Play it as it Lays (3 page)

“J
UST WANTED YOU TO KNOW I ’m thinking of you,” Freddy Chaikin said on the telephone. “I’ll be frank, I was surprised to hear you wanted to work again. After that debacle with Mark Ross, I just naturally thought—”

“I’ve always wanted to work.” Maria tried to keep her voice even. Freddy would be sitting in his office with the Barcelona chairs and the Giacometti sculpture and anything he wanted to say Maria would have to hear.

“—an actress walks off a set, people tend to think she doesn’t want to work.”

“That was almost a year ago. I was sick. I was upset about Kate. I haven’t walked off any more sets, you
know
that, Freddy.”

“You haven’t had any sets
to
walk off.”

Maria closed her eyes. “What are you doing right now, Freddy,” she said finally. “You sitting there playing with a Fabergé Easter egg? Or what?”

“Calm down. Actually I talked to Morty Landau about you today at lunch. I said, Morty, you know Maria Wyeth, and he did—”

“I should think so. I had the lead in two features.”

“Right, Maria, of course you did. You know that. I know that. And they were very interesting little pictures. Carter parlayed those two little pictures, one of them never distributed, into a very nice thing. Carter’s in the enviable position now where he wants to do something, it’s just a question of working out the numbers. I’m proud to represent him. I’m proud to represent both of you, Maria. Maybe I could arrange for Morty Landau to see some film, you give me your word that you really want to work.”

“See some
film.”

“Where’s the problem, Maria? There’s something so unusual about wanting to see some film? I show film on talent getting two, two-fifty a picture.”

“Morty Landau makes television.”

“Let’s get to the bottom line, Maria, if Carter were around he’d say the same thing. You want to work, I’ll arrange for Morty Landau to see film.”

“Carter is around.”

There was a silence, and when Freddy Chaikin spoke again his voice was gentle. “All I meant, Maria, was that Carter’s on location. All I meant.”

O
N THE TENTH DAY OF OCTOBER at quarter past four in the afternoon with a dry hot wind blowing through the passes Maria found herself in Baker. She had never meant to go as far as Baker, had started out that day as every day, her only destination the freeway. But she had driven out the San Bernardino and up the Barstow and instead of turning back at Barstow (she had been out that far before but never that late in the day, it was past time to navigate back, she was out too far too late, the rhythm was lost) she kept driving. When she turned off at Baker it was 115° and she was picking up Vegas on the radio and she was within sixty miles of where Carter was making the picture. He could be in the motel right now. They could be through shooting for the day and he could be having a drink with BZ and Helene, thinking about going into Vegas for dinner or just resting, resting on the unmade bed with his shirt off. The woman who ran the motel only made the beds
once a week, Carter had made a joke about it in an interview, Maria had read it in the trades. She could call. “Listen,” she could say. “I’m in Baker. I just happen to be in Baker.”

“So you just happen to be in Baker,” he could say. “Get on up here.”

Or he could even say: “Listen. Get up here quick.”

Those were things he could say but because she did not know if he would say them or even if she wanted to hear them she just sat in the car behind the 76 station in Baker and studied the pay phone by the Coke machine. Whatever he began by saying he would end by saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion. “Oh Christ,” he would say. “I felt good today, really good for a change, you fixed that, you really pricked the balloon.”

“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 not 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 Garson’s tonight if you’re not doing anything, all right?”

“Where’s Helene?”

“Helene’s in bed, Helene’s depressed. Helene has these very copious 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 down, 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 face 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.

“Y
OU 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.

S
HE 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. “All 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 uncertainly.

“Only if you want to.”

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

“Why don’t you sound like it.”

“Carter, I do.” She paused, abruptly exhausted. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea.”

“Do what you want,” he said, and went upstairs.

Maria sat with her eyes closed until the vein in her temple stopped pulsing, then followed him upstairs. He lay on the bed in their room, staring at the ceiling. Only by an increased immobility did he acknowledge her presence.

“I was going out to see Kate,” she said finally.

“How many times you been out there lately?” He still did not look at her.

“Hardly at all,” she said, and then: “In the past few weeks, maybe a couple of times.”

“You’ve been there four times since Sunday.”

Resolutely Maria walked into the dressing room and began pinning her hair back.

“They called me,” Carter said from the bedroom, speaking as if by rote. “They called me to point out that unscheduled parental appearances tend to disturb the child’s adjustment.”

“Adjustment to what.” Maria jabbed a pin into her hair.

“We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times.”

Maria put her head in her arms on the dressing table. When she looked into the mirror again she saw Carter’s reflection. There had come a time when she felt anesthetized in the presence of Ivan Costello and now that time had come with Carter.

“Don’t cry,” Carter said. “I know it upsets you, we’re doing all we can, I said don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” she said, and she was not.

“I
’M ADAMANT about the mixes, I’m sorry, I just won’t use them,” the masseur who wanted to be a writer called from the kitchen. Maria lay face down on the sand beyond the sun deck and tried to neutralize, by concentrating on images of Kate (Kate’s hair, brushing Kate’s hair, the last time she went to the hospital Kate’s hair was tangled and she had sat on the lawn and brushed it, worked out the tangles into fine golden strands, they told her not to come so often but how could she help it, they never brushed Kate’s hair), the particular rise and inflection of the masseur’s voice. There was always someone Maria tried not to hear at BZ and Helene’s. Either there were the sulky young men BZ met in places like Acapulco and Kitzbühel and Tangier or there were Helene’s friends, the women with whom she shopped and planned restorative weeks at Palm Springs and La Costa, the women with the silk Pucci shirts and the periodically tightened eye lines and the husbands on
perpetual location. They were always in their middle forties, those friends of Helene’s, always about ten years older than Helene herself. “Heaven pajamas,” Helene’s friends would say to one another, and they would exchange the addresses of new astrologers and the tag lines of old jokes. One of Helene’s friends had been at the house when Maria and Carter arrived. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, he’s a great
phone,”
she said several times, and she and Helene would laugh. It seemed to be a joke but Maria had failed to hear the beginning of it. Usually Maria could avoid hearing Helene’s friends but BZ’s friends were more difficult, and this one was particularly difficult. Part of it was his voice and part of it was that Maria had met him before, she was certain she had. He did not seem to recognize her but she was sure that she had met him three years before, at someone’s house in Santa Barbara. He had come in after a polo game with some people who spoke only to the host and to one another, never to Carter and Maria—there had been an actor whose last several pictures had failed, the actor’s mother, and a nervous steel heiress with whom the others seemed to have spent a week in Palm Beach—and then he had been not a masseur but the actor’s secretary. Even lying in the noon sun on this blazing dry October day Maria felt a physical chill when she thought about that afternoon in Santa Barbara. The way he looked was
the problem. He looked exactly the same. He looked untouched, and she did not.

“BZ, you’ve planned this to torment me,” he was saying now. He stood on the deck, holding a plastic lemon at elaborate arm’s-length. “You couldn’t possibly buy artificial lemon juice, someone left it here, it’s a bad joke.”

“All BZ’s friends are purists,” Helene murmured without opening her eyes.

“You’re a nasty,” BZ said, and laughed. He twisted a silver medallion on his chest so that it flashed in the sun. BZ was perpetually tanned, oiled, gleaming, not the negotiable health-club tan of people like Freddy Chaikin but tanned as evidence of a lifetime spent in season. “Isn’t Helene a nasty, Carter? Haven’t I got a bitch for a wife? And question number three,
who am I impersonating?”

“Yourself,” Helene suggested.

“Carter’s not listening,” the masseur said. “Don’t be draggy, Helene, run down the beach and ask Audrey Wise for a couple of lemons. Ask Audrey and Jerry for Bloodys even. I mean we could definitely stand a few giggles.”

Helene opened her eyes. “You know what Jerry gave Audrey for her birthday?”

“Let me guess.” BZ touched a finger to his tongue and held it to the wind. “One perfect white rose.”

“One perfect thousand-dollar bill” Helene said. “Smartass.”

“Maybe she can buy herself a good fuck,” BZ said.

Helene giggled. “Jerry’s a good phone.”

“The
lemons,”
the masseur said.

Carter threw down the script he was reading and stood up. “I’ll get the goddamn lemons,” he said. Maria lay perfectly still until she knew that he was beyond the dunes and then she sat up, everything swimming in her vision. Beneath the faded American flag hanging over the sun deck they were arranged in tableau: BZ and the masseur, their bodies gleaming, unlined, as if they had an arrangement with mortality. Helene stood on the edge of the deck, looking down the beach toward Audrey and Jerry Wise’s house. Helene was not quite so immune to time, there was a certain texture to Helene’s thighs, a certain lack of resilience where fabric cut into Helene’s flesh. It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women. That nervous steel heiress with whom Maria had last met the masseur, something bad had happened to her. She had been shot in the face by her fourteen-year-old son. It had been in the newspapers a few years ago. After the boy killed his mother he shot himself, and was later described by his father as a victim of divorce and drugs. Maria imagined that she had sunstroke. She closed her eyes
and concentrated on a prayer she had learned as a child.

“That’s one less for lunch,” Helene said.

“I seem to have come in after the main titles,” the masseur said petulantly. “Is he going to get the lemons or isn’t he?”

“Faggots make Carter nervous,” Helene said pleasantly.

BZ laughed and blew Helene a kiss off his fingertips. “Actually, Nelson,” he said then, “that lemon is not artificial. That lemon is reconstituted.”

Maria stood up and grabbed a beach towel from the deck and ran into the house with the towel clutched to her mouth and a few minutes later when, pale under her sunburn and covered with cold sweat, she stopped the dry heaves and pulled off her bathing suit she saw that for the fifty-first day she was not bleeding.