Play It As It Lays

I might as well lay it on the line, I have trouble with as it was. I mean it leads nowhere.

“He said, ‘What I like about your wife, Carter, is she’s not a cunt.’”

Maria said nothing.

“That’s very funny, Maria, Kulik saying that to Carter, you lost your sense of humor?”

“I’ve already heard it.”

“You haven’t asked me how it went after we left Anita’s,” BZ said.

“How did it go,” Maria said without interest.

“Everybody got what he came for.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of doing favors for people?”

There was a long silence. “You don’t know how tired,” BZ said.

The way he looked was the problem. He looked exactly the same. He looked untouched, and she did not.

“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.

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.

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.

“I am just very very very tired of listening to you all.”

That night as the plane taxied out onto the runway at McCarran Maria had kept her face pressed against the window for as long as she could see them, her mother and father and Benny Austin, waving at the wrong window.

“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 department. 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.”

“You look like hell, Maria this isn’t any excuse for you to fall apart, I mean a divorce. I’ve done it twice.”

She had watched them in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper’s Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamp chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

“Some people resist,” he said. “Some people don’t want to know.”

“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.”

“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 onto Maria’s shoulders. “If it’s not funny don’t say it, Maria.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

I know what “nothing” means, and I keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say.