laughed. Charlotte felt old and awkward and dimly humiliated, a woman almost forty with a body that masqueraded as that of a young girl, a caricature of what they believed her to be. When she went back to the room Warren had the air-conditioning off and the windows closed and all the blankets and spreads from both beds piled over him. By Meridian he was having sweats and chills every day as he slept. By Meridian he did not sleep at night. By Meridian Howard Holleriths girl was no longer with them. Charlotte supposed there had been a fight somewhere but she did not particularly remember it.
I cant get it up, Warren said when she tried to wake him. Baby, baby, I cant get it up.
I dont want it, she said. Thats not what I want.
Dont leave me. Dont leave me again.
How could I leave you. Dont wake up.
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
You like it too much, Warren said. You like it more than anybody I ever knew. I know a girl in Birmingham likes it almost as much as you. Well go do it with her. I want to see you with Julia.
I didnt like that before.
Did we do that before?
With Howards girl. I didnt like it.
You liked it all right.
We could have been doing this all our lives.
We should be doing this all our lives.
We should have done this all our lives, we should do this all our lives.
Talk about it and you lose it.
She was a woman almost forty whose fillings hurt when the highway vibrated. She was a woman almost forty waiting for the night she would call to get the Demerol. When Warren woke at sundown he took her to see a bike movie in a drive-in and drank a fifth of bourbon in the car and drove under the big pink arc lights with the rented car flat-out all the way to Birmingham. When the peonies swelled and broke behind her eyelids in the Ochsner Clinic they blazed like the big pink arc lights all the way to Birmingham. She could take care of somebody or somebody could take care of her and it was the same thing in the end.
Mérida.
Antigua.
Guadeloupe.
How could I leave you.
The same way you left everybody.
He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.
Tell her I said its all the same.
El Aeropuerto del Presidente General Luis Strasser-Mendana, deceased.
Tell her that for me.
FIVE
1
OIL WELLS ABOUT TO COME IN HAVE A SOUND THE ATTENTIVE ear can detect.
As do earthquakes.
Volcanoes about to erupt transmit for days or weeks before their convulsion a signal called the harmonic tremor.
Similarly I know for months before the fact when there is about to be a transition in Boca Grande. There is the occasional tank on the Avenida Centrale. Sentries with carbines appear on the roof of the presidential palace. For reasons I have never understood the postal rates begin to fluctuate mysteriously. There is a mounting mania for construction, for getting ones cut while the government lasts: dummy corporations multiply, phantom payrolls metastasize. No one has an office but everyone has a mail drop. A game is underway, the winner being the player who lands his marker in the Ministry of Defense, and the play has certain ritual moves: whoever wants the Ministry that year must first get the guerrilleros into the game The guerrilleros seem always to believe that they are playing on their own, but they are actually a diversion, a disruptive element placed on the board only to be quelled by stronger leadership. Guns and money begin to reach the guerrilleros via the usual channels. Mimeographed communiqués begin to appear, and twenty people are detained for questioning. A few are reported as prison suicides and a few more reported in exile but months later, again mysteriously, the same twenty are detained for questioning.
FIVE
1
OIL WELLS ABOUT TO COME IN HAVE A SOUND THE ATTENTIVE ear can detect.
As do earthquakes.
Volcanoes about to erupt transmit for days or weeks before their convulsion a signal called the harmonic tremor.
Similarly I know for months before the fact when there is about to be a transition in Boca Grande. There is the occasional tank on the Avenida Centrale. Sentries with carbines appear on the roof of the presidential palace. For reasons I have never understood the postal rates begin to fluctuate mysteriously. There is a mounting mania for construction, for getting ones cut while the government lasts: dummy corporations multiply, phantom payrolls metastasize. No one has an office but everyone has a mail drop. A game is underway, the winner being the player who lands his marker in the Ministry of Defense, and the play has certain ritual moves: whoever wants the Ministry that year must first get the guerrilleros into the game The guerrilleros seem always to believe that they are playing on their own, but they are actually a diversion, a disruptive element placed on the board only to be quelled by stronger leadership. Guns and money begin to reach the guerrilleros via the usual channels. Mimeographed communiqués begin to appear, and twenty people are detained for questioning. A few are reported as prison suicides and a few more reported in exile but months later, again mysteriously, the same twenty are detained for questioning.
A mounting giddiness about the proximity of the guerrilleros sets the social tone of the city: many tea dances are planned, many adulterous liaisons initiated.
Many citizens adopt eccentric schedules to comply with the terms of their kidnapping insurance.
El Presidente, whoever is playing El Presidente at the moment, falls ill, and is urged to convalesce at Bariloche, in Argentina.
Gerardo arrives, and stays for the action.