Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She’d driven to Santa Monica out of rich residential Bel Air. The hills. A fairy-tale mansion close by the Bel-Air Golf Club. He’d offered to pay for her divorce from the Ex-Athlete. “Mental cruelty.” “Incompatibility.” It was a bottle-green Bentley thinly scraped along its front left fender where she’d sideswiped a guard rail on the Santa Monica Freeway. Was this a time when Gladys was having shock treatments? Because her own head was feeling hurt, jagged. Her own thoughts were frequently derailed. You could smile at The Girl Upstairs but The Girl Upstairs had a script and never deviated. Most of the laughs were hers. Electroconvulsive shock therapy, it was called. They’d asked Norma Jeane, the next of kin, the legal guardian of the sick woman, for permission to perform a lobotomy. She, the daughter, refused. A lobotomy can work wonders sometimes on a deranged and hallucinating patient, a doctor assured her. No, but not my mother. Not my mother’s brain. My mother is a poet, my mother is an intelligent complex woman. Yes, my mother is a tragic woman but so am I! And so they merely “shocked” Gladys. Oh, but that was at Norwalk, years ago. That wasn’t at the more genteel Lakewood Home where Gladys was now.

  Mother, he wants to see you! Soon. He will forgive you, he says. He will love us both.

  It must mean something, her father had called her “Norma.” At first he’d called her “Norma Jeane”; then at the end of his letter he’d called her “Norma.” So that would be his name for her when they met and ever afterward: “Norma.” Not “Norma Jeane” and not “Marilyn.” And of course “Daughter.” Finally she’d taken the keys to the Bentley, needing to escape. But he wouldn’t report her to the police. His weakness was, he adored her. Grunting groveling Porky Pig little man at her feet. Marilyn’s bare feet. He’d sucked her grimy toes! She screamed, it tickled so. He was a good man, a decent man, a rich man. He owned stock in 20th Century-Fox. Not only he’d wanted to pay for her divorce but he wanted to hire a tough private detective (in fact, a moonlighting L.A. homicide detective with a number of “justified kills” on his record) to scare off the Ex-Athlete’s private detective. He’d wanted to introduce her to a lawyer friend, to help her form her own production company. Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. She would escape The Studio and she would break The Studio’s stranglehold. As a few years before Olivia De Havilland had sued to break her contract with another studio, and had won. He’d given her a pair of sapphire earrings from Madrid; she told him she never wore expensive jewelry! My Okie background she said. She’d keep the sapphire earrings with other items of expensive jewelry in the toes of slippers and shoes to be found in a closet amid dustballs after her death. But not for a long time. She didn’t intend to die for a long time! Not for years.

  I’m Miss Golden Dreams. How’d you like to kiss me? All over? Here I am, waiting. Already I’ve been loved by hundreds of thousands of men. And my reign is just beginning!

  This was the night she’d seen The Seven-Year Itch at the Sepulveda. Bucky would’ve loved the movie, laughing and gripping Norma Jeane’s hand, tight. And afterward he’d have her wear one of the lacy-sexy nighties and really make love to her, a healthy young married guy horny as hell. But she was through with that thing up on the screen that isn’t me. She’d made her decision to vanish. Like Harriet taking away Irina. It could happen within an hour. It could happen within a minute! She would vanish from Hollywood and from the Ex-Athlete’s surveillance and she would move to New York City and live alone in an apartment. She would study acting. It wasn’t too late! She would be anonymous. She would begin again, humbly, as a student. She would study stage acting. Living theater. She would play in Chekhov, Ibsen, O’Neill. Movies are a dead medium, alive solely for the audience. The Fair Princess and the Dark Prince are alive solely to the audience. Beloved solely by the audience, in their ignorance and need. But there was no Fair Princess, was there? No Dark Prince to save you.

  Later, she’d driven to Venice Beach. She would recall her bare foot on the gas pedal, and searching for the brake. But where was the clutch? She’d abandoned the scraped and overheated Bentley on Venice Boulevard, keys in the ignition. On foot, then. Barefoot. Running. She wasn’t frightened but exhilarated, running. The front of her pretty dress had been torn. The bearded derelict’s rough hands. Now this stretch of beach was home, at dawn. For Grandma Della lived close by. Grandma Della’s grave was close by. She and Norma Jeane walked along the beach shading their eyes against the bright glittering waves. Grandma Della would be proud of her, of course; yet she would say Make your own decision, dear. If you hate your life. Gulls, shorebirds. They circled above her screaming. She ran into the surf, the first of the waves, always you’re surprised at the strength of the surf, the chill of the waves. Water is so thin, trickles through your fingers, how can it be so strong, so hurtful? So strange! She saw in those waves, farther out, something living, a helpless drowning creature, it was her task to save it. Oh, she knew this wasn’t right, it was a dream or a hallucination or a spell cast by somebody wicked, she knew this but somehow couldn’t feel that she knew with any conviction and so she had to act quickly. Was this—Baby? Or another woman’s baby? A living creature, helpless, and only Norma Jeane saw, only Norma Jeane could save it. She ran stumbling and staggering into the water and waves socked at her calves, thighs, belly. These were no loving caresses but powerful blows. Rushing up into the deep cut between her legs. She was knocked down, and scrambled to get up. She could see the small struggling creature. It was borne high on the crest of a frothy wave, and then dropped into a shallow; lifted again, and again dropped. Its tiny limbs flailed! She’d begun to hyperventilate. Not enough oxygen. She was swallowing water. Water up her nose. A hand at her throat. Strong beautiful hands. Better for both of us to die. Yet he’d let her go—why? Always he let her go, that was the man’s weakness, he loved her.

  Surfers saved her from drowning.

  And kept her secret as she’d begged them.

  Just her luck, it was this stretch of Venice Beach where a half-dozen surfers hung out. Some of us even slept on the beach, mild nights. We were fully awake and in the water by dawn riding some rough, serious waves. And there came this distraught-looking blond woman in a torn party dress staggering along the beach. Barefoot, and her hair windblown.

  At first we thought somebody must’ve been chasing her, but she was alone. And suddenly wading into the surf! And these rough waves. She was like a blond doll knocked down and pummeled by the waves and she’d have drowned within minutes except one of the guys got to her in time, leapt off his surfboard and dragged her up onto the beach and straddled her limp body doing artificial respiration as he’d learned in the Scouts, and pretty soon she’s coughing, choking, vomiting, and breathing normally again, and back to life again, lucky she hadn’t swallowed more water or inhaled it into her lungs.

  There’s this fantastic movie moment we’d remember all our lives when the blonde’s astonished eyes open—glassy-blue, bloodshot eyes—seeing a half-dozen of us standing over her staring at her, recognizing her, or anyway who she’s supposed to be. Oh why? is the first thing she says in this stricken little voice. But trying to laugh, too. And vomiting again and the guy who’d saved her, a smooth-faced college kid from Oxnard, quickly wipes her mouth with the flat of his hand in a sudden tender gesture like nothing in his nineteen years, and all his life he’s going to remember how the near-drowned woman, this famous blond actress, clutches his hand and fumbles to kiss it saying what sounds like Thank you! but she’s sobbing too hard to be certain, and the surf’s too loud, and the kid from Oxnard kneeling beside her in the wet sand has to wonder if he did the wrong thing?

  Like she’d wanted to die. And I interfered. But if it hadn’t been me it would’ve been one of the other guys, right? So how was I to blame?

  THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE BLOND ACTRESS: THE SEDUCTION

  In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

  —Stanislavski,

>   Building a Character

  1

  You won’t ever write about me, will you? About us.

  Darling! Of course not.

  Because we’re special, aren’t we? We love each other so much. You couldn’t ever make anybody understand . . . how it is between us.

  Darling, I would never even try.

  2

  He’d written a play, and the play had become his life.

  This was not a good thing. The Playwright knew. A work of words, a vessel of mere language, somehow wrapped in with his guts, tangled with the arteries of his living body. In a neutral voice he said of this new work, his first in several years, “I have hope for it. It isn’t finished.”

  Hope for it. Isn’t finished.

  He knew! No play is the playwright’s life, as no book is a writer’s life. These are only interludes in the life, as a ripple, a wave, a violent shudder may pass through an element like water, agitating it but without the power to alter it. He knew. Yet he’d labored at The Girl with the Flaxen Hair for so long. He’d begun it in college, in its earliest, crudest “epic” version. He’d set it aside in the despair and rapture of first love and he’d written other plays—in the postwar forties he’d become the Playwright!—and he’d returned to it in youthful middle age, having carried The Girl with the Flaxen Hair—the handwritten notes, the awkwardly typed drafts, the abortive scenes and the protracted scenes and the lengthy character descriptions and increasingly yellowed and dog-eared snapshots from the twenties; above all he’d carried the chimerical hope of it—from one life to another, from single rooms and cramped apartments in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Brooklyn and New York City to his current six-room brownstone apartment on West 72nd Street near Central Park, and to summer places in the Adirondacks and on the Maine coast, and even to Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Morocco. He carried it with him from his bachelor life into a life complicated in unexpected ways by marriage and children, family life in which at the outset he’d rejoiced, as an antidote to the obsessive world inside his head; he’d carried it with him from the eager astonished sexuality of his young manhood to the waning and uncertain sexuality of his fifth decade. The girl of The Girl with the Flaxen Hair had been his first love, never consummated. Never even declared.

  Now he was forty-eight years old. The girl would be, if still living, in her mid-fifties. Beautiful Magda, middle-aged! He had not so much as glimpsed her in more than twenty years.

  He’d written a play, and the play had become his life.

  3

  Vanished! She withdrew the money she’d saved from checking accounts in three Los Angeles banks. She shut up her rented house and left messages for only a few people explaining she was vanishing from Hollywood and not to miss her, please! And not to look for her. She provided no forwarding address not even to her distraught agent because at the time of her flight she had none. And no telephone number because she had none. Books and papers and a few clothes, she packed hastily in boxes and mailed parcel post c/o Norma Jeane Baker, General Delivery, New York City, New York.

  Grandma Della said to make my own decision, if I hated my life. But it wasn’t life I hated.

  4

  A dream of Back There. The night before the Playwright and the Blond Actress meet in New York City, in the early winter of 1955, the Playwright has one of his recurring dreams of humiliation.

  Those dreams of which, since early adolescence, he has spoken to no one. Dreams he tries to erase immediately upon waking!

  In art the Playwright thinks dreams are profound, life-changing, often beautiful. In life, dreams are of no more significance than a blurred view of Rahway, New Jersey, through the rain-splotched window of a Greyhound bus expelling exhaust on Route 1.

  In fact, the Playwright was born in working-class Rahway, in northeastern New Jersey. In December 1908. His parents were German Jews from Berlin who’d emigrated in the late 1890s with a hope of being assimilated into America, their idiosyncratic Jewish surname Americanized and their gnarly Jewish roots extirpated. They were Jews grown impatient with being Jews even as they were Jews resentfully aware of being the object of the scorn of non-Jews, most of whom they knew to be their inferiors. In America, the Playwright’s father would find work in a machine shop in East New York alongside other immigrants, he would find work in a butcher’s shop in Hoboken and as a shoe salesman in Rahway, and at last, in the boldest adventure of his maturity, he would acquire a franchise to sell Kelvinator washing machines and dryers in a shop on Main Street, Rahway; the shop came into his hands in 1925 and would provide a steadily rising income until it collapsed in early 1931, when the Playwright was completing his senior year at Rutgers University in nearby New Brunswick. Bankruptcy! Misery! The Playwright’s family would lose their Victorian gabled house on a leafy residential street and take up residence in the upstairs of the very building in which the washing machines and dryers had been sold, a property in a depressed section of Rahway that no one wanted to buy. The Playwright’s father would suffer from high blood pressure, colitis, heart trouble, and “nerves” through the remainder of his long embittered life (he would endure until 1961); the Playwright’s mother would be employed as a cafeteria worker and eventually as a dietitian in Rahway public schools, until the year of miracles 1949 when her playwright son would have his first Broadway success and win his first Pulitzer Prize and move his parents out of Rahway forever. A fairy tale with a happy ending.

  The Playwright’s dream of Back There is set in Rahway in those years. He opens his eyes appalled to find himself in the kitchen of the cramped flat above the shop on Main Street. Somehow the kitchen and the shop have come together. Washing machines are in the kitchen. Time is askew. It isn’t clear if the Playwright is a boy just old enough to feel familial shame, or if he’s a Rutgers undergraduate with dreams of being another Eugene O’Neill, or if he’s forty-eight years old, his youth mysteriously gone, in dread of turning fifty with no strong, electrifying play in nearly a decade. In the dream, in the kitchen, the Playwright is staring at a row of washing machines, all in noisy operation. Dirty, soapy water is being agitated in each of the machines. That unmistakable smell of backed-up drains, plumbing. The Playwright begins to gag. This is a dream and he seems to recognize it’s a dream but at the same time it’s so painfully real he will be convinced, shaken, that it must have happened in life. Somehow his father’s financial records and his own writing materials have been mixed together and placed imprudently on the floor beneath the machines, and water has slopped over onto the papers. The Playwright must retrieve them. It’s a simple task he confronts with dread and disgust. Yet there’s a perverse pride in this, for it’s the son’s responsibility to help his weak, ailing father. He stoops over, trying not to gag. Trying not to breathe. He sees his hand fumbling to take hold of a sheaf of papers, a manila file. Even before he lifts it to the light he can see that the papers are wetted through, ink is smeared, and the documents are ruined. Is The Girl with the Flaxen Hair among these? “Oh God, help us.” It isn’t a prayer—the Playwright isn’t a religious man—but a curse.

  Abruptly the Playwright wakes. It’s his own hoarse breathing he’s been hearing. His mouth is dry and sour, he’s been grinding his teeth in sorrow and frustration. Grateful to be sleeping alone in his bed in the brownstone on West 72nd Street and out of Rahway, New Jersey, forever.

  His wife is in Miami visiting elderly relatives.

  All that day, the dream of Back There will haunt the Playwright. Like a bad meal, undigested.

  5

  I knew that girl! Magda. She wasn’t me but she was inside me. Like Nell, except stronger than Nell. Much stronger than Nell. She would have her baby; no one could deprive her. She’d have her baby giving birth on bare floorboards in an unheated room and muffling her cries with a rag.

  She’d stanch the bleeding with rags.

  Nursing the baby, then. Her big swollen breasts like a cow’s, warm and oozing milk.

  6

  The Playwright went
to check the papers on his desk. Of course, The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was where he’d left it. More than three hundred pages of scripts, revisions, notes. He lifted it, and one of the yellowed snapshots fell out. Magda, June 1930. It was in black-and-white, an attractive blond girl with wide-set eyes squinting in sunshine, her thick hair braided and wound about her head.

  Magda had had a baby but it hadn’t been his. Except in the play it was his.

  7

  Eager as a young lover, though no longer young, the Playwright hurried up four steep flights of metal paint-splotched stairs to the drafty loft rehearsal space at Eleventh Avenue and 51st Street. So excited! breathless! So anxious. As he entered the loft into a babble of voices, a haze of faces, he had to pause, to calm his heart. To compose himself.

  He wasn’t in condition to run up these stairs as he used to.

  8

  I was terrified. I wasn’t ready. I’d been up most of the night. I kept having to pee! I wasn’t taking any drugs, only just aspirin. And an antihistamine tablet Mr. Pearlman’s assistant gave me, for a sore throat. I believed the Playwright would take one look at me and speak to Mr. Pearlman and that was it, I’d be out of the cast. Because I never deserved to be there, and I knew it. I seemed to know this beforehand. I seemed to see myself going down those stairs. I held the script, and I tried to read the lines I’d marked in red, and it was like I’d never seen them before. My only clear thought was: If I fail now, it’s winter here, freezing. It wouldn’t be hard to die, would it?