Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Monroe laughed mischievously. “How’s about a good swift kick in the balls?”
You’re my friend, Fleece—aren’t you?
Norma Jeane, you know I am.
You’ve come back into my life for a reason.
I always knew you.
You did! I loved you so.
I loved you too, Mouse.
We were going to run away together, Fleece.
We did! Don’tcha remember?
I was afraid. But I trusted you.
Oh, Mouse, you shouldna. I wasn’t never good.
Fleece, you were!
To you, maybe. But not in my heart.
You were kind to me. I never forgot. That’s why I want to give you things now. And in my will.
Hey, don’t talk like that. I don’t like fucking talk like that.
It’s just realistic, Fleece. In this movie I’m making, a cowboy tells me We all got to go sometime.
Shit! Why’s that funny?
I didn’t mean to laugh, Fleece. I laugh sometimes . . . I don’t mean.
I don’t get why it’s funny. You seen dead people? I have. I seen ’em up close. I smelled ’em. They ain’t funny, Norma Jeane.
Oh, Fleece, I know. It’s just We all got to go sometime is a cliché.
A what?
Something been said before. Lots of times.
That’s why it’s funny?
I wasn’t really laughing, Fleece. Don’t get angry.
Everything’s been said before by somebody, that don’t mean it’s right to be laughed at.
Fleece, I’m sorry.
In the Home, you were the saddest little thing. Cried every night like your heart was broken & wet your bed.
No, I didn’t.
The girls who wet their beds, they had to have oilcloth instead of a bottom sheet. Didn’t smell too good. That was always little Mouse.
Fleece, that isn’t true!
Hell, I was mean to you. I shouldna.
Fleece, you weren’t mean to me! You protected me.
I protected you. But I was mean to you. I liked to make the other girls laugh.
You made me laugh.
I feel bad, Norma Jeane. I took your Christmas present from you that time & you cried.
No.
Yeah, I had it. I ripped the damn tail off it. The reason I think I did, I was jealous of it.
I don’t believe that, Fleece.
That little striped tiger I ripped the tail off. I had it in my bed for a while & later I threw it away. I was ashamed I guess.
Oh, Fleece, I thought you I-liked me.
I did! I liked you the best. You were my Mouse.
I’m sorry I left you. I had to.
Is your mother still alive?
Oh, yes!
You’d cry a lot. Your mother gave you away.
My mother was sick.
Your mother was crazy & you hated her. Remember, you & me were gonna go kill her where she was locked up at Norwalk.
Fleece, that isn’t true! That’s a terrible thing to say.
We were gonna burn it down. We were.
We were not!
She wouldn’t let you be adopted. That’s why you hated her.
I never hated my mother. I l-love my mother.
Don’t worry, “Marilyn.” I won’t tell anybody. That’s our secret.
It isn’t a secret, Fleece. It isn’t true. I always loved my mother.
You hated her so, she wouldn’t let you be adopted. Remember? Nasty old witch wouldn’t sign the papers.
Fleece, I never wanted to be adopted! I had a m-mother.
Hey: I been in Norwalk myself awhile.
Norwalk? Why?
Why d’you think, dummy?
Were you—sick?
Ask ’em. They do what the fuck they want with you, you can’t stop ’em. Fuckers.
You were in—Norwalk? When?
How in hell I know when? A long time ago. There was the War, I signed up with the WACS. I was trained in San Diego. I was shipped out to England. Me, Fleece, in England! I got sick, though. I had to be sent back to the States I guess.
Oh, Fleece. I’m sorry.
Hell, I don’t look back. I’d dress like a man, nobody bothered me mostly. Unless something got fucked up.
I like the way you look, Fleece. I saw you right away, in that crowd. You could be a good-looking guy. I like that.
Yeah but I don’t have a prick, see? If you have a cunt & not the other, you have to do what the pricks want. I’d use my knife on them if I could. I wasn’t a shrinking violet. I’m scared of more things now than I was then. I wanted beauty in my life. I lived in Monterey, in San Diego, & in L.A. I followed your career.
I was hoping you would, Fleece. All the girls.
I knew you right away. “Marilyn.” I saw Don’t Bother to Knock & wanted you to push that little brat out the window. I don’t like children! In Niagara I couldn’t believe how grown up you were, & beautiful. It excited me, though, when he strangled you.
Fleece! That’s a strange thing to say.
I only just tell the truth, Norma Jeane. You know Fleece.
That’s why I love you, Fleece. I need you in my life. Just to be in my life. See? We can talk once in a while.
I could be your driver. I can drive a car.
I’m Roslyn now. This woman in the movie I’m doing. I’m not an actress, just a woman. I try to be good. I’ve been hurt by men, I’m divorced. I’m not bitter, though. I’ll find my way. I live in Reno, I mean as Roslyn. But I never gamble in the casinos, I’d only just lose.
I could be your driver, I said.
The Studio provides a driver, I guess.
I could be Marilyn’s bodyguard.
Bodyguard?
You think I’m not strong? I am. Don’t underestimate me, Norma Jeane.
I’m not—
This knife? I carry this knife. I’m protected from any fucker fucking with me.
Oh, Fleece.
What? This scares you?
Oh, Fleece, I guess I . . . I don’t like a knife.
Well, this is my knife. This is my protection.
Fleece, I think you should put that knife away.
Yeah? Where? Put it away where?
In a—where you took it out of.
The blade? I should put the blade—where?
Fleece, don’t scare me. I n-never meant—
You look kind of scared, Marilyn. Jesus.
I’m not. I’m only just—
Like I’d hurt you? Norma Jeane? You? I’d never hurt you.
Oh, I know that, Fleece. I hope so.
My little Mouse.
It just makes me n-nervous. A knife like that.
I’m not afraid to use this to protect myself. I could protect you.
I know you could, Fleece. I appreciate that.
Somebody comes up to Marilyn & says something rude, or pushes against her. I’ll be your bodyguard.
I don’t know, Fleece.
There’s those who want to hurt Marilyn. I could protect you.
I don’t know, Fleece.
Hell you don’t know! That’s why you wanted me back.
Fleece, I—
OK I put the knife away, OK there ain’t no knife. Never was no knife. See?
Thank you, Fleece.
I always knew you, Norma Jeane. I never forgot you. I saw you were Marilyn, for all of us.
Kissing Fleece, did I dare kiss Fleece or it was a dream of kissing Fleece & being kissed by (& bitten by!) Fleece, & my lips raw afterward, swollen. Kissing Fleece like inhaling ether. So fierce & orangey-smelling & my heart brimmed to bursting.
oh God thank You.
The anniversary. Their fourth. Came & went unheralded.
The estranged husband. Discovered it wasn’t only Gable she was entranced by (& possibly fucking) there was the yet more enigmatic Montgomery Clift. Alcoholic and charmingly deranged and his handsome face ravaged and scarred from a motorcycle accident that had nearly killed
The husband had come to fear Clift as a mystery deeper than even his wife, whose suicidal malaise (he was certain) had only to do with the loss of their baby. That terrible day in Maine that had changed their lives forever. A woman’s perpetual and exhausting grief.
A woman is her womb, isn’t she?
If not her womb, what is a woman?
Since Maine, their relations had permanently altered. Since Nevada, she no longer welcomed him into her bed. Yet he knew she wanted a baby as desperately as ever; perhaps more desperately, now she’d had another birthday and her health was increasingly unstable. As the doctor had predicted she had frequent uterine pain, “spotting” that terrified her. Her menstrual periods were as painful as ever, and irregular.
Of course he’d never told her what the doctor had said. Her “scarred” uterus. Her “crude” abortions.
That would be his, the husband’s, secret. That he knew, and that she could not know what he knew.
If not her womb, what is a woman?
At the happy ending of The Misfits, Roslyn and her cowboy lover Gay Langland speak of having children. (No matter the disparity in their ages.) After the trauma of the lassoed and finally released mustangs, they are driving “home.” They are guided by a “north star.”
If I couldn’t give you a baby in life, Norma, I will give you a baby in this dream of you.
Did it matter that the Blond Actress regarded him, the master of words, with scorn? In the daily rushes, Roslyn was all shimmering sensitivity. Those who abhorred the Blond Actress were seduced by Roslyn. It would be acknowledged that Roslyn was the most subtle, the most complex, the most brilliant of all screen performances by Marilyn Monroe; even in the midst of filming, with disaster a possibility at any hour, this fact was known. Roslyn was like a beautiful vase that has been broken and shattered yet by patience, craft, and cunning meticulously restored, fragment by fragment, bit by bit, with tweezers and glue, you see only the restored vase and have no knowledge of the shattered vase, still less of the monomaniacal energy that has gone into its restoration. The illusion of wholeness, of beauty. Delusion?
I’m losing her. I must save her. The estranged husband would not have wished to admit even to himself that he’d abandoned his playwriting career. His deepest self. His life in New York City among his theater friends whom he respected as he could not respect filmmakers. H he recognized as a genius of a kind; yet not his kind, for he required solitude, inwardness, a probing of the imagination, not an aggressive prodding. He’d become, in the West, a servant not only of the Blond Actress, who devoured those in her service with the greed of the perpetually ravenous, but of The Studio; he, too, was on their payroll, he too was “for hire.” He told himself it was only temporary. He told himself that The Misfits would be a masterpiece that would redeem him. An act of husbandly love that would save his marriage. Yet his soul was elsewhere: in the East. He missed his book-crammed steam-heated little apartment on 72nd Street, he missed his daily walks into Central Park, he missed the quarrelsome company of Max Pearlman. He missed his younger self! Strange that plays of his were being performed, but these were plays he’d written years before; he wasn’t involved in their productions and would have had no time had he been asked. He’d become a classic while still alive: an alarming fate. Like Marilyn Monroe idolized by millions of strangers even as the woman herself was vomiting into a toilet, the door ajar so that he, the despairing husband, the revulsed husband, was obliged to hear and yet not to question.
“Nobody likes to be spied on, mister: got it?”
And another time he’d found her in the steamy bathroom shaving her legs, her hand so shaky or her vision so blurred she’d nicked and cut herself, her dead-white skin, her slender beautiful legs, and was bleeding from a dozen miniature wounds. Almost sobbing in her rage at his concern, the very look on his face: “Get out of here! Who asked you! Go to hell out of here! I’m so ugly? So disgusting? Jewish men despise women, that’s your problem, mister, not mine.”
He’d left her, screaming at him. He’d shut the door. Maybe she’d seen something in his face more than husbandly concern.
From that time he watched her covertly, without comment. He would have wanted to tell her I won’t judge you. I only just want to save you. He’d permanently set aside his dramatic work. All that remained of years of writing were fragments, sketches. Scenes that began and ended on a single sheet of paper. He’d abandoned The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. No longer could he believe in his naive vision of Magda, “the girl of the people.” As the Blond Actress had shrewdly seen, Magda would have been so much angrier than he knew. But he couldn’t envision his Magda that way. He couldn’t envision his adolescent Isaac self any longer. His dreams of Back There had long since ceased. Back There had meant emotional upset, yet inspiration for his writing; since marriage to the Blond Actress, little of his previous life remained. Rahway, New Jersey, had become more distant to him now than the miseries of London during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, when he’d given up even trying to write in order to care for his disintegrating wife. (He couldn’t begrudge her the surprising success of Monroe’s performance in that waxworks of a film. Critics had adored her. She’d even won an award from the Italian film industry! Not even a booby prize for him.) Yet he could not write about her and their marriage. Except in private, in secret. Never would I expose her. Betray her. I will not.
For the truth was, he still loved her. He was waiting to again love her.
Even if she repudiated him publicly. Even if she filed for divorce.
Covertly he watched her, without comment or judgment. She is deceiving herself. She isn’t Roslyn. She’s fighting for her life to wrest this movie away from the male actors. Her rivals. The Blond Actress perceived herself and was perceived by the world as a victim, yet in her innermost heart she was rapacious, pitiless. He’d seen her reading Darwin’s Origin of Species with such intensity you would think she was reading of her own future. Marilyn Monroe, reading Darwin! No one would believe it. Now she was reading Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal! (Where’d she get this book? He’d been astonished to see her extract it out of the chaos of one of her suitcases, leaf through it, and begin to read, where she stood, frowning and moving her her lips.) But rarely now did she speak with him about her reading, and if she still wrote poetry she didn’t show it to him. She no longer read Christian Science material. She’d left her books on Jewish history and the Holocaust behind in the Captain’s House.
A bloody pulp soaking into the dirt floor of the cellar.
In Reno, her most intense rivalry was with H. For H was one of those men who seemingly felt no desire for Marilyn Monroe. She complained of H. “Everybody says he’s a genius. Some genius! What he loves is gambling and horses. He’s in this project for the money. He doesn’t respect actors.”
The playwright husband asked, “Why are we in this project?”
“Maybe you for the money. Me, I’m fighting for my life.”
There’s a curse on the actor, always you are seeking an audience. And when the audience sees your hunger it’s like smelling blood. Their cruelty begins.
. . .
&nb
What she showed me was she wasn’t Roslyn. She was nothing to do with Roslyn. Roslyn who loves these men, these losers, and nurses them. She could play Roslyn like a virtuoso musician plays his instrument. No more. She wanted me to know. Only then she could finish the scene.
Fleece! She’d known it might be a mistake but what the hell, it’s like watching your hand toss a pair of losing dice. You have to watch.
She’d bought a plane ticket for Fleece to come to Reno for a week to stay at the Zephyr Hotel to keep her company when she was blue & to watch the filming of The Misfits. Shake hands with the legendary Clark Gable! Montgomery Clift! Her husband disapproved. Fleece wasn’t “stable,” he said, you could see that at thirty feet, & she retorted, “Am I stable? Is ‘Marilyn’?” He said, “The issue isn’t you. The issue is this person you call ‘Fleet.’” “Fleece.” (He’d met Fleece briefly in Hollywood, on a sidewalk. Sulky Fleece in soiled suede cowboy hat, electric-blue satin shirt, tight black jeans showing the V of her skinny crotch & fake palomino-hide boots. She’d shaken the playwright’s hand with exaggerated courtesy & called him “sir.”) Norma Jeane said, “Fleece is the only one who knows me. Who remembers Norma Jeane from the orphanage.” The husband said gently, “But why is that a good thing, darling?”