Play it as it Lays (7 page)

“I
’M GOING TO DO IT,” she would say on the telephone.

“Then do it,” Carter would say. “It’s better.”

“You think it’s better.”

“If it’s what you want.”

“What do
you
want.”

“It’s never been right,” he would say. “It’s been shit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you’re sorry. I’m sorry.”

“We could try,” one or the other would say after a while.

“We’ve already tried,” the other would say.

By the time Carter came back to town in February the dialogue was drained of energy, the marriage lanced.

“I’ve got a new lawyer,” she told him. “You can use Steiner.”

“I’ll call him today.”

“I’ll need a witness.”

“Helene,” he said. “Helene can do it.” He seemed relieved that the dialogue had worn itself down to legal details, satisfied that he could offer Helene. He would be staying in BZ and Helene’s guest house while they were looping and scoring the picture. He would speak to Helene immediately. Maria felt herself a sleepwalker to the courthouse.

“Let’s see … an afternoon hearing.” Helene spaced the words as if she were consulting an engagement book. “That means lunch before instead of after.”

“We don’t have to have lunch.”

“Day of days, Maria. Of course lunch.”

On the day of the hearing Maria overslept, thick with Seconal. When she walked into the Bistro half an hour late for lunch she could only think dimly how healthy Helene looked, how suntanned and somehow invincible with her silk shirt and tinted glasses and long streaked hair and a new square emerald that covered one of her fingers to the knuckle.

“Straighten your shoulders,” Helene said, lifting her drink slightly as Maria sat down. “You look spectral. We should go to the Springs together.” Helene’s eyes were not on Maria but on two women who sat across the room. “Aliene Walsh has a new friend,” she murmured
to Maria as she smiled at the older of the two women. “They’ve been spooning food into each other’s mouths for the past half hour.”

“She’s an actress named Sharon Carroll, I worked with her once.” Maria tried to summon up some other detail to assuage Helene’s avid interest in other people. “She kept a dildo in her dressing room.”

“Allene Walsh has more dildoes around her house than anybody I ever knew. Look at my new ring.”

“I saw it.”

“From Carlotta.” Helene studied the emerald. “For staying on the desert. Speaking of
new friends
. I mean he was shuttling them in and out of that motel like the dailies, I couldn’t even get up for a Nembutal without knocking over somebody’s bottle of
Monsieur
Y.” For an instant Helene’s face seemed to lose its animation, and when she spoke again her voice was flat and preoccupied. “You look like hell, Maria, this isn’t any excuse for you to fall apart, I mean a
divorce.
I’ve done it twice.”

“I thought only once.”

“Twice,” Helene said without interest. “BZ says once because that’s what he told his mother.” She was intent upon her reflection in the mirror behind the table, tracing a line with one finger from her chin to her temple. “You can really tell,” she said finally.

“Tell what?”

“Tell I haven’t done my Laszlo in three days.” Helene’s voice was still flat but her interest seemed revived.

At two o’clock they met Carter and the lawyers outside the courtroom in Santa Monica, and at two-thirty Maria swore and Helene confirmed that the defendant, Carter Lang, had repeatedly struck and in other ways humiliated the plaintiff, Mrs. Maria Lang. The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested. This Mrs. Maria Lang to whom the lawyers referred seemed to Maria someone other than herself, an aggrieved wife she might see interviewed on television. As they waited for the details to be cleared up, the papers to be signed, Maria sat very still with her hands in her lap. Helene stirred restlessly beside her, her eyes across the aisle, on Carter and his lawyer.
“Carter,”
Helene whispered finally, leaning across Maria to attract his attention. “
Puzzle of the week. Guess which two dykes were seen feeding each other cheese soufflé in the Bistro today.”

“W
HAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING,” Carter said the next time she saw him.

“Working. I’m going to be working very soon.”

“I mean who’ve you been seeing.”

“Nobody. Helene. BZ. BZ comes by sometimes.”

“Don’t get into that,” Carter said.

“He’s your friend,” Maria said.

T
HE FIRST TIME Maria ever met BZ it had been at the beach house and it had been two o’clock on a weekday afternoon and it was the summer Carter was cutting
Angel Beach.

“I’ve got a meeting at the beach with this guy from San Francisco I told you about,” Carter had said. “You come along and swim.”

“I don’t feel like swimming.”

“Maria,” Carter had said finally, “he’s going to maybe put up some money. Maybe. All right?”

When they walked into the beach house she thought there must have been some misunderstanding, some mixup of time or day, because the man to whom Carter spoke was sitting alone with a projector in the darkened living room running a blue movie of extraordinary technical quality.

“Stroke of two, very prompt,” the man had said, and looked at Maria for a long while before he turned off the projector.

“Did you get by the studio yesterday?” Carter seemed oblivious to the meeting’s peculiar circumstance. “They show you the rough cut?”

“Fantastic.”

“Did Helene see it?” Carter persisted. “Where’s Helene?”

“On the beach.”

“I’ll get my suit on,” Maria said, uneasy in the darkened room, and BZ had looked at her again, then flicked the projector back on.

“It’s too cold to swim,” he said, and then to Carter: “The rough cut looked fantastic, except you’re missing the story.”

“Meaning what.”

“Meaning,” BZ said, “how did Maria feel about the gangbang, the twelve cocks, did she get the sense they’re doing it not to her but to each
other
, does that
interest
her, you don’t get that, you’re missing the story.”

The reel had run out and the only sound was the film slapping against the projector. “It’s a commercial piece, BZ,” Carter said finally.

BZ only shrugged, and changed the reel. Again the figures flooded the screen. Wordlessly, BZ sat on a pillow and began watching Maria. He rolled a cigarette and passed it to her, and when she passed it on to Carter he took it without looking away from the
screen. Between the marijuana and the figures on the screen Maria felt flushed and not entirely in control.

“Look at the film, BZ,” Carter had said suddenly. “Incredible, they’ve got opticals.”

“I’ve seen the
film
, Carter,” BZ had said, and never took his eyes from Maria.

“L
ET’S GO TO MEXICO CITY tonight,” BZ said.

“Who?”

“You, me, Helene, I don’t know, maybe Larry Kulik, just fly down for a couple of days, Susannah Wood’s there now doing some interiors at Churubusco.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Maria said.

“Yes you do,” BZ said.

E
VERY NIGHT she named to herself what she must do: she must ask Les Goodwin to come keep her from peril. Calmed, she would fall asleep pretending that even then she lay with him in a house by the sea; The house was like none she had ever seen but she thought of it so often that she knew even where the linens were kept, the plates, knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools. Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in that house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table, and later when the tide ran out they would gather mussels together, Kate and Maria, and still later all three of them would sit down together at the big pine table and Maria would light a kerosene lamp and they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets. In
the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamplight, the opalescent mussel shells.

But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate’s own manifold histories, certain that BZ and Larry Kulik and all their kind recognized her in a way that Les Goodwin might not want to, recognized her, knew her, had her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic. Instead of calling Les Goodwin she bought a silver vinyl dress, and tried to stop thinking about
what had he done with the baby. The tissue. The living dead thing, whatever you called it.

“I
’M GOING TO NEW YORK for a few days,” she said to Carter. Going to New York had not before occurred to her but in the instant’s confusion of running into Carter on the street in Beverly Hills the idea simultaneously materialized and assumed a real plausibility. It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days. ‘Tomorrow morning,” she added.

“What are you going to do in New York?”

“What do people usually do in New York “

He looked at her for a long time. She was aware that her hair was unkempt, her face puffy. She did not meet his eyes.

“They see a few plays,” he said finally. “Maybe you can see a few plays.”

“Maybe I can,” she said, and walked away.

All that day Maria thought of fetuses in the East River, translucent as jellyfish, floating past the big sewage outfalls with the orange peels. She did not go to New York.

O
NCE A LONG TIME BEFORE Maria had worked a week in Ocho Rios with a girl who had just had an abortion. She could remember the girl telling her about it while they sat huddled next to a waterfall waiting for the photographer to decide the sun was high enough to shoot. It seemed that it was a hard time for abortions in New York, there had been arrests, no one wanted to do it. Finally the girl, her name was Ceci Delano, had asked a friend in the District Attorney’s office if he knew of anyone. “Quid pro quo,” he had said, and, late the same day that Ceci Delano testified to a blue-ribbon jury that she had been approached by a party-girl operation, she was admitted to Doctors’ Hospital for a legal D & C, arranged and paid for by the District Attorney’s office.

It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterfall and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria
tried now to put what had happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano’s situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.

T
HE LETTER from the hypnotist was mimeographed, and came to Maria in care of the studio that had released
Angel Beach.
“YOUR WORRIES MAY DATE FROM WHEN YOU WERE A BABY
,” the letter began, and then, after a space, were the words “
IN YOUR MOTHER’S WOMB
.” Maria read the letter very carefully. The hypnotist had found that many people could be regressed not only to infancy but to the very instant of their conception. The hypnotist would receive a few interested clients in the privacy of his Silverlake home. With a sense that she was about to confirm a nightmare, Maria telephoned the number he gave.

“Y
OU’VE BEEN BRUSHING IT wet,” the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria’s hair and letting it drop with distaste.

“I guess so.” Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers.

“I told you before, you split the ends,” he said with no real interest, and then transferred his attention to a thin girl who had just come up and kissed the back of his neck. “How are you, babe.”

“I had an operation.”

“No kidding.”

“Pelvic abscess.” The girl loosened her wrapper and absently stroked her collarbone. “All through my tubes.”

“Listen, I hear his new act is just lying there,” the hairdresser said. “Bibi Markel was just over there and she heard they were trying to transfer his contract to the lounge.”

“Macht nicht
to me,” the girl said. “Except maybe
I’ll have to go to court for the separate maintenance.” She slipped one big roller away from her scalp and touched the hair to see if it was dry. “Listen,” she said suddenly. “Finish her and then comb me out and come up for a drink on your way home.”

“Where you living now.”

“Off Coldwater, same place. O.K.? Promise?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Please. Promise.”

He ignored her, and handed Maria a mirror. “You want to use a drier, Maria honey?”

But Maria only shook her head and took the fifteen dollars from her bag and walked very fast toward the dressing room.

“Maybe I can get Sandy to come up.” Even from the dressing room Maria could hear the girl wheedling, the thin beautiful girl with the pelvic abscess and the separate maintenance and her hair all done and nobody to drink with. She fixed her attention on the mounds of used wrappers and damp towels and tried not to hear whatever it was the girl would say next. The girl was a presentiment of something.
“Listen,”
the girl said then.
“Maybe I can get Bibi Markel.”

S
HE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in
Harper’s Bazaar
and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house
in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.