Play It as It Lays: A Novel (7 page)

“I can't."

"Too busy, I suppose."

Maria said nothing.

"Or maybe you're afraid you might have a good time."

"I said I
can't
."

"Why can't you, just for the record."

"She's not my mother," Maria said.

THE BLEEDING BEGAN a few weeks later. "It's nothing," the doctor on Wilshire said when she finally went.

"Whoever did it did all right. It's clean, no infection, count your blessings."

"The pain."

"You're just menstruating early, I'll give you some Edrisal."

The Edrisal did not work and neither did some Darvon she found in the bathroom and she slept that night with a gin bottle by her bed. She did not think she was menstruating. She wanted to talk to her mother.

"I'VE GOT NEWS," Freddy Chaikin said after the waiter had brought her Bloody Mary and his Perrier water. "I didn't want to break it until it was set. Morty Landau, I predicted it, he's in love with you. You've got a guest-star on a two-part
Interstate 80."

"That's fine, Freddy." She tried for more conviction. "That's really fine."

He watched her drain her glass. "It'll get you seen."

"Actually I'm not feeling too well."

"You mean you don't want to work."

"I didn't say that. I just said I wasn't feeling too well."

"Maria, I empathize. What you and Carter are going through, it tears my heart out. Believe me, I've been through it. Which is why I know that work
is the
best medicine for things wrong in the
private-life de
partment. And I don't want to sound like an agent, but ten percent of nothing doesn't pay the bar bill." He laughed, and then looked at her. "A joke, Maria. Just a joke."

THE BLEEDING CAME AND WENT and came again. By late afternoon of her third day's work on
Interstate 80
there were involuntary pain lines on her forehead and she could not stand entirely upright for more than a few seconds. She sat back in the shadows on the edge of the set and prayed that the cameramen would be so slow with the set-ups that the day's last shot would be delayed until morning. At five-thirty they got the shot in three takes and later in the parking lot she could not remember doing it.

By midnight the blood was coming so fast that she soaked three pads in fifteen minutes. There was blood on the bed, blood on the floor, blood on the bathroom tiles. She thought about calling Les Goodwin—it would be all right to call him, she knew that Felicia was in San Francisco—but she did not. She called Carter.

"Get the doctor," Carter said.

"I don't exactly want to do that."

"For Christ’s sake then get to an emergency hospital."

"I can't," she said finally. "The thing is, I'm working tomorrow."

“What do you mean,
work
ing. What in fuck does
work
ing mean.

You just told me you were
dying
."

“I never said that."

"You said you were afraid."

Maria said nothing.

"Jesus Christ, Maria, I'm out here on the desert, I can't do anything, will you please get to a hospital or do you want me to call the police to come
get
you.”

"You just want me in a hospital so that nothing'll happen to make you feel guilty," she said then, said it before she meant to speak, and when she heard the words she broke out in a sweat. "
Listen
," she said. "I didn't mean that. I'm just tired. Listen. I'll call the doctor right now."

"You have to swear to me." Carter's voice was drained, exhausted.

"You have to swear you'll call the doctor. And call me back if something's wrong."

"I promise."

Instead she took a Dexedrine to stay awake. Awake she could always call an ambulance. Awake she could save herself if it came to that. In the morning, from the studio, she called the doctor.

"I'll meet you at St. john's," he said.

"I can't go to the hospital. I told you before, I'm working."

"You're hemorrhaging, you can't work."

'Oh yes I can work," she said, and hung up. She had wanted to ask him for more Dexedrine, but instead she got some from a hairdresser on the set. While she was changing she found a large piece of bloodied tissue on the pad she had been wearing, and she put it in an envelope and dropped it by the doctors office on her way home from the studio. When she called the next day the doctor said that the tissue was part of the placenta, and that was the end of that.

For the first time in two weeks she slept through the night, and was an hour late for her morning call.

"YOU WERE GOING to come over and use the sauna," Larry Kulik said.

"I've been—"

"So I hear."

"Hear what."

"Hear you're ready for a nuthouse, you want to know."

'You think I need a sauna."

"I think you need something."

Maria said nothing.

"I'm a good friend to people I like," Larry Kulik said. "Think it over."

A FEW DAYS LATER the dreams began. She was in touch with a member of a shadowy Syndicate. Sometimes the contact was Freddy Chaikin, sometimes an F.B.I. man she had met once in New York and not thought of since. Certain phrases remained constant.

Always he explained that he was

“part of that operation." Always he wanted to discuss a “business proposition." Always he mentioned a plan to use the house in Beverly Hills for "purposes which would in no way concern" her.

She need only supply certain information: the condition of the plumbing, the precise width of the pipes, the location and size of all the clean-outs. Workmen appeared, rooms were prepared. The man in the white duck pants materialized and then the doctor, in his rubber apron. At that point she would fight for consciousness but she was never able to wake herself before the dream revealed its inexorable intention, before the plumbing stopped up, before they all fled and left her there, gray water bubbling up in every sink. Of course she could not call a plumber, because she had known all along what would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh.

IN NOVEMBER THE HEAT BROKE, and Carter went to New York to cut the picture, and Maria still had the dream. On the morning a sink backed up in the house in Beverly Hills she looked in the classified for another place to sleep.

"You'd be surprised the history this place has," the man said as he showed her the apartment. He was wearing a pumpkin velour beach robe and wraparound glasses and she had found him not in the apartment marked "Mgr." but out on Fountain Avenue, hosing down the sidewalk. "As a writer, it might interest you to know that Philip Dunne once had 2-D."

"I'm not a writer," Maria said.

"Excuse me, it was Sidney Howard." He took off his glasses and wiped them on a sleeve of the beach robe. "Or so the legend goes."

In December the Christmas tree on top of the Capitol Records Tower came and went, and Maria had Kate for three days. They drove up and down La Brea looking for a Christmas tree and had Christmas dinner at Les and Felicia Goodwin's new house and Kate smashed the Victorian doll Felicia had given her against a large mirror.

"She misses Carter," Felicia murmured, distraught beyond the immediate breakage.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Les Goodwin said.

Kate's eyes darted from Maria to Les to Felicia and back to Maria and then, preternaturally attuned to the threat of voices not even raised, she began to scream. The mother apologizing, the child screaming, the polished floor covered with shards of broken mirror and flesh-colored ceramic, they left the Christmas dinner. All that night the two of them held each other with a dumb protective ferocity but the next day at the hospital, parting, only Maria cried.

In January there were poinsettias in front of all the bungalows between Melrose and Sunset, and the rain set in, and Maria wore not sandals but real shoes and a Shetland sweater she had bought in New York the year she was nineteen. For days during the rain she did not speak out loud or read a newspaper. She could not read newspapers because certain stories leapt at her from the page: the four-year-olds in the abandoned refrigerator, the tea party with Purex, the infant in the driveway, rattlesnake in the playpen, the peril, unspeakable peril, in the everyday. She grew faint as the processions swept before her, the children alive when last scolded, dead when next seen, the children in the locked car burning, the little faces, helpless screams. The mothers were always reported to be under sedation. In the whole world there was not as much sedation as there was instantaneous peril. Maria ate frozen enchiladas, looked at television for word of the world, thought of herself as under sedation and did not leave the apartment on Fountain Avenue.

"I DON'T KNOW if you noticed, I'm mentally ill," the woman said. The woman was sitting next to Maria at the snack counter in Ralph's Market. "I'm
talking
to you."

Maria turned around. "I'm sorry."

"I've been mentally ill for seven years. You don't know what a struggle it is to get through a day like this."

"This is a bad day for you," Maria said in a neutral voice.

"What's so different about this day."

Maria looked covertly at the pay phones but there was still a line.

The telephone in the apartment was out of order and she had to report it. The line at the pay phones in Ralph's Market suddenly suggested to Maria a disorganization so general that the norm was to have either a disconnected telephone or some clandestine business to conduct, some extramarital error. She had to have a telephone. There was no one to whom she wanted to talk but she had to have a telephone. If she could not be reached it would happen, the peril would find Kate. Beside her the woman's voice rose and fell monotonously .

"I mean you can't fathom the despair. Believe me I've thought of ending it. Kaput. Over. Head in the oven.'

"A doctor," Maria said.

"
Doctor
. I've talked to doctors."

'You'll feel better. Try to feel better." The girl now using the nearest telephone seemed to be calling a taxi to take her home from Ralph's. The girl had rollers in her hair and a small child in her basket and Maria wondered whether her car had been repossessed or her husband had left her or just what had happened, why was she calling a taxi from Ralph's. "I mean you have to try, you can't feel this way forever."

"I'll say I can't." Tears began to roll down the woman's f ace.

"You don't even want to talk to me."

"But I do." Maria touched her arm. "I do."

'Get your whore's hands off me,"
the woman screamed.

"THERE'S SOME PRINCIPLE I'm not grasping, Maria,"

Carter said on the telephone from New York. "You've got a $1,500-a-month house sitting empty in Beverly Hills, and you're living in a furnished apartment on Fountain Avenue. You want to be closer to Schwab's? Is that it?"

Maria lay on the bed watching a television news film of a house about to slide into the Tujunga Wash. "I'm not living here, I'm just staying here."

"I still don't get the joke."

She kept her eyes on the screen. "Then don't get it," she said at the exact instant the house splintered and fell.

After Carter had hung up Maria wrapped her robe close and smoked part of a joint and watched an interview with the woman whose house it had been. "You boys did a really outstanding camera job," the woman said. Maria finished the cigarette and repeated the compliment out loud. The day's slide and flood news was followed by a report of a small earth trernor centered near Joshua Tree, 4.2

on the Richter Scale, and, of corollary interest, an interview with a Pentecostal minister who had received prophecy that eight million people would perish by earthquake on a Friday afternoon in March.

The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tujunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquillity. Within these four rented walls she was safe.

She was more than safe, she was all right: she had seen herself on
Interstate 80
just before the news and she looked all right. Warm, content, suffused with tentative small resolves, Maria fell asleep before the news was over.

But the next morning when the shower seemed slow to drain she threw up in the toilet, and after she had stopped trembling packed the few things she had brought to Fountain Avenue and, in the driving rain, drove back to the house in Beverly Hills. There would be plumbing anywhere she went.

"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."