Play It as It Lays

18

"MONDAY," the voice on the telephone said. "Monday at five o'clock. We'll be in touch again on Monday."

'Where," she said. "Where do I go."

"I said we'll be in touch, Maria. We will."

She drove to the beach, but there was oil scum on the sand and a red tide in the flaccid surf and mounds of kelp at the waterline. The kelp hummed with flies. The water lapped warm, forceless. When she got back into town she drove aimlessly down Sunset, pulled into a drive-in at the comer of La Brea, and, briefly flushed into purposefulness by a Coca-Cola, walked barefoot across the hot asphalt to a telephone booth.

"This is Maria," she said helplessly when Felicia Goodwin picked up the telephone in New York. She did not know why but she had not counted on talking to Felicia. "I just wondered when you were coming back.'

"We've been trying to get you for days." Felicia always spoke on the telephone as if a spurious urgency could mask her radical lack of interest in talking to anyone. Sometimes Maria was depressed by how much she and Felicia had in common. "Les was worried something had happened to you, I said no, she's on the desert with Carter-didn't you call the service?"

"Not exactly."

"Anyway we'll be out in a few days, this time to stay, we're going to buy a house—” Felicia's voice

faded, as if she had stretched her capacity for communication to its limit.

"Les finished the script?"

"I'll get him," Felicia said with relief.

"Never mind," Maria said, but it was too late.

"Where've you been," he said.

"Nowhere." When she heard his voice she felt a rush of well-being.

"I didn't want to call because—"

"I can't hear you, Maria, where are you?"

"In a phone booth. I just wanted—"

"You all right?"

"No. I mean yes." A bus was shifting gears on Sunset and she raised her voice. "Listen. Call me."

She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to a supermarket.

The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing. She did not know why she had told Les Goodwin to call her.