Marjorie Morningstar (47 page)

“Well, that makes sense, God knows.”

“I think it does. I feel full of beans today. And I’m grateful to you. Do you know,
I believe it was your graduation that pushed me over the edge. I actually went from
Schrafft’s and phoned Sam. The graduation was such a great divide of time for you…
and somehow, I felt myself passing over it, too. I saw myself all too clearly. Thirty,
and nowhere, and disgusting your parents, your ratty down-at-the-heels admirer from
Greenwich Village. Maybe if it hadn’t been so gray and rainy, and I hadn’t been wearing
my oldest coat and my greasiest hat—And then Marsha showing up, grinning at the pair
of us like an itchy old maid… I don’t know, everything closed in on me, all at once,
and I went and called Sam. I’d been fearfully low for days, you see. Last Sunday I
found out that my brother Billy was engaged to be married.”

Marjorie looked startled. “Billy!”

“Twenty-two. In his second year at law school. She’s the daughter of a big corporation
lawyer, a heavyweight in the Democratic party in Brooklyn. Another Marjorie, by the
way, Marjorie Sundheimer—”

“Marjorie Sundheimer? Good Lord, Billy’s marrying
her
?”

“You know her, then?”

“Oh, for years at fraternity dances—and all that—Well, well, Billy Ehrmann and Marjorie
Sundheimer. Honestly, truth is stranger than fiction.”

“Marjorie, ugly girls get married, too.”

“I never said she was ugly.”

“Your tones, dear, are implying that you’d be less surprised if Billy’d become engaged
to a red-bottomed baboon.”

“That’s absurd. She’s a lovely girl. It’s just—well, they’re both so young.”

“Sweetheart, this sets Billy up for life. He’ll be a judge at forty. Nothing can stop
it. What the devil, I’m happy for him, he’s a decent egg.”

“Billy’s grand.”

“He dropped in with this girl unexpectedly at my apartment, the night of your graduation.
That’s why I didn’t call you. I couldn’t have been more depressed. They’re such children!
I’m barely used to the idea that he shaves. She’s had her nose fixed, by the way,
and she’s really quite pleasant-looking. And for such a rich girl, she’s touchingly
humble. Like Billy. They’re a nice couple. I think they’re going to be happy.”

“No doubt she knows all about us.”

“The last thing she said at the door was, ‘Love to Marjorie,’ in a quavering voice,
after nobody’d referred to you for two hours. I think coming below Fourteenth Street
was a scary adventure for her. She kept staring around, you know, at the books, and
the carpet, and the pictures, and the dust on the molding, and at me. She laughed
hysterically at everything I said, including half a dozen remarks that were perfectly
serious. Obviously she thought I was a highly decadent monster, like Baudelaire. I
think she was looking around for hypodermic needles. I was sorry I didn’t at least
have a gorgeous drunken blonde to fall naked out of the closet at one point. She seemed
to be waiting for something like that.”

“What she was waiting for, more likely,” Marjorie said, “was for me to come out from
under the bed in a transparent negligee.”

Noel burst out laughing. “I swear I think that was it.”

Marjorie said, “Well, what do I care? My reputation’s gone, anyway, from associating
with you.”

He said with sudden earnestness, “Honestly, the uptown idea of Village life is preposterous,
isn’t it? Believe me, the main charm of the Village is the cheap rent. For me, anyway.
I find overgrown hair and dirty necks as offensive as you do. As for the celebrated
Village sex life, which had Billy’s girl’s eyes popping out of her head looking for
evidence—what is it, after all, once you’re over the college boy’s glee at finding
it available? Most of the time it’s a mean dirty chore. Unattractive people snuffling
and wrestling together because they’re bored, or lonesome, or sick in the head. You
say I’ve lived the life of a pig. Well, it’s not true. I’ve always been fastidious
by any standard, I claim. But I’ll tell you this, and I don’t say it to score a point.
Since the day you left South Wind, there’s been nothing like that for me. Nothing
at all.”

This question had been plaguing Marjorie for months. Her heart swelled to have the
answer, but how like Noel to drop it casually into a conversation, as a fact of no
importance! She looked him in the face. “I’m not sorry to hear that.”

“Understand this, I have no more scruples or morals than before. I’ve simply decided
it’s the better part of self-indulgence to have love or nothing.”

She couldn’t repress a grin. “Noel dear, I think you’re slowly but surely reverting
to your origins.”

He shook his head at her. “You’ll make me over, come hell or high water, won’t you?
Or you’ll tell yourself you’re doing it, anyhow. Your voice just then had the timbre
of your mother’s. Let’s get out of this oak-panelled vault.”

“All right, but I must say I love it here.”

“What tastes you’re acquiring! You’ll keep your husband broke, and working nights
in his dress business.” He paid the check.

“I’m not marrying anybody in the dress business.”

“Of course. I forgot. A doctor. A specialist.”

“Yes, with a big black mustache, named Shapiro. We’ve been all through that.”

“Ah, you see, our relationship’s exhausted. I’m repeating my jokes.”

They walked up the side street to Fifth Avenue. It was cold and windy, but clear,
and the sunshine was almost blinding. He said, “Come, walk up Fifth with me. I have
to pick up Sam’s car at Sixty-third.”

“Sure.—Ever heard of a producer named Guy Flamm?”

“Of course. The fringe of the fringe. What about him?”

She told him the story while they strolled uptown past the shopwindows, amid a scurrying
crowd. He was amused and sympathetic. “You poor baby.”

“Oh, I don’t much care. It didn’t last long enough to mean anything. And anyway, the
play was such balderdash—at least
I
thought it was.”

“Of course it was. All the same, he’ll probably produce
Down Two Doubled
one of these days, when a Clarice walks into his office with a richer or dumber father
than yours. It can happen tomorrow, there are so many Clarices drifting around Broadway.
The desire to be an actress, in middle-class American girls of a certain IQ—say around
115—isn’t even a conscious decision, Margie. It’s a tropism, an organic thing that
comes out of the nature of their lives…. All right, all right—” She was gnawing her
lips, scowling at him. “I thought we’d agreed that no generalizations whatever applied
to you.”

“Noel, does Flamm know
Down Two Doubled
is rubbish? Or does he really think it’s good?”

“Who knows? For a career like his what you need is an infinite capacity for self-deception.”

“How does he live, pay his rent? His name gets in the theatre columns—”

“Why, dear, he’s a real producer. He probably has scratched up some money with
Down Two Doubled
already, small amounts from idiotic amateur backers. The theatre is so cockeyed,
he may even produce a smash some day. Those scripts you saw his girl reading were
the flotsam that drifts around the producers’ offices forever, one abomination more
frightful than the last. I was a playreader for a few months once. I nearly went crazy.
Undoubtedly he pulled
Down Two Doubled
out of that rancid flood. Maybe he likes it. Maybe he’s had the author rewrite it
ten times. Maybe he’s charged him for his advice. There’s no end to the follies that
go on in the theatre.”

She said, “I take it you’ve decided I have no talent. You were still dodging the issue,
last time we talked about it.”

His face wrinkled. “I’m really not sure. Anyone can see you’re bright and pretty and
full of nineteenish charm. You walk on stage endowed by nature with half the effects
a skilled actress has to work to create. But such incandescence doesn’t last. What
you’ll be left with when it goes, I can’t say. My guess is that you’ll be snagged
into a fine fat marriage long before that, so you’ll never really find out. One thing
I’ll tell you, though. If you’re going at this seriously, you ought to get rid of
that Marjorie Morningstar name. It has a fake ring.”

“Shows how much you know. It’s in the New York phone book.”

“I don’t care. You’d be better off calling yourself Marjorie Morgan.”

“That’s drab and commonplace.”

“Well? The idea of a name change is to make you more like other people, not less.”

“I suppose Noel Airman is commonplace.”

“I was in just about the stage you are now when I thought of that. If I had it to
do over again, I’d call myself something like Charlie Robinson. If you want to pretend
you’re not a Jew, you may as well do it right.”

“That’s not why I’m doing it.”

“Then what’s wrong with Morgenstern?”

“It’s too ordinary.”

“I see. You want an unusual name, like Maggie Sullavan.”

“Well, that’s different. Morgenstern sounds so… I don’t know—”

“So Jewish, girlie, so Jewish. Those overtones of potato pancakes, Friday-night candles,
gefilte fish—that’s what you don’t like.”

She said, irritated, “Of course, everybody’s motives have to be as wretched as yours.
All the same, Noel, I’m going to call myself Marjorie Morningstar, and I’m going to
become an actress, in spite of Guy Flamm, and my mother, and you, and all the odds.”

He put his arm around her waist and briefly squeezed it. “That’s the old college fight.”
They walked in silence for a while. He said, “But I can’t picture it, and you know
why, Margie? Every real actress I’ve ever known has had a—I don’t know, a sort of
iron core. When you talk to them—even romantically—you get a metallic ring in response.
I’m not putting this well. I don’t mean insincerity, d’you see, or phoniness, or frigidity.
It’s—well, they’re more like men, in a fixity of purpose, and a hard alertness to
the business at hand. Most of them make a hash of their love lives. It’s as though
the price of having talent is the loss of the womanish instinct for sniffing along
the right path of life. Well, you—you’re such a female, such a cat picking your way
with dainty paws—”

“I often wonder where you get your ideas about me. Of all my graduating class, I think
I should have been voted the girl most likely to hash up her life.”

“You like to romanticize yourself. You’re pure cat, sniffing nervously but surely
toward a house in New Rochelle, and a husband making a minimum of fifteen thousand
a year.”

“Go climb a tree. Lord, you’re a bore sometimes.”

He laughed. They were walking along the eastern side of the plaza. The breath of the
hansom-cab horses across the street smoked in the sunshine. “D’you know, you’ve had
an effect on me? I respect cat wisdom. I think now I might very well enjoy that kind
of life, myself—and buying in these shops, and staying weekends at the Pierre or the
Plaza, and all that—always providing one thing. Providing that my wife and I both
regarded such a life as a pleasant comic mask, put on like Mexican living or Fiji
Island living, because at the moment it pleased us—but in itself unreal, empty, of
no importance, and discardable overnight.” With a sharp turn, he pulled her into a
florist’s shop.

“What on earth—”

“Violets, in February! Didn’t you see them in the window? Must buy you a bunch.”

“You’re a madman.”

Noel scribbled a card while the florist prepared the violets. He handed the little
purple nosegay and the card to her with a flourish:

She blushed, laughed huskily, and dropped the card in the purse. “Very witty. I think
I’ll carry the flowers.”

Sam Rothmore’s black Cadillac stood in front of a lean gray stone house which had
rococo black iron grillwork on the windows and the massive doors. The chauffeur, a
neat gray-haired man in black, greeted Noel respectfully and held the door of the
limousine open. “Say, come on, I’ll drop you off at home first,” Noel said.

“Oh no, Noel, the car is for business.”

“Nonsense. There’s all kinds of time. Get in and stop arguing. Seven-forty West End
Avenue, Philip.”

“Certainly, Mr. Airman.”

Rolling through Central Park in the Cadillac, Marjorie sniffed the violets, and looked
out at the muddy brown-green lawns with patches of ice on the rocks, and thought that
it might not be bad to die at this instant. She turned to Noel. “You’re ruining my
life. I wonder if you’re doing it deliberately.”

“I’m in love with you,” Noel said.

She glanced at the chauffeur’s back, then reached up and kissed him lightly on the
lips. “I’m in love with you, too.”

“One of us must crack,” Noel said.

“Not me,” Marjorie said.

Noel did not telephone during the next three weeks, and a very dreary three weeks
they were. She spent the time exploring the theatre district, and what she found out
mainly was that there were a large number of girls like her—droves of them, indeed—marching
doggedly and without much hope from one producer’s office to another, through February
snow and slush, under unchanging black skies that seemed to hang a few feet above
the tops of the buildings.

When Sandy Goldstone called, inviting her to come with him to Billy Ehrmann’s engagement
reception, Marjorie accepted eagerly. She was only mildly curious to see Sandy, or
for that matter Billy and his bride-to-be; but she figured that Noel would probably
appear at the party. A melancholy, quenched Sandy called for her that Sunday. He seemed
to be a foot or so shorter than she remembered him; round-shouldered, listless, dull.
But he said bravely that he loved working at Lamm’s, and that everything couldn’t
be better. He confided to Marjorie that he had found a way to make a fortune. He owned
twenty per cent of a race horse; and while twenty per cent of the horse’s weekly hay
consumption cost him most of his salary, he had high hopes of making a killing soon
in one of the big stake races.