Play it as it Lays

by Joan Didion

  In December the Christmas tree on top of the Capitol Records Tower came and went, and Maria had Kate for three days. They drove up and down La Brea looking for a Christmas tree and had Christmas dinner at Les and Felicia Goodwin’s new house and Kate smashed the Victorian doll Felicia had given her against a large mirror.

  “She misses Carter,” Felicia murmured, distraught beyond the immediate breakage.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Les Goodwin said.

  Kate’s eyes darted from Maria to Les to Felicia and back to Maria and then, preternaturally attuned to the threat of voices not even raised, she began to scream. The mother apologizing, the child screaming, the polished floor covered with shards of broken mirror and flesh-colored ceramic, they left the Christmas dinner. All that night the two of them held each other with a dumb protective ferocity but the next day at the hospital, parting, only Maria cried.

  In January there were poinsettias in front of all the bungalows between Melrose and Sunset, and the rain set in, and Maria wore not sandals but real shoes and a Shetland sweater she had bought in New York the year she was nineteen. For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper. She could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page: the four-year-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, unspeakable peril, in the everyday. She grew faint as the processions swept before her, the children alive when last scolded, dead when next seen, the children in the locked car burning, the little faces, helpless screams. The mothers were always reported to be under sedation. In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril. Maria ate frozen enchiladas, looked at television for word of the world, thought of herself as under sedation and did not leave the apartment on Fountain Avenue.

  35

  “I DON’T KNOW if you noticed, I’m mentally ill,” the woman said. The woman was sitting next to Maria at the snack counter in Ralph’s Market. “I’m talking to you.”

  Maria turned around. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve been mentally ill for seven years. You don’t know what a struggle it is to get through a day like this.”

  “This is a bad day for you,” Maria said in a neutral voice.

  “What’s so different about this day.”

  Maria looked covertly at the pay phones but there was still a line. The telephone in the apartment was out of order and she had to report it. The line at the pay phones in Ralph’s Market suddenly suggested to Maria a disorganization so general that the norm was to have either a disconnected telephone or some clandestine business to conduct, some extramarital error. She had to have a telephone. There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone. If she could not be reached it would happen, the peril would find Kate. Beside her the woman’s voice rose and fell monotonously.

  “I mean you can’t fathom the despair. Believe me I’ve thought of ending it. Kaput. Over. Head in the oven.”

  “A doctor,” Maria said.

  “Doctor. I’ve talked to doctors.”

  “You’ll feel better. Try to feel better.” The girl now using the nearest telephone seemed to be calling a taxi to take her home from Ralph’s. The girl had rollers in her hair and a small child in her basket and Maria wondered whether her car had been repossessed or her husband had left her or just what had happened, why was she calling a taxi from Ralph’s. “I mean you have to try, you can’t feel this way forever.”

  “I’ll say I can’t.” Tears began to roll down the woman’s face. “You don’t even want to talk to me.”

  “But I do.” Maria touched her arm. “I do.”

  “Get your whore’s hands off me,” the woman screamed.

  36

  “THERE’S SOME PRINCIPLE I’m not grasping, Maria,” Carter said on the telephone from New York. “You’ve got a $1,500-a-month house sitting empty in Beverly Hills, and you’re living in a furnished apartment on Fountain Avenue. You want to be closer to Schwab’s? Is that it?”

  Maria lay on the bed watching a television news film of a house about to slide into the Tujunga Wash. “I’m not living here, I’m just staying here.”

  “I still don’t get the joke.”

  She kept her eyes on the screen. “Then don’t get it,” she said at the exact instant the house splintered and fell.

  After Carter had hung up Maria wrapped her robe close and smoked part of a joint and watched an interview with the woman whose house it had been. “You boys did a really outstanding camera job,” the woman said. Maria finished the cigarette and repeated the compliment out loud. The day’s slide and flood news was followed by a report of a small earth tremor centered near Joshua Tree, 4.2 on the Richter Scale, and, of corollary interest, an interview with a Pentecostal minister who had received prophecy that eight million people would perish by earthquake on a Friday afternoon in March. The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tujunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquillity. Within these four rented walls she was safe. She was more than safe, she was all right: she had seen herself onInterstate 80 just before the news and she looked all right. Warm, content, suffused with tentative small resolves, Maria fell asleep before the news was over.

  But the next morning when the shower seemed slow to drain she threw up in the toilet, and after she had stopped trembling packed the few things she had brought to Fountain Avenue and, in the driving rain, drove back to the house in Beverly Hills. There would be plumbing anywhere she went.

  37

  “I’M GOING TO DO IT,” she would say on the telephone.

  “Then do it,” Carter would say. “It’s better.”

  “You think it’s better.”

  “If it’s what you want.”

  “What do you want.”

  “It’s never been right,” he would say. “It’s been shit.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you’re sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “We could try,” one or the other would say after a while.

  “We’ve already tried,” the other would say.

  By the time Carter came back to town in February the dialogue was drained of energy, the marriage lanced.

  “I’ve got a new lawyer,” she told him. “You can use Steiner.”

  “I’ll call him today.”

  “I’ll need a witness.”

  “Helene,” he said. “Helene can do it.” He seemed relieved that the dialogue had worn itself down to legal details, satisfied that he could offer Helene. He would be staying in BZ and Helene’s guest house while they were looping and scoring the picture. He would speak to Helene immediately. Maria felt herself a sleepwalker to the courthouse.

  “Let’s see … an afternoon hearing.” Helene spaced the words as if she were consulting an engagement book. “That means lunch before instead of after.”

  “We don’t have to have lunch.”

  “Day of days, Maria. Of course lunch.”

  On the day of the hearing Maria overslept, thick with Seconal. When she walked into the Bistro half an hour late for lunch she could only think dimly how healthy Helene looked, how suntanned and somehow invincible with her silk shirt and tinted glasses and long streaked hair and a new square emerald that covered one of her fingers to the knuckle.

  “Straighten your shoulders,” Helene said, lifting her drink slightly as Maria sat down. “You look spectral. We should go to the Springs together.” Helene’s eyes were not on Maria but on two women who sat across the room. “Aliene Walsh has a new friend,” she murmured to Maria as she smiled at the older of the two women. “They’ve been spooning food into each other’s mouths
for the past half hour.”

  “She’s an actress named Sharon Carroll, I worked with her once.” Maria tried to summon up some other detail to assuage Helene’s avid interest in other people. “She kept a dildo in her dressing room.”

  “Allene Walsh has more dildoes around her house than anybody I ever knew. Look at my new ring.”

  “I saw it.”

  “From Carlotta.” Helene studied the emerald. “For staying on the desert. Speaking of new friends. I mean he was shuttling them in and out of that motel like the dailies, I couldn’t even get up for a Nembutal without knocking over somebody’s bottle of Monsieur Y.” For an instant Helene’s face seemed to lose its animation, and when she spoke again her voice was flat and preoccupied. “You look like hell, Maria, this isn’t any excuse for you to fall apart, I mean a divorce. I’ve done it twice.”

  “I thought only once.”

  “Twice,” Helene said without interest. “BZ says once because that’s what he told his mother.” She was intent upon her reflection in the mirror behind the table, tracing a line with one finger from her chin to her temple. “You can really tell,” she said finally.

  “Tell what?”

  “Tell I haven’t done my Laszlo in three days.” Helene’s voice was still flat but her interest seemed revived.

  At two o’clock they met Carter and the lawyers outside the courtroom in Santa Monica, and at two-thirty Maria swore and Helene confirmed that the defendant, Carter Lang, had repeatedly struck and in other ways humiliated the plaintiff, Mrs. Maria Lang. The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested. This Mrs. Maria Lang to whom the lawyers referred seemed to Maria someone other than herself, an aggrieved wife she might see interviewed on television. As they waited for the details to be cleared up, the papers to be signed, Maria sat very still with her hands in her lap. Helene stirred restlessly beside her, her eyes across the aisle, on Carter and his lawyer.“Carter,” Helene whispered finally, leaning across Maria to attract his attention. “Puzzle of the week. Guess which two dykes were seen feeding each other cheese soufflé in the Bistro today.”

  38

  “WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING,” Carter said the next time she saw him.

  “Working. I’m going to be working very soon.”

  “I mean who’ve you been seeing.”

  “Nobody. Helene. BZ. BZ comes by sometimes.”

  “Don’t get into that,” Carter said.

  “He’s your friend,” Maria said.

  39

  THE FIRST TIME Maria ever met BZ it had been at the beach house and it had been two o’clock on a weekday afternoon and it was the summer Carter was cutting Angel Beach.

  “I’ve got a meeting at the beach with this guy from San Francisco I told you about,” Carter had said. “You come along and swim.”

  “I don’t feel like swimming.”

  “Maria,” Carter had said finally, “he’s going to maybe put up some money. Maybe. All right?”

  When they walked into the beach house she thought there must have been some misunderstanding, some mixup of time or day, because the man to whom Carter spoke was sitting alone with a projector in the darkened living room running a blue movie of extraordinary technical quality.

  “Stroke of two, very prompt,” the man had said, and looked at Maria for a long while before he turned off the projector.

  “Did you get by the studio yesterday?” Carter seemed oblivious to the meeting’s peculiar circumstance. “They show you the rough cut?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Did Helene see it?” Carter persisted. “Where’s Helene?”

  “On the beach.”

  “I’ll get my suit on,” Maria said, uneasy in the darkened room, and BZ had looked at her again, then flicked the projector back on.

  “It’s too cold to swim,” he said, and then to Carter: “The rough cut looked fantastic, except you’re missing the story.”

  “Meaning what.”

  “Meaning,” BZ said, “how did Maria feel about the gangbang, the twelve cocks, did she get the sense they’re doing it not to her but to each other, does that interest her, you don’t get that, you’re missing the story.”

  The reel had run out and the only sound was the film slapping against the projector. “It’s a commercial piece, BZ,” Carter said finally.

  BZ only shrugged, and changed the reel. Again the figures flooded the screen. Wordlessly, BZ sat on a pillow and began watching Maria. He rolled a cigarette and passed it to her, and when she passed it on to Carter he took it without looking away from the screen. Between the marijuana and the figures on the screen Maria felt flushed and not entirely in control.

  “Look at the film, BZ,” Carter had said suddenly. “Incredible, they’ve got opticals.”

  “I’ve seen the film, Carter,” BZ had said, and never took his eyes from Maria.

  40

  “LET’S GO TO MEXICO CITY tonight,” BZ said.

  “Who?”

  “You, me, Helene, I don’t know, maybe Larry Kulik, just fly down for a couple of days, Susannah Wood’s there now doing some interiors at Churubusco.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Maria said.

  “Yes you do,” BZ said.

  41

  EVERY NIGHT she named to herself what she must do: she must ask Les Goodwin to come keep her from peril. Calmed, she would fall asleep pretending that even then she lay with him in a house by the sea; The house was like none she had ever seen but she thought of it so often that she knew even where the linens were kept, the plates, knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools. Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in that house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table, and later when the tide ran out they would gather mussels together, Kate and Maria, and still later all three of them would sit down together at the big pine table and Maria would light a kerosene lamp and they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets. In the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamplight, the opalescent mussel shells.

  But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate’s own manifold histories, certain that BZ and Larry Kulik and all their kind recognized her in a way that Les Goodwin might not want to, recognized her, knew her, had her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic. Instead of calling Les Goodwin she bought a silver vinyl dress, and tried to stop thinking about what had he done with the baby. The tissue. The living dead thing, whatever you called it.

  42

  “I’M GOING TO NEW YORK for a few days,” she said to Carter. Going to New York had not before occurred to her but in the instant’s confusion of running into Carter on the street in Beverly Hills the idea simultaneously materialized and assumed a real plausibility. It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days. ‘Tomorrow morning,” she added.

  “What are you going to do in New York?”

  “What do people usually do in New York “

  He looked at her for a long time. She was aware that her hair was unkempt, her face puffy. She did not meet his eyes.

  “They see a few plays,” he said finally. “Maybe you can see a few plays.”

  “Maybe I can,” she said, and walked away.

  All that day Maria thought of fetuses in the East River, translucent as jellyfish, floating past the big sewage outfalls with the orange peels. She did not go to New York.

  43

  ONCE A LONG TIME BEFORE Maria
had worked a week in Ocho Rios with a girl who had just had an abortion. She could remember the girl telling her about it while they sat huddled next to a waterfall waiting for the photographer to decide the sun was high enough to shoot. It seemed that it was a hard time for abortions in New York, there had been arrests, no one wanted to do it. Finally the girl, her name was Ceci Delano, had asked a friend in the District Attorney’s office if he knew of anyone. “Quid pro quo,” he had said, and, late the same day that Ceci Delano testified to a blue-ribbon jury that she had been approached by a party-girl operation, she was admitted to Doctors’ Hospital for a legal D & C, arranged and paid for by the District Attorney’s office.

  It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what had happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano’s situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

  44

  THE LETTER from the hypnotist was mimeographed, and came to Maria in care of the studio that had released Angel Beach.“YOUR WORRIES MAY DATE FROM WHEN YOU WERE A BABY,” the letter began, and then, after a space, were the words “IN YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB.” Maria read the letter very carefully. The hypnotist had found that many people could be regressed not only to infancy but to the very instant of their conception. The hypnotist would receive a few interested clients in the privacy of his Silverlake home. With a sense that she was about to confirm a nightmare, Maria telephoned the number he gave.

  45

  “YOU’VE BEEN BRUSHING IT wet,” the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria’s hair and letting it drop with distaste.