by Joan Didion
2
THE SECOND PICTURE she had made with Carter was called Angel Beach, and in it she played a girl who was raped by the members of a motorcycle gang. Carter had brought the picture in for $340,000 and the studio had saturation-booked it and by the end of the first year the domestic and foreign gross was just under eight million dollars. Maria had seen it twice, once at a studio preview and a second time by herself, at a drive-in in Culver City, and neither time did she have any sense that the girl on the screen was herself. “I look at you and I know that …what happened just didn’t mean anything,” the girl on the screen would say, and “There’s a lot more to living than just kicks, I see that now, kicks are nowhere.” Carter’s original cut ended with a shot of the motorcycle gang, as if they represented some reality not fully apprehended by the girl Maria played, but the cut released by the studio ended with a long dolly shot of Maria strolling across a campus. Maria preferred the studio’s cut. In fact, she liked watching the picture: the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own destiny.
The other picture, the first picture, the picture never distributed, was called Maria. Carter had simply followed Maria around New York and shot film. It was not until they moved to California and Carter began cutting the film together that she entirely realized what he was doing. The picture showed Maria doing a fashion sitting, Maria asleep on a couch at a party, Maria on the telephone arguing with the billing department at Bloomingdale’s, Maria cleaning some marijuana with a kitchen strainer, Maria crying on the IRT. At the end she was thrown into negative and looked dead. The picture lasted seventy-four minutes and had won a prize at a festival in Eastern Europe and Maria did not like to look at it. She had once heard that students at UCLA and USC talked about using her the way commercial directors talked about using actresses who got a million dollars a picture, but she had never talked to any of them (sometimes they walked up to Carter in front of a theater or a bookstore and introduced themselves, and Carter would introduce Maria, and they would look sidelong at Maria while they talked to Carter about coming to see their film programs, but Maria had nothing to say to them, avoided their eyes) and she disliked their having seen her in that first picture. She never thought of it as Maria. She thought of it always as that first picture. Carter took her to BZ and Helene’s one night when BZ was running the picture and she had to leave the house after the titles, had to sit outside on the beach smoking cigarettes and fighting nausea for seventy-two of the seventy-four minutes.
“Why does he run it so often,” she had said to Carter later. “Why do you let him keep a print out there, he keeps a print in the house.”
“He owns it, Maria. He owns all the prints.”
“That’s not what I mean. I said why does he run it so often.”
“He wants Helene to see it.”
“Helene’s seen it a dozen times. Helene doesn’t even like it, she told me so.”
“You don’t understand anything,” Carter had said finally, and they had gone to bed that night without speaking. Maria did not want to understand why BZ ran that first picture so often or what it had to do with Helene. The girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything.
3
“MARIA WYETH,” she repeated to Freddy Chaikin’s receptionist. The reception room was full of glossy plants in chinoiserie pots and Maria had an abrupt conviction that the plants were consuming the oxygen she needed to breathe. She should not have come here without calling. Only people in trouble came unannounced to see their agents. If Freddy Chaikin thought she carried trouble with her he would avoid her, because trouble was something no one in the city liked to be near. Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants. It seemed to Maria that even the receptionist was avoiding her eyes, fearing contamination. “He’s kind of expecting me,” Maria added in a near whisper.
“Maria Wyeth,” the receptionist said. “Mr. Chaikin is in the projection room, do you want to wait? Or could he call you.”
“No. I mean yes. But tell him it has to be today or—”
The receptionist waited.
“Or I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” Maria said finally.
In the elevator was an actor she recognized but had never met, the star of a canceled television Western. He was with a short agent in a narrow dark suit, and the agent smiled at Maria as the elevator door closed.
“The word on Carter’s dailies is sensational,” the agent said.
Maria smiled and nodded. It did not require an answer: it was a cue for the actor, who waited a suitable instant and then picked it up. “Your pocketbook’s open,” he drawled, and the look he gave Maria was dutifully charged with sexual appreciation, meant not for Maria herself but for Carter Lang’s wife. She leaned against the padded elevator wall and closed her eyes. If she could tell Les Goodwin about the actor in the elevator he would laugh. When she got home she thought about calling him, but instead she went upstairs and lay face down on Kate’s empty bed, cradled Kate’s blanket, clutched Kate’s baby pillow to her stomach and fought off a wave of the dread. The time seemed to have passed for telling Les Goodwin funny stories.
4
SHE SAT ON THE RATTAN CHAISE in the hot October twilight and watched BZ throw the ice cubes from his drink one by one into the swimming pool. They had already talked about Helene’s week at La Costa and they had already talked about an actress who had been admitted to UCLA Neuropsychiatrie with her wrists cut (the papers said exhaustion, but BZ knew things like that, knew about people, that was why she had called him) and now it was the hour when in all the houses all around the pretty women were putting on perfume and enameled bracelets and kissing the pretty children goodnight, the hour of apparent grace and promised music, and even here in Maria’s own garden the air smelled of jasmine and the water in the pool was 85 . The water in the pool was always 85 and it was always clean. It came with the rent. Whether or not Carter could afford the rent, whether it was a month like this one when he was making a lot of money or a month when the lawyers were talking about bankruptcy, the boy came twice a week to vacuum the pool and the man came four days a week to work on the roses and the water in the pool was 85 . Sometimes it occurred to Maria that maybe the pretty children and the enameled bracelets came the same way, but she did not like to think about that.
“Tell me who you’ve seen,” she said. She did not much want to hear who BZ had seen but neither did she want BZ to leave. BZ had not yet mentioned Carter. BZ was the producer on the picture, BZ had come in from the location two days before and he was going back to the location tomorrow and he had not once mentioned Carter. “Tell me about the Willards’ dance.”
“Strobe lights in Pasadena.” BZ stood up. “On nights like that you could kill yourself for being a Gentile.”
“Don’t leave.”
“I’m late now. I’m supposed to be somewhere.”
“Who is it,” she said, not looking at him.
“Nobody special, I’m meeting Tommy Loew, you know Tommy, he’s in from New York.”
“I don’t mean you.” She wondered without interest if Tommy Loew was a faggot. “You know I don’t mean you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” BZ put his glass on a table, and looked at Maria for a long while. “Just let him finish.”
“Who is it.” She did not know why she persisted.
“Listen, Maria. I don’t know if you know this, but he wanted you in this picture very badly. At one point he was ready to scrap the deal, jeopardize the entire project, just because he wanted to use you.”
“I know that.”
“Then why not stop thinking Carter designs his every move expressly to thwart you. Why not stop thinking like Carlotta.”
“You don’t have any idea in your mind how I think.” Carlotta was BZ’s mother. Carlotta had $35 million and was engaged in constant litigation with her estranged second husband. Maria sat down on the edge of the pool and splashed
the clear water over her bare feet. “Listen to the music from the Kuliks’. They’re having a party.”
“You going?”
“Of course I’m not going. He’s a gangster.”
“I just asked if you were going to a party, Maria, I didn’t ask for a grand-jury indictment.” BZ paused. “In the second place he’s not a gangster. He’s a lawyer.”
“For gangsters.”
BZ shrugged. “I think of him more as a philosopher king. He told me once he understood the whole meaning of life, it came to him in a blinding flash one time when he almost died on the table at Cedars.”
“Larry Kulik’s not going to die at Cedars. Larry Kulik’s going to die in a barber chair.”
“It’s uphill work making you laugh, Maria. Anyway, Larry Kulik’s a great admirer of yours. You know what he said to Carter? He said, What I like about your wife, Carter, is she’s not a cunt.’”
Maria said nothing.
“That’s very funny, Maria, Kulik saying that to Carter, you lost your sense of humor?”
“I’ve already heard it. Give me your glass.”
“I told you, Tommy Loew. I’m already late.”
“Who is it,” she repeated.
“He’s two weeks behind schedule now, Maria. Just let him finish the picture.” BZ stood up, and ran the tips of his fingers very lightly across Maria’s bare back. “Seen anything of Les Goodwin?” he said finally.
Maria watched a leaf in the water and tried not to recoil from BZ’s fingers. “Les and Felicia are in New York,” she said carefully, and then reached for a towel. “You’re already late for Tommy Loew, I mean aren’t you?”
Later in the week she saw in one of the columns that BZ had been at the Kuliks’ party with Tommy Loew and a starlet whose name she did not recognize. She did not know why it annoyed her but it did. She wondered if Tommy Loew and the starlet had gone back to BZ’s later, and who had watched whom, and if Helene had been back from La Costa.
5
“JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW I ’m thinking of you,” Freddy Chaikin said on the telephone. “I’ll be frank, I was surprised to hear you wanted to work again. After that debacle with Mark Ross, I just naturally thought—”
“I’ve always wanted to work.” Maria tried to keep her voice even. Freddy would be sitting in his office with the Barcelona chairs and the Giacometti sculpture and anything he wanted to say Maria would have to hear.
“—an actress walks off a set, people tend to think she doesn’t want to work.”
“That was almost a year ago. I was sick. I was upset about Kate. I haven’t walked off any more sets, you know that, Freddy.”
“You haven’t had any sets to walk off.”
Maria closed her eyes. “What are you doing right now, Freddy,” she said finally. “You sitting there playing with a Fabergé Easter egg? Or what?”
“Calm down. Actually I talked to Morty Landau about you today at lunch. I said, Morty, you know Maria Wyeth, and he did—”
“I should think so. I had the lead in two features.”
“Right, Maria, of course you did. You know that. I know that. And they were very interesting little pictures. Carter parlayed those two little pictures, one of them never distributed, into a very nice thing. Carter’s in the enviable position now where he wants to do something, it’s just a question of working out the numbers. I’m proud to represent him. I’m proud to represent both of you, Maria. Maybe I could arrange for Morty Landau to see some film, you give me your word that you really want to work.”
“See some film.”
“Where’s the problem, Maria? There’s something so unusual about wanting to see some film? I show film on talent getting two, two-fifty a picture.”
“Morty Landau makes television.”
“Let’s get to the bottom line, Maria, if Carter were around he’d say the same thing. You want to work, I’ll arrange for Morty Landau to see film.”
“Carter is around.”
There was a silence, and when Freddy Chaikin spoke again his voice was gentle. “All I meant, Maria, was that Carter’s on location. All I meant.”
6
ON THE TENTH DAY OF OCTOBER at quarter past four in the afternoon with a dry hot wind blowing through the passes Maria found herself in Baker. She had never meant to go as far as Baker, had started out that day as every day, her only destination the freeway. But she had driven out the San Bernardino and up the Barstow and instead of turning back at Barstow (she had been out that far before but never that late in the day, it was past time to navigate back, she was out too far too late, the rhythm was lost) she kept driving. When she turned off at Baker it was 115° and she was picking up Vegas on the radio and she was within sixty miles of where Carter was making the picture. He could be in the motel right now. They could be through shooting for the day and he could be having a drink with BZ and Helene, thinking about going into Vegas for dinner or just resting, resting on the unmade bed with his shirt off. The woman who ran the motel only made the beds once a week, Carter had made a joke about it in an interview, Maria had read it in the trades. She could call. “Listen,” she could say. “I’m in Baker. I just happen to be in Baker.”
“So you just happen to be in Baker,” he could say. “Get on up here.”
Or he could even say: “Listen. Get up here quick.”
Those were things he could say but because she did not know if he would say them or even if she wanted to hear them she just sat in the car behind the 76 station in Baker and studied the pay phone by the Coke machine. Whatever he began by saying he would end by saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion. “Oh Christ,” he would say. “I felt good today, really good for a change, you fixed that, you really pricked the balloon.”
“How did I fix that.”
“You know how.”
“I don’t know how.”
She would wait for him to answer but he would say nothing then, would just sit with his head in his hands. She would feel first guilty, resigned to misery, then furious, trapped, white with anger. “Listen to me,” she would say then, almost shouting, trying to take him by the shoulders and shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose; he would knock her away, and the look on his face, contorted, teeth bared, would render her paralyzed. “Why don’t you just get it over with,” he would say then, leaning close, his face still contorted. “Why don’t you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don’t you die.”
After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself. She did not know what she was doing in Baker. However it began it ended like that.
“Listen,” she would say.
“Don’t touch me,” he would say.
Maria looked at the pay phone for a long while, and then she got out of the car and drank a warm Coke. With the last of the Coke she swallowed two Fiorinal tablets, then closed her eyes against the sun and waited for the Fiorinal to clear her head of Carter and what Carter would say. On the way back into the city the traffic was heavy and the hot wind blew sand through the windows and the radio got on her nerves and after that Maria did not go back to the freeway except as a way of getting somewhere.
7
“C’EST MOI, MARIA,” the voice said on the telephone. “BZ.”
Maria tried to untangle the cord from the receiver and fight her way out of sleep. Sleeping in the afternoon was a bad sign. She had been trying not to notice the signs but
she could not avoid this one, and a sharp fear contracted her stomach muscles. “Where are you,” she said finally.
“At the beach.”
Maria groped on the edge of the pool for her dark glasses.
“Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose, Maria? Or what?”
“I thought you were on the desert.”
“We’re shutting down for a week, don’t you read the trades? Because of the fire.”
“What fire.”
“On top of the news as ever,” BZ said. “The fire, we had a fire, we have to rebuild the set. Carter’s coming in tomorrow. I’ll take you to Anita Garson’s tonight if you’re not doing anything, all right?”