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

She would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again.

23
    SHE TRIED TO STRAIGHTEN a drawer, and abandoned it. She heard fire reports on the radio, and turned the sprinklers on the ivy. For almost two hours she studied an old issue of Vogue she picked up in the poorhouse, her attention fixed particularly on the details of the life led in New York and Rome by the wife of an Italian industrialist. The Italian seemed to find a great deal of purpose in her life, seemed to make decisions and stick by them, and Maria studied the photographs as if a key might be found among them.
    When she had exhausted the copy of Vogue she got out her checkbook and a stack of bills and spread them on the kitchen table.
    Paying bills sometimes lent her the illusion of order but now each bill she opened seemed fresh testimony to her life's disorder, its waste and diffusion: flowers sent to people whom she had failed to thank for parties, sheets bought for beds in which no one now slept, an old bill from F.A.O. Schwarz for a tricycle Kate had never ridden.
    When she wrote out the check to Schwarz her hand trembled so hard that she had to void the first check, and smoke a cigarette before she could write another.
    "Get it right, Maria," the voice on the telephone said. "You got a pencil there? You writing this down?"
    "Yes," Maria said.
    "Ventura Freeway north, you got that all right? You know what exit?"
    "I wrote it down."
    "All set, then. I'll meet you in the parking lot of the Thriftimart."
    "What Thriftimart," Maria whispered.
    "Maria, I told you, you can't miss it. Under the big red T."
    In the aftermath of the wind the air was dry, burning, so clear that she could see the ploughed furrows
    of firebreaks on distant mountains. Not even the highest palms moved. The stillness and clarity of the air seemed to rob everything of its perspective, seemed to alter all perception of depth, and Maria drove as carefully as if she were reconnoitering an atmosphere without gravity. Taco Bells jumped out at her. Oil rockers creaked ominously. For miles before she reached the Thriftimart she could see the big red T, a forty-foot cutout letter which seemed peculiarly illuminated against the harsh unclouded light of the afternoon sky.

24
    “YOU DRIVE," the man had said. "We'll pick up my car after."
    He was wearing white duck pants and a white sport shirt and he had a moon f ace and a eunuch's soft body. The hand resting on his knee was pale and freckled and boneless and ever since he got in the car he had been humming I Get a Kick Out of You.
    'You familiar with this area, Maria?"
    The question seemed obscurely freighted. "No," Maria said finally.
    "Nice homes here. Nice for kids." The voice was bland, ingratiating, the voice on the telephone. "Let me ask you one question, all right?"
    Maria nodded, and tightened her grip on the steering wheel.
    "Get pretty good mileage on this? Or no?"
    "Pretty good," she heard herself saying after only the slightest pause. "Not too bad."
    "You may have noticed, I drive a Cadillac. Eldorado. Eats gas but I like it, like the feel of it."
    Maria said nothing. That, then, had actually been the question.
    She had not misunderstood.
    "If I decided to get rid of the Cad," he said, "I might pick myself up a little Camaro. Maybe that sounds like a step down, a Cad to a Camaro, but I've got my eye on this par tic ular Camaro, exact model of the pace car in the Indianapolis 500."
    "You think you'll buy a Camaro," Maria said in the neutral tone of a therapist.
    "Get the right price, I just might. I got a friend, he can write me a sweet deal if it's on the floor much longer. They almost had a buyer last week but lucky for me—here, Maria, right here, pull into this driveway."
    Maria turned off the ignition and looked at the man in the white duck pants with an intense and grateful interest. In the past few minutes he had significantly altered her perception of reality: she saw now that she was not a woman