by Joan Didion
She had said she wanted to live that way.
“What if I did,” she had said a long time later.
“Did what.”
“Got pregnant. Then at least I’d have a baby.”
“No you wouldn’t,” he had said.
56
“MAYBE NEXT TIME,” the hypnotist said. “Next week.”
“I’m not coming next week.” Maria did not look at him. “I can’t come any more.”
The hypnotist watched her as she opened her bag, found her car keys, dropped them beneath a sofa cushion and groped for them. The room was overheated but he was wearing two faded cardigan sweaters and standing over a furnace vent.
“It doesn’t prove anything, you know,” he said.
“What doesn’t.”
“That you couldn’t open enough doors to get back. Your failure. It doesn’t prove anything at all.”
“I have to leave.”
He shrugged. As she stood up he was pouring water into a cheese glass coated with Pernod, swirling the mixture into a milky fluid.
“Some people resist,” he said. “Some people don’t want to know.”
Maria drove down to the New Havana Ballroom on Sunset and, trembling, made a telephone call.
“I need help,” she said. “Ivan, I need help bad.”
57
“WHO’S YOUR FRIEND,” Ivan Costello said. “Who loves you.”
It was five o’clock in Los Angeles and eight in New York and he was drunk. She should have known better than to call him. She did not even like him. She could not bring herself to give the answer he expected, could not pick up the old litany, could not say you do.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What’s the matter with you.”
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“You just wanted …” He paused, and she knew that he was turning on her. “To talk to me.”
She said nothing. The bar in the New Havana was empty and smelled of disinfectant and the bartender was watching her distrustfully.
“You mean you want to talk to me direct, you don’t want me to make an appointment? Go through your agent?”
“All right. I get it.”
“You’re feeling good enough to talk to me? You aren’t sick? You aren’t asleep? You aren’t out of town? You aren’t just fucking unavailable?”
“Ivan—”
“‘Ivan’ shit.”
“All right,” she said. “O.K.”
“You want to know what I think of your life?”
“No,” she said, but he was already spitting into the telephone.
In the morning he left four messages on the service and Maria returned none of them. She did call Larry Kulik.
58
MARIA SAT ON A COUCH in the ladies’ room of the Flamingo with the attendant and a Cuban who was killing the hour between her ten o’clock and midnight dates and she knew that she could not go back out to the crap tables.
“Like a cemetery,” the Cuban said.
The attendant shrugged. “Every place the same.”
“Not the Sands, I could hardly get through the Sands tonight.”
“So do business at the Sands.”
“Fucking negrita,” the Cuban said without rancor, and looked at Maria appraisingly. “You sick? You need something?”
“I’m all right,” Maria said. “Thank you.”
She could not go back to the tables because Benny Austin was out there. Somehow she had never expected to see Benny Austin again: in her mind he was always in her father’s pickup, or standing with her mother and father on the tarmac at McCarran waving at the wrong window. There was something wrong with running into Benny Austin in the Flamingo. “Maria?” he had called when he saw her. “Maria? That you?” He was shorter than she remembered him, shorter and more frail, almost bald, a failed man wearing a lariat tie clasp. “Jesus if you aren’t the picture of Francine,” he kept saying. “Jesus but you’re her daughter.” He had asked her if she was married. He had shrugged and said that the course of true love never was a straight flush. He had ordered Cuba Libres for the two of them and he had talked about as it was and finally she had run. He would be waiting there still, trying to run up a stake for her with the chips she had left, that was like Benny, he would play her chips until they were gone and then he would play his own for her, waiting, holding the Cuba Libre until the ice was gone. Benny would wait there all night. Benny would lay anybody in the Flamingo five-to-one that Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter would not run out on him, and five-to-one were the best odds Benny would lay on the sun rising.
When Maria heard herself being paged she asked the Cuban for a match and gave no sign that she was Maria Wyeth. Maybe it was Benny paging her but having people paged was not much Benny’s style, more likely it was Larry Kulik. She smoked a cigarette and tried not to think about Benny hearing her name and looking around, adjusting his tie clasp and holding his bets, wondering who was calling Harry and Francine’s girl, waiting for her to reappear and introduce her friend, make it an evening. After Maria had finished the cigarette she took a back elevator up to Larry Kulik’s suite.
59
“TELL HIM TO COME UP,” Larry Kulik said, handing her a drink while she waited for the operator to page Benny Austin. In the other room there were some of Larry Kulik’s well-manicured friends and a couple of girls, one of them the Cuban she had seen in the ladies’ room. The Cuban had given her no sign of recognition. “Guys like that interest me, you’d be surprised.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Tell that spic to turn the music down.”
She waited. “Benny?” She raised her voice over the clatter of the slot machines downstairs. “Benny, I got sick, I—”
“Christ, Maria, why didn’t you say something, I got a good friend, house doctor at the Mint.”
“I just need some rest. Benny? Can you hear me? You come see me the next time you’re in Los Angeles, all right? Promise?”
“Sure, honey, swell. I’d like that.”
Maria felt a rush of shame. Benny Austin never came to Los Angeles. “Listen,” she said suddenly. “You remember the last time you saw me? Remember? You and Mother and Daddy put me on the plane at McCarran? And before that we ate spare ribs at the house? Remember?”
“Sure, honey, you bet. Next time I’m over we’ll paint the town.”
For a long while Maria lay on the bed and stared at a large oil painting of a harlequin. In a sense the day they ate spare ribs and drove to McCarran had ceased to exist, had never happened at all: she was the only one left who remembered it. Maria followed this thought for as far as it would go, which was not very far, and then she got up and opened the door. A second-string comedian had come in with some of his entourage, and a girl Maria had seen drinking in the lounge.
“New talent,” the comedian said, looking at Maria.
“She’s not talent,” Larry Kulik said.
At dawn she woke Larry Kulik and told him she was taking the seven o’clock flight out.
“Stick around,” he said. “What is it with you, you want to get paid for your time or something? So I crapped out on you last night. So what.”
“That’s not it.”
“Suit yourself,” Larry Kulik said.
60
AT A PARTY IN MAY she left not with the choreographer who had brought her but with an actor she had never before met. They had danced together and shared a joint in the garden and he told her that they would leave and go up to his house. He had some friends there. Maria was wearing the silver vinyl dress she had bought to make her feel better and her hair was loose and her feet were bare and driving up through the canyon in the actor’s Ferrari she felt good for the first time in a long while. The actor had a tape in the car that played Midnight Hour over and over again and when they got to his house he introduced her to the eight or ten people in the living room as Myra. “This is Myra,” he said. “I just found her some place.” Four or five joints were bein
g passed in the living room and she smoked one and then went to find a Coca-Cola. In the kitchen she danced by herself and felt a little dizzy but still good. She liked his not knowing her. She did not much like him but she liked his not knowing her.
“Let’s fuck,” the actor said from the doorway.
“You mean right here.”
“Not here, in the bed.” He seemed annoyed.
She shook her head.
“Then do it here,” he said. “Do it with the Coke bottle.”
When they finally did it they were on the bed and at the moment before he came he reached under the pillow and pulled out an amyl nitrite popper and broke it under his nose, breathed in rapidly, and closed his eyes.
“Don’t move,” he said. “I said don’t move.”
Maria did not move.
“Terrific,” he said then. His eyes were still closed.
Maria said nothing.
“Wake me up in three hours,” he said. “With your tongue.”
After he had gone to sleep she got dressed very quietly and walked out of the house. She was in the driveway before she remembered that she had no car. The keys were in his Ferrari and she took it, hesitating when she came out to the main canyon road, turning then not toward Beverly Hills but toward the Valley, and the freeway. It was dawn before she reached Vegas and, because she stopped in Vegas to buy cigarettes, eight o’clock before she reached Tonopah. She was not sure what she had meant to do in Tonopah. There was something about seeing her mother’s and father’s graves, but her mother and father were not buried in Tonopah. They were buried in Silver Wells, or what had been Silver Wells. In any case she was stopped for speeding outside Tonopah and when the highway patrolman saw the silver dress and the bare feet and the Ferrari registered to someone else, he checked California to see if the car had been reported stolen, and it had.
61
THEY LET HER make one call, and she called Freddy Chaikin. It was not as easy for Freddy to fix as it might have been, because when they vacuumed the car they picked up marijuana, but still, by sundown, she was flying back across the desert with Freddy in a Lear he had borrowed from a client. Freddy had done everything. Freddy had driven out to the Malibu ranch where the actor was shooting a Western and had told the actor whom to call to retract the complaint. Freddy had waited there while the actor did it. Freddy had gotten in touch with one of the big savings-and-loan Democrats, who got in touch with someone in Nevada and the marijuana came off the report. And now as the jet gained altitude Freddy was handing Maria a drink. She was still wearing the silver dress and she was still barefoot and her face was streaked with dust and when she tasted the drink it all came up, all the pills and the not eating and the liquor and the fear and the way she had felt about the actor and the way she had felt when the matron had her finger up her looking for drugs, all that came up in a trail of mucous on the floor of the Lear that Freddy had borrowed in his day-long effort to protect Carter. Freddy watched her clean it up.
“I don’t understand girls like you,” he said finally.
She clutched a towel to her mouth but the convulsion passed.
“I mean there’s something in your behavior, Maria, I would almost go so far as to call it …” Freddy paused, and lit a cigarillo with his gold Cartier lighter. When he spoke again he measured each word. “Almost go so far as to call it a very self-destructive personality structure.”
Maria closed her eyes. “You know what, Freddy?”
“What.”
“I’d almost go so far as to call you—”
Freddy Chaikin flicked the gold lighter closed and smiled at her.
Maria took his hand, and went to sleep.
62
TWO DOZEN ROSES ARRIVED from the actor, or rather from his business manager. Maria knew that the business manager had sent them because his name was on the delivery slip.
“Hey, babe,” the actor said when he called. “You didn’t have to call out the tactical nukes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about Freddy Chaikin, he shows up at ten o’clock in the morning and tries to lay it on me I’ll never be in a package with any of his clients again. I mean I was shooting.”
“I was in jail.”
“Just hold on, cunt,” the actor said, his voice rising. “You never told me who you were.”
“I hear you had a rather baroque morning-after,” Helene said.
Helene came to the house all the time now. Sometimes Maria would pretend no one was home but today Helene had walked in without ringing and come directly upstairs. She sat on the edge of the bed and took out a cigarette.
“How exactly did you hear that,” Maria said finally. She had taken so many showers during the past several hours that her skin felt damp between the sheets, but the smell of Helene’s cigarette and perfume was making her feel dirty again. “I mean what exactly did you hear.”
“Just that. Carter called from New York and told BZ.”
“I haven’t even talked to Carter.”
“Freddy did, naturally.” Helene picked up Maria’s lipstick and studied the effect of the color on the back of her wrist. “I mean Freddy is seriously worried about you, Carter is seriously worried about you, BZ and I are—”
“I’m all right.”
“Of course. You’re really on top of it. I mean for example there’s nothing at all peculiar about hiding here under the covers shaking at three o’clock in the afternoon. Nothing at all off about leaving a party with Johnny Waters and ending up in jail in Nevada at eight o’clock the next morning. Nothing wrong there.”
“I’ve got a headache. I’m in bed because my head aches.”
“I’ll get a Darvon.”
Maria pulled the sheet up to her chin.
“I’m just trying to help you, Maria.”
“I’ll be all right.” Maria sat up and touched Helene’s arm. “Really, Helene. I promise.”
“All right, never mind, I’m leaving.” Helene stood up and smoothed the bed where she had been sitting and then stared at herself for a long while in the mirror on the dressing-room door. “What kind of fuck is Johnny Waters?” she asked finally.
During the next week Freddy Chaikin made a number of telephone calls to various television producers asking, “as a personal favor to Carter,” that Maria be considered for parts, even day work. “Anything to take her mind off herself,” Freddy said to each of them. “What we’ve got here is a slightly suicidal situation.” Maria knew about these calls because Helene told her about them.
“I saw a picture of you today,” Helene said.
“Where.” Every time she went downstairs Helene seemed to be there.
“You know that employment agency on Beverly? The one where you got the Guatemalan who stole your diaphragm?”
“I don’t know.” Maria did not want to think about he Guatemalan who had taken her diaphragm.
“You do too know. They’ve got all those studio stills on the wall? Satisfied customers? Anyway, now they’ve got a picture of you, signed ‘Good luck, Maria Wyeth.’ ”
“Well, fine,” Maria said. “I didn’t think you’d be in town again today.”
Helene looked at her and giggled. “BZ sent me,” she said finally. “BZ wants me to get you to spend a few weeks at the beach.”
Maria said nothing.
“You looked years younger in this picture, I must say.” Helene laughed again. “‘Good luck, Maria Wyeth.’ ”
“Dear Maria,” the note read. “Well don’t know when I’ll get over to LA but wanted to give you a telephone where you can call if you are in Nevada again or need help. Have some things of your Dad’s I want to give you, also because you are like my own daughter there will be a little windfall from this quarter some day, not too soon let’s hope. Have all your Dad’s papers plus mineral certificates, no action now but quien sabe, once knew a man who thought his rights were worthless and he was sitting on pitchblende so loaded with U. the coun
ters went haywire. Call me at number below and ask for Benny, phone belongs to lady next door, also she cooks for me sometimes. Not like your Mom. Ha ha. Your Friend Benny C. Austin.”
Maria was listening to someone talk and every now and then she would hear herself making what she thought was an appropriate response but mostly she was just swaying slightly with the music and wondering where her drink was when suddenly Felicia Goodwin took her arm.
“We’re leaving now, Maria. We’ll drop you.”
“I have my car, thanks, I’m fine.”
“Les?” Felicia was talking over her shoulder. “I need you.”
Maria picked up someone else’s drink and smiled past Felicia at Les. “Crowd scene,” she said. “Principals emerge.”
“You come with Felicia and me, Maria. I’ll get your car tomorrow.”
Maria put the glass down and looked at him for a long while.
“I didn’t come with you,” she said very clearly then. “Thank Christ.”
After that she was crying, and Helene was holding her arm while BZ got her coat.
“I thought it merited a mention,” Felicia Goodwin whispered.
“Let it go,” Helene said. Grateful, Maria put her head on Helene’s shoulder and let herself be led outside. In the car she was sick on Helene’s lap, and told BZ he was a degenerate.
When she woke before dawn in Helene’s bedroom she saw that someone had undressed and bathed and creamed her body. At first she thought she was alone in the room but then she saw BZ and Helene, sprawled together on a chaise. She had only the faintest ugly memory of what had brought BZ and Helene together, and to erase it from her mind she fixed her imagination on a needle dripping sodium pentathol into her arm and began counting backward from one hundred. When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream.