by Joan Didion
“I guess so.” Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers.
“I told you before, you split the ends,” he said with no real interest, and then transferred his attention to a thin girl who had just come up and kissed the back of his neck. “How are you, babe.”
“I had an operation.”
“No kidding.”
“Pelvic abscess.” The girl loosened her wrapper and absently stroked her collarbone. “All through my tubes.”
“Listen, I hear his new act is just lying there,” the hairdresser said. “Bibi Markel was just over there and she heard they were trying to transfer his contract to the lounge.”
“Macht nicht to me,” the girl said. “Except maybe I’ll have to go to court for the separate maintenance.” She slipped one big roller away from her scalp and touched the hair to see if it was dry. “Listen,” she said suddenly. “Finish her and then comb me out and come up for a drink on your way home.”
“Where you living now.”
“Off Coldwater, same place. O.K.? Promise?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Please. Promise.”
He ignored her, and handed Maria a mirror. “You want to use a drier, Maria honey?”
But Maria only shook her head and took the fifteen dollars from her bag and walked very fast toward the dressing room.
“Maybe I can get Sandy to come up.” Even from the dressing room Maria could hear the girl wheedling, the thin beautiful girl with the pelvic abscess and the separate maintenance and her hair all done and nobody to drink with. She fixed her attention on the mounds of used wrappers and damp towels and tried not to hear whatever it was the girl would say next. The girl was a presentiment of something. “Listen,” the girl said then. “Maybe I can get Bibi Markel.”
46
SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper’s Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.
47
“YOU’RE LYING IN WATER,” the hypnotist said. “You’re lying in water and it’s warm and you hear your mother’s voice.”
“No,” Maria said. “I don’t.”
The hypnotist stood up. He always seemed cold and he was always sipping Pernod and water and his house was dusty and cluttered with torn newspaper clippings and stained file folders. “What do you hear,” he said finally. “What do you hear and see in your mind right now. What are you doing.”
“I’m driving over here,” Maria said. “I’m driving Sunset and I’m staying in the left lane because I can see the New Havana Ballroom and I’m going to turn left at the New Havana Ballroom. That’s what I’m doing.”
48
THERE WAS AT FIRST that spring an occasional faggot who would take her to parties. Never a famous faggot, never one of those committed months in advance to escorting the estranged wives of important directors, but a third-string faggot. At first she was even considered a modest asset by several of them: they liked her not only because she would listen to late-night monologues about how suicidal they felt but because the years she spent modeling had versed her in precisely the marginal distinctions which preoccupied them. She understood, for example, about shoes, and could always distinguish among the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy. Still, there remained some fatal lack of conviction in her performance, some instant of flushed inattention that would provoke them finally to a defensive condescension. Eventually they would raise their eyebrows helplessly at one another when they were with her, and be oversolicitous. “Darling,” they would say, “have another drink.” And she would. She was drinking a good deal in the evenings now because when she drank she did not dream. “This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen,” a loudspeaker kept repeating in her dreams now, and she would be checking off names as the children filed past her, the little children in the green antechamber, she would be collecting their lockets and baby rings in a fine mesh basket. Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation.
49
“LEONARD’S IN NEW YORK for ten days,” Helene said as soon as Maria had hung up the telephone. “Did I tell you?”
“Three times,” Maria said. Leonard was Helene’s hairdresser.
“I don’t mind if I’m out of town, but if I’m in town and Leonard’s not—who was that on the telephone?”
“Somebody’s leg man.”
“What do you mean, somebody’s? Whose?”
“Some columnist in the trades. I don’t know.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to know if I was dating anyone in particular. He also wanted to know what I thought of Carter’s dating Susannah Wood.”
Helene shrugged. “You knew that.”
“I mean the word dating? Doesn’t it strike you funny?”
“Not particularly.” Helene was studying her hair line in a small mirror. “If I’m in town, and Leonard’s not, I feel almost … frightened.”
Maria said nothing.
“I don’t suppose you understand that.”
Maria watched the tears welling in Helene’s eyes. “Don’t, Helene,” she said finally. “Don’t be depressed.”
“It’s shit,” Helene said. “It’s all shit.”
50
EVERYTHING MARIA could think to do in the town she had already done. She had checked into the motel, she had eaten a crab at the marina. At three in the afternoon she had been the only customer in the marina restaurant and it had been a dispiriting thirty or forty minutes, sliced beets staining the crab legs and a couple of waitresses arguing listlessly and a piped medley from Showboat. After that she had walked on the gravelly sand and she had driven aimlessly to Port Hueneme and back to Oxnard and now she sat on a bench in the downtown plaza, watching some boys in ragged Levi jackets and dark goggles who sat on the grass near her car. Their Harleys were pulled up to the curb and they seemed to be passing a joint with furtive daring and every now and then they would look over at her and laugh. Because there was an oil fire somewhere to the north a yellow haze hung over the town, a stillness over the plaza. On the next bench an old man coughed soundlessly, spit phlegm that seemed to hang in the heavy air. A woman in a nurse’s uniform wheeled a bundled neuter figure silently past the hedges of dead camellias. Maria closed her eyes and imagined the woman coming toward her with a hypodermic needle. When she opened her eyes again the boys in the Levi jackets seemed to be rifling the glove compartments of parked cars. To hear the sound of her own footsteps Maria stood up and walked to the pay phone by the public toilet and asked the operator to try the number in Los Angeles again.
She would tell him she could not wait.
She would tell him she was sitting in a park watching some hoods rifling cars and she could not wait.
Maybe she would not feel this way if she talked to him, maybe he would make her laugh. Maybe she would hear his voice and the silence would break, the woman in the nurse’s uniform would speak to her charge and the boys would get on their Harleys and roar off.
When she hung up the phone the silence was absolute. The boys in the Levi jackets were all watching her now, because they were standing around her car, they knew it was her car, they had watched her lock it. They were trying various keys. They were watching to see what she would do. As if in slowed motion she began walking across the grass toward the car, and as she got closer they melted back, formed a semicircle. Abstractly she admired the way that she and they together were evolving a choreography, hearing the same silent beat. She kept her eyes steady, her pace even, and when she found herself unlocking the car under their blank gaze it was with extreme deliberation. As she slid into the driver’s seat she stared directly at each of them, one by one, and in that instant of total complicity one of them leaned across the hood and raised a hand in recognition of what had passed between them, his palm out, inscribing an arc in the still air. Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.
51
SHE SAT IN THE MOTEL ROOM near the Southern Pacific tracks in Oxnard and waited for Les Goodwin to call. He had said nine-thirty or ten but she had driven past the theater in the afternoon, the marquee readMAJOR STUDIO PREVIEW 8 p.m. An eight o’clock sneak meant eleven, by the time they counted the cards. When the telephone rang, it was quarter to eleven and he said it would be another half hour. Maria took two Librium, washed her face although she had showered an hour before, straightened the immaculate room as if to erase any sign of herself. When there was nothing left to straighten she walked across the parking lot to the ice machine by the swimming pool and filled a paper bucket with ice. After she had arranged the bucket on a tray with two water glasses and a bottle of whisky she sat on the bed and turned the pages of the Oxnard-Port Hueneme telephone book. There were fourteen Wyeths listed, twenty-three Langs and twenty Goodwins.
When she finally opened the door for him she avoided his eyes, buried her face against his shirt. They were both shaking. He poured Scotch into the two glasses without ice and they sat down on the bed and still they had not looked at each other.
“I almost didn’t come,” he said then. “I called the house this afternoon, I was going to tell you I wasn’t coming up, they’d canceled the preview.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
“I was going to tell you I was here and couldn’t wait.”
“You came up this afternoon?”
“I didn’t have anything in particular to do in town,” she said, and then she looked at him. “I came up this afternoon because I was afraid you’d call me up and tell me they’d canceled the preview.”
“This is a lousy place,” he said finally. “Let’s get out of here.”
They drove up the coast until they were exhausted enough to sleep, and then they did sleep, wrapped together like children in a room by the sea in Morro Bay.
“I’ve got until tomorrow, we can go on up the coast,” he said the next morning.
“We could go up to Big Sur.”
“We could have a picnic, we could stay at the Lodge.”
“We could buy a sleeping bag and sleep on the beach.”
“I’ve got to call Felicia,” he said then.
“Wait until I’m dressed.”
She dressed with her back to him, then left the motel room and walked down to the water. A culvert had washed out and the equipment brought in to lift it was mired in the sandy mud. Bare-legged and bare-armed, shivering in her cotton jersey dress, she stood for a long while watching them try to free the equipment. When she got back to the motel he was dressed, sitting on the unmade bed.
“Don’t cry,” he said.
“There’s no point.”
“No point in what.”
“No point in our doing any of those things.”
He looked at her for a long while. “Later,” he said then.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
On the drive back they told each other that it had been the wrong time, the wrong place, that it was bad because he had lied to arrange it, that it would be all right another time, idyllic later. He mentioned the strain he had been under, he mentioned that the preview had gone badly. She mentioned that she was getting the curse. They mentioned Kate, Carter, Felicia, the weather, Oxnard, his dislike of motel rooms, her fear of subterfuge. They mentioned everything but one thing: that she had left the point in a bedroom in Encino.
52
MARIA MADE A LIST of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.
53
“I’LL BE AWAY A few weeks,” Carter said. “I came by because I’ll be away, I wanted to tell you—you know the picture’s entered at Cannes.”
“I read that.”
“You seen it yet?”
“How would I have seen it, it’s not in release, I mean is it?”
“Maria, for Christ’s fucking sake, they’ve been screening it every night for a month, you know that—oh shit.”
“I didn’t mean to be that way,” she said after a while.
“You never mean to be any way.”
It was always that way when he came by but sometimes later, after he had left, the spectre of his joyless face would reach her, talk about heart’s needle, would flash across her hapless consciousness all the images of the family they might have been: Carter throwing a clear plastic ball filled with confetti, Kate missing the ball. Kate crying. Carter swinging Kate by her wrists. The spray from the sprinklers and the clear plastic ball with the confetti falling inside and Kate’s fat arms stretched up again for the catch she would always miss. Freeze frame. Kate fevered, Carter sponging her back while Maria called the pediatrician. Kate’s birthday, Kate laughing, Carter blowing out the candle. The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed a family.
“Listen,” Maria said to Carter the night before he left for Cannes. She had put off calling until almost midnight but had finally made herself do it. “The picture’s fine. I went to a screening, it’s a beautiful picture.”
There was a silence. “If you need to reach me call BZ,” he said then. “He’ll know where I am.”
“The picture. I really liked it.”
“Fine. Thanks.”
“What’s the matter.”
“Just forget it, Maria.” His voice was tired. “There hasn’t been a print in Los Angeles all week.”
During the next few weeks Maria bought Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and studied them dutifully for small mentions of Carter. After Cannes he seemed to be in London, and after that in Paris again, where he appeared on television discussing the auteur principle.
“Carter’s staying another week in Paris, I guess you know,” Helene said on the telephone.
“The touring auteur,” Maria said.
Helene paused only slightly. “BZ called them last night, apparently she has to stay over to talk about a picture.”
“I suppose he was pleased about Cannes.”
“He didn’t talk about it much but she said—”
“You think you’re telling me something, Helene, you’re missing the point.”
Helene giggled. “Whose point.”
That afternoon Maria had a small accident with the Corvette, received a call from the bank about her overdrawn account, and learned from the drugstore that the doctor would no longer renew her barbiturate prescriptions. In a way she was relieved.
54
MARIA STOOD IN THE SUN on the Western street and waited for the young agent from Freddy Chaikin’s office to back his Volkswagen past the Writers’ Building to where she was. It was hot and no one had l
eft her name at the gate and there was a spot on her skirt and she was annoyed because of the trouble at the gate and because Freddy Chaikin had not come himself. He had arranged for her to see a director who wanted her for a bike picture and the least he could have done was show up himself. She did not even want to do another bike picture.
“Looks like we missed him,” the young agent said. He did not turn the motor off.
“How do you mean, we missed him.”
“I mean I guess he’s already left for lunch.” The agent looked uncomfortably past Maria. “Actually it wasn’t two hundred percent confirmed, he told Freddy he might be tied up with the girl they’re looking at for the lead.”
Maria pushed her hair back and watched the agent avoid her eyes. “What exactly did they want me for,” she said finally.
“The high-school teacher, Freddy must’ve told you that. You read the script, that’s the part, the lead’s just any teeny fluff. I mean the teacher, she … she carries the picture.”
“The teacher,” Maria said. “Who plays the Angel Mama?”
“His girlfriend.”
“I have to go now,” Maria said, and without waiting for him to speak she turned and began walking toward the gate. Once in her car she drove as far as Romaine and then pulled over, put her head on the steering wheel and cried as she had not cried since she was a child, cried out loud. She cried because she was humiliated and she cried for her mother and she cried for Kate and she cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born.
55
“I WANT TO TELL YOU right now I’m never going to do anything again,” Ivan Costello had said in the beginning. “If you want to live that way, O.K. There’s not going to be any money and there’s not going to be any eating breakfast together and there’s not going to be any getting married and there’s not going to be any baby makes three. And if you make any money, I’ll spend it.”
