Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

"How did I fix that."

"You know how."

"I don't know how."

She would wait for him to answer but he would say nothing then, would just sit with his head in his hands. She would feel first guilty, resigned to misery, then furious, trapped, white with anger. " Listen to

me," she would say then, almost shouting, trying to take him by the shoulders and shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose; he would knock her away, and the look on his face, contorted, teeth bared, would render her paralyzed. 'Why don't you just get it over with,' he would say then, leaning close, his face still contorted. 'Why don't you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don't you die."

After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open,

picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave.

Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.

She did not know what she was doing in Baker. However it began it ended like that.

"Listen,' she would say.

"Don't touch me," he would say.

Maria looked at the pay phone for a long while, and then she got out of the car and drank a warm Coke. With the last of the Coke she swallowed two Fiorinal tablets, then closed her eyes against the sun and waited for the Fiorinal to clear her head of Carter and what Carter would say. On the way back into the city the traffic was heavy and the hot wind blew sand through the windows and the radio got on her nerves and after that Maria did not go back to the freeway except as a way of getting somewhere.

"C'EST MOI, MARIA," the voice said on the telephone. "BZ."

Maria tried to untangle the cord from the receiver and fight her way out of sleep. Sleeping in the afternoon was a bad sign. She had been trying riot to notice the signs but she could not avoid this one, and a sharp fear contracted her stomach muscles. "Where are you,"

she said finally.

"At the beach."

Maria groped on the edge of the pool for her dark glasses.

"Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose, Maria? Or what?"

"I thought you were on the desert."

"We're shutting down for a week, don't you read the trades?

Because of the fire."

'What fire."

"On top of the news as ever," BZ said. "The fire, we had a fire, we have to rebuild the set. Carter's coming in tomorrow. I'll take you to Anita Garsori's tonight if you're not doing anything, all right?"

"Where's Helene?"

"Helene's in bed, Helene's depressed. Helene has these very co pious menstruations." There was a pause. "Seven-thirty all right?"

"I don't know about Anita Garson's, I don’t—”

"I meant of course unless you've got plans ." His voice rose almost imperceptibly. "Unless you've got an à deux going at the Marmont.

Or wherever it is he stays.'

Maria said nothing.

"You're a lot of laughs this afternoon, Maria, I'm glad I called. I just meant that you and Les Goodwin were friends. As in just-good. No innuendo. No offense." He paused. "You still sulking in there?"

"I'll see you at seven-thirty," she said finally.

Later she could not think how she had been coerced by BZ into going to Anita Garson's party, which was large and noisy and crowded with people she did not much like. There was a rock group and a pink tent and everywhere Maria looked she saw someone who registered on her only as a foreigner or a faggot or a gangster. She tried to keep her eyes bright and her lips slightly parted and she stayed close to BZ. "How's Carter," someone said behind her, and when she turned she saw that it was Larry Kulik.

"Carter's on location," she said, but Larry Kulik was not listening.

He was watching a very young girl in a white halter dress dancing on the terrace.

"I'd like to get into that," he said contemplatively to BZ.

"I wouldn't call it the impossible dream," BZ said.

Maria twisted the napkin around her glass. She had already smiled too long and she did not want to look any more at Larry Kulik’s careful manicure and expensively tailored suit and she did not want to consider why Larry Kulik was talking to BZ about the girl in the white dress.

"Not that many guys," Larry Kulik was saying. "Not just anybody."

"Shit no. You have to be able to get her into the Whisky."

Larry Kulik was still watching the girl. "Only six guys."

"How do you know, six?"

Larry Kulik shrugged. "I had her researched. Six." He patted Maria's arm absently. "How's it going, baby? How's Carter?"

At the table on the terrace where Maria and BZ sat for dinner there were a French director, his cinematographer, and two English Lesbians who lived in Santa Monica Canyon. Maria sat next to the cinematographer, who spoke no English, and during dinner BZ and the French director disappeared into the house. Maria could smell marijuana, but it was not mentioned on the terrace. The cinematographer and the two Lesbians discussed the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French.

"You have to come over sometime and use the sauna," Larry Kulik said when he brushed by the table on his way inside. "Stereo piped in, beaucoup fantastic."

At midnight one of the amplifiers broke dovm, and the band packed up to leave. BZ was getting together a group to go back to his house: the French director, Larry Kulik, the girl in the white halter dress. "Simplicity itself," he said to Maria. "The chickie wants the frog."

"I have to go home."

"You're not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway."

"I feel beaucoup fantastic," Maria said, and turned her f ace away so that he would not see her tears. When Les Goodwin called from New York the next morning at seven o'clock she began to cry again.

Why was she crying, he wanted to know. Because he made her so happy, she said, and for that moment believed it.

"YOU HAVEN'T ASKED ME how it went after we left Anita's," BZ

said.

"How did it go," Maria said without interest.

"Everybody got what he came for."

"Don't you ever get tired of doing favors for people?"

There was a long silence. 'You don't know how tired," BZ said.

SHE LOOKED AT CARTER sitting in the living room and all she could think was that he had put on weight. The blue work shirt he was wearing pulled at the buttons. She supposed that he had weighed that much when he left, she noticed it now only because she had not seen him.

"You going to stay here?" she said.

He rubbed his knuckles across the stubble on his chin. "AU my things are here, aren't they?"

Maria sat down across from him. She wished she had a cigarette but there were none on the table and it seemed frivolous to go get one. Carter's saying that all his things were in the house did not seem entirely conclusive, did not address itself to the question.

Quite often with Carter she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight , another frivolous thought.

'I mean I thought we were kind of separated." That did not sound exactly right either.

"If that's the way you want it."

"It wasn't me. I mean was it me?"

"Never, Maria. Never you."

There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

"I guess we could try," she said uncertainty.

"Only if you want to."

"Of course I do." She did not know what else to say. "Of course I want to."