"Did you get by the studio yesterday?" Carter seemed oblivious to the meeting's peculiar circumstance. "They show you the rough cut?"
"Fantastic."
"Did Helene see it?" Carter persisted. "Where's Helene?"
"On the beach."
"I'll get my suit on," Maria said, uneasy in the darkened room, and BZ had looked at her again, then flicked the projector back on.
"It's too cold to swim," he said, and then to Carter: "The rough cut looked fantastic, except you're missing the story."
"Meaning what."
"Meaning," BZ said, "how did Maria feel about the gangbang, the twelve cocks, did she get the sense they're doing it not to her but to each other, does that interest her, you don't get that, you're missing the story."
The reel had run out and the only sound was the film slapping against the projector. "It's a commercial piece, BZ," Carter said finally.
BZ only shrugged, and changed the reel. Again the figures flooded the screen. Wordlessly, BZ sat on a pillow and began watching Maria. He rolled a cigarette and passed it to her, and when she passed it on to Carter he took it without looking away from the screen. Between the marijuana and the figures on the screen Maria felt flushed and not entirely in control.
"Look at the film, BZ," Carter had said suddenly. "Incredible, they've got opticals."
“I've seen the film, Carter," BZ had said, and never took his eyes from Maria.
40
"LET'S GO TO MEXICO CITY
tonight," BZ said.
“Who?"
“You, me, Helene, I don't know, maybe Larry Kulik, just fly down for a couple of days, Susannah Wood's there now doing some interiors at Churubusco."
"I don't want to do that," Maria said.
"Yes you do," BZ said.
41
EVERY NIGHT she named to herself what she must do: she must ask Les Goodwin to come keep her from peril. Calmed, she would f all asleep pretending that even then she lay with him in a house by the sea. The house was like none she had ever seen but she thought of it so often that she knew even where the linens were kept, the plates, knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools. Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in that house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table, and later when the tide ran out they would gather mussels together, Kate and Maria, and still later all three of them would sit down together at the big pine table and Maria would light a kerosene lamp and they would eat the mussels and drink a bottle of cold white wine and after a while it would be time to lie down again, on the clean white sheets. In the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamphght, the opalescent mussel shells.
But by dawn she was always back in the house in Beverly Hills, uneasy in the queer early light, plagued by her own and his own and Kate's own manifold histories, certain that BZ and Larry Kulik and all their kind recognized her in a way that Les Goodwin might not want to, recognized her, knew her, had her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic. Instead of calling Les Goodwin she bought a silver vinyl dress, and tried to stop thinking about what had he done with the baby. The tissue. The living dead thing, whatever you called it.
42
"I'M GOING TO NEW YORK for a few days," she said to Carter. Going to New York had not before occurred to her but in the instant's confusion of running into Carter on the street in Beverly Hills the idea simultaneously materialized and assumed a real plausibility. It was something people did when they did not know what else to do, they went to New York for a few days. "Tomorrow morning," she added.
"What are you going to do in New York?"
"What do people usually do in New York."
He looked at her for a long time. She was aware that her hair was unkempt, her face puffy. She did not meet his eyes.
"They see a few plays," he said finally. 'Maybe you can see a few plays."
"Maybe I can," she said, and walked away.
All that day Maria thought of fetuses in the East River, translucent as jellyfish, floating past the big sewage outfalls with the orange peels. She did not go to New York.
43
ONCE A LONG TIME BEFORE Maria had worked a week in Ocho Rios with a girl who had just had an abortion. She could remember the girl telling her about it while they sat huddled next to a waterfall waiting for the photographer to decide the sun was high enough to shoot. It seemed that it was a hard time for abortions in New York, there had been arrests, no one wanted to do it. Finally the girl, her name was Ceci Delano, had asked a friend in the District Attorney's office if he knew of anyone. "Quid pro quo," he had said, and, late the same day that Ceci Delano testified to a blue-ribbon jury that she had been approached by a party-girl operation, she was admitted to Doctors' Hospital for a legal D & C, arranged and paid for by the District Attorney's office.
It had seemed a funny story as she told it, both that morning by the waterf all and later at dinner, when she repeated it to the photographer and the agency man and the fashion coordinator for the client. Maria tried now to put what had happened in Encino into the same spirited perspective, but Ceci Delano's situation seemed not to apply. In the end it was just a New York story.
44
THE LETTER from the hypnotist was mimeographed, and came to Maria in care of the studio that had released Angel Beach.
"YOUR WORRIES MAY DATE FROM WHEN YOU WERE A BABY," the letter began, and then, after a space, were the words "IN
YOUR MOTHER'S WOMB." Maria read the letter very carefully.
The hypnotist had found that many people could be regressed not only to infancy but to the very instant of their conception. The hypnotist would receive a few interested clients in the privacy of his Silverlake home. With a sense that she was about to confirm a nightmare, Maria telephoned the number he gave.
45
"YOU'VE BEEN BRUSHING IT wet," the hairdresser said, lifting a strand of Maria's hair and letting it drop with distaste.
"I guess so." Maria could never keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers.
"I told you before, you split the ends," he said with no real interest, and then transferred his attention to a thin girl who had just come up and kissed the back of his neck. "How are you, babe."
"I had an operation."
"No kidding."
"Pelvic abscess." The girl loosened her wrapper and absently stroked her collarbone. "All through my tubes."
"Listen, I hear his new act is just lying there," the hairdresser said.
"Bibi Markel was just over there and she heard they were trying to transfer his contract to the lounge."
"Macht nicht to me," the girl said. "Except maybe I'll have to go to court for the separate maintenance." She slipped one big roller away from her scalp and touched the hair to see if it was dry.
"Listen," she said suddenly. "Finish her and then comb me out and come up for a drink on your way home."