Play It as It Lays: A Novel (11 page)

“I was in
jail
."

“Just hold on, cunt," the actor said, his voice rising. "
You never
told me who you were
."

"I hear you had a rather baroque morning-after,” Helene said.

Helene came to the house all the time now. Sometimes Maria would pretend no one was home but today Helene had walked in without ringing and come directly upstairs. She sat on the edge of the bed and took out a cigarette.

"How exactly did you hear that," Maria said finally. She had taken so many showers during the past several hours that her skin felt damp between the sheets, but the smell of Helene's cigarette and perfume was making her feel dirty again. "I mean what exactly did you hear."

"Just that. Carter called from New York and told BZ."

"I haven't even talked to Carter."

"Freddy did, naturally." Helene picked up Maria's lipstick and studied the effect of the color on the back of her wrist. "I mean Freddy is seriously worried about you, Carter is seriously worried about you, BZ and I are—”

"I'm
all right."

"Of course. You're really on top of it. I mean for example there's nothing at all peculiar about hiding here under the covers shaking at three o'clock in the afternoon. Nothing at all off about leaving a party with Johnny Waters and ending up in jail in Nevada at eight o'clock the next morning. Nothing wrong there."

"I've got a headache. I'm in bed because my head aches."

"I'll get a Darvon."

Maria pulled the sheet up to her chin.

"I'm just trying to help you, Maria."

"I'll be all right." Maria sat up and touched Helene's arm. "Really, Helene. I promise."

"All right, never mind, I'm leaving." Helene stood up and smoothed the bed where she had been sitting and then stared at herself for a long while in the mirror on the dressing-room door. "What kind of fuck is Johnny Waters?" she asked finally.

During the next week Freddy Chaikin made a numher of telephone calls to various television producers asking, "as a personal favor to Carter," that Maria be considered for parts, even day work.

"Anything to take her mind off herself," Freddy said to each of them.

"What we’ve got here is a slightly suicidal situation." Maria knew about these calls because Helene told her about them.

"I saw a picture of you today," Helene said.

"Where." Every time she went downstairs Helene seemed to be there.

"You know that employment agency on Beverly? The one where you got the Guatemalan who stole your diaphragm?"

"I don't know." Maria did not want to think about the Guatemalan who had taken her diaphragm.

"You do too know. They've got all those studio stills on the wall?

Satisfied customers? Anyway, now they've got a picture of you, signed 'Good luck, Maria Wyeth."'

"Well, fine," Maria said. "I didn't think you'd be in town again today."

Helene looked at her and giggled. "BZ sent me," she said finally.

"BZ wants me to get you to spend a few weeks at the beach."

Maria said nothing.

"You looked years younger in this picture, I must say." Helene laughed again. "'Good luck, Maria Wyeth."'

"Dear Maria,"
the note read. "
Well don't know when I'll get over
to LA but wanted to give you a telephone where you can call if you
are in Nevada again or need help. Have some things of your Dad's
I want to give you, also because you are like my own daughter
there will be a little windfall from this quarter some day, not too
soon let's hope. Have all your Dad's papers Plus mineral
certiftcates, no action now but quien sabe, once knew a man who
thought his rights were worthless and he was sitting on
pitchblende so loaded with U. the counters went haywire. Call me
at number below and ask for Benny, phone belongs to lady next
door, also she cooks for me sometimes. Not like your Mom. Ha ha.

Your Friend Benny C. Austin."

Maria was listening to someone talk and every now and then she would hear herself making what she thought was an appropriate response but mostly she was just swaying slightly with the music and wondering where her drink was when suddenly Felicia Goodwin took her arm.

"We're leaving now, Maria. We'll drop you."

"I have my car, thanks, I'm fine."

Les?" Felicia was talking over her shoulder. "I need you."

Maria picked up someone else's drink and smiled past Felicia at Les. "Crowd scene," she said. "Principals emerge."

"You come with Felicia and me, Maria. I'll get your car tomorrow."

Maria put the glass down and looked at him for a long while.

"I didn't come with you," she said very clearly then. "Thank Christ."

After that she was crying, and Helene was holding her arm while BZ got her coat.

"I thought it merited a mention," Felicia Goodwin whispered.

"Let it go," Helene said. Grateful, Maria put her head on Helene's shoulder and let herself be led outside. In the car she was sick on Helene's lap, and told BZ he was a degenerate.

When she woke before dawn in Helene's bedroom she saw that someone had undressed and bathed and creamed her body. At first she thought she was alone in the room but then she saw BZ and Helene, sprawled together on a chaise. She had only the faintest ugly memory of what had brought BZ and Helene together, and to erase it from her mind she fixed her imagination on a needle dripping sodium pentathol into her arm and began counting backward from one hundred. When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernardino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream.

"I GUESS I DRANK too much last night," Maria said carefully.

"Don't talk about it." Helene was staring out the kitchen window, holding a cup of coffee in her two hands as if for warmth. Her eyes were puffy and there was a bruise on her left cheekbone and her voice was soft and vague. "I don't want to talk about it. The wind makes me feel bad."

"I just don't remember getting here." Maria had a flash image of BZ holding a belt and Helene laughing and she tried not to look at the bruise on Helene's face. "That's all I was saying."

Tears began falling down Helene's face. "Don't
talk
about it. And don't say you don't remember, either."

"I didn't—" Maria broke off. BZ was standing in the doorway.

"I picked up your car." BZ dropped the keys on the table and looked from Maria to Helene. "What have we here," he said softly.

"A little hangover terror? A few second thoughts? Is that about the size of it?"

Helene said nothing.

"I can't take this, Helene." BZ was wearing tinted glasses and for the first time Maria noticed a sag

beneath his eyes. "If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game. You've been around a long time, you know what it is, it's play-or-pay."

"Why don't you go tell that to Carlotta," Helene whispered.

Maria closed her eyes at the instant BZ’s hand hit Helene's face.

"Stop it," she screamed.

BZ looked at Maria and laughed. "You weren't talking that way last night," he said.

FROM A PAY PHONE on the highway outside Las Vegas she called the number Benny Austin had given her. The number was no longer in service.

“You here all alone?" the bellboy in the Sands asked, lingering after she had tipped him.

"My husband's meeting me here."

"Is that right? Today? Tomorrow?"

She looked at him. "Go away," she said.

The room was painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread. Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could send people into irreversible insanity she thought about asking for a different room, but the boy had unnerved her. She did not want to court further appraisal by asking anyone for anything. To hear someone's voice she looked in the telephone book and dialed a few prayers, then took three aspirin and tried not to think about BZ and Helene.

In the morning she went to the post office. Because it was Saturday the long corridors were deserted, and all but one of the grilled windows shuttered. Her sandals clattered against the marble and echoed as she walked.

"Could you put this in Box 674," she said to the clerk at the one open window. 674 was the number on the envelope of Benny Austin's letter.

"Can't."

"Why not."

"It's got to have postage. It's got to go through the United States mail."

Sullenly he studied the nickel and penny she gave him, then pushed one stamp under the grill and watched her stamp the note.

"Now could you put it in 674?"

"No," he said, and threw the letter into a canvas bin.

She found a bench near Box 674 and sat down. At noon the last window slammed shut. Maria drank from the water cooler, smoked cigarettes, read the F.B.I. posters. Wandering the country somewhere were Negro Females Armed with Lye, Caucasian Males posing as Baby Furniture Representatives, Radio Station Employees traveling out of Texas with wives and children and embezzled cash and Schemes for Getting Money and Never Delivering on Piecework, an inchoate army on the move. Maria crossed the street to a diner with a view of the post office and tried to eat a grilled-cheese sandwich.

On the third day a woman unlocked Box 674. She was wearing a soiled white uniform and she had a hard sad face and Maria did not want to speak to her.

"Excuse me," she said finally. "I'm trying to reach Benny Austin

—"

"What is this." The woman was holding Maria's letter and her eyes darted from the letter to Maria.

“Actually I sent that letter—"

"And now you want it back."

"No. Not at all. I want you to give it to Benny Austin and tell—"

"I don't know any Benny person. And I think it's pretty funny this letter addressed to some Benny person in my box and then right off you sashay up and start dropping the same name, either you've been tampering in my box, a federal offense, or you're trying some other mickey mouse and believe me you've got the wrong party."

Maria backed away. The woman's face was white and twisted and she was following Maria, her voice rising. "You're Luanne's foster mother, is exactly who you are, and you're nosing around Vegas because you

heard about the injury settlement, well just you
forget
it. I said
forget it."

“WHAT DO YOU THINK," Maria could hear one of the men saying. She was trying to eat an egg roll in the Sands and the two men and the girl had been watching her ever since she sat down.

"About what," the girl said.

"That."

The girl shrugged. "Maybe."

“The other man said something that Maria did not hear and when she looked up again the girl was still watching her.

"Thirty-six," the girl said. "But a good thirty-six."

For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas she wore dark glasses. She did not decide to stay in Vegas: she only failed to leave.

She spoke to no one. She did not gamble. She neither swam nor lay in the sun. She was there on some business but she could not seem to put her finger on what that business was. All day, most of every night, she walked and she drove. Two or three times a day she walked in and out of all the hotels on the Strip and several downtown. She began to crave the physical flash of walking in and out of places, the temperature shock, the hot wind blowing outside, the heavy frigid air inside. She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers' patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day's tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards f armed on a table and a dealer's rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Street. A light blinking.

In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpot was on eighteen
, the
only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man
, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she
rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.

By the end of a week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between
Maria
and
other
. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity.

She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves.

She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined that she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which.

"Maria," she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.

She began to feel the pressure of Hoover Dam, there on the desert, began to feel the pressure and pull of the water. When the pressure got great enough she drove out there. All that day she felt the power surging through her own body. All day she was faint with vertigo, sunk in a world where great power grids converged, throbbing lines plunged finally into the shallow canyon below the dam's f ace, elevators like coffins dropped in to the bowels of the earth itself With a guide and a handful of children Maria walked through the chambers, stared at the turbines in the vast Flittering gallery, at the deep still water with the hidden intakes sucking all the while, even as she watched; clung to the railings, leaned out, stood finally on a platform over the pipe that carried the river beneath the dam. The platform quivered. Her ears roared. She wanted to stay in the dam, lie on the great pipe itself, but reticence saved her from asking.