Misfit (24 page)

She can barely see straight anymore, and though she's flat on the bed, she's balled up, feeling herself in free flight, sinking down. She's still fully clothed but her evening dress seems to hover above her, humming like some sort of electric coating. Her palms push flat against the mattress to break the fall. She slows a little. Once it's finally safe to let go of the bed, she'll work her body out of the dress and kick the garment off, where it will slump to the floor. Then she'll stretch out across the bed, fully nude and no longer constricted. And then just be. She lets up slightly on her grip, only to plunge further.

She barely notices him when he bursts through the door.

Her right leg sticks out of the covers, twitching, her foot on the verge of cramping, the toes and the arch contracting. What's left of the moonlight flows down her thighs, and she swears she can feel it running off her ankles, puddling on the sheets. Her left hand is clenched into a fist. The right holds on to the telephone receiver, cradled against her hip. She glances up, barely able to see straight. Trying to look is like staring into an eclipse.

He stands too large for the room. Pulling at his fingers. The joints popping in little bursts of thunder. Stepping forward, he accidentally kicks a champagne bottle. It rolls under the bed and knocks against a leg. A dull chime.

“Hi,” she says. Her gums stick together, her mouth dry. She drops the phone. It dangles off the bed.

He lets out a sigh, as though relieved to know she's alive.

Could she look that dead?

Before she knows it his thumbs hook under her armpits. He pulls her up until she's propped against the headboard. She can feel his breath blowing warm down her back. For his own sake, he tugs the bedsheets up to cover her breasts. “Marilyn,” he finally says. “Can you hear me? I know you're in there, Marilyn.”

His voice is not just directed at her. It's surrounding her, pouring in at all the unsuspecting places.

She nods her head in affirmation. But it must not look like much, because he keeps asking if she can hear him. All the while lightly slapping her cheek.

She feels herself sinking again. Being drawn back down into the bed.

Suddenly, water is falling over her, head and torso, slowly bringing her back up to the surface.

She nods. Feels her body. Touches her hips. No longer sinking.

With her eyes beginning to focus, it looks as if it's Peter Lawford shaking out the last of the ice bucket over her head. Not Joe? It isn't that she's had a real reason to believe it'd be Joe. She just sort of expected it would be.

By late morning the sheets have dried. One stream of light comes between the curtains. The room is already warm. She's slept through breakfast.

Initially she rolls out of bed as though it's any other day, stretching her legs and arms and rolling her neck. Her fingers splay toward the ceiling, elongating her spine. Her hips pop, as though they've been jammed into their sockets too tightly. And then she sees the room, and she smells the stale stink of last night, which
brings everything back, reminding her that her head is throbbing and that her eyeballs might burst.

 

The physical remnants that the disaster left behind:

She walks right to the mirror arched over the bureau, places her sticky palms flat on the dresser top, and leans in to the mirror until her face nearly touches the surface. Her hair is stringy and matted, her eyes puffed, and her skin almost pure white. She huffs a breath against the glass, looking for a billow of fog, just to make sure she's still alive.

 

She doesn't know what will be waiting outside the door, or who will be there, or where the escape holes are.

She slips on a pair of capris, her green Pucci top, and unballs a scarf, tying it over her head. She feels like a primitive in a mask with bug eyes and exaggerated features, meant to ward off marauding sprits and enemies.

This is what failure looks like. How it lives. Like a room on a ward, where your disappointments and
fears live among you as taunting reminders, while outside there's a world that's festively alive, but which you can't enter because your disappointments and fears won't let you out.

Coming in for her afternoon shift, the hotel operator returns to the front desk. The first thing she does is check the switchboard, to confirm that the line for cabin three is properly hung up. And even if it weren't she wouldn't say anything. There's been no word about what actually happened in the middle of the night. Whether her alarm was warranted. Nobody's whispered any rumors. There've been no leaked details. In fact, she knows that if she pushes a little for information, needles some of her coworkers with vague hints and leading questions, they won't reply because they won't know what she's talking about. Which is precisely why she won't say anything again, if placed in a similar circumstance.

She understands the shape of privacy.

On the landing below her cabin's deck, she spots Sinatra and Buddy Greco. They're bordered by a giant rock wedged in the mountainside and the tall pines that
cascade down to the lakeshore. Sinatra, in his swim trunks, lounges shirtless in a deck chair, reading the paper, his bony shoulders streaked by sunlight, bare legs crossed. Wearing a khaki jungle-style short-sleeved shirt with matching trousers, Greco is getting a haircut. He keeps looking around the grounds, and the barber jerks his head back in place, annoyed at the interruption of his snipping.

She waves to Frank; he's been the one solid thing for her.

Peering over the top of his newspaper, Sinatra catches her eye. “So the queen's come out of her chamber,” he announces. The paper drops into his lap. A page slips off, and the wind skirts it across the concrete. He shakes his head: “The definition of a civilization in ruins.” He motions her away. A brushstroke.

She stays put. Adjusts her sunglasses. On her face they feel like part of a villain's disguise. “Frank?” she starts with a weak voice.

The wind blows the paper in a circle around the landing, until it comes back, wrapped against his ankle. He kicks the sheet away. “Can it,” he says. “Pack your bags, and go home.” He snaps his fingers, disappearing her.

And with that snap she's invisible. She grips on to the safety rail to keep from falling down. All she can imagine doing is bounding down the stairs, heading toward the lake, building her velocity, in hopes that she might sail across Lake Tahoe and just fade away.

One Week Later

Covering Marilyn Monroe's death, the August 6, 1962, edition of the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “Coroner Theodore J. Curphey today ordered a ‘psychiatric autopsy' for Marilyn Monroe.” The psychiatric autopsy, sometimes called the psychological autopsy, was introduced and refined by Drs. Edwin Shneidman, Norman Farberow, and Robert Litman of the Suicide Prevention Center at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Their method relied on a series of interviews with friends and colleagues of the deceased—essentially a conversational gathering of evidence to develop a postmortem psychological history. While it could point to various causes of death, its marquee objective was to determine if there had been a suicide. From a clinical research standpoint it was also hoped the practice would provide critical information for suicide prevention. Monroe's psychological autopsy report was never made public. At one point it was leaked that one of the study's conclusions described her as having a “suicidal state of mind prior to her death.” But that didn't make it to the papers. It was hardly news.

 

The August 6
New York Times
article about her death painted Marilyn as being, by the end, a “virtual recluse.”

Three days straight it took.

Nothing but quiet.

At the Westwood Village Mortuary a few family members mingled among the staff. A makeup man and a wardrobe woman waited, on call for the eventual dressing. But other than that, no Hollywood types. Joe DiMaggio had made sure of that. Muttered under his breath that they were the ones who did this to her. Muttered a lot of things under his breath, without saying much of anything to anybody. He kept his reserve, instead charging Allan Abbott of Abbott and Hast Funeral Services to oversee the details for the service and its preparations, instructing him to hire and
post six Pinkerton guards to keep the showbiz people out, with additional orders to prevent postmortem photographs, as well as be sure nothing was snipped from the body as a souvenir. It was quiet in the mortuary. Quiet, except for the embalmer at work. And the squeaking soles of the six Pinkerton guards.

 

On the third day, something doesn't look right. They're getting ready to dress her, but the embalmer won't leave the table. She looks swollen. Her neck is bulging like a bodybuilder's, puffed out as though it could burst. The embalmer steps back. “Do you see it?” he asks Mary, one of the mortuary's co-owners. Then he looks over at Abbott, who can only shrug. The embalmer doesn't talk much. He prefers not to say things that don't need to be said. At one time the embalmer wished he were deaf, until he realized it wasn't noise on its own that bothered him, just unnecessary noise. People are surprised when he speaks. Almost honored. “I'm not imagining it, Mary, am I?”

“You're not.”

“Then you see it too?” He squints his eyes, head cocked.

“You're not.”

“Meaning, I don't see it?”

“Meaning, no. You're not imagining it, is what I mean to say. You're not, is what I'm saying.”

He pokes at the neck with the blunt end of a scalpel, trying to measure the density. Seeing how firm
her neck is. Then he touches it with his index finger, pushing in slightly, feeling through the latex that it's all fluid; something inside has weakened, causing the embalming chemicals to leak internally. A reservoir in her neck.

The embalmer steps back and reconsiders. He pinches the bridge of his nose, then shakes his head in some disappointment. It's only that he'd thought he was done, is all. If the embalmer were married, he'd have to call home to tell his wife he'd be late for dinner. And though he'd work carefully into the night, going through the extra steps to remedy and reconstruct, somehow the embalmer knows he'd be fighting the urge to rush. But he has the whole evening. He circles her body, trying to find the best way in for the incision.

“I don't think we can leave her this way,” Mary says.

“No.”

“You mean she may have to stay this way?”

The embalmer picks up the scalpel and runs it across his smock. Not really sharpening it. Not quite cleaning it. He thinks that action must answer the question. To explain any more would only be noise.

He takes a pair of scissors to her hair, trimming around the back, so he can get at the least visible part of the neck. Her hair is coarse and strawlike. Not much different from a doll's. The studio technicians gasp at the sound of the chopping scissors. It must seem like
defiling to them. Abbott scurries over quickly with a broom and dustpan, trying to be useful. The hair is dumped into a barrel along with all the wadded papers, gauze, and leftover suture clippings.

Mary says it looks as though this might take some time, and she promised Mr. DiMaggio an update. Abbott thinks that is a good idea, as Mr. DiMaggio wants to be kept abreast of all the steps. He doesn't want anybody trying to take anything over. She nods in agreement, saying she'll be back shortly, unless the embalmer needs her help.

The embalmer doesn't reply. He's bent over, his back to the door, twisting the head slowly in the support, for access. He focuses as though lining up his shot, then he's incising the scalpel into the back of her neck. He cuts a little to both sides, letting the fluid drain into a pan. Though this procedure was unexpected, it's not far from the routine. One of a series of variables. When he's finished he'll suture the incision, then step back to observe the dressing, ensuring there are no more surprises. Then he'll go home. It's been a long three days.

“Okay,” he says to the studio people. “Ready.”

“We can? It's okay to . . . ?”

“Ready.”

The two studio people walk up to the table. Abbott moves with them slowly. He's just going to observe. Oversee.

The embalmer does his best to stay out of their way, standing off to the side, implying that he'll help
lift her body when needed. It shouldn't be a big deal to put a dress on her. The embalmer doesn't like fussing. He's lived alone most of his adult life, not because he is incapable of being with someone, but more because of what he has observed: a relationship, especially marriage, seems to be ritualized fussing.

The dress is pale green. It was sewn in Italy. The dresser has mentioned that several times, maybe his way of saying she's being buried with the class she's earned. The dresser smoothes the material with his hand over and over, almost stroking it. And he keeps trying to spit out words, until eventually he says
this can't be so
, and his chest starts to heave like he's either going to throw up or burst into tears. He turns his head to protect the dress. The embalmer looks away because he doesn't want any part of this. Of course the embalmer knows how significant this particular death is, but still he expects professionals to act as such, no matter how meaningful some people seem to find her. He saw
The Misfits
last year (although more for Gable), and it was the first time he'd seen her in a movie. She wasn't as dopey and light as he'd imagined, based on how she'd been portrayed in the papers, and her acting wasn't half bad; for the most part he believed her as Roslyn, and not as a starlet. He felt a little for Roslyn's loneliness, but not like he did for Gable's character, Gay—a solitary man in a world that will no longer allow for solitary men. And when he heard the news of her death—and nobody
should mince words:
suicide
—he thought to himself,
Well, I guess she wasn't that light
. But that was a person, and this is a body—with cotton stuffed under its eyelids, and disinfectant sprayed up the nose and in the rear, and the organs full of preservatives. The only thing that gets to the embalmer is the Yankee Clipper. The thought of meeting DiMaggio makes him a little weak. He knows he'll want to say something, but he doesn't know what, other than that it will probably be the wrong thing.