Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It wasn’t a tragedy! Only just, the Playwright believed, ordinary life. Not life dramatized on the stage.

  The Playwright didn’t care to think how long it had been since he and Esther had made love or even kissed, with feeling. Where Eros has departed, a kiss is the oddest gesture: numbed lips touching, pressing: why? The Playwright knew, if he embraced Esther, she would stiffen in irony and say, “Why? Why now?”

  Hardly could her husband say Because I am falling in love with another woman. Help me!

  Still, he believed their love hadn’t ceased but had only faded. Like the dust jacket of the Playwright’s first book, a slender book of poems published when he’d been twenty-four years old, to reviews of praise and encouragement and sales of 640 copies. In his memory, the dust jacket of The Liberation was a beautiful cobalt blue and the lettering canary yellow, but in fact, as he had occasion to notice now and then, always to his surprise, the front cover had been bleached by the sun almost white, and the once-yellow letters were nearly unreadable.

  There was the book jacket in memory, and there was the book jacket a few feet from the Playwright’s desk. You could argue that both were real. Only just that they existed in separate times.

  Hesitantly the Playwright said to the woman with whom he lived in the handsome old brownstone on West 72nd Street amid overflowing bookshelves, “We never talk much any longer, dear. I was hoping, now that—”

  “When did we ever talk much? You talked.”

  This was unfair. In fact, it was inaccurate. But the Playwright let it pass in silence.

  Saying, another day, “How was St. Petersburg?”

  Esther stared at him as if he’d spoken in code.

  On the stage, language is code. The text’s true meaning lies beneath the text. And in life?

  The Playwright, sick with guilt, called the Blond Actress to break off their meeting that afternoon. It was to have been his first visit to her sublet flat in the Village.

  Recalling those lurid soft-porn scenes in Niagara. The astonishing spread legs of the blond woman, the V of her crotch almost visible through the sheet drawn up to her breasts. How had the filmmakers gotten such scenes past the censor? Past the Legion of Decency? The Playwright had seen Niagara alone, in a Times Square movie house. Just to satisfy his curiosity.

  He hadn’t seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Seven-Year Itch. He wouldn’t have cared to see Marilyn Monroe in comic roles. Not after Niagara.

  Carefully he explained to the Blond Actress that he couldn’t see her for a while. Maybe in a week or two. Please understand.

  In her husky-cheerful Magda voice the Blond Actress said yes, she understood.

  19

  The Ghost Sonata. The Playwright and his wife Esther attended the opening of a production of Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata at the Circle in the Square on Bleecker Street. Many in the audience were friends, acquaintances, theater associates of the Playwright’s; the director of the production was an old friend. The theater held only about two hundred seats. Shortly before the lights dimmed there were excited murmurs among the audience and the Playwright turned to see the Blond Actress coming down the center aisle. At first he believed she was alone, for always the woman seemed to him alone, in his memory alone, so strangely, luminously alone, with her vague sweet wistful smile, her quivering eyelids, her air of having wandered in by chance. Then he saw that she was with Max Pearlman and his wife and their friend Marlon Brando; Brando was the Blond Actress’s escort, talking and laughing with her as they took their seats in the second row. What a vision: Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. Both were dressed informally, Brando with a stubbled chin, shaggy hair past his ears, a worn leather jacket, and khaki trousers; the Blond Actress wrapped in her dark wool coat purchased at an Army-Navy surplus store on Broadway. She was bareheaded; her platinum hair, darkening at the roots, glowed.

  The Playwright, six feet two, shrank in his seat hoping not to be seen. His wife nudged him and said, “Is that Marilyn Monroe? Are you going to introduce me?”

  THE EMISSARY

  The Gemini have said they miss their Norma, and the baby.

  In the claw-footed tub with gleaming brass fixtures, the Dark Prince, naked. In the steaming bathwater she’d lavishly sprinkled with fragrant salts, as you would prepare the bath of a god. To welcome the Dark Prince. To honor the Dark Prince. I love a man she’d confessed suddenly to him. I am so deeply in love with a man for the first time in my life, I want to die sometimes! No, I want to live. Chastely the Dark Prince kissed her on the brow. Not as a lover. For the Dark Prince could not love her. Had loved too many women and had sickened of the love of women, of even the touch of women. She believed that the Dark Prince gave her his blessing in this way. Just to live she said and to know he’s living, too. That we might love each other someday as man and wife. The Dark Prince had grown contemptuous of Caucasian females, yet her he called Angel. From the first he’d called her Angel. By none of her names did he call her except Angel. Telling her now, sly-slurred words and his beautiful cruel eyes brought close to hers Angel, don’t tell me you believe in love? Like in an afterlife? And quickly she said, confused Oh d’you know that Jews don’t believe in an afterlife like Christians do? I just learned that today. The Dark Prince said Your lover’s a Jew, eh? and quickly she said We are not lovers. We love each other from a distance. The Dark Prince laughed, saying Keep that distance, Angel. And you’ll keep your love. She said I want to be a great actress, for him. To make him proud of me. The Dark Prince was swaying on his feet. Tugging at his shirt, which he’d sweated through. Already he’d removed his ratty leather jacket and dropped it onto the carpeted floor of her sublet flat on East 11th Street. The Dark Prince may not have known his precise whereabouts. He was one of those whom others tend to, as handmaids and lackeys. The Dark Prince was fumbling at his belt and at his fly, which was partly unzipped. I need to take a bath the Dark Prince declared. I need to cleanse myself. It was an abrupt and unexpected demand but she was prepared for the abrupt and unexpected demands of men.

  Helping this man into the bathroom at the rear of the flat and turning on the gleaming brass faucets and gaily sprinkling bath salts into the tub and into the gushing steaming water to welcome him, to honor him. The Dark Prince was an emissary from her past and she was terrified of the message he might be bringing her for they’d first met years ago when she’d been Norma living with the Gemini before she’d made Niagara and become “Marilyn Monroe” and of that era she did not wish to think, and perhaps could not think clearly, chattering to the Dark Prince as women do to make a kind of movie music to dispel the terror of silence. When she turned, she saw to her shock that the Dark Prince had stripped himself clumsily bare. Except for his socks. He was panting from just this exertion. He’d been drinking for hours and he’d smoked a thin parchment cigarette with a virulent-sweet smoke, offering it to her (who declined), and now he was panting and flush-faced and his eyes clouded. His trousers, soiled shorts, and sweaty shirt in a tangle at his feet, kicked aside.

  She smiled, frightened. She had not expected this. The Dark Prince’s body was so—profound! It was a body only partially and teasingly exposed in the eight remarkable movies that had made the Dark Prince the most revered film actor of the era: a beautifully sculpted male body with distinct chest muscles, perfectly shaped male breasts and nipples like miniature grapes, a peltlike covering of dark hairs in a swirl at his chest and thickening at his groin. The Dark Prince was thirty-two years old and at the height of his male beauty: within a few quick years his skin would lose its arrogant glisten, his body would grow flaccid; within a decade he would be visibly overweight, potbelly and jowls; within two decades he would be frankly fat. In time, the Dark Prince would become obese as a balloon mannequin blown up by a bicycle pump in willful mockery of this young self. Staring at him she thought If only I could love him! If he might love me. We are free to love and to save each other. The Dark Prince’s penis dangled swollen and sullen amid the frieze of groin hai
r, semierect, stirring; at its tip there gleamed a solitary pearl drop of moisture. She stumbled backward, colliding with a towel rack. The faucets gushed water, the fragrant water steamed. Still she was smiling, panicked. For there was a script for this scene. He will want me to kiss that off. That is what they demand. He will take me by the nape of my neck. For where was Mother? In another room. In bed. Asleep, and moaning in sleep. Just Norma Jeane and a swaying-drunk naked man, a man with an erect bobbing penis, kindly crinkled eyes, and a kissable mouth as Gladys wryly acknowledged As long as he gets his way, oh sure he’s a prince.

  Instead, the Dark Prince pushed past Norma Jeane to the tub, lowering his bare buttocks hard against the porcelain rim. Amid the fragrant rising steam helpless and peevish as a young child Angel c’n you help me, these fuckin’—

  It was his socks he meant, he couldn’t bend to remove them by himself.

  (Such sorry episodes the Sharpshooter would record. The Sharpshooter would indicate no moral judgments in his meticulous reports for that was not the Sharpshooter’s task. In the service of the Agency. In such matters of suspected subversive activities, threats to the national security of the United States. For where there is an innocent citizenry there will be nothing to hide. There will be no guilt. All citizens will be informers and no professional Sharpshooters required.)

  She was his Magda, his! She would telephone her lover. She would weep over the phone I love you, please come to me now! Tonight. The Jews are an ancient people, a nomadic people blessed and accursed by God. Their history is yet a history of god-men: Adam, Noah, Abraham the father god of all. A lineage of men. Men who understood the weakness of women and could forgive them. I forgive you! For being a coward. For not daring to love me as I love you.

  Oh, yes, she’d seen the Playwright in the theater on Bleecker Street. Certainly she’d seen him. She’d known he would be there, in fact. For a woman new to this city she knew many things; she had many new friends to tell her things; how many strangers yearned to be her friend, men and women of good reputation eager to walk beside “Marilyn Monroe” in public and be photographed with her.

  Yes, I saw you. Saw you look away and deny your Magda.

  In the musty-smelling little theater on Bleecker Street stiff and cringing beside his wife. That woman, his wife!

  I’m Miss Golden Dreams. I’m the one a man deserves.

  Never would she telephone her lover! Not the Playwright she admired above all men. He was her Abraham: he would lead her into the Promised Land. She’d been baptized a Christian and would unbaptize herself and become a Jew. In my soul I am Jewish. A wanderer seeking my true homeland. He would see how serious she was, how dedicated to her profession. For acting is both a craft and an art and she meant to master both. She was an intelligent young woman, a woman of pride and honor and shrewd common sense. A man like the Playwright could not love her otherwise. A man like the Playwright would flee from her otherwise. See how level-headed, his Magda: so far from bitterness and female hysteria, she changed into a quilted dressing gown and as the Dark Prince bathed at the rear of her sublet flat in the claw-footed antique porcelain tub with the gleaming brass fixtures she curled up on a sofa to copy into her journal verses from The Song of Solomon. At the Strand Bookshop she’d bought a copy of The Hebrew Bible and was astonished yet relieved to discover that it was the Old Testament merely under another name.

  Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

  Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.

  The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

  For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds.

  I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.

  I opened to my beloved: but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

  She must have slept. Her head so heavy! All that lay before her, the effort of the remainder of a life.

  Yes, she would return to Hollywood; she would contract for another film. How could she avoid it, she had no money; for the Playwright’s divorce, and for their life together, she would need money; and money was available for Marilyn Monroe if not for her. As Marilyn then she would return to the City of Sand. This I knew beforehand. Without knowing that I knew.

  Yet she would return knowing far more about acting than she’d known in the past. For months studying with Max Pearlman, her exacting tutor. For months humbled and eager as a bright child being taught the rudiments of reading and writing and speaking.

  You have the promise of a great actress he’d said.

  If it was not true, she would make it true!

  The Dark Prince was the greatest American actor of his time, as Laurence Olivier was the greatest British actor of his time. To the Dark Prince, his genius seemed to mean very little; his success had aroused him to contempt, not gratitude. I will not be that way. Where I am blessed, I will bless.

  She must have slept for now she woke suddenly. A sensation of sick dread swept over her. It was 3:40 A.M. Something was wrong. The Dark Prince! He’d been in her bathroom for hours.

  In the claw-footed tub in tepid bathwater there he lay, the back of his lolling head against the porcelain rim, the Dark Prince with slack mouth, spittle on his chin, eyes half shut and showing only a clouded crescent of gray, like mucus. His hair was damp and his head sleek as a seal’s. The body that had seemed so beautifully sculpted to her only a few hours ago was now strangely bent, the shoulders rounded and chest collapsed, a ridge of fat at the waist, his penis shrunken to a stub of flesh lifting wanly upward in the scummy water. Oh, he’d vomited in the water! Skeins and puddles of vomit surrounding him. Yet he was breathing, he was alive. That was all that mattered to me. She managed to wake him. He shook off her hands and cursed her. He heaved himself to his feet, slopping water onto the tile floor, and cursed again, losing his balance and almost falling in the slippery porcelain tub so that she had to catch him to keep him from cracking his skull, and held him in her arms, which trembled with strain; for the Dark Prince was a heavy man, not tall but compact and muscled. She pleaded with him, she begged him to be careful, he called her cunt! (but without knowing her, he could not mean insult to her) but gripped her hard, and after some minutes she managed to maneuver him out of the tub, sitting again on the rim swaying and mumbling and his eyes shut, and she soaked a washcloth in cold water and gently wiped his face and did what she could to wipe patches of vomit from his body, still she was concerned that he begin to vomit again, he might collapse and die for his breath came erratically, his mouth slack and fallen, and he seemed not to know where he was, yet after several applications of the washcloth he revived to a degree and got to his feet, and she wrapped him in a bath towel and led him into the bedroom, her arm around his waist, his pale hairy legs and bare feet dripping water, she was laughing gently to assure him it was all right, he was safe with her, she would take care of him; stumbling then and cursing her again cunt! stupid cunt! he fell sideways onto the bed with such violence that the springs creaked loudly and she was in terror he’d broken this bed which did not belong to her, the handsome antique brass bed of a well-to-do woman friend of Max Pearlman residing in Paris. Next she lifted his feet, his feet that were heavy as concrete bricks, and positioned his damp head on a pillow, all the while murmuring to him, comforting him as she’d done with the Ex-Athlete sometimes and with other citizens of the City of Sand; she was feeling better now, more optimistic now, Norma Jeane Baker was by nature an optimistic girl, hadn’t she sworn herself to eternal optimism crouched on the roof of the Home staring at the lighted RKO tower miles away in Hollywood, I pledge! I vow! I will! I will never give in! and now it dawned on her that t
heir ugly ignominious scene was in fact a movie scene; its contours if not its details were familiar, and in a way romantic; she was Claudette Colbert, and he was Clark Gable; no, she was Carole Lombard and he was Clark Gable; there was a script for this situation, and if neither of them knew it they were gifted actors and might improvise.