“Here.”
“Thank you.”
As his hand brushes hers, she feels a spark. But he looks away, toward the TV: A fisherman tricks one of these creatures into letting itself be trapped in a bottle.
Alan is stumped.
“What is a genie,” James says quietly.
Marilyn studies his face.
“Later,” he says.
“Bye!” Justin calls.
“Nice to meet you,” Marilyn stutters out to the room, but James is already opening the door to let her out.
Early-morning sun dapples the sidewalk, the smell of exhaust mixing with the sweet scent from the doughnut shop across the street. Marilyn peers into the stream of traffic on Washington, searching for the bus she hopes is about to arrive, and tucks her freshly blow-dried hair behind her ear. She wears jeans and a white T-shirt, black Converse, face free of makeup—a carefully crafted look she hopes will make her appear normal enough to get by without question, but plain enough not to solicit much interest.
After a week at Woody’s, she’s begun to look forward to the beginning of school, daunting as it may be. Anything seems better than being cooped up in that apartment. She’s spent most of her time with her door closed, reading and rereading The White Album. After she’d failed to get through the first essay during her last audition disaster, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to return the book to the Orange County Public Library when it was time to pack up and go, so she’d tucked it into the bottom of her suitcase.
Joan Didion describes, in the title essay, a time in which she felt she was merely going through the motions of life—she was giving an “adequate enough performance” but had “mislaid the script,” no longer understood the plot. Marilyn understands—she studies for the SATs, buys the groceries, does the laundry at the coin-op down the street, but she feels as if the invisible thread that’s meant to attach her to the world has been severed, if it were ever there.
When she steps onto the campus of Los Angeles High, she sees an endless stream of kids pouring into the building, dotting the lawn, sending shouts and laughter ringing through the air. The school must be twice as big as her old one in the OC. All the better, she thinks. Among two thousand students, it will be easy to be invisible.
And it’s true. From the moment she steps through the doors, she becomes only one of many in the packed hallway. She frames imaginary photos of the girls pushing and giggling in midriff shirts, in short shorts, in baggy pants, owning their space, owning their bodies and what they are becoming. She feels passing stabs of jealousy toward them and their vibrancy, but there’s no point in trying to make friends. Marilyn’s here for just a year, then she’ll be gone.
Even at Orange High, she’d often had the sensation that she was standing behind an imperceptible screen, separating her from her surroundings. But at least she’d had a group to hang out with, a place to sit at lunch and invitations to movies or bonfires on the beach. Tiffany Lu had been her closest companion; they’d bonded over their mutual obsession with getting into a good college, though while Tiffany spent her weekends at debate club tournaments and violin lessons, Marilyn’s time was taken up by a stream of failed auditions.
Just one more year, Marilyn tells herself again, as she navigates the overcrowded cafeteria. She’s interested in only one person: James, though she hasn’t seen him all morning. Part of her wants to skip the issue of lunch altogether, but in preparation for her meeting at a new talent agency, Sylvie’s been making her diet shakes, eyeing every bite of food she eats skeptically until she’ll finally admonish Marilyn, “That’s enough,” and clear her plate. As a result she’s been constantly hungry and decides now to take the opportunity to eat all she can in private. Marilyn buys a bag of Cheetos, a bag of Ruffles, a Dr Pepper, two slices of pizza, and an apple. She carries her loot across the lunch yard, then wanders through the main building, opening doors to empty classrooms. The arts budget has been cut and along with it the photography class (she’d inquired during registration last week), but there’s still a small darkroom, which Marilyn discovers at the end of a long, empty hall. She inhales the scent of the chemicals lingering in the air, slumps down against the wall, and spreads her lunch before her, staring into the glow of the red safety light.
As she eats, Marilyn calls up images of the great buildings of Columbia University from the brochure she keeps carefully pressed between the pages of her dictionary—students poring over books on the lawn, leaves falling along brick pathways, city skyscrapers. She imagines the people she’ll speak to across the tables of New York restaurants one day—artists, gallery owners, magazine editors—and takes comfort in the idea that this moment in her life, sitting alone in the defunct Los Angeles High School darkroom, and all the moments she’s lived thus far, will disappear into a remote past. She will no longer be the child who played with My Little Ponies in the commercial, nor the preteen grinning at a Carl’s Jr. cheeseburger. Not the girl who lived in the boxy apartment in Orange County, nor the girl going home to the musty, shag-carpeted space where she stays with her mother and her alcoholic uncle. Not the child who was once trapped in a talent agent’s office, ostensibly to work on her “audition skills,” not an aspiring model, not even her mother’s daughter. Instead, Marilyn imagines a self, a hard, brilliant kernel, waiting patiently somewhere in her depths to be revealed when she arrives into the future.
* * *
Still. There is another year left to survive, and James, in the apartment below, becomes her private life raft. She sees him coming home in the afternoons wearing navy slacks and a pale polo top—a uniform, clearly—so she’s gleaned that he must go to a private school. But her days—blurs of classroom lessons, bus stops, still-stifling summer heat, homework done on her single mattress—are punctuated by the sounds of him. She learns to pick out his footsteps, the light, purposeful clip he makes when walking up the drive; the particular jangling of his keys as he unlocks the apartment door; the way his voice drops deep when calling out a name; the softer murmurs of conversation, often accompanied by Justin’s playful laughter.
He appears sometimes in the mornings, taking down and rehanging the hummingbird feeder, which Marilyn finds devastatingly charming. He often goes out in the early evening, dressed in sneakers and shorts, and comes home an hour later, T-shirt soaked through with sweat, the light of the sky dimming to a pale glow. She routinely peers out the window, watching him walk up the drive, his body singular in the dusk, the Jeopardy! tune leaking out as he opens his apartment door. But her favorite time is just before she falls asleep, when his music drifts into her room with the night air. She imagines he’s playing it for her to hear, that the voices of Erykah Badu, 2Pac, Wyclef, Prince, are his way of speaking to her.
Two weeks go by before Marilyn finds the courage to manufacture another encounter with him, but finally, dizzy from the crash diet Sylvie has her on, last night’s song still playing in her head on repeat, she decides to take action. She waits as the sun drops and the sky turns soft; when at long last she sees him walk out (later than usual today), she jumps up. But by the time she gets outside, he’s already at the end of the block, taking off in a jog. She can’t exactly run after him, can she? So instead she continues to the bodega and buys a Mexican Coke, a much-needed rush to her blood sugar. She sips slowly, soothing herself with the pleasure of the fizzy taste mixing with twilight. It’s on her way home, when she passes the park, that she sees James sprinting back and forth over a section of blacktop, his body slicing through the air, before he bends to catch his breath. My god, he’s beautiful. She stops, stares.
Finally, she calls out, “James!”
He lifts his hand, waves. In a burst, she runs over to where he stands.
“Thirsty?” Marilyn asks.
She can hear his panting breath (the heat of his body, so close). She offers the Coke.
“Thanks.” James takes it. Tilts his head back. Chugs. She watches his Adam’s apple moving up and down his throat, exposed.
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He hands the bottle back and looks at his watch, and again, he explodes into a run.
Marilyn and Sylvie sit in a giant waiting room with leather chairs imposing enough to swallow them, and wall-size windows offering views of the mess of traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Sylvie flips through a magazine with Drew Barrymore on the cover, shot to look as if she’s topless, and the headline “Secrets to Hollywood Survival.” Drew Barrymore is one of the actresses Marilyn admires—she’s adored her since she saw E.T. as a girl—but she could do without Sylvie’s running commentary: Did you know Drew uses lipstick on her cheeks—for blush! I thought I invented that trick … Marilyn knows exactly why they are here, what they’ve come for, and yet part of her feels that it is utterly pointless, that there’s no reason at all for them to be in these chairs, in this waiting room, in this city, on this planet. When she catches her reflection in the glass, she sees someone she doesn’t recognize—her pale blue eyes painted smoky, lips a deep berry color that Marilyn thinks makes her mouth look like a gash.
Sylvie’s rubbing a perfume sample from the magazine on her own wrists and Marilyn’s struggling to breathe through the tightness in her chest when a girl with a pencil skirt and pouty lips appears and calls Marilyn’s name. The girl escorts them up an elevator, gives them glasses of water, and seats them on a less imposing leather couch in an office full of orchid plants—five to be exact.
“Well, this is very classy,” Sylvie comments when they’re left alone in the room. “I love those flowers. We should get some of those, don’t you think, Mari?”
Because the question seems rhetorical, Marilyn only nods in response.
This place is certainly a departure from that of the previous talent agent she’d worked with in the OC, the one who booked her first commercial, the one who began to lose interest in her as she grew out of childhood, the one who Sylvie finally fired after the last audition didn’t pan out. He’d been a short, round man, who always wore a three-piece suit, had an office with ’70s wood paneling and a yellow paisley couch that Marilyn never wanted to sit on, due to its subtle but suspect stains. Marilyn can still recall his prickly, pungent smell, which, as a child, made her think of porcupines; she can still recall the dread at entering his office, the feeling of spiders crawling under her skin, the way she wished she could curl into a protective ball like the roly-polys she liked to play with in the grass outside their apartment.
* * *
After some time a small-boned woman with an expensive-looking pantsuit, a close-cropped pixie cut, and a no-makeup face comes in, all at once, as if she’d blown the door open.
“Hello, hello, hope I didn’t keep you waiting. I’m Ellen, obviously.” She speaks quickly, so that the words blur together, Ellen-obviously sounding like a single name.
Marilyn wipes her sweaty palms on her skirt and stands to shake Ellen-obviously’s hand. Sylvie launches, automatically, into a too-eager soliloquy on her daughter’s value and merits, but Ellen-obviously quickly interrupts and directs her attention to Marilyn.
“Tell me about your aspirations, dear. How hard are you willing to work?”
Marilyn thinks of waking up to the smell of Woody’s cigar smoke, of his eyes following her around the kitchen, of his voice demanding that Sylvie clean the bathroom, and takes a deep breath, willing herself to focus. At once, she floats successfully above herself, watching as she performs her role (which is possible, she’s learning, even if she’s mislaid the script, even if it’s only an improvisation).
“I’m willing to work as hard as necessary,” Marilyn hears herself saying. “As for my aspirations? I want to make money.”
Ellen-obviously laughs, an abrupt laugh that stops as quickly as it began. She studies Marilyn, letting the silence hang in the air for a moment before she says, “Well, you’re honest. I like that. I saw your reel, of course—very cute. Clearly you’ve grown out of the kiddie stuff.” She makes a circular gesture in the direction of Marilyn’s face. “No Disney here, uh-un. But you’ve got a rather interesting look. Blond but not blond. I can work with that. And you have a vibe—a je ne sais quoi. You should lose ten pounds, but not more—don’t lose your glow—and we can start putting you up for some modeling gigs.”
“Terrific!” Sylvie says. Ellen merely nods in her direction, indicating they are free to go.
* * *
“Just like Marilyn Monroe!” Sylvie squeals as soon as they step out of the building. “She—”
“Started as a model, you’ve told me.”
“Baby, it’s all happening!” Sylvie squeezes Marilyn’s hand, and Marilyn smiles at her weakly in return.
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“I mean, I’ll try, I know we need the money, but it’s not … I just don’t want you to get your hopes up…”
“Oh, Marilyn, where’s your optimism? Positive thinking is half the battle. You have to believe it to make it real. We should be celebrating!”
As they arrive at the old Buick, Marilyn pulls an ad for a local BMW dealership from the windshield. It’s not an uncommon thing, flyers like this one left on dusty, beat-up cars parked in the lots of fancy hotels, pre-furnished condos, talent agencies—the assumption being that here, in this city, your life can change overnight. Yesterday you may have been broke, living in your uncle’s run-down apartment. Tomorrow, you could be “someone,” someone ready to buy a new car to fit your new status. She balls up the paper, tosses it in the nearest trash.
Sundaes from Dairy Queen are her and Sylvie’s usual celebration treat, but those are a no-go based on the weight-loss recommendation. It’s just as well, because Marilyn feels like throwing up. Instead, Sylvie suggests, they ought to celebrate by looking at houses.
Not up for protesting, Marilyn sits in silence as they turn into the narrow streets of the Hollywood Hills. Sylvie drives slowly, precariously, as she leans out the window, making running commentary on each of the homes. A BMW honks, speeds around her. Sylvie pretends not to notice. When she spots a house with a for sale sign, she pulls into the driveway. Little white statues—identical replicas of Michelangelo’s David in miniature—are lined up and spaced at even intervals at the edge of the lawn.
“Oh my god, they’re so cute!” Sylvie exclaims, and tells Marilyn to hop out and grab one of the brochures beneath the image of real estate agent Rod Peeler’s smiling face. Marilyn does, as quickly as possible, hoping this means they can go home.
But Sylvie idles, studying the brochure, which tells them the asking price is eight hundred grand. There will be an open house the following Sunday. Sylvie declares, with delight, that they ought to go. Just to “see what’s out there,” so that they’ll be “educated” when they’re “ready to buy.” Marilyn shuts her eyes, reminding herself that there is one thing she must focus on: the diamond at the end of her tunnel. Next year. College. Getting the fuck out of here.
Saturday morning Marilyn sleeps as long as possible and wakes to the relentless sound of the ice cream truck, which has taken to parking regularly outside the apartment. Sylvie’s already at work, and Woody’s at the casino. Marilyn tries calling Tiffany, and listens while she recites updates about their old group—who’s dating who, who hooked up at the beach, who’d gotten suspended for weed in their locker. Marilyn’s side of the conversation consists mostly of a bunch of uh-huhs, oh cools, no ways. It’s painfully obvious that whatever her connection to that world, it was fleeting. Now that she’s lying on her single bed in her stuffy room at Woody’s, none of it seems to matter.
She hangs up with Tiffany and fishes for change at the bottom of her purse, ready to give in to the call of the ice cream truck. She steps outside, and there, sitting at the bottom of the steps, is Justin, reading a comic book. When he sees her, his round face lights up with an open grin.
“It’s hot as a devil’s butt.” He giggles.
“Yep,” Marilyn agrees.
She gestures to the ice cream truck. “A
ny recommendations?”
“Get Pink Panther. That’s the best.”
Marilyn does, but instead of eating it herself, she gives it to Justin.
“Thanks,” he says, eagerly devouring the panther’s ice cream ears.
“So, what grade are you in?” Marilyn asks, sitting down beside him on the steps.
“Sixth.”
“Do you like middle school?”
Justin shrugs. “I guess.”
“It’s a little scary?”
He pauses. “Naw.” He turns to her, his mouth full. “You gonna kiss my brother?”
Marilyn laughs. “Um. I don’t think so.”
“You want to, though. I can tell.”
“And how’s that?”
“You were all nervous when you came to our house that night.”
Marilyn feels herself blush.
“He kisses lots of girls,” Justin says. “Once I made him tell me all the names, and I counted. There were twenty-nine.”
“Oh. Wow. That is a lot.” Marilyn supposes it shouldn’t be shocking. He’s beautiful, after all, even if he’s reserved. But in all the time she’s spent listening for him, she’d somehow imagined him as hers alone.
“He’d kiss you too if you want to.”
“And how do you know that? What if he doesn’t think I’d be nice to kiss?”
“I asked him.”
“Oh.” Her cheeks go hot again, her heart swerving like a car speeding around a sudden bend.
“I’ll start kissing soon. James started in middle school.”
“Well, that seems okay. But you don’t have to kiss that many girls. Maybe you’ll wait and find someone you really like.”
Justin shrugs, seemingly unconvinced. “Me and James are going to the beach.”
“That sounds so nice.” She imagines waves, and the smell of ocean air breaking through the suffocating heat.
“You wanna come?”
She does want to, very much, but she remembers James’s face when she walked into his apartment without invitation, and worries about intruding again.