“Darling, the Holocaust isn’t likely to be forgotten. It isn’t your responsibility to remember it.”
He laughed, harshly. His face was heating.
“Oh, I know! That sounds so vain. I mean”—she was apologizing, and yet not apologizing—“I guess I mean—what Freud said? ‘No one who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such’? So you could have a delusion that other people were doing what you need to do, so you didn’t need to do it? Right at that time? See what I mean?”
“No. I don’t see what you mean. You’re wallowing in others’ grief, frankly.”
“That’s what it is?”
“There’s an element of the ghoulish in this, darling. I know plenty of Jews who wallow in it, believe me. The rotten luck of history given a cosmological spin. Bullshit! But I didn’t marry a ghoul.” More excited than he knew, the Playwright suddenly smiled horribly. “I didn’t marry a ghoul, I married a girl.”
Norma laughed. “A girl not a ghoul.”
“A pretty girl, not a ghoul.”
“Ohhh—can’t a ghoul be pretty, too?”
“No. A ghoul can’t be pretty. Only a girl.”
“Only a girl. Okay!”
Lifting her face to be kissed. Her perfect mouth.
Improvising, you don’t know where you’re headed. But sometimes it’s good.
“He doesn’t love me. It’s some blond thing in his head, he loves. Not me.”
19
In fact she crept away like a kicked dog. And Baby in her womb, shrunken in shame to the size of a thumb.
Afterward, always they made up. Hours later, in their four-poster bed in the night. The comically hard horsehair mattress, the creaking bed springs. These were exquisite times which the Playwright would recall throughout his life, stunned by the power of physical love, sexual pleasure, to reverberate through time long after the individuals who generated such love out of their yearning, anguished bodies have died.
She would be Rose for him, if it was Rose he wished.
Oh, she was his wife, she would be anyone! For him.
She kissed, kissed, kissed his breath away. She sucked his tongue into her mouth. Ran her hands over his body, his lean angular body beginning to go slack at the waist and belly, boldly she kissed his chest, the fuzzy hairs of his chest, kissed and sucked his nipples, laughed and tickled and stroked him hard. Her deft hands. Practiced (it excited him to think this, whether it was true or not) as a concert pianist running his fingers over the keyboard, playing scales. She was Rose of Niagara. The adulterous wife, the murderous wife. The blond woman of surpassing beauty and sexual allure he’d gazed upon years ago, long before even the possibility of knowing her. And what a fantasy, to imagine he might know her! When he’d identified with the betrayed, impotent husband Joseph Cotten. Even at the end of the movie he’d identified with Cotten. When Cotten strangles Rose. An eerie dreamlike scene, of mute strangulation. A ballet of death. The expression on Monroe’s perfect face when she realizes. She is going to die! Her husband is Death! The Playwright, staring up at the flickering screen images in silence, had been moved as never before by any film. (He tended to speak dismissively of film as a medium.) Never had he seen any woman like Rose. He’d seen the movie alone in a Times Square theater and he believed that there could be no man in the audience who felt otherwise than he felt. No man is equal to her. She has to die.
In their bed in their summer house above the ocean at Galapagos Cove she lay upon him, his wife, his pregnant wife, and fitted herself to him. Her sweet baby breath. Her sweet sharp strangulated cries—“Oh, Daddy! Oh, God!”—he would not know whether feigned or genuine. Never would he know.
20
He pushed open the bathroom door not knowing she was inside.
Her hair in a towel, naked and flat-footed, stomach bulging, she turned to him startled. “Oh! Hey.” In the palm of one hand several pills, and in her other hand a plastic cup. She popped the pills into her mouth quickly and drank and he said, “Darling, I thought you weren’t taking anything? Any more?” and she said, meeting his eyes in the mirror, “These are vitamins, Daddy. And cod-liver oil capsules.”
21
The phone rang. Few had their number here in Galapagos Cove, and the sound of the ringing telephone was jarring.
Norma answered. Her stricken face. Wordless, she handed the receiver to the Playwright and walked quickly out of the room.
It was Holyrod, the Hollywood agent. Apologizing for calling. He knew, he said, that Marilyn was not considering films at the present time. But this was a special project! Titled Some Like It Hot, a madcap comedy about men disguised as women with the lead role expressly written for “Marilyn Monroe.” The Studio was eager to finance the project and would pay Marilyn a minimum of $100,000—
“Thank you. But we’ve told you: my wife isn’t interested in Hollywood at the present time. She’s expecting our first baby in December.”
What pleasure in these words! The Playwright smiled.
Our first baby. Ours!
What pleasure, though they would soon be in need of money.
22
DESIRE
Because you desire me
I am not
This, Norma shyly showed to her husband for he’d often said he would like to see her poetry.
He read this little poem and reread it and smiled in perplexity having expected something very different from her. Something that rhymed, surely! Now, what to say? He wanted to encourage her; he knew how abnormally sensitive she was, how easily her feelings were bruised. “Darling, this is a strong, dramatic beginning. It’s very . . . promising. But where does it go from here?”
Quickly Norma nodded as if she’d been anticipating such criticism. No, it wasn’t criticism of course, it was encouragement. She took the poem back from him and folded it up into a small square and said, laughing in the manner of The Girl Upstairs, “‘Where does it go from here?’ Oh, Daddy. You’re so right. The riddle of all our lives, I guess!”
23
In the near distance, beneath the floorboards of the old house, a faint plaintive sound like mewing, whimpering. Crying Help! Help me.
“There’s nothing there. And I don’t hear anything. I know.”
24
It was late July, late one afternoon. A male friend of the Playwright had come up from the city and the two were out together fishing for bluefish. Norma was alone in the Captain’s House. Alone with Baby: just us. She was in good spirits, she’d never felt healthier. She had not gone into the cellar, nor even glanced down the stairs, for days. Nothing there. I know! “It’s just that, where I come from, there aren’t cellars? No need.”
She was in the habit, alone in the house, of speaking aloud.
It was Baby she addressed. Her closest friend!
That was what Nell the babysitter had lacked, in her own being: a baby. “Why she’d wanted to push that little girl out a window. If she’d had a baby of her own . . .” (But what had happened to Nell? She’d failed to slash her throat. They’d led her away to confinement. Without a struggle she’d surrendered.)
Late July, late one afternoon. A mild muggy day. Airless. Norma Jeane entered the Playwright’s study feeling a tremor of excitement like one trespassing. Yet the Playwright wouldn’t mind if she used his typewriter. Why would he mind? This was not an improvised scene exactly for she’d planned it. She intended to type out a letter to send to Gladys in Lakewood, making a carbon copy. That morning she’d awakened with a jolt realizing that Gladys must miss her! She’d been away, in the East, so long. She would invite Gladys to come visit them here in Galapagos Cove! For she was certain that Gladys was recovered enough now to travel, if she wished; this was the view of her mother she’d presented to the Playwright, and it was a view she thought reasonable. The Playwright had said how interesting Gladys sounded, how he’d like to meet her. Norma Jeane would write two letters, making carbon copies of both. One to Gladys and one to the director of the Lakewood Home.
&n
bsp; Of course, she would tell only Gladys that she was expecting a baby in December.
“At last, you’ll be a grandmother. Oh, I can’t wait!”
Norma Jeane sat at the Playwright’s desk. The camera would hover close about her, peering down. She loved her husband’s old faithful Olivetti with its frayed ribbon. Papers strewn across his desk so real like the scattered thoughts of genius. Maybe these were notes, sketches? Fragments of dialogue? The Playwright rarely spoke of his work-in-progress. Superstitious probably. But Norma Jeane knew he was experimenting with two or three projects at the same time, including his very first screenplay. (She’d been able to do this for him, she was so pleased and so proud.) Searching for a clean sheet of paper when her eye involuntarily skimmed—
X.: Know what, Daddy? I want Baby to be born here. In this house.
Y.: But darling, we’ve planned—
X.: We could get a midwife for me! I’m serious.
(X., excited & eyes dilated; holds her belly with both hands as if it is already swollen)
On another page, with numerous corrections—
X. (angrily): You didn’t defend me! Not ever.
Y.: It wasn’t clear who was in the wrong.
X.: He despised me!
Y.: No. It was you who despised yourself.
Y.: No. It is you who despise yourself.
(X. can’t bear it that any man might look upon her without desire.
She is 32 yrs old & fears her youth is passing)
25
Where do you go when you disappear? She’d been hearing that sound in the cellar. She told him with averted eyes, knowing he did not believe her, did not wish to believe her. He touched her to comfort her and she stiffened. “Norma, what?” She could not speak. He went away to investigate the cellar, using the flashlight, but found nothing. Still, she heard the sound. A faint plaintive mewing, whimpering. Sometimes a scuffling sound. A sound of clawing, agitation. She recalled (had this been a dream? a movie scene?) a baby’s single scream. Early in the mornings and during the day when she was alone downstairs and often in the middle of the otherwise quiet night when she woke in a sweat with a sudden acute need to use the bathroom. She thought it might be a stray cat or a raccoon—“something trapped down there. Starving.” It filled her with horror to imagine that a living creature might be trapped in that hideous cellar as in a pit. The Playwright saw that she was truly agitated, and he meant to placate her fear. He didn’t want her poking around in the cellar herself, in that depressing dark. “I forbid you to go down there, darling!” He’d discovered that joking with his wife was the shrewdest strategy: in this way he co-opted her commonsense Norma-self against her irrational Marilyn-self. Holding his nose against the smell (more than rotted apples it had now a meaty-rancid stench mixed with smells of earth and Time), he descended again into the cellar and probed the flashlight beam into all the corners and returned to her panting and irritable (for it was an unfairly hot, humid day, for the Maine coast) and wiping cobwebs from his face but gentle with Norma insisting no, there wasn’t anything down there, nothing he’d been able to discover; nor had he heard the sounds she claimed to hear. Norma seemed placated by this report. She seemed relieved. She lifted his hand impulsively to her mouth and kissed it, embarrassing him. His hand wasn’t clean!
“Oh, Daddy. Guess you have to humor a pregnant woman, huh?”
In fact Norma had been feeding feral cats in the back yard since the second week they’d moved here. Against the Playwright’s better judgment. At first just one cat, a skinny black tom with bitten ears; then another joined the tom, a skinny but very pregnant calico; soon there were as many as a half dozen cats waiting patiently at the back door to be fed. The cats were strangely silent and crouched separate from one another; they kept their distance as Norma set down their dishes, then hurried in to eat, swift as little machines, and as soon as they finished eating they trotted away without a backward glance. At first Norma had tried to befriend them, even to pet them, but they hissed at her and shrank away, baring their teeth. Since there was an outdoor entrance to the cellar it wasn’t unreasonable to think that one of the cats might have gotten inside and become trapped. If so, the creature hid itself from the Playwright, who’d come to rescue it.
“Darling, maybe you should stop feeding those cats,” the Playwright suggested.
“Oh, I will! Soon.”
“More and more of them will be showing up. You can’t feed the entire Maine coast.”
“Daddy, I know. You’re right.”
Yet she continued, through the summer, as he’d known she would. How many scrawny, starving cats showed up each morning to be fed by her, he didn’t want to know. Her strange stubbornness. Her powerful will. The man knew himself obliterated by her, in essential things. Only in surface matters was he triumphant.
He was upstairs at his desk writing these words or words very like these when he heard a cry. “I knew. I knew what it would be.”
He ran downstairs to find her lying at the bottom of the cellar steps, moaning and writhing. The flashlight, fallen from her hand, casting its tunnel-like beam into the cellar’s depths as into an oblivion of unshaped, undefined shadow.
She screamed for him to help her, to save the baby. As he stooped over her she clawed at his hands, pulling at his hands. As if wanting him to deliver the baby.
He called an ambulance. She was taken to the Brunswick hospital.
A miscarriage in the fifteenth week of pregnancy.
The date was August 1.
THE FAREWELL
We began to die then, didn’t we? You blamed me.
Never. Not you.
Because I failed to save you and the baby.
Not you.
Because I wasn’t the one to suffer. To bleed out my guts.
Not you. It was me. All that I deserved. I killed Baby once, Baby was already dead.
She, the stricken woman, was hospitalized for a week. She’d hemorrhaged severely and had nearly died in the emergency room. Her skin was a lusterless waxy-white, there were deep circles beneath her eyes, bruises and lacerations on her face, throat, upper arms. She’d sprained a wrist in her fall. She’d cracked several ribs. She’d had a concussion. There were sharp, shallow lines beside her stunned eyes and slack lips. When her terrified husband had first seen her unconscious on a gurney in the emergency room he’d believed she must be dead; that body was a corpse. Now in her hospital room closed to all visitors but him, propped up against pillows, in glaring white, IV tubes in both her arms and a breathing tube in her nostrils, she looked like the survivor of a disaster: an earthquake, a bombing raid. She looked like a survivor who would have no language in which to express what she’d survived.
She’s aged. Her youth has vanished at last.
She was “under observation” because, as the Playwright was informed, she’d raved in a delirium of killing herself.
Yet, how festive the patient’s room! Filled with flowers.
Though this patient was under an assumed name. A name in no way resembling any name of her own.
Such beautiful floral displays, no one on the staff at Brunswick General had ever seen before. Spilling out of the room and into the visitors’ and nurses’ lounges.
Of course, Brunswick General had never had a Hollywood celebrity patient before.
Of course, press and photographers were forbidden. Yet, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe would appear on the front cover of The National Enquirer, the stricken woman in her hospital bed, glimpsed through a doorway at a distance of about fifteen feet.
MARILYN MONROE SUFFERS MISCARRIAGE IN 4TH MONTH OF PREGNANCY. “SUICIDE WATCH.”
Another similar photograph appeared in the Hollywood Tatler along with an “exclusive bedside telephone interview” with Monroe, by the columnist who called himself, or herself, “Keyhole.”
These outrages, and others, the Playwright would keep from her.
On the phone he would say, talking eagerly, compulsively, to friends in Man
hattan: “I’d been belittling Norma’s fear. I can’t forgive myself now. No, not about her pregnancy: she wasn’t at all afraid of having a baby. I mean her fascination with the Holocaust, with ‘being a Jew.’ Her fascination with history. Now I see that her fear wasn’t exaggerated or imagined. Her fear is an intelligent apprehension of—” He paused, confused. He was breathing quickly and on the verge of breaking down, as several times publicly he’d broken down since the catastrophe, not knowing what word he sought. In this time of distress, the Playwright, the master of language, had lost much of his power; to himself he seemed a small child struggling to express concepts that floated in his brain like great soft balloons that, as you reach for them, elude you. “Others of us learn to gloss over this fear. This tragic sense of history. We’re shallow, we’re survivors! But Marilyn . . . I mean, Norma . . .”
Oh, God, what did he mean?
Much of the time in the hospital she was silent. She lay with her bruised eyes half shut like a body floating just beneath the surface of the water. A mysterious potion dripped into her vein and from her vein coursed to her heart. She breathed so shallowly, he couldn’t be certain she was breathing at all and if he slipped into a light hypnotic doze, a veil of white flashing over his brain, for he was an exhausted man, a not-young man, a man who would lose most of the surplus fifteen pounds he’d gained since his marriage, he woke in a panic that his wife had ceased breathing. He held her hands, securing her to life. He stroked her limp unresisting hands. Her poor, hurt hands! Seeing with horror that her hands were rather small stumpy hands, ordinary hands, with broken, dirt-edged nails. Her hair, her famous hair, darkening at the roots, dry and brittle and beginning to thin. Quietly he murmured as at child’s bedside, “I love you. Norma darling. I love you,” in the certitude that she must hear him. She must love him, too, and would forgive him. And then suddenly in the evening of the third day she was smiling at him. She clutched at his hands and seemed suddenly revived.