The Alexandrite

by Rick Lenz

  “Could he be on a dig or something in Utah, looking for some kind of gemstone?”

  “Sure,” I say, my head bobbing up and down.

  “Well, come on back up.”

  “Isn’t it winter?” I say, in the director’s office again.

  “Maybe it hasn’t been snowing all the time.” Logan is thinking out loud, the pallor gone from his face. “We don’t know exactly when the blizzard started.” He studies me. “A gemologist could conceivably be caught out in the boondocks doing his work, couldn’t he?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ve been racking my brain trying to think what kind of exotic thing this guy could be. Of course, we’ve eliminated artists and writers.”

  “Of course.” I’m standing in front of Logan’s desk again.

  “What kind of a gemstone could he be looking for?”

  “They mine sapphires in Montana.”

  “How about Utah? Do they mine any gems in Utah?”

  At the moment he asks me that, I’m twisting the ring on my right ring finger with the thumb of the same hand, around and around. “Alexandrite. They found alexandrite in south Utah about 1950.”

  Logan chooses his words carefully. “Would it be possible … Would it be reasonable for a gemologist to be coincidentally near the bus station in this story, looking for alexandrite?”

  “You would normally choose the summer, but yes, of course. If a company had reason to try to determine if there is alexandrite on a tract of land … Sure, a gemologist could very well be there looking for it.”

  Logan starts to smile, then the smile slowly becomes a grin. “If Miss Monroe will go along with it, you may have solved our problem.” He smoothes his mustache again, but now it comes with an expression of relief. “I didn’t think to ask why you came to see me. How may I help you?”

  The phone rings, and he picks up the receiver. “Yes? … Thank you, Dottie.” Logan hangs up the phone.

  I’m still standing in front of his desk.

  Logan smiles again. “Have you ever met Marilyn Monroe?”

  “No.”

  “You’re about to.”

  I hear the door open and feel her behind me. I turn around and, framed in the doorway, there she is.

  15

  She stops momentarily when she sees me standing between her and Logan. Then she moves quickly around me to Logan’s side behind the desk and leans over him with one hand on the desk, the other on his shoulder.

  “I want to do this scene. And I think you’re right. We need it. I spoke with Arthur just now, and he agrees with me. He feels Lawrence could be a writer after all.”

  Logan looks pained. He speaks patiently. “I just don’t think so, dear heart. Audiences are suspicious of writers. And this character doesn’t have enough screen time to win them over. He’s got to be a bit of an eccentric, but there can’t be anything calculated. And there’s nothing more calculated, no offense intended, than a writer.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I was thinking about a gemologist.”

  “What’s a … gemologist?”

  “Well”—he points at me—“this is one.”

  She looks up. “Who is he?”

  “A gemologist,” says Logan.

  “What does he do?”

  Logan smiles again. “Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Blake?”

  She is dressed in blue jeans and a man’s white shirt, the tails of which are tied in front, at her waist. She wears light makeup, skillfully applied, her pale skin glowing. Her hair is drawn behind her head in a low, loose ponytail held by a pink elastic band. She is not exactly beautiful, but lovely in the way of a young girl who’s just come of age and hasn’t yet fully realized how pretty she is. She has a warm, clean smell of freshly laundered clothes and Ivory soap.

  My mouth opens, but no sound comes out.

  “I’m sorry,” says Logan. “Marilyn, this is Richard Blake. Richard, Marilyn Monroe.”

  I extend my right hand over the desk.

  She gazes at it, obviously fascinated by the alexandrite, then she looks up at me. A smile slowly forms. She takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. “How do you do?”

  I find my voice. “Fine … Thank you … I’m both a gemologist and a geologist. My specialty is the … indexing of the wide range of North”—my mouth is totally dehydrated—“American gemstones.”

  “Lawrence could be a gemologist,” says Logan. “It’s perfect. We save the problems of his being a writer or an artist, but we also elevate him above the commonplace of being a bureaucrat. He’ll have been nearby looking for alexandrites. That’s a kind of … gemstone … er, right?” he asks.

  “Right.”

  “Maybe,” says Marilyn. “Maybe that would be okay.”

  My moment is over. I’m about to be dismissed. I’ve served my purpose. I’ve given them an identity for Lawrence.

  I blurt out, “I’m an actor, too.”

  Logan’s head retracts into his neck.

  “I was on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I understudied Gooper. I went on several times. Could I read for you? I heard you hadn’t decided on your Lawrence.”

  “How did you hear that?”

  “Actors’ grapevine.”

  Logan shakes his head. “You’re a curious man.”

  Marilyn is staring at me. “Maybe we could read the scene together,” she says.

  She turns to Logan, who looks at me as if for the first time, appraising my possibilities as Lawrence. He turns back to Marilyn and shrugs. “We’ve got to cast it today. I guess it couldn’t hurt. Actors have gotten roles in crazier ways.” He looks off with a faraway smile. He had enormous success last year with the film version of Picnic. One of his accomplishments was to use real-people locals in peripheral roles. This original play, Bus Stop, was written by the same playwright as Picnic—William Inge. Marilyn is already giving Cherie a natural, unactorish performance. Logan smiles impishly. “It would be sort of poetic if he could act.”

  Although it’s still unfamiliar terrain, channeling through Richard, I try out our most ingratiating charm on them. “I understand you’ll do what you think is best for the film.”

  Even though I’m nervous, Marilyn and I seem to connect. This Richard can be kind of sweet when he tries. Or maybe Marilyn feels sympathy for his obvious unease. Or perhaps it’s because she and I have always had a connection. I have the familiar feeling of being subsumed into that chaotic, spiraling part of my brain I have no choice but to give in to. It’s the way I feel during jet takeoffs, a benign state of shock—an ocean of life, but inside me somehow. It’s Marilyn Monroe. It’s immensity. I wouldn’t fight it if I could; it wouldn’t be safe. I haven’t a prayer of controlling it. I relax, cradled like a baby, into Richard’s lack of acting craft.

  Logan tells me I’ve brought an “open vulnerability” to the character, and for a second time he thinks I’m unactorish.

  Logan looks at Marilyn, then turns back to me. “The part’s yours. Who’s your agent?”

  “Jerry Kennents,” I say, my heart pounding out fancy jazz riffs.

  “All right. Fine. Have you had your lunch yet?”

  “I don’t eat lunch.”

  Logan laughs, smiles, and looks at Marilyn again. “How’d you sleep last night, sweetheart?”

  “Not bad. Not bad-ly. Not badly at all.”

  “Me too. Go figure.” He beams at her with fatherly affection. Apparently, they both suffer from insomnia, and each of them feels compassion for the other’s problem with it.

  “Well, if you’re available right now,” says Logan, glancing at the dumbfounded gemologist, “and if it’s okay with you, dear, I’d like to get started rehearsing as soon as possible—although I think it’s going to be an easy scene to do.”

  “I’m ready,” I say.

  In my excitement, it hasn’t even crossed my mind to remember that there is no Lawrence in the movie Bus Stop.

  16

  Joyce Faberman, the casting d
irector, is out to lunch when I’m cast. I call Virginia at Jerry Kennents’ office. She tells me Kennents isn’t in. I tell her they’ll be getting a call from Joyce and that I want Kennents to negotiate my deal. “I expect he’ll have to settle for what he can get because I’m already at work.” Virginia sounds flustered.

  We rehearse in Marilyn’s apartment on the lot.

  After an hour, Logan says, “You kids stick with it. It’s going to be splendid.” Then he excuses himself, saying he’ll see me on the set at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. As he leaves, he says, “Will that be all right with you, dear?”

  Marilyn smiles. “I don’t know why, Josh, but there are a few things temporarily under my … well, sort of under my control.”

  “I’ve gotten a reputation for being late,” she says after Logan has gone, settling into a plain, overstuffed chair. “Late for work, late for engagements.” She hides for a moment behind a shy smile, raising her eyebrows, signifying there’s truth in the rumors.

  I’m sitting at the end of a reproduction Danish Modern sofa, three feet away from her. “How old are you?” I can’t believe I said that. “I’m sorry. I have no idea why I … I’m really sorry.”

  She giggles. “That’s okay. I’m twenty-nine. I’ll be thirty on the first of June.”

  “What will you do when filming is over?” I’m not a lot more pleased with that one, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit my careening thoughts.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  “Just somebody else who’s looking.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know … Any kind of purpose.”

  She smiles. “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world.” She runs the fingertips of one hand lightly along the line of her chin bone. “Sometimes I think if I only knew the right questions to ask, I’d be able to learn a few things and maybe that would be enough.” She looks at me as if I may have brought some answers with me. “Everyone wants to know me. Why is that?”

  “Because if they can get to understand your story, it’ll make theirs … clearer.”

  “Why me? … You mean the movie-star thing?”

  “Yeah, but mostly the acting thing—that you do. Sometimes you reveal things to us about ourselves. We’re human and hungry for ways to cope, and we want to know more.”

  “How do I reveal myself?” As I try to think how to answer that without accidentally hurting her feelings, she answers it herself: “I mean I’m trying in this movie to reveal this … girl. But that’s a really different thing that doesn’t help me be … what I want to be … Maybe that’s what I’m revealing about Cherie—a girl so open and woundable she doesn’t recognize the answers even when they’re staring her in the face. I mean, Cherie doesn’t seem to be the brightest coin in the collection—but she’s a long way from being dumb, and some serious things are beginning to dawn on her.”

  “Yes, and she’s gaining incredible spirit, the way you play her.” Shit.

  “How would you know that?”

  “I can … I can just tell.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “By the way you were when I auditioned and the way you … are … now—your sense of serenity, your dignity.”

  “Really?” She smiles again but seems vastly unsure of her dignity. “Maybe it’s the ‘energy and excitement’ thing Josh talks about. He’s always trying to find ways to make me look on the positive side—you know, the side of me that feels that good things are bound to come my way if I just believe it? And along with that comes poise. He says that should be starting to bloom in me.” She stares up at the canopy of a sycamore tree shadowing the manicured lawn outside the window, remembering. Now, she looks back at me. “Anyway, Josh said if he hadn’t been the way he was—like me, he meant, I could tell—he would have missed ‘the sharpest, the rarest, the sweetest moments of his existence.’”

  She seems to hold her breath. She’s watching me, seeing what I may have to say to that. But I’m tongue-tied, unable to do any more than smile at her.

  She continues to hold my gaze. “This wonderful, poised man—Josh—said, ‘Marilyn’—he spoke my name in such a … kind way. He said, ‘Darling, your sweetest moments are still ahead of you.’ I mean he’s really smart and dear, and if he can say a thing like that—” She sees something in the look on my face.

  “And that made you feel better?”

  She hesitates, still trying to read a thought I’m glad she can’t read. “More than that, it made me feel hopeful. I mean real hope. Now, if I can only keep it here—the hope.” She taps herself on the forehead. “I know what he said will come true.” She looks at her lap and emits a slow, soundless whistle. “My problem is, the better the advice is, the quicker I do the opposite.”

  She shrugs, gazes at me, then stretches both fists up in the air. It’s meant to indicate triumph, but her moment of jubilation is gone now and her “positive side” no longer rings true. “Lately, I really do feel optimistic.” She sighs. “Well, sometimes. But that is who I want to be all the time. Someday, I’d like to be a person who looks at life—at the whole world that way, you know? I just want to feel the hell with all these demons and ghosts and stop having to try to figure out the reason for every little emotional itch. I just want to live. You know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “It’s the way I want to feel every minute.”

  “Me too. I want to be alive.”

  She smiles a sad, longing smile. “But we are, aren’t we. We are alive.”

  “Sure.”

  Her look darkens. “But in a few weeks I’m not going to have Josh, and …” She shakes her head and looks out the window. “Well, I guess people can’t feel that way all the time.” She leans an elbow against the chair and, resting her chin on her hand, lifts a shoulder in resignation. It reminds me of the French actress Jeanne Moreau acknowledging that life comes without guarantees. “I started out wanting the world to know me,” she says. “Like Cherie, singing at the Dragon Nightclub down by the stock yard. And now people do know me …” She thinks about that. “Photography is so scary. I just go on and on living in pictures, but really I’m like all those people wondering who that girl is.” She shivers. “And that’s not the worst thing …”

  “What is?”

  She looks down at her hands. “‘The wings of insanity.’ Somebody wrote that.” ‘The wings of insanity over my head.’ Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She frowns. “What will I do when filming is over?” She shakes her head. “The press is always asking me what I’m going to do next—like they want to know where to go hang out until I get there. And I can’t tell them the real truth—that they might as well save themselves the trouble; that it’s all over now. I’m never going to be better than I am in this movie. And it’ll all be over soon, and they’ll put me wherever they put used sex symbols … Over a year in New York, in and out of therapy and the Actors Studio, and failing in love, and I have new friends and old ones, who are gone now out of my life, and I don’t know—if I’m really honest—why the new ones are any better than the old ones. It’s not enough to have people know you. What you need is for someone to know you’re alive. The only one who knows I’m alive is … oh well.” She smiles, but it’s half-hearted.

  “I’ve made you unhappy.”

  She stares at me. “You haven’t made me unhappy at all. Everybody’s always interrupting me to give me advice and to tell me what to do.” She looks at me for a long time, then out the window. She laughs, self-conscious. “This is me happy.”

  She turns back and looks into my eyes, as if trying to decipher an inscrutable code. “I think I’m having one of my instant crushes on you. I have to watch those, or I get into awful trouble.” She frowns and looks away. “Which did you do first, gemology or acting?”

  “Gemology.”

  “That’s nice. It’s good not to make the acting too important. I did a scene from Anna Christie … you know? Euge
ne O’Neill …? It was a few months ago at the Actors Studio, and I was so nervous, the next morning I woke up with laryngitis. I felt like I’d been strangled. It’s not worth it.” She looks at me for what feels like a long time. “Do you want to run the scene again?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  She sits next to me shyly, looking at me with the same puzzled expression, then slowly begins to tell me about Cherie’s childhood in the Ozarks, hanging out with her sister Nan at Liggett’s Drugstore in River Gulch. Finally, Cherie tells Lawrence he’s a good listener, and he says she’s nice to listen to.

  She stops, just before the end of the scene, looks at me for a long time and says again, “Who are you?”

  17

  It’s dark when I get home. Margaret is sitting in her usual chair in the living room. Lily is in the wooden rocker.

  “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “Where’ve you been?” Margaret is doing her best to cover her anger.

  “There was a lot of traffic.”

  “Would you like to know how many times you’ve told me that?”

  “No, thanks. Did anybody call me?”

  “Yes. Jerry somebody. He said you’d know what it’s about. The number is by the phone in the library. You didn’t answer my question. Where’ve you been?”

  “I did some work for a movie company today. They need some technical help for a film at Twentieth Century Fox. One of the characters is a gemologist. I’ll be working on it tomorrow, too.”

  She weighs this. “Will they pay you decently?”

  “Yes, very decently. That’s what the phone call is about.”

  I wait for her to respond to that, but she turns away. “If you want your supper, you’ll have to reheat it.”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “We had roast beef,” says Lily, rocking.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. It was overcooked. Margaret overcooked it.”

  “I’ll bet it was good anyway.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was overcooked. It was burnt.”