Read Online A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion - Free Book Online Page B

the revolutionary character of our organization ,” Marin definitely said on the tape. “ The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary. ”
    Charlotte read this sentence several times. She wondered if she had misheard Marin, or missed an important clause. The tape was still running and Marin could still be heard, talking about “expropriation” and “firepower” and “revolutionary justice” and about how the Transamerica Building was one of many symbols of imperialist latifundismo in San Francisco, but Charlotte was still fixed on that one sentence. The fact that our organization is revolutionary in character is due above all to the fact that all our activity is defined as revolutionary . She could parse the sentence but she could make no sense of it, could find no way to rephrase it so that Leonard and Warren would understand.
    As it turned out she did not need to explain the sentence to Leonard because when he arrived from the airport at midnight he said that the sentence was not original with Marin but had been lifted from a handbook by a Brazilian guerrilla theorist named Marighela.
    “I’ve got just one thing to say about the operation,” Leonard said.
    Charlotte waited.
    “I know where they got their rhetoric but I’d like to know where they got their hardware.”
    As it turned out Charlotte did not need to explain the sentence to Warren either because when he called from New York at two that morning he had already heard the tape and, like Leonard, he had just one thing to say about the operation.
    “Fuck Marin,” he said.
    I think Warren Bogart would have had my sympathy that night.

7
    W HEN I MARRIED EDGAR STRASSER-MENDANA I RECEIVED , from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the “Windsor Rose” pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband’s books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in these same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.
    So in many ways did Charlotte.
    As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.
    Not Charlotte.
    Never Charlotte.
    I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo’s hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to “entertain” she could never just