Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Pearlman, too, had held his ground with HUAC. Pearlman, too, had behaved with integrity. Give the man credit.

  Have you fucked her, Max? Or plan to? That’s the subtext here?

  “If we did the play, Marilyn would be sensational. I could work with her privately for months. Already, in acting class, she’s responding. There’s an outer shell of her—as in all of us—that has to be penetrated; inside, she’s molten lava. Everybody in town would be saying what a risk for our theater, for Pearlman’s reputation, and Pearlman would show ’em, Marilyn would show ’em, this could be the stage debut of the century.”

  “A coup,” the Playwright said ironically.

  “Of course,” Pearlman worried aloud, “she might return to Hollywood. They’re suing her, The Studio. She refuses to discuss it but I called her agent out there and the man was frank and friendly enough; he explained what the situation is: Marilyn’s in violation of her contract, she owes The Studio four or five movies, she’s suspended without pay and hasn’t anything saved, and I said, But is she free to work for me? and he laughed and said, ‘She’s free if she wants to pay the price, or maybe you could match the price,’ and I said, What kind of money are we talking here? A hundred thousand? Two hundred? and he said, ‘More like a cool million. This is Hollywood, not the Great White Way,’ the fucker said, sounding like a young guy, younger than me, laughing at me. So I hung up.”

  Again, the Playwright said nothing. He felt a small shudder of contempt.

  Since that first evening, he and the Blond Actress had met twice. They’d talked earnestly. Yes, they’d held hands. The Playwright had yet to say I love you, I adore you. He had yet to say I can’t continue to see you. The Blond Actress had been brimming with talk but not of her Hollywood past or her financial difficulties at the present time. Yet the Playwright knew, from what he’d heard or read, that Marilyn Monroe was being sued by The Studio.

  How little that person, that presence, has to do with her. Or with us.

  Max Pearlman continued to speak for another ten minutes, his mood veering from ecstatic and convinced to agitated and doubtful. The Playwright could imagine his old friend leaning back in his ancient swivel chair, stretching his fatty-muscled arms, scratching his hairy belly where his stained sweater rode up his torso, and on the walls of his cluttered and smelly office photographs of such Ensemble-associated actors as Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger and Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley and Julie Harris and Montgomery Clift and James Dean and Paul Newman and Shelley Winters and Viveca Lindfors and Eli Wallach smiling fondly upon their Max Pearlman; one day soon, the beautiful face of Marilyn Monroe to be added to these, the most prized of trophies. At last Pearlman said, “You’re taking your play to another theater, eh? That’s it?” and the Playwright said, “No, Max. I am not. I just don’t think it’s finished yet, ready to be performed, that’s all,” and Pearlman said, explosively, “Shit! Then let’s finish it together, let’s work on it for God’s sake, you and me, and get it into shape for next year. For her,” and the Playwright said gently, “Max. Good night.”

  Hanging up then, quickly. And taking the receiver from the hook.

  Pearlman was the type to call back and let the phone ring to infinity.

  17

  Deceit. She, too, had called him. The familiar phone’s ringing like a knife blade in the heart.

  Hi! It’s me. Your Magda?

  As if she’d needed to identify herself.

  One afternoon picking up the receiver to hear the woman’s lovely low breathy-throaty voice, no preamble to her singing:

  “You ain’t been blue

  No, no, no

  You ain’t been blue

  Till you’ve got that mood indigo.”

  His wife, Esther, had returned from wherever she’d been. Miami.

  In his face, in his grieving guilty eyes, she saw.

  This awkward, improvised scene: the Blond Actress’s words thrumming in his ears, in his groin, in his soul, the remembered scent of her, the promise of her, the mystery of her, in comic collision with a frowning Esther and her suitcases thudding in the front hall, the hall of this cramped old brownstone impossibly narrow because the Playwright’s books overflowed in teetering pinewood bookshelves into every part of the household, not excluding the bathrooms, and there was the Playwright stooping to lift the suitcases, and somehow a Neiman-Marcus shopping bag spilled at his feet. “Oh, clumsy! Oh, look what you’ve done.”

  True! He was clumsy. Not a graceful man. Not a romantic man. Not a lover.

  He’d begun to call her Dear, dear one. Not yet darling. Oh, not yet darling!

  Holding hands, gripping hands. In their shadowed jazz-club rendezvous. Where no one recognized them. (In fact, did no one recognize them? A middle-aged bespectacled stork of a man with a luminous young woman gazing adoringly up at him?) A few kisses. Yet not yet a deeply passionate kiss. Not a kiss that was a prelude to lovemaking.

  Please understand: my life is not my own. I have a wife, I have children and a family. I could hurt others by loving you. But I can’t hurt others! I prefer to hurt myself.

  And the Blond Actress smiled, and sighed, and so beautifully improvised her half of the scene. Oh gosh. I understand, I guess!

  His wife was saying, brightly, “Miss me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “I can see.”

  Since the night of the play reading, and all that it had revealed to the Playwright of his folly and the futility of his labor, he’d been unable to concentrate on his work. He’d hardly been able to sit still. Mornings, he went for long windblown walks to the far side of the park and back; the cold was a corrective to his fevered state. He wandered the drafty corridors of the Museum of Natural History where, as a boy, Isaac-like, he’d dreamt and brooded and lost himself in the austere impersonality of the past. What a mystery, that the world precedes us, gives birth to us, seems for a brief while to cherish us, then sloughs us off like outgrown skin. Gone! Fiercely, he thought I want my passage here to be remembered. To be worthy of being remembered.

  The Playwright understood that the Blond Actress did not want to be his equal. Shrewdly he perceived that she was reliving a role she’d once played, maybe more than once, and for which she’d been rewarded: she was the girl child; he was the older male mentor. But did he want to be this woman’s mentor/father, or did he want to be her lover? To the Blond Actress, the two were possibly identical. To the Playwright, there was something perverse about being both, or seeming to be both. She can only love a man she imagines to be her superior. Am I that man? He knew his failings! Of the Playwright’s critics, he was himself the harshest. He knew how painstaking and tentative he was in composition; how he lacked the genius of poetry that is quicksilver, magic, unwilled. The Chekhovian moment that flashes out of the seeming ordinary, as out of an empty sky. A sudden peal of laughter, an old man’s snoring, the death stink of Solyony’s hands. The sound of a string breaking that dies away sadly.

  He could not have created Chekhov’s Natasha. He could not have understood even that his “girl of the people” was too good, and so not credible, except the Blond Actress had seen it by instinct. In his doggedly crafted plays there were no such Chekhovian flashes, for the Playwright’s imagination was literal, at times clumsy; yes, he acknowledged his clumsiness, which was a form of honesty. The Playwright would not bend truth even in the service of art! Yet he’d been rewarded for his work; he’d received a Pulitzer Prize (which had had the unexpected result of making his wife both proud of him and resentful of him simultaneously) and other prizes; he would be honored as a major American dramatist. For his work could wrench hearts, even as Chekhov’s work did. And the work of Ibsen, O’Neill, Williams. Perhaps in its very homeliness it more powerfully wrenched the American heart. When he was feeling hopeful he told himself that he was an honest craftsman who built sturdy seaworthy vessels. The lighter, sleeker, more dazzling crafts of poet playwrights flew past, but his reached the same harbor a
s theirs.

  He believed this. He wanted to believe!

  Your wonderful work. Your beautiful work. I admire you so!

  A beautiful young woman, saying such things to him. Speaking sincerely. With the air of one imparting an obvious truth. She’d gone to the Strand Bookshop to buy those out-of-print plays of his she hadn’t yet read, back in her old life.

  She was living in the Village. She’d sublet a flat on East 11th Street from a theater friend of Max Pearlman. She never spoke of her “old life.” The Playwright would have liked to ask her: Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never “collapse,” only just fade gradually away?

  I honor marriage. The bond between a man and a woman. I believe it must be sacred. I would never violate such a bond.

  Gazing at him with her lovelorn smiling eyes.

  He was deeply touched by her, as by a lost child. An abandoned child. In that voluptuous body. Her body! When you came to know Norma Jeane (as The Playwright would think of her, though rarely call her: it wasn’t his privilege somehow) you saw how, to the woman, her body was an object of curiosity. It seemed at times her odd wish to bring the Playwright into collusion with her, into a shared understanding. Other men were sexually attracted to her, because her body was all they could see; he, the Playwright, a superior man, knew her differently and could never be so deceived.

  Was she serious? The Playwright laughed at her, gently.

  “You must know you’re a lovely woman. And that isn’t a debit.”

  “A what?”

  “A debit. A shortcoming, a loss.”

  The Blond Actress nudged his arm. “Hey. You don’t need to flatter me.”

  “I’m flattering you by suggesting that, in all frankness, you’re a beautiful woman? And that it’s no handicap?” The Playwright laughed, wanting to squeeze her arm, her wrist; wanting to make her flinch just a little, to acknowledge the simple truth of what he said. She could not wish him not to be a man! Even as, presenting herself to him as she did, childlike, yearning, wistful, seductive, she was so clearly arousing him to sexual desire.

  Unless maybe he was imagining it. Her campaign to make him love her. To leave his wife, love her. Marry her.

  Hadn’t the Blond Actress said she lived for her work, and she lived for love. And she wasn’t working at the present. And she wasn’t in love at the present. (Lowering her eyes, her quivering eyelids. Oh, but she wanted to be in love!) With touching earnestness she told the Playwright, “The only meaning of life is s-something more than just you yourself? In your own head? In your own skeleton? In your own history? Like in your work, you leave something of yourself behind; and in love, you are elevated to a higher level of being, it isn’t just you.” She spoke so passionately, the Playwright half wondered if these weren’t words she’d memorized. The naïveté, the idealism—was she echoing one of Chekhov’s fiercely intelligent yet fatally deluded young women? Nina of The Seagull, or Irina of The Three Sisters? Or was she quoting from a source closer to home, dialogue the Playwright himself had written years ago? Yet there was no doubting her sincerity. They were together in a shadowy booth at the rear of a Sixth Avenue jazz club in the West Village and they were holding hands and the Playwright was a little drunk and the Blond Actress had had two glasses of red wine, she who rarely drank, and her eyes were brimming with tears for a crisis of some kind was approaching, now that the Playwright’s wife was returning home next day. “And if you’re a woman, and you love a man, you want to have that man’s baby. A baby means . . . oh, you’re a father, you know what a baby means! It isn’t just you.”

  “No. But a baby isn’t you, either.”

  The Blond Actress looked so confused, so oddly hurt, as if rebuked, the Playwright slipped his arm around her shoulders and held her, for they were huddled on one side of the booth; no longer did they meet chastely with a tabletop between them. The Playwright wanted to hold the Blond Actress in his arms and she would lay her head against his chest, or bury her warm teary face in the crook of his neck and shoulder, and he would console her and protect her. He would protect her against her own delusions. For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage. He knew, as a parent, that a child can enter your life and rend your life in two, not make it whole; he knew, as a man, that a child can intrude in a seemingly happy marriage, a child can alter if not irrevocably destroy the love between a man and a woman; he knew, as one who’d lived as a mature citizen for decades, that there is no romance in parenthood, or even in motherhood, only just a heightening of life. When you are a parent, you are yet still you—now with the new and terrifying burden of being a parent. He wanted to kiss the fluttering eyelids of this beautiful young woman so magical to him, so mercurial, and say, Of course I love you. My Magda. My Norma Jeane. How could a man not love you? But I can’t. . . .

  I can’t provide what you require. I am not the man you seek. I am a flawed man, I am an incomplete man, I am a man whom fatherhood has not appreciably altered, I am a man fearful of hurting, humiliating, angering his wife, I am not the savior of your dreams, I am no prince.

  The Blond Actress protested. “My mother and me, when I was a baby, were like the same person. . . . And when I was a little girl. We wouldn’t need to talk, even. She could send her thoughts to me, almost. I was never alone. That’s the kind of love I mean, between a mother and a baby. It takes you out of yourself, it’s real. I know I would be a good m-mother because—don’t laugh at me, hey?—I see a baby being pushed in a carriage, it’s all I can do to hold myself back from reaching in and kissing it! ‘Oh, gosh!’ I’m always saying. ‘Oh, can I hold your baby? Oh, he’s so beautiful!’ I start to cry, I can’t help it. You’re laughing at me! It’s the way I am, I always loved kids. When I was a kid myself, in foster homes, I’d be the one to take care of the babies. Just kind of sing to them and rock them, y’know? Till they fell asleep. There was this little girl, her mother didn’t love her, I took care of her a lot, I pushed her stroller in the park—this was later when I was maybe sixteen—I sewed her a little stuffed tiger toy with material from a dime store, I loved her so. But it’s a boy baby I hope I have, y’know why?”

  The Playwright heard himself ask why.

  “He’d be like his father, that’s why. And his father, he’d be somebody I was crazy for, you can bet he’d be a wonderful man. I don’t just fall for anybody, y’know?” The Blond Actress laughed breathlessly. “Most men, I don’t even like. And you wouldn’t either, honey, if you were a woman.”

  They were laughing together. The Playwright was sick with desire. He heard himself say, “You would make a wonderful mother, dear. A born mother.”

  Why, why was he saying this! An improvised scene, and the vehicle careening out of control, and nobody to grab the wheel.

  Drunken driving!

  Lightly yet sexily the Blond Actress kissed the Playwright on the lips. A wave of sick exhilarated desire in his groin, in the pit of his belly, suffused his body.

  Hearing himself say, in a raw, tender voice, “Thank you. My darling.”

  18

  The Adulterous Husband. He didn’t want to exploit the Blond Actress. She was a child, so trusting. He wanted to caution her Beware of us! Don’t love me.

  By “us” he meant both himself and Max Pearlman. All of the New York theater community. The Blond Actress had journeyed here as to a shrine, to redeem herself in art.

  To sacrifice herself for art.

  The Playwright hoped she hadn’t journeyed here to sacrifice herself for him.

  His predicament was, he hadn’t ceased loving his wife. He wasn’t a man to take marriage casually, like so many men of his acquaintance. Even men of his generation, from Jewish-liberal-family-oriented backgrounds like his own. He hated the careless, jaunty amours of the satyr Pearlman; he hated it that Pearlman was so readily forgiven, by women he’d treated shabbily, and by his own attractive but now middle-aged wife.

  Not once
had the Playwright been unfaithful to Esther.

  Even after his rapid ascendancy to a modest sort of fame, in 1948. When, to his shock, chagrin, embarrassment, he’d experienced a quickening of female interest in him: intellectual women, Manhattan socialites, divorcées, even the wives of certain of his theater friends. At universities at which he was invited to speak, at regional theaters where his plays were being performed, invariably there were these women, bright, animated, attractive, cultured, Jewish and non-Jewish, academic women, literary women, the wives of well-to-do businessmen, many of them middle-aged, moist-eyed over male genius. Perhaps he’d been drawn to some of these women out of boredom and loneliness and the usual frustration with his work, but never had he been unfaithful to Esther; there was this grim dutiful accountant’s side to him, committed to facts. He hadn’t been unfaithful to Esther, surely that should mean something to her?

  My precious fidelity. What hypocrisy!

  He hadn’t ceased loving Esther and he believed, despite her anger and resentment, she hadn’t ceased to love him. But they felt no quickening of desire for each other. Oh, no quickening even of interest! Not for years. The Playwright lived so much inside his head, other people were often unreal to him. The more intimate, the less real. A wife, children. Now grown children. Grown-distant children. And a wife at whom—literally!—he sometimes failed to look even when speaking with her. (“Miss me?” “Of course.” “Yes, I can see.”) The Playwright’s life was words, painstakingly chosen words, and when not words typed out singly with two quick-darting forefingers on an Olivetti portable, his life was meetings with producers and directors and actors, auditions and play readings and workshops and rehearsals (culminating in dress rehearsal and “tech”) and previews and opening nights, good reviews, not-so-good reviews, good box office, not-so-good box office, prizes and disappointments, a fever chart of continuous crises not unlike the careening course of a downhill skier through an unknown terrain, rocks amid the snow, and either you’re born to this crazed life and are thrilled by it, however much exhausted by it, or you are not born to such a life, and exhaustion is most of what you feel, and finally you wish to feel nothing. The Playwright had not wanted to marry an actress or a writer or a woman of artistic ambition, so he’d married a handsome energetic good-natured young woman from a background similar to his own with a degree from Columbia Teachers College. Esther had taught junior high math briefly when they were first married, capably but without enthusiasm; she’d been eager to marry and to have children. All this in the early thirties, a lifetime ago. Now the Playwright was a distinguished man and Esther was one of those spouses of distinguished men of whom neutral observers remark Why? What did he ever see in her? At social gatherings, the Playwright and his wife would not have naturally gravitated toward each other, would not have naturally fallen into conversation, would perhaps have merely glanced at each other, smiled, and moved on. No one of their mutual friends would have introduced them to each other.