“They had invited some of the world’s top photographers to come and shoot informal pics of the film as it was being made. It was deeply documented, because all these photogs came to The Misfits like a desert field trip. They say Arthur Miller wrote the movie as homage to Monroe, who was still his wife then. He captured that empathy, that creature being. And guess what? The next Mrs. Miller was one of the photographers who happened to come to the location to document it, Inge Morath. How like The Misfits itself, that the woman who shot a great picture of Arthur Miller’s back looking at Marilyn Monroe’s back as she looked out of the window in the small hotel where they were all staying, and of the unimpeachable sadness between his unseen face and her unseen face and the high desert mountains out the frame of the window. The woman who shot that picture became the next wife of the man standing with his back to her.”
Andy got out of bed and offered his back to Vivienne. He stood naked, reflected in the glass like a goat come down from the high conflict terrain to the lower reaches, to find an oasis before nightfall. Night was beginning the blue hour as the mountains blackened.
“Tell me a story,” he said, standing at the edge of the bed, half-erect.
“You have to go,” she said.
“Tell me about a place you went. Let me be an ear for a while.”
This was not a good idea, Vivienne knew. When the work was done, the work was done. She had grown fond of him, or at least fond of the spell they wove together. He went with the music of hazard. “Okay,” she said, “just one, but then you go.”
“Yes, boss,” he said.
He settled back on the pillow dunes. Vivienne began, “It was 1965, November. I flew down to New York from TO. Marty had a place in Tudor City on East 43rd, at The Hermitage, up the stairs from the United Nations. Marty was in Saigon. I had to stretch my legs, so I took my camera for a walk down by the East River. Down the stairs on bedrock, across First Avenue and over to the UN building.
“So there I am, on Tuesday, November the 9th, 1965, and my camera started snapping and my body was running and I did not know why. There in front of the United Nations, a young man was lighting himself on fire. This cannot be: a self-immolation in New York City? But yes. He was a man in his early twenties; he was pouring gasoline on himself. I came home from Vietnam to see Vietnam in front of the UN.”
She jumped off the bed; her body needed to move. She paced a bit in front of the bed as if she were a movie Andy was watching; she got down on her haunches at the foot of the bed, with her chin on the foot of the bed, on the sheets.
“There is a thing today. We have put ourselves in the safekeeping of a thing we hate, an abstract thing that we call government. We have never loved it; all we know is our despising of its core and its values. We have never written poetry to it. It is not an onion or an orchid we might write odes to, it is not the true love we lost, it is apart from us, our land has become them. We know what we hate, but what do we love? We are like exiles in our own countries, and we blame only the rulers. Even in democracy, we blame the rulers we elected, we are skilled in hate, we are five stars in sarcasm, we have the same skill set in petulance and outrage that we had when we were fourteen. Oh man, honey. I used to fling myself at the world, like an idiot infatuated by democracy. To know it, like a bad crush.”
Andy raised his right eyebrow. “Lay off dissing my time, all right?”
Vivienne went from heated to boiling fast. “Look, son. Better vitriol is still vitriol. Do things only happen to you? Never being the agency of your destruction is what you are to yourself at nine years old. An immature nine. A nine without eyes or curiousity about the world. Today, all you smartasses are like émigrés to your dry heart state and you hate and you hate and you hate. But, son, you are not heartbroken.”
“Don’t call me son. I bet in your time you were quite the heartbreaker.”
“This is my time now, boy.”
He did not take the bait. “Go on,” he said softly.
“When they came to our houses to take our libraries, or to arrest us for our utterances,” she said, up and pacing again, “they were taking things we had loved. Free speech was not a thing we insisted on because we had come out of our hidey-holes for the first time to march, trash, get arrested and shoyn. Oh, you know, fuck rights. When they beat the shit out of peace, it was our lover they were beating up. So you want to call me a soppy drip, be my guest. I was covering war when I was fifteen. I was a boomer with feeling, arrest me. So I loved art and life, go on, throw away the key. If we hated capitalism, we loved the co-op. We had songs, we had a soundtrack. Music getting its ghost on, to haunt us in short nights later. I can allocute to the judge. Yes, your honour, I slow danced in all the wrong places. Yes, your honour, I was too humid too young. Yes, I confess, I danced to ‘When a Man Loves a Woman,’ and Percy Sledge was the damage fur in me, that summer of ’66, when a quarter of a million troops was not enough for the US in Vietnam. And I was only eighteen years of age, and I was in my fourth year of wartime. And so I still see their beautiful bewildered faces whenever I hear that song, I still see their faces in the open caskets, and the boys as young as the corpses, folding the flag to honour them with precision.
“How can you fight for antiglobalization? That is their language. Why use the language of those you despise? Why not be eloquent in the tear gas, where is the poetry of the resistant tongue? I cannot get excited about the leadership of looters. I get their fury, but I get it for an instant and I pass on.”
Andy chuckled. He jabbed the air with his cigarette, a horizontal high-five. Vivienne was at the glass wall of windows, looking down to the garden. A bride in full white walked through dimming greenery like a swan on dry land trailing her tulle feathers. Vivienne turned around to look at Andy.
“Peace was our lover, we were shy to say it, but it was true. Peace was our boon companion.” She kneeled at the side of the bed. “We were heartsick at peace’s sick condition.” She put her hands on the bed, crawling onto it. Andy picked up her camera from the side table, and took a shot of her hands distorted, coming towards him; of her four silver rings, two on each hand, one on the left ring finger. Andy inched down towards her.
“Look,” she said, naked, sitting cross-legged. “So I was beating the hell across First Avenue, running, and there was this young man in lotus position in front of the UN, he had doused himself with gasoline. My motor drive was way ahead of me. He was in a peace protest, self-immolating at First Avenue and East 44th Street. My camera was like an animal, let me tell you, it was eating up film.” She had her toes up on her knees, and her hands calm in her lap.
“The NYPD, the FDNY, the reporters came. I walked around a while, I got a bite to eat, I swear to you I do not know where I went, I walked through Grand Central Station, I did some grab shots of the Chrysler Building, how could it be lit the same way it was before the young man burned to death five minutes away? Didn’t the buildings know what had happened in New York City? I walked over to Park and way down, cut through Madison Square Park and down Broadway through Union Square, then down past NYU into the heart of SoHo, to The Photographers Place on Mercer. I looked at some old daguerreotypes there, and some new ones people were making. I bought a couple photo mags from the ’50s, and I walked a minute back along Mercer to Prince and went into Fanelli’s to get a beer. True story: I am sitting at Fanelli’s bar, flipping through that mag, and lo and behold there is an article by a photog about how he was taken out with a group to see a nuke go off at the Nevada Test Site.”
Andy put his hand on hers. She leaned forward. “Man, you cannot get away from the world, it will stalk you at every corner. I went out of Fanelli’s. There used to be a nice vacant lot across the street with great yellow and blue graffiti. There was a guy there in a long tweed overcoat and pyjamas and slippers. He was a stout guy with a reddish beard, he could have been an actor, an artist, a bum; life has always been cheap, hon, but back then the rents were more lifelike. He gave me a joint, next thing I knew I
was in some theatre with him watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Man, the saturated colours. They were singing, the French boy was going off to the war in Algeria, was his sweetheart going to marry the other guy? Mostly I remember the colours and the romance. You really cannot describe how vivid New York City felt in November when the trees were sticks and it was this fucked-up Eden in black and white in 1965. I can still feel the exact shape of the street around me. It felt wet and grey and dour and possible, beautiful in a busy empty way, there was a lot of mix in the city, it was not over yet. I was eighteen. I had a crush on living.” She ran her hand through her hair. “Man. But you know what, baby, I will never mock an eighteen-year-old who is embracing the world. There are a lot of eighteen-year-olds who have lived a lot of life. Be wary of mocking your long-ago experienced self.
“I must have walked all the way back to Marty’s, because I distinctly remember walking along Great Jones Street in the hustle-jumble of lower Manhattan – you know, trucks loading, idling, people tucking themselves into corners – and then I was on Broadway and Park South and up as the sun set, and how the light just flashed in the slits down the streets as I walked up the avenue. You know, you do not really see the sunset in Manhattan away from the Hudson, the buildings block it, but I was getting these block-by-block flashes off the river as I walked. So I am back at Tudor City at Marty’s apartment, and it’s maybe only five o’clock, drive time. So I turn on the radio to one of the local stations and make some coffee and I am in a bit of a trance.
“They were talking on the radio about the man who self-immolated. His name was Roger Allen LaPorte, he was involved with the Catholic Worker Movement, he was twenty-two years old. They were recapping how just a week before another young man had burned himself alive as a protest against Vietnam. Keep in mind, this was 1965. Early days yet. The November 2nd self-immolation had been in Washington. The dead man was a young father by the name of Norman Morrison who had gone to Washington, carrying his baby daughter to the Pentagon. And he positioned himself directly below the office window of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and he burned himself alive under McNamara’s window.”
“I never heard of any guy killing himself in front of the Pentagon,” Andy said.
“McNamara looked out his window and saw a person burning alive.”
“And the baby?”
“Hang on, hang on,” she said. “Man, feature it: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara looks out his office window and sees an individual dying for peace, by fire. Yeah. He was a Quaker. So the radio guy is talking about this Norman Morrison the Quaker, who had self-immolated exactly one week before, on November 2nd, and now on this day, November 9th, came the young Catholic to the United Nations.” Vivienne shifted her upper torso, taking Andy’s upper forearm in her two hands. “So here is the part: they were talking about this on the radio, comparing and contrasting the two suicides in one week to protest the war in Vietnam, and saying how the one at the Pentagon was a young father who brought his little baby girl and handed her off to someone standing nearby. The baby’s name was Emily. And the way the radio jock said Emily sounded all drawn out like a spook on a phone demanding ransom using a voice distorter. Emmmmilllyyyy. ‘Did that joint I took from that guy have acid laced in it?’”
Vivienne let go of Andy’s arm and stretched her legs, laughing. “Today, I might say, ‘Did I just have a mini-stroke?’ Okay maybe no Purple Owsley, maybe this is a local New York avant-garde radio show, because the guy’s voice was getting slower and slower and then it stopped. Oh my God, I thought, did they just assassinate the DJ?”
Andy swept her up to sit with him back on the pillows. He lit two more smokes, saying, “What the hell was going on, babe?” His babe was so soft and sweet it could have been local peace on the prowl, purring.
She closed her eyes, seeing the dark of memory.
“All the lights went out in Marty’s apartment. I looked out the window: the East River looked mighty dark. The city looked dark. The DJ came back on and said there had been a blackout, that the subways had stopped mid-station, people were trapped in elevators, and… Then he was cut off again and never came back. The city was dark, the radio was dead. You know what it was?”
“Tell me,” Andy said, putting her head on his shoulder.
“It was too much, you know,” she said. “You cannot bear it, but you know what? You can. They say we use only what is it, ten per cent of our brains?”
“Thirty, maybe,” Andy said. “My buddy Sean used to say, ‘Like one per cent.’”
“But how much of our hearts do we use?” Vivienne jumped up, went to the hotel room window, looked down to the garden. A man sat on a wooden bench with his head in his hands, leaning forward, his elbows almost at his knees. She grabbed her camera off the side table and took a shot of the posture of grief, unmistakable even three hundred feet up. “Information does not make a heart,” she said, with her back to Andy who watched her from the bed. “Information makes a database. A nation is not a database, a nation is a heart. New York was blacked out, and a man had lit himself on fire to claim peace as his true lover just before the lights went out on Manhattan. My brain says they were not connected, but my heart, honey, knew they were. They were connected inside me. War was my kismet, it was my work marriage. I had to go back.”
Andy got up, turned Vivienne’s chin to him and kissed her with tenderness.
“So out I went into Blackout New York. I walked for hours, and I mean hours, and my camera took pictures of the dark, I mean really dark. A blackout doesn’t black out everything, it just brings us back in time. New York was like pictures you see of the 1920s. Like some old George Raft movie, like what’s that one with Glenn Ford where he goes into a bar and he’s all mixed up with some dame and the music playing is the same music that tormented Glenn Ford in Gilda…?”
“The one where Lee Marvin throws the hot coffee on Monroe?” Andy asked.
“I used to think that, too,” Vivienne said. “But it wasn’t Monroe, it was Gloria Grahame, and he never threw the coffee.”
“He did so, I saw it. The Big Heat. It’s my favourite movie. Lee Marvin takes that coffee pot, like the one she was pouring from downstairs when I met you, and Lee Marvin throws it at okay Gloria Grahame and scars her all up. Yeah, that’s right, Glenn Ford is the cop. He’s gone on her, he wants to help her after that coffee fiasco.”
“You think you see the coffee thrown, you think you see the coffee in the air, you think you see the hot coffee hit her, but none of that is in the movie. It is so brilliantly edited, they make you think you saw what is not there. It’s magic, baby.”
“We’ll get it out sometime. I’ll show you.”
“I’ll show you water in Death Valley,” she said.
“Tell me about the dark,” Andy said. “Did you meet Lee Marvin ordering a latte?”
“I wish. That soldier can put his stripes on my pussy any day of the week. What is a man? Lee Marvin is a man. He was wounded in war, young, you could tell. Nobody has eyes so blue unless there is a story.”
“I have blue eyes,” Andy said. “Or so they say.”
“So, the blackout. I went into Grand Central Station. There were all these business guys who couldn’t get the train home, holed up on benches, trying to sleep. It was like a prophecy of hard times to come. I took a lot of pics of men in overcoats, lines of them talking on the pay phones, sitting in the booths. They say, ‘It’s never too late.’ I say, it is always too late. Who knew these phone booths would be relics in no time? I walked back up East 43rd to Tudor City, my heart was full of the world. Everywhere I went I was having another small lifetime in one day. I was so hungry to live, and I could not stop noshing.”
Andy kissed the back of her neck and she did not protest it.
“I was alone, I was always a bit of a solitary bird. I was just eighteen, and I had captured two men in film self-immolating, one the Vietnamese monk in his sixties, the other the young Catholic in his twenties, and I kept wa
lking, and I sat in the Great Northeast Blackout, and I looked at the dark East River. And I thought about Poe and Whitman, and how Whitman came to the soldiers who had been wounded, in the hospitals in Washington, during the Civil War, how the poet came to the most wounded, the most distressed, the men who knew their dressings would not be on a living man in the morning. And how Whitman read poetry to the men all night. He came and sat at the bed of a man who was dying, and they both knew that the poetry Whitman read low in the soldier’s ear was the last poetry the young man would ever hear in his short sweet existence on earth. Maybe that is all you can do. I thought of Walt Whitman, living in Washington for a couple of years, and going nightly to the hospitals, and how he was a salve and a balm. I looked out at the East River, and I thought about how poetry might be the twin brother of journalism. And maybe nothing else much matters in this world. You look it right in the face, and you frame it. I thought about how much we need the poet-nurses.”
Andy drew her back to the bed. He stroked her hair. He held her in his arms.
“The next day, check it out, I went to the MoMA, and I saw Guernica for the first time. My head was exploding. It had been at the MoMA for years, okay? Just an hour’s flight from Toronto. But I came to it in just the right time. I had been primed to see Guernica by the preceding day. The lies of war you figure out young, but the science of war, the pimp science had become, pimping out humans like rats… I knew nothing, yet, about Franco. I thought Guernica was about the Second World War. I did not know when I first laid eyes on the painting that I was in a moment of absolute clarity. I knew gar nichts, baby. I did not know that Guernica was a city. I did not know that Guernica was in Spain. I did not know that Guernica was Basque. I did not know that Franco offered to exterminate the people of Guernica as a gift to ingratiate himself with Hitler and Mussolini. Who knew they thought Franco was a pathetic little suck-up wannabe, or that Hitler privately called Franco a pig with verbal diarrhea? But they found Franco useful. After all, he had offered to wipe out one of his own Spanish cities just to impress them. Offering his own people as a test run for World War Two, a lab experiment, the first one in human history, and the experiment was could an entire civilian population be eliminated by saturation bombing from the air? Guernica was a sacrifice offered not in the mysteries of faith, but in the creeps of evil. I did not know any of this when I was looking at Picasso’s painting Guernica at the MoMA when I was eighteen. I sat alone on a bench, inhaling the horses.
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