Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? some people ask. I never ask.

Why should Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more. I recall an incident reported not long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their Scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in the thermal blanket. Why? Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory “answer” to such questions.

Just so. I am what I am. To look for “reasons” is beside the point. But because the pursuit of reasons is their business here, they ask me questions.

From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine. From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently.

“This is a bad hand but God if there is one, and Honey I sincerely believe there must be ‘Something’, never meant it to set you back in your Plans,” is how it ends. “Don’t let them bluff you back there because you’re holding all the aces.”

I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.

She was always a very selfish girl, it was first last and always Maria.

All I can say is this: it was after a succession of such small scenes that I began to see the improbability of a rapprochement with Maria.

Failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants.

Whatever he began by saying he would end by saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.

“Listen to me,” she would say then, almost shouting, trying to take him by the shoulders and shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose; he would knock her away, and the look on his face, contorted, teeth bared, would render her paralyzed. “Why don’t you just get it over with,” he would say then, leaning close, his face still contorted. “Why don’t you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don’t you die.” After

Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.

She was staring into a hand mirror, picking out her mother’s features. Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

“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.

I’ve thought of ending it. Kaput. Over. Head in the oven.” “A doctor,” Maria said. “Doctor. I’ve talked to doctors.” “You’ll feel better. Try to feel better.” The girl now using the nearest telephone seemed to be calling a taxi to take her home from Ralph’s. The girl had rollers in her hair and a small child in her basket and Maria wondered whether her car had been repossessed or her husband had left her or just what had happened, why was she calling a taxi from Ralph’s. “I mean you have to try, you can’t feel this way forever.” “I’ll say I can’t.” Tears began to roll down the woman’s face. “You don’t even want to talk to me.” “But I do.” Maria touched her arm. “I do.” “Get your whore’s hands off me,” the woman screamed.

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.

Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation.

“You mean you want to talk to me direct, you don’t want me to make an appointment? Go through your agent?” “All right. I get it.” “You’re feeling good enough to talk to me? You aren’t sick? You aren’t asleep? You aren’t out of town? You aren’t just fucking unavailable?” “Ivan—” “‘Ivan’ shit.” “All right,” she said. “O.K.” “You want to know what I think of your life?” “No,” she said, but he was already spitting into the telephone.

“It’s all gone with you,” he said. “It used to be there but it’s gone.” “Listen,” she said as if by rote. “I love you.”

“What’s the matter,” Carter would ask when he saw her sitting in the dark at two or three in the morning staring out at the dry wash. “What do you want. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.” “I don’t want anything.” “Tell me.” “I just told you.” “Fuck it then. Fuck it and fuck you. I’m up to here with you. I’ve had it. I’ve had it with the circles under your eyes and the veins showing on your arms and the lines starting on your face and your fucking menopausal depression—” “Don’t say that word to me.” “Menopause. Old. You’re going to get old.” “You talk crazy any more and I’ll leave.” “Leave. For Christ’s sake leave.”

The next day she borrowed a gun from a stunt man and drove out to the highway and shot at road signs.

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.

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.

“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.