Cass whistled. “I can see that, ma’am.”
“I can see that, ma’am, and I’m totally wasted,” Eddy G said. This was meant as a joke, for Eddy G was never totally wasted so early in the day.
The young blond woman who’d previously introduced herself to the realtor as “Norma Jeane Baker” now stared at the French Normandy mansion through dark glasses, rapt and solemn as a little girl. She appeared to be wearing little makeup but her skin was luminous. Her platinum-blond hair was all but hidden by a crimson turban of the kind worn by Betty Grable in the forties. Her breasts were covered by a loose-fitting white silk tunic. She wore white silk slacks wrinkled at the crotch, and she was barefoot in flat-heeled straw sandals. In a breathy, wondering voice she said, “Oh!—it’s beautiful. Like in a fairy tale, but which one?”
Theda Bara smiled uncertainly. She decided this wasn’t a query that merited a reply.
She’d begin, she told them, with a tour of the grounds. “So we can get our bearings.” Briskly she led them over cobblestones, across flagstone terraces, past a kidney-shaped swimming pool upon whose shivering aqua water floated desiccated palm fronds, the bodies of dead insects, and several small birds. “The pool is cleaned every Monday morning,” she said apologetically. “I’m sure it was cleaned this week.” Norma Jeane seemed to see shadows flitting across the bottom of the pool as of ghost swimmers; she didn’t want to look too closely. Eddy G clambered up onto the diving board and flexed his knees as if about to dive in. Cass drawled to the women, “Don’t dare him, please. Don’t even look at him. I don’t intend to drown trying to rescue him.” “Fuck you, Jew-boy,” Eddy G said. He was laughing but he sounded genuinely incensed.
Quickly, Theda Bara continued the tour.
Norma Jeane whispered to Eddy G, “That’s rude. What if she’s Jewish?”
“She knows I’m just joking. Even if you don’t.”
So high above the city, there was a persistent wind. How it would be to live here during Santa Ana season, Norma Jeane dreaded to think. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good atmosphere for a pregnant woman or for an infant. Yet Cass and Eddy G, who’d both lived in elegant homes as young children, wanted a house in the hills, something “exotic,” “special.” Money didn’t appear to be a concern of theirs, but from where, exactly, would the rental money come? And you’d need to hire servants for a house like this. Norma Jeane wouldn’t be receiving any bonuses from Niagara, although it was a box-office hit; she was a Studio contract player and she’d been paid. Cass and Eddy G knew this! Now she was pregnant, she couldn’t make another movie for a year. Or more. (And maybe her career was over.) But when she inquired how much The Cypresses rented for a month, the men told her it was reasonable enough, not to worry. “We can swing it. We three.”
Norma Jeane was examining another zigzag crack, this one in a stucco wall decorated with exquisite Mexican mosaics. It was crawling with tiny black ants.
The Cypresses was so named because Italian cypresses had been planted around the house instead of palm trees. A few of these had retained their graceful sculpted shapes but most had become stunted from the continual wind, disfigured like tortured creatures. You could almost see them writhing. Dwarves, elves, evil fairies. But Rumpelstiltskin hadn’t been evil, he’d been Norma Jeane’s only friend. He’d loved her without qualification. If only she’d married Mr. Shinn!—and he hadn’t died. She would be having I. E. Shinn’s baby now, she’d have a big beautiful house of her own, and all of Hollywood would respect her, even the bosses at The Studio. (But Isaac had betrayed her, for all his talk of love. He hadn’t left her anything in his will. Not a penny! He’d signed her to a seven-film contract at The Studio that made her virtually a slave.)
Theda Bara was ushering them into the house. Into the baronial front foyer. It was like a museum: a marble floor, brass and crystal chandeliers, silk wallpaper, mirrored panels, and a sweeping staircase. The living room was sunken and so large that Norma Jeane had to squint to see the farthest walls. Here, furniture was shrouded in white and the parquet floor was bare. Above a gigantic stone fireplace were crossed swords. Close by was a suit of medieval-looking armor. Cass whistled. “D. W. Griffith. One of his weird epics.” Oval mirrors framed in gold filigree reflected oval mirrors framed in gold filigree in an infinite regress that made Norma Jeane’s heart flutter.
There is madness here. Don’t enter!
But it was too late, she couldn’t turn back. Cass and Eddy G would be furious with her.
The property’s current owner was the Bank of Southern California. No one had lived in The Cypresses for several years except short-term renters. The previous owner had been a film beauty of the thirties, a minor actress who’d outlived her wealthy producer husband by decades. This woman, a local legend, had had no children of her own but had adopted a number of orphaned children, some of them Mexican-born. One or two of these children had died “of natural causes” and others had disappeared or had run away. The woman had brought into her household a shifting number of “relatives” and “assistants,” who had in turn stolen from her and abused her. There were lurid tales told of the woman’s drinking, drug addiction, suicide attempts. Yet she’d given large sums of money to local charities, including the Sisters of Perpetual Mercy, an extreme Catholic order devoted to continual fasting, prayer, and silence. Norma Jeane had not wanted to hear the worst of these tales. She knew how misleading such tales could be. “Even beginning with the truth, what people say shifts into lies.” Norma Jeane’s heart pounded with the injustice of it, cruel things whispered of the woman who’d lived alone in this house at the end, found dead in her bedroom by a housekeeper. The coroner had ruled “misadventure” through malnutrition, barbiturates, and alcohol. Norma Jeane whispered, “It isn’t fair. Those vultures!”
Ahead, Theda Bara in her spike high heels was talking and laughing with the men. Allowing herself to think they might actually rent The Cypresses. She said to Norma Jeane, “It’s a fantasy house, isn’t it, dear? So original and inventive. Your friends were telling me, the three of you are going into seclusion? This is the ideal place, I promise you.”
The downstairs tour was taking a long time. Norma Jeane was beginning to feel fatigued. This house! Delusions of grandeur! Eight bedrooms, ten bathrooms, several living rooms, an enormous dining room with crystal chandeliers that quivered and vibrated as if the ceiling were shifting, a breakfast room large enough to seat two dozen guests. Always you were descending little flights of steps or ascending others. In a sunken area overlooking the swimming pool was a lounge with a long curving bar, leather booths, a dance floor, and a jukebox. Norma Jeane made straight for the jukebox, which was not only darkened and unplugged but empty of records. “Damn! Nothing’s so sad as a jukebox not plugged in.” She turned sulky, sullen. She’d have liked to play a record and dance. Jitterbug! She hadn’t jitterbugged in years. And the hula: she’d loved to do the hula, and she’d been a terrific hula dancer, aged fourteen. Now she was twenty-seven and pregnant and exercise was good for her; why shouldn’t she dance? If “Marilyn” did Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—which she wasn’t going to do—she’d be dancing as a showgirl, in glamorous expensive costumes, in elaborately choreographed musical numbers like Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, fancy-phony stuff, not the kind of dancing Norma Jeane truly loved.
“First thing we’ll do, Norma: plug the jukebox in,” Eddy G promised.
Had it been decided somehow? without her agreeing?
Still Theda Bara led them on. Talking and laughing flirtatiously with the men. Who in stylish but wrinkled and not-clean clothes looked like exactly who they were: cast-off sons of Hollywood royalty. Norma Jeane was left to follow behind, gnawing at her lower lip. Oh, she distrusted her lovers! Baby too distrusted them.
An actor is instinct.
But for instinct there is no actor.
Norma Jeane was trying to remember a vivid disturbing dream she’d had just before waking that morning. She’d been holding Baby against her swo
llen aching breasts wanting to nurse him but someone appeared and yanked at him. . . . Norma Jeane had cried no! no! and still the hands tugged at Baby and she’d been able to escape only by forcing herself awake.
“Norma Jeane,” the woman realtor said politely, “is something wrong? I thought I’d take you through here. . . .” Norma Jeane was shielding her eyes from so many damned mirrors! There were oval mirrors, rectangular mirrors, tall vertical mirrors, mirror panels on nearly every wall in this house. One of the downstairs bathrooms was floor-to-ceiling mirrors edged with zinc! Every room you stepped into, there was your reflection stepping in and your face looming like a balloon, eyes snatching at eyes. This is what the girl in Mayer’s mirror has come to! In the crimson turban and dark glasses Norma Jeane looked like a busty-leggy girl extra in Road to Rio, one Bob Hope would leer at. Norma Jeane was thinking that the point of her Magic Friend was she’d been secret. If you live with your Magic Friend continuously, the specialness is lost.
Cass might have read her thoughts; he said they’d take most of the mirrors down if that was what Norma Jeane wanted. “The Gemini can live without mirrors because we ‘mirror’ each other, right?”
“Cass, I don’t know. I want to go home.”
She loved him, and she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust either of the men she loved. One of them was Baby’s father, or was it possible both had fathered Baby? Today wasn’t the first time they’d brought up the subject of insurance policies, and now they were suggesting wills too. Did they expect her to die, in childbirth maybe? Were they hoping for her to die? (But they loved her. She knew!) If only she had Mr. Shinn to consult. Maybe: the Ex-Athlete who wanted to “date” her?
The night before, Norma Jeane had told Cass about the famous ex-baseball player wanting to meet her, and Cass seemed more impressed than Norma Jeane herself had been, saying the Ex-Athlete was a hero to many Americans as much or maybe more than any movie star, so maybe Norma Jeane should meet him. Norma Jeane protested, saying she didn’t know the first thing about baseball and didn’t care about it and anyway she was pregnant—“He wants to ‘date’ me, he says! We know what that means.” “You can play hard to get. Hard to get into. Great role for Marilyn.” “He’s famous. He must be rich.” “Marilyn’s famous. She’s not rich.” “Oh, but I’m not—famous like him. He had a long career before he retired. Everyone loves him.” “So why not you?” Norma Jeane had glanced anxiously at Cass to see if he was jealous, but he didn’t seem to be. Yet Cass, unlike Eddy G, was hard to read.
Norma Jeane hadn’t told Cass that she’d turned down the famous Ex-Athlete. Not in person, for the man hadn’t called her personally, but through a third party who’d contacted her agent. What nerve! As if “Marilyn Monroe” was merchandise. You saw the billboard, you made a call and an offer. What was Marilyn’s price?
On the second floor of The Cypresses, in the older, French Normandy section of the house, the undulating brass and crystal chandeliers were more evident. A sickly, sinister golden light rayed through windows as if from a source other than the sun. There was an odor of stopped-up drains, insecticide, and stale perfume. And the incessant wind. . . . Norma Jeane imagined she could hear voices, children’s muffled laughter. It had to be the wind, rattling windowpanes or chandeliers. She noticed Cass glancing irritably about; he must have been hearing this sound too. He’d been sick that morning, with a hangover, an alarming not-thereness in his eyes when Norma Jeane stole a glance at him. While Theda Bara was explaining the house’s complicated intercom system, Cass stood rubbing his eyes and working his mouth as if something was caught inside he couldn’t swallow. Norma Jeane tried to slip an arm around him but he nudged her aside, embarrassed. “I’m not your baby. Lay off.”
Why did we come to this terrible place? It was not a vision we sought.
Theda Bara spent some time describing the property’s complicated burglar alarm, floodlight, and surveillance system. Evidently it had cost nearly a million dollars to install. The previous owner, she said, had had an “extreme fear” of someone breaking into the house and murdering her.
“Just like my mother,” Eddy G said morosely. “That’s the first symptom. But it isn’t the last.”
Norma Jeane tried to lighten the mood. “Why’d anybody want to murder me? I always ask. Because, y’know—who’s that important?”
Theda Bara said with a cool smile, “Lots of people in this part of the world are important enough to murder. And even more are wealthy.”
Norma Jeane felt this as a rebuff, though she didn’t understand it. She wondered, with a smile: What would the famous Ex-Athlete think if he knew she was pregnant? And in love with not one handsome sexy young man but two?
Maybe I was a tramp. Gee, there was plenty of proof!
It was then the strange things began. While Eddy G was asking the realtor questions. Norma Jeane wasn’t listening much, and Cass had all but dropped out, ashy-skinned, itchy. Working his mouth as if trying to swallow. The air was so dry, it was like sand accumulated in your mouth. Norma Jeane wanted to hold Cass in her arms, kiss and comfort him. In a corner of her eye suddenly there was a scuttling-scurrying movement. A shadow in flight. Across one of the mirrors? Neither Theda Bara nor Eddy G noticed, but Cass turned to stare in terror. Yet there seemed to be nothing. When Theda Bara showed them still another bedroom, behind a brocaded drape there seemed to be something moving, agitated. “Oh!—look.” Norma Jeane spoke without thinking. Theda Bara said uncertainly, “It’s—nothing, I’m sure.” Bravely the realtor would have strode over to see, but Cass held her back. “No. Fuck it; just shut the door.”
They left, and the door was shut.
Norma Jeane and Eddy G exchanged a worried glance. What was wrong with Cass? Of the threesome, Cass Chaplin had to be the one in control.
Norma Jeane had been hearing muffled soprano voices, children’s cries and laughter, yet of course it was the wind, only the wind, only her fevered imagination, and when Theda Bara led them into the nursery Norma Jeane saw with relief that it was empty; except for the murmurous wind, it was silent. Why am I so silly? Nobody would have killed a child here. “What a b-beautiful room!” Norma Jeane felt she must say. But the nursery wasn’t beautiful, only just large. And long. Most of the outer wall was foggy plate glass, looking into empty space as into eternity; the other walls had been painted flamingo pink and decorated with cartoon figures the size of human adults. These were both quaint old-fashioned Mother Goose creatures and American-cartoon creatures: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Goofy. The flat blank eyes. The happy-human grins. The white-gloved hands instead of animal paws. But why so large? Norma Jeane stood eye-to-eye with Goofy, and it was Norma Jeane who backed down. She said, making a joke of it, “This character a sweater girl isn’t going to impress.”
As sometimes at parties, smashed out of his mind as his drinker-druggie friends fondly described him, Cass Chaplin began to expostulate—on Thomistic philosophy, or geological fault lines in Los Angeles County, or the “secret lynching heart” of America that wasn’t, in Cass’s view, imported to the New World from the Old but had in fact awaited the American Puritans when they came to settle here in the wilderness—now, abruptly, like a sleepwalker awaking from a trance, Cass began to speak of animal figures in children’s books and in movies. “Jesus! It would be terrifying if animals could talk. If in fact they were ourselves. Yet in the children’s world that’s always the case. Why?”
Norma Jeane surprised him by saying, “That’s because animals are human! They can’t talk the way we do but they communicate, sure they do. They have emotions like us—pain, hope, fear, love. A mother animal—”
Eddy G interrupted. “Not cartoon animals, sweetheart. They never have litters.”
Cass said, with surprising rancor, “Our Norma loves animals. That’s because she doesn’t know any. She imagines they would love her back without qualification.”
Norma Jeane said, hurt, “Hey, don’t talk about me like I’m not here. And
don’t condescend to me.”
The men laughed. Possibly they were proud of her, flaring up like this, even removing her sunglasses like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford in a melodrama, confronting her betrayers. “Norma says ‘Don’t condescend.’” “Even Fishie has her pride.” “Especially Fishie has her pride.” Theda Bara was looking from one to the other to the third, her bee-stung lips parted in amazement. What was going on here? Who were these reckless young people?
Deliberate as a stab in the heart. A stab in the belly.
She. Norma Jeane was she. Never could she be anything except she. The third point of Gemini. That distant third point of the eternal triangle which Cass had described as Death. Norma Jeane was made to realize that it would never make any difference to the men—how much she loved them, how she would sacrifice for them, how celebrated she would be by strangers, and how talented an actress—always she was she. She was their Fishie, she was Fish.
The men’s laughter subsided. Except for the wind it was very quiet.
They would have left the ghastly pink nursery, Theda Bara was clearing her throat to say a few final upbeat words, when there came a sudden slithering sound. Close by their feet, partly hidden by a playpen, there was a rushing shadow. “Rattlesnake!” the realtor cried.
Panicked, Eddy G climbed onto a table. It was a plastic-topped picnic table on a little island of fake grass and miniature palm trees. He grabbed Norma Jeane’s arm and lifted her up beside him, and he helped Theda Bara and poor trembling Cass, who’d gone dead-white in the face, four adults panting and cringing.
“The snake! It’s the same one,” Cass said. His ravaged boy-doll face was covered in sweat and his eyes were dilated. ‘It’s my fault. I’m to blame. I shouldn’t have brought us here.”
Norma Jeane said, meaning to be practical because Cass was making no sense, “Would a rattlesnake really attack? A human being? They’re supposed to be more scared of us.”