For the rest of the time Maria was in Las Vegas she wore dark glasses. She did not decide to stay in Vegas : she only fealed to leave. She spoke to no one. She did not gamble. She neither swam not lay in the sun. She was there on somme business but she could not seem to put her finger on what that business was. All day, most of every night, she walked and drove. Two or three times a day she walked in and out of all the hotels on the Strip and several downtown. She began to crave the physical flash of walking in and out of places, the temperature shock, the hot wind blowing outside, the heavy frigid air inside. She thought about nothing. Her mind was a blank tape, imprinted daily with snatches of things overheard, fragments of dealers’ patter, the beginnings of jokes and odd lines of song lyrics. When she finally lay down nights in the purple room she would play back the day’s tape, a girl singing into a microphone and a fat man dropping a glass, cards fanned on a table and a dealer’s rake in closeup and a woman in slacks crying and the opaque blue eyes of the guard at some baccarat table. A child in the harsh light of a crosswalk on the Strip. A sign on Fremont Sreet. A light blinking. In her half sleep the point was ten, the jackpoint was on eighteen, the only man that could ever reach her was the son of a preacher man, someone was down sixty, someone was up, Daddy wants a popper and she rode a painted pony let the spinning wheel spin.
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, chapter 65
