Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

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.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

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.

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

Quite often with Carter she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, another frivolous thought.

Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play it through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.

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

It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women.

Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.

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 did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.

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.

A few days later the dreams began. She was in touch with a member of a shadowy Syndicate. Sometimes the contact was Freddy Chaikin, sometimes an F.B.I. man she had met once in New York and not thought of since. Certain phrases remained constant. Always he explained that he was “part of that operation.” Always he wanted to discuss “a business proposition.” Always he mentioned a plan to use the house in Beverly Hills for “purposes which would in no way concern” her. She need only supply certain information: the condition of the plumbing, the precise width of the pipes, the location and size of all the clean-outs. Workmen appeared, rooms were prepared. The man in the white duck pants materialized and then the doctor, in his rubber apron. At that point she would fight for consciousness but she was never able to wake herself before the dream revealed its inexorable intention, before the plumbing stopped up, before they all fled and left her there, gray water bubbling up in every sink. Of course she could not call a plumber, because she had known all along what would be found in the pipes, what hacked pieces of human flesh.

“I don’t want to do that,” Maria said. “Yes you do,” BZ said.

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.

‘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.”

I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.

Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work.

The heat stuck. The air shimmered. An underground nuclear device was detonated where Silver Wells had once been, and Maria got up before dawn to feel the blast. She felt nothing.

I’m giving this one more chance,” Carter said when he saw her sitting by the window. “Tell me what you want.” “Nothing.” “I want to help you. Tell me what you feel.” She looked at the hand he held out to her. “Nothing,” she said. “You say that again and I swear to Christ—” She shrugged. He left the motel. They had three days left on the desert.

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.”

“Listen to that,” he said. “Try to think about having enough left to break a bottle over it.”

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.