Play it as it Lays

by Joan Didion

  63

  “I GUESS I DRANK too much last night,” Maria said carefully.

  “Don’t talk about it.” Helene was staring out the kitchen window, holding a cup of coffee in her two hands as if for warmth. Her eyes were puffy and there was a bruise on her left cheekbone and her voice was soft and vague. “I don’t want to talk about it. The wind makes me feel bad.”

  “I just don’t remember getting here.” Maria had a flash image of BZ holding a belt and Helene laughing and she tried not to look at the bruise on Helene’s face. “That’s all I was saying.”

  Tears began falling down Helene’s face. “Don’t talk about it. And don’t say you don’t remember, either.”

  “I didn’t—” Maria broke off. BZ was standing in the doorway.

  “I picked up your car.” BZ dropped the keys on the table and looked from Maria to Helene. “What have we here,” he said softly. “A little hangover terror? A few second thoughts? Is that about the size of it?”

  Helene said nothing.

  “I can’t take this, Helene.” BZ was wearing tinted glasses and for the first time Maria noticed a sag beneath his eyes. “If you can’t deal with the morning, get out of the game. You’ve been around a long time, you know what it is, it’s play-or-pay.”

  “Why don’t you go tell that to Carlotta,” Helene whispered.

  Maria closed her eyes at the instant BZ’s hand hit Helene’s face. “Stop it,” she screamed.

  BZ looked at Maria and laughed. “You weren’t talking that way last night,” he said.

  64

  FROM A PAY PHONE on the highway outside Las Vegas she called the number Benny Austin had given her. The number was no longer in service.

  “You here all alone?” the bellboy in the Sands asked, lingering after she had tipped him.

  “My husband’s meeting me here.”

  “Is that right? Today? Tomorrow?”

  She looked at him. “Go away,” she said.

  The room was painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread. Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could send people into irreversible insanity she thought about asking for a different room, but the boy had unnerved her. She did not want to court further appraisal by asking anyone for anything. To hear someone’s voice she looked in the telephone book and dialed a few prayers, then took three aspirin and tried not to think about BZ and Helene.

  In the morning she went to the post office. Because it was Saturday the long corridors were deserted, and all but one of the grilled windows shuttered. Her sandals clattered against the marble and echoed as she walked.

  “Could you put this in Box 674,” she said to the clerk at the one open window. 674 was the number on the envelope of Benny Austin’s letter.

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not.”

  “It’s got to have postage. It’s got to go through the United States mail.”

  Sullenly he studied the nickel and penny she gave him, then pushed one stamp under the grill and watched her stamp the note.

  “Now could you put it in 674?”

  “No,” he said, and threw the letter into a canvas bin.

  She found a bench near Box 674 and sat down. At noon the last window slammed shut. Maria drank from the water cooler, smoked cigarettes, read the F.B.I. posters. Wandering the country somewhere were Negro Females Armed with Lye, Caucasian Males posing as Baby Furniture Representatives, Radio Station Employees traveling out of Texas with wives and children and embezzled cash and Schemes for Getting Money and Never Delivering on Piecework, an inchoate army on the move. Maria crossed the street to a diner with a view of the post office and tried to eat a grilled-cheese sandwich.

  On the third day a woman unlocked Box 674. She was wearing a soiled white uniform and she had a hard sad face and Maria did not want to speak to her.

  “Excuse me,” she said finally. “I’m trying to reach Benny Austin—”

  “What is this.” The woman was holding Maria’s letter and her eyes darted from the letter to Maria.

  “Actually I sent that letter—”

  “And now you want it back.”

  “No. Not at all. I want you to give it to Benny Austin and tell—”

  “I don’t know any Benny person. And I think it’s pretty funny this letter addressed to some Benny person in my box and then right off you sashay up and start dropping the same name, either you’ve been tampering in my box, a federal offense, or you’re trying some other mickey mouse and believe me you’ve got the wrong party.”

  Maria backed away. The woman’s face was white and twisted and she was following Maria, her voice rising. “You’re Luanne’s foster mother, is exactly who you are, and you’re nosing around Vegas because you heard about the injury settlement, well just you forget it. I said forget it.”

  65

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK,” Maria could hear one of the men saying. She was trying to eat an egg roll in the Sands and the two men and the girl had been watching her ever since she sat down.

  “About what,” the girl said.

  “That.”

  The girl shrugged. “Maybe.”

  The other man said something that Maria did not hear and when she looked up again the girl was still watching her.

  “Thirty-six,” the girl said. “But a good thirty-six.”

  For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas she wore dark glasses. She did not decide to stay in Vegas: she only failed to leave. She spoke to no one. She did not gamble. She neither swam nor lay in the sun. She was there on some business but she could not seem to put her finger on what that business was. All day, most of every night, she walked and she drove. Two or three times a day she walked in and out of all the hotels on the Strip and several downtown. She began to crave the physical flash of walking in and out of places, the temperature shock, the hot wind blowing outside, the heavy frigid air inside. She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

  By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. “Maria,” she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

  She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam’s face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself. With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast glittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned
out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.

  “Just how long have you been here now,” Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar’s. “You planning on making a year of it? Or what?”

  “Two weeks, Freddy. I haven’t been here even two weeks.”

  “Jesus Christ, two weeks in Vegas.”

  “I like the good talk.”

  “I’m over for Lenny’s opening, you coming?”

  She tried to think who Lenny was. “I’m not seeing too many people, actually.”

  “That’s not healthy, you’re morbid enough. Do me a favor, come on over after. Lenny’s suite. A lot of people you know.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “Maria. A personal favor. You owe me one, O.K.? 1202, that’s in the new building.”

  “Could you tell me how to find 1202,” she asked the man at the desk in the hotel. When she had called up from the lobby there was too much noise to understand Freddy’s directions.

  She waited. The desk clerk did not look up.

  “I’m looking for 1202.”

  He lifted his eyes only slightly. “No,” he said.

  “You don’t understand. I don’t know how to get to the new building.”

  “I do understand, honey. I understand very well. No dice. If they want you up there they’d tell you how to get there. Freelance some place else.”

  When she got back to the Sands she looked at herself in the mirror for a long while, then called room service and asked for a double bourbon. When the boy came he looked at her.

  “Pretty early still,” he said.

  She poured a few drops of bourbon over the ice and watched it coat the glass. It seemed to her now that she had been driving all week toward precisely this instant. “I don’t know anyone,” she heard herself saying.

  “Lots of guys around.”

  “I don’t know any.”

  “I could make an introduction.”

  She looked at him. “All right,” she said. “In an hour.”

  After he left she waited five minutes and then walked into the corridor and out onto the burning floodlit parking lot and an hour later she was deep into the desert, driving west at eighty miles an hour.

  Early in the morning she called Freddy Chaikin from Los Angeles and asked him to pay her bill and bring back her clothes.

  “What happened.”

  Maria did not answer.

  “I don’t even want to know,” Freddy Chaikin said.

  “Don’t forget my dark glasses,” Maria said.

  66

  “WHAT DO YOU WEIGH NOW? About eighty-two?”

  Maria opened her eyes. The voice was Carter’s but for an instant in the bright afternoon light on the sun deck she could not make out his features.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here today,” she said finally.

  “Helene told me you were coming out.”

  “Helene is a veritable Celebrity Register.”

  “Just calm down. I want to talk about something.” He looked back toward the house. BZ was on the telephone in the living room. “Let’s walk down the beach.”

  “We can talk here.”

  “Have it your way, we can talk here.” He kicked aside her sandals and sat down. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for two weeks.”

  “I know it.”

  “No games, Maria, O.K.? I came all the way out here, I walked out of a meeting, a meeting with Carl Kastner, just to—”

  She reached for his hand and put it over his mouth. She was absurdly touched by the detail about Carl Kastner: Carter was still Carter. “I haven’t wanted to see you because I didn’t feel good. That’s all. Talk to me.”

  Carter took out a cigarette, crumpled the package, then smoothed out the package and replaced the cigarette. “You know I’m starting the new picture on the desert in ten days,” he said finally. “You knew about that.” He was not looking at her. “Which means this: it means—”

  “It means,” she prompted after a pause.

  He looked at her. “I want you out there.”

  Maria said nothing.

  “We could do it.”

  “Why should we.”

  Carter looked uncomfortable. “It just might be better.”

  “You mean you don’t think I can take care of myself.”

  “No.” Carter stood up. “I do not. I do not think you can take care of yourself. Things I’ve been hearing, things I—”

  “What things.”

  “You know goddamn fucking well what things.”

  He stood over Maria with his hand frozen in air. He had been about to hit her.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “You can’t hurt me.”

  “Fantastic day,” a clear voice said, and Carter dropped his arm. A girl with long tangled hair and a short chemise nightgown stood in the doorway, yawning and shaking out her hair. “You suppose there’s any coffee?” The girl examined what seemed to be a bite on her arm and walked out into the sun. “I mean I could die for some.”

  “I don’t know,” Maria said.

  “BZ honey?” the girl called. “Is there coffee made?”

  “No,” BZ said from the house. “There is no coffee. There is not any coffee.”

  “Honey, there must be instant,” the girl drawled. From the doorway she smiled back at Carter. “I’m Jeanelle,” she said.

  “Who the fuck was that,” Carter said after a moment.

  Maria sat huddled in a towel. “I guess that’s Jeanelle.”

  “Who’s she for?”

  “How should I know.”

  Carter looked at her. “Stop it,” he said finally. “Stop crying. Baby, listen. Stop.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re going to come to the desert with me.”

  “Just as a point of interest, you going to be fucking Susannah Wood out there?”

  Carter pulled her to her feet and kissed her. She stood without moving and after a while he let his arms drop.

  “What’s the matter now,” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s all gone with you,” he said. “It used to be there but it’s gone.”

  “Listen,” she said as if by rote. “I love you.”

  “You know what I wish it was tonight?” the girl in the nightgown was saying when Maria came inside at four o’clock. “I wish it was New Year’s Eve. Most people think New Year’s Eve is a bore but I love it.”

  Helene lay on a couch staring at the ceiling. “You do,” she said.

  “Helene,” BZ said. “Maria’s going to the desert with us, isn’t that interesting?” BZ smiled at Maria. “I said Maria’s going to the desert, Helene.”

  “I heard you.”

  “I also love Christmas,” the girl said.

  “Jeanelle,” BZ said, “there’s some coke in the bedroom if you want to go get it. Some Merck.”

  “You’ve been holding out,” Jeanelle said.

  BZ watched the girl leave and then turned to Helene. “Get her out of here,” he said.

  Helene stared at him. “You started it,” she whispered.

  67

  “YOU TOLD ME YOU’D COME,” Carter said.

  “What for.”

  “I want you out there.”

  “It’s all gone, you said so yourself.”

  “All right,” Carter said. “Stay here and kill yourself. Something interesting like that.”

  Carter and BZ and Helene left for the desert. Maria found a doctor who would give her barbiturates again, and in the evenings she drove.

  “Who is it,” she whispered when she saw the lighted cigar in the dark living room. She had just let herself into the house and locked the door behind her and now she leaned against it. “I said who is it.”

  The cigar moved. She closed her eyes.

  “Who do you think it is
,” Ivan Costello said. “Maybe if you’d call your answering service once in a while you’d know when I was in town.”

  “What are you doing in my house.”

  “Come here.”

  She turned on a light.

  “I said come here.”

  “No.” She could see that he was drunk. “I’m going out.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere. Don’t tell me no.”

  “No.”

  “All right,” he said. “Fight me. You’ll like it better that way anyway.”

  “What did you come here for,” she said at three or four in the morning.

  “What I got.”

  “What did you come here for,” she repeated.

  “I didn’t come here to hurt you, if that’s what you mean.”

  She said nothing.

  “Oh Christ,” he said. “Baby. I just came to make you remember.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You remembered all right the last three hours.”

  She wrapped her arms around her bare shoulders. “That hasn’t got anything to do with me.”

  “Baby, it used to.”

  “Get out of here,” she said, and this time he did.

  In the morning he came again. She answered the door and went back to the couch where she had spent the rest of the night.

  “You don’t have to crack up over this,” he said. “You used to tell me you’d do it for me until you died. You used to tell me—”

  “I used to tell you a lot of things.” She could still smell cigar smoke on his coat. “Leave me alone.”

  “I’ll leave you alone,” he said finally. “See how you like it.”

  She lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on a bowl of dead roses, until four o’clock in the afternoon. At four she called Les Goodwin.

  “Something bad is going to happen to me,” she said.