Play It as It Lays

6

ON THE TENTH DAY OF OCTOBER at quarter past four in the afternoon with a dry hot wind blowing through the passes Maria found herself in Baker. She had never meant to go as far as Baker, had started out that day as every day, her only destination the freeway. But she had driven out the San Bernardino and up the Barstow and instead of turning back at Barstow (she had been out that far before but never that late in the day, it was past time to navigate back, she was Out too far too late, the rhythm was lost) she kept driving. When she turned off at Baker it was 115° and she was picking up Vegas on the radio and she was within sixty miles of where Carter was making the picture. He could be in the motel right now. They could be through shooting for the day and he could be having a drink with BZ and Helene, thinking about going into Vegas for dinner or just resting, resting on the unmade bed with his shirt off. The woman who ran the motel only made the beds once a week, Carter had made a joke about it in an interview, Maria had read it in the trades. She could call. "Listen," she could say. "I'm in Baker. I just happen to be in Baker."

'So you just happen to be in Baker," he could say.

"Get on up here."

Or he could even say: "Listen. Get up here quick."

Those were things he could say but because she did not know if he would say them or even if she wanted to hear them she just sat in the car behind the 76 station in Baker and studied the pay phone by the Coke machine. Whatever he began by saying he would end by saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion. "Oh Christ," he would say. "I felt good today, really good for a change, you fixed that, you really pricked the balloon."

"How did I fix that."

"You know how."

"I don't know how."

She would wait for him to answer but he would say nothing then, would just sit with his head in his hands. She would feel first guilty, resigned to misery, then furious, trapped, white with anger. " Listen to

me," she would say then, almost shouting, trying to take him by the shoulders and shake him out of what she could not see as other than an elaborate pose; he would knock her away, and the look on his face, contorted, teeth bared, would render her paralyzed. 'Why don't you just get it over with,' he would say then, leaning close, his face still contorted. 'Why don't you just go in that bathroom and take every pill in it. Why don't you die."

After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open,

picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor. Always when he came back he would sleep in their room, shutting the door against her. Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave.

Each believed the other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.

She did not know what she was doing in Baker. However it began it ended like that.

"Listen,' she would say.

"Don't touch me," he would say.

Maria looked at the pay phone for a long while, and then she got out of the car and drank a warm Coke. With the last of the Coke she swallowed two Fiorinal tablets, then closed her eyes against the sun and waited for the Fiorinal to clear her head of Carter and what Carter would say. On the way back into the city the traffic was heavy and the hot wind blew sand through the windows and the radio got on her nerves and after that Maria did not go back to the freeway except as a way of getting somewhere.