Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He knows me. My insides.

  Yet there was the triumphant Lorelei Lee moving beautiful bare shoulders suggestively, tilting her head in that way she’d rehearsed to robot perfection, and cooing in a baby-sexy voice

  Men grow cold as girls grow old

  And we all lose our charms in the end.

  How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics! How radiant her smile! Lorelei sang, who had no voice, but the voice was surprisingly sweet and assured; Lorelei danced and her body, which was not a dancer’s body and trained far too late in life, was surprisingly supple. Who could guess the hours, hours, hours of rehearsals? Bloodied toenails, and that sick throbbing in the womb. She sounded like a younger sister of Peggy Lee. But of course she was much more beautiful than Peggy Lee.

  “I’m proud of myself, I guess. Shouldn’t I be?”

  Whispering to Mr. Shinn, who belonged beside her. Gripping her hand. Oh, she’d trusted him!

  The movie was ending, at last. A triumphant double wedding. Those radiantly beautiful showgirl brides Lorelei Lee and Dorothy, virginal in white. (Were these girls virgins? It was a shock, but yes.) Immediate applause. The audience loved it, every slick phony moment of it. The Blond Actress, urged to her feet by tuxedo arms on either side, was crying. Look! Marilyn Monroe was crying genuine tears! So deeply moved. Whistles, cheers, a standing ovation.

  For this you killed your baby.

  7

  The Imperial Suite was on the penthouse floor of the Beverly Wilshire. The Blond Actress, dazed and excited, remained less than an hour at the lavish dinner in her honor, excusing herself to slip away. Someone special. Come alone! When finally she arrived at the hotel it was past eleven o’clock. Her heart pounding like a bird’s, so rapidly she worried she might faint. At the theater after the warm wonderful tumultuous ovation she and Jane Russell had received, she’d had to stealthily swallow another of Doc Bob’s tablets to keep from slumping into premature exhaustion. To keep Lorelei Lee foam-rubber solid, not deflated like a balloon spent and stepped on, on a dirty floor. “Just one more. Just tonight.” She promised herself!

  She fumbled the key in the lock. Her fingers were icy and brittle. Her voice was frightened—“H-hello? Who is it?”

  He was seated on a velvet love seat in a pose of self-conscious relaxation. Like Fred Astaire, though not in a tux and not with Fred Astaire’s poise. On a low table before him was a cut-glass vase containing a dozen long-stemmed red roses, a silver ice bucket, and a bottle of champagne. He was as excited as she; she could hear his quickened breath. Maybe he’d been drinking, awaiting her. The white fox stole was slipping from her shoulders. She was in childish terror, she’d be revealed to him only partially clothed. He’d risen awkwardly to his feet, a tall muscular figure with surprisingly dark hair. He said, “Marilyn?” just as the Blond Actress said, “D-daddy?” They hurried together. Her eyes were blinded with tears. She might have stumbled, her spike heels catching in the carpet, but immediately he caught her. She reached out her hands; he gripped them tightly in his. How strong his fingers, how warm. He was laughing, startled by her emotion. He began to kiss her, hard on the lips.

  Of course, it was the Ex-Athlete. Of course, this man was her lover. She was crying, and she was laughing. “I’m so h-happy, darling. You’re here with me after all.” Eagerly they kissed, stroking each other’s arms. Oh, it was a dream come true. He was explaining he’d decided to fly back a day early; he’d hoped to make the premiere but couldn’t get a flight in time. He’d missed her. She said, “Oh, darling, I missed you. Everybody was asking about you.”

  They had champagne and a late supper. The Ex-Athlete claimed not to have eaten since lunch and was ravenous. The Blond Actress picked distractedly at her food. She hadn’t been able to eat at the dinner in her honor, anticipating what was to follow; now, giddy with happiness beside the Ex-Athlete, she had no appetite either. Her brain was ablaze, as a house with every room lighted and the shades yanked up to the tops of the windows. The Ex-Athlete had ordered poached pears in brandy for her, cinnamon and cloves. Since their first date at Villars he’d been led to believe that poached pears in brandy were the Blond Actress’s favorite dessert. As champagne was her favorite drink and blood-red roses her favorite flower.

  Sweetly she called him “Daddy.” She’d been calling him “Daddy” for months, in private, since they’d first become lovers.

  In turn, the Ex-Athlete called her “Baby.”

  Another surprise was, he’d brought her a ring. Had this been decided beforehand? A large diamond edged with smaller diamonds. She laughed nervously as he helped push it onto her finger. When had this been decided? He was saying in a low, tense voice, as if they’d been arguing, “We love each other, it’s time we were married,” and she must have agreed. She heard a frightened whispery voice agreeing. “Oh, yes! Yes, darling.” She lifted his hands impulsively, pressed them against her face. “Your hands!—your strong, beautiful hands. I love you.” It must have been a script she’d memorized without knowing it.

  The Ex-Athlete was sleeping. Snoring. A man chuckling wetly to himself. He lay on his back in boxer shorts (he’d tugged them on, using the bathroom after lovemaking), bare-chested. He was one who sweated in his sleep and who twitched and lurched and ground his teeth. Now he was dodging stealthy phantom balls thrown at his unprotected head. The Blond Actress sometimes comforted her lover at such times but now she slipped from the bed to wander naked across the carpet. She used the bathroom, careful to shut the door before turning on the light. Blinding white tile, mirrors reflecting mirrors. Her Magic Friend staring at her without recognition. It didn’t leave any scar you can see. Not like an appendectomy or a cesarean. She went then into the adjoining room, the spacious, formally furnished living room of the suite where they’d had their romantic late supper and gotten drunk on champagne and kissed and kissed and made their vows. Just want to protect you. From those jackals. Want you to be happy. She believed it might work: here was a man who loved her more than she loved herself. She meant more to him than she meant to herself. Maybe the key to happiness isn’t in your own keeping after all but in another’s. She in turn would be the key to this man’s happiness. The Ex-Athlete and the Blond Actress. “I can do it! I will.”

  Suffused with joy she went to stand at a window. It was a tall narrow window like a doorway in a dream. The curtain was of a fine transparent material. A naked woman standing at a sixth-floor window of the Wilshire. How relieved she was, now her life was settled! They would marry; it had been decided. They would marry in January 1954 and they would be divorced in October 1954. They would love each other deeply but blindly and in confusion, and they would hurt each other like wounded animals desperately flailing with claws, teeth. She may have known this beforehand. She may have already memorized the script.

  Across the boulevard from the Wilshire the die-hard ragtag band of fans still waited. For what, for whom? It was nearly 2 A.M. There were perhaps twelve or fifteen of them, mostly male. One or two were of indeterminate sex. They’d been roused from their stupor by a sudden movement at the sixth-floor window. With childlike curiosity the Blond Actress peered down at those eager faces both familiar and unfamiliar as faces in dreams we have reason to believe are not our own dreams but dream landscapes through which we travel helpless and enthralled as infants in our mother’s arms. Where our drifting mothers bring us, we must go. The Blond Actress saw a tall fattish albino male she’d noticed standing on a bleacher near Grauman’s Theatre earlier that evening. He wore a knitted cap on his oblong head and his expression was one of utter rapt reverence. She saw a shorter, hydrant-shaped male with a youthful beardless face and squinty eyes hidden by glasses. He held something precious at chest level—a flashbulb camera? A lanky female with a prominent jaw, bony hands, and long narrow feet in cowboy boots was there, in jeans and a floppy-brim hat; she carried a duffel bag stuffed with belongings. (Was this woman Fleece? But Fleece was dead.) These, and others, held autograph books with plast
ic covers, and cameras. They moved forward haltingly as if not trusting their eyes. Staring up at the sixth-floor window where the Blond Actress had drawn the filmy curtain aside. “Marilyn! Marilyn!” Several reached out toward her while others frantically clicked their cheap cameras. The young man with the video recorder lifted it higher, above his head.

  But what image could any camera capture, in the dark, at such a distance? And what were they seeing? A naked woman, calm and radiant and still as a statue? Platinum-blond hair touseled from love. Wetted, slightly parted lips. Those unmistakable lips. Pale bare breasts, shadowy nipples. Nipples like eyes. And the shadowy crevice between the thighs. “Marilyn!”

  In this way, the long night was endured.

  AFTER THE WEDDING: A MONTAGE

  She was studying mime: the primacy of the body and the body’s natural intelligence. She was studying yoga: the discipline of breath. She was reading Autobiography of a Yogi. She was reading The Pathway of Zen and the Book of the Tao and she was writing in her journal I am a new person in a new life! Each day is the happiest day of my life. She was writing haikus, Zen poems:

  River of Night

  On and on endless.

  And I this eye. Open.

  (Though in fact she wasn’t insomniac, much. These nights.) She was teaching herself to play the piano. For long dreamy spells sitting at the white Steinway spinet she’d bought from Clive Pearce and had repaired and retuned and moved to her home. The spinet wasn’t really white any longer but a subtly discolored ivory. The tone was alternately sharp and flat, depending upon which part of the keyboard you were playing. Mr. Pearce was correct: she’d never played Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and never would. Not as “Für Elise” should be played. She liked to sit at the piano anyway, depressing the keys gently, running her fingers up into the treble, down into the bass. If she struck the bass too emphatically she could hear, as if dislodged from watery depths, a man’s deep baritone voice; in the treble, a woman’s soprano voice in contention. Did you tell me you had a baby. Did you tell me you had this baby. And Gladys’s words, which thrilled Norma Jeane each time she heard them, Nobody is adopting my child! Not while I’m alive to prevent it. She was often held by her husband, who adored her. Held in his arms, which were strong muscled arms. His hands, strong muscled hands. She would have liked to draw him, this handsome muscled man! This kindly daddy man. She would have liked to “sculpt” him. But it was figure drawing she was taking, Thursday evenings at the West Hollywood Academy of Art, not entirely with her husband’s approval. And she was learning to cook Italian food: when they visited his family in San Francisco, which was often, her mother-in-law instructed her in the Ex-Athlete’s favorite foods, Italian sauces and risottos. She did not read the daily papers, much. She did not read the trade papers, the fan magazines. She did not read the trash tabloids. She saw few Hollywood people. She had a new telephone number and a new address. She’d sent a bottle of champagne to her agent with a note:

  Marilyn is permanently on her honeymoon.

  Don’t pursue & don’t interrupt!

  She was reading The Teachings of Nostradamus. She was rereading Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She was in perfect health and she was sleeping well and she was hoping to become pregnant for the first time, as she told the Ex-Athlete who was her husband who was Daddy and who adored her. He’d rented for her a spacious hacienda-style house north of Bel Air and south of the Stone Canyon Reservoir. The house was set back behind a wall covered with bougainvillea. In the night sometimes she heard fluttery scratching sounds on the roof and against the windows and had the thought Spider monkeys! though she knew there were certainly no spider monkeys there. Her husband slept soundly and did not hear these noises, or others. He slept in just boxer shorts, and during the night the curly-kinky-graying hairs of his chest, belly, and groin became moist, and a fine oil oozed through the pores of his skin. It was “Daddy’s smell” and she loved it. The scent of him! A man. She was herself fastidious about showering, shampooing her hair, soaking in long therapeutic baths. She seemed to recall that, at the Home, or had it been at the Pirigs’, she’d had to bathe in water already used by others, sometimes as many as five or six others, but now she could bathe in her own bathwater for long dreamy spells amid wintergreen salts doing her yoga breathing exercises.

  Draw breath deeply in. Hold. Observe breath as it slowly expels. Say to yourself I AM BREATH. I AM BREATH.

  She was not Lorelei Lee and could barely remember Lorelei Lee. The movie had made millions of dollars for The Studio and would make more millions and she had received for her effort less than $20,000 but she was not bitter for she was not Lorelei Lee, who lived only for money and diamonds. She was not Rose who had conspired to murder her adoring husband, and she was not Nell who’d tried to murder that poor little girl. If she returned to acting she would return to serious roles exclusively. If she returned to acting perhaps she would become a stage actress. She most admired stage actors because they were “real” actors. Often she hiked or ran along the reservoir. She was conscious of persons watching her sometimes. Neighbors who knew her and the Ex-Athlete’s identities but who would not intrude upon their privacy. Not usually! But there were others, dog walkers and house sitters and men with secret cameras. There were individuals seen and unseen. Otto Öse was still living, she believed. Otto Öse scorned her marriage to the Ex-Athlete, she believed. As did her Gemini lovers, who had sworn (oh, she knew!) revenge. As if they had not wanted Baby dead. As if it had not been their Gemini will coercing her. In this season of happiness she had come to accept the fact that life is breathing. One breath following another. So simple! She was happy! Not unhappy like Nijinski, who went mad. The great dancer Nijinski whom everybody adored. Nijinski, who danced because it was his destiny, as it was his destiny to go mad; who said

  I weep from grief. I weep because I am so happy. Because I am God.

  She tried to watch TV with her husband, who was obsessed with TV sports, but her mind drifted off and she saw herself in a tight-stitched purple-sequin gown being flown through the sky like a statue lowered from an airborne vehicle, she saw her uplifted arms and her hair that looked white whipped in the wind. She would make an effort quickly then to comment on the TV sports action or to ask her husband what had happened. At such times she couched her question in the form, Oh, what was all that? I missed the fine points, I guess. During the advertisement break, her husband would explain. By herself she rarely watched TV news for fear of being distressed by the evil of the world. The Holocaust had ended in Europe, now the Holocaust would spread invisibly through the world. For the Nazis themselves had migrated, she knew. Many to South America including (rumor had it) Hitler himself. Prominent Nazis lived incognito in Argentina, Mexico, and Orange County, California. It was rumored, or it was known, that a high-ranking Nazi had had cosmetic surgery, hair transplants, a total transformation of his identity, and was now involved in Los Angeles banking and “international trade.” One of Hitler’s most brilliant speechwriters worked incognito for a certain California congressman frequently in the news for his zealous anti-Communist campaign. At the white Steinway spinet that had been given to Gladys by Fredric March she was Norma Jeane and she played children’s pieces slowly, quietly. Mr. Pearce had given her Béla Bartók’s “Evenings in the Country.” The Ex-Athlete had a call from his lawyer; the warning was that she would receive a subpoena. She did not think about this. She knew that X, Y, and Z had been interrogated by Communist-hunting committees and had “named names” and one of the men who’d been injured was the playwright Clifford Odets, but Mr. Odets was not her playwright. She was not thinking about politics but about her breathing, which was a way of thinking about the soul and a way of not-thinking about politics or about the baby scraped out of her womb and into a bucket to be disposed of like garbage and she was not thinking of whether the baby had lived outside her womb for a heartbeat or two or whether it had been killed immediately (as Yvet assured her
—It’s always immediate and merciful and is perfectly legal in civilized nations like those of northern Europe). But usually she was not-thinking of these things as she was not-reading the daily papers or watching TV news. On the far side of the world in Korea, United Nations troops were occupying a ravaged and chaotic landscape, but she did not care to know painful details. She did not care to know of Government nuclear testing a few hundred miles to the east in Nevada and Utah. She may have understood that she was being watched by Government informers and that her career-self Monroe was “on a list,” but she did not care to think about it and in any case there were many lists and many names on these lists in the year 1954.

  That which we cannot affect, that we must pass by in silence like those whirling spheres of the Heavens.

  So spoke Nostradamus. She was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. She was deeply moved by the character of Grushenka, the childish cruel soft-sugary-buxom twenty-two-year-old whose peasant beauty would be short-lived as a flower but whose bitterness would rage through a lifetime. Oh, in another lifetime, Norma Jeane had been Grushenka! She was reading the short stories of Anton Chekhov in fanatic night-long sessions, during which time she seemed to have but the vaguest idea where she was, who she was, and would recoil wincing if touched (by her annoyed husband, for instance) like a snail unprotected by its shell. She read “The Darling”—she was Olenka! She read and wept over “The Lady with the Pet Dog”—she was the young married woman who falls in love with a married man and whose life is forever changed! She read “The Two Volodyas”—and she was the young wife who falls passionately in love with, and out of love with, her seducer husband! But “Ward No. 6” she could not bear to finish.

  “This is the happiest day of my life.”

  She would take with her to Tokyo the purple-sequin gown with spaghetti straps and a rhinestone brooch riding the crest of the right breast like a nipple that her husband the Ex-Athlete liked her in; tight as sausage skin that dress, it fell to just below her knee, not in fact a cheap dress but it certainly looked cheap, and squeezed inside it she looked cheap, like a moderately high-priced hooker, which he liked sometimes, private times, but didn’t like at other times. She would take the gown with her to Tokyo in secret, but it wouldn’t be in Tokyo she’d wear it.