Play It As It Lays: A Novel (FSG Classics)

by Joan Didion

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

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.

The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tujunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquillity.

But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate’s own manifold histories, certain that BZ and Larry Kulik and all their kind recognized her in a way that Les Goodwin might not want to, recognized her, knew her, had her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea.

“Don’t,” he would say then. “Don’t.” “Why do you say those things. Why do you fight.” He would sit on the bed and put his head in his hands. “To find out if you’re alive.”

“You’re still playing.” BZ did not take his eyes from hers. “Some day you’ll wake up and you just won’t feel like playing any more.”