In fact, Nina seemed to avoid Emily. And Emily felt more alien. She tried to think noble thoughts or to think about noble people, like Margaret Fuller, who died so dramatically, her boat sinking off the coast of Fire Island, drowning with her new husband, the Count Ossoli, and their baby. After two years in Italy, she was coming home from her self-imposed exile fighting for the revolution, at Garibaldi’s side, metaphorically, no doubt. And now she was returning home to face everyone who had laughed at her, and she never got there. Never got home. There was something sad, even tragic, Emily thought, about how Margaret Fuller’s happiness was not allowed into her mother country.
CHAPTER 15
Grace was listening to Lou Reed sing “I can’t stand it anymore, more” when Mark phoned from New York. When he’d left Providence, Grace had taken him and his boyfriend to the train and waved goodbye as it pulled out of the station, Mark yelling, How often have you gotten to do this scene? And he grew smaller and smaller the further away he got. When he was no more than a blotch, Grace went to her waitressing job, cursing him for leaving until she got to the restaurant, where she stopped talking to herself because people think you’re crazy if you do. Mark wanted her to join him and this call described the bounty she’d find were she to arrive. The pissoirs were more dangerous. One club made Oscar’s look like kindergarten or maybe Lamston’s. Every drag queen in the universe plus all the pop stars and fifteen-year-old hustlers who’d go home with you for a cup of coffee and a danish. Bliss, it was twisted bliss. He said his color slides were better than ever and he realized yet again what a terrible photographer he’d been, and he wanted to write a new play, something about Marilyn Monroe, and there’d be a role for her if she’d just get her act together.
Grace was thinking about studying acting, because even if she wasn’t sure that she liked it, it was better than being a waitress. But maybe she’d change her mind about that too. Mark told her to read any biography she could find about Marilyn, just in case.
Show business was kind of appealing. Maggie said Grace might be an exhibitionist. Grace denied it. Maggie had moved into the room beneath her. She’d earned money doing almost everything, from being a short-order cook to being a call girl, the way she was now, once a week, which made it seem more like dating, the way she talked about it. She also did art, as she put it, and magic, concocting potions and drawing magic circles on the floor of her room, which Grace had to be careful not to step into or on. Maggie had one expensive dress for her dates, and that dress was good enough to go anywhere. The way she talked it sounded like the dress could go there without her, Grace told Mark. It had passed inspection by the madam, a woman Grace never saw but heard about. The dress was big enough to be worn no matter what size Maggie was. She could swell as much as twenty pound in two weeks, she swore, because of the moon and gravity and how she held on to liquid.
Black plastic bags of garbage lay strewn all over lower Manhattan and to Mark they looked like parts of a huge body that some maniac had cut up and scattered. People sometimes found babies in the garbage. He couldn’t go for a walk without thoughts like that, even in a bucolic setting he’d wonder about what was really going on in the woods and behind the placid facade of a saltbox house. Mark was debating with himself whether sexual fidelity had any value at all, apart from staying out of VD clinics. Like anyone else his understanding of the present was tainted by some previous view. A moon landing looked fake or merely a reproduction of a fake. An original fake. Like me, he thought. The fact that moon landings happened even depressed him slightly, as if too organized or efficient, they left nothing to the imagination. But he doubted its existence as well, and finally decided it was part of that long list of déjà vus he’d stopped keeping. To think that when Oscar Wilde contemplated life after Reading Gaol, he expected there would be loveliness to look at. Mark jumped on an uptown train, to the Met, to look at paintings of the Madonna and Child because they made him feel peaceful.
Maggie’s room was a mess but not as bad as Grace’s, in which she could never find anything. Grace was looking for something she’d lost when her father called to say that her mother had had a heart attack. It didn’t look good. Grace borrowed money from Maggie to return to New York, Maggie sympathetic even when Grace walked right in the middle of a magic circle, but Grace said she felt nothing. Maggie said it was shock.
Later Grace couldn’t remember the order of things. The Greyhound bus skidding. The couple in front of her nearly fucking. Some guy who looked like a dirty old man. The hospital. Her father and brother. Did her brother say he’d never fight again unless they had landed on the beaches of Coney Island, and the nurse say that she could see her mother but just for a little while, then she saw her mother, who was all swollen, her face waxy like the bowl of fruit she kept on the kitchen table. Maybe he said it after she came out, to make her laugh, because she didn’t think her brother was as much of a jerk after he’d said that. Her father crying. People she didn’t know waiting. Grace hated waiting, especially in a hospital. Gave her the creeps, the nice nurses, the precious doctors. She told her father she’d wait somewhere else, although Grace felt her mother somehow knew that she was present, visiting.
Grace had nearly not been allowed into the transvestite club but Mark talked the doorman, who was a woman, although you’d never know it, into giving Grace permission. Mark couldn’t believe that Some Like It Hot had been made in the fifties, even the end of the fifties. The first time he’d even been in front of transvestites was with his parents, a nightclub they’d taken him to, unaware, they claimed, of what was to come. There was a strip act done by one of the very best drag queens, not Lynne Carter but famous, and everyone was riveted on him. Her. Then came the big moments after all the bumps and grind and she, he, tore off the little top and there was nothing there. It was flat. “You should have seen the looks on the men’s faces, men like my father. So disappointed. All this buildup and nothing.” Mark couldn’t remember how the women reacted because he was already so focused on men. “Born gay I guess,” was how he put it. Grace looked around the club and thought she might be the only woman in it, although that was hard to tell, or she could say born woman, or was it natural woman or real woman. It didn’t matter. She told Mark she felt like a transvestite.
Marilyn Monroe had at least four names, none of them her real father’s. She had all her mother’s married names, then her own married names, but for her acting name, Monroe, she took her grandmother’s married name. Mark looked sadly into his vodka. She died thirty-five years to the day her grandmother was committed to a mental institution. Grace knew Marilyn’s mother had been put away, but she didn’t know about her grandmother. Talking about Marilyn’s death made her think about Ruth’s almost certain death, so she switched subjects, back to The Misfits and Marilyn Monroe’s breasts. What a good comedienne she was. How she told people in high school that Clark Gable was her father and kept his picture on her bedroom wall. That The Misfits must have been a dream come true, because in it Gable loves her. Except he dies a week after the picture’s over, and she thinks she caused it because she was difficult. “That’s crazy,” Grace objected loudly. It was almost a shout. Mark would later write a line for the play: “A silk scream in the night when it isn’t quite right.” It was too bad that Grace didn’t look anything like Marilyn but maybe it didn’t matter. Makeup, Mark thought.
The thoughts that entered Grace’s mind upon leaving the hospital had ranged from picking up anyone to killing herself or someone to laughing at how dumb everything was to cold-blooded matter of factness. She hated her mother anyway. But maybe she didn’t hate her mother completely. What difference did it make now. Ruth wasn’t a mother. All of which reminded Grace of Ellen’s chants in the mental hospital: “My mother is the Rose of Sharon, my mother is lily white, my mother is the whore of Babylon. My mother is better than your mother.” Then Ellen stuck her tongue out and wiggled her fingers at Grace, the way kids do.
Ruth didn’t wake up. The doctor said sh
e had three more heart attacks and there was nothing anyone could have done for her. And if she had lived she wouldn’t have been the same because of the brain damage. Ruth used to say she wanted to go in her sleep. She didn’t want to know she was dying. And she didn’t want a fuss. No big funeral. No graveside eulogy by a man who didn’t know her, especially since she didn’t think there was a God for anyone to be addressing. Still, Grace’s father said that she had told him it was up to them, to him, to do what he wanted. Ruth had been convinced she’d die before her husband, as did her mother before her father, and she had repeated often, “I just want it to be fast.” Secretly Ruth prayed that if there were a heaven, her soul would find peace in that next world.
Mark read some parts of De Profundis aloud to Grace, because Wilde was the poet of suffering and because Mark thought he should do something. Grace insisted she wasn’t suffering. Mark read on into the night, and it was distracting, especially when, after a few drinks—he called what they were doing a wake—he began marching back and forth through his railroad apartment declaiming and ranting. Upon finding the passage where Wilde complains that prison attire is so dreadful prisoners are condemned to be the zanies of style, Mark shouted, “We’re all zanies of style, the zanies of style died for our sins.” His new constellation of stars was Poe, Wilde, Marilyn, and Jane Bowles, whose life ended in a Spanish asylum. She died without knowing her name. To Mark that fate seemed especially terrible for a writer, but in Grace it produced the image of her mother, all swollen, who also didn’t know her name. Not exactly didn’t know it but couldn’t speak it. And what good would it have done for her anyway to speak. Except maybe she could have said something. Dead is dead, as Ruth would say, and homilies rushed into Grace’s mind and out her mouth, so that after saying one she wanted to slap her hand over that mouth, but even that gesture may have been borrowed or stolen from her mother. “I hated seeing her dead,” Grace announced, as if Mark and she were discussing Ruth. “Although she looked almost alive, but not as alive as when she was in a coma. If she’d spoken I bet she would have found something to criticize. Fuck her.”
Mark considered beginning the play by having a narrator speak in a singsong voice, as if it were a fairy tale, some of the facts about Marilyn’s life: Once upon a time there was a little girl who didn’t have a father. Her mother told the little girl that her father was alive and showed her a picture of him that looked just like Clark Gable. Then the little girl’s mother, who can’t take care of her—she puts the little girl into foster homes—retrieves her to try and be a real mother to her, but fails at the part and everything else, and from the age of ten or so the little girl has a mother who’s institutionalized. Her real mother refuses to allow anyone else ever to adopt her. So the little girl grows up an orphan, no matter who cares for her. With her mother and grandmother certified insane, the little girl fears the onset of madness all her life, but to protect herself she tries to find love and makes herself into the most lovable star in the world, Marilyn Monroe.
It was winter and the ground was hard. Mark had wanted Grace to wear a veil but she said he could go in her place, wear a veil, and no one would know the difference. Grace had thoughts like, when does embalming stop working? If Ruth froze would she stay like that forever, but then the ground would get warm in spring, the big thaw, and she’d melt in her coffin and the worms would get her, the worms crawl in the worms crawl out, they eat your guts and spit them out. But how do the worms get through a solid coffin, are there wormproof ones? Her body had seemed hollow, lying there in the funeral home with those creepy guys around and people saying sympathetic things. People told Grace, now you only have your memories, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember or, if she did, what would she choose to remember. She’d have to pick and choose carefully, to construct something that hadn’t existed anyway. She could almost hear Ruth saying life wasn’t a pretty picture with only happy endings. Grace picked up some dirt and threw it on the coffin. She felt peculiarly free, because she was really alone. Although when saying that to herself, she caught herself and restated it as if giving a lecture to someone else. There’s no difference now. A bad mother deserves a bad daughter she thought as she walked to meet Mark at a neighborhood bar they’d soon call home.
Mark thought of Marilyn’s life as a kind of in-the-blood tragedy. Revenge in the blood, of the blood. Blood tells. Grace had called Maggie in Providence. She promised to visit after finishing some work, and Grace didn’t know if she meant a john, a drawing, or a circle, but she didn’t ask. Celia was going to get married any day and asked Grace to come to the Midwest for the wedding, Grace said she’d think about it, but wouldn’t. She told Maggie that her new roommate, whom Mark had found for her, was so skinny it would make Maggie sick. Sarah had the bedroom and Grace slept on a convertible couch in the living room. Sarah was supposed to be okay because she kept irregular hours and kept to herself. Her entire career she’d been playing nothing but ingenues, and since she no longer was near being one, she starved herself so that she didn’t have any curves and hardly any breasts. “Flat,” Grace reported to Mark, “like that guy doing the strip.” She should have been heavier, her body looked like it was dying for weight. Large bony hands that didn’t look like any ingenue’s, or should she say virgin’s. Sarah in fact led a nunlike life and didn’t drink, smoke, or eat red meat. What she ate was mostly white, and it was eaten with piety. Mark told Grace that Marilyn was raised a Fundamentalist and then became a Christian Scientist. Funny or horrible when you think about how dependent she became on pills. She always had trouble sleeping. Always. Maybe she was afraid she’d die in her sleep. And she slept with her bra on. Mark loved the sadness of her life. He and Grace went to see a revival of The Misfits and sat through a whole day’s performances. Sometimes Grace hated her, the way she parted her lips, ready to be hit or stroked like a puppy. “She’s a baby,” Mark said, “she should be the child to some Madonna. If I could paint, I’d paint without perspective, like Giotto.” “The baby can’t be a girl,” Grace answered, putting on her black coat.
Grace wore black most of the time and when she visited her father he remarked that she looked like a Greek widow. Or as if she were still in mourning. Grace thought her father was crazy, and wondered when he’d find a woman to take care of him the way Ruth did, a widow or a young woman. Wash his clothes, Cook. Clean. Or maybe he’d just hire someone to come in every once in a while but that wasn’t like her father, or her family. Little things of Ruth’s, her knicknacks, sat primly on cupboards and shelves, as if waiting to be animated. Her father seemed reluctant to put them away and hadn’t touched Ruth’s clothes, which should have meant he missed her, but to Grace it was something about habit and the loneliness you’d expect after anyone’s death. She hated the apartment.
Grace’s shared apartment was all right, nondescript. She didn’t bring people home. She liked watching Sarah eat her wheat germ and yogurt. She was so serious, they didn’t talk too much, both avoiding the possibility that they might not like each other. But one night Sarah started screaming, a nightmare about a cat’s eating her kittens alive for which Grace liked Sarah better. You tell me your dream, I’ll tell you mine. And with this bond between them, Grace felt sympathetic to Sarah, who kept losing parts to real ingenues. Except for the time she played a young nun who becomes pregnant by a priest and should have an abortion but kills herself instead. Grace was not sympathetic to Sarah’s character the night she saw it. But she was offended for Sarah the actress when her final speech—before she puts the pills in her mouth—was violated by a man’s unwrapping a piece of gum and crinkling the paper. Sarah’s concentration impressed Grace, who decided to take a few acting classes with her, though Mark worried that she might lose some of her naturalness. Grace said that’d be fine.
Haunted Houses Page 17