Play it as it Lays (11 page)

“Y
OU 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.

T
HE 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.”

T
HE 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.

“Y
OU’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.”

“My husband is.”

“You want to know how I guessed?”

“How,” Maria said.

“Because I—” The boy studied his grimy fingernails, as if no longer confident that the story illustrated a special acumen. “Because I personally know everybody from around here,” he said then, his eyes on his fingernails. “I mean I guessed right away you weren’t somebody I already knew.”

“Actually I come from around here.” Maria had spoken to no one else all day and she did not want to go into the bathhouse. She did not even know why she had come to the bathhouse. The bathhouse was full of old people, their loose skin pink from the water, sitting immobile on the edge of the pool nursing terminal
cancers and wens and fear. “Actually I grew up in Silver Wells.”

The boy looked at her impassively.

“It’s across the line. I mean it’s on the test range.”

“How about that,” the boy said, and then he leaned forward. “Your husband couldn’t be Harrison Porter, could he?”

“No,” Maria said, and then there seemed nothing more to say.

“My room, my game.” Susannah Wood was sitting on her bed rolling cigarettes. “So turn up the sound.”

Carter walked over to the bank of amplifiers and speakers and tape reels that Susannah had brought with her to the desert.

“Somebody’s going to complain,” Maria repeated.

“So what,” Susannah Wood said, and then she laughed. “Maria thinks we’re going to get
arrested
for possession. Maria thinks she’s already
done
that number in Nevada.”

BZ looked up. “Turn it down, Carter.”

Susannah Wood looked first at BZ and then at Maria. “Turn it up, Carter.”

Maria stood up. It was midnight and she was wearing only an old bikini bathing suit and her hair clung damply to the back of her neck. “I don’t like any of you,” she said. “You are all making me sick.”

Susannah Wood laughed.

“That’s not funny, Maria,” Helene said.

“I mean sick. Physically sick.”

Helene picked up a jar from the clutter on Susannah Wood’s dressing table and began smoothing cream into Maria’s shoulders. “If it’s not funny don’t say it, Maria.”

“What about Susannah,” Maria asked Carter. She was standing in the sun by the window brushing her hair.

“What about her.”

Maria brushed her hair another twenty strokes and went into the bathroom. “I mean did you really like fucking her.”

“Not particularly.”

“I wonder why not,” Maria said, and closed the bathroom door.

“Where’s Carter,” Maria said when she came into BZ’s room.

“We had some trouble with Harrison, Carter stayed out there to block a scene with him. You want a drink?”

“I guess so. They coming back here?”

“I said we’d meet them in Vegas. Helene’s there already.”

“Let’s not have dinner at the Riviera again.”

“Harrison likes the Riviera.”

Maria leaned back on Helene’s bed. “I’m tired of Harrison.” She licked the inside of her glass and let the bourbon coat her tongue. “Some ice might help.”

“The refrigerator’s broken. Roll a number.”

Maria closed her eyes. “And I’m also tired of Susannah.”

“What else are you tired of.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re getting there,” BZ said.

“Getting where.”

“Where I am.”

T
HEY HAD BEEN on the desert three weeks when Susannah Wood got beaten up in a hotel room in Las Vegas. The unit publicity man got over there right away and Harrison Porter did a surprise Telethon for Southern Nevada Cystic Fibrosis and there was no mention of the incident. When Maria asked Carter what had happened he shrugged.

“What difference does it make,” he said.

Susannah Wood was not badly hurt but her face was bruised and she could not be photographed. Carter tried to shoot around her until the bruise was down enough to be masked by makeup but by the end of the fourth week they were running ten days over schedule.

“Was it Harrison?”

“It’s over, she’s O.K., drop it.” Carter was standing by the window watching for BZ’s car. BZ had been in town for meetings at the studio. “Susannah doesn’t
take things quite as hard as you do. So just forget it.”

“Was it you?”

Carter looked at her. “You think that way, get your ass out of here.”

In silence Maria pulled out a suitcase and began taking her clothes from hangers. In silence Carter watched her. By the time BZ walked in, neither of them had spoken for ten minutes.

“They’re on your back,” BZ said. He dropped his keys on the bed and took an ice tray from the refrigerator.

“I thought they liked the dailies.”

“Ralph likes them. Kramer says they’re very interesting.”

“What does that mean.”

“It means he wants to know why he’s not seeing a master, two, closeup and reaction on every shot.”

“If I started covering myself on every shot we’d bring it in at about two-five.”

“All right, then, it doesn’t mean that. It means he wants Ralph to hang himself with your rope.” BZ looked at Maria. “What’s she doing?”

“Ask her,” Carter said, and walked out.

“Harrison did it,” BZ said. “What’s the problem.”

“Carter was there. Wasn’t Carter there.”

“It was just something that got a little out of hand.”

Maria sat down on the bed beside her suitcase. “Carter was there.”

BZ looked at her for a long while and then laughed. “Of course Carter was there. He was there with Helene.”

Maria said nothing.

“If you’re pretending that it makes some difference to you, who anybody fucks and where and when and why, you’re faking yourself.”

“It does make a difference to me.”

“No,” BZ said. “It doesn’t.”

Maria stared out the window into the dry wash behind the motel.

“You know it doesn’t. If you thought things like that mattered you’d be gone already. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Why don’t you get me a drink,” Maria said finally.

“What’s the matter,” Carter would ask when he saw her sitting in the dark at two or three in the morning staring out at the dry wash. “What do you want. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Tell me.”

“I just told you.”

“Fuck it then. Fuck it and fuck you. I’m up to here with you. I’ve had it. I’ve had it with the circles under
your eyes and the veins showing on your arms and the lines starting on your face and your fucking menopausal depression—”

“Don’t say that word to me.”

“Menopause. Old.
You’re going to get
old.”

“You talk crazy any more and I’ll leave.”

“Leave. For Christ’s sake
leave.”

She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. “All right.”

“Don’t,” he would say then. “Don’t.”

“Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.”

He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. “To find out if you’re alive.”

In the heat some mornings she would wake with her eyes swollen and heavy and she would wonder if she had been crying.