Read Play it as it Lays Online
Authors: Joan Didion
T
HEY HAD TEN DAYS LEFT on the desert.
“Come out and watch me shoot today,” Carter said.
“Later,” she said. “Maybe later.”
Instead she sat in the motel office and studied the deputy sheriff’s framed photographs of highway accidents, imagined the moment of impact, tasted blood in her own dry mouth and searched the grain of the photographs with a magnifying glass for details not immediately apparent, the false teeth she knew must be on the pavement, the rattlesnake she suspected on the embankment. The next day she borrowed a gun from a stunt man and drove out to the highway and shot at road signs.
“That was edifying,” Carter said. “Why’d you do it.”
“I just did it.”
“I want you to give that gun back to Farris.”
“I already did.”
“I don’t want any guns around here.”
Maria looked at him. “Neither do I,” she said.
“I can’t take any more of that glazed expression,” Carter said. “I want you to wake up. I want you to come out with us today.”
“Later,” Maria said.
Instead she sat in the coffee shop and talked to the woman who ran it.
“I close down now until four,” the woman said at two o’clock. “You’ll notice it says that on the door, hours 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 4 p.m. to—”
“6:30 p.m.,” Maria said.
“Well. You saw it.”
“What do you do between two and four.”
“I go home, I usually—” The woman looked at Maria. “Look. You want to come out and see my place?”
The house was on the edge of the town, a trailer set on a concrete foundation. In place of a lawn there was a neat expanse of concrete, bordered by a split-rail fence, and beyond the fence lay a hundred miles of drifting sand.
“I got the only fence around here. Lee built it before he took off.”
“Lee.” Maria tried to remember in which of the woman’s stories Lee had figured. “Where’d he go.”
“Found himself a girl down to Barstow. I told you. Doreen Baker.”
The sand was blowing through the rail fence onto the concrete, drifting around the posts, coating a straight-backed chair with pale film. Maria began to cry.
“Honey,” the woman said. “You pregnant or something?”
Maria shook her head and looked in her pocket for a Kleenex. The woman picked up a broom and began sweeping the sand into small piles, then edging the piles back to the fence. New sand blew in as she swept.
“You ever made a decision?” she said suddenly, letting the broom fall against the fence.
“About what.”
“I made my decision in ‘61 at a meeting in Barstow and I never shed one tear since.”
“No,” Maria said. “I never did that.”
When I was ten years old my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout: I could trace a layout in my sleep, the field here and the pass line all around, even money on Big Six or Eight, five-for-one on Any Seven. Always when I play back my father’s voice it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.
S
HE SAT IN THE MOTEL in the late afternoon light looking out at the dry wash until its striations and shifting grains seemed to her a model of the earth and the moon. When BZ came in she did not look up.
“Let me entertain you,” BZ said finally.
Maria said nothing.
“I could do my turn about Harrison calling one of the grips a vicious cunt.”
“Please don’t smoke in here, BZ.”
“Why not.”
She got up and filled a glass with the warm water from the tap. “Because it’s a felony.”
BZ laughed. Maria sat on the bed and drank the water and watched him roll a cigarette.
“I said don’t, BZ.”
“I get the feeling you want me to leave.”
“I don’t feel like talking to anybody.”
“You don’t have to talk to me.” He lit the cigarette
and handed it to her. “You want to know where Carter is?”
“Still shooting.”
“Maria, it’s seven-thirty.”
“I give up.”
“He’s with Helene.”
“I thought I didn’t have to talk to you.”
“You aren’t paying attention, Maria. Carter is fucking Helene. I thought these things made a big difference to you.”
Maria got up and walked back to the window. In the few minutes that BZ had been distracting her the light had changed on the dry wash. Tomorrow she would borrow a camera, and station it on the dry wash for twenty-four hours.
“Tell me what matters,” BZ said.
“Nothing,” Maria said.
If Carter and Helene want to think it happened because I was insane, I say let them. They have to lay it off on someone. Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane. Just once, the week after the desert, when Helene came to see me in Neuropsychiatrie, I tried to explain how wrong she had been when she screamed that last night about my carelessness, my selfishness, my insanity, as if it had somehow slipped my attention what BZ was doing. I told her: there was no carelessness involved. Helene, I said: I knew precisely what BZ was doing. But Helene only screamed again.
Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work.
“W
HAT DO YOU THINK about it,” Maria asked Carter.
“About what.”
“What I just told you. About the man at the trailer camp who told his wife he was going out for a walk in order to talk to God.”
“I wasn’t listening, Maria. Just give me the punch line.”
“There isn’t any punch line, the highway patrol just found him dead, bitten by a rattlesnake.”
“I’ll say there isn’t any punch line.”
“Do you think he talked to God?”
Carter looked at her.
“I mean do you think God answered? Or don’t you?”
Carter walked out of the room.
The heat stuck. The air shimmered. An underground nuclear device was detonated where Silver Wells had once been, and Maria got up before dawn to feel the blast. She felt nothing.
“I’m giving this one more chance,” Carter said when he saw her sitting by the window. “Tell me what you want.”
“Nothing.”
“I want to help you. Tell me what you feel.”
She looked at the hand he held out to her. “Nothing,” she said.
“You say that again and I swear to Christ—”
She shrugged. He left the motel.
They had three days left on the desert.
Except when they let Carter or Helene in, I never minded Neuropsychiatrie and I don’t mind here. Nobody bothers me. The only problem is Kate. I want Kate.
“W
E SHOT THE LAST MASTER after you left this afternoon,” Carter said when he came in with Helene. “Three set-ups in the morning and we’re home. Fantastic.”
“Susannah was fabulous,” Helene said. “Super-good.”
BZ said nothing. Maria stared out the window.
“You should have seen Carter working with her.”
“I bet he was fabulous,” BZ said. “Fab.”
The one time Ivan Costello got through the switchboard to me here he told me that I had lost my sense of humor. In spite of what Carter and Helene think, maybe my sense of humor was all I did lose.
“Y
OU WERE FANTASTIC TODAY” Helene said when Susannah Wood came in.
“Super-good,” BZ said. “Really key.”
Susannah Wood lay down on Maria’s bed. “Let’s go into Vegas.”
“It’s all planned.” Helene did not look at BZ. “Sylvie Roth’s over, and Cassie and Leona and—”
BZ stood up. “You go into Vegas.”
“Don’t you want to see Sylvie?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to see Leona’s last show?”
“No.”
The cords tightened on Helene’s neck. “Exactly what do you want.”
Susannah Wood giggled. “I saw the charts today, Leona’s single stopped at 85.”
BZ looked at Helene. “Exactly nothing,” he said pleasantly.
Maria dropped a tray of ice on the floor.
Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is “nothing.” Now that I have the answer, my plans for the future are these: (1) get Kate, (2) live with Kate alone, (3) do some canning. Damson plums, apricot preserves. Sweet India relish and pickled peaches. Apple chutney. Summer squash succotash. There might even be a ready market for such canning: you will note that after everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter and Benny Austin’s godchild. For all I know they knew the answer too, and pretended they didn’t. You call it as you see it, and stay in the action. BZ thought otherwise. If Carter and Helene aren’t careful they’ll get the answer too.
“I
THOUGHT YOU’D BE in Vegas,” BZ said when Maria opened the door. He was holding a bottle of vodka and in spite of the heat he was wearing a blazer and a tie. “With Carter and Helene and Susannah and Harrison and Sylvia and Cassie and Leona and—”
“You knew I wasn’t going.” Maria lay down on the bed again.
“All right, I knew.” He sat on the edge of the bed and loosened his tie. “Look at me all duded up. Why are you in bed at nine o’clock.”
“Why not.”
“Beautiful.”
Maria looked at him. “Tell me why you’re sad.”
“You’re a good girl.” All the musculature seemed gone from BZ’s face. He put down the bottle of vodka and reached into his pocket. “You know what these are?”
He poured twenty or thirty capsules onto the bed before she answered.
“Grain-and-a-half Seconal.”
“You want some?”
She looked at him. “No.”
“You’re still playing.” BZ did not take his eyes from hers. “Some day you’ll wake up and you just won’t feel like playing any more.”
“That’s a queen’s way of doing it.”
“I never expected you to fall back on style as an argument.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“I know that. You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She took his hand and held it. “Why are you here.”
“Because you and I, we
know
something. Because we’ve been out there where nothing is. Because I wanted—you know why.”
“Lie down here,” she said after a while. “Just go to sleep.”
When he lay down beside her the Seconal capsules rolled on the sheet. In the bar across the road somebody punched
King of the Road
on the jukebox again, and there was an argument outside, and the sound of a bottle breaking. Maria held onto BZ’s hand.
“Listen to that,” he said. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”
“It would be very pretty,” Maria said. “Go to sleep.”
She was almost asleep when she sensed that his weight had shifted.
“Don’t.”
After she had said it she opened her eyes.
He was swallowing the capsules with a glass of water. There were not very many left on the bed.
“Don’t start faking me now.” BZ turned off the light and lay down again. “Take my hand. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” she said after a while.
“Hold onto me,” BZ said.
When Maria woke again the room was blazing with light and Carter was shaking her and Helene was screaming. Maria thought she had never heard anyone scream the way Helene screamed. She closed her eyes against the light and her ears against Helene and her mind against what was going to happen in the next few hours and tightened her hold on BZ’s hand.
Carter called today, but I saw no point in talking to him. On the whole I talk to no one. I concentrate on the way light would strike filled Mason jars on a kitchen windowsill. I lie here in the sunlight, watch the hummingbird. This morning I threw the coins in the swimming pool, and they gleamed and turned in the water in such a way that I was almost moved to read them. I refrained.
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.
Joan Didion
is one of the few novelists still passionate enough about the idea of America to make it the subject of fiction. She has published five novels in three decades and each book has come closer to the source of the national psychosis, where romance and reality collide and the outcome is loss. Her novels have been underrated, perhaps because of critical resistance to a writer who can do too much. Yet her fiction is no less indispensable than her five books of essays and reportage are. Together her works provide a chronicle of personal and political change over the past thirty years, told in the irresistibly observant tone of a compulsively self-reflective prose stylist.
JOHN WEIR,
New Yorker
THE LAST THING HE WANTED
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS
MIAMI
DEMOCRACY
SALVADOR
THE WHITE ALBUM
A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
RUN RIVER
Flamingo
An Imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
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Published by Flamingo 1998
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First published in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1970
Copyright © Joan Didion 1970
Joan Didion asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne ISBN 0 00 654587 4
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Epub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-41499-4