The Alexandrite

by Rick Lenz

  Most of any audience to these scenes between her and me would get up, leave the theatre or hit the remote, and tune in to something believable. There’s already too much material on Marilyn—as there is on Elvis, Michael Jackson, and everyone else we treat like public property. We’re lucky no one ever overhears us. What Marilyn says would be misinterpreted, misunderstood, and ridiculed as something she wouldn’t say, even though every word she speaks, she speaks.

  I know I could get a copyright on some of the Beatles’ songs. I have a couple of notions for screenplays I might call Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, and Star Wars, but I understand I’m not supposed to do things like that, so I go down to a coin shop one day and make a few purchases. Then I go next door to a fancy hobby shop and buy Mickey Mantle’s, Willie Mays,’ and Ted Williams’ rookie cards, among other select baseball greats. For good measure I throw in early comic book appearances of Superman and Batman. They don’t cost much, which is good; I have no reason to expect them to travel anyway.

  I’ve done everything I can think of, but it doesn’t make the sick, apprehensive ache in my gut go away.

  WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1956

  I say goodbye to Marilyn. She hasn’t shot today. I meet her at her apartment after my two o’clock class and stay for only a few minutes. I don’t feel well.

  “I’ve tried to keep my mind off the calendar,” I say, “and now the days are gone.”

  She answers impatiently, “You’re the only one I ever knew who’s more screwed up than I am.”

  “I understand why you say that, but I did know about Lawrence.”

  She glances around the room like she wonders if it might be bugged. “It’s cut anyway. It’ll never be shot.”

  I take her hand. “Don’t take them—” I point outside, toward anyone not in the room with us, anyone or anything other than her own best-self voice; not the injured, angry one, but the one that wants to live and be happy “—don’t take any of them seriously. They know about one percent of what they say they know. Less.”

  She puts her hand on my forehead. “You’re hot.”

  “Sometimes it happens when I’m anxious … Listen, I’m sorry but I have to tell you again, I keep getting this distinct message from—sorry to mention him—the other me.”

  She sighs. “It’s insulting you think I’m crazy enough to believe any of that.”

  “You’re right. You don’t want to take me seriously, either … I’m sorry.”

  “If I was to guess, I’d say that’s ‘Richard’ speaking.”

  “It’s not. It’s someone who’s known you forever—long before you were Marilyn Monroe, long before … Don’t you feel it, too—a longtime connection between us?”

  Now she gazes at me as if she were looking at an injured puppy. “No, honey. I wish I could say I did. But I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “I’m disappointed. I’ve always felt that. I’d see you on film, or … any picture of you—mostly film—and I always saw something in your smile, in … your eyes that I knew was speaking to me alone. And now that I know you, I’m sure of it.”

  “I don’t think it was me you were seeing—I think you were seeing through, you know, that filter you talk about. Maybe it was someone you knew before … or a missing part of yourself, if you’re like me. I’ve always had a missing part.” She touches my face with one hand and holds the other up to her own cheek, as if testing to see if we’re made of the same material. “Maybe sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”

  By the time I get home, I’m feeling lousy and have a fever of 102. Lily is working on a sculpture. “Hello, Richard. Margaret’s drinking again. She’s in bed. Shall I fix you a Scotch?”

  “No, thanks. I’m going to lie down for a while.”

  I sleep fitfully, dreamlessly, for about two hours. When I wake up, I still feel rotten.

  For dinner, I have the burnt roast beef again.

  “Margaret burned it,” says Lily.

  So much for General Psychology. “I’m sure it’s good anyway.”

  “No, it isn’t. Margaret burned it.”

  I stay up and watch the old television shows with Margaret and Lily. We hear the story of the marines on Paris Island again. Grace Kelly gets ready to take the plunge. Joe Friday is stern and thrifty of word but way too articulate for a detective sergeant confronting a “reefer dealer.” Ida Lupino goes nuts again as the rats close in.

  Margaret doesn’t ask me to refill her gin and tonic, but by the way her face has gone slack, I can tell there wasn’t much tonic in the large one she’s been sipping all evening.

  As the eleven o’clock news starts, I say goodnight to them and go upstairs.

  I take a shower to try to get my mind back into focus, but can’t. I wipe the steam off the big mirror in the bathroom and look at Richard’s body for what may or may not be the last time. I wonder if it’s possible I’ll soon be awakened by Douglas Crossley telling me I’m late for Hamlet rehearsal.

  I don’t look myself in the eye. I’m afraid I might see an X on my forehead.

  It’s windy outside. I sit like a bent ramrod against the headboard of my bed. I’m terrified of dropping off and waking up to my nightmare.

  I’m equally afraid I won’t.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1956

  I open my eyes and look at Richard’s Bulova. It’s four a.m.—here and in Kingman, Arizona.

  I’m still sitting, slumped now, against the head of the bed.

  I’ve survived my moment again. I have to stay in the year 1956. I feel a flood of deep sadness thinking of Sophie.

  I’m alive and out of my time for good. What did I expect? The end of the world never comes when the crazy guy with the placard announcing the apocalypse is waving it at you. It comes while you’re sitting on the toilet.

  Richard was an old man. Or he had been. He had insisted he was ready to go. It was his time.

  “God damn you to hell, Richard Blake.”

  But Brer Richard, he don’t say nothin’.

  I fall asleep again. At seven, I get up, call Dr. Tandler’s office at UCLA, and cancel my two classes for the day. I tell Margaret I’m sick, go back to bed, and sleep until two in the afternoon.

  When I wake up, I can barely move. It’s the same sensation I had as I watched Margaret fall to the floor when she was shot, a mixture of grief and exhaustion. I wonder if this is the way old people feel when they reach their final moments, ready to move on—maybe not so much grief-stricken at the end as drained, bone-tired of their years on earth.

  I stumble downstairs and drink a glass of orange juice. Margaret says, “I didn’t feel very well last night, either. I had the awfullest feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

  I make sure no one can overhear me, and telephone Marilyn.

  She sounds like she just woke up.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “You’re alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you come over the hill?” she says. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Can we meet someplace? I’ve got to do press stuff tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know if I can drive. I want to, but I honestly don’t know if I can.”

  After a short silence she says, “I’ll mail it to you.”

  “Could you drive out here? Lily and Margaret are in class at Northridge tonight.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Marilyn?”

  “If you give me directions,” she says curtly, “I’ll come.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m not that damaged. What time should I come?”

  “They leave for class at six thirty and get back about nine thirty.”

  I give her directions to La Vieja and Shoemaker Drive.

  Margaret offers to stay home with me, but I tell her I’m okay and that she doesn’t have to. They drive away on schedule.

  At nine, Marilyn still isn’
t here. I continue to have alternating chills and fever.

  I sit in a chair near the window the branch of the pepper tree scraped against. I’m wearing a sweatshirt with a sweater over that and am wrapped in a blanket, but I’m still shivering. I’m sure I’m hallucinating; I hear the pepper tree swaying again, as in the other storm.

  But it’s windless outside, entirely still.

  At 9:15, Marilyn’s Thunderbird pulls into the driveway. The engine shuts off, the headlights go out, and I hear the car door slam. I get up, leaving my blanket in the chair, and make my way to the front door.

  Marilyn, again the shy waif Norma Jean, is dressed in a long navy-blue coat, walking awkwardly toward me. When she gets to the doorway, she reaches up and touches my face.

  “You’re burning up.”

  “I’ll be all right.” I take her inside.

  We sit next to each other on the silver brocade settee where Margaret and I sat the night she was killed.

  The last thing Margaret said to me before Lily came into the room that night runs through my mind: “I want to talk about Lily—and the unspeakable damage that’s been done to her.”

  Marilyn looks around at the room I’ve described to her, at the trappings of Richard’s life with Lily and Margaret.

  Margaret continued, “But that’s not all.” Then she said, “Come here, I want to show you something.” At that moment, Lily called out my name. Margaret stopped, turned, and went into the kitchen to fix us some tea.

  And now I know what she was going to show me.

  “This is for you,” says Marilyn. She holds out a hand. “Someone gave it to me—I think, I can’t quite remember—a long time ago. I thought you might like it. The stone is red if you look at it indoors, but it’s green in the sunlight, and other colors other times. It’s my birthstone. Alexandrite.” She frowns. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

  I understand the meaning of what I’ve just remembered. I have no idea why it took me this long.

  The next thing I know, I’m standing beside Marilyn on the front porch. She kisses me goodbye and hurries off to her car. She looks back at me, gives me a little wave, hesitates, then gets in and drives off.

  I’m still standing there, looking after her, when Margaret and Lily pull in. The Thunderbird and Oldsmobile passed each other on the road.

  I look over at Lily’s sculpture on the front lawn, forlorn, longing, eerie. It seems to call out my names through the stillness.

  It’s almost entirely dark under the portico. I reach out in front of me, placing my right hand on one of the columns.

  I imagine—I don’t believe I can actually see it in the darkness—a glint of photographic sun flare, a flash of memory, a single red star in a midnight sky; a shaft of clarity shooting through my bewildered consciousness.

  The earth trembles.

  26

  1996 TO THE PRESENT

  1833 Shoemaker Drive is a museum now. In it, you can see more than fifty sculptures by the artist Lily St. Carnes. She lives with her sister in New York City—so the literature says.

  When I get back, it’s still the second Friday in October, but there is no Dr. L.M. Partridge to report my experiences to. She no longer exists. If she does, I wouldn’t begin to know where to look for her.

  I walk out of the living room, past a surprised museum guard who didn’t know anyone was in that room, and head over to Dick’s Gas and Hot Food.

  If I’d asked the man at the Los Angeles Times Information Service, when I spoke to him so long ago, to look up the headline for the afternoon edition of Friday, April thirteenth, the man would have read to me, “Six Killed in San Fernando Valley Earthquake.”

  I knew if I asked him to read that same headline when I got back this time, the number would have been seven.

  The night after Marilyn and I returned from Arizona, encountering all the traffic and the people outside on the sidewalks—shortly before Lily killed Margaret—I turned off the headlights, coasted into the garage, and went in the back door, not looking at the front of the house. Margaret wanted to talk about Lily’s pregnancy that night. She also wanted to discuss something else.

  I never gave her a chance. I grabbed her, hauled her into the living room, and demanded to know the whereabouts of a revolver she thought was upstairs in her mahogany box and that by then she had no intention of using.

  I remember the day all this began, standing beneath the portico at Shoemaker Drive, noticing the steel struts that had been used to reinforce the columns that were damaged, as it turned out, during that quake.

  The first April twelfth that earthquake happened, I had traveled abruptly into the future the night before. The second April twelfth, I was in Arizona with Marilyn. But this time, I was standing in the silent darkness, on the porch; looking into the sparkling raspberry red of the alexandrite—as if it were lit from within, a polestar for the lost and weary—when the ground moved and the portico collapsed.

  I refuse to go to the Hollywood Health Spa and get on the treadmills with Rita. Before she’s finished her first sentence about the shake-up at Paramount, I sit her down firmly and say, “Where was I born?”

  “You know where. Kingman, Arizona.”

  “I checked on that. There was no John Cade Jr. born at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Kingman, Arizona, on April 12, 1956.”

  For once she is speechless.

  “What’s the story?”

  She’s defiant. “I didn’t think you’d ever have to know. But at least I can tell you now why you’ve never gotten to be a star.”

  “What’s that got to do with where I was born?”

  “Nothing. It’s got to do with when you were born. I bribed an official at the hospital to … um … fudge your birth record. You were born the next day, on April thirteenth. Friday the thirteenth. I couldn’t have that.”

  I must look stricken because her eyes take on an uncharacteristic look of motherly worry. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “It wasn’t seven minutes later!” I shout. “It was a day and seven minutes!”

  “What?” She looks even more stricken.

  “Nothing … Except now that I say it, I realize it doesn’t mean anything. It might as well have been a hundred and seven years later. Or a thousand.”

  “What doesn’t mean anything?”

  If I’d stayed at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Kingman, Arizona, fifteen minutes longer, I’d have seen my father bring my mother in to give birth to their baby boy. But that’s not the way it was meant to be.

  “Time, Ma. Time doesn’t mean a thing.”

  I visit Mr. Parsons at Jewels By Jaxon shortly after I get back from my trip but am not surprised that he has no new light to shed. I say thank you and that I’m sorry to take his time again. Then I walk back out onto Rodeo Drive.

  I look at the calendar less often now that I’m back, and when I do, I’m never really sure of the date. I’ve come to expect time to do very odd things. It never disappoints me. When I try to remember my life, it’s not exactly my life I’m remembering, but recollections of other lives—all rocketing together into a mind-blowing wash. It’s like watching the peeling of an onion in slow-motion rewind. All the layers fly back together and somehow recreate “my” entire life without my ever being able to explain the whole, or even any of the parts. And what I’m left with is a tumble of sensations that feel as if they connect me with … something—but I couldn’t possibly describe what that something is, and to try to explain to anyone what happened, or what is happening now, is beyond impossible. I end up unable to think of it as anything other than part of—the immensity.

  Sophie and I are still married and living with each other again. She is the big part of me coming together. She arouses the same tenderness I feel for the vulnerable and unprotected—not that she’s a reed in the wind, unable to take care of herself; she’s the very opposite—but there is such total kindness in her, it makes me feel kindheartedly toward the kindness (or the part of her that values kindness
), and I see in her a recognition of the fragility of all of us, and it seems as gallant as anything I’ve ever seen. I think of Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird not liking being spat upon, but able to put up with it because the reason for letting it pass is so vital to our unfolding humanity. It’s as if I’m looking at all sides of Sophie now, as if the luxury of seeing out of other eyes for a change has enhanced my comprehensive vision, and I’m able to see a radiance in her I couldn’t make out before, or somehow forgot, or lost track of, during all my absences—drifting around in time. Maybe Plato was right, that precious stones are living beings. If so, it’s entirely possible it works both ways. That would make Sophie an alexandrite, the glow within her always shifting, her dazzling colors endlessly changing, depending on the light she’s in.

  I pause briefly and gaze at Marilyn, still smiling imperfectly back at me from the painting in the window of Morgan’s Gifts. I remember our last meeting at Marilyn’s apartment.

  How could she not have felt the same bond I did?

  The answer comes to me without even thinking about it. She was busy being Marilyn. She was caught up in that time. Those last minutes alone together in her apartment—when she claimed not to believe there was a longtime connection between us—she was “Marilyn Monroe,” the invention she herself didn’t, in her heart, recognize, and not the woman, the girl, I’d known most of the times we’d been together.