Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Oh, how’d she know she’d be invited by a U.S. Army colonel to “boost G.I. morale” in Korea? She’d swear, at the time she hardly knew where that tragic country was “situated.”

  In her paperback copy of the classic The Paradox of Acting, which someone had given her, she underlined in red ink:

  As eternity is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, so the true actor discovers that his stage is both everywhere and nowhere.

  This, on the eve of their departure for Japan.

  The Ex-Athlete was a man of so few words, in a sense he, too, was a mime.

  For her final mime class (which no one but the Blond Actress knew would be her final class) she portrayed an aged woman on her deathbed. Her fellow students were captivated by her painfully realistic performance, so different from their own breezy stylized mimery. The Blond Actress lay flat on her back in a black sheath to her ankles, barefoot, and lifted herself by degrees through anguish, doubt, and despair, yielding finally to an acceptance of her fate and a joyous awakening to—Death? She lifted and lifted herself until like a dancer she was balanced on the balls of her trembling feet, her arms stretched over her head. For a long ecstatic moment she retained this posture, her body trembling.

  You could see her heart beating. Against her breastbone. You could see the life vibrating inside her, on the brink of breaking out. Some of us swore, her skin was translucent!

  It wasn’t just I was in love with the woman because I’m not sure that I ever was.

  What wasn’t being said was, he couldn’t forgive her for being bored by his family. His family!

  He was choked with it. What was unsaid. Unsaid and unforgiven. His wife was bored with his family and with him.

  Did she think herself superior to them? Her?

  At Christmas they’d driven up and she’d been quiet, watchful, sweet-smiling, polite. Hardly saying a word. Laughing when others laughed. She was the kind of baby-faced woman both men and women tell their stories to, and she seemed to be listening wide-eyed and impressed, but he, the husband, the only one of them who knew her, could see how her attention was forced, her smile faded, leaving only its lines around her mouth. She knew to defer to his father and to older male relatives. She knew to defer to his mother and to older female relatives. She knew to make a fuss over babies and small children and to compliment their mothers—“You must be so happy! So proud.” There was no flaw to her performance but he could see it was a performance and that pissed him. Like taking a few bites of chicken liver, sweetbreads, marinated thin-sliced salmon, anchovy paste, and practically tears in her eyes saying it’s delicious but she isn’t very hungry right now. Almost a look of panic in her face with so much shouting, laughing, crowding, and jostling, and kids running screaming in and out of the room, and the football game on TV turned up loud for the hard-of-hearing among the men. And afterward she’d apologized to him, leaning against him in that weak guilty way of hers, pressing her cheek against his cheek, saying she’d never had any real Christmas when she was growing up. As if that was the problem.

  “I guess I got a lot to learn, Daddy? Huh?”

  After the wedding, when you’d expect her to be more relaxed with the family and happy to visit them, she wasn’t. Oh, she gave that impression, or tried to. But he, the husband—an athlete trained to read his opponents’ deadpan expressions, a batter skilled not only at deciphering a pitcher’s every nuance of a twitch but at keeping in his consciousness the exact position of every opposing player on the field relative to one another and to his teammates (if any) on base, and to him—could tell. Did she think he was blind? Did she think he was just another asshole like the kind she’d “dated” since possibly junior high? Did she think he was insensitive as her, passing off as a joke her vomiting through the night after one of Momma’s rich marathon meals? She knew, she was always assuring him, that his family “blames me, a little” for him being excommunicated from the Church. Sure, he’d been divorced, and the Church doesn’t recognize divorce, but it was only when he remarried (a divorced woman!) that he violated canon law and had to be excommunicated. She needed to make that up to them, if they doubted her. Doubted her sincerity. Her integrity. Her seriousness about life and about religion. “Maybe I’ll convert? To Catholicism? Would you accept that, Daddy? My m-mother is Catholic, sort of.”

  So she went to mass with them. The women. His mother, and his elderly grandmother, and his aunts. And kids. And both Momma and his aunt complained she was “always craning her neck”—“smiling.” Like you don’t do in church. Like something is funny? At a side altar when they were coming in she pointed to a statue and whispered, “Why is his heart outside his body?” And that smile, like everything is a joke. “Pappa says it’s a scared smile, she’s a scared little bird. So she’s nervous? People looking at her. Because they do. Knowing she’s your wife, and who she is. And she kept pulling the shawl over her head and it kept slipping off like this was an accident and she yawned so much during mass we thought her jaws were gonna break. Then it’s communion, and she’s going to come with us! ‘Aren’t I supposed to?’ she asked. We told her no, you’re not Catholic, are you Catholic, Marilyn? and she said with this hurt little baby pout, ‘Oh. You know I’m not.’ Sure she’s aware of men looking at her, that walk of hers. And she’s got her head bowed but her eyes are skittering all over. In the car coming home she says how interesting the service was, like ‘service’ is some word we’re supposed to know. She says this word ‘Cath-ol-i-cism’ like it’s something anybody would know. She says with that breathy laugh ‘Oh, that was long, wasn’t it!’ and the kids laughing at her in the car saying, “Long? That’s why we go to nine o’clock mass, that priest is the fast one.’ ‘Long? Wait’ll we take you to high mass.’ ‘Or a requiem mass!’ and everybody laughing at her, and the shawl sliding off her hair that’s so slippery and shiny like a dummy’s hair in a department store, that’s why the shawl don’t stay.”

  In the kitchen, it was true she tried hard. She meant well but she was clumsy. It was easier to take things from her and do them yourself. So she’d get jumpy and nervous, if you came near. She’d let pasta boil to a mush if you didn’t watch her every second and she was always dropping things, like the big knife. She couldn’t do a risotto, her mind was always drifting off. She tasted something, she didn’t know what she was tasting. ‘Is it too salty? Does it need salt?’ She thought onions and garlic were the same thing! She thought olive oil was the same as melted margarine! She said, ‘People make pasta? I mean—not just in a store?’ Your aunt gives her a marinated hard-boiled egg out of the refrigerator and she says, ‘Oh is this to eat? I mean—standing up?’”

  The Ex-Athlete, the husband, listened politely to his mother’s litany of complaints, which were riddled with the refrain Well, it’s none of my business. He would listen, and he would say nothing. His face darkened with blood, he stared at the floor, and when Momma finished he walked out of the room, and in his wake invariably he’d hear in wounded Italian See? He blames me.

  It offended him more, his bachelor’s sense of propriety, that his wife left any room she inhabited a mess, failing to pick up not only after him but after herself. Even in his parents’ household. He’d swear she hadn’t been so distracted before they were married, she’d been neat and clean and prettily shy about undressing in his presence. Now, he stumbled over clothes of hers he hadn’t remembered her owning, let alone wearing recently. Tissues caked with makeup! In their bathroom at his parents’ home there were ugly splotches of makeup in the sink, a toothpaste tube missing a top, blond hairs in combs and hairbrushes, and scum in the bathtub for Momma to discover when they left, unless he cleaned it himself. God damn.

  Sometimes she forgot to flush the toilet.

  It wasn’t drugs, he was certain. He’d destroyed her cache and read her the riot act and she’d sworn she would never, never swallow another pill—“Oh, Daddy! Believe me.” He couldn’t figure it: since she wasn’t doing a movie why’d s
he need quick energy or courage? Almost, it seemed it was ordinary life baffled her. Like one of his teammates, only good in the heat of a close game, otherwise a chronic fuckup. She was so earnest, saying, “Daddy, it’s so scary: how a scene with actual people just goes on and on? Like on a bus? What’s to stop it?” And, that wistful little-girl look in her face, “D’you ever think, Daddy, how hard it is to figure what people mean when probably they don’t mean anything? Not like a script. Or that the point of something happening is when probably there’s no point, it just ‘happened’? Like the weather?” He’d shake his head, not knowing what the hell to say. He’d dated actresses and models and party girls, and he’d have sworn he knew the personality type, but Marilyn was something else. Like his buddies said, suggestively, giving him a poke in the ribs to make him blush, Marilyn’s something else, eh? Those assholes didn’t know the half of it.

  Sometimes she scared him. Kind of. Like if an actual doll opened its blue glass eyes and you’re expecting baby talk but she says something so weird, and possibly so deep, it’s like one of these Zen riddles, you can’t grasp it. And saying it in the vocabulary of a ten-year-old. He’d try to assure her sure he understood, sort of. “See, Marilyn, you been working nonstop for ten years making movies, almost like me, a real pro; now you’re taking a break, it’s off-season for you, like for me I’m retired, see?”—but by this time he’d lost the point of what he was saying. He wasn’t good at bullshitting. Just he could appreciate the similarity between them. Like when you’re a top pro and the eyes of the world on you and it’s a tight season including playoffs and the Series, never do you have to cast around for something to think about, let alone do. And a game in session consumes those hours of that day as nothing else can, except possibly fighting in a war or dying. “In boxing they say ‘That got his attention.’ When a guy is hit hard.” He told her this meaning to be sympathetic, and she looked at him smiling and confused like he was speaking a foreign language. “It’s about attention,” he said, faltering. “Concentration. And if you don’t have that—” His words drifted off like children’s balloons, lacking gravity.

  Once, at their place in Bel Air, he’d come upon her in their bedroom and she was hurriedly cleaning the clothes-strewn room, though a maid (he’d hired himself) was due in a few hours. She’d showered and was stark naked except for a towel wrapped like a turban around her head. She acted guilty seeing him and stammered, “I d-don’t know how the room got this way. I’ve been sick, I guess.” It was like, he’d come to think, she was two people: the blind-seeming and totally self-absorbed woman who left a mess in her wake and the alert and intelligent and stricken woman, a girl really, her eyes snatching at his like they were two kids together in this predicament maybe fifteen years old somehow waking up married. In that instant her body seemed to him not a woman’s beautiful voluptuous body but a responsibility they jointly shared, like a giant baby.

  But in his parents’ house on Beach Street in San Francisco he felt estranged from her. Even as she gazed at him with her wistful-guilty look. Even as, out of sight of his family, she’d pluck at him with her fingers. Help me! I’m drowning. Somehow, this hardened his heart against her. His first wife had gotten along well with his family, or reasonably well. And Marilyn was the dream girl everybody was primed to adore. Yet she shut up like a clam if anybody asked her about being a “movie star,” as if she’d never heard of such a thing. Blushing and stammering if anybody spoke of seeing her movies as if she was ashamed of them, which possibly she was. She was tongue-tied with embarrassment when one of the Ex-Athlete’s nieces asked innocently, “Is your hair real?” Then, a while later, he’d see a savage look in her face: it was Rose, the bitch. Superior. Scornful. Well, Rose was only a waitress, in that trashy film, and a slut. And Marilyn Monroe—a pinup, a photographer’s model, a starlet, and God knows what else.

  He’d wanted to belt her. Who did she think she was, looking at his family like that?

  He’d never told her, of course: he’d come close to canceling their first date when a friend called to tell him Monroe had been involved with Bob Mitchum, a notorious coke user and a suspected Commie; the story was she’d gotten pregnant and Mitchum had beaten her in a rage and caused a miscarriage.

  (Was any of this true? He knew how rumors spread, how people lied. He’d hired a private detective recommended by his friend Frank Sinatra, who’d hired him to check up on Ava Gardner with whom he was crazy in love, but the results were, after a six-hundred-buck fee, “inconclusive.”)

  One thing was certain. Long before he knew her, she’d posed for nude photos. There was a perennial tale in Hollywood that Monroe had done a few porn films in her late teens, too, but none of these ever surfaced. After they were married, a so-called photography dealer contacted the Ex-Athlete through a business associate saying he had some photo negatives he believed “Miss Monroe’s husband would wish to acquire.” The Ex-Athlete called the man and asked bluntly was this blackmail? Extortion? The dealer protested it was just a business transaction. “You pay, Slugger. And I deliver.”

  The Ex-Athlete asked how much. The dealer named a sum.

  “Nothing’s worth that.”

  “If you love the lady, sure it is.”

  The Ex-Athlete spoke quietly. “I can have you hurt. You cocksucker.”

  “Hey, now. That’s not the right attitude.”

  The Ex-Athlete didn’t reply.

  The dealer said, quickly, “I’m on your side. I’m an old admirer of yours, actually. And the lady’s too. She’s a real high-class lady, in fact. About the only one of them with any integrity. The females, I mean.” He paused. The Ex-Athlete could hear him breathing. “What I feel strongly is, these negatives should be off the market so they can’t be misappropriated.”

  A meeting was arranged. The Ex-Athlete went alone. For a long time he examined the prints. She’d been so young! Hardly more than a girl. The photos were calendar-art nudes, from the series to which “Miss Golden Dreams 1949” belonged, which he’d already seen in Playboy. A few were more frontal, more revealing. A swath of darkish-blond pubic hair, the tender soles of her naked feet. Her feet! He wanted to kiss her feet. This was the woman he loved before she’d become that woman. She hadn’t been Marilyn yet. Her hair wasn’t platinum blond but a honey-brown shade, wavy and curly to her shoulders. A sweet-faced trusting girl. Even her breasts looked different. Her nose, her eyes. The tilt of her head. She hadn’t learned yet to be Marilyn. He realized that this was the girl he truly loved. The other, Marilyn, he was crazy for, or maybe crazed over, but you couldn’t trust the woman.

  So the Ex-Athlete bought the prints and the negatives and paid the “photography dealer” in cash, so filled with disgust for the transaction he could barely force himself to meet the man’s eye. It wasn’t just the Ex-Athlete was this girl’s husband, he was a man of integrity. What the world knew of him, his manliness, his pride, even his reticence, was true. “Thanks, Slugger. You did the right thing.” Like a boxer trained not to lead but to counterpunch, the Ex-Athlete jerked his head up at this sniggering remark and met the eyes of his tormentor, a mollusk-faced Caucasian of no specific age, greasy hair, sideburns, a smiling row of capped teeth, and without a word the Ex-Athlete balled his fist and threw a punch into the teeth, a punch uncoiled from the shoulder, a damned good punch for a guy almost forty, not in top condition, and basically sweet-natured and not a fighter. The dealer stumbled and went down. It happened fast and clean as a home run. Even the beautiful crack! of the blow. The Ex-Athlete, panting now, still wordless, nursing his cut knuckles, walked swiftly away.

  He’d destroy the evidence. Prints, negatives. Up in smoke.

  “‘Miss Golden Dreams 1949.’ If I’d met you then.”

  This episode, the Ex-Athlete played and replayed like a movie. It was his movie, no one else knew. He’d never tell the Blond Actress. Observing her with his family, her forced fading smile, the glaze of boredom in her eyes, he was forced to acknowledge that his generosity, h
is forgiveness, the affection of his family, his mother’s effort, were unappreciated by his wife. Maybe she wasn’t on drugs but she was god-damned self-absorbed, selfish. By the end of Sunday dinner she’d disappeared again. Where the hell? The Ex-Athlete saw his relatives’ eyes on him as he stalked off to find her. Knowing how they’d murmur in Italian, when he left the room. It’s between him and her, nobody’s business. You think she’s maybe pregnant?

  In their bedroom, she was doing dance exercises. Lifting her legs, pulling at her toes. She wore a silky rust-orange dress he’d bought her in New York, which wasn’t an appropriate costume for doing exercises in, and she was in her stocking feet, and there were snags and runs in her stockings. Across the unmade bed and on the chairs and even the carpet were items of clothing, hers and his, and damp towels, and books—God damn he was fed up with her books, one of her suitcases was stuffed mostly with books, he had to carry the fucker and he resented it. In Hollywood it was an open joke Marilyn Monroe thought she was an intellectual, never graduated from high school even and mispronounced every other word she spoke. “Where’d you go so fast? What’s this?” She turned a bright insincere actressy smile on him, and his hand shot out and struck her on the jaw.

  Not a fist. An opened hand, his palm.

  “Oh!—oh, please.”

  She stumbled and cringed backward, sitting down hard on the bed. Except for her red-lipstick mouth her face was deathly white and looked like a piece of china in the instant before it shatters. A single tear rolled down her cheek. He was beside her, holding her. “No, Daddy. It was my fault. Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry.” She began to cry, and he held her, and after a while they made love, or tried to, except outside the windows, outside the shut door, she could hear murmurous muffled voices, like waves lapping. Finally they gave up and just held each other. “Daddy, forgive me? I won’t do it again.”