Play it as it Lays

by Joan Didion

  “Where’s Helene?”

  “Helene’s in bed, Helene’s depressed. Helene has these very copious menstruations.” There was a pause. “Seven-thirty all right?”

  “I don’t know about Anita Garson’s, I don’t—”

  “I meant of course unless you’ve got plans.” His voice rose almost imperceptibly. “Unless you’ve got an à deux going at the Marmont. Or wherever it is he stays.”

  Maria said nothing.

  “You’re a lot of laughs this afternoon, Maria, I’m glad I called. I just meant that you and Les Goodwin were friends. As in just-good. No innuendo. No offense.” He paused. “You still sulking in there?”

  “I’ll see you at seven-thirty,” she said finally.

  Later she could not think how she had been coerced by BZ into going to Anita Garson’s party, which was large and noisy and crowded with people she did not much like. There was a rock group and a pink tent and everywhere Maria looked she saw someone who registered on her only as a foreigner or a faggot or a gangster. She tried to keep her eyes bright and her lips slightly parted and she stayed close to BZ. “How’s Carter,” someone said behind her, and when she turned she saw that it was Larry Kulik.

  “Carter’s on location,” she said, but Larry Kulik was not listening. He was watching a very young girl in a white halter dress dancing on the terrace.

  “I’d like to get into that,” he said contemplatively to BZ.

  “I wouldn’t call it the impossible dream,” BZ said.

  Maria twisted the napkin around her glass. She had already smiled too long and she did not want to look any more at Larry Kulik’s careful manicure and expensively tailored suit and she did not want to consider why Larry Kulik was talking to BZ about the girl in the white dress.

  “Not that many guys,” Larry Kulik was saying. “Not just anybody.”

  “Shit no. You have to be able to get her into the Whisky.”

  Larry Kulik was still watching the girl. “Only six guys.”

  “How do you know, six?”

  Larry Kulik shrugged. “I had her researched. Six.” He patted Maria’s arm absently. “How’s it going, baby? How’s Carter?”

  At the table on the terrace where Maria and BZ sat for dinner there were a French director, his cinematographer, and two English Lesbians who lived in Santa Monica Canyon. Maria sat next to the cinematographer, who spoke no English, and during dinner BZ and the French director disappeared into the house. Maria could smell marijuana, but it was not mentioned on the terrace. The cinematographer and the two Lesbians discussed the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French.

  “You have to come over sometime and use the sauna,” Larry Kulik said when he brushed by the table on his way inside. “Stereo piped in, beaucoup fantastic.”

  At midnight one of the amplifiers broke down, and the band packed up to leave. BZ was getting together a group to go back to his house: the French director, Larry Kulik, the girl in the white halter dress. “Simplicity itself,” he said to Maria. “The chickie wants the frog.”

  “I have to go home.”

  “You’re not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway.”

  “I feel beaucoup fantastic,” Maria said, and turned her face away so that he would not see her tears. When Les Goodwin called from New York the next morning at seven o’clock she began to cry again. Why was she crying, he wanted to know. Because he made her so happy, she said, and for that moment believed it.

  8

  “YOU HAVEN’T ASKED ME how it went after we left Anita’s,” BZ said.

  “How did it go,” Maria said without interest.

  “Everybody got what he came for.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of doing favors for people?”

  There was a long silence. “You don’t know how tired,” BZ said.

  9

  SHE LOOKED AT CARTER sitting in the living room and all she could think was that he had put on weight. The blue work shirt he was wearing pulled at the buttons. She supposed that he had weighed that much when he left, she noticed it now only because she had not seen him.

  “You going to stay here?” she said.

  He rubbed his knuckles across the stubble on his chin. “All my things are here, aren’t they?”

  Maria sat down across from him. She wished she had a cigarette but there were none on the table and it seemed frivolous to go get one. Carter’s saying that all his things were in the house did not seem entirely conclusive, did not address itself to the question. Quite often with Carter she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, another frivolous thought.

  “I mean I thought we were kind of separated.” That did not sound exactly right either.

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “It wasn’t me. I mean was it me?”

  “Never, Maria. Never you.”

  There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

  “I guess we could try,” she said uncertainly.

  “Only if you want to.”

  “Of course I do.” She did not know what else to say. “Of course I want to.”

  “Why don’t you sound like it.”

  “Carter, I do.” She paused, abruptly exhausted. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

  “Do what you want,” he said, and went upstairs.

  Maria sat with her eyes closed until the vein in her temple stopped pulsing, then followed him upstairs. He lay on the bed in their room, staring at the ceiling. Only by an increased immobility did he acknowledge her presence.

  “I was going out to see Kate,” she said finally.

  “How many times you been out there lately?” He still did not look at her.

  “Hardly at all,” she said, and then: “In the past few weeks, maybe a couple of times.”

  “You’ve been there four times since Sunday.”

  Resolutely Maria walked into the dressing room and began pinning her hair back.

  “They called me,” Carter said from the bedroom, speaking as if by rote. “They called me to point out that unscheduled parental appearances tend to disturb the child’s adjustment.”

  “Adjustment to what.” Maria jabbed a pin into her hair.

  “We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times.”

  Maria put her head in her arms on the dressing table. When she looked into the mirror again she saw Carter’s reflection. There had come a time when she felt anesthetized in the presence of Ivan Costello and now that time had come with Carter.

  “Don’t cry,” Carter said. “I know it upsets you, we’re doing all we can, I said don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” she said, and she was not.

  10

  “I’M ADAMANT about the mixes, I’m sorry, I just won’t use them,” the masseur who wanted to be a writer called from the kitchen. Maria lay face down on the sand beyond the sun deck and tried to neutralize, by concentrating on images of Kate (Kate’s hair, brushing Kate’s hair, the last time she went to the hospital Kate’s hair was tangled and she had sat on the lawn and brushed it, worked out the tangles into fine golden strands, they told her not to come so often but how could she help it, they never brushed Kate’s hair), the particular rise and inflection of the masseur’s voice. There was always someone Maria tried not to hear at BZ and Helene’s. Either there were the sulky young men BZ met in places like Acapulco and Kitzbühel and Tangier or there were Helene’s friends, the women with whom she shopped and planned restorative weeks at Palm Springs and La Costa, the women with the silk Pucci shirts and the periodically tightened eye lines and the husbands on perpetual location. They were always in their middle forties, those friends of Helene’s, always about ten years older than Helene herself. “Heaven pajamas,” Helene’s friends would say to one another, and they would exchange the addresses of new astrologers and the tag lines of old jokes. On
e of Helene’s friends had been at the house when Maria and Carter arrived. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, he’s a great phone,” she said several times, and she and Helene would laugh. It seemed to be a joke but Maria had failed to hear the beginning of it. Usually Maria could avoid hearing Helene’s friends but BZ’s friends were more difficult, and this one was particularly difficult. Part of it was his voice and part of it was that Maria had met him before, she was certain she had. He did not seem to recognize her but she was sure that she had met him three years before, at someone’s house in Santa Barbara. He had come in after a polo game with some people who spoke only to the host and to one another, never to Carter and Maria—there had been an actor whose last several pictures had failed, the actor’s mother, and a nervous steel heiress with whom the others seemed to have spent a week in Palm Beach—and then he had been not a masseur but the actor’s secretary. Even lying in the noon sun on this blazing dry October day Maria felt a physical chill when she thought about that afternoon in Santa Barbara. The way he looked was the problem. He looked exactly the same. He looked untouched, and she did not.

  “BZ, you’ve planned this to torment me,” he was saying now. He stood on the deck, holding a plastic lemon at elaborate arm’s-length. “You couldn’t possibly buy artificial lemon juice, someone left it here, it’s a bad joke.”

  “All BZ’s friends are purists,” Helene murmured without opening her eyes.

  “You’re a nasty,” BZ said, and laughed. He twisted a silver medallion on his chest so that it flashed in the sun. BZ was perpetually tanned, oiled, gleaming, not the negotiable health-club tan of people like Freddy Chaikin but tanned as evidence of a lifetime spent in season. “Isn’t Helene a nasty, Carter? Haven’t I got a bitch for a wife? And question number three, who am I impersonating?”

  “Yourself,” Helene suggested.

  “Carter’s not listening,” the masseur said. “Don’t be draggy, Helene, run down the beach and ask Audrey Wise for a couple of lemons. Ask Audrey and Jerry for Bloodys even. I mean we could definitely stand a few giggles.”

  Helene opened her eyes. “You know what Jerry gave Audrey for her birthday?”

  “Let me guess.” BZ touched a finger to his tongue and held it to the wind. “One perfect white rose.”

  “One perfect thousand-dollar bill” Helene said. “Smartass.”

  “Maybe she can buy herself a good fuck,” BZ said.

  Helene giggled. “Jerry’s a good phone.”

  “The lemons,” the masseur said.

  Carter threw down the script he was reading and stood up. “I’ll get the goddamn lemons,” he said. Maria lay perfectly still until she knew that he was beyond the dunes and then she sat up, everything swimming in her vision. Beneath the faded American flag hanging over the sun deck they were arranged in tableau: BZ and the masseur, their bodies gleaming, unlined, as if they had an arrangement with mortality. Helene stood on the edge of the deck, looking down the beach toward Audrey and Jerry Wise’s house. Helene was not quite so immune to time, there was a certain texture to Helene’s thighs, a certain lack of resilience where fabric cut into Helene’s flesh. It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women. That nervous steel heiress with whom Maria had last met the masseur, something bad had happened to her. She had been shot in the face by her fourteen-year-old son. It had been in the newspapers a few years ago. After the boy killed his mother he shot himself, and was later described by his father as a victim of divorce and drugs. Maria imagined that she had sunstroke. She closed her eyes and concentrated on a prayer she had learned as a child.

  “That’s one less for lunch,” Helene said.

  “I seem to have come in after the main titles,” the masseur said petulantly. “Is he going to get the lemons or isn’t he?”

  “Faggots make Carter nervous,” Helene said pleasantly.

  BZ laughed and blew Helene a kiss off his fingertips. “Actually, Nelson,” he said then, “that lemon is not artificial. That lemon is reconstituted.”

  Maria stood up and grabbed a beach towel from the deck and ran into the house with the towel clutched to her mouth and a few minutes later when, pale under her sunburn and covered with cold sweat, she stopped the dry heaves and pulled off her bathing suit she saw that for the fifty-first day she was not bleeding.

  11

  “I WASN’T JUST CRAZY about your asking Helene how much money BZ’s mother gives them to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach. The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen’s at seven o’clock. “I wasn’t just crazy about that at all.”

  “Well, she does.”

  “Does what.”

  “Carlotta gives them money to stay married.”

  “So what.”

  “I’m sick of everybody’s sick arrangements.”

  “You’ve got a fantastic vocabulary.”

  She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low. “I’ve got a fantastic vocabulary and I’m having a baby.”

  Carter slowed the car down. “I missed a transition,” he said finally.

  Maria did not look at him.

  “It’s not mine,” he said, his voice raised. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s not mine.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She did not know why she had said it but she had to. She had to get it straight. For a moment Carter said nothing.

  “You don’t fucking know,” he said then.

  She put her bare feet on the dashboard and pressed her face against her knees. Now it was a fact. He could stay or he could leave, she had set forth the fact.

  “Who was it,” he said.

  “You know.”

  He kept his eyes on the highway and his foot hard on the accelerator. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled. The late sun glazed the Pacific. The wind burned on her face. Once they were off the Coast Highway he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car.

  “I know,” he said. “But Felicia doesn’t.”

  She said nothing. It was going to be bad.

  “What makes you so sure,” he said then.

  “I didn’t say I was sure.” The air seemed suddenly still and close and she pulled off her scarf. “I said I didn’t know.”

  “I mean what makes you so sure it’s happening.”

  “Because I went to this doctor.” She spoke very fast and kept her mind on something else. It seemed to her that they had once been to dinner at somebody’s house who lived off San Vicente around here, she could not remember whose house it had been but there had been Japanese food and women with long handcrafted earrings and it had been summer. “Because I went to this doctor and the test he did in his office was positive but that’s not an absolutely certain test so he had me bring in some urine for a rabbit test. And he gave me this shot. And if I really wasn’t the shot would make me bleed in three to five days.” She paused. It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play. “And it was six days ago I had the shot.”

  “What about the test.”

  “What test?”

  “The test you were talking about. The second test.”

  “The rabbit test.” She was suddenly almost too exhausted to speak. “I just never called back about it.”

  “You were afraid to call back about it.” He was speaking in a careful monotone, a prosecutor with an open-and-shut case. “You thought if you didn’t call back it would just go away.”

  She closed her eyes. “I guess so. I guess that’s right.”

  “But now it’s certain anyway. Otherwise the shot would have made you
bleed.”

  She nodded mutely.

  “What doctor. Who was the doctor.”

  “Just a doctor. On Wilshire.”

  “A doctor you didn’t know. You thought that was smart.”

  She said nothing.

  “I’m interested in the mechanics of this, Maria. I’m interested in how your mind works. How exactly you picked this doctor out, why this particular doctor.”

  Maria folded her scarf and smoothed it carefully over her bare knees. “He was near Saks,” she whispered finally. “I was having my hair done at Saks.”

  12

  LATE THAT NIGHT sitting alone in the dark by the pool she remembered whose house it had been out off San Vicente with the Japanese food, it had been the house of a couple named Sidney and Ruth Loomis. Sidney Loomis was a television writer and Ruth Loomis was very active in the civil-rights movement and group therapy. Maria had never been able to think of anything to say to Ruth Loomis, but in retrospect that was not why Carter had stopped seeing Sidney and Ruth Loomis. He had stopped seeing them because the show Sidney Loomis was writing had been canceled in midseason and he did not pick up another. Maria tried very hard to keep thinking of Carter in this light, Carter as a dropper of friends and names and obligations, because if she thought of Carter as he was tonight she would begin to cry again. He had left the house. He had neither met Freddy Chaikin at Chasen’s nor called to say that he was not coming. She knew that because Freddy Chaikin had called for him. She had at last done something that reached him, but now it was too late. “What am I supposed to do,” he had said before he left the house. “What in fuck am I supposed to do?”

  13

  WHEN CARTER CALLED the next morning it was from the motel on the desert. His voice was measured, uninflected, as if he had been saying the words to himself all night. “I love you,” she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response. “Get a pencil,” he ordered. He was going to give her a telephone number. He was going to give her the telephone number of the only man in Los Angeles County who did clean work.