Play it as it Lays (5 page)

“Y
OU WANT IT IN CASH,” the teller said doubtfully.

“I’m taking a trip.” She did not know why she was saying this but she kept on. “Mexico City, Guadalajara.”

“You don’t want traveler’s checks?”

“Cash,” she said, and when the teller handed her the bills she ran from the bank with them still in her hand.

In the car she counted the stiff bills. They stuck together and she missed one and she counted them four more times before she was certain she had them all. Since early morning she had been trying to remember something Les Goodwin had said to her, anything Les Goodwin had said to her. When she was not actually talking to him now she found it hard to keep him distinct from everyone else, everyone with whom she had ever slept or almost slept or refused to sleep or wanted to sleep. It had seemed this past
month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself. She tried to remember how it had been to drag Fremont Street in Vegas with Earl Lee Atkins when she was sixteen years old, how it had been to go out on the desert between Vegas and Boulder and drink beer from halfquart cans and feel her sunburn when he touched her and smell the chlorine from her own hair and the Lava soap from his and the sweet sharp smell of starched cotton soaked with sweat.
How High the Moon
, the radio would play, Les Paul and Mary Ford. She tried to remember Ivan Costello, tried to fix in her mind the exact way the light came through the shutters in his bedroom in New York, the exact colors of the striped sheets she had put on his bed and the way those sheets looked in the morning and the look of a motel room in which they had once spent a week in Maryland. She tried to remember Carter. She tried to remember Les Goodwin. She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

“N
OTHING’S WRONG,” she repeated to Les Goodwin on the telephone.

“I know something’s wrong.”

“Nothing.”

“O.K.,” he said finally. “All right. I’m coming out alone on Monday, meet my plane at four.”

“I can’t.”

“I want to
talk
to you, Maria. I want to see you.”

“Monday night,” she said. “Listen. You make me happy.”

She hung up very fast then because she did not want to find herself telling him why she could not meet his flight.

I
N THE DREAM from which she woke when the telephone rang again that night she had the baby, and she and the baby and Kate were living on West Twelfth Street with Ivan Costello. In the dream she did not yet know Carter, but somehow had Carter’s daughter and Carter’s blessing. In the dream it was all right. She supposed that she had dreamed of Ivan Costello because the telephone was ringing, and he used to call her in the middle of the night. “How much do you want it,” he used to say. “Tell me what you’d do to get it from me.” The telephone was still ringing and she pulled the cord loose from the jack. She could not remember what she would have done to get it from any of them.

“Y
OU SHOULD ALWAYS CALL before you come,” the nurse in charge of Kate’s cottage said on Sunday. The nurse had short hair and a faint moustache and Kate clung to her knees and Maria did not like her. “The new medication, new treatment, naturally she’s not—”

“What new medication,” Maria heard herself saying. “You keep talking about the new medication, I mean
what is it.”

Kate screamed. The nurse looked reproachfully at Maria. “Methylphenidate hydrochloride.”

Maria closed her eyes. “All right. Your point.”

“We definitely would have suggested you wait until next week.”

“I won’t be here next week.”

“You’re going away?”

“Cozumel,” Maria said. “Mexico.”

On the way to the parking lot she twice invented pretexts to run back, kiss Kate’s small fat hands, tell
her to be good. The third time she ran back it was to find the nurse.

“One thing. You know when she wakes up at night and says
‘oise, oise
,’ it means she’s …” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. “It means she’s having a nightmare,” she said finally.

The nurse looked at her impassively.

“I mean I don’t know if I ever told you that.”

“I’m sure you did,” the nurse said.

That night the house crackled with malign electricity. A hot wind came up at midnight and the leaves scraped the screens, a loose storm drain slapped against the roof. Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet. The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds. At six-thirty that morning she
placed a call to Carter at the motel on the desert but Carter had already left for the location. She interpreted that as a sign and did not try to call the location. She would do what he wanted. She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.

S
HE TRIED TO STRAIGHTEN a drawer, and abandoned it. She heard fire reports on the radio, and turned the sprinklers on the ivy. For almost two hours she studied an old issue of
Vogue
she picked up in the poolhouse, her attention fixed particularly on the details of the life led in New York and Rome by the wife of an Italian industrialist. The Italian seemed to find a great deal of purpose in her life, seemed to make decisions and stick by them, and Maria studied the photographs as if a key might be found among them. When she had exhausted the copy of
Vogue
she got out her checkbook and a stack of bills and spread them on the kitchen table. Paying bills sometimes lent her the illusion of order but now each bill she opened seemed fresh testimony to her life’s disorder, its waste and diffusion: flowers sent to people whom she had failed to thank for parties, sheets bought for beds in which no one now slept, an old bill from F.A.O. Schwarz for a tricycle Kate had never ridden. When
she wrote out the check to Schwarz her hand trembled so hard that she had to void the first check, and smoke a cigarette before she could write another.

“Get it right, Maria,” the voice on the telephone said. “You got a pencil there? You writing this down?”

“Yes,” Maria said.

“Ventura Freeway north, you got that all right? You know what exit?”

“I wrote it down.”

“All set, then. I’ll meet you in the parking lot of the Thriftimart.”

“What Thriftimart,” Maria whispered.

“Maria, I told you, you can’t miss it. Under the big red T.”

In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a
forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.

“Y
OU DRIVE,” the man had said. “We’ll pick up my car after.”

He was wearing white duck pants and a white sport shirt and he had a moon face and a eunuch’s soft body. The hand resting on his knee was pale and freckled and boneless and ever since he got in the car he had been humming
I Get a Kick Out of You.

“You familiar with this area, Maria?”

The question seemed obscurely freighted. “No,” Maria said finally.

“Nice homes here. Nice for kids.” The voice was bland, ingratiating, the voice on the telephone. “Let me ask you one question, all right?”

Maria nodded, and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

“Get pretty good mileage on this? Or no?”

“Pretty good,” she heard herself saying after only the slightest pause. “Not too bad.”

“You may have noticed, I drive a Cadillac. Eldorado. Eats gas but I like it, like the feel of it.”

Maria said nothing. That, then, had actually been the question. She had not misunderstood.

“If I decided to get rid of the Cad,” he said, “I might pick myself up a little Camaro. Maybe that sounds like a step down, a Cad to a Camaro, but I’ve got my eye on this particular Camaro, exact model of the pace car in the Indianapolis 500.”

“You think you’ll buy a Camaro,” Maria said in the neutral tone of a therapist.

“Get the right price, I just might. I got a friend, he can write me a sweet deal if it’s on the floor much longer. They almost had a buyer last week but lucky for me—here, Maria, right here, pull into this driveway.”

Maria turned off the ignition and looked at the man in the white duck pants with an intense and grateful interest. In the past few minutes he had significantly altered her perception of reality: she saw now that she was not a woman on her way to have an abortion. She was a woman parking a Corvette outside a tract house while a man in white pants talked about buying a Camaro. There was no more to it than that. “Lucky for you what?”

“Lucky for me, the guy’s credit didn’t hold up.”

T
HE FLOOR OF THE BEDROOM where it happened was covered with newspapers. She remembered reading somewhere that newspapers were antiseptic, it had to do with the chemicals in the ink, to deliver a baby in a farmhouse you covered the floor with newspapers. There was something else to be done with newspapers, something unexpected, some emergency trick: quilts could be made with newspapers. In time of disaster you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster. She could manage. Carter could never manage but she could. She could not think where she had learned all these tricks. Probably in her mother’s
American Red Cross Handbook,
gray with a red cross on the cover. There, that was a good thing to think about, at any rate not a bad thing if she kept her father out of it. If she could concentrate for even one minute on a picture of herself as a ten-year-old sitting on the front
steps of the house in Silver Wells reading the gray book with the red cross on the cover (splints, shock, rattlesnake bite, rattlesnake bite was why her mother made her read it) with the heat shimmering off the corrugated tin roof of the shed across the road (her father was not in this picture, keep him out of it, say he had gone into Vegas with Benny Austin), if she could concentrate for one more minute on that shed, on whether this minute twenty years later the heat still shimmered off its roof, those were two minutes during which she was not entirely party to what was happening in this bedroom in Encino.

Two minutes in Silver Wells, two minutes here, two minutes there, it was going to be over in this bedroom in Encino, it could not last forever. The walls of the bedroom were cream-colored, yellow, a wallpaper with a modest pattern. Whoever had chosen that wallpaper would have liked maple furniture, a maple bedroom set, a white chenille bedspread and a white Princess telephone, all gone now but she could see it as it must have been, could see even the woman who had picked the wallpaper, she would be a purchaser of Audubon prints and scented douches, a hoarder of secret sexual grievances, a wife. Two minutes in Silver Wells, two minutes on the wallpaper, it could not last forever. The table was a doctor’s table but not fitted with stirrups: instead there were two hardbacked chairs with
pillows tied over the backs. “Tell me if it’s too cold,” the doctor said. The doctor was tall and haggard and wore a rubber apron. “Tell me now because I won’t be able to touch the air conditioner once I start.”

She said that it was not too cold.

“No, it’s too cold. You don’t weigh enough, it’s too cold.”

He adjusted the dial but the sound remained level. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sound. Carter did not like air conditioners but there had been one somewhere. She had slept in a room with an air conditioner, the question was where, never mind the question, that question led nowhere. “This is just induced menstruation,” she could hear the doctor saying. “Nothing to have any emotional difficulties about, better not to think about it at all, quite often the pain is worse when we think about it, don’t like anesthetics, anesthetics are where we run into trouble, just a little local on the cervix, there, relax, Maria, I said
relax.”

No moment more or less important than any other moment, all the same: the pain as the doctor scraped signified nothing beyond itself, no more constituted the pattern of her life than did the movie on television in the living room of this house in Encino. The man in the white duck pants was sitting out there watching the movie and she was lying in here not watching the
movie, and that was all there was to that. Why the volume on the set was turned up so high seemed another question better left unasked. “Hear that scraping, Maria?” the doctor said. “That should be the sound of music to you … don’t scream, Maria, there are people next door, almost done, almost over, better to get it all now than do it again a month from now … I said don’t make any noise, Maria, now I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, you’ll bleed a day or so, not heavily, just spotting, and then a month, six weeks from now you’ll have a normal period, not this month, this month you just had it, it’s in that pail.”

He went into the bathroom then (later she would try to fix in her mind the exact circumstances of his leaving the bedroom, would try to remember if he took the pail with him, later that would seem important to her) and by the time he came back the contractions had stopped. He gave her one envelope of tetracycline capsules and another of ergot tablets and by six o’clock of that hot October afternoon she was out of the bedroom in Encino and back in the car with the man in the white duck pants. The late sun seemed warm and benevolent on her skin and everything she saw looked beautiful, the summer pulse of life itself made manifest. As she backed out of the driveway she smiled radiantly at her companion.

“You missed a pretty fair movie,” he said. “Paula
Raymond.” He reached into his pocket for what seemed to be a cigarette holder. “Ever since I gave up smoking I carry these by the dozen, they look like regular holders but all you get is air.”

Maria stared at his outstretched hand.

“Take
it. I noticed you’re still smoking. You’ll thank me some day.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m a regular missionary.” The man in the white duck pants resettled his soft bulk and gazed out the car window. “Gee, Paula Raymond was a pretty girl,” he said then. “Funny she never became a star.”