Marjorie Morningstar (59 page)

Marjorie said, “Well, I’ll tell you this, if you’ve really answered the questions
you’ve raised, you’ll be the most famous man in the world.”

“I’ve answered them.”

“Well, come on. It’s almost like a murder mystery by now, this big idea of yours.”

Noel nodded, his eyes wide and gleaming, his fingers drumming on the table. “Can’t
wait to find out who’s the Bat, hey? Well, it isn’t Moses or Jesus, or any religious
figure—and it isn’t Marx, and it isn’t Freud—”

“There’s nobody left nowadays, is there?”

“There’s the butler,” Noel said. “The inconspicuous little character who really did
it.”

“What’s his name, for heaven’s sake?”

At that moment Mrs. Kleinschmidt set the steak before Noel on a thick cracked white
plate, brown and sizzling, oozing red juice around a heap of potatoes. He seized knife
and fork, cut the steak across the middle, and peered into the purple gash. “Very
good. Perfect. Thank you. And a bottle of Guinness, please.” He crushed out his cigar.
“Margie, I propose to enjoy this steak more than I have any food in my life. Please
eat something.”

“No, thank you.”

He ate a bite of steak. “Superb. Now then, listen carefully. If I were to get technical
about what I’m writing, I’d say it reintroduces teleology as a major concept in dialectical
analysis, which in itself is mighty startling, or would be in a professional journal,
or I’m very much mistaken. But I’ll spare you the academic verbiage. I think I can
put it clearly and simply, and still be fair to it. I’m developing the concept, briefly,
that the force that moves the world is a desire for Hits.
Hits
.”

“Hits?” Marjorie said, vaguely disappointed.

“Now wait, don’t get that dumb stunned look. All important ideas sound trivial or
wild the first time you hear them. Let me spell it out a bit. The central truth about
human nature and conduct, I say, is hidden inside a fortress of four rings, four walls
of illusion, Margie—remember that, and remember Noel Airman said it. Those four walls
of illusion are: religion, philosophy, sex, and money. What worldly wisdom does is
punch through those two mushy outer walls, and come upon the big thick bastions of
pretty girls and dough. Whereupon it cries, with French gestures, ‘Voilà! Zut alors!
Parbleu! Here’s the truth! The real inside story! We’ve found it!’ It stops there.
It never learns that the truth is further inside yet, and that you’ve still got to
blast.

“No, ten million dollars in the bank, and all the pretty girls in bed with you, that’s
the final wisdom of the world. People talk religion, but they pursue sex and cash—that’s
the big secret of life. It’s the entire point of French literature, for instance,
the glory of which is supposed to be that it’s wise and matter-of-fact and ironically
honest, and lays bare the secrets of the human heart. Well, honey, no man is more
saturated with this ironic view than I am. I’ve lived with it for a dozen years. In
fact I’ve
lived
it, the way a monk lives a creed. I’ve found out the hard way that that’s all it
is—another creed, another hopeful story, another dreamy lie.

“The pretty girls break down first, once you try to grasp the dream. They’re hard
to get at, sure, but not nearly as hard as lots of money. Oh, I suppose if I’d been
a little humpbacked spider I’d have tried to become a millionaire, and then gone out
to buy women. But as it was, I simply worked myself into the circle of the pretty
girls, the wolf in the fold. They really do herd like sheep, you know, in New York.
They do the same things, go to the same parties, talk the same talk, all of them.
I actually lived the dream life of the college boys and the bald businessmen. I had
models, show girls, all I wanted, ‘the real stuff,’ as they would say, for years.
There’s nothing anybody can tell me about that answer—I’m not annoying you, I hope?”

Marjorie with an effort took the frown off her face, and unclenched her fists on the
table. “Well, you needn’t elaborate the point, that’s all.”

With the shadow of a crooked grin he said, “But what I’m getting at should comfort
you, if you’re irritated. The pretty girls turn out to be as phony an answer as philosophy.

“Pretty girls are just girls, Margie, you see. That’s what finally emerges. The most
immoral slut among them, even a dumb roundheels like Imogene, at heart just wants
a fellow and a nest and clothes and furniture. What’s more, they tend to be stupider
than other girls, because being pretty makes life too easy for them. The day they
sprout those charming breasts, they usually turn off their brains, and just bob along
on the tide of attention and fun that starts up. Then after a while they’re twenty-five
and have to start thinking again. Because by that time the breasts are beginning to
droop and the fuss is dying down. Of course by then it’s too late, like as not. They’re
empty-headed fools, they can’t read, they can’t talk, they can’t think, their emotions
have been gutted by random sleeping around, and their lives are a shambles—”

Marjorie said, “You’re a cruel hound, do you know? A cruel hound.”

“Well, I don’t want to offend you, Margie, truly I don’t, but we’re coming to the
heart of the matter. The poor slobs in restaurants and theatres who used to goggle
at me when I’d walk in with one of those girls were suffering for nothing, if they’d
only known. They were thinking, ‘Wowie! There goes the lucky guy, the guy with the
answer.’ But there’s nothing special about a pretty girl, and that’s God’s truth.
Once you’re in bed with a girl, it hardly matters a damn what she looks like. Because
you’re too close to her, don’t you see? She’s just a pink warm expanse and a blurry
face. The rest is all imagination. No matter who a man’s bedmate is—his old boring
wife, or the glamorous new model he’s inveigled or bought—when he gets right down
to it sex is just the same old clumsy business, Marjorie, that the birds and the bees
and the dogs do. If he’s in love, or thinks he’s in love, then it’s charming. If he’s
not in love, if he’s just doing it to be doing it—Margie, I swear to you, with the
prettiest living girl it’s nothing. A man makes it something only by telling himself
over and over, ‘Look at me, look at me, I’ve got myself a model, a show girl,’ whipping
up his imagination to remind himself that he’s achieved the world’s desire. Because
it’s so ordinary in fact, so paltry, so trivial. If he has a shred of affection for
his sagging old wife, or the homely girl next door he grew up with, he’s better off
in bed with her than with all the M-G-M starlets, one after another. That is the fact
of the matter. Few people have a chance to find it out. And those who do, like me,
usually shut up about it. Because they don’t want to knock down their own achievements
in their minds, they can’t afford to. Happily, my self-esteem doesn’t happen to rest
on my box score with girls.

“Now you’ll say that certain men spend their lifetime wallowing with one pretty girl
after another—rich lechers, gangsters, Hollywood wolves. ‘How come,’ you’ll say, ‘these
men never find out they’re living a lie, chasing an empty delusion, if it’s so obvious?’

“And now we’re getting really warm. For them, it’s no lie, no delusion at all. For
them, you see, a model isn’t a model, a show girl isn’t a show girl. Sex is the least
of their preoccupations, though they do nothing but talk and think about it. For a
certain low-grade or immature or sick mind, a pretty girl is a Hit.”

“Noel, I hate to interrupt you, but your steak’s getting cold. Take a few bites.”

She was scared by the flash of anger across his face. He struck the table with his
fist. “I’ll eat when I’m
bloody
good and ready. What’s the matter, is this too hard for you? I don’t think I’ve used
a single three-syllable word. Hell, I’d be better off telling all this to a turtle.”
He splashed Guinness into the empty glass and drank thirstily.

Marjorie now decided that there was something seriously wrong with Noel. She had frightening
forebodings that he might be on the verge of a mental collapse. He looked sick. He
fell on the steak and began devouring it with unhealthy voracity. She said, “Dear,
I’m fascinated, but you said you were starving, and you
look
starved, that’s all—”

He ate in silence for a while, washing down the meat with Guinness. “Okay, don’t apologize.
I shouldn’t have flared. I’m tense and tired, just don’t interrupt me again. And don’t
go blank on me. This takes some telling and some listening.

“All this evolved, obviously, from a process of self-searching. I was asking myself,
All right, let’s get down to it, just once in this life. What do you honestly and
truly want? Do you want to marry Marjorie Morgenstern, for instance? You’re in love
with her—” (Marjorie’s breath caught, and she listened to what followed with a throbbing
ache in her breast.) “She may not be the most beautiful girl in the world, but she
is in your silly eyes, and that’s all that counts…. Well, after some hard thinking
the answer was no, I don’t want to marry Marjorie Morgenstern—certainly not with my
whole heart. Okay, next question, do you want to sleep with her? Answer, yes and no—the
chains and the mess would be the same as if I married her. Maybe more so.”

“Well, thanks for that, anyway.” Marjorie’s gay tone broke to hoarseness in the middle
of the sentence.

Noel went on, “Is there some other woman you really want, then? Miss America? Hedy
Lamarr, maybe? No, we’ve been through all that. Professional beauties are dull people,
and actresses are hard-boiled guys inside lovely bodies. Well, then, down comes bastion
three, sex.—You understand, we’ve already levelled religion and philosophy.”

“I understand, dear.”

“Good. We proceed to the last bastion. Money. Cash.
L’argent
, the great French secret of secrets, which God knows the French actually do revere
like religious fanatics, as though it were the last inner mystery of a creed. Now,
I asked myself, is that the ultimate answer, really? Is Balzac the last word? And
after a few minutes I burst out laughing to realize how completely
I myself
refuted that idea. Margie, you know that the path to money, all the money I can ever
use, is open to me in Sam Rothmore’s office. Sam, sad old bastard, wants a son. I
can have the job by simply showing up on time and answering the mail. In time I can
be a millionaire like him, own paintings and black Cadillacs. But I hate the whole
prospect so, I’ve been fighting it by being a sloven and a washout. I didn’t start
working in his office because I wanted money, but because I thought maybe you wanted
it. And not even because
you
want it so much. But because your mother estimates men by their earning power, and
I was just piqued enough by this whole thing to want to show her I could beat old
steady Dr. Shapiro at raking in the shekels, as well as in all the more important
ways—”

“I thought we were going to forget Dr. Shapiro—”

“And the real motive under it all probably was that I suspected, as I still suspect,
that you have the same ideas as your mother deep down. And that they’ll emerge like
rocks at low tide, when the dream of being Marjorie Morningstar ebbs.”

“You’re drawing a lovely picture of me, I must say.”

“Please don’t be idiotic enough to take this personally, Margie, will you? I’m following
the thread of an idea.”

“Oh, I see. Following the thread of an idea.”

“Yes. Shut up, please. I thought of all the clichés. ‘It’s not money, but what you
can buy with it. Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom.’ And so forth.
Well, then, whatever the last bastion is, evidently it’s not money, is it? It’s freedom,
or power, or security, or whatever money really represents. We haven’t come to the
prime mover, the uncaused cause, of human nature. As for the French and all their
ironic wisdom about sex and cash—well, they’re not only erotic lunatics, as Tolstoy
said long ago, they’re pecuniary lunatics, that’s the long and short of it, and so
to hell with Balzac. I don’t particularly want money—or, rather yes, sure, I want
it, the way I want a dinner tonight, so that I can go on being Noel Airman, comfortably
and pleasantly, But what does
Noel Airman
really want? In common with everybody else? That is the question.

“When the answer suddenly broke over me, Margie, I got up and danced. I swear I danced
around on the steps of the Forty-second Street Library, where I’d gotten to with all
my walking, hours and hours. I’d been sitting there on a stone bench by the lions,
all alone in a black mist—you could barely see the street lamps, just little yellow
blurs, it was so foggy—it must have been four in the morning. Well, I got up, and
danced and capered between those two lions, Marjorie, like the devil on Bald Mountain.

“You see, by great good luck I’d had the crucial clue that same afternoon.

“Imogene brought me down to earth, you know, out of that religious seizure I was having,
and I remembered that my publishers had had
Old Moon Face
for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t heard anything. I phoned them. They said they’d
been trying to get in touch with me for days. Well, baby, the song’s a dead-sure hit.
Crosby is going to record it. Benny Goodman, too. It’ll be played everywhere. My publisher
says it’s bigger than
Raining Kisses
—”

“Noel! How marvelous!”

He squeezed briefly the hand she put on his. “I can’t make less than ten thousand.
Margie, it isn’t the money, I swear. I know that by being a good boy I can make more
in the Paramount hierarchy than I ever will writing songs and shows. But—and this
is where the French are so cockeyed—five thousand earned by a hit song makes me feel
richer than fifty thousand earned at a Paramount desk. At the thought of having a
hit again after four years, I tell you I’m filled with a happiness that’s sweet and
pure and total. That’s the inspiration that came to me, Marjorie. What makes Noel
Airman purely and wholly happy? Answer: a Hit. Nothing else. A Hit is beauty bare.
And if you ask me what I really want out of life after this, I have to tell you I
want nothing, really, but another Hit. And after that, another Hit. And for the rest
of my life, Hits. I’m being honest. This is the filthy bottom truth that people will
never say about themselves, and half of them won’t even believe. But that’s the fire
that will never burn out, Margie, it’s the worm that never dies.