"Looks like we missed him," the young agent said. He did not turn the motor off.
"How do you mean, we missed him."
"I mean I guess he's already left for lunch." The agent looked uncomfortably past Maria. "Actually it wasn't two hundred percent confirmed, he told Freddy he might be tied up with the girl they're looking at for the lead."
Maria pushed her hair back and watched the agent avoid her eyes. "What exactly did they want me for," she said finally.
"The high-school teacher, Freddy must've told you that. You read the script, that's the part, the lead's just any teeny fluff. I mean the teacher, she. . she carries the picture."
"The teacher," Maria said. "Who plays the Angel Mama?"
"His girlfriend."
"I have to go now," Maria said, and without waiting for him to speak she turned and began walking toward the gate. Once in her car she drove as far as Romaine and then pulled over, put her head on the steering wheel and cried as she had not cried since she was a child, cried out loud. She cried because she was humiliated and she cried for her mother and she cried for Kate and she cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born.
55
"I WANT TO TELL you right now I'm never going to do anything again," Ivan Costello had said in the beginning. "If you want to live that way, O.K. There's not going to be any money and there's not going to be any eating breakfast together and there's not going to be any getting married and there's not going to be any baby makes three. And if you make any money, I'll spend it."
She had said she wanted to live that way.
"What if I did," she had said a long time later.
"Did what."
"Got pregnant. Then at least I'd have a baby."
"No you wouldn't," he had said.
56
"MAYBE NEXT TIME," the hypnotist said. "Next week."
"I'm not coming next week." Maria did not look at him. "I can't come any more."
The hypnotist watched her as she opened her bag, found her car keys, dropped them beneath a sofa cushion and groped for them.
The room was overheated but he was wearing two faded cardigan sweaters and standing over a furnace vent.
"It doesn't prove anything, you know," he said.
“What doesn't."
"That you couldn't open enough doors to get back. Your failure.
It doesn't prove anything at all."
"I have to leave."
He shrugged. As she stood up he was pouring water into a cheese glass coated with Pernod, swirling the mixture into a rnilky fluid.
"Some people resist," he said. "Some people don't want to know."
Maria drove down to the New Havana Ballroom on Sunset and, trembling, made a telephone call.
"I need help," she said. "Ivan, I need help bad."
57
"WHO'S YOUR FRIEND," Ivan Costello said.
"Who loves you.”
It was five o'clock in Los Angeles and eight in New York and he was drunk. She should have known better than to call him. She did not even like him. She could not bring herself to give the answer he expected, could not pick up the old litany, could not say you do.
"I don't know," she said.
“What's the matter with you."
"I just wanted to talk to you."
"You just wanted. ." He paused, and she knew that he was turning on her. "To talk to me."
She said nothing. The bar in the New Havana was empty and smelled of disinfectant and the bartender was watching her distrustfully.
"You mean you want to talk to me direct, you don't want me to make an appointment? Go through your agent?"
"All right. I get it."
"You're feel ing good enough to talk to me? You aren't sick?
You aren't asleep? You aren't out of town?
You aren't just fucking una vail able?"
"Ivan—"
" ‘lvan’ shit."
"All right," she said. "O.K."
"You want to know what I think of your life?"
"No," she said, but he was already spitting into the telephone.
In the morning he left four messages on the service and Maria returned none of them. She did call Larry Kulik.
58
MARIA SAT ON A COUCH in the ladies' room of the Flamingo with the attendant and a Cuban who was killing the hour between her ten o'clock and midnight dates and she knew that she could not go back out to the crap tables.
"Like a cemetery," the Cuban said.
The attendant shrugged. "Every place the same."
"Not the Sands, I could hardly get through the Sands tonight."
"So do business at the Sands."
"Fucking negrita," the Cuban said without rancor, and looked at Maria appraisingly. "You sick? You need something?"
"I'm all right," Maria said. "Thank you."
She could not go back to the tables because Benny Austin was out there. Somehow she had never expected to see Benny Austin again: in her mind he was always in her father's pickup, or standing with her mother and father on the tarmac at McCarran waving at the wrong window. There was something wrong with running into Benny Austin in the Flamingo. "Maria?" he had called when he saw her. "Maria? That you?" He was shorter than she remembered him, shorter and more frail, almost bald, a failed man wearing a lariat tie clasp. "Jesus if you aren't the picture of Francine," he kept saying.
"Jesus but you're her daughter." He had asked her if she was married. He had shrugged and said that the course of true love never was a straight flush. He had ordered Cuba Libres for the two of them and he had talked about as it was and finally she had run.
He would be waiting there still, trying to run up a stake for her with the chips she had left, that was like Benny, he would play her chips until they were gone and then he would play his own for her, waiting, holding the Cuba Libre until the ice was gone. Benny would wait there all night. Benny would lay anybody in the Flamingo five-to-one that Harry and Francine Wyeth's daughter would not run out on him, and five-to-one were the best odds Benny would lay on the sun rising.
When Maria heard herself being paged she asked the Cuban for a match and gave no sign that she was Maria Wyeth. Maybe it was Benny paging her but having people paged was not much Benny's style, more likely it was Larry Kulik. She smoked a cigarette and tried not to think about Benny hearing her name and looking around, adjusting his tie clasp and holding his bets, wondering who was calling Harry and Francine's girl, waiting for her to reappear and introduce her friend, make it an evening. After Maria had finished the cigarette she took a back elevator up to Larry Kulik's suite.
59
"TELL HIM TO COME up," Larry Kulik said, handing her a drink while she waited for the operator to page Benny Austin. In the other room there were some of Larry Kulik's well-manicured friends and a couple of girls, one of them the Cuban she had seen in the ladies'room. The Cuban had given her no sign of recognition.