Joan Didion: Play It as It Lays

She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.

"I've got a fantastic vocabulary and I'm having a baby."

Carter slowed the car down. 'I missed a transition,' he said finally.

Maria did not look at him.

"It’s not mine," he said, his voice raised. "I suppose you're going to tell me it's not mine."

"I don't know."

She did not know why she had said it but she had to. She had to get it straight. For a moment Carter said nothing.

"You don't fucking know," he said then.

She put her bare feet on the dashboard and pressed her face against her knees. Now it was a fact. He could stay or he could leave, she had set forth the fact.

'Who was it," he said.

"You know."

He kept his eyes on the highway and his foot hard on the accelerator. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled. The late sun glazed the Pacific. The wind burned on her face. Once they were off the Coast Highway he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car.

"I know," he said. "But Felicia doesn't."

She said nothing. It was going to be bad.

"What makes you so sure, " he said then.

"I didn't say I was sure." The air seemed suddenly still and close and she pulled off her scarf. "I said I didn't know."

"I mean what makes you so sure it's happening."

"Because I went to this doctor.” She spoke very fast and kept her mind on something else. It seemed to her that they had once been to dinner at somebody's house who lived off San Vicente around here, she could not remember whose house it had been but there had been Japanese food and women with long handcrafted earrings and it had been summer. "Because I went to this doctor and the test he did in his office was positive but that’s not an absolutely certain test so he had me bring in some urine for a rabbit test. And he gave me this shot. And if I really wasn't the shot would make me bleed in three to five days." She paused. It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.

"And it was six days ago I had the shot."

"What about the test."

"What test?"

"The test you were talking about. The second test."

"The rabbit test." She was suddenly almost too exhausted to speak. 'I just never called back about

it."

"You were afraid to call back about it." He was speaking in a careful monotone, a prosecutor with an open-and-shut case. "You thought if you didn’t call back it would just go away."

She closed her eyes. "I guess so. I guess that's right."

"But now it's certain anyway. Otherwise the shot would have made you bleed."

She nodded mutely.

"What doctor. Who was the doctor."

"Just a doctor. On Wilshire."

"A doctor you didn't know. You thought that was smart."

She said nothing.

"I'm interested in the mechanics of this, Maria. I'm interested in how your mind works. How exactly you picked this doctor out, why this particular doctor."

Maria folded her scarf and smoothed it carefully over her bare knees. "He was near Saks," she whispered finally. "I was having my hair done at Saks."

LATE THAT NIGHT sitting alone in the dark by the pool she remembered whose house it had been out off San Vicente with the Japanese food, it had been the house of a couple named Sidney and Ruth Loomis. Sidney Loomis was a television writer and Ruth Loomis was very active in the civil-rights movement and group therapy. Maria had never been able to think of anything to say to Ruth Loomis, but in retrospect that was not why Carter had stopped seeing Sidney and Ruth Loomis. He had stopped seeing them because the show Sidney Loomis was writing had been canceled in midseason and he did not pick up another. Maria tried very hard to keep thinking of Carter in this light, Carter as a dropper of friends and names and obligations, because if she thought of Carter as he was tonight she would begin to cry again. He had left the house. He had neither met Freddy Chaikin at Chasen's nor called to say that he was not coming. She knew that because Freddy Chaikin had called for him. She had at last done something that reached him, but now it was too late. “What am I supposed to do," he had said before he left the house. "What in fuck am I supposed to do?"

WHEN CARTER CALLED the next morning it was from the motel on the desert. His voice was measured, uninflected, as if he had been saying the words to himself all night. "I love you,"

she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response. "Get a pencil," he ordered. He was going to give her a telephone number. He was going to give her the telephone number of the only

man in Los Angeles County who did clean work.

"Then we'll see."

"I'm not sure I want to do that," she said carefully.

'All right, don't do it. Go ahead and have this kid.'

He paused, confident in his hand. She waited for him to play it through. "And I'll take Kate."

After he hung up she sat very still. She had a remote sense that everything was happening exactly

the way it was supposed to happen. By the time she called him back she was calm, neutral, an intermediary calling to clarify the terms.

"Listen," she said. "If I do this, then you promise I can have Kate?

You promise there won't be trouble later?"

"I'm not promising anything," he said. "I said we'll see."

AT FOUR THAT AFTERNOON, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number. A man answered, and said that he would call back. When he did he asked who had referred her.

"You want an appointment with the doctor,' he said.

'When could he see me.'

"The doctor will want to know how many weeks."

"How many weeks what?"

There was a silence. "How advanced is the problem , Maria," the voice said finally.

"THE FOOD WAS UNSPEAKABLE, my clothes mildewed in the closet, you can have Cozumel," BZ's mother said. She was playing solitaire and Maria sat transfixed by the light striking off the diamond bracelets on her thin tanned wrists. "Also Machu Picchu,"

she added, slapping down another card.

"I can't even dream why you stopped at Cozumel," Helene said.

"I mean since you can't bear Mexicans."

"BZ said it was marvelous, that's why."

"BZ likes Mexicans."

"I know why BZ likes Mexicans." Carlotta Mendenhall Fisher shuffled the cards once and pointed at Maria. "Did you ask this child for dinner?" she demanded. "Or didn't you?"

"It's just seven, Carlotta. I thought we'd have another drink."

"I always serve at seven."

"The last time I was in Pebble Beach," Helene said, "you served at quarter to eleven."

Helene and her mother-in-law looked at each other for an instant and then Carlotta began to laugh. "This girl is my own natural child," she said finally to Maria, gasping through her laughter. "The daughter I didn't have."

"Speaking of the one you did have," Helene said, "does Nikki know you're back in the country?"

" Nikki . Nikki's like this child, I bore her." She looked at Maria.

"Don't I bore you. Admit it.”

Maria looked up uncertainly. The voice on the telephone had known what she wanted without either of them saying it. The voice on the telephone had said that this would be expensive. The voice on the telephone had told her that on the day set she was to bring a pad and a belt and $1,000 in cash. In confusion Maria looked away from Carlotta's bright blue eyes, glittering like her bracelets.