by Joan Didion
Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work.
77
“WHAT DO YOU THINK about it,” Maria asked Carter.
“About what.”
“What I just told you. About the man at the trailer camp who told his wife he was going out for a walk in order to talk to God.”
“I wasn’t listening, Maria. Just give me the punch line.”
“There isn’t any punch line, the highway patrol just found him dead, bitten by a rattlesnake.”
“I’ll say there isn’t any punch line.”
“Do you think he talked to God?”
Carter looked at her.
“I mean do you think God answered? Or don’t you?”
Carter walked out of the room.
The heat stuck. The air shimmered. An underground nuclear device was detonated where Silver Wells had once been, and Maria got up before dawn to feel the blast. She felt nothing.
“I’m giving this one more chance,” Carter said when he saw her sitting by the window. “Tell me what you want.”
“Nothing.”
“I want to help you. Tell me what you feel.”
She looked at the hand he held out to her. “Nothing,” she said.
“You say that again and I swear to Christ—”
She shrugged. He left the motel.
They had three days left on the desert.
78
Except when they let Carter or Helene in, I never minded Neuropsychiatrie and I don’t mind here. Nobody bothers me. The only problem is Kate. I want Kate.
79
“WE SHOT THE LAST MASTER after you left this afternoon,” Carter said when he came in with Helene. “Three set-ups in the morning and we’re home. Fantastic.”
“Susannah was fabulous,” Helene said. “Super-good.”
BZ said nothing. Maria stared out the window.
“You should have seen Carter working with her.”
“I bet he was fabulous,” BZ said. “Fab.”
80
The one time Ivan Costello got through the switchboard to me here he told me that I had lost my sense of humor. In spite of what Carter and Helene think, maybe my sense of humor was all I did lose.
81
“YOU WERE FANTASTIC TODAY” Helene said when Susannah Wood came in.
“Super-good,” BZ said. “Really key.”
Susannah Wood lay down on Maria’s bed. “Let’s go into Vegas.”
“It’s all planned.” Helene did not look at BZ. “Sylvie Roth’s over, and Cassie and Leona and—”
BZ stood up. “You go into Vegas.”
“Don’t you want to see Sylvie?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to see Leona’s last show?”
“No.”
The cords tightened on Helene’s neck. “Exactly what do you want.”
Susannah Wood giggled. “I saw the charts today, Leona’s single stopped at 85.”
BZ looked at Helene. “Exactly nothing,” he said pleasantly.
Maria dropped a tray of ice on the floor.
82
Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.” Now that I have the answer, my plans for the future are these: (1) get Kate, (2) live with Kate alone, (3) do some canning. Damson plums, apricot preserves. Sweet India relish and pickled peaches. Apple chutney. Summer squash succotash. There might even be a ready market for such canning: you will note that after everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter and Benny Austin’s godchild. For all I know they knew the answer too, and pretended they didn’t. You call it as you see it, and stay in the action. BZ thought otherwise. If Carter and Helene aren’t careful they’ll get the answer too.
83
“I THOUGHT YOU’D BE in Vegas,” BZ said when Maria opened the door. He was holding a bottle of vodka and in spite of the heat he was wearing a blazer and a tie. “With Carter and Helene and Susannah and Harrison and Sylvia and Cassie and Leona and—”
“You knew I wasn’t going.” Maria lay down on the bed again.
“All right, I knew.” He sat on the edge of the bed and loosened his tie. “Look at me all duded up. Why are you in bed at nine o’clock.”
“Why not.”
“Beautiful.”
Maria looked at him. “Tell me why you’re sad.”
“You’re a good girl.” All the musculature seemed gone from BZ’s face. He put down the bottle of vodka and reached into his pocket. “You know what these are?”
He poured twenty or thirty capsules onto the bed before she answered.
“Grain-and-a-half Seconal.”
“You want some?”
She looked at him. “No.”
“You’re still playing.” BZ did not take his eyes from hers. “Some day you’ll wake up and you just won’t feel like playing any more.”
“That’s a queen’s way of doing it.”
“I never expected you to fall back on style as an argument.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“I know that. You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She took his hand and held it. “Why are you here.”
“Because you and I, we know something. Because we’ve been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted—you know why.”
“Lie down here,” she said after a while. “Just go to sleep.”
When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsules rolled on the sheet. In the bar across the road somebody punched King of the Road on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ’s hand.
“Listen to that,” he said. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”
“It would be very pretty,” Maria said. “Go to sleep.”
She was almost asleep when she sensed that his weight had shifted.
“Don’t.” After she had said it she opened her eyes.
He was swallowing the capsules with a glass of water. There were not very many left on the bed.
“Don’t start faking me now.” BZ turned off the light and lay down again. “Take my hand. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” she said after a while.
“Hold onto me,” BZ said.
When Maria woke again the room was blazing with light and Carter was shaking her and Helene was screaming. Maria thought she had never heard anyone scream the way Helene screamed. She closed her eyes against the light and her ears against Helene and her mind against what was going to happen in the next few hours and tightened her hold on BZ’s hand.
84
Carter called today, but I saw no point in talking to him. On the whole I talk to no one. I concentrate on the way light would strike filled Mason jars on a kitchen windowsill. I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
About the Author
Joan Didion is one of the few novelists still passionate enough about the idea of America to make it the subject of fiction. She has published five novels in three decades and each book has come closer to the source of the national psychosis, where romance and reality collide and the outcome is loss. Her novels have been underrated, perhaps because of critical resistance to a writer who can do too much. Yet her fiction is no less indispensable than her five books of essays and reportage are. Together her works provide a chronicle of personal and political change over the past thirty years, told in the irresistibly observant tone of a compulsively self-r
eflective prose stylist.
JOHN WEIR, New Yorker
Also by Joan Didion
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
RUN RIVER
Copyright
Flamingo
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Published by Flamingo 1998
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First published in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1970
Copyright © Joan Didion 1970
Joan Didion asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne ISBN 0 00 654587 4
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Epub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-41499-4
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