Marion's Wall

by Jack Finney

  People change with experience, we’re told, or ought to, and maybe Marion Marsh changed us; maybe she did. Certainly she was an experience we’re not ever going to forget. And much, much later that night in our bedroom at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I thought for a moment as I walked out of the bathroom that Marion had returned once more—smiling wantonly as she waited in bed, wearing the filmiest negligee I’d ever given Jan. But it wasn’t, it was Jan, wanting to make me think, I’m almost sure, that maybe it was Marion. Trying at least, and not altogether failing, either, to be a little more like her, a little more wild and free. But we don’t really change much. We remain ourselves, and mostly this was Jan, and that was fine with me. After all, and I knew it, I’m not Rodolpho Guglielmi myself.

  We were a little reckless: we didn’t go straight home. We spent a couple days at Disneyland and really did visit Forest Lawn cemetery, though I didn’t find Felix the Cat’s marble mausoleum. Then we drove home, because we were running out of money, and I had the new bathroom to finish.

  Some ten days later a batch of papers arrived from Hollywood, and we filled them out and returned them, signed with our real names, with a note explaining that Marsh and Guglielmi were pseudonyms. So for a while, as long as those damned Huntley Tomato Catsup commercials ran, we got checks for something called residual payments. I bought The Narrow Trail, starring William S. Hart; Nomads of the North, with Betty Blythe; and Captain January, with Baby Peggy. Al got a new plaid wool coat for winter, which he didn’t like and resisted, even though, as I pointed out to him, it had a cute little pocket big enough for a dog-bone biscuit. And Jan bought a couple new pieces of furniture and had the living room redecorated.

  Except for the one wall, of course. That hasn’t changed, and never will as long as we’re in this house. Marion Marsh lived here, it still says in that enormous, free-swinging scrawl of lipsticked letters across it, Read it and weep.

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