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 mother’s 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 Marin’s 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 Warren’s 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.
“He’s had fifteen years, I guess he’s figured it out,” Leonard said to Charlotte.
“I mean I just kissed him goodbye at Idlewild and said I’d be back in a week and I knew I wouldn’t be.”
“I know it.”
“How could you know it.”
“Because that’s how you’ll 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 woman’s 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
“
I’ve never been afraid of the dark.
”
“
Actually I’m never depressed. Actually I don’t 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 Marin’s questions would therefore strike the child as weird and unsettling, cheerful but not quite responsive. “Do you think I’ll get braces in fourth grade,” Marin would ask. “You’re going to love fourth grade,” Charlotte would answer. During such periods Charlotte suffered the usual dread when forced to visit Marin’s 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
C
HARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER
she went with Pete Wright to open the safe-deposit box.
“I’m not sure your daughter appreciates the legal bind she’s 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 Leonard’s 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.
“You’re in a bit of a pickle here, Char.”
“That’s exactly what you said when I left Warren. And you took this enormous legal problem to Leonard and Leonard said I wasn’t.”
Charlotte took a gold pin of her grandmother’s from the safe-deposit box.
Charlotte imagined the gold pin attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
Pete Wright had come to New York once when she was married to Warren.
“And I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what.”
“I wasn’t in a bit of a pickle.”
“I have nothing but respect for Leonard as a lawyer, Charlotte, but as you know, Leonard leaves the estate work to me.” Pete Wright took a deep breath. “Now. What we have here are stock certificates worth X dollars a quarter in dividends—”
“Eight-hundred and seven. $807 a quarter. I looked it up when you called me.”
“What I’m saying, Charlotte, is that these particular certificates are in your and your daughter’s names as joint tenants. Her signature—”
“I can forge it, can’t I.”
“Not legally, no.”
“All right. I won’t cash the checks. It’s $807 a quarter, it’s nothing.”
The gold pin had a broken clasp. As Charlotte held the pin in her fingers she had an abrupt physical sense of eating chicken à la king and overdone biscuits at her grandmother’s house in Hollister.
Pete Wright.
Pete Wright had been in New York once and had taken her to the Palm for dinner.
“What may seem ‘nothing’ to you, Charlotte—”
“I suppose you’re about to tell me that $807 a quarter is the average annual income for a grape picker. Is that what you’re about to tell me?”
“I’m about to overlook your hostility.”
“Leonard leaves the estate work to you, you leave the grape pickers to Leonard. Is that fair?”
“We used to be friends, Charlotte, and I like to think—”
She could taste the soft bits of pimento in the chicken à la king.
She could smell the biscuits burning in the oven.
She could also smell citronella, and calamine lotion, and the sweetened milky emulsion in prescription bottles that contained aureomycin. She could taste the acrid goat cheese her father used to get from the man who ran his cattle on the ranch. Her father had died. She could feel crushed and browning in her hand the camellias her mother used to braid into her hair for birthday parties. Her mother had died. She had erased burned biscuits and citronella when Warren came to her door in Berkeley, and she seemed to have been busy since, but there in the safe-deposit vault of the Wells-Fargo Bank on Powell Street she was not so busy.
She had erased some other things too.
She had been too busy.
Charlotte closed her hand around the pin with the broken clasp and tried not to think how it could be attached to the firing pin of a bomb.
She had gotten drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.
“I gather by your silence you think Warren might oppose it.”
“Oppose what,” Charlotte said.
“Oppose declaring your daughter legally dead.”
Charlotte looked at Pete Wright.
“It’s a legality. It doesn’t mean anything, but it would enable you to cash these particular dividend checks. Or sell this particular stock. Or whatever.”
Charlotte picked up the certificates.
“As well as clarify the question of the ranch. Which I feel impelled to remind you is tied up in trust for her. A loose trust, granted, but—”
Charlotte tore the certificates in half.
Pete Wright gazed at the wall behind Charlotte and made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Warren’s quite disturbed, I don’t know if you realize that. He comes by the house, he drinks too much, he jumps all over Clarice about her hatha yoga class, he acts like—”
Her mother had died.
Warren had not come home the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright.
“You don’t need to tell me what Warren acts like.”
“I gather you and Warren have had some misunderstanding, the rights and wrongs of which are outside my purview, but—”
Her father had died.
Warren had called at four A.M. the night she got drunk at the Palm with Pete Wright and she had told him not to come home.
“—I must say I don’t think you’re solving anything by pretending there aren’t certain complications to—”
People did die. People were loose in the world and left it, and she had been too busy to notice.
The morning after she got drunk at the Palm she and Warren had taken Marin to lunch at the Carlyle. Marin was cold.
“I’m trying to talk to you like a Dutch uncle,” Pete Wright said.
Warren gave her his coat.
“I think I fucked you one Easter,” Charlotte said.
For the next several days Charlotte wanted only to eat the food she had eaten in Hollister but she had lost the recipes her mother had written out and Charlotte did not know the number of any couple who would come to the house on California Street and do chicken à la king and burned biscuits. When I think of Charlotte Douglas apprehending death at the age of thirty-nine in the safe-deposit vault of a bank in San Francisco it occurs to me that there was some advantage in having a mother who died when I was eight, a father who died when I was ten, before I was busy.
14
C
HARLOTTE DID NOT GET OUT OF BED THE DAY AFTER
she met the woman named Enid Schrader.
“Mark spoke so very highly of you,” the woman had said on the telephone. There had been in Enid Schrader’s voice something Charlotte did not want to recognize: a forced gaiety, a haggard sprightliness, a separateness not unlike her own. “Of you and your beautiful home.”
Mark Schrader was said to have been on the L–1011 with Marin. Mark Schrader had on his face, in the pictures Charlotte had seen of him, a pronounced scar from a harelip operation. It did not seem plausible to Charlotte that she could have met a boy with such a scar and forgotten him, nor did it seem plausible that anyone on the L–1011 with Marin had ever spoken highly of the house on California Street, but maybe the boy’s mother was trying to tell her something. Maybe there was a code in that peculiar stilted diction. Maybe Enid Schrader knew where Marin was.
“I think we should meet,” Charlotte said guardedly. “Could you have lunch at all? Today? The St. Francis Grill?”
“Delightful. Why.”
“Why what?”
“Why the St. Francis Grill?”
“I just thought—” Charlotte did not know what she had just thought. She had rejected the house because it was watched. She had hit upon the St. Francis Grill as a place where all corners of the room could be seen. “Is there somewhere you’d rather go?”
“Not at all, I don’t keep up with where the beautiful people eat. Not to worry about my recognizing you, I’ve seen pictures of you.”
“I’ve seen pictures of you too.”
“Before,” the woman said. “I meant before. Pictures of you and your beautiful home.”
Charlotte had met the woman at one-thirty and at two-thirty the code remained impenetrable. The woman did not seem interested in talking about her son, or about Marin. The woman seemed interested instead in talking about a friend who had a decorator’s card.
“You’ll adore Ruthie.” The woman was drinking daiquiris and had refused lunch. “I’m getting you together soonest, that’s definite, a promise. Meanwhile I’ll borrow her card and we’ll do the trade-only places. How’s Tuesday?”
“How’s Tuesday for what?” Charlotte said faintly.
“Monday’s a no-no for me but if Tuesday’s bad for you, let’s say Wednesday. Earliest. Grab lunch where we find it.”
“Listen.” Charlotte glanced around the room before she spoke. “If there’s something to see I think we should—I mean could we see it now?”
“But I haven’t got Ruthie’s card. I mean unless
you
have a card—” The woman looked up. “What’s the matter?”