Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

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.

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."

“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 f armed 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 f ace, elevators like coffins dropped in to 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 Flittering 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."