"Not exactly."
"Anyway we'll be out in a few days, this time to stay, we're going to buy a house—” Felicia's voice
faded, as if she had stretched her capacity for communication to its limit.
"Les finished the script?"
"I'll get him," Felicia said with relief.
"Never mind," Maria said, but it was too late.
"Where've you been," he said.
"Nowhere." When she heard his voice she felt a rush of well-being.
"I didn't want to call because—"
"I can't hear you, Maria, where are you?"
"In a phone booth. I just wanted—"
"You all right?"
"No. I mean yes." A bus was shifting gears on Sunset and she raised her voice. "Listen. Call me."
She walked back to the car and sat for a long while in the parking lot, idling the engine and watching a woman in a muumuu walk out of the Carolina Pines Motel and cross the street to a supermarket.
The woman walked in small mincing steps and kept raising her hand to shield her eyes from the vacant sunlight. As if in trance Maria watched the woman, for it seemed to her then that she was watching the dead still center of the world, the quintessential intersection of nothing. She did not know why she had told Les Goodwin to call her.
19
"YOU WANT IT IN CASH," the teller said doubtfully.
"I'm taking a trip." She did not know why she was saying this but she kept on. "Mexico City, Guadalajara."
"You don't want traveler's checks?"
'Cash," she said, and when the teller handed her the bills she ran from the bank with them still in her hand.
In the car she counted the stiff bills. They stuck together and she missed one and she counted them four more times before she was certain she had them all. Since early morning she had been trying to remember something Les Goodwin had said to her, anything Les Goodwin had said to her. When she was not actually talking to him now she found it hard to keep him distinct from everyone else, everyone with whom she had ever slept or almost slept or refused to sleep or wanted to sleep. It had seemed this past month as if they were all one, that her life had been a single sexual encounter, one dreamed fuck, no beginnings or endings, no point beyond itself. She tried to remember how it had been to drag Fremont Street in Vegas with Earl Lee Atkins when she was sixteen years old, how it had been to go out on the desert between Vegas and Boulder and drink beer from half-quart cans and feel her sunburn when he touched her and smell the chlorine from her own hair and the Lava soap from his and the sweet sharp smell of starched cotton soaked with sweat. How High the Moon, the radio would play, Les Paul and Mary Ford. She tried to remember Ivan Costello, tried to fix in her mind the exact way the light came through the shutters in his bedroom in New York, the exact colors of the striped sheets she had put on his bed and the way those sheets looked in the morning and the look of a motel room in which they had once spent a week in Maryland. She tried to remember Carter. She tried to remember Les Goodwin. She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the drearn had ended and she had slept on.
20
"NOTHING'S WRONG," she repeated to Les Goodwin on the telephone.
"I know something's wrong."
"Nothing."
"O.K.," he said finally. "All right. I'm coming out alone on Monday, meet my plane at four."
"I can't."
"I want to talk to you, Maria. I want to see you,"
"Monday night," she said. "Listen. You make me happy.”
She hung up very fast then because she did not want to find herself telling him why she could not meet his flight.
21
IN THE DREAM from which she woke when the telephone rang again that night she had the baby, and she and the baby and Kate were living on West Twelfth Street with Ivan Costello. In the dream she did not yet know Carter, but somehow had Carter's daughter and Carter's blessing. In the dream it was all right. She supposed that she had dreamed of Ivan Costello because the telephone was ringing, and he used to call her in the middle of the night. "How much do you want it," he used to say. "Tell me what you'd do to get it from me." The telephone was still ringing and she pulled the cord loose from the jack. She could not remember what she would have done to get it from any of them.
22
"YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CALL before you come," the nurse in charge of Kate's cottage said on Sunday. The nurse had short hair and a faint moustache and Kate clung to her knees and Maria did not like her. "The new medication, new treatment, naturally she's not—"
"What new medication," Maria heard herself saying. "You keep talking about the new medication, I
mean what is it.”
Kate screamed. The nurse looked reproachfully at Maria.
"Methylphenidate hydrochloride."
Maria closed her eyes. "All right. Your point."
"We definitely would have suggested you wait until next week."
"I won't be here next week
"You're going away?"
"Cozumel," Maria said. "Mexico."
On the way to the parking lot she twice invented pretexts to run back, kiss Kate's small fat hands, tell
her to be good. The third time she ran back it was to find the nurse.
"One thing. You know when she wakes up at night and says 'oise, oise,' it means she's. .” Maria faltered. She realized that she expected to die. All along she had expected to die, as surely as she expected that planes would crash if she boarded them in bad spirit, as unquestionably as she believed that loveless marriage ended in cancer of the cervix and equivocal adultery in fatal accidents to children. Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal. "It means she's having a nightmare," she said finally.
The nurse looked at her impassively.
'I mean I don't know if I ever told you that."
“ I'm sure you did," the nurse said.
That night the house crackled with malign electricity. A hot wind came up at midnight and the leaves scraped the screens, a loose storm drain slapped against the roof. Sometime in the night Maria wrote three letters which, before dawn, she tore up and flushed down the toilet. The bits of paper kept floating back into the toilet bowl and by the time she finally got rid of them it was light, and all the daisies in the garden had been snapped by the wind, and the concrete around the swimming pool was littered with fallen palm fronds. At six-thirty that morning she placed a call to Carter at the motel on the desert but Carter had already left for the location. She interpreted that as a sign and did not try to call the location. She would do what he wanted. 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.