From the ferryboat we watched the passing of the Queen Elizabeth bound for Southampton. There was something in the Cunard ship’s great majesty, in its two grey funnels gliding over the Bay, that made one imagine Europe must be a firm retort to the comedy of America. But no. The matter of the passing ship opened up a difference between Charlie and Marilyn. She held me with one hand and shielded her eyes with the other. ‘They’re going in exactly the wrong direction,’ said Charlie.
‘I wouldn’t say so,’ she said. ‘The nice people will be sitting down with silver forks in an hour. They’ll be drinking cold wine and thinking of the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square.’
‘Your ideas are very beautiful, Marilyn. But ludicrous.’
‘Well, that’s what people say. But I think those people are heading toward a little culture, no?’
‘I don’t think so. They’re leaving the culture behind. The best of Europe lives here now.’
Marilyn was thinking of Yves Montand. She was thinking of darkly clever French movies. She always thought Europeans were sniffy with her and felt compelled to give them credit for that. But Charlie was thinking of the Jews: the great escape, the miracle of survival. Charlie was an interesting new type in those days. He had the confidence, the brio, the spiritual brawn of literate young American Jews whelped on Bellow and the first book by Philip Roth. He could magic certainty out of his parents’ doubts; he could sleep with girls and drive cars and think about the condition of his people in a culture of waste. Charlie craved. Charlie yearned. He soaked up history and sensuality and spoke of the intricate dangers to world peace: Jesus Christ, Charlie was ready for anything in 1961. He was a junior editor in publishing. He made his point about the ship and Europe, but what he mostly wanted to do was kick a thousand survival myths down the field of a lighted stadium. Good old Charlie. He breezed into the elevator at the Viking Press each day with a copy of Partisan Review in the pocket of his windbreaker. Ruby-cheeked and ready to go, he travelled up to the eleventh floor, strode past the sexy girls with history behind him and a dick in his pants. His dark eyes were happy and naive as he made his way down the corridor, winking at himself, dwelling on the existential purity of a life of crime and the untold mysteries of the orgasm. He had read all Mailer’s essays. He cared for jazz, movies, and was moved by the psychic terrorism of the Bomb. Charlie was far into Henderson the Rain King and the familiar old voice within, which says ‘I want, I want, I want . . . raving and demanding, making a chaos, desiring, desiring, and disappointed continually.’ One day at a breakfast joint he tried to talk to my owner about the book’s symbols. ‘Gevalt,’ said Marilyn. ‘Don’t talk to me about symbols. Aren’t they things you clash together?’
Charlie was especially sweet on the movies. As I said, for two years he and five friends had made it their business to shadow my companion around Manhattan. Not in a creepy way: they were fans, and Marilyn felt they looked after her when she was on the East Coast. It was true she hadn’t seen so much of him recently: he was growing up. On the ferryboat to Staten Island, she felt tickled to be with him in an ordinary way, so clever and respectful, so clean and modern and alive, the Charlies of the world. The boat seemed to slow as we passed Ellis Island and I must admit I felt a stab of pain at the memory of my quarantine. It wouldn’t be long before we were California-bound again. Meanwhile, what a lovely day we had in the soft breeze with Charlie and his vast opinions about everything. Ellis Island was in a state of decay with long grass around the buildings and the windows broken. ‘So many languages were spoken there once,’ Charlie said. ‘In those halls and corridors. So many. But they were all saying the same thing, weren’t they? Let me start again.’
‘I guess that’s true,’ she said.
‘Like Irving Howe said, quoting one of the immigrants: “America was in everybody’s mouth”.’
Marilyn put her arms behind her on the railing and the wind blew the tails of her headscarf as she smiled. She was looking back at Manhattan. ‘It’s a place to get lost in. It’s a place where you can disappear,’ she said. ‘And doesn’t everybody want that eventually?’ The boat moved on and the wastes of Ellis Island were quickly supplanted by the stone cartoon of Liberty, thousands of starlings wheeling over the statue, forming a grey elastic cloud around her head. From the deck of the ferryboat, I could hear the birds: they weren’t murmuring at all, they were joshing as a single choir, poking fun at the human notion of liberty. ‘They call that freedom?’ The starlings made the observation into an occasion for selfcelebration. Birds are always talking out of charity to themselves, snapping, preening, touting the superiority of their own experience. They pitied people to ennoble themselves. That was my thought as the boat rode into the foam.
‘Arthur’s brother Kermit always said their family left Poland clutching sewing machines,’ Marilyn said. ‘That’s a fact. Their father Isidore is a dream of a man. When he was a kid he turned up on Ellis Island with a scab on his head the size of a silver dollar.’
‘My people were the same,’ said Charlie. ‘Garments. They made coats. They lost it all in the Depression. How does that sound? If immigration taught my people how to be capitalists, the Depression taught us how to be leftists.’
Marilyn put me on a leash and I walked around the deck quoits.
‘To understand the pure good of America you have to have been a communist in your youth,’ said Charlie. ‘You have to have felt, at least once, that after a certain point money-making is aggression. It murders people.’
‘That’s the way Arthur talks in his plays. But I don’t know about real life. He always seemed pretty interested in money to me.’
‘That’s the way it is. You hate it and you love it. You hate loving it. You love hating it.’
‘Hey, buster,’ I said, licking his trouser leg. ‘Stick to being a fan of the movies. You don’t know the half of what people want. You young guys wouldn’t know a cause if it slapped you in the face!’
‘Okay, wise guy,’ she said. ‘What else is true?’
‘Garments,’ he said. ‘You throw a little survivors’ guilt in among all those American rags and you’ve got yourself a national literature.’
‘Ha! The cheek,’ I said.
‘Arthur used to read Bashevis Singer to me,’ said Marilyn. ‘I converted, you know?’
‘To Singer?’
‘To the whole cannoli.’
‘Good for you,’ Charlie said. ‘Now we’re equal.’ She laughed and then hid her laughter, afraid she might be recognised. ‘Those dockyards over there have stories to tell,’ he continued. ‘We all have stories to tell and they’re never the ones your family wanted.’
‘That’s for sure.’
They looked over at the chemical plants of New Jersey. The photographer Sam Shaw once told her they only produced chlorine and cyanide. My memory gave me a little gust of almonds and evil, a memory of something I’d absorbed about Hitler feeding poison to his dog Blondi. I suddenly felt grateful for Charlie and his generation, the things they might do to take the world forward. The pair talked about California and Marilyn’s forthcoming trip to Mexico for her divorce. It seemed to her that Charlie was always sizing her up for an education, but she found that cute in someone so fundamentally green. ‘None of us has our own names,’ he said. ‘You’re not you. I’m not me. Nobody in America is who they are.’
‘What do your parents call you?
‘Gedaliah. The Jews are my unconscious,’ he said. ‘My parents were wage slaves. They scrubbed and cleaned and now they are proud to say they know nothing of the working class.’
‘Gee,’ she said.
‘They deny the workers. They say they don’t know anything of such people.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess we all grow.’
‘That’s right. We all grow. I saw some pages of Bellow’s new work-in-progress. Do you know what one of the characters says? He says, “He sometimes imagined he was an industry that manufactured personal history.” That’s what it
says in his next book, Marilyn. I’m not kidding – it’s me. That’s me talking. It’s the story of my entire life.’
‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said. ‘That’s cute. You’re twenty-three years old. You don’t know what the story of your life is.’ She reflected for a moment and showed me thoughts are stories. She always did that. She showed me encounters are stories and moments sagas. The ferry made its way up the Bay and nature suddenly seemed awake to us, to them, to Charlie and Marilyn and their laughter and their passing camaraderie, the little flag at the end of the boat snapping in pointless allegiance.
‘Do you really think Kennedy will make all the difference?’ Charlie said.
‘I hope so. It would be swell, wouldn’t it, just to have a guy who’s on your side?’
‘Yup.’
‘It feels like a natural change.’
‘Nature might be a mentality,’ he said. ‘Everything changes. Change is ordained. If Kennedy hadn’t come along we might have invented him. No question.’
‘That’s tough,’ she said. ‘It can’t be easy living up to people’s hopes, like that, don’t you think? So many hopes?’ She looked out and remembered Anna Christie.
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘We manufacture hope. That’s just the way it is over there.’
He gestured towards New Jersey.
‘What a game,’ she said.
‘People love it,’ Charlie said, smiling again. ‘Hoping and believing. That’s just what people love in Linoleumville.’ Charlie took out a pack of Twinkies. Good man. He gave me two in a row. Good man. Underneath all his thinking and quoting, Charlie just wished more girls would kiss him. He stroked me for a moment with displaced affection. ‘In Henderson,’ he said, almost wistfully, ‘the character says a person might reason with an English dog.’
‘I’m not English,’ I said. ‘I’m Scottish. An ancestor of mine is known to have licked the face of his dead owner at Culloden.’
Nationalities. Don’t get me started. I had to explain to a squirrel in Battery Park that dogs need no translation from one language to another – that is simply another human problem, and a problem for Manhattan squirrels apparently. We hear expression very clearly, as if it was being played on a series of wonderful drums. I didn’t have much luck explaining to the squirrel that drumming was a native American tradition.
A week later, she travelled to Mexico to divorce Arthur. At first Victor the doorman was going to look after me, then his wife got a temperature and he was forced to spend the week boiling kettles in Queens. Then May Reis, Marilyn’s secretary, said she would stay at 444, but Marilyn needed her on the trip, she needed May’s professional loyalty as well as her loyally disapproving face, so in the end the three of us headed south on an extremely bumpy plane. As we boarded, the navigator chucked my chin: I had begun to think of myself as one of those fluffy companions, those charming vertebrates that are known to chaperone elegant individuals across the globe. Like Leoncico, for instance, the yellow hound that belonged to Vasco Núñez de Balboa and sniffed along at his side as he discovered the Isthmus of Panama. Leoncico’s voice had a similar background to mine, though history fails to record whether there was anything Scottish in his pedigree. There was more tolerance in his moral character than there was in his master’s. The dog protected him against everything except his own viciousness. (Typical problem, I have to say.) He even climbed into a barrel with Balboa to escape his owner’s enemies. Maud Gonne’s chaperone was actually called Chaperone, nicely enough, a grey marmoset filled with Celtic lore and Hellenic rhymes, poems, for the most part, to the impotence of human passion.* Alas, the little primate was not set to cavort with his owner through the years of her national widowhood. Gonne took him on a spying trip to St Petersburg where the cold put a quick end to his life. Thinking of marmosets as companions, there was also poor Mitz, ‘that horrid little monkey’ as Vanessa Bell used to call the animal, who accompanied Virginia and Leonard Woolf through Germany in 1935. According to Vanessa, the rise of the Nazis was nothing compared to the increasing power of Mitz, who made the Woolfs quite ill with parental angst. Vanessa was always happy to report how jealous her sister had been of the little beast’s powers of concentration. ‘He always behaved as if the world were a question,’ said Virginia.
* Marmosets are known for their nationalism. Miss Gonne needed no encouragement in that department, but the beast made her worse.
These creatures were on my mind as the plane chugged over Hanover, Pennsylvania, and the thought of them continued to grow and yap in my sleep, as we passed the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Sinks of Gandy in West Virginia. We sat in the big tin bird, leaving a trail above the Cumberland River in south-eastern Kentucky. I saw the world down there in my sleep, the open fields, the farmhouses, and the faces at the farmhouse table in the chirrupy shade of the evening. We passed over Memphis, Tennessee, and DeGray Lake, Arkansas. I thought perhaps I could be a navigator when I grew up. Anyhow, soon we were flying over miles of empty space, single houses standing in the middle of nowhere, then we roared above Franklin and Hopkins, a place called Rains. My journey came to an end at Dallas Love Field.
I was delighted with the ensuing chaos and its resolution. One of the reasons I love Trotsky is because he took so well to being a picaroon, travelling the earth looking for a place to dwell and work, encountering new people and fresh enemies in Turkey and France and Norway and Mexico. At Dallas, the authorities forbade me a seat on the Mexico plane. Wrong forms, no permission, quarantine issues, what a riot. (I was reminded of Noël Coward’s first encounter with American Customs. ‘Little Lamb, who made thee?’ he said to the grumpy official, and all hell broke loose.) May Reis tried to call the Mexican Ambassador, but then a helpful woman from the airline said she knew some dog-sitters. My owner and May were only going to be in Mexico for one day to tie up the divorce. I felt sad but I knew I’d get my chance to go to Mexico before too long: it was written.* While we waited for the dog-sitters to come I managed to knock over a bucket of detergent in the airport lounge. Marilyn was mournful, sitting at the bar with May and a martini. The television was lined and fuzzy, but it showed pictures of the very thing that was on her mind that day: the inauguration of Senator Kennedy as the thirty-fifth President of the United States.
The Russian novel sat on the counter. She filed her nails and she watched and drank, just like any white girl in America. A man in a business suit picked up a cigarette butt from the floor of the bar and smoked it. The people on the television were wearing heavy coats. You could see the white clouds of Kennedy’s breath as he spoke. ‘Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,’ he said. Marilyn suspended the glass an inch from her lips and noticed the businessman bending down to lift another butt from the floor. She began to get nervous and then she smiled most perfectly. ‘You know, May,’ she said, ‘I think I could live very happily on the streets. Like a bum, I mean. Don’t you think I’d be . . . you know, resourceful?’
* Every dog must go to Mexico at least once before he dies. It is said to be the place where we are most at home. This was said to me by one of the Duffs in the earliest days of my puphood, and it stuck. Not every dog makes it there, but it is our dream project. It is our Mecca, our Never Land, our Xanadu.
‘I think you’d hate it, Marilyn.’ But I loved the idea of Marilyn turning her face to the wall and refusing all luxury. Before we parted, I had that last image of a fur-coated Marilyn as Diogenes of Sinope, refusing all comforts while the street dogs looked on in admiration.
Raymond and Arlene were the two young dog-sitters, fairly daft the pair of them, beautiful and cool, into beer and sweaters and necking in cars. Raymond was holding up the Dallas Morning News as we walked back outside. ‘This is too darn crazy,’ he was saying. ‘This dawg’s too crazy. This jaaab.’ He looked away from the paper for a second.
‘D’ya see that lady’s face?’ asked Arlene.
‘I saw she was lookin’ away.
The ol’ lady was doin’ everythin’. D’ya think she was somebody?’
‘I’m thinking she was,’ said Arlene. ‘I’m thinkin’ she was really somebody. Her coat hangin’ off her shoulders like that, like she’s somebody.’ Raymond went back to his paper and I got to tune into Arlene as she walked in silence and chewed gum. ‘I sure wish we could meet somebody,’ she said.
‘New Ross, Ireland,’ Raymond read. ‘The people of this tiny coastal village where John F. Kennedy’s ancestors once lived danced on the Charles Street Pier last Friday night to celebrate the inauguration of their favourite son.’
‘That’s neat,’ she said.
‘It was from the Charles Street Pier’, he continued, ‘that President Kennedy’s great-grandfather set sail to seek his fortune in the new world. Friday night there were bonfires, a torchlight procession, songs, jigs.’ He looked up. ‘What’s jigs?’ he asked.
‘Dances. Dancin’. Like all them Irish people dancin’ together.’
‘. . . and good cheer. And at the hour of the actual Inauguration the Stars and Stripes was raised alongside the Irish tricolour by Kennedy’s fourth cousin, James Kennedy of Duganstown.’
She put me down on the back seat of the car, next to a generator and a heap of empty bottles. I licked a Lone Star label and then chewed on a ticket from the Jefferson Drive-In for a movie called The House of Usher. I liked Raymond and Arlene instantly, which was more than a little promiscuous of me given I was only passing through. But the rule for us picaroons says that a rogue will always like a rogue. They moved up the highway looking for trouble, my tousled dogs, my friends, powered by l’esprit humain. I’m sure they could scarcely spell their own names, but that can be quite charming of an afternoon, when the sun is high and the world is yours. It turned out the kids were very happy to be making some extra cash, courtesy of Arlene’s uncle Arnold, who ran an agency fixing people’s problems. Two days before they had delivered two giant bags of ice to a funeral parlour in Duncanville. Last night it was cups: seventy paper cups for a doctor’s house party in Lake Highlands. But mostly what the kids did was steal – they were shameless and quite accomplished thieves. All the beer was stolen, apparently, and when they stopped at gas stations or drug stores they had a tendency to bring back items of temporary usefulness. Arlene was especially brilliant at bringing home the nonbacon: plastic sunglasses and barbecue instruments being the sort of thing she would chortle over before tossing them onto the back seat.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 13