Play It as It Lays: A Novel (12 page)

"Just how long have you been here now," Freddy Chaikin asked when she ran into him in Caesar's. "You planning on making a year of it? Or what?"

"Two weeks, Freddy. I haven't been here
even
two weeks."

"Jesus Christ, two weeks in Vegas."

"I like the good talk."

"I'm over for Lenny's opening, you coming?"

She tried to think who Lenny was. "I'm not seeing too many people, actually."

"That's not healthy, you're morbid enough. Do me a favor, come on over after. Lenny's suite. A
lot
of people you know."

"I'll see."

"Maria. A personal favor. You owe me one, O.K.? I 202, that's in the
new
building."

"Could you tell me how to find I 202," she asked the man at the desk in the hotel. When she had called up from the lobby there was too much noise to understand Freddy's directions.

She waited. The desk clerk did not look up.

"I'm looking for 1202."

He lifted his eyes only slightly. "No," he said.

"You don't understand. I don't know how to get to the new building."

"I do understand, honey. I understand
very well.
No dice. If they want you up there they'd tell you how to get there. Freelance some place else."

When she got back to the Sands she looked at herself in the mirror for a long while, then called room service and asked for a double bourbon. When the boy came he looked at her.

“Pretty early still," he said.

She poured a few drops of bourbon over the ice and watched it coat the glass. It seemed to her now that she had been driving all week toward precisely this instant. "I don't know anyone," she heard herself saying.

"Lots of guys around."

"I don't know any."

“I could make an introduction."

She looked at him. "All right," she said. "In an hour."

After he left she waited five minutes and then walked into the corridor and out onto the burning floodlit parking lot and an hour later she was deep into the desert, driving west at eighty miles an hour.

Early in the morning she called Freddy Chaikin from Los Angeles and asked him to pay her bill and bring back her clothes.

"What happened."

Maria did not answer.

"I don't even want to know," Freddy Chaikin said.

"Don't forget my dark glasses," Maria said.

"WHAT DO YOU WEIGH NOW? About eighty-two?"

Maria opened her eyes. The voice was Carter's but for an instant in the bright afternoon light on the sun deck she could not make out his features.

"I didn't know you'd be here today," she said finally.

"Helene told me you were coming out."

"Helene is a veritable Celebrity Register."

"Just calm down. I want to talk about something." He looked back toward the house. BZ was on the telephone in the living room.

"Let's walk down the beach."

"We can talk here."

"Have it your way, we can talk here." He kicked aside her sandals and sat down. "I've been trying to get hold of you for two weeks."

"I know it."

"No games, Maria, O.K.? I came all the way out here, I walked out of a meeting, a meeting with Carl Kastner, just to—"

She reached for his hand and put it over his mouth. She was absurdly touched by the detail about Carl Kastner: Carter was still Carter. "I haven't wanted to see you because I didn't feel good.

That's all. Talk to me."

Carter took out a cigarette, crumpled the package, then smoothed out the package and replaced the cigarette. "You know I'm starting the new picture on the desert in ten days," he said finally. "You knew about that." He was not looking at her. "Which means this: it means—"

"It means," she prompted after a pause.

He looked at her. "I want you out there."

Maria said nothing.

"We could do it."

"Why should we."

Carter looked uncomfortable. "It just might be better."

"You mean you don't think I can take care of myself.”

"No." Carter stood up. "I do not, I do not think you can take care of yourself. Things I've been hearing,

things I—"

"What things."

"You know goddamn fucking well what things."

He stood over Maria with his hand frozen in air. He had been about to hit her.

"Go ahead," she said. "You can't hurt me.

"Fantastic day," a clear voice said, and Carter dropped his arm. A girl with long tangled hair and a short chemise nightgown stood in the doorway, yawning and shaking out her hair. "You suppose there's any coffee?" The girl examined what seemed to be a bite on her arm and walked out into the sun. "I mean I could die for some."

"I don't know," Maria said.

"BZ honey?" the girl called. "Is there coffee made?"

"No," BZ said from the house. "There is no coffee. There is
not
any coffee."

"Honey, there must be instant," the girl drawled. From the doorway she smiled back at Carter. "I'm Jeanelle," she said.

"Who the fuck was that," Carter said after a moment.

Maria sat huddled in a towel. "I guess that's Jeanelle."

"Who's she for?"

"How should I know."

Carter looked at her. "Stop it," he said finally. "Stop crying.

Baby, listen. Stop."

"I don't know what to do."

“You're going to come to the desert with me."

"Just as a point of interest, you going to be fucking Susannah Wood out there?"

Carter pulled her to her feet and kissed her. She stood without moving and after a while he let his arms &op.

"What's the matter now," he said.

"Nothing."

"It's all gone with you," he said. "It used to be there but it's gone."

"Listen," she said as if by rote. "I love you."

"You know what I wish it was tonight?" the girl in the nightgown was saying when Maria came inside at four o'clock. "I wish it was New Year's Eve. Most people think New Year's Eve is a bore but I love it."

Helene lay on a couch staring at the ceiling. "You do," she said.

"Helene," BZ said. "Maria's going to the desert with us, isn't that interesting?" BZ smiled at Maria. I said Maria's going to the desert, Helene."

"I heard you."

"I also love Christmas," the girl said.

"Jeanelle," BZ said, "there's some coke in the bedroom if you want to go get it. Some Merck."

"You've been holding out," Jeanelle said.

BZ watched the girl leave and then turned to Helene. "Get her out of here," he said.

Helene stared at him. “You started it," she whispered.

"YOU TOLD ME YOU'D come,"

Carter said.

"What for."

"I want you out there."

"It's all gone, you said so yourself."

"All right," Carter said. "Stay here and kill yourself. Something interesting like that."

Carter and BZ and Helene left for the desert. Maria found a doctor who would give her barbiturates again, and in the evenings she drove.

"Who is it," she whispered when she saw the lighted cigar in the dark living room. She had just let herself into the house and locked the door behind her and now she leaned against it. "I said who is it."

The cigar moved. She closed her eyes.

"Who do you think it is," Ivan Costello said. "Maybe if you'd call your answering service once in a while you'd know when I was in town.

"What are you doing in my house."

"Come here."

She turned on a light.

"I said come here."

"No." She could see that he was drunk. "I'm going out."

"You aren't going anywhere. Don't tell me no."

“No.”

"All right," he said. "Fight me. You'll like it better that way anyway.'

"What did you come here for," she said at three or four in the morning.

"What I got."

"What did you come here for," she repeated.

"I didn't come here to hurt you, if that's what you mean."

She said nothing.

"Oh Christ," he said. "Baby. I just came to make you remember."

"I can't remember."

"You remembered all right the last three hours."

She wrapped her arms around her bare shoulders. "That hasn't got anything to do with me."

"Baby, it used to."

"Get out of here," she said, and this time he did.

In the morning he came again. She answered the door and went back to the couch where she had spent the rest of the night.

"You don't have to crack up over this," he said. "You used to tell me you'd do it for me until you died. You

used to tell me—"

"I used to tell you a lot of things." She could still smell cigar smoke on his coat. "Leave me alone."

"I'll leave you alone," he said finally. "See how you like it."

She lay on the couch, her eyes fixed on a bowl of dead roses, until four o'clock in the afternoon. At four she called Les Goodwin.

"Something bad is going to happen to me," she said.

"Something bad is going to happen to all of us."

She could hear a typewriter in the background. "I mean it. Take me somewhere."

"You got a map of Peru?"

She said nothing.

"That's funny, Maria. That's a line from
Dark Passage."

"I know it."

"I had a fight with Felicia at lunch, I've got to have a rewrite by tomorrow morning, I tell you something

funny and you don't laugh."

"When I want to hear something funny I'll call you up again."

After she hung up she packed one bag and drove to the desert.

When I first married Carter and my name began
appearing in columns I received mail from mad
people. I am not much engaged by the problems of
what you might call our day but I am burdened by
the particular, the mad person who writes me a
letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to
write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I
learn to deal with this.

THE FIRST NIGHT in the still heat of the motel on the desert Carter turned away from Maria without speaking. The second night he got up and lay down on the bed in the other room.

"What's the matter," Maria said, standing in the doorway in the dark.

"It isn't any better."

"How do you know."

He said nothing.

"I mean we didn't even try."

"You don't want it."

"I do too."

"No," he said. "You don't."

Maria turned away. After that either she or Carter slept most nights in the other room. Some nights he said that he was tired, and some nights she said that she wanted to read, and other nights no one said anything.

In the motel on the desert there were the two rooms, and a bathroom with a scaling metal shower stall, and a kitchenette with a few chipped dishes and an oilcloth-covered table. The air conditioner was broken, and through the open windows at night Maria could hear the jukebox from the bar across the road. On those nights when Carter could not sleep she lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, and waited for the moment when Carter would begin banging drawers, slamming doors, throwing a magazine across the bed where she lay.

"You aren't waking me up," she would say then. "I'm not asleep."

"Well
go
to sleep, cunt. Go to sleep. Die. Fucking vegetable."

After that point he would sleep. She would not.

By the time Maria woke at eight-thirty or nine in the morning it would already be 105°, 110°. Carter would be gone. For the first week Maria would wash in the trickle that came from the shower and drink a Coca-Cola in the bathroom and then drive out to the location, but on Monday of the second week Carter asked her to leave at lunchtime.

"You're making Susannah nervous," he said. "It's only her second picture, she's worried about working

against Harrison, now you're here—the point is, when an actress is working, there's a certain—"

"I've worked once or twice. As an actress."

Carter avoided her eyes. "Maybe you and Helene could do something."

"Maybe we could see some plays."

THE TOWN WAS ON A DRY RIVER bed between Death Valley and the Nevada line. Carter and BZ and Helene and Susannah Wood and Harrison Porter and most of the crew did not think of it as a town at all, but Maria did: it was larger than Silver Wells.

Besides the motel, which was built of cinder block and operated by the wife of the sheriff's deputy who patrolled the several hundred empty square miles around the town, there were two gas stations, a store which sold fresh meat and vegetables one day a week, a coffee shop, a Pentecostal church, and the bar, which served only beer. The bar was called The Rattler Room.

There was a bathhouse in the town, an aluminum lean-to with a hot spring piped into a shallow concrete pool, and because of the hot baths the town attracted old people, believers in cures and the restorative power of desolation, eighty- and ninety-year-old couples who moved around the desert in campers. There were a few dozen cinder-block houses in the town, two trailer courts, and, on the dirt road that was the main street, the office for an abandoned talc mine called the Queen of Sheba. The office was boarded up.

Fifty miles north there was supposed to be a school, but Maria saw no children.

"You can't call this a bad place," the woman who ran the coffee shop told Maria. The fan was broken and the door open and the woman swatted listlessly at flies. "I've lived in worse."

"So have I," Maria said. The woman shrugged.

By late day the thermometer outside the motel office would register between 120° and 130°. The old people put aluminum foil in their trailer windows to reflect the heat. There were two trees in the town, two cottonwoods in the dry river bed, but one of them was dead.

"YOU'RE WITH THE MOVIE," the boy at the gate to the bathhouse said. He was about eighteen and he had fair pimpled skin and he wore a straw field hat to ward off the sun. "I guessed it yesterday.”