MARILYN: He is. Okay, smart-ass. Your turn.
TC: Forget it. I don’t have to tell you damn nothing. Because I know who your masked marvel is: Arthur Miller. (She lowered her black glasses: Oh boy, if looks could kill, wow!) I guessed as soon as you said he was a writer.
MARILYN (stammering): But how? I mean, nobody … I mean, hardly anybody—
TC: At least three, maybe four years ago Irving Drutman—
MARILYN: Irving who?
TC: Drutman. He’s a writer on the Herald Tribune. He told me you were fooling around with Arthur Miller. Had a hang-up on him. I was too much of a gentleman to mention it before.
MARILYN: Gentleman! You bastard. (Stammering again, but dark glasses in place) You don’t understand. That was long ago. That ended. But this is new. It’s all different now, and—
TC: Just don’t forget to invite me to the wedding.
MARILYN: If you talk about this, I’ll murder you. I’ll have you bumped off. I know a couple of men who’d gladly do me the favor.
TC: I don’t question that for an instant.
(At last the waiter returned with the second bottle.)
MARILYN: Tell him to take it back. I don’t want any. I want to get the hell out of here.
TC: Sorry if I’ve upset you.
MARILYN: I’m not upset.
(But she was. While I paid the check, she left for the powder room, and I wished I had a book to read: her visits to powder rooms sometimes lasted as long as an elephant’s pregnancy. Idly, as time ticked by, I wondered if she was popping uppers or downers. Downers, no doubt. There was a newspaper on the bar, and I picked it up; it was written in Chinese. After twenty minutes had passed, I decided to investigate. Maybe she’d popped a lethal dose, or even cut her wrists. I found the ladies’ room, and knocked on the door. She said: “Come in.” Inside, she was confronting a dimly lit mirror. I said: “What are you doing?” She said: “Looking at Her.” In fact, she was coloring her lips with ruby lipstick. Also, she had removed the somber head scarf and combed out her glossy fine-as-cotton-candy hair.)
MARILYN: I hope you have enough money left.
TC: That depends. Not enough to buy pearls, if that’s your idea of making amends.
MARILYN (giggling, returned to good spirits. I decided I wouldn’t mention Arthur Miller again): No. Only enough for a long taxi ride.
TC: Where are we going—Hollywood?
MARILYN: Hell, no. A place I like. You’ll find out when we get there.
(I didn’t have to wait that long, for as soon as we had flagged a taxi, I heard her instruct the cabby to drive to the South Street Pier, and I thought: Isn’t that where one takes the ferry to Staten Island? And my next conjecture was: She’s swallowed pills on top of that champagne and now she’s off her rocker.)
TC: I hope we’re not going on any boat rides. I didn’t pack my Dramamine.
MARILYN (happy, giggling): Just the pier.
TC: May I ask why?
MARILYN: I like it there. It smells foreign, and I can feed the sea gulls.
TC: With what? You haven’t anything to feed them.
MARILYN: Yes, I do. My purse is full of fortune cookies. I swiped them from that restaurant.
TC (kidding her): Uh-huh. While you were in the john I cracked one open. The slip inside was a dirty joke.
MARILYN: Gosh. Dirty fortune cookies?
TC: I’m sure the gulls won’t mind.
(Our route carried us through the Bowery. Tiny pawnshops and blood-donor stations and dormitories with fifty-cent cots and tiny grim hotels with dollar beds and bars for whites, bars for blacks, everywhere bums, bums, young, far from young, ancient, bums squatting curbside, squatting amid shattered glass and pukey debris, bums slanting in doorways and huddled like penguins at street corners. Once, when we paused for a red light, a purple-nosed scarecrow weaved toward us and began swabbing the taxi’s windshield with a wet rag clutched in a shaking hand. Our protesting driver shouted Italian obscenities.)
MARILYN: What is it? What’s happening?
TC: He wants a tip for cleaning the window.
MARILYN (shielding her face with her purse): How horrible! I can’t stand it. Give him something. Hurry. Please!
(But the taxi had already zoomed ahead, damn near knocking down the old lush. Marilyn was crying.)
I’m sick.
TC: You want to go home?
MARILYN: Everything’s ruined.
TC: I’ll take you home.
MARILYN: Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.
(Thus we traveled on to South Street, and indeed the sight of a ferry moored there, with the Brooklyn skyline across the water and careening, cavorting sea gulls white against a marine horizon streaked with thin fleecy clouds fragile as lace—this tableau soon soothed her soul.
As we got out of the taxi we saw a man with a chow on a leash, a prospective passenger, walking toward the ferry, and as we passed them, my companion stopped to pat the dog’s head.)
THE MAN (firm, but not unfriendly): You shouldn’t touch strange dogs. Especially chows. They might bite you.
MARILYN: Dogs never bite me. Just humans. What’s his name?
THE MAN: Fu Manchu.
MARILYN (giggling): Oh, just like the movie. That’s cute.
THE MAN: What’s yours?
MARILYN: My name? Marilyn.
THE MAN: That’s what I thought. My wife will never believe me. Can I have your autograph?
(He produced a business card and a pen; using her purse to write on, she wrote: God Bless You—Marilyn Monroe.)
MARILYN: Thank you.
THE MAN: Thank you. Wait’ll I show this back at the office.
(We continued to the edge of the pier, and listened to the water sloshing against it.)
MARILYN: I used to ask for autographs. Sometimes I still do. Last year Clark Gable was sitting next to me in Chasen’s, and I asked him to sign my napkin.
(Leaning against a mooring stanchion, she presented a profile: Galatea surveying unconquered distances. Breezes fluffed her hair, and her head turned toward me with an ethereal ease, as though a breeze had swiveled it.)
TC: So when do we feed the birds? I’m hungry, too. It’s late, and we never had lunch.
MARILYN: Remember, I said if anybody ever asked you what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like—well, how would you answer them? (Her tone was teaseful, mocking, yet earnest, too: she wanted an honest reply) I bet you’d tell them I was a slob. A banana split.
TC: Of course. But I’d also say …
(The light was leaving. She seemed to fade with it, blend with the sky and clouds, recede beyond them. I wanted to lift my voice louder than the sea gulls’ cries and call her back: Marilyn! Marilyn, why did everything have to turn out the way it did? Why does life have to be so fucking rotten?)
TC: I’d say …
MARILYN: I can’t hear you.
TC: I’d say you are a beautiful child.
MR. JONES
(1980)
During the winter of 1945 I lived for several months in a rooming house in Brooklyn. It was not a shabby place, but a pleasantly furnished, elderly brownstone kept hospital-neat by its owners, two maiden sisters.
Mr. Jones lived in the room next to mine. My room was the smallest in the house, his the largest, a nice big sunshiny room, which was just as well, for Mr. Jones never left it: all his needs, meals, shopping, laundry, were attended to by the middle-aged landladies. Also, he was not without visitors; on the average, a half-dozen various persons, men and women, young, old, in-between, visited his room each day, from early morning until late in the evening. He was not a drug dealer or a fortune teller; no, they came just to talk to him and apparently they made him small gifts of money for his conversation and advice. If not, he had no obvious means of support.
I never had a conversation with Mr. Jones myself, a circumstance I’ve often since regretted. He was a handsome man, about forty. Slender, black-haired, and with a distinctive face; a pale,
lean face, high cheekbones, and with a birthmark on his left cheek, a small scarlet defect shaped like a star. He wore gold-rimmed glasses with pitch-black lenses: he was blind, and crippled, too—according to the sisters, the use of his legs had been denied him by a childhood accident, and he could not move without crutches. He was always dressed in a crisply pressed dark gray or blue three-piece suit and a subdued tie—as though about to set off for a Wall Street office.
However, as I’ve said, he never left the premises. Simply sat in his cheerful room in a comfortable chair and received visitors. I had no notion of why they came to see him, these rather ordinary-looking folk, or what they talked about, and I was far too concerned with my own affairs to much wonder over it. When I did, I imagined that his friends had found in him an intelligent, kindly man, a good listener in whom to confide and consult with over their troubles: a cross between a priest and a therapist.
Mr. Jones had a telephone. He was the only tenant with a private line. It rang constantly, often after midnight and as early as six in the morning.
I moved to Manhattan. Several months later I returned to the house to collect a box of books I had stored there. While the landladies offered me tea and cakes in their lace-curtained “parlor,” I inquired of Mr. Jones.
The women lowered their eyes. Clearing her throat, one said: “It’s in the hands of the police.”
The other offered: “We’ve reported him as a missing person.”
The first added: “Last month, twenty-six days ago, my sister carried up Mr. Jones’s breakfast, as usual. He wasn’t there. All his belongings were there. But he was gone.”
“It’s odd—”
“—how a man totally blind, a helpless cripple—”
Ten years pass.
Now it is a zero-cold December afternoon, and I am in Moscow. I am riding in a subway car. There are only a few other passengers. One of them is a man sitting opposite me, a man wearing boots, a thick long coat and a Russian-style fur cap. He has bright eyes, blue as a peacock’s.
After a doubtful instant, I simply stared, for even without the black glasses, there was no mistaking that lean distinctive face, those high cheekbones with the single scarlet star-shaped birthmark.
I was just about to cross the aisle and speak to him when the train pulled into a station, and Mr. Jones, on a pair of fine sturdy legs, stood up and strode out of the car. Swiftly, the train door closed behind him.
A LAMP IN A WINDOW
(1980)
Once I was invited to a wedding; the bride suggested I drive up from New York with a pair of other guests, a Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, whom I had never met before. It was a cold April day, and on the ride to Connecticut the Robertses, a couple in their early forties, seemed agreeable enough—no one you would want to spend a long weekend with, but not bad.
However, at the wedding reception a great deal of liquor was consumed, I should say a third of it by my chauffeurs. They were the last to leave the party—at approximately 11 P.M.—and I was most wary of accompanying them; I knew they were drunk, but I didn’t realize how drunk. We had driven about twenty miles, the car weaving considerably, and Mr. and Mrs. Roberts insulting each other in the most extraordinary language (really, it was a moment out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), when Mr. Roberts, very understandably, made a wrong turn and got lost on a dark country road. I kept asking them, finally begging them, to stop the car and let me out, but they were so involved in their invectives that they ignored me. Eventually the car stopped of its own accord (temporarily) when it swiped against the side of a tree. I used the opportunity to jump out the car’s back door and run into the woods. Presently the cursed vehicle drove off, leaving me alone in the icy dark. I’m sure my hosts never missed me; Lord knows I didn’t miss them.
But it wasn’t a joy to be stranded out there on a windy cold night. I started walking, hoping I’d reach a highway. I walked for half an hour without sighting a habitation. Then, just off the road, I saw a small frame cottage with a porch and a window lighted by a lamp. I tiptoed onto the porch and looked in the window; an elderly woman with soft white hair and a round pleasant face was sitting by a fireside reading a book. There was a cat curled in her lap, and several others slumbering at her feet.
I knocked at the door, and when she opened it I said, with chattering teeth: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve had a sort of accident; I wonder if I could use your phone to call a taxi.”
“Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t have a phone. Too poor. But please, come in.” And as I stepped through the door into the cozy room, she said: “My goodness, boy. You’re freezing. Can I make coffee? A cup of tea? I have a little whiskey my husband left—he died six years ago.”
I said a little whiskey would be very welcome.
While she fetched it I warmed my hands at the fire and glanced around the room. It was a cheerful place occupied by six or seven cats of varying alley-cat colors. I looked at the title of the book Mrs. Kelly—for that was her name, as I later learned—had been reading: it was Emma by Jane Austen, a favorite writer of mine.
When Mrs. Kelly returned with a glass of ice and a dusty quarter-bottle of bourbon, she said: “Sit down, sit down. It’s not often I have company. Of course, I have my cats. Anyway, you’ll spend the night? I have a nice little guest room that’s been waiting such a long time for a guest. In the morning you can walk to the highway and catch a ride into town, where you’ll find a garage to fix your car. It’s about five miles away.”
I wondered aloud how she could live so isolatedly, without transportation or a telephone; she told me her good friend, the mailman, took care of all her shopping needs. “Albert. He’s really so dear and faithful. But he’s due to retire next year. After that I don’t know what I’ll do. But something will turn up. Perhaps a kindly new mailman. Tell me, just what sort of accident did you have?”
When I explained the truth of the matter, she responded indignantly: “You did exactly the right thing. I wouldn’t set foot in a car with a man who had sniffed a glass of sherry. That’s how I lost my husband. Married forty years, forty happy years, and I lost him because a drunken driver ran him down. If it wasn’t for my cats …” She stroked an orange tabby purring in her lap.
We talked by the fire until my eyes grew heavy. We talked about Jane Austen (“Ah, Jane. My tragedy is that I’ve read all her books so often I have them memorized”), and other admired authors: Thoreau, Willa Cather, Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Hawthorne, Chekhov, De Maupassant—she was a woman with a good and varied mind; intelligence illuminated her hazel eyes like the small lamp shining on the table beside her. We talked about the hard Connecticut winters, politicians, far places (“I’ve never been abroad, but if ever I’d had the chance, the place I would have gone is Africa. Sometimes I’ve dreamed of it, the green hills, the heat, the beautiful giraffes, the elephants walking about”), religion (“Of course, I was raised a Catholic, but now, I’m almost sorry to say, I have an open mind. Too much reading, perhaps”), gardening (“I grow and can all my own vegetables; a necessity”). At last: “Forgive my babbling on. You have no idea how much pleasure it gives me. But it’s way past your bedtime. I know it is mine.”
She escorted me upstairs, and after I was comfortably arranged in a double bed under a blissful load of pretty scrap quilts, she returned to wish me good night, sweet dreams. I lay awake thinking about it. What an exceptional experience—to be an old woman living alone here in the wilderness and have a stranger knock on your door in the middle of the night and not only open it but warmly welcome him inside and offer him shelter. If our situations had been reversed, I doubt that I would have had the courage, to say nothing of the generosity.
The next morning she gave me breakfast in her kitchen. Coffee and hot oatmeal with sugar and tinned cream, but I was hungry and it tasted great. The kitchen was shabbier than the rest of the house; the stove, a rattling refrigerator, everything seemed on the edge of expiring.
All except one large, somewhat modern object, a deep-freeze that fitted into a corner of the room.
She was chatting on: “I love birds. I feel so guilty about not tossing them crumbs during the winter. But I can’t have them gathering around the house. Because of the cats. Do you care for cats?”
“Yes, I once had a Siamese named Toma. She lived to be twelve, and we traveled everywhere together. All over the world. And when she died I never had the heart to get another.”
“Then maybe you will understand this,” she said, leading me over to the deep-freeze, and opening it. Inside was nothing but cats: stacks of frozen, perfectly preserved cats—dozens of them. It gave me an odd sensation. “All my old friends. Gone to rest. It’s just that I couldn’t bear to lose them. Completely.” She laughed, and said: “I guess you think I’m a bit dotty.”
A bit dotty. Yes, a bit dotty, I thought as I walked under gray skies in the direction of the highway she had pointed out to me. But radiant: a lamp in a window.
HOSPITALITY
(1980)
Once upon a time, in the rural South, there were farmhouses and farm wives who set tables where almost any passing stranger, a traveling preacher, a knife-grinder, an itinerant worker, was welcome to sit down to a hearty midday meal. Probably many such farm wives still exist. Certainly my aunt does, Mrs. Jennings Carter. Mary Ida Carter.
As a child I lived for long periods of time on the Carters’ farm, small then, but today a considerable property. The house was lighted by oil lamps in those days; water was pumped from a well and carried, and the only warmth was provided by fireplaces and stoves, and the only entertainment was what we ourselves manufactured. In the evenings, after supper, likely as not my uncle Jennings, a handsome, virile man, would play the piano accompanied by his pretty wife, my mother’s younger sister.