Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She had made a mistake, years ago. She had lost Baby.

  She had lost little Irina, too. Hadn’t saved Irina from her Death Mother.

  None of this could she explain to her husband, or to any man.

  How many times curling in her husband’s arms, removing his glasses (as in a movie scene, and he was Cary Grant) to kiss and cuddle and with girlish-shy audacity stroking him through his trousers to make him hard as no girl had ever done (was this possible?) to him in quite this way. Oh, Dad-dy! Oh my.

  Yes she’d forgive him if he made her pregnant. She’d married him to become pregnant and to have his child, a son by the American Playwright she revered. (His published plays on bookshelves in stores. Even in London! She’d loved him so. So proud of him. Wide-eyed, asking what does it feel like to see your name on a book jacket? To glance at a shelf in a bookstore not expecting to see your name on a book spine, then to see it; what does that feel like? I know I would be so proud, I would never again be unhappy or unworthy in my life.)

  Yes she’d forgive him. For siding with the Brit O who hated her and with all the goddam company of Brit actors who condescended to her.

  Yet he continued to plead. To reason. As if this were a matter of logic.

  Darling you have a fever you haven’t eaten Darling I’m going to call a doctor

  So she returned to the set. This was work to her now, this was duty and obligation and expiation. Silence at her entrance!—as in the aftermath, or the anticipation of, a cataclysm. Somewhere at the rear of the sound stage someone clapped harshly, in irony. And how long, how painstakingly long to summon gorgeous Marilyn out of the dressing room mirror, not one but two hours, Whitey’s skilled priest-hands working, finally, their magic.

  Frankly, it astonished us. This weak, tentative person. We were all so strong, and except for her looks she had nothing. Then, in the daily rushes, in the finished film, we saw an entirely different person. Monroe’s skin, her eyes, her hair, her facial expressions, her body that was so alive. . . . She’d made of the Showgirl an actual living person, where the script provided so little. She was the only one of us who’d had any experience making movies, we were all duds beside her. We were dressmaker’s dummies uttering perfectly enunciated perfectly empty English speech. Oh yes certainly we’d hated Monroe at the time we knew her but afterward seeing the movie we adored her. Even O, he had to admit he’d completely misjudged her. She virtually eradicated him, in every scene they shared! Monroe saved the ridiculous movie when we’d believed she was the one causing its ruin; now isn’t that ironic? Isn’t that strange?

  Yet again that damned drawing-room interior. Oh, it was hell to her, this stage set. The prig Prince and the Showgirl are alone together at last and the prig Prince hopes to seduce the Showgirl but the Showgirl is evading seduction and there is the damned curving staircase to be ascended, descended, ascended, and again descended in her low-cut tight-waisted satin gown the Showgirl must wear through how many scenes of this slow joyless fairy tale she’d come to loathe. The Showgirl as the Beggar Maid. The Showgirl as the Female Body. Worst of all, the Showgirl wasn’t allowed to dance! Why?—it wasn’t in the script. Why?—it wasn’t in the original play. Why?—it’s too late now, it would cost too much. Why?—it would take you forever to perform those scenes, Marilyn. Why?—just learn your lines, Marilyn. Why?—because we loathe you. Why?—because we want your American money.

  In this Kingdom of the Dead where a spell was laid upon her.

  I miss my home! I want to go home.

  Suddenly on the staircase the Showgirl fell, hard. Her high-heeled shoe catching in the hem of her gown. She grunted, falling. She’d swallowed several Benzedrines to counteract the Nembutal and the Miltown and she’d had gin in her hot tea and the Playwright had not known (he would afterward claim) and she’d fallen on the curved staircase and there were cries on the set and the young cameramen rushed to help her. The Playwright who’d been anxiously watching at a short distance now rushed to help her in a torment of love kneeling over her.

  Her pulse! Where was her pulse!

  A few yards away on the landing above stood the costumed prig Prince staring through his monocle.

  “It’s the drugs. Get her stomach pumped.”

  Never would they forgive him.

  THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA

  1

  It was an enchanted isle to which he brought her, Galapagos Cove on the Maine coast forty miles north of Brunswick.

  Though they’d been married for more than a year and had lived in many places, she was yet his girl bride. Yet to be completely won.

  He loved that in her, that edgy air of discovery, surprise, delight. He was not fearful of her moods, he had made himself master of her moods.

  Seeing the house he’d rented for them for the summer, and the view of the ocean beyond the house, she’d been excited, childlike. “Oh! This is so beautiful. Oh, Daddy, I don’t ever want to leave.”

  There was a strange child’s pleading in her voice. She hugged him and kissed him, hard. He felt the warm yearning life in her, as years ago he’d felt the warm yearning life of his children when he held them. Sometimes the love came so strong, and the sense of responsibility, he was physically shaken. His very identity seemed to him obliterated.

  He stood tall and proudly smiling out upon the rocky shore below the cliff and upon the vast open water of the Atlantic as if he owned these things. This was his gift to his wife. And it was taken as a gift, prized as a love offering by her. Wind made the waves turbulent this afternoon. Light reflected off the water like metal. Now slate-gray, now cloudy blue, now dark bitter green, trailing seaweed and froth, always shifting. The air was fresh and briny and wet with windborne spray as he remembered it, and the sky was a pale fading blue like a watercolor riddled with vaporous swift-scudding clouds. Yes, it was beautiful; it was his to bestow; his heart expanded with happiness and anticipation.

  They stood shivering in the ocean wind of early June. Arms tight around each other’s waist. Overhead, gulls reeled with flapping wings and sharp piercing cries as if furious that their territory had been violated.

  The ring-billed gulls of Galapagos Cove, like old thoughts.

  “Oh, I love you.”

  She spoke these words so fiercely, smiling up at him, her husband, you would believe she’d never spoken these words before.

  “We love you.”

  Taking his hand and pressing it against her belly.

  A warm rounded belly; she’d been gaining weight.

  Baby was two months, six days in the womb.

  2

  He stroked and kissed and pressed his cheek against her naked belly, in bed. Marveled at the pale skin stretched tight as a drum so early in the pregnancy. How healthy she was, brimming with life! She meant to nourish Baby in the womb, she followed a strict diet. She took no pills now except vitamins. She’d retired from her career in the world (as she spoke of it not disdainfully or with regret or anger but matter-of-factly as a nun might speak of her past, now repudiated secular life in the world) to cultivate a true life in marriage, and in motherhood. He kissed her, he pretended to hear Baby inside, a phantom heartbeat. No? Yes? Drawing his hand across her belly, lightly touching the zipper scar from an appendectomy she’d had a few years before. And how many abortions has she had. The rumors told of her! To which I refused to listen, even before falling in love with her. I swear. His need to protect her was a need to protect her from even her own recollection of a past confused and careless and promiscuous and yet innocent as the past of a wayward child.

  Losing himself in a trance of wonderment at the beauty of her body. This woman his wife. His!

  The exquisite soft skin, the living envelope of her beauty.

  Like the sea, this beauty changed constantly. As if with light, gradations of light. Or the moon’s gravitational pull. Her soul, mysterious and fearsome to him, was like a sphere precariously balanced atop a jet spray of water: tremulous, ever-shifting, now rising, now descendin
g, now rising again. . . . In England she’d wanted to die. If he had not summoned a doctor, more than once. . . . At the time of her collapse, following the completion of the movie, she’d been haggard, ravaged, looking her age and more; yet back in the States, within weeks she’d made a complete recovery. Now, two months pregnant, she was the healthiest he’d ever seen her. Even her morning bouts of nausea seemed to cheer her. How normal she was! And how good, being normal! There was a simplicity and a directness in her now he’d seen before only when she’d read the part of Magda in his play.

  Away from the city. Away from the expectations of others. The eternal eyes of others. Pregnant with his child.

  I have done this for her. Returned her to life. If only now I’m equal to it.

  Becoming a father again, after so many years. At almost fifty.

  3

  The Playwright had often come to Galapagos Cove in the summer, with another woman. A former wife. When younger. He frowned, remembering. But what was he remembering? Not quite remembering. Like searching through old yellowed papers, drafts of plays he’d written quickly in a fervor of inspiration, then laid aside; then forgot. You can’t believe in the fervor of such inspiration that you will ever feel differently, let alone that you will forget. He sighed, uneasy. He shivered in the damp ocean air. No, he was happy. His new young wife was climbing down to the pebbly shore, agile and just slightly reckless, as a willful child. He’d never been happier, he was certain.

  The gulls’ cries. What had stirred these unwanted thoughts?

  4

  “Daddy, come on!”

  She’d climbed down the cliff amid slippery mossy rocks and ocean debris. Excited as a little girl. The beach was more pebbly than sandy. Frothy waves broke at her feet. She seemed not to mind that her feet were getting wet. The cuffs of her khaki trousers wet and smeared with mud. Her pale hair was whipping in the wind. Tears glistened on her cheeks, her sensitive eyes watered easily. “Daddy? Hey.” The surf was so noisy, her words were almost inaudible.

  He hadn’t liked to see her climbing down there but he knew better than to caution her. He knew better than to reestablish the unhealthy bond between them, of his wife’s willful self-hurting behavior and his paternal reprimands, threats, dismay.

  Never again! The Playwright was too smart for that.

  He laughed and climbed down after her. The wet, slick rocks were treacherous. Spray blew into his face, covering his glasses with moisture. The cliff dropped about fifteen feet, not far, but tricky to manage without slipping. He was astonished she’d climbed down so quickly, nimble as a monkey. He thought I don’t know her, do I! It was a thought that came to him swift and unbidden a dozen times a day, and at night when he happened to wake to hear her moaning softly beside him, whimpering or even laughing in her sleep. His knees were stiff and he nearly sprained his wrist, catching himself when he lost his balance. He was panting, his heart pounding in his chest, yet he was smiling happily. He too was agile, for a man his age.

  In Galapagos Cove they would be mistaken for father and daughter, until their identities became known.

  At the Whaler’s Inn farther north along the coast where he would take her for dinner that evening. Holding hands by candlelight. A pretty young blond woman with delicate features, in a white summer dress; a tall, slope shouldered older man, polite, soft-spoken, with furrowed cheeks. That couple. The woman looks familiar. . . .

  He jumped down beside her, his heels sinking in the pebbly sand. The noise of the surf was deafening. She slipped her arms around his waist, tight; against his skin, up inside his sweater and shirt. They were wearing matching navy-blue cable-knit sweaters she’d ordered for them from an L. L. Bean catalog. They were panting and laughing with a curious kind of relief, as if each had barely escaped harm: yet where had been the harm? She stood on her toes and kissed his mouth hard. “Oh, Daddy! Thank you! This is the happiest day of my life.”

  Absolutely, you could see she meant it.

  5

  It was known locally as the Captain’s House, sometimes the Yeager House, built in 1790 for a sea captain on a bluff above the ocean. A tall scrubby hedge of lilac screened it from the traffic, heavy in summer, of the country highway Route 130.

  The Captain’s House was an old New England saltbox of weathered wood and weathered stone, with steep roofs and narrow mullioned windows and oddly narrow, low, rectangular rooms; the upstairs rooms were small and drafty; there were stone fireplaces large enough to stand inside, and worn brick hearths; bare floorboards covered with braided rugs, endearingly old and faded as if testaments to time. The baseboards and staircase railings were hand-molded. The furnishings were mostly old, antique, eighteenth-century New England hand-made chairs and tables and cabinets, flat surfaces, plain straight lines, an air of Puritan canniness and restraint. In the downstairs rooms there were paintings of sea scenes and portraits of men and women so awkwardly rendered they had to be authentic “folk art”; there were hand-sewn quilts and needlepoint cushions. There were numerous antique clocks: grandfather’s and ship’s clocks, glass-encased German clocks, music-box clocks, clocks finished in porcelain and black lacquer grown clouded with time. (“Oh, look! They’ve all stopped at different times,” Norma said.) The kitchen and bathrooms and electrical outlets were reasonably modern, for the property had been many times renovated, at considerable cost, but the Captain’s House smelled of age, of the ravages and wisdom of Time.

  Especially the low, windowless, dirt-floored cellar. You had to descend into it on wooden steps that swayed beneath your weight, shining a flashlight into the cobwebbed dark. There was an oil furnace there, fortunately unused in summer months. A powerful odor of something sweet and dank, like rotted apples.

  But why descend into the cellar? They would not. They sat for a while on the screened-in porch overlooking, at a short distance, the ocean; they drank lemon-flavored club soda and held hands and talked of the months ahead. The house was very quiet: the telephone wasn’t yet connected, and they fantasized having no telephone—“For why? For other people, wanting to call us.” But they would have a telephone of course. They could not avoid a telephone: the Playwright was deeply, passionately committed to his career. Next, they went upstairs and unpacked their things in the largest, airiest bedroom, with a stone fireplace and a swept brick hearth and new-looking floral wallpaper and a view of the ocean over the tops of juniper pines. Their bed was an old four-poster with a carved walnut headboard. In a dressmaker’s oval mirror, their smiling faces. His forehead, nose, and cheeks were sunburnt; her face was pale, for she’d shielded her sensitive skin from the sun with a wide-brimmed straw hat. She rubbed Noxzema into his smarting skin, gently. And were his forearms burnt too? She rubbed Noxzema into his forearms and kissed the backs of his hands. She pointed to their faces in the oval mirror and laughed. “They’re a happy couple. Know why? They’ve got a secret.” She meant Baby.

  In fact, Baby was not a complete secret. The Playwright had told his elderly parents and several of his oldest friends in Manhattan. He’d tried to keep an air of pride out of his voice; still more, an air of concern, and embarrassment. He knew what people would be saying, even people who liked him and wished him well in his new marriage. A baby! At his age! That’s a man for you. A man with a gorgeous young wife. Norma had told no one yet. As if the news were too precious to be shared. Or she was superstitious. (“Knock on wood!” was one of her frequent remarks, uttered with a nervous laugh.)

  Norma would call her mother in Los Angeles sometime soon, she said. And maybe Gladys could visit, later in her pregnancy. Or when Baby was born.

  The Playwright had yet to meet his mother-in-law. He was self-conscious, envisioning a woman not much older than he was.

  They lay for a while in the late afternoon, fully clothed except for their shoes, on the four-poster bed; it had a horsehair mattress, comically hard and unyielding. They lay with his left arm beneath her shoulders and her head on his shoulder in their favored position. Often they lay
like this when Norma was feeling weak, or lonely, or in need of affection. Sometimes they drifted into sleep; sometimes they made love; sometimes they slept and then made love. Now they lay awake listening to the quiet of the house, which seemed to them a layered, complex, and mysterious quiet; a quiet that began in the windowless dirt-filled cellar that smelled of rotted apples and lifted, through the floorboards, through the varied rooms of the house, to the part-finished attic above their heads, lined with a surprising metallic-silver insulation like Christmas wrapping paper. The Playwright envisioned, as Time lifted from the earth, it became airier, less condemning.

  Beyond the mysterious quiet of the Captain’s House which was theirs until Labor Day was the rhythmic pounding of the surf, like a gigantic heartbeat. From time to time, on the far side of the house, traffic on the country highway.

  He thought she’d drifted off to sleep but her voice was wide-awake and excited. “Know what, Daddy? I want Baby to be born here. In this house.”

  He smiled. The baby wasn’t due until mid-December, when they’d be back in Manhattan in their rented brownstone on West 12th Street. But he wouldn’t contradict her.

  She said, as if he’d spoken aloud, “I wouldn’t be afraid. Physical pain doesn’t scare me. Sometimes I think, it isn’t even real, it’s what we expect it to be, we tighten up and we get scared. We could get a midwife for me. I’m serious.”

  “A midwife?”

  “I hate hospitals. I don’t want to die in a hospital, Daddy!”

  He turned his head to look at her, so strangely. What had she said?

  6

  Yes but you killed Baby.

  She had not! She had not meant to.

  Yes you meant to kill Baby. It was your decision.

  Not the same baby. Not this baby. . . .

  It was me of course. Always it is me.

  She knew she must avoid the dirt-floored cellar that smelled of rotted apples. Baby was already there, waiting for her.