Free Play It as It Lays: A Novel by Joan Didion Page B

What are you doing."
    "I'm driving over here," Maria said. "I'm driving Sunset and I'm staying in the left lane because I can see the New Havana Ballroom and I'm going to turn left at the New Havana Ballroom. That's what I'm doing."

48
    THERE WAS AT FIRST that spring an occasional faggot who would take her to parties. Never a famous faggot, never one of those committed months in advance to escorting the estranged wives of important directors, but a third-string faggot. At first she was even considered a modest asset by several of them: they liked her not only because she would listen to late-night monologues about how suicidal they felt but because the years she spent modeling had versed her in precisely the marginal distinctions which preoccupied them. She understood, for example, about shoes, and could always distinguish among the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy. Still, there remained some fatal lack of conviction in her performance, some instant of flushed inattention that would provoke them finally to a defensive condescension.
    Eventually they would raise their eyebrows helplessly at one another when they were with her, and be oversolicitous. "Darling,"
    they would say, "have another drink." And she would. She was drinking a good deal in the evenings now because when she drank she did not dream. "This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen," a loudspeaker kept repeating in her dreams now, and she would be checking off names as the children filed past her, the little children in the green antechamber, she would be collecting their
    lockets and baby rings in a fine mesh basket. Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation.

49
    "LEONARD'S IN NEW YORK for ten days," Helene said as soon as Maria had hung up the telephone. "Did I tell you?"
    "Three times," Maria said. Leonard was Helene's hairdresser.
    "I don't mind if I'm out of town, but if I'm in town and Leonard's not —who was that on the telephone?"
    "Somebody's leg man."
    "What do you mean, somebody's? Whose?"
    "Some columnist in the trades. I don't know."
    "What did he want?"
    "He wanted to know if I was dating anyone in particular. He also wanted to know what I thought of Carter's dating Susannah Wood."
    Helene shrugged. "You knew that."
    "I mean the word dating? Doesn't it strike you funny?"
    “Not particularly." Helene was studying her hair line in a small mirror. "If I'm in town, and Leonard's not , I feel almost . . . frightened."
    Maria said nothing.
    "I don't suppose you understand that."
    Maria watched the tears welling in Helene's eyes.
    "Don't, Helene," she said finally. "Don't be depressed."
    "lt’s shit," Helene said. "It's all shit.'

50
    EVERYTHING MARIA could think to do in the town she had already done. She had checked into the motel, she had eaten a crab at the marina. At three in the afternoon she had been the only customer in the marina restaurant and it had been a dispiriting thirty or forty minutes, sliced beets staining the crab legs and a couple of waitresses arguing listlessly and a piped medley from Showboat . After that she had walked on the gravelly sand and she had driven aimlessly to Port Hueneme and back to Oxnard and now she sat on a bench in the downtown plaza, watching some boys in ragged Levi jackets and dark goggles who sat on the grass near her car. Their Harleys were pulled up to the curb and they seemed to be passing a joint with furtive daring and every now and then they would look over at her and laugh. Because there was an oil fire somewhere to the north a yellow haze hung over the town, a stillness over the plaza. On the next bench an old man coughed soundlessly, spit phlegm that seemed to hang in the heavy air. A woman in a nurse's uniform wheeled a bundled neuter figure silently past the hedges of dead camellias. Maria closed her eyes and imagined the