A Book of Common Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

be better if you left,” Victor said to Antonio.
    “Maybe I’ll go get your norteamericana to sit on my face,” Antonio said to Victor.
    Victor smoked his cigar and looked at me. “Feliz Navidad,” he said after a while.
    Here is what Charlotte Douglas was said by Elena to have done with the twenty-four white roses Victor sent her on Christmas Eve: left them untouched in their box and laid the box in the hallway for the night maid.

9
    “I T’S DEPRESSING TO BE SICK IN A HOTEL. ”
    “I don’t mind it.” She said it as a child might, and she said nothing more.
    “At Christmas.”
    “I didn’t mind.”
    I tried again. “You’re at the mercy of the maids.”
    “They’re very nice here.”
    I watched Charlotte Douglas unwrap a cracker and fold the cellophane into a neat packet. She had insisted that we meet not at my house but at the Capilla del Mar, that I be her guest.
    “Actually I’m never depressed.” The act of saying this seemed to convince her that it was so, and she picked up the wine list in a show of resolute conviviality. “Actually I don’t believe in being depressed. It’s hard to keep wine in this climate, isn’t it? Wine and crackers?”
    Through two courses of that difficult dinner she never mentioned Victor.
    She guided every topic to its most general application.
    She talked as if she had no specific history of her own.
    No Leonard.
    No Warren.
    As dessert was served she mentioned Marin for the first time: she said that she preferred the Capilla del Mar to the Jockey Club because the colored lights strung outside the Capilla del Mar reminded her of the Tivoli Gardens, where she had once flown with Marin for the weekend. Her face came alive with pleasure as she described this adult’s dream of a weekend a child might like, described the puppet shows, the watermills, the picnics with the child. They had made dinners of salami and petits fours. They had scarcely slept. They had wandered beneath the colored lights until Marin’s heels blistered, and then they had taken off their shoes and wandered barefoot.
    “And when we got back to the hotel we ordered cocoa from room service.” Charlotte Douglas leaned across the table. “And I let Marin place the order and tip the waiter and I taught her how to wash out her underwear at night.”
    I asked if her husband had gone to Copenhagen on business, but she said no. Her husband had not gone to Copenhagen at all. She had just woken up one morning in the house on California Street and decided to fly Marin to Copenhagen. “To see Tivoli. I mean before she was too old to like it.”
    Her eyes were fixed on the colored lights strung over our table on the porch at the Capilla del Mar. The lights at the Capilla del Mar were not Christmas lights but souvenirs of the season I married Edgar in São Paulo, the season a deranged Haitian dentist convinced the Minister of Health to string the entire city of Boca Grande with a web of colored lights as a specific against typhoid. The red and blue strings mostly shorted out in the first rain, leaving the city in the evening bathed in a necrotic yellow. So it was the night Edgar and I first arrived in Boca Grande from São Paulo. Edgar took me directly to Millonario and left me there until the epidemic waned. When I next saw the city many people had died and the rest seemed immune and the only lights left were at the Capilla del Mar.
    I mentioned this to Charlotte.
    “That’s very interesting,” Charlotte said politely, her eyes still on the lights. She had been smoking a cigarette as I talked and there was no ashtray and now, instead of just tossing the cigarette over the porch railing, she flicked off the lighted head with her fingernail, stripped the paper with the same fingernail and crumbled the tobacco neatly into the loam of a potted plant. I had seen men do this often and I had seen women do it in the field but I had never before seen a woman in a beige silk St. Laurent dress do it in a restaurant