Play It as It Lays: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

same. He looked untouched, and she did not.
    "BZ, you’ve planned this to torment me," he was saying now. He stood on the deck, holding a plastic lemon at elaborate arm's-length.
    "You couldn't possibly buy artificial lemon juice, someone left it here, it's a bad joke."
    "All BZ’s friends are purists," Helene murmured without opening her eyes.
    "You're a nasty," BZ said, and laughed. He twisted a silver medallion on his chest so that it flashed in the sun. BZ was perpetually tanned, oiled, gleaming, not the negotiable health-club tan of people like Freddy Chaikin but tanned as evidence of a lifetime spent in season. "Isn't Helene a nasty, Carter? Haven't I got a bitch for a wife? And question number three, who am I impersonating ?"
    "Yourself," Helene suggested.
    "Carter's not listening," the masseur said. "Don't be draggy, Helene, run down the beach and ask Audrey Wise for a couple of lemons. Ask Audrey and Jerry for Bloodys even. I mean we could definitely stand a few giggles."
    Helene opened her eyes. "You know what Jerry gave Audrey for her birthday?"
    "Let me guess." BZ touched a finger to his tongue and held it to the wind. "One perfect white rose."
    "One perfect thousand-dollar bill," Helene said. "Smartass."
    "Maybe she can buy herself a good fuck," BZ said.
    Helene giggled. "Jerry's a good phone."
    "The lemons ," the masseur said.
    Carter threw down the script he was reading and stood up. "I'll get the goddamn lemons," he said. Maria lay perfectly still until she knew that he was beyond the dunes and then she sat up, everything swimming in her vision. Beneath the faded American flag hanging over the sun deck they were arranged in tableau: BZ and the masseur, their bodies gleaming, unlined, as if they had an arrangement with mortality. Helene stood on the edge of the deck, looking down the beach toward Audrey and Jerry Wise's house.
    Helene was not quite so immune to time, there was a certain texture to Helene's thighs, a certain lack of resilience where fabric cut into Helene's flesh. It occurred to Maria that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women. That nervous steel heiress with whom Maria had last met the masseur, something bad had happened to her. She had been shot in the face by her fourteen-year-old son. It had been in the newspapers a few years ago. After the boy killed hismother he shot himself, and was later described by his father as a victim of divorce and drugs. Maria imagined that she had sunstroke. She closed her eyes and concentrated on a prayer she had learned as a child.
    "That's one less for lunch," Helene said.
    'I seem to have come in after the main titles," the masseur said petulantly. 'Is he going to get the lemons or isn't he?"
    "Faggots make Carter nervous," Helene said pleasantly.
    BZ laughed and blew Helene a kiss off his fingertips. "Actually, Nelson," he said then, "that lemon is not artificial. That lemon is re con stituted."
    Maria stood up and grabbed a beach towel from the deck and ran into the house with the towel clutched to her mouth and a few minutes later when, pale under her sunburn and covered with cold sweat, she stopped the dry heaves and pulled off her bathing suit she saw that for the fifty-first day she was not bleeding.

11
    “I WASN'T JUST CRAZY about your asking Helene how much money BEs mother gives them
    to stay married,” Carter said on the way back in from the beach.
    The top was down and Carter was driving too fast because he had to meet Freddy Chaikin and a writer from New York at Chasen's at seven o'clock. 'I wasn't just crazy about that at all.”
    "Well, she does."
    "Does what."
    "Carlotta gives them money to stay married.
    'So what."
    "I'm sick of everybody's sick arrangements."
    'You've got a fantastic vocabulary.”
    She looked at him and she spoke very fast and low.
    "I've got a fantastic vocabulary and I'm having a baby."
    Carter slowed the car down. 'I missed a transition,' he said finally.
    Maria did not look at him.
    "It’s