Play it as it Lays (4 page)

“I
WASN’T JUST CRAZY about your asking Helene how much money BZ’s mother gives them to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach. The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen’s at seven o’clock. “I wasn’t just crazy about that at all.”

“Well, she does.”

“Does what.”

“Carlotta gives them money to stay married.”

“So what.”

“I’m sick of everybody’s sick arrangements.”

“You’ve got a fantastic vocabulary.”

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.”

L
ATE 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?”

W
HEN 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.”

A
T 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.

“T
HE 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.

“Isn’t it kind of …” Maria trailed off.

“Isn’t
what?”

“I mean Cozumel,” Maria said finally. ‘Isn’t it the off season.”

“Of
course
the off season,” Carlotta said triumphantly.

The voice had called her Maria.

The voice had said that he would be in touch.

“Carlotta’s a demon for thrift,” Helene said.

“Now what about my boring you,” Carlotta said.

T
HE NEXT MORNING in the dry still heat she woke crying for her mother. She had not cried for her mother since the bad season in New York, the season when she had done nothing but walk and cry and lose so much weight that the agency refused to book her. She had not been able to eat that year because every time she looked at food the food would seem to arrange itself into ominous coils. She had known that there was no rattlesnake on her plate but once the image had seized her there was no eating the food. She was consumed that year by questions. Exactly what time had it happened, precisely what had she been doing in New York at the instant her mother lost control of the car outside Tonopah. What was her mother wearing, thinking. What was she doing in Tonopah anyway. She imagined her mother having a doctor’s appointment in Tonopah, and the doctor saying cancer, and her mother cracking up the
car on purpose. She imagined her mother trying to call her from a pay phone in Tonopah, standing in a booth with all her quarters and dimes and nickels spread on the shelf and getting the operator and getting New York and then the answering service picking up the call. Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailable in the Eastern dark. She would imagine the quarters and dimes and nickels spread out on the shelf and the light in the cottonwoods and she would wonder what she was doing in the dark. What time is it there, her mother would have asked had she gotten Maria. What’s the weather. She might never have said what was on her mind but she would have left a coded message, said goodbye. One time Maria had saved enough money to give her mother a trip around the world, but instead she had lent the money to Ivan Costello, and then her mother was dead.

“I’m not crying,” Maria said when Carter called from the desert at 8 a.m. “I’m perfectly all right.”

“You don’t sound perfectly all right.”

“I had a bad dream.”

There was a silence. “You called the doctor?”

“Yes. I called the doctor.” She spoke very rapidly
and distantly. “Everything’s arranged. Everything’s perfectly taken care of.”

“What did—”

“I have to go now. I have to hang up. I have to see somebody about a job.”

“Just hold on a minute, Maria, I want to know what the doctor said.”

She was staring into a hand mirror, picking out her mother’s features. Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

“I said what did they
say,
Maria.”

“They said they’d call me up some day and on the day they called me up I’d meet them some place with a pad and a belt and $1,000 in cash. All right, Carter? All right?”

A
LTHOUGH THE HEAT had not yet broken she began that week to sleep inside, between white sheets, hoping dimly that the white sheets would effect some charm, that she would wake in the morning and find them stained with blood. She did this in the same spirit that she had, a month before, thrown a full box of Tampax into the garbage: to be without Tampax was to insure bleeding, to sleep naked between white sheets was to guarantee staining. To give the charm every opportunity she changed the immaculate sheets every morning. She wore white crêpe pajamas and no underwear to a party. She pretended to herself that she was keeping the baby, the better to invite disappointment, court miscarriage. “I’m having a baby,” she heard herself telling the parking-lot attendant at Saks as they tried vainly to get a wicker bassinette into the Corvette. When it became clear that she would have to leave the bassinette for delivery she sat in the driver’s seat of the
Corvette and cried. She was crying too much. All the time now, when she was driving and when she was trying to clean a bathroom and when she was pretending to herself that she could have the baby, she was wondering where and when it was going to happen.

“Any calls,” she asked the service.

“Mr. Goodwin, New York, three times, you’re to call immediately.”

She looked again into the hand mirror and again saw her mother. “Tell him I haven’t picked up my messages.” She had nothing to say to any of them.

“M
ONDAY,” the voice on the telephone said. “Monday at five o’clock. We’ll be in touch again on Monday.”

“Where,” she said. “Where do I go.”

“I said we’ll be in touch, Maria. We will.”

She drove to the beach, but there was oil scum on the sand and a red tide in the flaccid surf and mounds of kelp at the waterline. The kelp hummed with flies. The water lapped warm, forceless. When she got back into town she drove aimlessly down Sunset, pulled into a drive-in at the corner of La Brea, and, briefly flushed into purposefulness by a Coca-Cola, walked barefoot across the hot asphalt to a telephone booth.

“This is Maria,” she said helplessly when Felicia Goodwin picked up the telephone in New York. She did not know why but she had not counted on talking to Felicia. “I just wondered when you were coming back.”

“We’ve been trying to get you for
days
.” Felicia always spoke on the telephone as if a spurious urgency could mask her radical lack of interest in talking to anyone. Sometimes Maria was depressed by how much she and Felicia had in common. “Les was worried something had happened to you, I said no, she’s on the desert with Carter—didn’t you call the service?”

“Not exactly.”

“Anyway we’ll be out in a few days, this time to stay, we’re going to buy a house—” Felicia’s voice faded, as if she had stretched her capacity for communication to its limit.

“Les finished the script?”

“I’ll get him,” Felicia said with relief.

“Never mind,” Maria said, but it was too late.

“Where’ve you been,” he said.

“Nowhere.” When she heard his voice she felt a rush of well-being. “I didn’t want to call because—”

“I can’t hear you, Maria, where are you?”

“In a phone booth. I just wanted—”

“You all right?”

“No. I mean yes.” A bus was shifting gears on Sunset and she raised her voice. “Listen. Call me.”

She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines
Motel and cross the street to a supermarket. The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing. She did not know why she had told Les Goodwin to call her.