She seems to have completely forgotten that only a few moments ago she thought I was an intruder, and chucked a cocktail shaker at me. But years of living with my sister have helped me spot a narcissist at a hundred paces, so I’m not falling down in shock at this.
Nor am I falling down in shock at the very sight of her, in all her platinum-blonde glory, sprawled on my Chesterfield.
Because this exact thing has happened to me before.
Except last time it was Audrey Hepburn.
Oh, and Audrey wasn’t naked. Let’s face it, Audrey would no more have been naked in a stranger’s flat than Adam Rosenfeld would have come home tonight to the sight of me in the Ribbony Elasticky Thing, had it all gone as planned, and had his wicked way with me on his kitchen table.
‘I mean, you’ll never guess my real name, honey,’ Marilyn Monroe is continuing. ‘Go on, I dare you! Try and guess!’
‘Norma Jeane,’ I say, as I shut the front door behind me. ‘Norma Jeane Mortenson.’
Her mouth falls open.
‘But how could you possibly … did you see me in a magazine, or something? That was the name I used back when I was a model …’
‘No, I just … you know what? I need a drink,’ I say. ‘It’s been a strange night already, and it’s only getting more strange. If you could just … er … wait here,’ I add – though I’m not sure why, because it’s not like there’s anywhere else she could go, ‘and I’ll nip down to the off-licence and get a bottle of wine.’
‘Wine?’ Marilyn pulls a face. ‘Oh, no, honey, we don’t need wine. We got cocktails, see?’ She gets to her feet, pulling the fur coat on, properly this time, as she does so, and comes to pick up the cocktail shaker from where it fell, next to me. ‘Gee, I’m glad this thing’s so indestructible,’ she adds, holding it out to show me that the lid is still on. ‘Care for a Manhattan, honey?’
I’m honestly finding it hard to form words to reply, because at such close quarters she’s absolutely stunning. Much shorter than I’d have thought, and more slender, and not as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn, obviously not, but with such a dazzling glow that it looks as if she’s been lit up, by the world’s greatest cinematographer, from within. It’s Marilyn at her peachiest. She can’t be any more than twenty-two or twenty-three; her skin is flawlessly white, her eyes are dazzlingly blue, her hair is softly waved and the colour of a cornfield in July, and her legendary body – at least from the glimpses of it I kept getting before she put the fur coat on properly – is exquisite.
‘I’m … I’m not wild about Manhattans, actually,’ I manage to say.
‘Sure you are! You just never tried mine before!’ She’s setting off for the kitchen, where she opens my one wall-hanging cupboard, and peers inside. ‘Where do you keep your cocktail glasses, honey?’
‘Ah, well, I don’t really have any cocktail glasses.’
She turns to look at me, her blue eyes wide in astonishment. ‘You don’t have any cocktail glasses? But honey, what on earth do you drink out of?’
‘Well, I usually just drink wine, you see … though I don’t even have any proper glasses for that, come to think of it. I break quite a lot of them, so I tend to just drink from a little tumbler.’ I go over to her, inhaling her heady, floral scent even more as I get closer, and reach up past her into the cupboard. ‘These,’ I say, handing over a couple of short glasses. ‘Would they do?’
‘A Manhattan in a lowball glass?’ Marilyn frowns. ‘I never heard of that before … but hey, what the hell?’ She unscrews the cocktail shaker and pours a good slosh of brownish-red liquid into each glass, hands one to me, picks up her own and then chinks it against mine. ‘Bottoms up, roomie!’ she breathes, with a little wriggle of her fur-clad shoulders.
I gaze at her as she closes her eyes, tilts her glass and takes a long drink from it.
‘Sorry … er … did you just say roomie?’
‘Sure! Isn’t that what you are, honey?’ Marilyn opens her eyes. ‘Haven’t the studio paired us up to room together?’
‘Studio? No, no, that’s not what this is …’
‘So you’re not an actress?’ She nods, her mussed-up curls bouncing as she does so. ‘Well, I gotta tell you, honey, that doesn’t come as that much of a surprise.’
‘Hey!’ I’m slightly needled by this. ‘I was an actress, actually. Admittedly, not a very successful one …’
But she isn’t listening.
‘I think we’ll have a swell time rooming together, honey, you and I! Though anyone would be better than the last girl the studio fixed me up with.’ Marilyn rolls her eyes. ‘She didn’t drink, she didn’t dance, she didn’t know any eligible guys … say, you know some eligible guys, right?’ She looks concerned, all of a sudden. ‘I mean, you’re not dressed like that because … well, you prefer girls?’
‘No, I don’t prefer girls.’ I glance down at myself, self-consciously. ‘And what’s wrong with the way I’m dressed?’
She looks at me.
‘Pants, honey?’ she asks. ‘And black ones at that?’
‘They’re chic!’
‘Oh, sugar. Who told you that?’
‘Audrey Hepburn!’
‘Well, I never heard of this Audrey gal,’ Marilyn says, shimmying back towards the sofa again, ‘and I’m sure she’s a sweetheart, but I gotta tell you, honey, she doesn’t know a whole hell of a lot about style. Ooooh,’ she suddenly breathes, as she plops herself back down on the cushions, ‘maybe that could be our first proper act, as roommates. We could give each other, whaddyacallit, makeovers! It’ll be fun! We’ll put on face masks, and paint each other’s nails, and then pick out cute new outfits for each other … or I could pick out a cute new outfit for you, at least … you know, I always wanted to have makeover night with a girlfriend, but for some reason none of them ever wanted to do it with me.’
I don’t point out that this was probably because they didn’t want to spend too long standing in front of a mirror with her next to them. She’s so puppyish with excitement about the prospect of Makeover Night that I don’t want to kill the thing stone dead. More to the point, I don’t know how to tell her that I probably wouldn’t be able to ‘make her over’ even if I tried. I mean, obviously I don’t know for sure, because I never tried this sort of thing with Audrey Hepburn (you don’t makeover Audrey; you just don’t) but these are magical beings we’re talking about.
At least, I think they’re magical.
This is the conclusion I came to, after Audrey Hepburn dropped by to visit me in my flat several times last summer: that there’s something supernatural going on with my Chesterfield sofa. That – even though I’m painfully aware that it sounds certifiably bonkers to say it – my Chesterfield is enchanted.
I did say it sounds certifiably bonkers.
I sit down, rather uncertainly, next to Marilyn now, as she pats the cushion beside her.
‘So, honey, before we start all the face masks and the pampering, we should talk a little! Get to know each other. Shall I tell you about myself first?’
‘Actually, I already—’
‘My real name’s Norma Jeane, like you said. I’m nineteen years old … OK, I’m twenty-three –’ she gives me a little wink – ‘but officially I’m nineteen. Anyhow, I’m from California, amongst other places, and I used to model, and now I’m an actress in the movies. I’m sort of doing fine, but … well, gee, honey, I just want to become a huge movie star!’ She wraps her arms around herself, childish in delight for a moment, almost sloshing red Manhattan all over her white mink. ‘Like Jean Harlow, only bigger! Can you imagine that?’
I don’t know what to reply to this.
Unfortunately she takes my silence for judgement, because she goes on, after an embarrassed little laugh, ‘I know that sounds crazy … but I always figured, you gotta dream big to make it big, right?’
‘It doesn’t sound crazy,’ I say, ‘at all.’
‘You think?’ She lowers her voice, and leans in towards me. ‘Becau
se sometimes I think I want it so badly, I might just bust. Go up in smoke, splattering teeny-tiny pieces of Norma Jeane everywhere!’ She’s solemn, now. Her big blue eyes are wider than ever, like a six-year-old girl’s when she’s telling you something Important and Secret. ‘Did you ever want anything that bad, honey? So much that you thought you might die if you didn’t get it?’
It’s funny – and in a ‘Dr Freud will see you now’ way, not in a ‘ha-ha’ way – that two things pop into my head, simultaneously, when Marilyn Monroe asks me this question. Did I ever want anything so badly that I thought I might die if I didn’t get it? Yes, two things in fact: Dad’s attention and Dillon’s devotion.
Turns out that, in not getting either of these, I haven’t actually died. It’s just felt like it, a little bit, at times.
‘You too, huh?’ Marilyn breathes, reaching out to pat my hand in a sympathetic manner. ‘So what is it you dream of, if it’s not movie stardom? You work at the studio, right? So are you a singer? A dancer?’
‘No, no, God, no. And I don’t work at the studio. I’m a jewellery designer.’
‘Honey! I just adore jewellery!’
‘I know. I named my latest collection after …’ I stop myself, just in time. ‘… er … my mother.’
Which is when I notice: I don’t have my Marilyn earrings.
Dammit. I must have left them on the kitchen floor at Adam’s.
I feel a brief flash of concern that maybe Fritz might end up swallowing them, or something …
I’ll have to text Adam about it before I go to sleep tonight. Which is incredibly annoying, because the one thing I did say to him, while we were all waiting for Bogdan and his hacksaw to turn up, was that I didn’t want to have any communication with him ever again. Still, I feel enough fondness for Fritz to temporarily break that vow. After all, he wasn’t to know his owner was gay. And, even if he did know, it wasn’t as if he could tell me. In German or otherwise.
‘That was sweet of you, honey. I don’t think my mother would even care if I named my first child after her.’
‘Me neither,’ I blurt.
‘But you just said you named your jewellery after her.’ Marilyn looks confused. ‘So don’t you get along with your mother either?’
‘It’s complicated …’ I take a large swig from my glass of Manhattan. And have to prevent myself from spraying the entire mouthful back over her.
Christ, it’s revolting.
‘Isn’t that good?’ Marilyn breathes, with another little wriggle of her shoulders.
‘Mmmm,’ I say, unconvincingly, but she isn’t paying much attention.
‘You know, you and me should swap complicated mother stories one day,’ she says. ‘Now that we’re going to be such good friends. I mean, we are, aren’t we?’
‘We are what?’
‘Going to be good friends? I don’t have a lot of girlfriends, you see.’
I feel a tiny stab of icy sadness for her, right through the middle of my heart, and I shiver. ‘No,’ I say, ‘I know you don’t.’
‘Honey, you’re cold!’ She balances her glass on the Chesterfield’s overstuffed arm and starts to peel off the white fur coat. ‘Take this! I’m roasting in here, anyhow!’
‘No, no!’ I yelp, trying to close the coat back around her for a moment before realizing I can’t actually bring myself to touch dead mink. ‘Honestly, Marilyn, keep it on. I wouldn’t even wear it.’
‘C’mon, honey, it’s real mink.’
‘I know. I don’t wear fur.’
She stares at me, uncomprehending. ‘You don’t?’
‘I don’t.’
‘But honey … why?’
‘Well, not to put a terrible downer on the conversation or anything, but I think it’s incredibly cruel.’
Marilyn looks even more bewildered for a moment, then she leans over and asks, in a low voice, ‘Because you worry that the guy who gave it to you hasn’t given as nice a coat to his wife as well?’
‘No! That’s not why I think it’s cruel!’
‘Oh … then is it some Canadian thing?’
OK, now I’m just plain baffled. ‘I’m not from Canada.’
‘You’re not?’
‘Um, no. I’m not.’
She puts her head on one side. ‘Then why are you talking in that funny accent?’
‘Because I’m British.’
‘You’re British?’ Marilyn gasps, delightedly. ‘Honey, why didn’t you say so? I love British people! Cary Grant, Sir Winston Churchill, oh, and Laurence Olivier! Did you see him in Hamlet? Gee, I adore him! You know, I have these silly daydreams, sometimes, that one day we’ll star in a movie together … and we’ll fall in love, and he’ll lie with his head in my lap and read me Shakespeare poetry …’
‘I wouldn’t,’ I say, hastily, knowing what a disastrous relationship Marilyn had with Olivier, ‘waste too much time daydreaming about that, if I were you.’
‘Oh!’ This time her gasp is dismayed, not delighted. She puts a hand to her cheek, which is turning from alabaster to the faintest pink. ‘I thought you said I didn’t sound crazy, dreaming about becoming a big movie star!’
‘Marilyn, no …’ I feel as if I’ve just accidentally trodden on a fluffy baby bunny rabbit. ‘That’s not what I meant at all! It was a comment about Laurence Olivier, not about you!’
‘Because it’s kind of mean, honey, one minute to seem like you understand, and then the next minute to sound just like everybody else who’s ever told me to stop wasting my time. That I’m not talented enough, pretty enough, good enough …’
‘Trust me, I don’t think you’re any of those things.’ Shit: that came out wrong. ‘What I mean is, I think – no, I know – that you’re absolutely talented enough and pretty enough and good enough.’
She takes a dejected swig from her cocktail glass, draining it dry. ‘How can you possibly know that I’m talented enough?’
OK: we’ve reached a tricky moment.
I never raised this with Audrey Hepburn, but that’s partly because I spent most of the time in Audrey’s company convinced she was the result of a brain tumour, or a nervous breakdown. Now that I’m running with this whole Enchanted Sofa angle, maybe it’s time to ask the apparition before me what she thinks about it all. It’s a thorny etiquette problem, though: working out the correct way to point out to a magical being that she’s, well, magical.
Because let’s be honest, it’s not as if Marilyn seems to realize this in the slightest.
‘The thing is, Marilyn,’ I begin, nervously, ‘I think maybe we should just have a quick chat about why it is you’re really here …’
‘Oh, honey.’ She smiles across the sofa at me, heartbreakingly. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little late in the day to start asking big, smart questions like that? I mean, if you stop and think about it, why are any of us really here?’
‘Yes … um, that’s not quite what I—’
‘Say, can you bring the cocktail shaker over,’ she adds, gesturing towards the kitchen worktop, where she left the shaker, ‘and give me a little top-up? I sure could use one right about now.’
‘Of course.’ I get to my feet and go to pick up the silver cocktail shaker.
But it seems to have disappeared.
And when I turn back, Marilyn has disappeared, too.
She’s vanished, into thin air, exactly the way Audrey Hepburn did when she was the one materializing through the Chesterfield.
The only part of her that remains is that heady scent of flowers – that rose-garden-at-midnight smell that now, of course, I recognize as Chanel No. 5, and a little dent in the cushion of the sofa where her perfectly formed bottom was just sitting.
I’m woken by the ringing of my phone.
For the third time so far this morning.
Well, if I’ve ignored it this many times, it can’t hurt to ignore it once more.
But this time, I’m awake enough to take a little peek out from beneath my duvet, just to see if, by
any chance, Marilyn Monroe has appeared on the Chesterfield again, mink-clad or otherwise.
She hasn’t, and the scent of Chanel No. 5 has faded by now too.
I sit up properly, rub my bleary eyes, and then, just to settle something in my own mind, I open the drawer at the bottom of my narrow bedside table. I lift up my vintage-bead box, and my makeup bag, and the pile of bills that I sometimes shove in there when they all arrive at once and get a bit too scary. Then I feel around for the pair of sunglasses that I hope – as I always do when I come back to check on them – will be hidden away there in the back left-hand corner.
They’re still there.
I pull them all the way out to have a proper look.
This pair of dark tortoiseshell Oliver Goldsmith sunglasses is the reason why I didn’t just assume, when I came upon Marilyn Monroe in my flat yesterday evening, that I was cracking up. Suffering hallucinations. Talking – like some sort of overgrown, Manhattan-swigging toddler – to an imaginary friend.
These are Audrey Hepburn’s sunglasses. She left them behind the last time she came for a ‘visit’. And thanks to the fact that Bogdan has seen them, and that Dillon has seen them, and that half the population of Rome commented on them (Ciao, Audrey!) every time I wore them, over there, on the first weekend Dillon and I ever spent together, I know that they’re as real as the nose on my face.
I know this. I always knew it, even though my faith has occasionally wavered a bit since then.
It didn’t help, probably, that in the (thorough, scientific) interests of eliminating any possibility that I was cracking up/suffering hallucinations/talking to an imaginary friend, I shelled out for a couple of terrifyingly expensive sessions with a psychiatrist friend of Nora’s, Dr Burnett, a few times last summer. Just to drop in a mention of my encounters with Audrey Hepburn, to see what a professional might say. I don’t know what I was expecting, really, but Dr Burnett couldn’t have been firmer about the fact that it had all been nothing more than my imagination. Stress-induced visual and auditory hallucinations, he mentioned on my second visit. And, as for the sunglasses, well, they must have been an old, forgotten pair of mine, according to him, or even something I’d gone out and bought, in some sort of fugue state, to convince myself that what I’d been seeing and hearing was in fact real.
A Night In With Marilyn Monroe Page 8
