"Where you living now."
"Off Coldwater, same place. O.K.? Promise?"
"I'll think about it."
"Please. Promise."
He ignored her, and handed Maria a mirror. "You want to use a drier, Maria honey?"
But Maria only shook her head and took the fifteen dollars from her bag and walked very fast toward the dressing room.
"Maybe I can get Sandy to come up." Even from the dressing room Maria could hear the girl wheedling, the thin beautiful girl with the pelvic abscess and the separate maintenance and her hair all done and nobody to drink with. She fixed her attention on the mounds of used wrappers and damp towels and tried not to hear whatever it was the girl would say next. The girl was a presentiment of something. " Listen," the girl said then. "Maybe I can get Bibi Markel."
46
SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time,
their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness
around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.
47
"YOU'RE LYING IN WATER," the hypnotist said. "You're lying in water and it's warm and you hear your mother's voice."
"No," Maria said. "I don't."
The hypnotist stood up. He always seemed cold and he was always sipping Pernod and water and his house was dusty and cluttered with torn newspaper clippings and stained file folders.
"What do you hear," he said finally. "What do you hear and see in your mind right now. What are you doing."
"I'm driving over here," Maria said. "I'm driving Sunset and I'm staying in the left lane because I can see the New Havana Ballroom and I'm going to turn left at the New Havana Ballroom. That's what I'm doing."
48
THERE WAS AT FIRST that spring an occasional faggot who would take her to parties. Never a famous faggot, never one of those committed months in advance to escorting the estranged wives of important directors, but a third-string faggot. At first she was even considered a modest asset by several of them: they liked her not only because she would listen to late-night monologues about how suicidal they felt but because the years she spent modeling had versed her in precisely the marginal distinctions which preoccupied them. She understood, for example, about shoes, and could always distinguish among the right bracelet and the amusing impersonation of the right bracelet and the bracelet that was merely a witless copy. Still, there remained some fatal lack of conviction in her performance, some instant of flushed inattention that would provoke them finally to a defensive condescension.
Eventually they would raise their eyebrows helplessly at one another when they were with her, and be oversolicitous. "Darling,"
they would say, "have another drink." And she would. She was drinking a good deal in the evenings now because when she drank she did not dream. "This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen," a loudspeaker kept repeating in her dreams now, and she would be checking off names as the children filed past her, the little children in the green antechamber, she would be collecting their
lockets and baby rings in a fine mesh basket. Her instructions were to whisper a few comforting words to those children who cried or held back, because this was a humane operation.
49
"LEONARD'S IN NEW YORK for ten days," Helene said as soon as Maria had hung up the telephone. "Did I tell you?"
"Three times," Maria said. Leonard was Helene's hairdresser.
"I don't mind if I'm out of town, but if I'm in town and Leonard's not—who was that on the telephone?"
"Somebody's leg man."
"What do you mean, somebody's? Whose?"
"Some columnist in the trades. I don't know."
"What did he want?"
"He wanted to know if I was dating anyone in particular. He also wanted to know what I thought of Carter's dating Susannah Wood."
Helene shrugged. "You knew that."
"I mean the word dating? Doesn't it strike you funny?"
“Not particularly." Helene was studying her hair line in a small mirror. "If I'm in town, and Leonard's not, I feel almost. . frightened."
Maria said nothing.
"I don't suppose you understand that."
Maria watched the tears welling in Helene's eyes.
"Don't, Helene," she said finally. "Don't be depressed."
"lt’s shit," Helene said. "It's all shit.'
50
EVERYTHING MARIA could think to do in the town she had already done. She had checked into the motel, she had eaten a crab at the marina. At three in the afternoon she had been the only customer in the marina restaurant and it had been a dispiriting thirty or forty minutes, sliced beets staining the crab legs and a couple of waitresses arguing listlessly and a piped medley from Showboat. After that she had walked on the gravelly sand and she had driven aimlessly to Port Hueneme and back to Oxnard and now she sat on a bench in the downtown plaza, watching some boys in ragged Levi jackets and dark goggles who sat on the grass near her car. Their Harleys were pulled up to the curb and they seemed to be passing a joint with furtive daring and every now and then they would look over at her and laugh. Because there was an oil fire somewhere to the north a yellow haze hung over the town, a stillness over the plaza. On the next bench an old man coughed soundlessly, spit phlegm that seemed to hang in the heavy air. A woman in a nurse's uniform wheeled a bundled neuter figure silently past the hedges of dead camellias. Maria closed her eyes and imagined the woman coming toward her with a hypodermic needle.
When she opened her eyes again the boys in the Levi jackets seemed to be rifling the glove compartments of parked cars. To hear the sound of her own footsteps Maria stood up and walked to the pay phone by the public toilet and asked the operator to try the number in Los Angeles again.
She would tell him she could not wait.
She would tell him she was sitting in a park watching some hoods rifling cars and she could not wait.
Maybe she would not feel this way if she talked to him, maybe he would make her laugh. Maybe she would hear his voice and the silence would break, the woman in the nurse's uniform would speak to her charge and the boys would get on their Harleys and roar off.
But when the operator got the studio a voice said only that Mr.
Goodwin could not be reached.
When she hung up the phone the silence was absolute. The boys in the Levi jackets were all watching
her now, because they were standing around her car, they knew it was her car, they had watched her lock it.
They were trying various keys. They were watching to see what she would do. As if in slowed motion she