“Marilyn just wanted love,” Mark was saying, slurring his words, looking as if he were about to cry. “A fifties girl or maybe a forties girl. Couldn’t survive in the sixties, doesn’t that make you sad?” Mark had discovered that in one of her acting classes with the actor Michael Chekhov she’d played Cordelia to his Lear. “That kills me. Doesn’t it kill you?” “No,” Grace said. “But can’t you see her, the girl who never had a father, at Daddy Lear’s knee?” Mark was pretty worked up, shouting that he hated retrospect because it was unfair to the dead. “Dead is dead,” Grace muttered. You look at Marilyn and she looks like she could make you so happy. So soft. She looks like you could make her happy. But no one could make her happy. Everyone tried. She looks like she can give you everything, that you’d forget with her. But she can’t forget, and she can’t be satisfied.
By now the rest of the bar was caught up in the Marilyn myth, and one woman said that Marilyn had wanted children with Arthur Miller but miscarried and then couldn’t have them. Mark, finding a comrade, walked over to the woman and threw his arm around her. “Is that biology is destiny in reverse?” Everyone agreed that life was hard, it was 4 A.M., bar-closing time, and Grace more or less carried Mark to a taxi, phoned his boyfriend and told him to be on the watch for him again. It was funny. She found it easier to talk about or read about Marilyn than to look at her, even though she could enjoy her films. Sometimes when she looked long enough, pity mixed with a kind of loathing, and a curious numbness came over Grace. She was fascinated.
Fascinated with her own fascination, Grace kept seeing all the horror films she could, especially the goriest ones. She’d even go alone. Poe would have been surprised, she was sure, at how gruesome they were, more disgusting all the time. But they weren’t haunting the way his stories were. She wanted to be left haunted, to walk out feeling haunted. It had to be what couldn’t be seen, wasn’t defined or specific. A bad feeling that someone or something is never going to let you alone. Is never going to go away. If someone reported to Grace that at this place, this corner, in this apartment so and so got killed, she’d walk past that place and wonder if the murderer had returned to the scene of the crime the way they’re supposed to, but more, did the murdered return? Did their souls rest? Or were they always watching, waiting to be avenged from the grave. The undead were vampires, but she was sure that the undead existed in other forms. People who refuse to die.
A guy came into the bar when Grace was working and ordered a draft beer. He looked like Ricky Nelson as a teenager. Beautiful purple eyes with long lashes, a loose wet lower lip. He said his name was John, and several drafts later launched into the story of how his mother used to send love letters to his principal, a minister at a prep school, and how his brother was an actor in Hollywood but was more interested in producing. John was carrying a roll of burlap that was meant to cover the walls of his apartment. That was the saddest thing, Grace thought, burlap. So later in the night she went home with him, and he made love with his eyes open, watching her face, her eyes. Grace said he should stop pretending and just let himself go. She told him what she liked, and he did it again and again, and walking home in the morning, Grace felt that leaden laziness in her body, but couldn’t enjoy it too long because Sarah was sitting on Grace’s couch, screaming about how worried she’d been and where was she and why hadn’t she called. Grace told Sarah that she wasn’t her mother and she didn’t want another one, and when Grace told Mark about her new lovers, he said he was jealous. “But you have a boyfriend,” Grace insisted. Mark admitted he was jealous of them, not her.
Grace’s father wanted to visit Ruth’s grave. To place flowers on it, with his children. To show respect, he said. You know what Oscar Wilde had on his grave in Paris, Mark said. “His mourners will be outcasts, for outcasts always mourn.” Grace refused to go, saying she had to work. It was her brother who accompanied their father to the cemetery. Behind the bar, she carried on a silent dialogue with Ruth, playing both daughter and mother with an accuracy only she knew. Grace accused Ruth, defended herself, listened to what Ruth would have said in response, defended herself again, cursed her, provided other answers, remembered some things that softened her to her, remembered things that hardened her to her. She never expected to forgive her. And respect, that made her sick. You want to be respected, don’t you? You want to be a nice girl, don’t you? Grace looked at Mark and handed him a drink he hadn’t ordered and said, “Fuck respect. She didn’t give me anything."
John was beautifully unhappy, a lost soul like Montgomery Clift in The Misfits, which endeared him to Mark finally. He wasn’t a cowboy, but had enough of the West in him to please an Easterner like Grace, though there was something frail about him, as if he thought he didn’t have the right to be alive. He didn’t make demands or requests or anything. He was just around, the way many people were in Grace’s life. The connections were fragile, short-lived. People moved in and out and Grace said she never missed anyone. Every once in a while she phoned Maggie and said she might move back to Providence, but she didn’t and she didn’t visit as she kept promising. Maggie promised to come see Grace play Marilyn, for which Grace allowed her hair to be bleached blond, but Maggie didn’t keep her promise either. Grace recalled a conversation she’d had with Maggie — it was easier to remember the stories than the faces — back in Providence, about how Jackie Curtis had stopped dressing in drag because it was harder being a woman. They laughed until tears came to Grace’s eyes. Mark hardly ever wore dresses anymore, even at home. That time had passed. He told Grace he’d rather just be effeminate.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.
About the Author
Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.