Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

"NOTHING'S WRONG," she repeated to Les Goodwin on the telephone.

"I know something's wrong."

"Nothing."

"O.K.," he said finally. "All right. I'm coming out alone on Monday, meet my plane at four."

"I can't."

"I want to talk to you, Maria. I want to see you,"

"Monday night," she said. "Listen. You make me happy.”

She hung up very fast then because she did not want to find herself telling him why she could not meet his flight.

IN THE DREAM from which she woke when the telephone rang again that night she had the baby, and she and the baby and Kate were living on West Twelfth Street with Ivan Costello. In the dream she did not yet know Carter, but somehow had Carter's daughter and Carter's blessing. In the dream it was all right. She supposed that she had dreamed of Ivan Costello because the telephone was ringing, and he used to call her in the middle of the night. "How much do you want it," he used to say. "Tell me what you'd do to get it from me." The telephone was still ringing and she pulled the cord loose from the jack. She could not remember what she would have done to get it from any of them.

"YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CALL before you come," the nurse in charge of Kate's cottage said on Sunday. The nurse had short hair and a faint moustache and Kate clung to her knees and Maria did not like her. "The new medication, new treatment, naturally she's not—"

"What new medication," Maria heard herself saying. "You keep talking about the new medication, I

mean what is it .”

Kate screamed. The nurse looked reproachfully at Maria.

"Methylphenidate hydrochloride."

Maria closed her eyes. "All right. Your point."

"We definitely would have suggested you wait until next week."

"I won't be here next week

"You're going away?"

"Cozumel," Maria said. "Mexico."

On the way to the parking lot she twice invented pretexts to run back, kiss Kate's small fat hands, tell

her to be good. The third time she ran back it was to find the nurse.

"One thing. You know when she wakes up at night and says 'oise, oise,' it means she's. .” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. "It means she's having a nightmare," she said finally.

The nurse looked at her impassively.

'I mean I don't know if I ever told you that."

“ I'm sure you did," the nurse said.

That night the house crackled with malign electricity. A hot wind came up at midnight and the leaves scraped the screens, a loose storm drain slapped against the roof. Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet. The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds. At six-thirty that morning she placed a call to Carter at the motel on the desert but Carter had already left for the location. She interpreted that as a sign and did not try to call the location. She would do what he wanted. She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.

SHE TRIED TO STRAIGHTEN a drawer, and abandoned it. She heard fire reports on the radio, and turned the sprinklers on the ivy. For almost two hours she studied an old issue of Vogue she picked up in the poorhouse, her attention fixed particularly on the details of the life led in New York and Rome by the wife of an Italian industrialist. The Italian seemed to find a great deal of purpose in her life, seemed to make decisions and stick by them, and Maria studied the photographs as if a key might be found among them.

When she had exhausted the copy of Vogue she got out her checkbook and a stack of bills and spread them on the kitchen table.

Paying bills sometimes lent her the illusion of order but now each bill she opened seemed fresh testimony to her life's disorder, its waste and diffusion: flowers sent to people whom she had failed to thank for parties, sheets bought for beds in which no one now slept, an old bill from F.A.O. Schwarz for a tricycle Kate had never ridden.

When she wrote out the check to Schwarz her hand trembled so hard that she had to void the first check, and smoke a cigarette before she could write another.

"Get it right, Maria," the voice on the telephone said. "You got a pencil there? You writing this down?"

"Yes," Maria said.

"Ventura Freeway north, you got that all right? You know what exit?"

"I wrote it down."

"All set, then. I'll meet you in the parking lot of the Thriftimart."

"What Thriftimart," Maria whispered.

"Maria, I told you, you can't miss it. Under the big red T."

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows

of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.

“YOU DRIVE," the man had said. "We'll pick up my car after."

He was wearing white duck pants and a white sport shirt and he had a moon f ace and a eunuch's soft body. The hand resting on his knee was pale and freckled and boneless and ever since he got in the car he had been humming I Get a Kick Out of You.

'You familiar with this area, Maria?"

The question seemed obscurely freighted. "No," Maria said finally.

"Nice homes here. Nice for kids." The voice was bland, ingratiating, the voice on the telephone. "Let me ask you one question, all right?"

Maria nodded, and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

"Get pretty good mileage on this? Or no?"

"Pretty good," she heard herself saying after only the slightest pause. "Not too bad."

"You may have noticed, I drive a Cadillac. Eldorado. Eats gas but I like it, like the feel of it."

Maria said nothing. That, then, had actually been the question.

She had not misunderstood.

"If I decided to get rid of the Cad," he said, "I might pick myself up a little Camaro. Maybe that sounds like a step down, a Cad to a Camaro, but I've got my eye on this par tic ular Camaro, exact model of the pace car in the Indianapolis 500."

"You think you'll buy a Camaro," Maria said in the neutral tone of a therapist.

"Get the right price, I just might. I got a friend, he can write me a sweet deal if it's on the floor much longer. They almost had a buyer last week but lucky for me — here, Maria, right here, pull into this driveway."

Maria turned off the ignition and looked at the man in the white duck pants with an intense and grateful interest. In the past few minutes he had significantly altered her perception of reality: she saw now that she was not a woman on her way to have an abortion.