Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

Kiss-kiss, Daddy? C’mon.

  Hey, listen: Mr. Pearlman wasn’t my lover really.

  What’s that mean—“really”?

  Oh, he might’ve done some things but it wasn’t. . . . Don’t look at me like that, Daddy. That scares me.

  What did he do?

  Nothing actual.

  He . . . touched you?

  I guess. How d’you mean?

  As a man touches a woman.

  Mmmmmm! Like this?

  Maybe like this? . . . This?

  But Daddy, like I said: it wasn’t anything actual, y’know?

  Meaning. . .?

  Just something in his office? Like . . . a present to him? He asked to interview me. Me! He was skeptical, he said. Why’d a famous movie star want to study at his theater? He thought it was . . . some kind of publicity thing? Like anybody’d care where I went, what I did? Now I’m done with movies? He fired these questions at me. He was suspicious, I don’t blame him. I guess I cried. How’d he know “Marilyn Monroe” was anybody real? He expected her, and I walked in.

  What kind of questions did he ask you?

  My . . . motivation.

  Which was?

  To . . . not die.

  What?

  To not die. To keep on. . . .

  I hate it when you talk like that. It tears my heart.

  Oh, I won’t! I’m sorry.

  He made love to you, then. How many times?

  It wasn’t l-love! I don’t know. Daddy, gee, this makes me feel bad. You’re mad at me.

  Darling, I’m not mad at you. I’m just trying to understand.

  Understand what? I didn’t know you then. I was . . . divorced.

  Where did you and Pearlman meet? Not always that smelly office of his.

  Oh, it was mainly in his office! Late, after class. I thought. . . well, I was flattered. So many books! Some of them, the titles I could see, in German? Russian? A picture of Mr. Pearlman with Eugene O’Neill. All these wonderful actors: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger. . . . I saw this book in German I’d read in English—I mean I saw the name “Schopenhauer”—I took it down and pretended to read. I said, “I can sure read Schopenhauer better when he writes in English, than like this.”

  What did Pearlman say?

  He corrected my pronunciation—“Schopenhauer.” He didn’t believe me that I’d read that book. In any language. I mean I read in that book. A photographer I used to know gave me a copy. “This is the truth of the world, The World as Will and Idea.” I used to read it till I felt too sad.

  Pearlman was always saying how surprised he was by you. What you’re really like.

  But . . . what’d that be? What I’m really like?

  Just yourself.

  But that isn’t enough, is it?

  Of course it is.

  No. It never is.

  What do you mean?

  You’re a writer, because being just yourself isn’t enough. I need to be an actress, because being just myself isn’t enough. Hey, you won’t ever tell people, will you?

  I would never speak of you, darling. It would be like flaying my own skin.

  You would never write about me, either . . . would you, Daddy?

  Of course not!

  This . . . with Mr. Pearlman . . . was just something that happened. Like a . . . present to him, to thank him? Like . . . “Marilyn Monroe”? For a few minutes?

  You let Pearlman make love to “Marilyn Monroe.”

  That’s maybe what he’d call it. . . . Oh, he wouldn’t like this! Me telling you.

  Exactly what did he do?

  Oh mainly just . . . kissing me. Different places.

  With your clothes on or off?

  Mostly on. I don’t know.

  His clothes?

  Daddy, I don’t know. I didn’t look.

  And did you have a . . . sexual response?

  Probably not. I don’t, mostly. . . . Except with somebody I love. Like you.

  Keep me out of this! This is about you and that pig.

  He wasn’t a pig! Just a man.

  A man among men, eh?

  A man among “Marilyn’s” men.

  Look, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to deal with this.

  Daddy, I remember now! I was thinking of Magda . . . in your play. The gift Mr. Pearlman was giving me. To read a new play by you . . . with real theater actors. The gift you were giving me.

  He cast you without consulting me. I never knew. He did all the casting when he directed.

  He didn’t inform you about me, I know! I was so scared . . . I revered you so.

  He said, “Trust me. I’ve got your Magda.”

  Did you trust him?

  Yes.

  Why don’t I remember things better, my mind gets stuck on a role I’m doing, and I . . . it’s like I’m in two places at once? With other people but not. . . with them. Why I love to act. Even when I’m alone I’m not.

  Your gift is so natural, you don’t “act.” You require no technique. Yes, it’s like a match being struck. A sudden flaring flame. . . .

  But I like to read, Daddy! I got good grades in school. I like to . . . think. It’s like talking with somebody. In Hollywood, on the set, I’d have to hide my book if I was reading. . . . People thought I was strange.

  Your mind can get muddled. You’re easily influenced.

  Only by people I trust.

  I’ve seen that office of his plenty of times. That sofa. . . . Filthy, isn’t it? Smelling of his hair oil, cigar smoke, stale pastrami. . . . Squalor is the atmosphere Pearlman thrives in, it’s his image. Amid the crass marketplace of Broadway. “Uncompromising.” “Incorruptible.”

  Oh . . . isn’t he? I thought you were his f-friend.

  When we were subpoenaed—by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953—he hired an expensive Harvard lawyer. Not a Jew. Me, I hired a guy from right here in Manhattan, a friend. A “Commie lawyer” he was called. . . . I was the idealist. Pearlman was the pragmatist. Damned lucky I didn’t get sent to prison.

  Oh, Daddy! That won’t happen again. It’s 1956 now. We’re more advanced now.

  He had a sexual response, yes?

  Why don’t you ask him? He’s your friend from way back.

  Pearlman’s not my friend. He’s been jealous of me from the start.

  I thought Mr. Pearlman gave you your s-start.

  As if I couldn’t have had a career without him? That’s what he says? Bullshit.

  I don’t know what he says. I don’t know Mr. Pearlman, really. He’s got a hundred friends in New York . . . you all know him better than I do.

  Do you see him now?

  What! Oh, Daddy.

  You and him, you’re together . . . he looks at you. I’ve seen it. And you look at him.

  I do?

  That way of yours.

  What way?

  That “Marilyn” way.

  That’s just maybe . . . nervousness.

  You don’t have to tell me, darling, if it’s too painful.

  Tell . . . what?

  How many times . . . you and him.

  Daddy, I don’t know. My mind’s not . . . an adding machine.

  You needed to show gratitude to him.

  That’s what it was? I guess.

  Before you and I met.

  Oh, Daddy! Yes.

  And it was, how many times? Five, six? Twenty? Fifty?

  What?

  You know what.

  Just . . . four or five times. I’d go into Magda. I wasn’t there.

  He’s married.

  I guess.

  But, hell. I was married too. Yes?

  Did you ever come?

  Huh?

  Did you ever have an orgasm? With him?

  Did I ever . . . oh, gee. Daddy, I didn’t know you then. I mean, as a real person. I knew your work. I revered you.

  Did you ever have an orgasm with Pearlman? Him “kissing” you.

  Oh, Daddy, if I did ever have a—a . . . it was only just for th
e scene, you know? And then the scene was over.

  Now you’re mad at me? Don’t you love me?

  I love you.

  You don’t! Not me.

  Of course I love you. I’d like to save you from yourself, is all. The low value you place upon yourself.

  Oh, but already I am saved. Already, my new life with you. . . . Oh, Daddy, you won’t write about me, will you? Us talking like this? After I’m—when, maybe, you don’t love me anymore?

  Darling, don’t say such things. You must know by now, I’ll always love you.

  12

  This play that was his life. Yet the Blond Actress, reading Magda in her small breathy impassioned voice, was entering the play and entering his life. The Blond Actress had shifted her terror onto Magda and made Magda come alive.

  When Magda spoke with Isaac’s parents she was faltering and stammering and her wispy voice was almost inaudible, and you felt embarrassment, that the Blond Actress wasn’t equal to the occasion and would give up in another minute; then, in the next scene, when Magda spoke with more assurance, you realized that the Blond Actress had been acting, and that this was what gifted “acting” was—a mimesis of life so intense you experienced it viscerally, as life. In her scenes with Isaac, Magda became animated, even vivacious; what was rare in this drab rehearsal space, as in Ensemble productions generally, the Blond Actress exuded a sudden sexual energy that took both the audience and the other actors by surprise. Certainly Isaac was taken by surprise. The young actor, whom the Playwright liked, talented, sharp, a handsome olive-skinned boy with glasses cast as scholarly-Jewish, was at a loss initially how to play to the Blond Actress’s Magda; then shortly he began to respond, awkward as Isaac would have been, and excited as an adolescent boy would have been in such circumstances. You felt the electricity between the two: the earthy Hungarian farm girl with nearly no schooling and the younger suburban-Jewish boy soon to depart for college on a scholarship.

  The audience relaxed and began to laugh, for the scene was tenderly comic in a mode unlike anything the Playwright, revered for his seriousness, had ever attempted. The scene ended with Magda’s “golden laughter.”

  The Playwright laughed too, a startled laughter of recognition. He’d ceased taking notes on his script. It seemed that the play, his play, was being wrested from him. That Magda, the Blond Actress’s Magda, was guiding it in a direction not his. Or was it?

  The reading continued through the play’s three acts, bringing Isaac and Magda by quick dramatic jumps into adulthood and into wholly separate lives. The Playwright was thinking how ironic! yet how fitting! the husky flaxen-haired Hungarian girl of memory was being replaced by the emotionally fragile Magda with the platinum-blond braid and brimming-blue eyes. Here was a Magda so vulnerable, so exposed, you dreaded her being hurt. You dreaded her being exploited. Isaac and his parents, suburban New Jersey Jews, privileged and well-to-do in contrast to Magda’s impoverished background, were not so sympathetic as the Playwright had intended them. And the fairy-tale plot the Playwright had invented to express the distance between Isaac’s and Magda’s worlds—Magda becomes pregnant by Isaac; Magda keeps her secret from Isaac and his parents: Isaac leaves for college and a brilliant career: Magda marries a farmer and has Isaac’s child and subsequent children: Isaac becomes a writer, successful while still in his twenties; Isaac and Magda meet at intervals, finally at Isaac’s father’s funeral; Isaac, for all his supposed brilliance, never knows what the audience knows, what Magda has shielded him from knowing—this plot seemed to him now unsatisfactory, incomplete.

  The play’s final lines belonged to Isaac, standing in the cemetery, as Magda faces him across his father’s grave. “I will always remember you, Magda.” The figures freeze, the lights dim and go out. The ending that had seemed so right was exposed now as inadequate, incomplete, for why should we care that Isaac remembers Magda? What of Magda? What are her final words?

  The reading ended. It had been an emotionally exhausting experience for everyone. In violation of Ensemble protocol for such informal occasions, many in the audience applauded. A few individuals got to their feet. The Playwright was being congratulated. What folly! He’d removed his glasses and wiped at his eyes with his sleeve, drawn, dazed, smiling in confusion, touched with panic. It’s a failure. Why are they clapping? Is this mockery? Without his glasses he saw the interior of the loft as a pulsing swirl of novalike lights and blurred motion and darkness. He saw no faces, he could recognize no one.

  He heard Pearlman speak his name. He turned away. He must escape! He muttered a few words of thanks, or apology. He couldn’t bear to speak with anyone. Even to thank the actors. Even to thank her.

  He fled. Out of the rehearsal room, down the steep metal stairs. On 51st Street he stepped into a wall of head-hammering cold. He fled to Eleventh Avenue seeking a subway. Had to escape! Had to get home. Or anywhere, where no one knew his name.

  “But I did love her. The memory of her. My Magda!”

  13

  You ran away from me! When already I loved you.

  When I’d come so far, for you.

  When my life was already yours. If you wanted it.

  How then could I trust you? Yet I loved you.

  Already then I began to hate you.

  14

  The following evening, they agreed to meet. At a restaurant on West 70th and Broadway. The Blond Actress was the one in pursuit.

  He knew! A married man. Yet not a happily married man, not for years. And already (it shamed him to think this, yet it was so) he’d begun to fall in love with her. My Magda.

  He’d recovered from his shock of the other evening. In a detached voice he said, “This play. It’s become too important to me. It’s become my life. For an artist, that’s fatal.”

  The Blond Actress listened carefully. Her expression was somber. Was she holding her dazzling smile in reserve? She’d come to comfort the brooding Playwright. There was the blond promise of infinite comfort. Except he was married, an old married man. He was a wreck! Thinning hair, a look about the eyes like frayed socks, those creases sharp as knife cuts in his cheeks. His shameful secret was, Magda had never stroked those cheeks. Magda had never kissed him. Magda had never touched him. Still less had Magda seduced him. He’d been twelve years old when Magda, brimming with blond vigor and health at seventeen, had come to work for his parents; by the time he’d left for Rutgers, Magda had already departed, married, and moved away. All had been the Playwright’s adolescent fantasy of a flaxen-haired girl as different from himself and his people as if she’d belonged to another species. Now Magda as the Blond Actress was seated gravely across from him in a booth in a Manhattan restaurant more than thirty years later, saying earnestly, “You shouldn’t say such things! About your beautiful play. Didn’t you see, people were crying? It has to be your life, see, otherwise you couldn’t love it so. Even if it kills you—” The Blond Actress paused. She’d said too much! The Playwright could see her mind working swiftly. Wondering was he one of those men who resent a woman speaking intelligently? Speaking much, at all?

  He said, “It’s just that I don’t think I will ever finish it now. Some of those scenes were originally written a quarter century ago. Before, almost, you were born.” This was spoken lightly and certainly without reproach. But the Blond Actress did look disconcertingly young. And her affect, her manner, her sense of herself were young, even childlike. So the world won’t hurt her as much as otherwise it might. The Playwright quickly calculated he was twenty years this woman’s elder and looked it. “Magda is a vivid character to me, yet I think, to an audience, inconsistent. And Isaac, of course, is too much me. Yet only a fraction of me. The material is too autobiographical. And the parents. . . .” The Playwright rubbed his eyes, which were aching. He hadn’t slept much the night before. The folly of his long effort and, more painfully, of his recent successes swept over him.

  I have no talent, no gift. I have the panting ardor of a workhorse. Yet in time even a work
horse wears out.

  He’d seen how, at the reading, when he’d risen to his feet to escape, the Blond Actress’s yearning eyes had snatched at him. He’d wanted to shout, Leave me alone all of you! It’s too late.

  The Blond Actress was saying, hesitantly, “I had some ideas about M-magda? If you’re interested?”

  Ideas? From an actress?

  The Playwright laughed. His laughter was startled, grateful.

  “Of course I’m interested. You’re very kind, to care.”

  The Playwright would not have arranged this meeting. And a romantic meeting it was, excitement and tension and a kind of dread on both sides, in a dimly lit smoky restaurant bar, a secluded booth at the rear. A Negro jazz combo playing “Mood Indigo.” And that was the Playwright’s mood: indigo. His wife had telephoned from Miami just before he’d left to meet the Blond Actress, hair damp from the shower and jaws pleasantly smarting from being shaved, and he’d been jumpy lifting the receiver in anticipation of—what? The Blond Actress was canceling their date? When she’d only just made it, a few hours before? The Playwright’s wife had sounded very distant, her voice crackling with static. Almost, he hadn’t recognized it. And what had that voice, with its perpetual edge of reproach, to do with him?

  The Blond Actress wore her hair still in a single short plait at the nape of her neck. He’d never seen her, in any of her photos, with plaited hair. So this was Magda! Her Magda. His Magda had had much longer hair and had worn it plaited and wound about her head in an old-fashioned style that made her seem older than her years and far more prim. His Magda’s hair had been coarse as a horse’s mane. This Magda’s hair was fine-spun, synthetic, a dreamy creamy blond like a doll’s hair; a man naturally wanted to bury his face in it, and to bury his face in the woman’s neck, and hold the woman tightly, and—protect her? But from whom? Himself? She seemed so vulnerable, so open to hurt. Risking a rebuff from the Playwright. As she’d risked a wounding public rebuff from Pearlman the night before. The Playwright had heard that the Blond Actress “went everywhere alone” in New York and that this was viewed as an eccentricity, if not a risk. Yet, hair hidden, in dark-tinted glasses, in clothes without conspicuous glamour, the Blond Actress wasn’t likely to be recognized. This evening she wore a loose-fitting angora sweater, tailored slacks, and shoes with a medium heel; a man’s fedora with a sloping brim shielded much of her face from the eyes of curious strangers. The Playwright had seen her, when she entered the crowded bar, as soon as she’d sighted him at the rear, smiling, removing horn-rimmed tinted glasses and fumbling to shove them in her handbag. The fedora she hadn’t removed until after the waiter had taken their orders. Her expression was playful, hopeful. Was this blond girl “Marilyn Monroe”? Or did she simply resemble, like a younger, inexperienced sister, the famous/ infamous Hollywood actress?