Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  7

  How happy she was! How healthy. The Playwright’s spirits lifted in the Captain’s House. In this summer place by the sea. He was more in love with his wife than ever. And so grateful.

  “She’s wonderful. Pregnancy agrees with her. Even morning nausea, she’s cheerful about. She says, ‘This is how it’s supposed to be, I guess!’” He laughed. He so adored his wife, he had a tendency to mimic her light, lilting, lyric voice. He was the Playwright: the subtle, and not-so-subtle, distinctions between voices fascinated him. “Except, if I have one regret—time passes so quickly.”

  He was talking on the phone. In another room of the spacious house, or in the back yard in the overgrown garden, she was singing to herself, utterly preoccupied, and would never have heard.

  Of course, he’d been worried. If not worried, “concerned.”

  Her emotions, her moods. Her fragility. Her fear of being laughed at. Her fear of being “spied upon”—photographed without her knowledge or consent. It had been a nightmare to him, her behavior in England. Her behavior for which he’d been as wholly unprepared as an explorer in the Antarctic equipped for a summer stroll in Central Park. The only women he knew intimately were his mother, his former wife, his adult daughter. All were capable of emotional outbursts of course and yet all behaved within the compass of what might be called fair play, or sanity. Norma was as different from these women as if she belonged to another species. She struck out at him blindly, yet woundingly.

  Let me die! It’s what you all want, isn’t it?

  The Playwright would think how, in a play, such an accusation would have a ring of truth to it. Even as the accusation was strenuously denied, the audience would understand. Yes, it’s so.

  Yet in actual life the strategies of drama were not applicable. In the extremities of emotion, terrible things were said that were not true and were not meant to be true, only just the expression of hurt, anger, confusion, fear; fleeting emotions, not obdurate truths. He’d been deeply wounded and had had to wonder: did Norma really believe that others would have liked her to die? Did she believe that he, her husband, would have liked her to die? Did she want to believe that? It sickened him to think that his wife whom he loved more than he loved his own life should believe, or wish to believe, such a thing of him.

  Yet here in Galapagos Cove, far from England, these ugly memories didn’t intrude. Rarely did they speak of Norma’s career. Of “Marilyn.” She was Norma here, and would be known locally by that name. She was happy, and healthier than he’d seen her; he didn’t want to risk upsetting her by talking of finances, of business, of Hollywood, or her work. It impressed him that she had the power to so completely shut out that part of her life. He didn’t believe any man in her position could do so, or would wish to do so. Certainly he himself could not.

  But, of course, the Playwright’s career didn’t terrify him. His public identity was agreeable to him. He was proud of his work and hopeful of the future. For all his reserve and irony he acknowledged he was an ambitious man. Smiling to himself, thinking yes, he could use a little more acclaim and a little more income.

  The previous year, with a play on Broadway and regional productions of earlier plays throughout the United States, he’d made less than $40,000. Before taxes.

  He’d refused to answer questions put to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He’d refused to allow “Marilyn Monroe” to be photographed with the committee chairman. (Though he’d been told that the committee would “go easy” on him if such a photo session could be arranged. What blackmail!) He’d been found in contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000 and his case was being appealed and was certain, his lawyers said, to be overturned; yet in the meantime he had legal fees to pay and no end in sight. HUAC had been harassing him now for six years. It was no accident that the IRS was auditing his income. And he had alimony payments to make to Esther, he meant to be a decent, generous ex-spouse. Even with “Marilyn Monroe’s” income, they hadn’t much money. There were medical expenses, and with Norma’s pregnancy and the baby’s imminent birth there would be more.

  “Well. It’s a theme of my plays, isn’t it? ‘For mankind, economy is destiny.’”

  Norma seemed truly to have repudiated her career. She might have a gift for acting but she hadn’t, she said, the temperament or the nerves. After The Prince and the Showgirl she refused even to think of making another movie. She’d escaped, she said, with her life—“but only just barely.”

  So she made a joke of the nightmare in England. Slyly and elliptically and without seeming to know, or to allow that she knew, the gravity of what had really happened. Her stomach pumped. A lethal amount of drugs in her blood. The British doctor querying him, was his wife consciously suicidal. No, Norma didn’t know. And he had not the heart to tell her, or the courage.

  He dreaded spoiling her recovery. Her new happiness.

  When she’d learned she was pregnant, she’d returned from the doctor’s office to seek out her husband (in his study at home, where he worked most days) and whisper the news in his ear. “Daddy, it’s happened. It’s happened to me at last. I’m going to have a baby.” She’d held on to him, weeping. With joy, with relief. He’d been stunned, yet happy for her. Yes, of course he was happy for her. A baby! A third child of his, born in his fiftieth year; at a time in his career when he felt himself stalled, uninspired. . . . But yes of course he was happy. He would never allow his wife to guess that he wasn’t as happy as she. For Norma had tried so hard to become pregnant. She’d talked of little else; she’d stared trancelike at babies and small children in the street; almost he’d begun to pity her and to dread her frantic lovemaking. Yet it had turned out well after all, hadn’t it? Like a neatly constructed domestic play.

  The first two acts, at least.

  As wife and mother-to-be, Norma had found her finest role. It was not a Marilyn Monroe glamour-girl role. Yet it was one for which, physically, she seemed fated. She walked about naked boasting that her breasts were growing even larger and harder. She was proud of her stomach swelling “like a melon.” Since coming to Maine she laughed spontaneously for no reason except she was happy. She prepared most of their meals at home. She brought fresh-brewed coffee and a single flower in a vase to the Playwright in the late morning where he worked in an upstairs bedroom of the Captain’s House overlooking the ocean. She was gracious if oddly shy with his friends when they came to visit; she listened eagerly as women spoke to her of their pregnancy and childbirth experiences, of which they were happy to speak, and at length; the Playwright heard his wife tell one of these women that her own mother had once told her she’d loved being pregnant, it’s the only time a woman truly feels at home in her body, and in the world—“Is that true?” The Playwright hadn’t lingered to hear the answer; he wondered what such a revelation meant, for a man. Are we never at home in our bodies? In the world? Except in the act of sexual intercourse, transmitting our seed to the female?

  It was a grim, truncated identity! He didn’t believe such lurid sex mysticism for a minute.

  Norma was the most devoted mother to a baby yet unborn. She would not allow anyone to smoke in Baby’s vicinity. She was always jumping up to open windows or to close windows against a draft. She laughed at herself but could not stop. “Baby makes his wishes known. Norma is just the vessel.” Did she believe this? Sometimes fighting nausea she ate six or seven times a day, small but nutritious meals. She chewed her food thoroughly to a pulp. She drank a good deal of milk which, she’d said, she’d always hated. She’d acquired an appetite for oatmeal with raw brown sugar, coarse-ground brown bread, very rare steaks leaking blood, raw eggs, raw carrots, raw oysters, and cantaloupes eaten virtually through their chewy rinds. She devoured mashed potatoes with ice-cold chunks of unsalted butter out of a mixing bowl, with a big spoon. She cleaned her plate at mealtimes, and often his. “Am I your good girl, Daddy?” she asked wistfully. He laughed and kissed her. Recalling with a sta
b of pleasure that years ago he’d kissed his young daughter to reward her for such accomplishments as cleaned plates.

  When his daughter had been two, three years old.

  “You’re my good girl, darling. My only love.”

  He liked it less, though he kept his feelings totally to himself, that Norma had acquired from a Christian Science reading room on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan a slew of materials including books by Mary Baker Eddy and a publication called The Sentinel in which true believers shared testimonies of their prayer-and-healing experiences. As a rationalist, a liberal and a Jew-agnostic, the Playwright felt only contempt for such “religion” and could but hope that Norma took it very lightly, in the way she skimmed the dictionary, encyclopedias, secondhand books, even clothing and seed catalogs as if seeking—what? Some stray wisdom to be put to use for Baby’s well-being? He was particularly touched by Norma’s long lists of vocabulary words, which often he found about the house in odd places like the bathroom, on the cracked porcelain rim of the old tub, or on top of the refrigerator, or on the top step of the cellar stairs, absurd and even archaic words neatly printed in a schoolgirl hand: obbligato, obcordate, obdurate, obeisance, obelisk, obelize. (“I didn’t graduate from high school like you and your friends, Daddy! Let alone college. What I’m doing is, I guess—I’m studying for my finals.”) She wrote poetry, too, curled up for long dreamy hours in a window seat of the Captain’s House, at which he would never glance without her permission.

  (Though he wondered what his Norma, his barely literate Magda, could possibly be writing!)

  His Norma, his Magda, his bewitching wife. The synthetic Marilyn hair was growing out at the roots; her true hair was a warm honey-brown, and wavy. And those sumptuous big-nippled breasts, enlarged for an infant’s nursing. And the fever of her kisses, and her hands in an ecstasy of gratitude caressing him, the male, the father-of-the-baby. Outside his clothes and inside. Running her hands swiftly up inside his shirt, down inside his trousers, as she leaned against him kissing him. “Oh, Daddy. Oh.”

  She was his geisha. (“I met them in Tokyo once, those geisha girls. They’re classy!”)

  She was his shiksa. (The very word tentative and salacious in her mouth, never quite accurately pronounced—“That’s why you love me, I guess? Daddy? ’Cause I’m your blond shik-sta?”)

  He, the husband, the male, was both privileged and overwhelmed. Blessed and frightened. From the first, their first touch, their first unmistakable sexual touch, their first real kiss, he’d felt that there was a superior power in the woman seeking to flow into him. She was his Magda, his inspiration, and yet—so much more!

  Like lightning, this power. It could justify his existence as a playwright and as a man, or it could destroy him.

  One morning near the end of June, when they’d been living in the Captain’s House for three idyllic weeks, the Playwright came downstairs much earlier than usual, at dawn, wakened by a passing thunderstorm that had shaken the house. Yet, within minutes, the worst of the storm seemed to be over; the house’s windows were illuminated by a quickly dawning gauzy-ocean light. Norma had already slipped from the four-poster bed. Only her scent remaining on the bedsheets. A strand or two of her hair, glinting. Pregnancy made her drowsy at unpredictable times, she napped like a cat whenever sleep overtook her; but always she woke at dawn, or even earlier, when the first birds began to sing, stirred by Baby into action. “Know what? Baby’s hungry. He wants his momma to eat.”

  The Playwright walked through the downstairs of the old house. Bare feet on bare floorboards. “Darling, where are you?” A man of the city, accustomed to despoiled city air and the incessant city noises of Manhattan, he breathed with satisfaction and a kind of proprietary joy this fresh chilly ocean air. There, the Atlantic Ocean! His ocean. He’d been the first person (he believed) to bring Norma within sight of the Atlantic; certainly he’d been the first to travel with her across the Atlantic, to England. Hadn’t she whispered to him, how many times in their most intimate embraces, her cheeks damp with tears Oh, Daddy. Before you I wasn’t anyone. I wasn’t born!

  Where was Norma now? He paused in the living room, a long narrow space with an unaccountably uneven floor, to stare outside at the breaking sky. How powerful such visions must have seemed to primitive man, as if a god were about to appear, presenting himself to mankind. The sky of dawn, at the ocean’s edge. A blaze of spectacular light. Fiery, golden, shading in the northwestern sky into the bruising dark of thunderclouds. But the thunderclouds were being blown away. The Playwright, staring, wondered if Norma too had been drawn to this sight? He felt a stirring of pride, that he, her husband, could offer her such gifts. She seemed to have no ideas of her own of where to travel. There were no such morning skies in Manhattan. No such morning skies in Rahway, New Jersey, in even the innocence of childhood. Through rain-splashed windowpanes the light of dawn was refracted onto the wallpapered interior of the living room in wisps and curls of flecked fire. As if light were life, living. The single carved mahogany grandfather clock that Norma had managed to rouse into life was calmly ticking, its smooth dully gleaming gold pendulum keeping an unhurried beat. The Captain’s House was a snug ship floating on a grassy-green sea, and the Playwright, the man of the city, was himself the Captain. Bringing my family into safe harbor. At last! The Playwright in the innocence of male vanity. In the blindness of hope. Feeling in that instant as if he’d penetrated the opaque layers of Time to realize a communion with generations of men who’d lived in this house through the decades, husbands and fathers like himself.

  “Norma, darling? Where are you?”

  A vague idea she might be in the kitchen, he’d imagined he heard the refrigerator door open and shut, but she wasn’t there. Was she outside? He went out onto the screened-in porch where the floor matting, some sort of braided bamboo, was wet; droplets of water gleamed like jewels on the green tubular porch furniture. He could see Norma nowhere in the back lawn and wondered if she’d gone down to the pebbly beach. So early? In this chill, and wind? In the northern sky the thunderous storm clouds had been beaten back. Most of the sky was now a brilliant bronze-gold, cobwebbed with flamey orange. Oh, why was he a “man of letters”—why not an artist, a painter? A photographer? One to pay homage to the beauty of the natural world, not to pick and poke and fuss over human foolishness and frailty. As a liberal, a believer in mankind, why was he always exposing mankind’s failings, blaming governments and “capitalism” for the evil in man’s soul? But there was no evil in nature, and no ugliness. Norma is nature. In her, there can be no evil, no ugliness. “Norma? Come look. The sky . . .!” He returned to the darkened kitchen. Through the kitchen and the laundry room in the direction of the garage, but there before the door to the garage was the cellar door, ajar; and a woman’s figure in white just inside in the shadows, seated or crouched on the top step. The cellar light, operated from a switch, was very feeble; if you intended to go into the cellar, you needed a flashlight. But Norma hadn’t a flashlight and evidently didn’t intend to go down into the cellar. Was she talking to someone there? To herself? She was wearing only her diaphanous white eyelet nightgown, and her hair, dark at the roots, was disheveled. He was about to speak her name another time when he hesitated, not wanting to startle her, and in that instant she turned, her azure eyes widened even as the pupils were dilated, unseeing. He saw that she held in both hands a plate and on the plate there was a chunk of raw hamburger, leaking blood; she’d been eating the hamburger from the plate, like a cat, and licking the blood. She saw him, her staring husband. She laughed.

  “Oh, Daddy! You scared me.”

  Baby was soon to be three months in the womb.

  8

  She was so excited! Guests soon to arrive.

  His friends. His friends from Manhattan who were intellectuals: writers and playwrights, directors, dramaturges, poets, editors. She felt (oh, it was silly she supposed!) that simply being in the vicinity of such superior people couldn’t help but have
a beneficent effect upon the baby in her womb. Like the solemn recitation of vocabulary words she meant to memorize. Like passages from Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Darwin, Freud. (In a used-book store in Galapagos Cove, in fact somebody’s musty, crazily cluttered cellar, she’d found a paperback copy of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents for sale for fifty cents—“Oh, this is a miracle. Just what I’ve been looking for.”) There was a nourishment of food, and there was a nourishment of the spiritual and the intellectual. Her mother had brought her up in an atmosphere of books, music, superior people if only just Studio employees in relatively low-paying positions, people like Aunt Jess and Uncle Clive, and her own baby would be far better nourished, she would see to that. “I’ve married a man of genius. Baby is the heir of genius. He’ll live into the twenty-first century, with no memory of war.”

  The Captain’s House, on two acres of land above the ocean. It was a true honeymoon house. She knew it could not be, but she fantasized Baby born in this house, in the four-poster bed, delivered (by a midwife?) with as much pain and blood as necessary, and Norma would not scream, not once. She had the uneasy memory (she’d told only Carlo, who’d seemed to believe her, saying yes he’d had the identical experience) of her own mother screaming and screaming in agony at her birth, the physical horror of it, like maddened pythons grappling with one another; she wanted to spare Baby such an experience, and a cruel memory to endure through his life.

  Guests soon to arrive for the weekend! Norma Jeane had become so domestic, so thrilled to be domestic; it was no screen role she’d ever played, yet it was the role for which she’d been born. Far more the housewife-hostess than the Playwright’s first wife (he’d told her) and she liked it, he was surprised and impressed. Marrying a temperamental actress, what a risk! A blond “sexpot” and “pinup”—what a risk! She meant to make her husband understand she was no risk, and it was deeply gratifying to her, he’d come to understand. She knew how his friends had taken him aside to exclaim, “Why, Marilyn is lovely! Marilyn is adorable. And nothing like what anyone might expect.” She’d even heard a few of them marvel, “Why, Marilyn is intelligent. And well read. I’ve just been talking with her about. . . .” Now some of them knew to call her not Marilyn but Norma. “Why, Norma is remarkably well read! She’s read my latest book, in fact.”