A Book of Common Prayer Read Online Free Page B

question. “Actually I don’t want Tuck to miss this.”
    “Leonard on that camel.” Still laughing Charlotte Douglas touched Victor’s arm. “After lunch one day in Kuwait.”
    Victor had the look of someone who had waded out too far. Ardis Bradley had vanished. I was myself unclear as to why this Leonard declined Iranian caviar in one story and lunched in Kuwait in another.
    “The inevitable five-course lunch. In the inevitable Valerian Rybar dining room. Followed by the inevitable camel. I tried to postpone the camel part, I kept eating and eating, everything had this vile mint taste, I kept trying to distract the sheikh, I kept asking him what I could—”
    She broke off abruptly and shrugged.
    “What you could—?”
    “It was hilarious.” She was looking around the room as if unsure how she had gotten there. “I used to like mint but I don’t any more, do you?”
    “You kept asking the sheikh what you could—?”
    “I suppose it’s one of those abandoned tastes. As opposed to acquired. Mint.” She focused on Victor with difficulty. “I kept asking the sheikh what I could send him from America. Of course.”
    “And then,” Victor prompted.
    “He wanted eight-track cassettes and flowered sheets.” Her voice was absent. “They all do.”
    “But after lunch?”
    “After lunch?”
    “The camel?”
    “The camel .” She seemed relieved to be handed the thread to her story but had lost interest in telling it. “So Leonard rode the camel. Of course. Leonard had to ride the camel.”
    “Leonard would be—”
    “You know how the Kuwaiti are.”
    “Your husband? Leonard would be your husband?”
    “One of them.” Her voice was still absent. “I mean they lay on a camel, you have to ride the camel.”
    “And he has occasion to travel a great deal.” Victor was not to be deflected. “Your husband. Leonard. He travels. For business. For pleasure. For whatever.”
    “He runs guns,” Charlotte Douglas said. “I wish they had caviar.”
    Victor stared at her.
    She speared a shrimp, dipped it in mayonnaise and offered it to Victor. Victor made no response.
    “I don’t mean literally.” She spoke with disinterested patience and still held out the shrimp to Victor. “I don’t mean he literally buys and sells the hardware.”
    “The hardware,” Victor said.
    She ate the shrimp herself and seemed about to drop the toothpick into the six-hundred-dollar handbag with the broken clasp when Tuck Bradley appeared. To my astonishment she handed Tuck Bradley the toothpick. To my further astonishment he stood there holding it, between two fingers, looking prissy and foolish. Beyond handing him the toothpick Charlotte seemed entirely unaware of Tuck Bradley’s presence. “He’s kind of a lawyer,” she said finally. “He’s kind of a lawyer in San Francisco.”
    “If you’re talking about Leonard he’s a very well-known lawyer,” Tuck Bradley said.
    “In a way,” Charlotte said.
    “In San Francisco,” Tuck Bradley said.
    “And in some other places,” Charlotte said.
    And then, her animation returning, she again touched Victor’s arm in that way she had of physically touching strangers, of reaching out unconsciously and then drawing back as if she had just realized the gesture’s sexual freight; that mannerism, that tic, that way of barely suggesting impossible intimacy. She did this only to strangers but she did not do it to all strangers. I never saw her do it to a woman and I never saw her do it to Antonio. She never did it to Gerardo either but that was because Gerardo did it first, to her. Sexual freight was another area in which I would have to say that Gerardo and Charlotte were well met.
    “You know what you need here,” she said to Victor, lifting her fingers from his arm as if burned. “You know what Boca Grande needs.”
    “We’re making great headway with the People-to-People program,” Tuck Bradley said. “Leaps and bounds.”
    Neither Charlotte nor Victor looked at