Misfit (12 page)

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I saw someone. A person.” She stops herself. After what Frank said earlier, she doesn't want to let on that it was Joe.

“I don't know what to tell you. Maybe some gawker or photographer. I don't know. We've heard of people sometimes trying to take pictures from up there. But you don't have to worry. Even if there was someone there, you were too far away to be anything but a speck.”

Joe is not there. But she did see him when she arrived. She's sure of it.

The man says he can send someone to take a look if she's worried or feels threatened, but really, he says, it looks all clear.

She tells him it's okay. Really she just wants to pick flowers. To make a bouquet, she tells him. She says
she'd like California poppies, that it must be legal to pick them on the Nevada side. “Maybe you can just help me find some here on the grounds,” she says.

“I can have some sent to your room.”

“No,” she says, “I prefer to pick them myself.”

As they walk the perimeter of the parking lot looking under bushes at the ground cover, she glances back once, at the last possible point to see the hill. She senses movement behind a tree, near the crest where the pines curve naturally into a half smile. Maybe it's Joe. Maybe he's peering out momentarily, before darting back and hiding behind the tall, lumbering pine.

 

She's bent down on one knee. Leaned forward, crouching, and pulling back the branches of a manzanita tree, its red bark peeling and curling with each tug. The bodyguard waits behind, standing sideways. He's not paying attention to her. A hummingbird appears over the patch she's reaching for, buzzing and hovering in place for a moment. Its wings are beating, and its heart thumps, and it looks suspended in place, as though held up by an electric current. As soon as it notices her, the bird darts away.

One hand keeps hold of the manzanita branch while she reaches the other in, grabbing several poppy stalks near the roots and pulling until they snap. A scent releases, and though initially it's acrid, there's a cleanliness to it, not quite sweet, but not like something risen from dirt.

She pulls the flowers in close, pressing the full bouquet against her chest. She glances back at the bodyguard. A stem brushes against her cheek. She takes in only a slight whiff, getting mostly the soil, but it's as though she's inhaled the whole plant. And she can feel it filling her, washing through her veins, being pumped in and out of her heart, and it feels so right in her body, as though she's made of glass, but not fragile, instead delicately structured and clear and clean and transparent, and this is the feeling, this is the one she wants to hold forever.

Clear. Transparent. And without form.

Nothing but a speck in the crowd.

GOING TO SEE THE PICTURE THAT EXPLODES WITH LOVE. IT'S ‘
THE MISFITS
'—NOW AT THE BIJOU!”

He tells her he's been thinking about his short story “The Misfits,” the one he wrote in the Nevada desert. They're sitting on the couch in the New York apartment. Marilyn holds a pillow against her stomach. The doctors assured her the meds have stanched any potential pain and that whatever she feels are imaginary symptoms; the explanations sounded logical, but still it feels as though a knife is jabbing through her uterus. She looks over to a lit candle. She thinks she smells something burning. But it's just part of the match gone to ember, that piece she dropped when she thought her fingers were going to be burned.

The story, he says, is something of a response, a way to find meaning in the landscape and the people
who surrounded him. And he recalls Pyramid Lake, almost like a mirage amid the lunarscape. And then there was Reno, and the Mapes Hotel, and the main room of the Nevada Club, filled with fresh smoke and the slight lilt of booze, and slots lining the rows evenly, chest high, blocked off by men whose jackets were slung over stools, and women in sleeveless blouses, carefree and quietly pulling on the machines' arms—the whole dreary scene oddly miscast against the bright patterns of the carpet and the velvet saloon-era wallpaper.

He holds a hand out to her. She keeps her arms around the pillow on her belly but stretches her feet across his lap.

Arthur keeps talking. He says it was mostly the people he needed to write out of his system. The old, mangled rodeo riders whose broken bodies left them useless, living in holes in abandoned silver mines, who craved Hollywood magazines with Hollywood movie cowboys on the cover, never quite accepting that they themselves were the real thing; and career ranch hands trying to find a place in a modernizing world, refusing to give up the life and vowing to work only for pay, never for wages; and the six-week divorcées, who'd arrived looking for something they weren't sure of and were living out their lives expecting that something better must be around the next corner. It was a place where people struggled with all their will to fit in, but only found themselves more alienated.

“A little like Hollywood,” she says.

“A little.”

She knows this is leading toward something, and she hopes that he's not going to break his silence about the operation. After all, it could barely be characterized as a miscarriage, since the tubal pregnancy was discovered almost immediately. She hasn't said anything about it to him since, and he looks away when he must sense she's thinking about it. Most of his days are spent in his studio. When he comes out they always stay on the surface, as though they can walk on it forever. A regular pair of Jesus Christs.

Arthur says what he's getting at is that he's been drafting “The Misfits” into a screenplay. He's really trying to write it with her in mind. In fact, after the story ran in
Esquire
, several people told him that they could picture Marilyn playing Roslyn. That it suited her. An ideal role to free her from the typecasting, one that would showcase her interior and really bust up the empty-blonde image that people have refused to let go of.

And later, when she thinks back on that evening, she won't recall the sincerity in his voice, the way it shook as if he were presenting an uncertain gift, and how his neck muscles clenched tightly to keep him from looking away. Instead she'll remember the spider in the corner of the wall they were facing, and how they both noticed the movement at the same time, and how Arthur pulled a tissue out of the box on the end table, and how when he stood her feet fell to the floor, and how he walked over to the corner,
perched on his tiptoes, and covered the spider with the crumpled tissue, and how just as he was about to smash the spider, instead he picked it up and stood there in the middle of the room, holding the spider trapped in the Kleenex, looking at her, unsure of what to do with it.

She's nervous with anticipation, waiting for Arthur to return, to hear if Arthur's convinced him to take the part. They're staying at a hotel on the coast, and she hasn't left the living room all day, limiting herself to one pill that's done nothing. Once Arthur finally comes through the door, she says,
Tell me everything
. Demands it. She wants to know what Clark Gable said. Did he say he'll do the picture? After Huston signed on to the movie, Arthur was brought out to Los Angeles to try to close the deal with Gable. She paces across the hotel room. Takes hold of the curtains. The light is bringing on a headache. She takes one last look in the direction of the Pacific—she's watched those waves her whole life, drifting out and then roaring right back. But the beach is almost eight miles away; it can't deliver any solace. She yanks the curtains shut with unexpected force.

Arthur tells her it went well. “Actually,” he says, “better than well.”

She says you wouldn't know by his face.

“It was just a lot,” Arthur says. “In a way I'm not accustomed to.”

“But he said yes?”

“It took a lot of convincing.”

“So he agreed?”

“He said he thought it was supposed to be a Western, but that he realized it wasn't, and that he was confused and really didn't know what to make of it.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I didn't know what to say. I got tongue-tied. I just kept looking at him, thinking that this man
is
Gay Langland, and wondering how I could make him understand that, Western or not.”

She sits down on the sofa, then springs back up. She just wants the end of the story.

He continues, “I told him it was an Eastern Western, and he kind of laughed, and I got more flustered, saying it wasn't about good guys and bad guys, or the evil within the good guys, and all those various genre conventions, but that it was existential, about how the so-called meaninglessness in our lives takes us to where we end up. And to tell you the truth, Marilyn, I had to stop talking after a while, because I wasn't quite sure what I was talking about anymore.”

Standing toe to toe with Arthur, she puts a hand on each of his shoulders. She draws in close to him, clenching her grip. Her stomach tightens. She forces herself to speak slowly, controlled. “Arthur,” she says. “For God's sake, did he say yes?”

He looks at her, almost with the shame of the scolded. “Yes,” he says. “He said he'd do it.”

She yelps out with joy, and it's a true joy, an emotion that feels almost foreign. Her heart pounds, and she dances in place, her smile so big and lumbering that it blocks any tears. “I've worshiped Gable all my life,” she says, throwing her arms around her husband. “I must have been ten or so when I first saw him in
San Francisco
, and only a few years later he captured my heart in
Gone with the Wind
. My whole life I've idolized him. This is the real dream. The real dream coming true.”

“I told you, you deserve this.”

She kisses him on the forehead, then goes back to the window. Parting the curtains, she peeks out, imagining she can see the surf. One small wave forming on the surface, battling several breakers, reshaping and refusing to be swallowed. It lifts and curls and thrusts and finally touches the shore.

On the first shooting call with Gable in
The Misfits
, Marilyn reports to the set at Harrah's at 11:45 AM. With her are the following:

She's anxious, but not the kind of anxious that debilitates her, the kind of anxious that pinches at her, that makes her feel as ordinary as her upbringing and makes her wonder how it is that she could possibly stand among such great talent. She's in her trailer, alone, parked on Virginia Street in front of Harrah's Club, where the first scene with Clark Gable will be shot. She sits with her knees drawn in to her chest, just in front of the wall unit air conditioner; it's the one place that really feels cool, because it's late July in Reno, and this time of year the heat pounds around the clock. She's told it's been upward of 100 degrees every day the past week, which explains why the trailer walls are hot to the touch, and why it's only the steadily manufactured air that brings any relief.

The scene will be simple. Short. It's set in the lounge at Harrah's, where Roslyn and Gable's character, Gay, along with their respective friends, Isabelle and Guido (played by Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach), first
meet. A dog named Tom Dooley will act as the catalyst that brings them all together. The lines were easily memorized. A good scene to break the ice with. But the thought of Gable makes her antsy, and for a split second she imagines him wondering who she is, and why he's acting opposite her. She just needs to prepare herself. It's a mental thing. A transformation. A way to make herself into someone who has no problem belonging.

She tries to put the anxiousness out of her mind. Reportedly, the entire movie crew has shown up for the occasion, as though it's something historic. And apparently several hundred people are pushing up against the Reno police line, trying to catch a glimpse inside the casino. A press corps worthy of a world event patiently waits, squatting and leaning against poles and walls, but ready to spring into action at a second's notice. And she laughs a little, thinking about the hubbub, knowing it's hardly the Chilean earthquake or the Greensboro sit-in or Kennedy's nomination or anything like that. But, she supposes, maybe their being outside does make it
something
, and the idea that leaving this trailer and stepping out onto the curb in order to play against Clark Gable might have that level of importance brings back the anxiousness, and all she can do is curl herself up tighter, and lift her face into the airstream, and let it continuously refresh.