Muse

The journalist who shows up at Marilyn’s house reminds her a little of herself. His grin is practiced and all-too-sweet to be genuine, and he steps easily through the door before she can even speak. “Ms. Adette”, he says, with a mock bow. “I’m Oscar. From the New York Times.” He is everything coy and suave, his gaze sliding past Marilyn to the glittering chandelier above their heads and the bottle of unopened pérignon champagne on the coffee table.

Marilyn smiles. He’ll do, she decides. “Please, call me Marilyn.”

When the camera crew is finally set up, and Marilyn is dusted and brushed and seated like a porcelain doll with Oscar in front of her, he clears his throat and the red staccato of the blinking light keeps the tempo to their rehearsed dance of questions and answers.

“Well, first off, congratulations on your new film! A work of art, indeed,” Oscar says, and Marilyn graciously thanks him, all the while wondering whether he’s even seen the film at all.

“So, what got you into acting?”

She pauses and is hit with the vivid memory of when she is ten, so poignant that it almost takes her breath away. It was just the two of them then – her and her mother, in a one-bedroom apartment all those years ago. The nights were always laced with the sound of cars backfiring, sharp like gunshots, and the mornings filled with greasy leftovers from the diner her mother worked at. Their kitchen table was always covered – in overdue bills and cheap tabloids that served as their tablecloth. It was in one of these newspapers that Marilyn had caught a glimpse of her namesake – Marilyn Monroe; with her blonde hair teased just so, her bright red lips, her easy gaze into the camera…

She looked untouchable. And that’s what Marilyn wanted to be.

I’m going to be an actress, Marilyn had declared, and her mother had smiled blearily, indulgently, and mussed up her hair.

This is what she wants to say to the journalist peering at her. She wants to say the hours she spent mimicking faces, reading expressions, recording thousands of audition tapes are not of her running towards some lofty goal or unrealized dream, but rather the desperate reaching for a life vest.

Because when you have a chance to run – to grasp something and never look back, you take it. But instead she only smiles and says, “Passion. I can’t imagine not acting.” And she almost laughs at this half-truth.

The rest of the interview goes in a blur; Oscar’s questions followed by simple, rehearsed answers or laughter that spills out of Marilyn like bubbles from a champagne bottle.

When Oscar finally leaves deep into the night, the red camcorder has long stopped blinking, and the champagne bottle is tipped on its side. Marilyn slips out of bed and puts on her clothes – slowly, tenderly, as if she is made of glass. She pushes open the doors of her balcony, and breathes in the night air.

Marilyn tilts her head upwards, cigarette between her fingers and blows smoke at the stars. Swathed under the pale glow of the balcony lamp, she looks like a marble statue. And of the city she loves ebbs and fades – the chattering of voices, the sharp clicks of heels against cobblestone, the screech of tires against asphalt all swallowed by the velvet blanket of night, she finally lets out a breath.

The rest is easy. She kicks her heels to the side, rips off the rhinestones woven into her hair, smears her mascara as she wipes at her eyes. The cold air kisses her skin as she stands, barefoot, and she knows she will pay for this tomorrow – with sore feet, a splitting headache, and dark circles under her eyes.

And yet… A feeling she cannot name coils around her heart – a weightlessness in the pit of her stomach and a heaviness in her heart that is constant and familiar like a second heartbeat. It will pass, she says to herself, her eyes squeezed tight, and is equally parts relieved and disappointed when it eventually does. As all things do.

When she finally stumbles back into her bedroom and slips into her cool sheets alone, reeking from cigarette smoke, she hears the chirp of a wren and smiles. In the space between one breath and the next, Marilyn marvels at the glittering opulence of her life – not so much the gilded jewels, extravagant parties and flashing cameras, but the fact that she does not need to answer to anyone save for herself.

In Marilyn’s sleep, she often dreams of clear blue lagoons and a set of footprints in the sand – always hers, and always alone. This is what you’ve always wanted, she says to the dark-eyed, scowling girl of her youth. To be untethered. Only now, she wonders whether to call it freedom or loneliness.