The Empty Glass (23 page)

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25

70.

I
know that I am slurring now. I might have had too many. You ask me the same questions. You ask me to repeat myself, but I am trying to stop the spinning. I shouldn’t have swallowed them all, but I did. The point is they will tell you I am crazy. They will tell you I’m an addict and can’t be trusted. They held back my arms on both sides; I couldn’t struggle. I kicked. My legs were the only things that I could move, until the floor was upended and the lightbulb on the ceiling passed over my eyes like a star, and my head hit the floor with a crack.

All I could see was the fan spinning slowly on the ceiling as they rolled my right sleeve up and took the tourniquet from the table and tied it on my arm and pulled it tight and the next thing I knew my eyes were bright and blinking against the light shining down, blood surging as a wave spread like darkness over the sun, an eclipse in my blood slowly blanketing my body with warmth and a peace that I had never known.

And everything in slow motion.

“Wait a second,” you say. “Where were you?”

“The hospital.”

“What happened to Max?”

“I brought him there. Well, he had all the symptoms. The itchy chin. The sound in his chest. The coughing and the sweat. It was an asthma attack, Doc. So what was I gonna do? They arrested me when I arrived—for assault and kidnapping. They wouldn’t let me see him. They called my wife.”

“Your wife.”

“They found her in the tub.”

Was I in that room for a month? I don’t know. The days telescoped and expanded, like an accordion. Einstein was wrong: Time isn’t relative. It’s a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family. Someone told me that I had checked myself in for the same sort of pill addiction that Marilyn had had. Like her, I had a taste for yellow jackets and, later, the black Novril.

They injected me. They fed me Novril, and kept feeding me the Novril, until they brought me here—wherever “here” is, Doc: the gray-green room with no windows and a metal door. A bare bulb on a ceiling fan over the long table. The reel-to-reel, a stack of tapes, an ashtray, and your pack of cigarettes. That and, of course, the box with the large label reading “Fitzgerald, Ben, Psych Eval” containing what you call “the evidence”:

1. The Smith & Wesson

2. A vial of Nembutal

3. A piece of notebook paper reading “Chalet 52” and “July 28”

4. A stained manila folder containing a number of 8 × 10 photographs

5.
Amahl and the Night Visitors

6. A bag of ashes

7. A new red
MEMORIES
diary

You pick up No. 6 and dump it on the table. Gray puffs rise. You stir through the ashes recovered from the fire, removing the last remaining page. You hold it up and read the words out loud:

The doorbell rang then. Pat was out by the pool she was still mad. “You can’t hold a press conference,” she said.

“But sure I can. I’m going to blow this whole thing wide open.”

“Marilyn, it’s the craziest thing,” she said. “You can’t keep the baby.”

You put the pages down. “Well?”

“What?”

“You didn’t tell the whole story. You left the main thing out.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Finish the diary, Ben,” you say. “Tell me what else you think happened.”

THE BOOK OF SECRETS

by Ben Fitzgerald

71.

F
orgive me but it was all I ever wanted,” Marilyn had written. “I tried so many times but never with results and always with pain, well once I almost died but this will be different and will change everything, the one who will have the things I never had and see the things I never saw and be loved and safe and sane and mine.

“[redacted], forgive me: [redacted].”

The lacunae here are “Bobby” and “you’re a daddy again.”

Arthur Miller once said that a baby would have been, for Marilyn, “a crown with a thousand diamonds.” But when she found herself pregnant by the attorney general, it wasn’t a crown. It was why she died. It was why Sinatra had taken Monroe to the Cal-Neva Lodge, why she had been drugged and, worse, why the photos were taken. If she refused to do what they were asking her, the photos were evidence they could use against her: She was nothing but a whore, like the word that she’d read on the window.

She had threatened to take all her secrets to the media. She had threatened more than once to call a press conference. And now she was going to have a baby. Which might have been the reason behind the series of phone calls from the unidentified woman (Ethel Kennedy?) the night before Monroe died:

“You stay away from Bobby,” she had said, knowing even then that the General’s eighth child was growing in the body of the film star.

All she’d ever wanted was that crown of diamonds, but why torture yourself with hellos?

Now you keep saying, “Finish the story. Write what you know.” But are you CIA or LAPD? Do you want evidence against the Kennedys or a reason to kill me?

Whatever: The pages from the logs at Conners helicopter at Clover Field in Santa Monica—the ones I’d found on Jo’s table—clearly showed the record of two helicopter flights. The first, from San Francisco, had landed at 1:16
P.M.
on August 4 at Stage 18 of the 20th Century-Fox lot near the Beverly Hilton. The second had flown out of Santa Monica just after midnight on August 5, heading to (where else?) San Francisco.

So what does this mean?

It means that Bobby
could
have left Gilroy on Saturday, flying from San Francisco to the Fox lot after lunch and then heading to see Marilyn. It meant he could have returned to Gilroy in time for prayers on Sunday. But Marilyn was found dead after midnight. Why did the second flight leave L.A. for San Francisco almost twelve hours after the first flight arrived? Maybe Bobby didn’t get what he wanted from Marilyn in the afternoon. So maybe he
returned
to her house that night—perhaps with Dr. Greenson, perhaps with Peter Lawford. And what happened then?

Maybe they administered either an enema (which would have explained the purplish congestion in the colon) or a hot shot, which might have explained the bruise.

We had, after all, found a large bruise on her left hip, a bruise that must have resulted from something that had happened on the night that she died. Maybe, drunk and high on pills, she was stumbling about the scattered scripts of that small bedroom, telephone in hand, bumping up against one or another of the pieces of furniture, or falling and hitting her hip against—what?—the bed? But I think it’s far more likely that someone
inflicted
that bruise.

Noguchi thought so, too, for the record.

And now it is—

Well, I’m not sure. There are no windows, and the lights are off, but from the paper that you left behind, I can see that things are calming down. It was Black Saturday. Now it’s only Lonely Monday: “the dismantling of offensive weapons is an important contribution to peace and . . . the governments of the world can turn their attention to the need to end the arms race,” the president said.

And all that.

I can’t read the rest.

I don’t expect this to survive, but listen: My name won’t show up in the obituaries. My life will be erased, the photos of my death ending up among the suicides and homicides and accidental overdoses in
The Book of the Unknown Dead
.

And now I’m wondering if the moment is coming when I will close my eyes and the things that seem real bleed into what can’t be. That’s the second you know you are slipping which is what I feel now a slow slipping. I want to write it out, what I remember, but am falling asleep leap a leap and so I won’t forget:

72.

CASE NO.: 81136

DECEDENT NAME: UNKNOWN

CONTENTS:

1. A MONOGRAMMED SHIRT

2. A MONOPOLY THIMBLE

3. A SUICIDE NOTE:
“Take care of Max for me. Tell him that I loved him. Tell him that whatever else his father did, he loved his son.”

LOCATION: BOX 35, ROW 33-D

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For support before, during, and after: Lani Adler, Josh Baker, Julie Baker, Thomas H. Cook, NYPD Detective Glenn Cunningham (retired), Ellen Datlow, Dennis Dermody, Klara Glowczewska, Scott Heim, Gail Horwood, John Huey, Clive Irving, Sue James, Bucky Keady, Dave C. Keady, Jim Kelly, Cindi Leive, Michael Lowenthal, Rob Minkoff, Scott Mowbray, Brothers Mueller, Martha Nelson, Sara Nelson, Winifred Ormond, Melissa Parrish, Otto Penzler, Daniel Silk, Geraldine Somers, Byron Stinson, Cyndi Stivers, Susan Terner, Kristin van Ogtrop, Craig Wright, Hanya Yanagihara, and Token Yee.

Special thanks and an enormous debt of gratitude to Richard Pine, who saw something in many early efforts and never stopped believing; Sarah Hochman, whose inspired edits and steady course saved me from myself in this; David Rosenthal, Aileen Boyle, Brian Ulicky, and their colleagues at Blue Rider Press and Penguin USA; and Philip Friedman, for absolutely everything.