Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Theda Bara was moaning “Oh oh oh” as if about to faint; Eddy G had to hold her up. “Ma’am, it’s gonna be all right. I don’t actually see the fucker. Anybody see the fucker?”

  Norma Jeane said, “I never did see any snake. But I heard him, I think.”

  Cass said, hunched and trembling, “It’s my fault. These things. I started seeing them in bathrooms, in toilets, and I can’t stop. It’s only because of me they’re here.”

  It seemed to be so; there was no snake in the nursery. Norma Jeane and Eddy G helped comfort Theda Bara, who’d had a terrible fright and wanted now only to leave The Cypresses, and Cass, who’d drifted into a kind of fugue state, like a man in shock, his eyes open and dilated and unfocused. He spoke incoherently, repentantly. It was his fault, he brought these things with him everywhere, they would kill him finally, and there was nothing to be done. Norma Jeane wanted to take Cass into a bathroom and wash his face in cold water but Eddy G advised no, there wouldn’t be any water, and if there was it’d be rust water and warm as blood—“That’d spook him all the more. Let’s just get him home.”

  Norma Jeane asked, “Did you know about this, Eddy? These ‘things’ of his?”

  Evasively Eddy G said, “I wasn’t sure whose they were, y’know? His or mine.”

  Driving back into the city, a sobered Eddy G at the wheel and Norma Jeane beside him shaken and scared, pressing the palms of both hands against Baby to comfort him, and Cass, his shirt torn open so he could breathe, lying shivering and whimpering in the back seat. Norma Jeane said in an undertone to Eddy G, “Oh, God. We should take him to a doctor. It’s d.t.’s, isn’t it? The Cedars of Lebanon. The emergency room.” Eddy G shook his head. Norma Jeane said, pleading, “We can’t just pretend he isn’t sick, like there’s nothing wrong with him.” Eddy G said, “Why not?”

  Once they were off curvy Laurel Canyon Drive and on the Boulevard, and back on Sunset, Cass surprised them by sitting up, sighing and blowing his cheeks, and laughing, embarrassed. “Jesus. Sorry. I don’t remember what all that was but don’t fill me in, OK?” He squeezed the nape of Eddy G’s neck, and he squeezed the nape of Norma Jeane’s neck. His touch was icy but comforting. Both Eddy G and Norma Jeane shivered with a weird quick kind of desire. “What I think it is, y’know?—sympathetic pregnancy. Norma’s so healthy and sane about this, one of the Gemini’s gotta crack up? I don’t mind, for the duration, it’s me.”

  This was so convincing, and so like a strange kind of poem, what could you do but believe?

  That dream. The beautiful blond woman crouched before her, impatiently tugging at her hands. The blond woman so beautiful you couldn’t see her face. You shrank from seeing her face. She’d stepped out of a mirror. Her legs were scissors, her eyes were fire. Her hair lifted in pale undulating tendrils. Give it to me! You sad, sick cow. She was trying to yank the crying infant from Norma Jeane’s weakening hands. No. This isn’t the right time. This is my time. You can’t deny me!

  “WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU DISAPPEAR?”

  Life and dreams are leaves of the same book.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer

  There came the morning when she knew what she would do.

  It was a morning after The Cypresses, and it was a morning after Lakewood.

  A morning after a long night of turbulent dreams like boulders rolling over her soft helpless body.

  She called Z, to whom she hadn’t spoken since the night of the premiere. She told him what the situation was. She began to cry. Maybe the crying had been rehearsed, Z would think, but possibly not. Z listened in silence. She might’ve figured this was a shocked silence but in fact it was a practical silence, Z having been in this position, heard these words, a well-worn script by an anonymous screenwriter, many times. “What I’ll do, Marilyn, is turn you over to Yvet.” The name was pronounced “Ee-vay.” It was not a name Norma Jeane had ever encountered before. “You know Yvet. She’ll help you.”

  Yvet was Z’s secretary-assistant. Norma Jeane remembered her from the shameful morning of the Aviary. How many years ago! Before, even, Norma Jeane had been named. In a time of innocence so distant to her now she could not recall the girl she’d been and even the stark stuffed birds of the Aviary seemed to her but provisional, not that she hadn’t seen them, witnessed them, heard their cries of pain and terror, but rather that the experience had happened to someone else, or had happened in a movie that Cass Chaplin might identify: something by D. W. Griffith?

  Yvet averting her eyes, that gaze of pity and contempt. There’s a powder room just outside.

  Yvet came on the line, and the woman was sympathetic and matter-of-fact and older-sounding than Norma Jeane would have guessed. Calling her “Marilyn.” Well, why not? At The Studio, she was Marilyn. In film credits, she was Marilyn. In the world so shimmering-vast it might be eternity, she was Marilyn. Yvet was saying, “Marilyn? I’ll make the arrangements. And I’ll accompany you. Plan for tomorrow morning, eight A.M. I’ll pick you up at home. We’ll just be driving a few miles outside Wilshire. It’s a clinic, it’s nothing back-street or dangerous. He’s a revered physician. He’s got a nurse. You won’t have to stay long. But, if you want to, you can stay all day. Sleeping, resting. They’ll dope you up. You won’t feel, well—you won’t feel nothing, sure you’ll feel something. When the drug wears off. But it’s just physical, and it goes away, and then you’ll feel just fine. Trust me. You’re still on the line, Marilyn?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “I’ll be there to pick you up, tomorrow morning, eight A.M. Unless you hear otherwise.”

  She didn’t hear otherwise.

  THE EX-ATHLETE AND THE BLOND ACTRESS: THE DATE

  When you believe you are acting, you will suddenly discover your truest self.

  —From The Paradox of Acting

  The Ex-Athlete took the Blond Actress on their first date to Villars Steakhouse in Beverly Hills.

  They dined there from 8:10 P.M. until 11 P.M.

  A shimmering luminous light hovered about their table.

  The glamorous couple was observed through mirrors by discreet diners who, at Villars, one of the most exclusive restaurants in Beverly Hills, would not have wished to stare. It was perceived that the Ex-Athlete, known for his taciturnity as well as for his remarkable baseball skills, spoke relatively little at the start but communicated with looks. His gaze was smoldering: Italian-dark. His horsey-handsome face was clean-shaven, youthful for his age. His near-black hair, receding at the temples, was perceived through mirrors to be thick, untouched by gray. Like a lawyer or a banker he wore a navy blue pin-striped suit, starched white shirt, and highly polished black leather shoes. His necktie was a rich royal blue silk embossed with miniature figures of baseball bats in eggshell-white. When the Ex-Athlete addressed a waiter, giving orders for his companion and himself, he was heard to speak in an oddly measured voice. She will have . . . and I will have. . . . She will have . . . and I will have. . . . She will have and I will have. . . . The Blond Actress was very beautiful but nervous. Like an ingenue in her first stage performance. At times during the evening her agitation was such, her mirrored reflection became blurred as if by mist or steam, and we couldn’t see her. Sometimes she vanished altogether! At other times, when she laughed, her red-glossy mouth glared, and that was all we could see. Mouth like a cunt. That’s her secret. She’s too dumb to know? To some observers at Villars, the Blond Actress looked “exactly like” her photographs; to others, the Blond Actress looked “nothing like” her photographs. The Blond Actress was wearing, and this must’ve been a calculated surprise, not her trademark plunging-neckline stark red or stark white or stark black but a pastel pink silk-and-wool cocktail dress with a girlish pleated skirt and a pearl-beaded bodice and a high tight neckline at which she tugged unconsciously with manicured fingernails. Above her left breast was pinned a creamy-white gardenia like a prom corsage which frequently, with a shy little smile at the Ex-Athlete, she sniffed.

  So sweet! Thank you so much
! Gardenias are my favorite flower.

  The Ex-Athlete’s face darkened pleasurably with blood. He seemed about to speak but did not. He smiled, he frowned. There was a mild tic in his left eye. Light emanating from the couple’s table was dappled and undulating like reflected water. The Ex-Athlete was thrilled by the Blond Actress’s beauty, or intimidated by it. In the eyes of some observers, the Ex-Athlete was already resentful of the Blond Actress’s beauty, and from time to time glanced irritably about the candlelit murmurous restaurant as if he sensed us watching, though at such moments all our eyes were averted.

  Except: the Sharpshooter in civilian clothes, lounging at the rear of the restaurant in a shadowy alcove between the bright bustling kitchen and the manager’s office, never once averted his eyes or slackened in his interest. For to the Sharpshooter this was hardly a mere diversion but a crucial episode in a narrative to which he, as a mere agent, in the hire of an Agency, could neither give a name nor would wish to.

  The Ex-Athlete was only just falling in love! All that lay in the future.

  No. The future is now. All that’s to come springs out of NOW.

  This was a fact. Several times, shyly yet boldly, with the air of a man stealing a base, the Ex-Athlete let his hand fall onto the Blond Actress’s.

  An electric ripple through the candlelit murmurous interior.

  It was observed that the Ex-Athlete’s hand was “twice as large” as the Blond Actress’s hand.

  It was observed that the Ex-Athlete wore no rings, nor did the Blond Actress wear any rings.

  It was observed that the Ex-Athlete’s hand was darkly tanned and the Blond Actress’s hand was feminine-pale and “lotion soft.”

  The Ex-Athlete began to relax to a degree. He was drinking scotch, and at dinner he was drinking red wine. The Ex-Athlete was encouraged by the Blond Actress to talk of himself. He told a sequence of baseball anecdotes, which perhaps he’d told before. But each telling of a fond familiar anecdote to a different audience is in fact a different anecdote; in the telling, we become different people. The Blond Actress appeared to be thrilled. She was listening attentively, only sipping at her drink, a fizzy fruity prom-girl drink in a tall frosted glass with a straw; she was leaning her elbows on the edge of the table, aiming her magnificent body at the Ex-Athlete. Often, she widened her blue-blue eyes.

  Don’t laugh, I used to love softball! In high school sometimes I played with the boys when they’d let me.

  What was your position?

  I guess—batter? When they let me.

  The Ex-Athlete had two distinct laughs, a quiet restrained chuckle and an explosive belly laugh. The first was accompanied by a wincing look; the other, taking him by surprise, was sheer hilarity. The Blond Actress was delighted with this outburst of laughter from one so darkly taciturn. Oh!—my daddy used to laugh just like that. Daddy brought the gift of laughter into every life he touched.

  The Ex-Athlete did not inquire after “Daddy.” Enough to know, with an expression of sympathy and regret and an inner feeling of satisfaction, that the Blond Actress’s father was dead and out of the way.

  As the Blond Actress often faded from view, or rather was obscured from our sight by an aura of shimmering light, so too her laughter was uncertainly perceived. To some attentive observers it was “high-pitched like tinkling glass, pretty but nervous.” To others it was “sharp, like fingernails scraping on a blackboard.” Yet to others it was a “choked sad little squeak like a mouse being murdered.” While to others it was “throaty, husky, a sexual moan.”

  Graceful in his baseball uniform, the Ex-Athlete was awkward in civilian clothes. By midevening he’d unbuttoned his coat. The expensive custom-tailored pin-striped suit fitted him tightly about the shoulders; maybe since retirement he’d gained ten to fifteen pounds in the torso and around the waist? The Blond Actress was perceived to be awkward too. Where in her films “Marilyn Monroe” was a fluid magical presence on the screen, like music, inimitable and unmistakable, in what’s called “real life” (if an evening at Villars Steakhouse in the company of the most famous ex-baseball player of the era might be designated “real life”) she was a girl child squeezed into the body of a fully mature female. The weight of her large breasts tugged her forward so that she was continually forced to lean back; the strain on her upper spine must have been considerable. And was she wearing a bra? It sure looked like she wasn’t.

  Or panties either. But a garter belt, and sheer stockings with sexy dark seams.

  The Ex-Athlete “wolfed” his food. The Blond Actress “picked at” hers.

  The Ex-Athlete had a twelve-ounce sirloin steak with sautéed onions, oven-roasted potatoes, and green beans. Except for the green beans he cleaned his plate. He ate much of a loaf of crusty French bread smeared with butter. For dessert, chocolate pecan pie with ice cream. The Blond Actress had fillet of sole in a light wine sauce, new potatoes, and asparagus. For dessert, poached pear. Often she raised her fork to her lips, then lowered it, as she listened with tremulous attention to the Ex-Athlete recounting one of his anecdotes.

  In The Paradox of Acting she’d read:

  All actors are whores.

  They want only one thing: to seduce you.

  She thought If I am a whore, that explains me!

  Eagerly the Blond Actress smiled at the Ex-Athlete’s anecdotes. She laughed as frequently as the occasion merited. By degrees, the Ex-Athlete shifted his chair closer to hers. His yearning body closer to hers. Midway in his enormous juicy steak he excused himself to use the men’s room. He returned and shifted his chair closer to his companion’s. It was noted, as the Ex-Athlete passed through the candlelit interior of the restaurant, that he smelled of a strong cologne, of whisky and tobacco. His hair smelled of an oily lotion. His breath smelled of meat. He was a cigar aficionado: Cuban cigars. There was one in its cellophane wrapper in his coat pocket. His gold cuff links were in the shape of baseballs and, like the silk necktie, were a gift from an admirer. When you’re a sports celebrity, all the world is an admirer. Yet this evening, the Ex-Athlete was slightly off his stride. He smiled strangely, and he frowned. His forehead creased with emotion. Blood throbbed in both his temples. He was standing at the batter’s plate forced to stare into a wicked sun. It was scaring the shit out of him, falling in love with this “Marilyn Monroe.” So fast! And the memory of an ugly divorce still clattering in his head like bowling pins struck by a vicious ball.

  The Ex-Athlete was a gentleman with women who deserved it. Like all Italian men. With women who’d demonstrated they didn’t deserve it, like his bitch of an ex-wife, you couldn’t blame him for losing control sometimes.

  With a bitter twist of his mouth, the Ex-Athlete spoke quickly of his early brief marriage, his divorce, his ten-year-old son. Immediately the Blond Actress inquired after the son, whom clearly the Ex-Athlete adored in that sentimental, furious way of divorced dads who have been denied custody of their children and can see them only at court-appointed times.

  Shrewdly, the Blond Actress made no inquiry after the ex-wife. Thinking If he hates her he’ll hate the next woman. Am I the next woman?

  The aura of light glowed, pulsed, nearly obscured the couple.

  The Ex-Athlete asked the Blond Actress how she’d gotten her start.

  The Blond Actress seemed puzzled. What start?

  In movies. Acting.

  The Blond Actress tried to smile. Strange and unnerving, she’d become in that instant an actress with no script.

  I don’t know. I guess—I was “discovered.”

  Discovered how?

  She smiled a wincing sort of smile. A companion more sensitive than the Ex-Athlete would not have pursued this line of questioning.

  The Blond Actress said, slowly at first, haltingly, then with more certainty, I acted in high school. I was Emily in “Our Town” and a talent scout saw me. We had a wonderful drama coach at Van Nuys; he gave me faith in myself. He taught me to believe in myself. Before the Ex-Athlete could ask another q
uestion, she said, in a breathy-fluttery way, that she was in rehearsal now for her first musical comedy, a big-budget studio production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Oh, she was frightened!—the eyes of the world would be upon her. She was being trained carefully, dancing, singing. She was in the hands of a brilliant choreographer. She was thrilled to be involved in such a glamorous production. I’ve always loved music. Dancing. Lifting people’s hearts? Just wanting to make people feel happy about life, and want to live. Sometimes I think God made me a pretty girl and not, oh—a scientist?—a philosopher?—for that reason alone.

  The Ex-Athlete was staring at the Blond Actress. If there was a script between them, the Ex-Athlete had no lines. It would have been only a slight exaggeration to say he was struck dumb.

  Now the Blond Actress ruefully complained, with a pouty pursing of her lips, of her tender aching feet and leg muscles, what with dance rehearsals six days a week from ten in the morning till six in the evening. In an impulsive childlike gesture she stretched out a shapely leg and hitched her skirt up to the knee, caressing the calf. It keeps cramping on me. Oh!

  Every eye in Villars noted how the Ex-Athlete’s hand moved like a wounded animal, blundering, to touch with just the fingertips the Blond Actress’s leg. How the Ex-Athlete murmured in tender confusion It’s a pulled tendon maybe. You need a massage.

  Like touching a hot stove, that skin of hers! Through the sheer nylon stocking.

  With shaky fingers the Ex-Athlete lit a cigar. A white-clad waiter appeared to haul away their dirtied plates. The Ex-Athlete, emboldened by alcohol, began to speak of being retired from the game. What it meant to him. In his late thirties. Attentive as before, the Blond Actress listened. She was more at ease listening than speaking; when you listen, you don’t need to improvise. She sat leaning forward on her elbows, her breasts predominant in the pearl-beaded pink bodice, rising and falling with the urgency of her breath, both her legs primly returned beneath the table.