Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  That was always Norma Jeane’s faith as a reader of books.

  You opened a book at random and leafed through the pages and began to read. Seeking an omen, a truth to change your life.

  She’d packed a suitcase with books, to take with her on location. She’d begged Cass Chaplin and Eddy G to accompany her, and when they declined she extracted from them the promise they’d fly east to visit her, though knowing at the time neither would come, the habit of Hollywood was so deep in them.

  “Call us, Norma. Keep in touch. You promise.”

  There were days when the filming of Niagara went well, and there were days when the filming of Niagara didn’t go well, and usually on these days “Rose Loomis” was to blame or was in any case blamed.

  She was an obsessive-compulsive. She couldn’t do anything once. Terror of failure was her secret.

  Those nights, Norma Jeane declined to eat dinner with the others. She’d had enough of them, and they’d had enough of her. She herself had had enough of “Rose Loomis.” She took a lengthy bath and sprawled naked across the double bed in her suite in the Starlite Motel. She never watched TV, and she never listened to the radio. She was still reading the disjointed and radiantly mad diary of Nijinski, which inspired her to poetry in imitation of Nijinsky’s dreamy incantatory lines.

  I want to tell you that I love you you

  I want to tell you that I love you you

  I want to tell you that I love I love I love.

  I love but you do not. You do not love love.

  I am life, but you are death.

  I am death, but you are not life.

  Norma Jeane wrote frantically. What did these lines mean? She could not have said if she was addressing Cass Chaplin and Eddy G, or whether she was addressing Gladys, or her absent father. Now she was thousands of miles from California for the first time in her life, she saw vividly and painfully. I need you to love me. I can’t bear it that you don’t love me.

  There were two or three days, when her period came late, when Norma Jeane convinced herself she was pregnant. Pregnant! Her nipples ached, and her breasts felt swollen; her belly seemed rounded to her, the skin glistening white, and the partly shaved, sparse bleached pubic hair stiff as if with static electricity. This had nothing to do with “Rose,” who’d let a helpless infant suffocate in a drawer and who would abort any pregnancy that interfered with her desire. You could just imagine Rose climbing onto an examining table and spreading her legs and telling the abortionist to “make it quick, I’m not sentimental.”

  Making love, those careless boys Cass Chaplin and Eddy G never used condoms. Unless, as they said, they were pretty sure a partner was “sick.”

  Twined in the young men’s supple downy arms, in a stupor of erotic pleasure as an infant sated at the breast, and with no more thought of the future than an infant, Norma Jeane drifted into sleep and in her dreams lay in her lovers’ arms, in utter bliss. If it happens, it was meant to be. With one part of her mind she wanted to have a baby—it would be both Cass’s and Eddy G’s baby—and with another, more lucid, part of her mind she knew this would be a mistake.

  As Gladys had made a mistake, having another daughter.

  She rehearsed telephoning Cass and Eddy G. “Guess what? Good news! Cass, Eddy—you’re going to be fathers.”

  Silence! The looks on their faces!—Norma Jeane laughed, seeing the men as clearly as if they were in the room with her.

  Of course, she wasn’t pregnant.

  As in a malevolent fairy tale where you never get your true wish, but only false wishes, it isn’t so easy to get pregnant if it’s pregnancy you want.

  So, midway in the scene in which “Rose Loomis” is taken to the morgue to identify her drowned husband but is shown her drowned lover instead and faints dead away, Norma Jeane began to bleed. It was a cruel trick! “Rose Loomis” in a skirt so tight she can barely walk in high heels, a belt cinching her narrow waist. “Rose Loomis,” who wears the scantiest lace underwear, quickly soaking up blood. Her fainting spell is genuine, almost. She would have to be helped to a waiting car.

  Norma Jeane was to be bedridden for three miserable days. She bled brackish clotted ill-smelling blood, her head raged with a blinding migraine. This was “Rose’s” punishment! The attending studio physician supplied her with a generous quantity of codeine painkillers—“Just don’t drink, promise?” There was a notorious laxness among the studio-employed physicians of Hollywood, an indifference to a patient’s future beyond the film project at hand. While Norma Jeane was in bed, filming on Niagara had to be done around her. Word came back to her that, without “Rose,” the daily rushes were flat, dull, disappointing. It struck Norma Jeane for the first time that she was crucial to this film, and not Joseph Cotten, and certainly not Jean Peters. For the first time, too, she wondered what these other leading actors were being paid.

  In the Starlite Motel, Norma Jeane was reading Nijinsky, and she was reading Stanislavski’s My Life in Art, which Cass Chaplin had given her on the eve of her departure. A precious hardcover book, with Cass’s handwritten annotations. She was reading The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life and she was reading in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which made her sleepy, it was so dogmatic and dull, a voice droning like a metronome. Yet wasn’t Freud a great genius? Wasn’t he like Einstein, Darwin? Otto Öse had alluded favorably to Freud, and so had I. E. Shinn. Half of upscale Hollywood was “in therapy.” Freud believed that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious” and Norma Jeane would have liked to travel that road, to seize control of her wayward emotions. So I could free myself not of love but of the requirement of love. So that I could free myself of wishing to die if I am not loved. She was reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which was not a story “Rose Loomis” would have had the patience or the temperament to read. So that I could look upon death. Not Rose, but me.

  The story would be told of how H himself had to come fetch Marilyn Monroe, exasperated and anxious when she’d failed to appear on the set after several summonses. Discovering her costumed in her skintight dress and glaring makeup for Rose’s climactic strangulation scene at the hands of her avenging husband. She stared at H in the mirror as if for an instant not recognizing him. As if for an instant H himself might have been Death. That loopy stricken smile. And breathy giggle! For she’d been crying over the terrible death of Ivan Ilyich, was that it? Crying over the death of a fictitious nineteenth-century Russian civil servant who hadn’t even been a particularly good or worthy man. An inky mascara trail on one rouged cheek and quickly, guiltily, she said, “I’m coming! Rose is ready to d-die.”

  9

  Yet she died in terror. That’s a fitting punishment. Except the bitch should’ve suffered a little more. And we should’ve seen it close up, camera right in her face. Not looking down from above. That cross-hatching of light making the death beautiful like a painting. Rose fallen and dead. A body sprawled inert. So suddenly Rose isn’t Rose but only the female body, dead.

  10

  “Why won’t you answer? Where are you?”

  Alone in the Starlite Motel in Niagara Falls, Norma Jeane so badly missed Cass Chaplin and Eddy G, who were rarely at any of the numbers they’d given her when she called, mystery residences in which the phones rang, rang, and rang or were answered by uncomprehending Hispanic or Filipino maids. So badly missed them that she did finally “make love” to herself as they’d taught her, envisioning Cass and Eddy G, both her lovers simultaneously conjoined in a single accelerated and panicked stroking of fingers that brought her to a climax so explosive, so frightening, she seemed to lose consciousness, waking a few seconds later, still dazed, a trail of saliva on her chin and her heart pounding at a dangerous clip. If I was Rose I’d love how this feels. But I’m not Rose I guess. She began to cry with the hopelessness of it, the shame. So badly missed her lovers, she’d come almost to doubt they existed. Or, if existing, that they adored their Norma as they claimed.

  Norma
Jeane wouldn’t have been devastated, she told herself, if Cass and Eddy G were involved together, or singly, with other men. (She guessed that was a way of life for male homosexuals: quick, casual sex. She tried not to think about it.) But yes, yes, Norma Jeane would have been devastated if they took on another girl lover in her absence.

  Her strength was, she was the Female. There were two Males, and she was the Female. “A magical and indissoluble triumvirate” in Cass’s exalted words. Oh, they did adore her! They loved her. She was certain. They were radiant with pride and possession appearing with her in public. The Studio invention “Marilyn Monroe” was on the verge of Fame, and canny Hollywood-born Cass and Eddy G knew what this could mean even if their girl seemed not to know. (“Oh!—that isn’t going to happen, don’t be silly. Like Jean Harlow? Joan Crawford? I’m not that important. I know what I am. How hard I work. How scared I am. It’s just a trick of the cameras, that I look the way I do sometimes.”) Even when Cass and Eddy G laughed at her, she understood that they loved her. For they laughed at her as you’d laugh at a younger, silly sister.

  Yet sometimes, well—sometimes their laughter was a little cruel. Norma Jeane tried not to recall those times. When the boys ganged up on her, you could say. Making love to her so it hurt. In that way she didn’t like, it hurt, and it hurt for a long time afterward so she could hardly sit, and had to sleep lying on her stomach and take painkillers, or one of Cass’s magic-potion pills, and why they liked it that way she couldn’t comprehend.

  “It just isn’t natural, is it? I mean—it can’t be.”

  Laugh, laugh at little Norma blinking tears from those lustrous baby blue eyes.

  Sometimes it was Norma Jeane’s feelings they hurt, referring to her repeatedly as she even when she was present. She, she, she! Sometimes they referred to her slyly, mysteriously, as Fish.

  As in “Hey, Fish, lend us a twenty?”

  As in “Hey, li’l Fishie, lend me a fifty?”

  (Norma Jeane recalled that she’d once or twice overheard Otto Öse on the phone referring to her, or to another of his girl models, as “fish.” But when she asked Cass what the term meant, he shrugged and drifted out of the room. She asked Eddy G, who told her bluntly, for in their triumvirate of personalities Eddy G was Cass Chaplin’s younger, brasher brother. “Fish? Why, you’re ‘fish,’ Norma. You can’t help it.” “But why? What does ‘fish’ mean?” Norma Jeane persisted, smiling. Eddy G smiled, too, saying pleasantly, “‘Fish’ only just means female. The sticky scales, the classic stink. A fish is slimy, y’ see? A fish is a kind of female no matter if it’s actually a male, specially when you see a fish gutted and laid out, get my meaning? It’s nothing personal.”)

  Yet Norma Jeane’s strength was Female. As “Marilyn Monroe”—“Rose Loomis”—was Female.

  They can’t have babies without us. They can’t have sons.

  The world would end without us! Females.

  She was dialing one of the Hollywood numbers another time.

  How many times that evening. That night. And what time was it in Los Angeles? Three hours ahead or three hours behind? She never could get it straight.

  “It’s one A.M. here, that means it’s ten P.M. there? Or—eleven?”

  Eagerly she was dialing the number of her own new, still barely furnished apartment near Beverly Boulevard. This time, the phone was answered.

  “Hello?” The voice was female, and sounded young.

  THE GEMINI

  The Greeting. There they were, awaiting their beloved at the gate! Continental Airlines, Los Angeles International Airport. In new stylish clothes—blazers, vests, ascots, silk shirts with prominent cuff links—and matching fedoras. A smoldering dark-eyed young man with thick black hair and Chaplinesque woeful-lover gaze and black mustache. Beside him, slightly taller, a compactly built young man with Edward G. Robinson’s pugnacious yet somewhat effeminate features, fleshy-pouty lips, and passionate eyes. The one who resembled Chaplin was carrying a half-dozen long-stemmed white roses and the one who resembled Robinson was carrying a half-dozen long-stemmed red roses. When a young blond woman in dark glasses appeared amid a line of passengers disembarking from the plane, in a white sharkskin suit wrinkled from the cross-country flight, her cotton-candy hair nearly hidden by a slope-brimmed straw hat, the dapper young men stared at her blankly.

  “What’s wrong? Don’t you kn-know me?”

  Norma Jeane gave to the tense moment a musical-comedy deftness. That was her gift, a knack for desperate improvisation. She laughed gaily and smiled her million-dollar smile. She waved a hand in the young men’s faces to wake them.

  “Nor-ma!”

  The other passengers stared as the young men rushed to embrace Norma Jeane. Eddy G hugged her so hard he lifted her grunting in the crook of his right arm, all but crushing her ribs. Then Cass with a dancer’s stealthy grace embraced her and kissed her full on the mouth, wet and hungry.

  But who were they? Actors? Fashion models? Each looked teasingly familiar, like somebody else.

  “Oh, Cass.”

  Norma Jeane wept, burying her face in the white roses.

  But Eddy G intervened, stepping back to her and also kissing her wetly on the mouth. “My turn.” Norma Jeane was too startled to kiss him back or even to shut her eyes. She was having a hard time catching her breath. So many roses thrust at her. And some had fallen to the ground. The plane landing had frightened her, a bumpy landing in sulfurous swirling smog, and this greeting had frightened her even more. Cass was deeply moved, gazing into her eyes. “Norma, it’s just you’re so—beautiful. I guess—”

  Eddy G flashed his fleet boyish grin. As he made friends howl with laughter doing his Little Caesar imitation, so now he mimicked his famous father without seeming to know what he did, sneering, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. It was Eddy G’s style to react quickly to avoid embarrassment. “Yeah! Kind of, it’s easy to forget. How beautiful ‘Marilyn’ is.”

  The young men laughed. Norma Jeane joined in, uncertainly.

  What changes in Cass and Eddy G! Almost, Norma Jeane might not have recognized them.

  Not just the stylish clothes. (Did they have a new friend, a new generous “benefactor”? One of their “older lovelorn-male types” it was impossible for them to resist?) Cass had let his hair grow thicker and curlier and was sprouting a silky-black mustache so like the Little Tramp’s you had to look closely to determine this couldn’t be the original. Eddy G was edgy and excited (his current drug of choice was Dexamyl, superior to Benzedrine in all ways and guaranteed nonaddictive); his dark eyes shone, though his eyelids were puffy and capillaries had burst in his left eyeball in a delicate lacework of blood.

  “Nor-ma. Welcome back to L.A.”

  “God, we missed you. Don’t ever leave us again, promise?”

  Norma Jeane struggled to carry the thorny roses, as Cass and Eddy G strode beside her, talking and laughing excitedly. Plans for that evening. Plans for tomorrow evening. Advance buzz on Niagara—“Walter Winchell predicts it’s gonna be a bombshell.” Walking three abreast through the crowded terminal, gaudy and self-displaying as peacocks. Norma Jeane was trying not to notice the eyes of strangers fixing avidly and curiously upon them. Strangers pausing to turn and look after them.

  Norma Jeane had left keys to her car with Cass and Eddy G, and they’d driven the lime-green Caddy out to the airport. She noticed a long deep scrape on the right rear fender. Serrated dents in the chrome grille. She laughed and said nothing.

  Eddy G drove. Norma Jeane sat between her lovers in the crowded front seat. The convertible top was down. Sulfur-tinged air whipped at Norma Jeane’s eyes. As Eddy G sped through traffic he took Norma Jeane’s hand to press against his swelling groin. Cass took Norma Jeane’s other hand to press against his swelling groin.

  But they don’t know me really. They didn’t recognize me.

  The Vow. Somehow it happened: the Château Mouton-Rothschild 1931 slipped through his fingers, he who was responsible
for acquiring the bottle from a friend of a friend of a friend whose cavernous wine cellar up on Laurel Canyon Drive could accommodate such mysterious losses, and God damn the bottle was two-thirds full. Glass shattered. Slivers flew across the hardwood floor like demonic thoughts. The tarty-sharp stink of the expensive wine would prevail for months. “Oh, God! Forgive me.” Whoever it was, forgiven. Dreamy-sticky kisses. Those lovelorn woebegone eyes. You laughed at such eyes, such beauty. Lost in rapture that went on and on. They were young enough, and the Dexamyl helped, to make love forever. Making love was the sweetest high. Other highs were interior, in the brain, but making love was shared, wasn’t it? Or usually.

  “Oh!—it hurts. I’m sorry. I c-can’t help it, I guess!”

  There were no blinds on these windows. The windows wide open to the sky. You could determine through shut eyelids if it was a clear southern California day or a not-clear day, if it was dawn or twilight, deep starry night or deep murky night, or “the great noontide” as Cass intoned, quoting Zarathustra, his early adolescent love. (“But who is Zarathustra?” Norma Jeane asked Eddy G. “Is this somebody we should know?” Eddy G said, shrugging, “Sure. I guess so. I mean—eventually you know everybody here. Sometimes the names change but if you’ve met, you’ve met.”) In Hollywood Tatler, in Hollywood Reporter, in L.A. Confidential and Hollywood Confidential, tabloid photos of these glamorous young people. In gossip columns.

  YOUNG MEN-ABOUT-TOWN CHARLIE CHAPLIN JR AND EDWARD G. ROBINSON JR AND BLOND SEXPOT MARILYN MONROE: A THREESOME?

  Vulgar, said Cass. Exploitative, said Eddy G. “Marilyn” is a serious actress, said Cass. He hated this one of himself looking like a complete asshole, his mouth open like he’s panting, said Eddy G. Yet they tore out the most lurid photos and taped them to the walls. The week they made the cover of Hollywood Confidential, a photo taken of the three of them playfully dancing together in a bar on the Strip, Cass and Eddy G bought a dozen copies of the magazine to tear off the covers and tape them to Norma Jeane’s bedroom door. Norma Jeane laughed at them, they were so vain. In turn, they were merciless in teasing her—“Is this the sexpot? Or this?” Grabbing at her buttocks and at her vagina. Norma Jeane squealed and pushed their hands away. Just the touch of them, their quick hard fingers, the heat in their faces, made her melt. Oh it was a cliché but it was so.