Play it as it Lays

by Joan Didion

  “Then we’ll see.”

  “I’m not sure I want to do that,” she said carefully.

  “All right, don’t do it. Go ahead and have this kid.” He paused, confident in his hand. She waited for him to play it through. “And I’ll take Kate.”

  After he hung up she sat very still. She had a remote sense that everything was happening exactly the way it was supposed to happen. By the time she called him back she was calm, neutral, an intermediary calling to clarify the terms. “Listen,” she said. “If I do this, then you promise I can have Kate? You promise there won’t be trouble later?”

  “I’m not promising anything,” he said. “I said we’ll see.”

  14

  AT FOUR THAT AFTERNOON, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number. A man answered, and said that he would call back. When he did he asked who had referred her.

  “You want an appointment with the doctor,” he said.

  “When could he see me.”

  “The doctor will want to know how many weeks.”

  “How many weeks what?”

  There was a silence. “How advanced is the problem, Maria,” the voice said finally.

  15

  “THE FOOD WAS UNSPEAKABLE, my clothes mildewed in the closet, you can have Cozumel,” BZ’s mother said. She was playing solitaire and Maria sat transfixed by the light striking off the diamond bracelets on her thin tanned wrists. “Also Machu Picchu,” she added, slapping down another card.

  “I can’t even dream why you stopped at Cozumel,” Helene said. “I mean since you can’t bear Mexicans.”

  “BZ said it was marvelous, that’s why.”

  “BZ likes Mexicans.”

  “I know why BZ likes Mexicans.” Carlotta Mendenhall Fisher shuffled the cards once and pointed at Maria. “Did you ask this child for dinner?” she demanded. “Or didn’t you?”

  “It’s just seven, Carlotta. I thought we’d have another drink.”

  “I always serve at seven.”

  “The last time I was in Pebble Beach,” Helene said, “you served at quarter to eleven.”

  Helene and her mother-in-law looked at each other for an instant and then Carlotta began to laugh. “This girl is my own natural child,” she said finally to Maria, gasping through her laughter. “The daughter I didn’t have.”

  “Speaking of the one you did have,” Helene said, “does Nikki know you’re back in the country?”

  “Nikki. Nikki’s like this child, I bore her.” She looked at Maria. “Don’t I bore you. Admit it.”

  Maria looked up uncertainly. The voice on the telephone had known what she wanted without either of them saying it. The voice on the telephone had said that this would be expensive. The voice on the telephone had told her that on the day set she was to bring a pad and a belt and $1,000 in cash. In confusion Maria looked away from Carlotta’s bright blue eyes, glittering like her bracelets.

  “Isn’t it kind of …” Maria trailed off.

  “Isn’t what?”

  “I mean Cozumel,” Maria said finally. ‘Isn’t it the off season.”

  “Of course the off season,” Carlotta said triumphantly.

  The voice had called her Maria.

  The voice had said that he would be in touch.

  “Carlotta’s a demon for thrift,” Helene said.

  “Now what about my boring you,” Carlotta said.

  16

  THE NEXT MORNING in the dry still heat she woke crying for her mother. She had not cried for her mother since the bad season in New York, the season when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose so much weight that the agency refused to book her. She had not been able to eat that year because every time she looked at food the food would seem to arrange itself into ominous coils. She had known that there was no rattlesnake on her plate but once the image had seized her there was no eating the food. She was consumed that year by questions. Exactly what time had it happened, precisely what had she been doing in New York at the instant her mother lost control of the car outside Tonopah. What was her mother wearing, thinking. What was she doing in Tonopah anyway. She imagined her mother having a doctor’s appointment in Tonopah, and the doctor saying cancer, and her mother cracking up the car on purpose. She imagined her mother trying to call her from a pay phone in Tonopah, standing in a booth with all her quarters and dimes and nickels spread on the shelf and getting the operator and getting New York and then the answering service picking up the call. Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailable in the Eastern dark. She would imagine the quarters and dimes and nickels spread out on the shelf and the light in the cottonwoods and she would wonder what she was doing in the dark. What time is it there, her mother would have asked had she gotten Maria. What’s the weather. She might never have said what was on her mind but she would have left a coded message, said goodbye. One time Maria had saved enough money to give her mother a trip around the world, but instead she had lent the money to Ivan Costello, and then her mother was dead.

  “I’m not crying,” Maria said when Carter called from the desert at 8 a.m. “I’m perfectly all right.”

  “You don’t sound perfectly all right.”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  There was a silence. “You called the doctor?”

  “Yes. I called the doctor.” She spoke very rapidly and distantly. “Everything’s arranged. Everything’s perfectly taken care of.”

  “What did—”

  “I have to go now. I have to hang up. I have to see somebody about a job.”

  “Just hold on a minute, Maria, I want to know what the doctor said.”

  She was staring into a hand mirror, picking out her mother’s features. Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

  “I said what did they say, Maria.”

  “They said they’d call me up some day and on the day they called me up I’d meet them some place with a pad and a belt and $1,000 in cash. All right, Carter? All right?”

  17

  ALTHOUGH THE HEAT had not yet broken she began that week to sleep inside, between white sheets, hoping dimly that the white sheets would effect some charm, that she would wake in the morning and find them stained with blood. She did this in the same spirit that she had, a month before, thrown a full box of Tampax into the garbage: to be without Tampax was to insure bleeding, to sleep naked between white sheets was to guarantee staining. To give the charm every opportunity she changed the immaculate sheets every morning. She wore white crêpe pajamas and no underwear to a party. She pretended to herself that she was keeping the baby, the better to invite disappointment, court miscarriage. “I’m having a baby,” she heard herself telling the parking-lot attendant at Saks as they tried vainly to get a wicker bassinette into the Corvette. When it became clear that she would have to leave the bassinette for delivery she sat in the driver’s seat of the Corvette and cried. She was crying too much. All the time now, when she was driving and when she was trying to clean a bathroom and when she was pretending to herself that she could have the baby, she was wondering where and when it was going to happen.

  “Any calls,” she asked the service.

  “Mr. Goodwin, New York, three times, you’re to call immediately.”

  She looked again into the hand mirror and again saw her mother. “Tell him I haven’t picked up my messages.” She had nothing to say to any of them.

  18

  “MONDAY,” the voice on the telephone said. “Monday at five o’clock. We’ll be in touch again on Monday.”

  “Where,” she said. “Where do I go.”

  “I said we’ll be in touch, Maria. We will.”

 
She drove to the beach, but there was oil scum on the sand and a red tide in the flaccid surf and mounds of kelp at the waterline. The kelp hummed with flies. The water lapped warm, forceless. When she got back into town she drove aimlessly down Sunset, pulled into a drive-in at the corner of La Brea, and, briefly flushed into purposefulness by a Coca-Cola, walked barefoot across the hot asphalt to a telephone booth.

  “This is Maria,” she said helplessly when Felicia Goodwin picked up the telephone in New York. She did not know why but she had not counted on talking to Felicia. “I just wondered when you were coming back.”

  “We’ve been trying to get you for days.” Felicia always spoke on the telephone as if a spurious urgency could mask her radical lack of interest in talking to anyone. Sometimes Maria was depressed by how much she and Felicia had in common. “Les was worried something had happened to you, I said no, she’s on the desert with Carter—didn’t you call the service?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Anyway we’ll be out in a few days, this time to stay, we’re going to buy a house—” Felicia’s voice faded, as if she had stretched her capacity for communication to its limit.

  “Les finished the script?”

  “I’ll get him,” Felicia said with relief.

  “Never mind,” Maria said, but it was too late.

  “Where’ve you been,” he said.

  “Nowhere.” When she heard his voice she felt a rush of well-being. “I didn’t want to call because—”

  “I can’t hear you, Maria, where are you?”

  “In a phone booth. I just wanted—”

  “You all right?”

  “No. I mean yes.” A bus was shifting gears on Sunset and she raised her voice. “Listen. Call me.”

  She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to a supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing. She did not know why she had told Les Goodwin to call her.

  19

  “YOU WANT IT IN CASH,” the teller said doubtfully.

  “I’m taking a trip.” She did not know why she was saying this but she kept on. “Mexico City, Guadalajara.”

  “You don’t want traveler’s checks?”

  “Cash,” she said, and when the teller handed her the bills she ran from the bank with them still in her hand.

  In the car she counted the stiff bills. They stuck together and she missed one and she counted them four more times before she was certain she had them all. Since early morning she had been trying to remember something Les Goodwin had said to her, anything Les Goodwin had said to her. When she was not actually talking to him now she found it hard to keep him distinct from everyone else, everyone with whom she had ever slept or almost slept or refused to sleep or wanted to sleep. It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself. She tried to remember how it had been to drag Fremont Street in Vegas with Earl Lee Atkins when she was sixteen years old, how it had been to go out on the desert between Vegas and Boulder and drink beer from halfquart cans and feel her sunburn when he touched her and smell the chlorine from her own hair and the Lava soap from his and the sweet sharp smell of starched cotton soaked with sweat. How High the Moon, the radio would play, Les Paul and Mary Ford. She tried to remember Ivan Costello, tried to fix in her mind the exact way the light came through the shutters in his bedroom in New York, the exact colors of the striped sheets she had put on his bed and the way those sheets looked in the morning and the look of a motel room in which they had once spent a week in Maryland. She tried to remember Carter. She tried to remember Les Goodwin. She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

  20

  “NOTHING’S WRONG,” she repeated to Les Goodwin on the telephone.

  “I know something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing.”

  “O.K.,” he said finally. “All right. I’m coming out alone on Monday, meet my plane at four.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I want to talk to you, Maria. I want to see you.”

  “Monday night,” she said. “Listen. You make me happy.”

  She hung up very fast then because she did not want to find herself telling him why she could not meet his flight.

  21

  IN THE DREAM from which she woke when the telephone rang again that night she had the baby, and she and the baby and Kate were living on West Twelfth Street with Ivan Costello. In the dream she did not yet know Carter, but somehow had Carter’s daughter and Carter’s blessing. In the dream it was all right. She supposed that she had dreamed of Ivan Costello because the telephone was ringing, and he used to call her in the middle of the night. “How much do you want it,” he used to say. “Tell me what you’d do to get it from me.” The telephone was still ringing and she pulled the cord loose from the jack. She could not remember what she would have done to get it from any of them.

  22

  “YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CALL before you come,” the nurse in charge of Kate’s cottage said on Sunday. The nurse had short hair and a faint moustache and Kate clung to her knees and Maria did not like her. “The new medication, new treatment, naturally she’s not—”

  “What new medication,” Maria heard herself saying. “You keep talking about the new medication, I mean what is it.”

  Kate screamed. The nurse looked reproachfully at Maria. “Methylphenidate hydrochloride.”

  Maria closed her eyes. “All right. Your point.”

  “We definitely would have suggested you wait until next week.”

  “I won’t be here next week.”

  “You’re going away?”

  “Cozumel,” Maria said. “Mexico.”

  On the way to the parking lot she twice invented pretexts to run back, kiss Kate’s small fat hands, tell her to be good. The third time she ran back it was to find the nurse.

  “One thing. You know when she wakes up at night and says ‘oise, oise,’ it means she’s …” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. “It means she’s having a nightmare,” she said finally.

  The nurse looked at her impassively.

  “I mean I don’t know if I ever told you that.”

  “I’m sure you did,” the nurse said.

  That night the house crackled with malign electricity. A hot wind came up at midnight and the leaves scraped the screens, a loose storm drain slapped against the roof. Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet. The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds. At six-thirty that morning she placed a call to Carter at the motel on the desert but Carter had already left for the location. She interpreted that as a sign and did not try to call the location. She would do what he wanted. She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.

  23

  SHE TRIED TO STRAIGHTEN a drawer, and abandoned it. She heard fire reports on the radio, and turned the sprinklers on the ivy. For almost two hours she studied an old issue of Vogue she picked up in the poolhouse, her attention fixed particularly
on the details of the life led in New York and Rome by the wife of an Italian industrialist. The Italian seemed to find a great deal of purpose in her life, seemed to make decisions and stick by them, and Maria studied the photographs as if a key might be found among them. When she had exhausted the copy of Vogue she got out her checkbook and a stack of bills and spread them on the kitchen table. Paying bills sometimes lent her the illusion of order but now each bill she opened seemed fresh testimony to her life’s disorder, its waste and diffusion: flowers sent to people whom she had failed to thank for parties, sheets bought for beds in which no one now slept, an old bill from F.A.O. Schwarz for a tricycle Kate had never ridden. When she wrote out the check to Schwarz her hand trembled so hard that she had to void the first check, and smoke a cigarette before she could write another.

  “Get it right, Maria,” the voice on the telephone said. “You got a pencil there? You writing this down?”

  “Yes,” Maria said.

  “Ventura Freeway north, you got that all right? You know what exit?”

  “I wrote it down.”

  “All set, then. I’ll meet you in the parking lot of the Thriftimart.”

  “What Thriftimart,” Maria whispered.

  “Maria, I told you, you can’t miss it. Under the big red T.”

  In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.