Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Norma Jeane, who’d been warned by her agent never to sign any of the petitions circulating in Hollywood, said vehemently, “Oh, yes, I will! I will.” In her gay giddy mood, with V looking on, she was immediately incensed. She blinked away tears of hurt and indignation. She said, “Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson are great artists. I don’t care if they’re Communists or—whatever! It’s t-terrible what this great country of America is doing to its g-greatest artists.” She took a pen offered by the turtle-eyed man and would have signed at once except V, who’d been trying to draw her away from the turtle-eyed man, now said, “Marilyn, I don’t think you should,” and the turtle-eyed man said loudly, “You! Damn you! This is between the young lady and me.” Norma Jeane said to both men, “But what’s my name? ‘Monroe’—? I’ve forgotten my name.” She went to a nearby table, where to the surprise of people sitting there she tried to sign the unwieldy petition except she’d laid it atop silverware. She was laughing, though still indignant. “Oh, yes—‘Marilyn Monroe.’” With a flourish she signed twice, as Marilyn Monroe and as Mona Monroe. She began to sign as Norma Jeane Glazer except I. E. Shinn, breathing flames through both nostrils, snatched the pen from her and crossed out the names.

  “Marilyn! God damn! You are drunk.”

  “I am not! I’m the only sober person here.”

  That evening at Enrico’s she met V. That evening she lost her lover Cass.

  She fled Enrico’s. She was sick of them all. Cass was right. They’re flesh merchants all of them. Outside the restaurant as she tried to get into a taxi there was a small crowd gathered. “Who’s she? The blonde.” “Lana Turner?—no, too young.” Norma Jeane laughed uneasily. In her low-cut white silk-and-chiffon. In her spike-heeled shoes. A pudgy smiling man in a plastic raincoat walked into her, intentionally it seemed. Another petition thrust into her face? No, it was an autograph book. “Sign, please!”

  Norma Jeane murmured, “I c-can’t. I’m nobody.”

  She had to escape! Another man came to her rescue, opening the rear door of the taxi and helping her climb inside. She had a fleeting frightened impression of a battered face like something shaped out of putty. The nose was flattened and broad at the tip like a trowel; the eyes were puffy, and both lids drooped; the eyebrows appeared to be singed; one ear was partly missing like something corroded. A rancid yeasty smell like Gladys at Norwalk.

  That smell would stay with her through the long night until early next morning she’d cleanse herself in fury and desperation.

  Maybe it’s my own smell. Maybe it’s beginning.

  Shinn had insulted her. V had discreetly backed away. The turtle-eyed man had been ejected from Enrico’s. Norma Jeane pressed her fingertips against her eyelids to erase them all. It was a habit of the orphanage. A strategy of the Time Traveler pulling the rod of his magic machine to propel him swiftly through time. So when she opened her eyes after fifteen or so minutes she was at the Spanish-style bungalow on Montezuma Drive. The borrowed house was near the foot of the mountain, not near the top like the millionaires’ houses. Norma Jeane was shivering and excited and she hadn’t eaten since noon that day, except for a few canapés hungrily and absentmindedly devoured at the reception. She’d left behind the white fox stole lent to her by the M-G-M wardrobe department but Mr. Shinn had the check claim ticket; he’d return it. Oh, but she hated him! She would quit as his client and if that meant she never got another Hollywood job, so be it. She’d brought her little white beaded purse but she hadn’t more than five dollars in change; fortunately, this was enough for the taxi driver, who was asking was she sure this was the right address, it looked dark. “Maybe I should wait, miss? If you might want to go somewhere else?” Her immediate response was a curt “No. I don’t want to go somewhere else” but a shrewder response followed—“All right, yes, why don’t you wait. But only for a minute. Thank you.” She had no difficulty making her way up the steep cracked sidewalk in her high-heeled shoes, which meant she wasn’t drunk on champagne as that cruel dwarf-man had accused her.

  Oh Cass I love you, I’ve been missing you so, it was a success I think. I was a success. I mean, it’s a beginning. just a minor role. But a beginning. I don’t need to be ashamed of myself. That’s all I ask, not to be ashamed. I don’t expect happiness. My only happiness is from you. Cass—

  The little bungalow overgrown with sickly palm trees and a leafless and flowerless vine did appear to be deserted but Norma Jeane peered through a front window and saw a dim light burning at the rear. The front door was locked. She had a key, but where was it?—not in her little white-beaded purse. Or maybe she hadn’t a key. Calling softly, “Cass? Darling?” He was sleeping, she supposed. She hoped it wasn’t a heavy drugged sleep from which she’d be unable to wake him.

  The taxi idled on the gravel road; Norma Jeane pulled off her high-heeled sandals and made her way groping to the rear of the house. Cass never bothered to lock the back door. In the darkness she saw an empty wading pool littered with palm fronds. The first time she’d seen this shabby little pool she’d had a strange hallucinatory vision of little Irina wading in it, in aquabright water. Cass had seen her staring, white-faced, and asked what was wrong, but she hadn’t told him. He knew about Norma Jeane’s early marriage and divorce and he knew about Gladys who’d been a poet until her breakdown and he knew about Norma Jeane’s father who was a prominent Hollywood producer who’d never publicly acknowledged his “illegitimate” daughter. But that was all he knew.

  “Cass? It’s Norma.” Inside the house was an odor of whiskey. An overhead light burned in the kitchen but the narrow hall was darkened. Norma Jeane saw no light beneath the bedroom door, which was ajar. Softly she called again, “Cass? Are you sleeping? I’m sleepy!” Suddenly she felt like a big cuddly kitten. She pushed open the door. Light from the kitchen slanted inside. There was the bed, a luxurious double bed too large for the cramped room, and there was Cass in bed, naked except for a sheet covering him to the waist. Norma Jeane had a confused impression of dark furry-matted hair on his chest that she’d never seen before and his shoulders and torso were more muscular than she recalled and again she whispered, “Cass?” even as she realized there were two figures in the bed, two young men. The nearer, the stranger, remained lying on his back, the sheet now barely covering his hairy groin and his arms behind his head, while the other, Cass, shoved himself up on his elbow, smiling. Both young men were covered in sweat. Young beautiful male bodies gleaming. Quickly before Norma Jeane could escape Cass leapt naked from the bed, lithe as a dancer, grabbing her wrist, and with his other hand he tugged at his companion’s thigh.

  “Norma, darling! Don’t run away. I want you to meet Eddy G—he’s my twin too.”

  THE BROKEN ALTAR

  A little Westwood secretary figuring to improve her mind.

  A religious fanatic, maybe. Or the daughter of such. That type you get to recognize in southern California.

  Mostly we paid her no attention. Prof Dietrich would inform us afterward that she’d never missed a single class until November. But she was so quiet in class, it was like she was invisible. Slipping into her seat early each week she’d lean forward over her book rereading the assignment so if you glanced in her direction you’d get the clear signal Don’t talk to me please, don’t even look at me. So it was easy not to notice her. She was serious and down looking and prim without makeup and her skin pale and slightly shiny and her ash-blond hair rolled back and pinned up in the style women were wearing during the war if they worked in factories. It was a look of the forties and of another time. And sometimes she’d tie a scarf around her hair. She wore nondescript skirts and blouses and loose-fitting cardigans and flat-heeled shoes and stockings. No jewelry, no rings on either hands. And her fingernails plain. You’d figure her about twenty-one but younger than that in experience. Living at home with her parents in a little stucco bungalow. Or maybe her widowed mother. The two of them singing hymns, Sunday mornings, in some drab little church. A virgin for sure.r />
  If you said hello to her or made a friendly remark in her direction the way some of us did, breezing into class and eager to talk and laugh and exchange news before class, she’d lift her eyes quick and startled-blue and shrink back in the same reflex. It was then you’d see, like a kick in the groin, that this little girl was good-looking, or might’ve been good-looking, if she’d known it. But she didn’t know. She’d lower her eyes or turn away and rummage in her shoulder bag for a tissue. Mumble something polite and that was that. Don’t even look at me, please!

  So, who would? There were other girls in the class, and women, and they weren’t shy.

  Even her name was a nothing name. You’d hear it and forget it in the same moment. “Gladys Pirig”—Prof Dietrich read it off, first class meeting. Reading the roll in his deep sonorous voice and making marks beside our names, and he’d peer up at us over his glasses and make a twitchy gesture with his mouth meant to be a smile. Some of us knew Prof Dietrich from previous classes in night school and liked him, which was why we were enrolled for another, so we knew he was a good-natured generous and optimistic man but a tough grader even in the night school where we were all adults.

  “Prof Dietrich” we called him, or just “Prof.” We knew from the UCLA catalog he wasn’t an actual professor only just an “adjunct instructor” but we called him “Prof” and he’d blush a little but not correct us. Like it was a game we played that we night school students were important enough to merit a professor and he wasn’t going to disillusion us.

  This class was Renaissance Poetry. UCLA Night School, fall 1951, Thursday evenings 7 to 9 P.M. Thirty-two of us were enrolled and it was surprising, and a testament to Prof Dietrich, that almost everybody showed up for most classes, even after the winter rainy season began. We were veterans on the G.I. bill and retired men and middle-aged housewives with no kids left at home and office workers and two young students from Westwood Theological Seminary, and a few of us were would-be poets. The dominant group in the class, apart from two or three outspoken vets, were a half-dozen schoolteachers, female, in their thirties and forties, taking extra courses to beef up their credentials. Most of us worked days. And long days they were. You had to love poetry, and you had to believe that poetry was worthy of your love, to spend two hours in a classroom at the end of a workday. Prof Dietrich was an excitable energetic teacher so you’d get caught up in his enthusiasm even if you didn’t always understand what he was declaiming about. In the presence of such teachers, it’s enough to know that they know.

  Like the first class period after reading through our names, Prof Dietrich stood before us clasping his chunky, chafed-looking hands together and said, “Poetry. Poetry is the transcendental language of mankind.” He paused and we shivered, figuring whatever the hell that meant it was worth the tuition at least.

  How Gladys Pirig took this, nobody would notice. Probably she wrote it down in her notebook, schoolgirl-style, as she had a habit of doing.

  We began the semester reading Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan. We were gearing up, Prof Dietrich said, for Donne and Milton. In his booming dramatic voice like Lionel Barrymore’s, reciting Richard Crashaw’s “Upon the Infant Martyrs”—

  “To see both blended in one flood;

  The mother’s milk, the children’s blood,

  Makes me doubt if Heaven will gather

  Roses hence, or lilies rather.”

  And Henry Vaughan’s “They Are All Gone into the World of Light”—

  “They are all gone into the world of light!

  And I alone sit lingering here;

  Their very memory is fair and bright,

  And my sad thoughts doth clear.”

  We’d analyze and discuss these knotty little poems. Always there was more than you’d expect. One line opened up another, and one word another, it was like a fairy-tale riddle leading you in, and further in, and still further. For some of us in the class it was a revelation. “Poetry! Poetry is compression,” Prof Dietrich told us, seeing the bewilderment on some faces. His eyes shone inside the smudged wire-rimmed glasses that he’d take off and put back on and take off again a dozen times during the class period. “Poetry is the soul’s shorthand. Morse code.” His jokes were clumsy and corny but we all laughed, even Gladys Pirig, who had a squeaky little laugh that sounded more surprised than mirthful.

  Prof Dietrich had a determinedly light tone. He meant to be funny, witty. Like he was carrying a burden of something else, something darker and snarled, and his jokes were a way of deflecting our attention from it, or maybe his own. He was about forty years old and going soft in the middle, a big-boned guy like a bear on its hind legs, about six feet three and weighing maybe two hundred twenty pounds. A linebacker but with this chiseled chipped-at sensitive face, quick to blush and acne-pitted, yet the women in the class considered him handsome in the battered Bogart style, his myopic eyes “sensitive.” He wore mismatched coats and trousers and vests, and plaid neckties that bunched beneath his chin. From some remarks he’d made absentmindedly about London during the war you had the idea he’d been there, probably stationed there for some time, you had a quick glimpse of the man in a uniform but that was it, just a glimpse; he’d never talk about himself, not even after class. “Poetry is the way out of the self,” Prof told us, “and poetry is the way back into the self. But poetry is not the self.”

  Nobody wrote better poetry, Prof Dietrich said, than the Renaissance poets, not even counting Shakespeare (Shakespeare was another course). He lectured us on the poetic forms, especially on the sonnets—English and Petrarchan, or Italian. He lectured us on “mutability”—“the vanity of human wishes”—“the fear of growing old and dying.” This was a Renaissance theme so prevalent you could say it was “a cultural obsession, a pandemic neurosis.” One of the theological students asked, “But why? When they believed in God?” and Prof Dietrich laughed and hitched up his trousers and said, “Well, maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. There’s a profound difference between what people say they believe and what, in their guts, they truly believe. Poetry is the lancet that digs through dead tissue into the truth.” Someone commented that, after all, people didn’t live very long centuries ago; men were lucky to live to be forty and women died young in childbirth frequently, so it made sense, didn’t it? “They worried about dying all the time. It could happen any time.” One of the female teachers, a practiced talker, said argumentatively, “Oh, bosh! Probably ‘mutability’ was just a topic these male poets wrote about, like ‘love.’ They wanted to be poets and they had to write about something.” We laughed. We disagreed. We began talking excitedly as we always did, starved for serious intellectual conversation in our lives, or what passed for intellectual conversation. We interrupted one another.

  “Love poems, love lyrics, like in our own popular songs of today, and movies—they’re the subjects, see? Like nothing else in life is important? But at the same time, maybe they’re just—y’know, ‘subjects.’ Maybe none of it is real.”

  “Yes, but it was real once, wasn’t it?”

  “Who knows? What the hell is ‘real’?”

  “You’re saying love isn’t real? Dying isn’t real? What?”

  “Well, everything was real at one time! Otherwise how’d we even have the words for these things?”

  During these free-for-alls over which Prof Dietrich presided like a gym teacher, pleased at so much activity but maybe a little worried things might get out of control, the blond Gladys Pirig would sit silent, staring at us. During Prof’s lectures she took notes, but at these times she’d lay down her pen. You could see she was listening hard. Tense and quivering and her backbone ramrod straight so you could see she was a girl who made too much of things like every instant was a streetcar rattling past she needed to catch and was in terror she might miss.

  A little Westwood office worker, but she’d been encouraged by some teacher in high school to reach out for something better an
d maybe she’d written poetry and this teacher had praised her so she was writing poetry still, in secret and out of a dread it wasn’t any good. Her pale lips moved silently. Even her feet were restless. Sometimes we’d notice her half-consciously rubbing her legs, her calves, as if her muscles ached, or flexing her feet as if they were cramping on her. (But nobody would’ve figured she was taking dance lessons, probably. You just wouldn’t have figured Gladys Pirig for anything physical.)

  Prof Dietrich wasn’t the kind of bullying teacher to call on quiet or shy students but obviously he was aware of this neat well-groomed excruciatingly shy blond girl seated right in front of him, as he was alert and aware of all of us; and one evening he inquired who’d like to read aloud George Herbert’s “The Altar” and he must’ve seen something quick and yearning in the girl’s face, because instead of calling on one of us with our hands in the air he said in a kindly voice, “Gladys?” There was a moment’s silence, a pause when you could almost hear the girl suck in her breath. Then she whispered, in the way of a child taking a dare, reckless, even smiling, “I’ll t-try.”