Norma Jeane Baker of Troy Read online

  BEAUTY AND JUSTICE: Some women know how to keep the game going, some don’t. When Marilyn Monroe did telephone interviews the journalist would often begin by asking, “So, Marilyn, what do you have on?” And she would answer, “The radio.”

  Norma Jeane takes up knitting.

  One thing I learned from psychoanalysis is how to fake it, with men. The guy I went to, Dr. Cheeseman — one day we were talking about Arthur’s dimpled white buttocks and how I felt no sexual attraction for them or for him, which was awkward as we were newlywed and Arthur, king of Sparta and New York, hoped to engender a tiny prince Arthur — and Dr. Cheeseman went into his Lacanian riff, about how “desire full stop is always desire of the Other capital O”, which I took to mean “visualize Yves Montand when screwing Arthur” but that didn’t work for me and what did work for me, oddly enough, was when I found myself one day describing Arthur to Dr. Cheeseman as an Asian boy — Asian boys being Dr. Cheeseman’s own little problem — and so discovering Arthur to be desirable by seeing him shine back at me from Dr. Cheeseman’s eyes. Is this too weird? I don’t think it’s uncommon. Psychoanalysts call it triangular desire. But it’s not what most people mean by faking it. They just mean acting. Well, in the first place, acting is not fake. And, number two, acting has nothing to do with desire. Desire is about vanishing. You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice. Or, a better example: you know I’m not a totally bona fide blonde — I always say blonde on the inside is what counts — so I get a bit of colour every 2 weeks from a certain Orlando in Brentwood and I used to wonder shouldn’t I dye the hair down there too, you know, make it match, but the thing is — talk about a bowl of cherries — most men like it dark. Most men like what slips away. A bit of strange. But I digress.

  The manager at Best Western was still talking

  when Arthur closed the phone

  and closed his eyes and said,

  I need a drink.

  Good idea, I said.

  I need to think.

  Exit Norma Jeane.

  παλλακή

  “concubine”

  HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 5

  How do you define dirt? Here is what the ancient Greeks thought of it: dirt is matter out of place. The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt. Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confuses categories and mixes up form.

  APPLICATIONS: Use this spatial hygiene to explain certain neo-liberal neuroses. Because the spooky thing about dirt, if you’re a neo-liberal, is that dirt is not passive. Dirt is coming to get you.

  CASE STUDY: The noun for “concubine” in Greek comes from the verb that means “to sprinkle.” A concubine is a stranger who sprinkles herself into someone else’s household — as Helen does when she follows Paris to Troy — hoping to assimilate herself to the texture there. Helen does not belong in the house of Priam. She comes in tracking Greek mud all over the floor.

  CAN YOU PASS: Assimilation is tricky. You have to invent a new self in a new household. Even Marilyn Monroe had trouble at the start. “When I signed my first autograph I had to go slow. I wasn’t too sure where the ‘y’ went or where you put the ‘i’.”

  TEACHABLE MOMENT: Helen’s very first appearance in history and literature, at verse 126–129 of the third book of Homer’s Iliad, shows her sitting in her chamber in the palace of Priam, weaving. She is weaving a vast tapestry that depicts, minute by minute, the battle going on outside her window. Notice Homer uses the verb “sprinkle” to describe how she embroiders the dooms of men into her web. Helen knows dirt. Helen is a death-sprinkler.

  BATTLEFIELD CLICHÉ: Her thread is deep dark red.

  Enter Norma Jeane on wind phone, hand to ear.

  Dear Hermione,

  I dreamed of you.

  I saw you floating face down.

  Every day is a struggle here, I woke up late

  and had a bad thought:

  all those lives at Troy, all those souls gone down to Hades for my sake—

  who pays for that?

  It wouldn’t be some sort of capital obligation would it? Some kind of debt

  that needs to be made good?

  Surely the life of a girl can’t be collateral?

  Surely the gods don’t think like that?

  How do gods think?

  Does it all make sense to them — war? Clouds? Fakery? People in flames?

  Do they like a good war show? Cover their eyes

  at the bloody parts?

  Poor gods!

  We’re beyond that.

  We don’t cover our eyes anymore, do we — we mortals, we creatures of a day?

  We’re more or less blind —

  shooting day for night.

  And anyway, a heart surgeon told me once,

  no need to worry: once the cutting starts,

  a wound

  shines by its own light.

  Exit Norma Jeane.

  Enter Norma Jeane as Mr. Truman Capote.

  Second choral ode.

  We have three objectives.

  One: rescue this play from melodrama.

  Two: keep her away from that wind phone.

  And three (plotwise):

  get Arthur out of Hollywood alive.

  MGM thinks him already dead, they’ve sent out

  advance PR for the reality show (I think Orson Welles wrote it).

  I’ll give you the premise:

  Norma Jeane’s married Fritz Lang.

  They bought the Chateau Marmont, put in a racetrack.

  Fritz took a physics course at Pomona and won the Nobel Prize.

  But he lost all his horses in a fire set by the Taliban.

  Norma Jeane’s decided to join the Taliban

  and is training as a prophet.

  Each show ends with a prophet’s round table—

  they bring in local prophets, all vote Yes or No

  on who’s better at holding hot coals in their mouth,

  Norma Jeane or Fritz.

  No room in any of this for Arthur,

  obviously.

  No room for Norma Jeane’s tortured personal truth either.

  I love her dearly but — let’s be frank—

  there’s nothing mythic here.

  She’s just a bit of grit caught in the world’s need for transcendence.

  It’s a hustle. I keep telling her:

  lower your eyes,

  count to four,

  raise your eyes,

  say the line.

  That’s how you lock in a hustle.

  Make them feel they’re looking at Norma Jeane nude

  even if you’re standing there with all your clothes on.

  Exit Norma Jeane as Mr. Truman Capote.

  Exit Norma Jeane.

  ἀπάτη

  “deception illusion trickery duplicity doubleness fraud bluff beguilement hankypanky dodge hoodwink artifice chicanery subterfuge ruse hoax shift stratagem swindle guile wile wiles The Wiles of Woman”

  HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 6

  In war, things go wrong. Blame Woman.

  YOU LOSE YOU WIN YOU WIN YOU LOSE: The wiles of woman cause men much anger, an anger amounting to agony. Their whoring is a big yellow tree that blooms in a man’s mind, it is agony. Is she human? Are you? Is she a beast out of control? There’s so much danger. No human can become just a beast, you plunge beyond — beyond what? Remember Jack the Ripper? “I’m down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I get buckled,” Jack wrote in a letter to the newspaper, September 18, 1888. He never did get buckled. Of course insane, his mind blooming with it, who could go down that rabbit hole or unlock such a puzzle as Jack? — but still, the woman! the thing is! the woman has everything and you smile and you take some.

  I GOT THIS FROM TED HUGHES AND WHO SHOULD KNOW IF NOT TED HUGHES: Of everything she has you have absolutely nothing, she has everything too much, so you take some. At first just a little. It blooms. You smile. You are in agony.

  Enter Norma Jeane.

  Enter Norma Jeane as Norma Jeane.

  Okay. Hustle on.

  Episode four.

  Here’s how it goes.

  I was supposed to tell the producers that Truman and I had to go to New York

  for the weekend.

  Say we’d take Dr. Cheeseman along to keep me off the booze.

  Substitute Arthur for Cheeseman at the last minute.

  Of course they’d ask, Why go to New York?

  Truman said, Use Hermione.

  She’s a good pretext.

  The overdose. The coma.

  Everyone’s heard about it.

  Say you don’t know when you’ll be back,

  there might be a funeral,

  there might not.

  I put the burning coals in my mouth

  and I said this.

  Then I fainted.

  I am that Persephone

  Who played with her darlings in Sicily

  Against a background of social security.

  Oh what a glorious time we had.

  Or had we not? They said it was sad.

  I was born good, grown bad.

  βάρβαρος

  “barbarian, Other”

  HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 7

  Barbarians always come from somewhere uncanny, on the far side of No Man’s Land or an ocean or the fence. They are another species. They have different, more savage helmets and backpacks with animal hair on them. Their bread is black, their smell heavy or ancient, their parapets bizarre — they build them up with cooking pots, pillow slips, anything! Even the barbs of their barbed wire look more numerous and foreign. There’s no doubt about it, they’re a dirty lot of bastards.

  WHOM SHALL WE DRINK TO: Ancient Greeks gave the name barbaros to anyone not provably or originally a Greek. The word is thought to replicate the sound made by sheep: bar bar bar bar.

  Episode five.

  When I woke it was night and already pouring.

  Pouring what? That’s not rain.

  Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused

  by winds trapped in subterranean caves.

  We’re more scientific now, we know

  it’s just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it’s still legal.

  Miss Pearl Bailey came in, said, Truman sent me,

  Arthur’s getting a boat. Time to exit the Chateau Marmont.

  We’ll walk down—

  that sound you hear is debris pouring in the elevator shaft.

  So we walked down, seventeen floors.

  Earthquake light is bizarre, like morning at midnight.

  I could hear the voices of birds going round and round

  looking for a back door.

  Everywhere the crunch of glass underfoot.

  And Miss Pearl Bailey was tilting — no, the hotel was — all

  top seven floors snapped off, billowed sideways

  and crashed.

  A sudden rush of open sky made us look up — tenth floor — and laugh.

  It was a photoelectric laugh.

  Last laugh that day.

  Arthur’s boat is a medium-sized trireme, same kind he took to Troy.

  (I never went to Troy, that was a cloud, don’t forget this.)

  By now you could see the wave coming up Sunset Boulevard.

  A single wave filling Sunset Boulevard with white and black foam five stories high.

  Arthur and Truman were packing the boat

  with all the kitchen and wait staff of the hotel,

  plus Pearl’s entourage,

  a mob of anorexic youth in sexual T-shirts.

  The wave hit.

  The night roared.

  We were popped up to the top of the sky and we set off. Sailing east.

  καιρός

  “opportunity”

  HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 8

  Think about bronze. It was the Bronze Age when the war at Troy took place (if it took place at all). Killing a man in full bronze armour — helmet, breastplate, greaves — was not an easy task. Two relatively small targets affording maximum bloody access were the neck and the groin, i.e. exposed areas at the top and bottom of the breastplate. A person wounded there would bleed out in a few hours. But for instant certain death you would aim your sword or spear or arrow or sharpened stick at the place where the helmet stopped above the eyes, the temple of the head. These three locations were called καιρία, mortal spots, from the Greek καιρόs, which means “the exact right place and time for something to happen, the critical juncture, the perfect opportunity.”

  NOT YET IRONY: Notice καιρόs has its accent on the final syllable. This same word with accent moved to the initial syllable, καῖροs, was a technical term from the art of weaving to indicate the thrums of the web or, more specifically, that critical point in space and time when the weaver must thrust her thread through a gap that momentarily opens in the warp of the cloth.

  TEACHABLE MOMENT: We have already reflected on Helen’s first appearance in Homer’s Iliad (Book III, verses 126–129) where she sits in her room live­streaming the war at Troy onto a tapestry. Her thread weaves in and out of living skulls.

  Norma Jeane as Truman Capote

  Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren’t they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy — you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time. I remember almost nothing but the fights — every fight a war to end all wars, you know how it goes, a righteous war, a final war, the worst fight you’ve ever had, you can’t do this again, this time you’ll get things straight one way or the other or it’s over, he’ll see what you mean, see you’re right, fights aren’t about anything except being right, are they? once and for all. You feel old. Wrong. Clumsy. You sit in two chairs on the porch. Or the kitchen. Or the front hall. Hell arrives. It’s as if the war was already there, waiting, the two of you poured into it like wet concrete. The chairs you sit in are the wrong chairs, they’re the chairs you never sit in because they’re so uncomfortable, you keep thinking you should move but you don’t, your neck hurts, you hate your neck, evening closes in. Birds move about the yard. Hell yawns. War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps contracting, or flaring, or flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline, Fuckshit this! Fuckshit that! no reason to live. You’re getting vertigo. He’s being despicable. Your mother was like this. Stop whimpering. No use asking, What is this about? Don’t leave the room. I have to leave the room. Breathless, blaming, I’m not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren’t about anything, fights are about themselves. You’re stiff. You hate these chairs. Nothing is resolved. It is too dark to see. You both go to bed and doze slightly, touching slightly. In the night a nightmare. Some giant bird, or insect, some flapping thing, trying to settle on the back of your neck, you can’t see what it is or get it off. Pure fear. Scream unearthly. He jerks you awake. Oh sweetie, he says. He is using his inside voice, his most inside voice. The distance between that voice and the fight voice measures your whole world. How can a voice change so. You are saved. He has saved you. He sees you saved. An easement occurs, as night dew on leaves. And yet (you think suddenly) you yourself do not possess this sort of inside voice — no wonder he’s lonely. You cannot offer this refuge, cannot save him, not ever, and, although physiological in origin, or genetic, or who knows, you understand the lack is felt by him as a turning away. No one can heal this. You both decide without words to just — skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep.

  Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.

  τις, τίς

  “someone, anyone, a person, a certain person, who?”

  HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 9

  τις the indefinite, τίς the interrogative, pronoun of ancient Greek. It might sound to you like almost the same word, but for the accent — that slight upward pitch? Easy words, easy to learn, easy to slide around. Easy to slide “interrogative” sideways into “indefinite” or downward into “definite” (say) enemy — who is that at the door? Is it someone we know? Is it one of them? Were they here yesterday? The ones camping on the shore? The ones who took our soup? Took our cow? Took our doorstep? What do they want with doorsteps? What do they want with our daughter? Will any daughter do? Someone else’s? Anyone? A certain who. A certain melody. Any melody. A certain pointed blade. Some blade. Some blunder. Some bargain. Some bloody marriage. Some stupid obsession. Some berserk battlefield anger. Some pretext for war. Any pretext. Any daughter. Someone is anyone is war is who is that at the door? Even among these there are differing, there is any, there’s a white cloth on their, for whom no relatives have yet, a certain rate of decomposition stuns you! a certain stink! a certain stink of battlefields, any battlefield, who’s that at the door? Who’s that stiff white blossom at the end of your pointed blade, you who abandoned me here, who’s that corpse of a girl now bloated to the size of a grown man — is anyone growing a man? Is that what we’re growing here? Does a certain injury to the man distort the face beyond recognition, he could be anyone? Could be her? Who? Who are we deciding to kill now? What is that stain spreading from your neck to your knees to your doorstep to your ridiculous glass-like soul that was supposed to outlast the centuries, outlive the galaxies, survive the rules of love, master the odds of war and transcend all seven level oceans of Homer?