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
