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.
"Something bad is going to happen to all of us."
She could hear a typewriter in the background. "I mean it. Take me somewhere."
"You got a map of Peru?"
She said nothing.
"That's funny, Maria. That's a line from Dark Passage."
"I know it."
"I had a fight with Felicia at lunch, I've got to have a rewrite by tomorrow morning, I tell you something
funny and you don't laugh."
"When I want to hear something funny I'll call you up again."
After she hung up she packed one bag and drove to the desert.
When I first married Carter and my name began appearing in columns I received mail from mad people. I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.
THE FIRST NIGHT in the still heat of the motel on the desert Carter turned away from Maria without speaking. The second night he got up and lay down on the bed in the other room.
"What's the matter," Maria said, standing in the doorway in the dark.
"It isn't any better."
"How do you know."
He said nothing.
"I mean we didn't even try."
"You don't want it."
"I do too."
"No," he said. "You don't."
Maria turned away. After that either she or Carter slept most nights in the other room. Some nights he said that he was tired, and some nights she said that she wanted to read, and other nights no one said anything.
In the motel on the desert there were the two rooms, and a bathroom with a scaling metal shower stall, and a kitchenette with a few chipped dishes and an oilcloth-covered table. The air conditioner was broken, and through the open windows at night Maria could hear the jukebox from the bar across the road. On those nights when Carter could not sleep she lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, and waited for the moment when Carter would begin banging drawers, slamming doors, throwing a magazine across the bed where she lay.
"You aren't waking me up," she would say then. "I'm not asleep."
"Well go to sleep, cunt. Go to sleep. Die. Fucking vegetable."
After that point he would sleep. She would not.
By the time Maria woke at eight-thirty or nine in the morning it would already be 105°, 110°. Carter would be gone. For the first week Maria would wash in the trickle that came from the shower and drink a Coca-Cola in the bathroom and then drive out to the location, but on Monday of the second week Carter asked her to leave at lunchtime.
"You're making Susannah nervous," he said. "It's only her second picture, she's worried about working
against Harrison, now you're here — the point is, when an actress is working, there's a certain—"
"I've worked once or twice. As an actress."
Carter avoided her eyes. "Maybe you and Helene could do something."
"Maybe we could see some plays."
THE TOWN WAS ON A DRY RIVER bed between Death Valley and the Nevada line. Carter and BZ and Helene and Susannah Wood and Harrison Porter and most of the crew did not think of it as a town at all, but Maria did: it was larger than Silver Wells.
Besides the motel, which was built of cinder block and operated by the wife of the sheriff's deputy who patrolled the several hundred empty square miles around the town, there were two gas stations, a store which sold fresh meat and vegetables one day a week, a coffee shop, a Pentecostal church, and the bar, which served only beer. The bar was called The Rattler Room.
There was a bathhouse in the town, an aluminum lean-to with a hot spring piped into a shallow concrete pool, and because of the hot baths the town attracted old people, believers in cures and the restorative power of desolation, eighty- and ninety-year-old couples who moved around the desert in campers. There were a few dozen cinder-block houses in the town, two trailer courts, and, on the dirt road that was the main street, the office for an abandoned talc mine called the Queen of Sheba. The office was boarded up.
Fifty miles north there was supposed to be a school, but Maria saw no children.
"You can't call this a bad place," the woman who ran the coffee shop told Maria. The fan was broken and the door open and the woman swatted listlessly at flies. "I've lived in worse."
"So have I," Maria said. The woman shrugged.
By late day the thermometer outside the motel office would register between 120° and 130°. The old people put aluminum foil in their trailer windows to reflect the heat. There were two trees in the town, two cottonwoods in the dry river bed, but one of them was dead.
"YOU'RE WITH THE MOVIE," the boy at the gate to the bathhouse said. He was about eighteen and he had fair pimpled skin and he wore a straw field hat to ward off the sun. "I guessed it yesterday.”
"My husband is.'
"You want to know how I guessed?"
"How," Maria said.
"Because I—" The boy studied his grimy fingernails, as if no longer confident that the story illustrated a special acumen.
"Because I personally know everybody from around here," he said then, his eyes on his fingernails. "I mean I guessed right away you weren't somebody I already knew."
"Actually I come from around here." Maria had spoken to no one else all day and she did not want to go into the bathhouse. She did not even know why she had come to the bathhouse. The bathhouse was full of old people, their loose skin pink from the water, sitting immobile on the edge of the pool nursing terminal cancers and wens and fear. "Actually I grew up in Silver Wells."
The boy looked at her impassively.
"It's across the line. I mean it's on the test range.
"How about that," the boy said, and then he leaned forward.
"Your husband couldn't be Harrison Porter, could he?"
"No," Maria said, and then there seemed nothing more to say.
"My room, my game." Susannah Wood was sitting on her bed rolling cigarettes. "So turn up the sound."
Carter walked over to the bank of amplifiers and speakers and tape reels that Susannah had brought with her to the desert.
"Somebody's going to complain," Maria repeated.
"So what," Susannah Wood said, and then she laughed. "Maria thinks we're going to get ar rest ed for pos ses sion. Maria thinks she's already done that number in Nevada."
BZ looked up. "Turn it down, Carter."
Susannah Wood looked first at BZ and then at Maria. "Turn it up, Carter."
Maria stood up. It was midnight and she was wearing only an old bikini bathing suit and her hair clung damply to the back of her neck. "I don't like any of you," she said. "You are all making me sick."
Susannah Wood laughed.
"That's not funny, Maria," Helene said.
"I mean sick. Physically sick."
Helene picked up a jar from the clutter on Susannah Wood's dressing table and began smoothing cream into Maria's shoulders.
"If it's not funny don't say it, Maria."
"What about Susannah," Maria asked Carter. She was standing in the sun by the window brushing her hair.
"What about her."
Maria brushed her hair another twenty strokes and went into the bathroom. "I mean did you really like fucking her."
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