Play It as It Lays

60

AT A PARTY IN MAY she left not with the choreographer who had brought her but with an actor she had never before met.

They had danced together and shared a joint in the garden and he told her that they would leave and go up to his house. He had some friends there. Maria was wearing the silver vinyl dress she had bought to make her feel better and her hair was loose and her feet were bare and driving up through the canyon in the actor's Ferrari she felt good for the first time in a long while. The actor had a tape in the car that played Midnight Hour over and over again and when they got to his house he introduced her to the eight or ten people in the living room as Myra. "This is Myra," he said. "I just found her some place." Four or five joints were being passed in the living room and she smoked one and then went to find a Coca-Cola. In the kitchen she danced by herself and felt a little dizzy but still good.

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

"Let's fuck," the actor said from the doorway.

"You mean right here."

"Not here, in the bed." He seemed annoyed.

She shook her head.

"Then do it here," he said. "Do it with the Coke bottle."

When they finally did it they were on the bed and at the moment before he came he reached under the pillow and pulled out an amyl nitrite popper and broke it under his nose, breathed in rapidly, and closed his eyes.

"Don't move," he said. "I said don't move."

Maria did not move.

"Terrific," he said then. His eyes were still closed.

Maria said nothing.

"Wake me up in three hours," he said. "With your tongue."

After he had gone to sleep she got dressed very quietly and walked out of the house. She was in the driveway before she remembered that she had no car. The keys were in his Ferrari and she took it, hesitating when she came out to the main canyon road, turning then not toward Beverly Hills but toward the Valley, and the freeway. It was dawn before she reached Vegas and, because she stopped in Vegas to buy cigarettes, eight o'clock before she reached Tonopah. She was not sure what she had meant to do in Tonopah.

There was something about seeing her mother's and father's graves, but her mother and father were not buried in Tonopah. They were buried in Silver Wells, or what had been Silver Wells. In any case she was stopped for speeding outside Tonopah and when the highway patrolman saw the silver dress and the bare feet and the Ferrari registered to someone else, he checked California to see if the car had been reported stolen, and it had.