by Joan Didion
“Something bad is going to happen to all of us.”
She could hear a typewriter in the background. “I mean it. Take me somewhere.”
“You got a map of Peru?”
She said nothing.
“That’s funny, Maria. That’s a line from Dark Passage.”
“I know it.”
“I had a fight with Felicia at lunch, I’ve got to have a rewrite by tomorrow morning, I tell you something funny and you don’t laugh.”
“When I want to hear something funny i’ll call you up again.”
After she hung up she packed one bag and drove to the desert.
68
When I first married Carter and my name began appearing in columns I received mail from mad people. I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.
69
THE FIRST NIGHT in the still heat of the motel on the desert Carter turned away from Maria without speaking. The second night he got up and lay down on the bed in the other room.
“What’s the matter,” Maria said, standing in the doorway in the dark.
“It isn’t any better.”
“How do you know.”
He said nothing.
“I mean we didn’t even try.”
“You don’t want it.”
“I do too.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t.”
Maria turned away. After that either she or Carter slept most nights in the other room. Some nights he said that he was tired, and some nights she said that she wanted to read, and other nights no one said anything.
In the motel on the desert there were the two rooms, and a bathroom with a scaling metal shower stall, and a kitchenette with a few chipped dishes and an oilcloth-covered table. The air conditioner was broken, and through the open windows at night Maria could hear the jukebox from the bar across the road. On those nights when Carter could not sleep she lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, and waited for the moment when Carter would begin banging drawers, slamming doors, throwing a magazine across the bed where she lay.
“You aren’t waking me up,” she would say then. “I’m not asleep.”
“Well go to sleep, cunt. Go to sleep. Die. Fucking vegetable.”
After that point he would sleep. She would not.
By the time Maria woke at eight-thirty or nine in the morning it would already be 105°, 110°. Carter would be gone. For the first week Maria would wash in the trickle that came from the shower and drink a Coca-Cola in the bathroom and then drive out to the location, but on Monday of the second week Carter asked her to leave at lunchtime.
“You’re making Susannah nervous,” he said. “It’s only her second picture, she’s worried about working against Harrison, now you’re here—the point is, when an actress is working, there’s a certain—”
“I’ve worked once or twice. As an actress.”
Carter avoided her eyes. “Maybe you and Helene could do something.”
“Maybe we could see some plays.”
70
THE TOWN WAS ON A DRY RIVER bed between Death Valley and the Nevada line. Carter and BZ and Helene and Susannah Wood and Harrison Porter and most of the crew did not think of it as a town at all, but Maria did: it was larger than Silver Wells. Besides the motel, which was built of cinder block and operated by the wife of the sheriff’s deputy who patrolled the several hundred empty square miles around the town, there were two gas stations, a store which sold fresh meat and vegetables one day a week, a coffee shop, a Pentecostal church, and the bar, which served only beer. The bar was called The Rattler Room.
There was a bathhouse in the town, an aluminum lean-to with a hot spring piped into a shallow concrete pool, and because of the hot baths the town attracted old people, believers in cures and the restorative power of desolation, eighty- and ninety-year-old couples who moved around the desert in campers. There were a few dozen cinder-block houses in the town, two trailer courts, and, on the dirt road that was the main street, the office for an abandoned talc mine called the Queen of Sheba. The office was boarded up. Fifty miles north there was supposed to be a school, but Maria saw no children.
“You can’t call this a bad place,” the woman who ran the coffee shop told Maria. The fan was broken and the door open and the woman swatted listlessly at flies. “I’ve lived in worse.”
“So have I,” Maria said. The woman shrugged.
By late day the thermometer outside the motel office would register between 120°and 130°. The old people put aluminum foil in their trailer windows to reflect the heat. There were two trees in the town, two cottonwoods in the dry river bed, but one of them was dead.
71
“YOU’RE WITH THE MOVIE,” the boy at the gate to the bathhouse said. He was about eighteen and he had fair pimpled skin and he wore a straw field hat to ward off the sun. “I guessed it yesterday.”
“My husband is.”
“You want to know how I guessed?”
“How,” Maria said.
“Because I—” The boy studied his grimy fingernails, as if no longer confident that the story illustrated a special acumen. “Because I personally know everybody from around here,” he said then, his eyes on his fingernails. “I mean I guessed right away you weren’t somebody I already knew.”
“Actually I come from around here.” Maria had spoken to no one else all day and she did not want to go into the bathhouse. She did not even know why she had come to the bathhouse. The bathhouse was full of old people, their loose skin pink from the water, sitting immobile on the edge of the pool nursing terminal cancers and wens and fear. “Actually I grew up in Silver Wells.”
The boy looked at her impassively.
“It’s across the line. I mean it’s on the test range.”
“How about that,” the boy said, and then he leaned forward. “Your husband couldn’t be Harrison Porter, could he?”
“No,” Maria said, and then there seemed nothing more to say.
“My room, my game.” Susannah Wood was sitting on her bed rolling cigarettes. “So turn up the sound.”
Carter walked over to the bank of amplifiers and speakers and tape reels that Susannah had brought with her to the desert.
“Somebody’s going to complain,” Maria repeated.
“So what,” Susannah Wood said, and then she laughed. “Maria thinks we’re going to get arrested for possession. Maria thinks she’s already done that number in Nevada.”
BZ looked up. “Turn it down, Carter.”
Susannah Wood looked first at BZ and then at Maria. “Turn it up, Carter.”
Maria stood up. It was midnight and she was wearing only an old bikini bathing suit and her hair clung damply to the back of her neck. “I don’t like any of you,” she said. “You are all making me sick.”
Susannah Wood laughed.
“That’s not funny, Maria,” Helene said.
“I mean sick. Physically sick.”
Helene picked up a jar from the clutter on Susannah Wood’s dressing table and began smoothing cream into Maria’s shoulders. “If it’s not funny don’t say it, Maria.”
“What about Susannah,” Maria asked Carter. She was standing in the sun by the window brushing her hair.
“What about her.”
Maria brushed her hair another twenty strokes and went into the bathroom. “I mean did you really like fucking her.”
“Not particularly.”
“I wonder why not,” Maria said, and closed the bathroom door.
“Where’s Carter,” Maria said when she came into BZ’s room.
“We had some trouble with Harrison, Carter stayed out there to block a scene with him. You want a drink?”
“I guess so. They coming back here?”
“I said we’d meet them in Vegas. Helene’s there already.�
��
“Let’s not have dinner at the Riviera again.”
“Harrison likes the Riviera.”
Maria leaned back on Helene’s bed. “I’m tired of Harrison.” She licked the inside of her glass and let the bourbon coat her tongue. “Some ice might help.”
“The refrigerator’s broken. Roll a number.”
Maria closed her eyes. “And I’m also tired of Susannah.”
“What else are you tired of.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re getting there,” BZ said.
“Getting where.”
“Where I am.”
72
THEY HAD BEEN on the desert three weeks when Susannah Wood got beaten up in a hotel room in Las Vegas. The unit publicity man got over there right away and Harrison Porter did a surprise Telethon for Southern Nevada Cystic Fibrosis and there was no mention of the incident. When Maria asked Carter what had happened he shrugged.
“What difference does it make,” he said.
Susannah Wood was not badly hurt but her face was bruised and she could not be photographed. Carter tried to shoot around her until the bruise was down enough to be masked by makeup but by the end of the fourth week they were running ten days over schedule.
“Was it Harrison?”
“It’s over, she’s O.K., drop it.” Carter was standing by the window watching for BZ’s car. BZ had been in town for meetings at the studio. “Susannah doesn’t take things quite as hard as you do. So just forget it.”
“Was it you?”
Carter looked at her. “You think that way, get your ass out of here.”
In silence Maria pulled out a suitcase and began taking her clothes from hangers. In silence Carter watched her. By the time BZ walked in, neither of them had spoken for ten minutes.
“They’re on your back,” BZ said. He dropped his keys on the bed and took an ice tray from the refrigerator.
“I thought they liked the dailies.”
“Ralph likes them. Kramer says they’re very interesting.”
“What does that mean.”
“It means he wants to know why he’s not seeing a master, two, closeup and reaction on every shot.”
“If I started covering myself on every shot we’d bring it in at about two-five.”
“All right, then, it doesn’t mean that. It means he wants Ralph to hang himself with your rope.” BZ looked at Maria. “What’s she doing?”
“Ask her,” Carter said, and walked out.
“Harrison did it,” BZ said. “What’s the problem.”
“Carter was there. Wasn’t Carter there.”
“It was just something that got a little out of hand.”
Maria sat down on the bed beside her suitcase. “Carter was there.”
BZ looked at her for a long while and then laughed. “Of course Carter was there. He was there with Helene.”
Maria said nothing.
“If you’re pretending that it makes some difference to you, who anybody fucks and where and when and why, you’re faking yourself.”
“It does make a difference to me.”
“No,” BZ said. “It doesn’t.”
Maria stared out the window into the dry wash behind the motel.
“You know it doesn’t. If you thought things like that mattered you’d be gone already. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Why don’t you get me a drink,” Maria said finally.
“What’s the matter,” Carter would ask when he saw her sitting in the dark at two or three in the morning staring out at the dry wash. “What do you want. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Tell me.”
“I just told you.”
“Fuck it then. Fuck it and fuck you. I’m up to here with you. I’ve had it. I’ve had it with the circles under your eyes and the veins showing on your arms and the lines starting on your face and your fucking menopausal depression—”
“Don’t say that word to me.”
“Menopause. Old. You’re going to get old.”
“You talk crazy any more and I’ll leave.”
“Leave. For Christ’s sake leave.”
She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. “All right.”
“Don’t,” he would say then. “Don’t.”
“Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.”
He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. “To find out if you’re alive.”
In the heat some mornings she would wake with her eyes swollen and heavy and she would wonder if she had been crying.
73
THEY HAD TEN DAYS LEFT on the desert.
“Come out and watch me shoot today,” Carter said.
“Later,” she said. “Maybe later.”
Instead she sat in the motel office and studied the deputy sheriff’s framed photographs of highway accidents, imagined the moment of impact, tasted blood in her own dry mouth and searched the grain of the photographs with a magnifying glass for details not immediately apparent, the false teeth she knew must be on the pavement, the rattlesnake she suspected on the embankment. The next day she borrowed a gun from a stunt man and drove out to the highway and shot at road signs.
“That was edifying,” Carter said. “Why’d you do it.”
“I just did it.”
“I want you to give that gun back to Farris.”
“I already did.”
“I don’t want any guns around here.”
Maria looked at him. “Neither do I,” she said.
“I can’t take any more of that glazed expression,” Carter said. “I want you to wake up. I want you to come out with us today.”
“Later,” Maria said.
Instead she sat in the coffee shop and talked to the woman who ran it.
“I close down now until four,” the woman said at two o’clock. “You’ll notice it says that on the door, hours 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 4 p.m. to—”
“6:30 p.m.,” Maria said.
“Well. You saw it.”
“What do you do between two and four.”
“I go home, I usually—” The woman looked at Maria. “Look. You want to come out and see my place?”
The house was on the edge of the town, a trailer set on a concrete foundation. In place of a lawn there was a neat expanse of concrete, bordered by a split-rail fence, and beyond the fence lay a hundred miles of drifting sand.
“I got the only fence around here. Lee built it before he took off.”
“Lee.” Maria tried to remember in which of the woman’s stories Lee had figured. “Where’d he go.”
“Found himself a girl down to Barstow. I told you. Doreen Baker.”
The sand was blowing through the rail fence onto the concrete, drifting around the posts, coating a straight-backed chair with pale film. Maria began to cry.
“Honey,” the woman said. “You pregnant or something?”
Maria shook her head and looked in her pocket for a Kleenex. The woman picked up a broom and began sweeping the sand into small piles, then edging the piles back to the fence. New sand blew in as she swept.
“You ever made a decision?” she said suddenly, letting the broom fall against the fence.
“About what.”
“I made my decision in ‘61 at a meeting in Barstow and I never shed one tear since.”
“No,” Maria said. “I never did that.”
74
When I was ten years old my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout: I could trace a layout in my sleep, the field here and the pass line all around, even money on Big Six or Eight, five-for-one on Any Seven. Always when I play back my father’s voice it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As
lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.
75
SHE SAT IN THE MOTEL in the late afternoon light looking out at the dry wash until its striations and shifting grains seemed to her a model of the earth and the moon. When BZ came in she did not look up.
“Let me entertain you,” BZ said finally.
Maria said nothing.
“I could do my turn about Harrison calling one of the grips a vicious cunt.”
“Please don’t smoke in here, BZ.”
“Why not.”
She got up and filled a glass with the warm water from the tap. “Because it’s a felony.”
BZ laughed. Maria sat on the bed and drank the water and watched him roll a cigarette.
“I said don’t, BZ.”
“I get the feeling you want me to leave.”
“I don’t feel like talking to anybody.”
“You don’t have to talk to me.” He lit the cigarette and handed it to her. “You want to know where Carter is?”
“Still shooting.”
“Maria, it’s seven-thirty.”
“I give up.”
“He’s with Helene.”
“I thought I didn’t have to talk to you.”
“You aren’t paying attention, Maria. Carter is fucking Helene. I thought these things made a big difference to you.”
Maria got up and walked back to the window. In the few minutes that BZ had been distracting her the light had changed on the dry wash. Tomorrow she would borrow a camera, and station it on the dry wash for twenty-four hours.
“Tell me what matters,” BZ said.
“Nothing,” Maria said.
76
If Carter and Helene want to think it happened because I was insane, I say let them. They have to lay it off on someone. Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane. Just once, the week after the desert, when Helene came to see me in Neuropsychiatrie, I tried to explain how wrong she had been when she screamed that last night about my carelessness, my selfishness, my insanity, as if it had somehow slipped my attention what BZ was doing. I told her: there was no carelessness involved. Helene, I said: I knew precisely what BZ was doing. But Helene only screamed again.