Free A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male’s totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. “I mean that’s pretty much what happens everywhere, isn’t it,” she said. “Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn’t show?”
    I keep those cuts that don’t show in mind when I think about Charlotte Douglas’s passage from the house on California Street to the Boca Grande airport. Charlotte Amelia Douglas. Charlotte Amelia Bogart. Born Charlotte Amelia Havemeyer. Charlotte. I am not even certain she was talking figuratively.
    In the first week after the release of Marin’s tape these events occurred.
    Charlotte received a call from a young woman in New York who said that Warren would arrive in San Francisco on a midnight plane. Warren did not.
    Charlotte received a call from a spiritualist in the Netherlands who said that he perceived the aura of a girl in a pinafore selling tripe in the Belleville section of Paris. He would discuss his vision in detail upon receipt of a first-class airplane ticket to San Francisco, round-trip and refundable.
    Leonard received a call from the sister of a convict at San Quentin who said that her brother had reason to know that Marin was working as an aide in a state mental hospital. He would name the state upon receipt of an unconditional parole.
    The young woman in New York called back to say that Warren had missed the midnight plane but would arrive in San Francisco the next afternoon. Warren did not.
    A pair of FBI men came for coffee every morning.
    An apartment-court manager on the outskirts of Detroit told NBC that he had seen Marin and “two jumped-up coloreds” loading carbines into the trunk of a 1957 Pontiac at dawn in the Livonia Mall parking lot. By the time he appeared on CBS he described Marin’s companions as “possibly black or Indian” and the car as a 1957 Pontiac “or some later-model General Motors vehicle.” In the Detroit Free Press the story was headlined “ A SEARCH FOR A NERVOUS INDIAN. ”
    Marin was said to be in Havana.
    Marin was said to be in Hanoi.
    Warren left two messages on the answering service that he would definitely arrive in San Francisco via TWA the following morning at 10:35 A.M. He did not.
    “What have we here,” Leonard said when he finally walked into the room Charlotte had taken in the Fairmont Hotel. Leonard had addressed a bar luncheon on constitutional law at the Fairmont and a telephone had been brought to the dais and it was Warren calling from New York. Charlotte had watched Leonard take the call from Warren and then she had left the dais and gone to the desk and asked for a room and telephoned Leonard to meet her upstairs when he finished lunch. The room was cold and the radiator jammed off and the big windows overlooking the Pacific Union Club would not close. Yet for an hour and ten minutes Charlotte had been sitting barefoot in the gray afternoon light wearing only the handmade navy-blue silk underwear she had just bought in a shop in the lobby. She had been trying not to remember about Marin or Warren. She had been trying to remember a carnal mood.
    “No. Don’t tell me,” Leonard said. “Let me guess. You decided the way to avoid seeing Warren was to move to the Fairmont.”
    “I don’t want to talk about Warren,” Charlotte said.
    “I got him a ride out.”
    “Don’t talk about him,” Charlotte said. “Come here.”
    “I know perfectly well what you’re doing. Even if you don’t.”
    “Don’t talk about it. Don’t laugh. I just want it.”
    “You don’t want it at all.”
    Charlotte sat on the edge of the bed and pulled the spread around herself. “I did.”
    “You’re