Joan Didion: Play It as It Lays

Easy aces. I am not sure what year it was because I have this problem with as it was, but after a while I had a bad time. (There, you will say now, she believed her sins were unpardonable, but I told you, nothing applies.) The tulips on Park Avenue looked dirty and I was sent twice to Montego Bay to get some color back in my face but I could not sleep alone and stayed up late and it was falling apart with Ivan Costello and everything showed in the camera by then. Of course I did not get back to Nevada that year because that was the year I screamed at Ivan and married Carter, and the next was the year we came here and Carter put me in a couple of little pictures (one you may have seen, a doctor here claims to have seen it but he will say anything to make me talk, the other never distributed) and I don't know what happened the year after that and then I started getting to Nevada quite a bit, but by then my father was dead and I was not married any more.

Those are the facts. Now I lie in the sun and play solitaire and listen to the sea (the sea is down the cliff but I am not allowed to swim, only on Sundays when we are accompanied) and watch a hummingbird. I try not to think of dead things and plumbing. I try not to hear the air conditioner in that bedroom in Encino. I try not to live in Silver Wells or in New York or with Carter. I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

HELENE

I SAW MARIA TODAY. Or at least I tried to see Maria today: I made the effort. I didn't make it for Maria I don't mind saying, I made it for Carter, or for BZ, or for old times or for something, not for Maria. "I don't much want to talk to you, Helene," was what she said the last time. "It's not personal, Helene, I just don't talk any more." Not for Maria.

Anyway I didn't. See her. I drove all the way out there, took the entire morning and packed a box for her, all the new books and a chiffon scarf she left at the beach once (she was careless, it must have cost thirty dollars, she was always careless) and a pound of caviar, maybe not Beluga but Maria shouldn't bitch now, plus a letter from Ivan Costello and a long profile somebody did in The New York Times about Carter, you'd think that would at least interest her except Maria has never been able to bear Carter's success, all that, and Maria wouldn't see me. "Mrs. Lang is resting,"

the nurse said. I could see her resting, I could see her down by the pool in the same bikini she was wearing the summer she killed BZ, lying by that swimming pool with a shade over her eyes as if she hadn't a care or a responsibility in the world. She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women. Not that I blame Maria for anything that happened to me, although I'm the one who suffered, I'm the one who should be "resting," I'm the one who lost BZ through her carelessness, her selfishness, but I blame her only on Carter's behalf. Half a chance and she would have killed Carter too. She was always a very selfish girl, it was first last and always Maria.

CARTER

HERE ARE SOME SCENES I have very clear in my mind.

"I always get breakfast out," I say to someone. This is at a dinner party, a group of friends. Maria would say that they were not her friends, but Maria has never understood friendship, conversation, the normal amenities of social exchange. Maria has difficulty talking to people with whom she is not sleeping.

"I go to the Wilshire or the Beverly Hills," I say. "I read the trades, I like to be alone at breakfast."

'In fact he doesn't always get breakfast out," Maria says, very low, to no one in particular. "In fact the last time he got breakfast out was on April 17."

The others at the table look first at her and then away, astonished, uneasy: something in the way her hands are tensed on the edge of the table prevents passing this off. Only BZ continues to look directly at her.

"Oh fuck it," she says then, and tears run down her cheeks. She still looks very straight ahead at no one in particular.

Another scene: she is playing on the lawn with the baby, tossing up drops of water from a clear plastic

hose. "Watch out she doesn't get chilled," I say from the terrace; Maria looks up, drops the hose, and walks away from the baby toward the poolhouse. She turns, and looks back at the baby. "Your father wants to talk to you," she says. Her voice is neutral.

After BZ's death there was a time When I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none. All I can say is this: it was after a succession of such small scenes that I began to see the improbability of a rapprochement with Maria.

IN THE FIRST HOT MONTH of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. if she was not she lost the day's rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie ¼

Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1 . Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly. By then she was sleeping not in the house but out by the pool, on a faded rattan chaise left by a former tenant. There was a jack for a telephone there, and she used beach towels for blankets. The beach towels had a special point. Because she had an uneasy sense that sleeping outside on a rattan chaise could be construed as the first step toward something unnameable (she did not know what it was she feared, but it had to do with empty sardine cans in the sink, vermouth bottles in the wastebaskets, slovenliness past the point of return) she told herself that she was sleeping outside just until it was too cold to sleep beneath beach towels, just until the heat broke, just until the fires stopped burning in the mountains, sleeping outside only because the bedrooms in the house were hot, airless, only because the palms scraped against the screens and there was no one to wake her in the mornings. The beach towels signified how temporary the arrangement was. Outside she did not have to be afraid that she would not wake up, outside she could sleep. Sleep was essential if she was to be on the freeway by ten o'clock.

Sometimes the freeway ran out, in a scrap metal yard in San Pedro or on the main street of Palmdale or out somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped, turned into common road, abandoned construction sheds rusting beside it.