Play It as It Lays: A Novel by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

Moon , the radio would play, Les Paul and Mary Ford. She tried to remember Ivan Costello, tried to fix in her mind the exact way the light came through the shutters in his bedroom in New York, the exact colors of the striped sheets she had put on his bed and the way those sheets looked in the morning and the look of a motel room in which they had once spent a week in Maryland. She tried to remember Carter. She tried to remember Les Goodwin. She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the drearn had ended and she had slept on.

20
    "NOTHING'S WRONG," she repeated to Les Goodwin on the telephone.
    "I know something's wrong."
    "Nothing."
    "O.K.," he said finally. "All right. I'm coming out alone on Monday, meet my plane at four."
    "I can't."
    "I want to talk to you, Maria. I want to see you,"
    "Monday night," she said. "Listen. You make me happy.”
    She hung up very fast then because she did not want to find herself telling him why she could not meet his flight.

21
    IN THE DREAM from which she woke when the telephone rang again that night she had the baby, and she and the baby and Kate were living on West Twelfth Street with Ivan Costello. In the dream she did not yet know Carter, but somehow had Carter's daughter and Carter's blessing. In the dream it was all right. She supposed that she had dreamed of Ivan Costello because the telephone was ringing, and he used to call her in the middle of the night. "How much do you want it," he used to say. "Tell me what you'd do to get it from me." The telephone was still ringing and she pulled the cord loose from the jack. She could not remember what she would have done to get it from any of them.

22
    "YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CALL before you come," the nurse in charge of Kate's cottage said on Sunday. The nurse had short hair and a faint moustache and Kate clung to her knees and Maria did not like her. "The new medication, new treatment, naturally she's not—"
    "What new medication," Maria heard herself saying. "You keep talking about the new medication, I
    mean what is it .”
    Kate screamed. The nurse looked reproachfully at Maria.
    "Methylphenidate hydrochloride."
    Maria closed her eyes. "All right. Your point."
    "We definitely would have suggested you wait until next week."
    "I won't be here next week
    "You're going away?"
    "Cozumel," Maria said. "Mexico."
    On the way to the parking lot she twice invented pretexts to run back, kiss Kate's small fat hands, tell
    her to be good. The third time she ran back it was to find the nurse.
    "One thing. You know when she wakes up at night and says 'oise, oise,' it means she's . . .” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. "It means she's having a nightmare," she said finally.
    The nurse looked at her impassively.
    'I mean I don't know if I ever told you that."
    “ I'm sure you did," the nurse said.
    That night the house crackled with malign electricity. A hot wind came up at midnight and the leaves scraped the screens, a loose storm drain slapped against the roof. Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet. The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds. At six-thirty that morning she placed a call to Carter at the motel on the desert but Carter had already left for the location. She interpreted that as a sign and did not try to call the location. She would do what he wanted.