Play It as It Lays

12

LATE THAT NIGHT sitting alone in the dark by the pool she remembered whose house it had been out off San Vicente with the Japanese food, it had been the house of a couple named Sidney and Ruth Loomis. Sidney Loomis was a television writer and Ruth Loomis was very active in the civil-rights movement and group therapy. Maria had never been able to think of anything to say to Ruth Loomis, but in retrospect that was not why Carter had stopped seeing Sidney and Ruth Loomis. He had stopped seeing them because the show Sidney Loomis was writing had been canceled in midseason and he did not pick up another. Maria tried very hard to keep thinking of Carter in this light, Carter as a dropper of friends and names and obligations, because if she thought of Carter as he was tonight she would begin to cry again. He had left the house. He had neither met Freddy Chaikin at Chasen's nor called to say that he was not coming. She knew that because Freddy Chaikin had called for him. She had at last done something that reached him, but now it was too late. “What am I supposed to do," he had said before he left the house. "What in fuck am I supposed to do?"