Play It as It Lays

11

“I WASN'T JUST CRAZY about your asking Helene how much money BEs mother gives them

to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach.

The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen's at seven o'clock. 'I wasn't just crazy about that at all.”

"Well, she does."

"Does what."

"Carlotta gives them money to stay married.

'So what."

"I'm sick of everybody's sick arrangements."

'You've got a fantastic vocabulary.”

She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.

"I've got a fantastic vocabulary and I'm having a baby."

Carter slowed the car down. 'I missed a transition,' he said finally.

Maria did not look at him.

"It’s not mine," he said, his voice raised. "I suppose you're going to tell me it's not mine."

"I don't know."

She did not know why she had said it but she had to. She had to get it straight. For a moment Carter said nothing.

"You don't fucking know," he said then.

She put her bare feet on the dashboard and pressed her face against her knees. Now it was a fact. He could stay or he could leave, she had set forth the fact.

'Who was it," he said.

"You know."

He kept his eyes on the highway and his foot hard on the accelerator. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, but saying she was sorry did not seem entirely adequate, and in any case what she was sorry about seemed at once too deep and too evanescent for any words she knew, seemed so vastly more complicated than the immediate fact that it was perhaps better left unraveled. The late sun glazed the Pacific. The wind burned on her face. Once they were off the Coast Highway he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car.

"I know," he said. "But Felicia doesn't."

She said nothing. It was going to be bad.

"What makes you so sure, " he said then.

"I didn't say I was sure." The air seemed suddenly still and close and she pulled off her scarf. "I said I didn't know."

"I mean what makes you so sure it's happening."

"Because I went to this doctor.” She spoke very fast and kept her mind on something else. It seemed to her that they had once been to dinner at somebody's house who lived off San Vicente around here, she could not remember whose house it had been but there had been Japanese food and women with long handcrafted earrings and it had been summer. "Because I went to this doctor and the test he did in his office was positive but that’s not an absolutely certain test so he had me bring in some urine for a rabbit test. And he gave me this shot. And if I really wasn't the shot would make me bleed in three to five days." She paused. 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.

"And it was six days ago I had the shot."

"What about the test."

"What test?"

"The test you were talking about. The second test."

"The rabbit test." She was suddenly almost too exhausted to speak. 'I just never called back about

it."

"You were afraid to call back about it." He was speaking in a careful monotone, a prosecutor with an open-and-shut case. "You thought if you didn’t call back it would just go away."

She closed her eyes. "I guess so. I guess that's right."

"But now it's certain anyway. Otherwise the shot would have made you bleed."

She nodded mutely.

"What doctor. Who was the doctor."

"Just a doctor. On Wilshire."

"A doctor you didn't know. You thought that was smart."

She said nothing.

"I'm interested in the mechanics of this, Maria. I'm interested in how your mind works. How exactly you picked this doctor out, why this particular doctor."

Maria folded her scarf and smoothed it carefully over her bare knees. "He was near Saks," she whispered finally. "I was having my hair done at Saks."