36
"THERE'S SOME PRINCIPLE I'm not grasping, Maria,"
Carter said on the telephone from New York. "You've got a $1,500-a-month house sitting empty in Beverly Hills, and you're living in a furnished apartment on Fountain Avenue. You want to be closer to Schwab's? Is that it?"
Maria lay on the bed watching a television news film of a house about to slide into the Tujunga Wash. "I'm not living here, I'm just staying here."
"I still don't get the joke."
She kept her eyes on the screen. "Then don't get it," she said at the exact instant the house splintered and fell.
After Carter had hung up Maria wrapped her robe close and smoked part of a joint and watched an interview with the woman whose house it had been. "You boys did a really outstanding camera job," the woman said. Maria finished the cigarette and repeated the compliment out loud. The day's slide and flood news was followed by a report of a small earth trernor centered near Joshua Tree, 4.2
on the Richter Scale, and, of corollary interest, an interview with a Pentecostal minister who had received prophecy that eight million people would perish by earthquake on a Friday afternoon in March.
The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tujunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquillity. Within these four rented walls she was safe.
She was more than safe, she was all right: she had seen herself on Interstate 80 just before the news and she looked all right. Warm, content, suffused with tentative small resolves, Maria fell asleep before the news was over.
But the next morning when the shower seemed slow to drain she threw up in the toilet, and after she had stopped trembling packed the few things she had brought to Fountain Avenue and, in the driving rain, drove back to the house in Beverly Hills. There would be plumbing anywhere she went.
37
"I'M GOING TO DO IT," she would say on the telephone.
"Then do it," Carter would say. "It's better."
"You think it's better."
"If it's what you want."
"What do you want."
"It's never been right," he would say. "It's been shit."
"I'm sorry."
"I know you're sorry. I'm sorry."
"We could try," one or the other would say after a while.
"We've already tried," the other would say.
By the time Carter came back to town in February the dialogue was drained of energy, the marriage lanced.
"I've got a new lawyer," she told him. "You can use Steiner."
"I'll call him today."
"I'll need a witness."
"Helene," he said. "Helene can do it." He seemed relieved that the dialogue had worn itself down to legal details, satisfied that he could offer Helene. He would be staying in BZ and Helene's guest house while they were looping and scoring the picture. He would speak to Helene immediately. Maria felt herself a sleepwalker to the courthouse.
"Let's see. . an afternoon hearing." Helene spaced the words as if she were consulting an engagement book. "That means lunch before instead of after."
"We don't have to have lunch."
"Day of days, Maria. Of course lunch."
On the day of the hearing Maria overslept, thick with Seconal.
When she walked into the Bistro half an hour late for lunch she could only think dimly how healthy Helene looked, how suntanned and somehow invincible with her silk shirt and tinted glasses and long streaked hair and a new square emerald that covered one of her fingers to the knuckle.
"Straighten your shoulders," Helene said,]if ting her drink slightly as Maria sat down. "You look spectral. We should go to the Springs together." Helene's eyes were not on Maria but on two women who sat across the room. "Allene Walsh has a new friend," she murmured to Maria as she smiled at the older of the two women.
"They've been spooning food into each other's mouths for the past half hour."
“She's an actress named Sharon Carroll, I worked with her once."
Maria tried to summon up some other detail to assuage Helene's avid interest in other people. "She kept a dildo in her dressing room."
"Allene Walsh has more dildoes around her house than anybody I ever knew. Look at my new ring."
"I saw it."
"From Carlotta." Helene studied the emerald. "For staying on the desert. Speaking of new friends. I mean he was shuttling them in and out of that motel like the dailies, I couldn't even get up for a Nembutal without knocking over somebody's bottle of Monsieur Y."
For an instant Helene's face seemed to lose its animation, and when she spoke again her voice was flat and preoccupied. "You look like hell, Maria, this isn't any excuse for you to f all apart, I mean a divorce. I've done it twice."
"I thought only once."
"Twice," Helene said without interest. "BZ says once because that's what he told his mother." She was intent upon her reflection in the mirror behind the table, tracing a line with one finger from her chin to her temple. "You can really tell," she said finally.
"Tell what?"
"Tell I haven't done my Laszlo in three days." Helene's voice was still flat but her interest seemed revived.
At two o'clock they met Carter and the lawyers outside the courtroom in Santa Monica, and at two-thirty Maria swore and Helene confirmed that the defendant, Carter Lang, had repeatedly struck and in other ways humiliated the plaintiff, Mrs. Maria Lang.
The charge was mental cruelty, uncontested. This Mrs. Maria Lang to whom the lawyers referred seemed to Maria someone other than herself, an aggrieved wife she might see interviewed on television.
As they waited for the details to be cleared up, the papers to be signed, Maria sat very still with her hands in her lap. Helene stirred restlessly beside her, her eyes across the aisle, on Carter and his lawyer. " Carter," Helene whispered finally, leaning across Maria to attract his attention. " Puzzle of the week. Guess which two dykes were seen feeding each other cheese soufflé in the Bistro today."
38
"WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING," Carter said the next time she saw him.
"Working. I'm going to be working very soon."
"I mean who've you been seeing."
“Nobody. Helene. BZ. BZ comes by sometimes."
"Don't get into that," Carter said.
"He's your friend," Maria said.
39
THE FIRST TIME Maria ever met BZ it had been at the beach house and it had been two o'clock on a weekday afternoon and it was the sumner Carter was cutting Angel Beach.
"I've got a meeting at the beach with this guy from San Francisco I told you about," Carter had said. "You come along and swim."
"I don't feel like swimming."
"Maria," Carter had said finally, 'he's going to maybe put up some money. Maybe. All right?"
When they walked into the beach house she thought there must have been some misunderstanding, some mixup of time or day, because the man to whom Carter spoke was sitting alone with a projector in the darkened living room running a blue movie of extraordinary technical quality.
"Stroke of two, very prompt," the man had said, and looked at Maria for a long while before he turned off the projector.