Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

no matter what happened she remembered her body)

It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.

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

quite often the pain is worse when we think about it,

“I am just very very very tired of listening to you all.”

It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days.

She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart.

she was the only one left who remembered it. Maria followed this thought for as far as it would go, which was not very far, and then she got up and opened the door.

She did not much like him but she liked his not knowing her.

She was there on some business but she could not seem to put her finger on what that business was.

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.

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 face, elevators like coffins dropped into the bowels of the earth itself.

“You can’t call this a bad place,” the woman who ran the coffee shop told Maria. The fan was broken and the door open and the woman swatted listlessly at flies. “I’ve lived in worse.”

“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.”

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.

“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.”

I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.