Haunted




19.
In her dressing room, Miss America is screaming.
In bed, her skirts pulled up and her stockings down, Miss America screams, “Don’t let that witch take my baby . . .”
Kneeling next to the bed, toweling the sweat from America’s forehead, the Countess Foresight says, “It’s not a baby. Not yet.”
And Miss America screams, again, but not in words.
In the hallway outside the dressing-room doorway, you can smell blood and shit. It’s the first bowel movement any of us has had in days, maybe weeks.
It’s Cora Reynolds. A cat reduced to a flavor. To crap.
“She’s there, waiting,” Miss America says, panting, biting her fist. Pain pulling her knees up to her chest. Cramps turning her onto her side, curled in the mess of sheets and blankets.
“She’s waiting for the baby,” Miss America says. Tears turning her pillow dark gray.
“It’s not a baby,” the Countess Foresight says. She wrings water from a rag and leans over to wipe away sweat. She says, “Let me tell you a story.”
Wiping Miss America’s face with water, she says, “Did you know? Marilyn Monroe had two miscarriages?”
And for a moment, Miss America is quiet, listening.
From our own rooms, putting pen to paper, we’re all listening. Our ears and tape recorders tilted toward the heating ducts.
From the hallway outside the door, in her Red Cross nurse uniform, Director Denial shouts, “Should we start boiling water?”
And, kneeling beside the bed, the Countess Foresight says, “Please.”
Again from the hallway, Director Denial’s head and white nurse-hat leans in through the open doorway, and she says, “Chef Assassin wants to know . . . how soon should he put in the carrots?”
Miss America screams.
And the Countless Foresight shouts, “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny . . .”
The invisible carrot, the story left over from Saint Gut-Free.
And from the hallway, Chef Assassin shouts, “Calm down. Of course it’s a joke.” He says, “We don’t have any potatoes or carrots . . .”
 

Shortsighted

A Poem About the Countess Foresight

“An electronic tracking sensor,” says the Countess Foresight, shaking her plastic bracelet.
A condition included in the terms of her recent parole from prison.

The Countess Foresight onstage, she’s folded inside the webs of a black lace shawl.
A turban of blue velvet wrapped around her head.
A ring with different-colored stones on every finger.
Her turban, pinned in front with a polished black stone,
onyx or jet or sardonyx,
some stone that absorbs everything. Reflects nothing.

Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
The shadows of dead movie stars, the residue of electrons bounced off them
a hundred years ago.
Those electrons passed through a film of cellulose,
to change the chemical nature of silver oxide
and re-create chariot races, Robin Hood, Greta Garbo.

“Radar,” says the Countess. “Global positioning systems. X-ray imaging . . .”
Two hundred years ago, these would get you burned as a witch.
A century ago, at least laughed at. Called a fool or a liar.
Even today, if you predict the future or read the past from indicators
not everyone can recognize . . .
it’s the prison or the asylum you’ll eventually call home.
The world will always punish the few people with special talents
the rest of us don’t recognize as real.

A psychologist at her parole hearing called her crime “acute stress-induced psychosis.”
An “isolated, atypical episode.”
A crime of passion.
That would never, ever, ever happen again.
Knock wood.
At that point, she’d served four years of a twenty-year sentence.
Her husband was gone with her kids in tow.

Two hundred years from today, when what she saw, and read, and knew,
when it all makes sense.
By then, the Countess will be nothing but a prisoner number.
A case file.
The ash of a witch.
 

Something’s Got to Give

A Story by the Countess Foresight

Claire Upton phones from a bathroom stall in the back of an antique store. From behind a locked door, her voice echoes off the walls and floor. She asks her husband: How tough is it to get into a video surveillance camera? To steal a security videotape? she says, and starts to cry.
This is the third or fourth time Claire’s been to this shop in the past week. It’s one of those shops where you have to leave your purse with the cashier to get inside. You have to check your coat, too, if it has deep, roomy pockets. And your umbrella, because some people might drop small items, combs, jewelry, knickknacks, inside the folds. A sign next to the old-man cashier, written with black felt-tipped pen on gray cardboard, it says: “We don’t like you stealing from us!”
Taking her coat off, Claire said, “I’m not a thief.”
The old-man cashier looked her up and down. He clicked his tongue and said, “What makes you the exception?”
He gave Claire half a playing card for each item she left behind. For her purse, the ace of hearts. For her coat, the nine of clubs. Her umbrella, the three of spades.
The cashier eyed Claire’s hands, the lines of her breast pockets and pantyhose, for bulges that might be something stolen. Behind the front counter, all over the store, hung little signs telling you not to shoplift. Video cameras watched every aisle and corner, showing it on a little screen, stacked with other screens, a bank of little television monitors where the old-man cashier could sit behind the cash register and watch them all.
He could watch her every move, in black and white. He’d know where Claire was at any moment. He’d know everything she touched.
The shop was one of those antique-selling cooperatives where a lot of small dealers band together under one roof. The old-man cashier was the only person working that day, and Claire was his only customer. The store was big as a supermarket, but broken up into small stalls. Clocks everywhere made a wallpaper of sound, a din of tick, tick, ticking. Everywhere were brass trophies tarnished dark orange. Cracked and curled leather shoes. Cut-glass candy dishes. Books fuzzy with gray mold. Wicker rocking chairs and picnic hampers. Woven straw hats.
A cardboard sign, taped to the edge of a shelf, said: “Lovely to Look At, Delightful to Hold, But If You Should Break It, Consider It SOLD!”
Another sign said: “See it. Try it. Break it. BUY IT!”
Another sign says, “You break it here . . . YOU TAKE IT HOME!”
Even with the security cameras watching her, Claire treats an antique shop as a psychic petting zoo. A museum where you can touch each exhibit.
According to Claire, everything ever seen in a mirror is still there. Layered. Everything ever reflected in a Christmas ornament or a silver tray, she says she can still see it. Everything shiny is a psychic photo album or a home movie of the images that occurred around it. In an antique store, Claire can fondle objects all afternoon, reading them the way people read books. Looking for the past still reflected there.
“It’s a science,” the Countess Foresight says. “It’s called psychometry.”
Claire will tell you not to pick up a silver-handled carving knife because she can still see the reflection of a murder victim screaming in its blade. She can see the blood on the policeman’s glove as he pulls it out of someone’s dead chest. Claire can see the darkness of the evidence room. Then a wood-paneled courtroom. A judge in black robes. A long wash in warm, soapy water. Then the police auction. This is all still reflected in the blade. The next reflection is right now, you standing here in an antique store ready to pick up the knife and take it home. You just thinking it’s pretty. Not knowing its past.
“Anything pretty,” Claire will tell you, “it’s only for sale because no one wants it.”
And if no one wants something pretty and polished and old, there’s a terrible reason why.
With all the shoplifting video cameras watching her, Claire could tell you all about surveillance.
When she went back to get her coat, she gave the old-man cashier his three playing cards cut in half. The ace of hearts. The nine of clubs. The three of spades.
From behind his cash register, the old man said, “Were you looking to buy something?” He hands her purse across the counter, nodding his head toward the bank of little televisions. The proof he’d been watching her touch everything.
It’s then she sees it, in a glass case behind the old man, in a curio cabinet crowded with salt and pepper shakers and porcelain thimbles, surrounded by junk jewelry, there’s a jar full of murky white liquid. Inside the haze, a tiny fist, lined with four perfect fingers, was just touching the glass.
Claire points past the old man, looking from him to the curio case, and she says, “What’s that?”
The man turns to look. He takes a ring of keys from a hook behind the counter and goes back to open the cabinet. Reaching in, past the jewelry and thimbles, he says, “What would you say it is?”
Claire couldn’t say. All she knows is, it gives off an incredible energy.
As the old man carries the jar toward her, the dirty white liquid sloshes inside. The top is white plastic, screwed down and sealed with a band of tape striped red and white. The old man sets one elbow on the counter in front of Claire, holding the jar near her face. With a twist of his wrist, he turns the jar until she can see a small dark eye looking out. An eye and the outline of a small nose.
A moment later, the eye is gone, sunk back into the murk.
“Guess,” the old man says. He says, “You’ll never guess.” He lifts the jar to show the glass underside, and pressed there are a tiny pair of gray buttocks.
The old man says, “You give up?”
He sets the jar on the counter, and on top of the white plastic lid is a peeling label. Printed in black ink, it says: “Cedars–Sinai Hospital.” Below that, handwritten in red ink, the rest is smeared. Some words. A date, maybe. Too smudged to read.
Looking at it, Claire shakes her head.
Reflected in the side of the glass jar, she can see years back, decades back: A room lined with green tile. A woman with both bare feet hooked to either side, draped in blue cloth. The woman’s legs hooked in stirrups. Above an oxygen mask, Claire can see the woman’s white-blond hair, growing out, already a little brown at the roots.
“It’s the real deal,” the old man says. “We tested the DNA against some certified hair. Markers all matched.”
You can still buy her hair on the Internet, the man says. The bleached-blond scraps and trimmings.
“According to you bra-burners,” the old man says, “it ain’t a baby—just tissue. Could be her appendix.”
Reading the glass, the layers of picture there, Claire can see: A lamp on a bedside table. A telephone. Prescription pill bottles.
“Whose hair?” Claire says.
And the old man says, “Marilyn Monroe’s.” He says, “If you’re interested, it’s not cheap.”
This is a movie relic, the old man says. A sacred relic. The Holy Grail of movie memorabilia. Better than the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz or the sled named “Rosebud.” Here’s the baby Monroe lost while shooting Some Like It Hot, when Billy Wilder made her run down the train-station platform, take after take, wearing high heels.
The man shrugs. “Got it from a guy—told me the real story how she died.”
And Claire Upton just stared, watching the movie of old reflections in the jar’s curved side.
Here’s a souvenir, a relic like the hand of a saint, mummified and adored in the rock-crystal case of some Italian cathedral. Or a lock of hair. Or this is another person, dead. The little boy or girl that might’ve saved Monroe’s life.
The old man says, “Everything has a cash value on the Internet.”
According to the man who sold it to him, Monroe got herself murdered. The summer of 1962, she’d been fired from the production of Something’s Got to Give. George Cukor was bad-mouthing her, and the studio execs were pissed about how she’d jumped ship from the production to go sing at Kennedy’s birthday bash. Her thirty-sixth birthday had just come and gone. The Kennedys were shutting her out. She was getting old with nobody, nothing. Her career over, and Liz Taylor eating up the public’s attention.
“So she tries to get smart,” the old man says.
Monroe gets Life magazine on her side, reeling them in to do a big feature on her. She talks Dean Martin into quitting Something’s Got to Give when the studio replaces her with Lee Remick. And she calls a little meeting. At her place in Brentwood, a very little meeting with just the tip of every movie-studio iceberg. Every studio that owns a movie she’s been in.
“Smart girl like her,” the man says, “and you’d think she’d keep a gun on hand. Something to defend herself with.”
With all the studio top brass sitting around her Mexican table, Monroe drinks champagne and tells them she plans to kill herself. Unless they give her back the last movie, and sign her to a new million-dollar contract, she’ll overdose. Simple as that.
“Studio people,” he says, “they don’t scare that easy.”
Those sharks, they got the best of her already in the can. Monroe’s just getting older, and the public is bored with her looks. Killing herself would gold-plate every movie of hers they had in their vaults. They told her: Go ahead, lady.
“The guy who sells me the jar, here,” the old man says, “he heard that direct from a big shot at the meeting.”
Monroe getting high on champagne. The studio dragons in their chairs. She had their blessing. It must’ve broke her heart.
“Then,” the old man says, “she gets smart with them.”
She’s changing her will, she says. True, she’s got terrible profit-sharing deals, but she pulls a little from any re-release of her old stuff. Those films in the vaults, someday they’ll sell to television. And they’ll keep selling, especially if she’s done suicide. She knows that. So do they.
Dead, she’ll be sexy forever. People will love that studio-owned image of her forever. Those old films are money in the bank, unless . . .
The old man says, “Here’s where her last will and testament comes in.”
She’ll set up a foundation: The Marilyn Monroe Foundation. And all income from her estate will feed into it. And that foundation will distribute every penny to the causes she’ll name. The Ku Klux Klan. The American Nazi Party. The North American Man/Boy Love Association.
“Maybe some of those didn’t exist back then,” the old man says, “but you get the general idea.”
When the American public knows that a few cents of every ticket to one of her shows, maybe even a nickel, goes to Nazis . . . No box office. No television sponsors. Those films will be worth—nothing. No naked picture of her will be worth anything. Marilyn Monroe will become America’s Lady Hitler.
“She’d made her image, she told the studio heads. And she could damn well break it,” the old man said.
The jar sitting on the counter between them, Claire looked up from watching it and said, “How much?”
The old man looked at his wristwatch. He said he’d never sell it except he’s getting old. He’d like to retire and not sit here all day getting robbed blind.
“How much?” Claire said, her purse on the counter, open, and her gloved hands digging out her wallet.
And the man said, “Twenty thousand dollars . . .”
It’s five-thirty, and the store closes at six.
“Chloral hydrate,” the old man told her. Knockout drops, is how the guy killed her. That August night he found her half asleep on pills, he just tipped a bottle down her throat. Of course, a Mickey Finn shows up in the liver during autopsy, but everybody said she’d got the stuff in Mexico. Even her doctor who’d wrote the script for her pills, he said Mexico. Even he said suicide.
Twenty thousand dollars.
And Claire said, “Let me think.” Still watching the white murk inside the jar, she pushed back from the counter, saying, “I need to . . .”
The old man snapped his fingers for her purse and coat and umbrella. If she was going to wander the store, he’d hang on to them.
Without even taking the playing cards, Claire handed her things over the counter.
Claire Upton, she could look at a polished trophy and see a young man still reflected there, smiling and beaded with sweat, holding a tennis racquet or a golf club. She can watch him getting fat, married, with kids. After that, the trophy shows nothing but the inside of a brown cardboard box. Then the trophy comes out, held by another young man. This one, the son of the first.
But that jar, it felt like a bomb waiting to go off. A murder weapon trying to confess. Just putting your finger on it, you’d feel a jolt. An electric shock. Some kind of warning.
While she wandered through the shop, he was watching her in the video monitors.
In the dark lenses of old sunglasses for sale, she watches a man wrestle a woman to the ground and kick her feet apart.
In the gold-tone tube of an old lipstick, she can see a face crushed inside a nylon stocking, two hands around the neck of someone in bed, then the same hands scooping the spare change, the wallet, and keys off the dresser beside the lipstick. The witness.
Claire Upton and the old-man cashier, they’re alone in the shadowy store with pillows of yellowed lace. Needlepoint dishtowels. Counted cross-stitch pot holders. Silver-plate brush sets tarnished dark brown. Mounted deer heads holding wide racks of antlers.
In the steel blade of a straight razor, the handle, chromium, scrolled and heavy—reflected there, Claire can see her future.
There, among the shaving mugs and horsehair brushes. Tall stained-glass church windows. Beaded evening bags.
Alone in the shop with Marilyn Monroe’s lost child. Alone in this museum of things that no one wanted. Everything dirty with the reflection of something terrible.
Telling the story now, locked in the bathroom stall, Claire says how she picked up the razor and kept walking, down every aisle, always peeking at the blade to see if it showed her the same scene.
Telling her story now, sitting in the bathroom at the back of the antique store, Claire says it’s not easy, being a gifted psychic.
The truth is, Claire’s not easy to be married to. Over dinner at a restaurant, she may be listening, then her entire body will shudder. One hand will fly to cover her eyes, and her head will rear back and twist away from you. Still shaking, she’ll peek out at you from between her fingers. A beat later, she’ll sigh and put one hand against her mouth in a fist, biting the knuckle but looking at you without a word.
When you ask her what’s wrong . . .
Claire will say, “You don’t want to know. It’s too awful.”
But when you press her to tell . . .
Claire will say, “Just promise me. Promise you’ll stay away from all cars for the next three years . . .”
The truth is, even Claire knows she can be wrong. To test herself, she picks up a polished silver cigarette-case. And reflected there is her future: her holding the straight razor.
When it’s closing time, she walks to the front of the shop, just in time to watch the old man turn the sign from “Open” to “Closed.” He was pulling down the shade that covered the window in the front door. The shop display window was cluttered with egg cups. Chenille bathrobes and bedspreads. Perfume bottles shaped like Southern belles wearing hoop skirts. Dead butterflies framed behind glass. Rusted birdcages. Railroad lanterns with shades of red or green glass. Folding silk fans. No one on the street could see inside.
The old-man cashier says, “Made up your mind?” The jar is back, locked in the glass cabinet next to his register. In the white murk, only a dark eye and the shell of a tiny ear show through.
Reflected in the jar’s curved side, distorted there, while the old man had told the story of Monroe’s murder, Claire had seen something else: A man tipping a small bottle between two lips. A face rolling back and forth against a pillow. The man wiping the lips with his shirtsleeve. His eyes settling on the bedside table. The phone and lamp and the jar.
In Claire’s vision, the man’s face comes closer. His two hands reach out, huge, until they wrap the jar in darkness.
That reflected face, it’s the old-man cashier, without his wrinkles. With lots of brown hair.
Behind the counter, the jar just sits there, throbbing with energy. Glowing with power. A sacred relic trying to tell her something important. A time capsule of stories and events wasted here, locked in a glass case. More compelling than the best television series. More honest than the longest documentary. A primary history source. A real player. The child sits there, waiting for Claire to rescue it. To listen.
Wanting justice. Revenge.
Still watched by the security cameras, Claire holds up the straight razor. She says, “I want to buy this, but I don’t see a price on it . . .”
And the old man leans over the counter for a closer look.
Outside the shopwindows, the street is empty. The security video monitors show the store, every aisle and corner, empty.
In the monitor, the old man falls backward, smashing the glass curio cabinet behind him, then sliding to the floor in a mess of broken glass and blood. The jar tipping, then falling, then broken.
Calling now, from a bathroom stall, Claire Upton tells her husband, “It was a doll. A plastic baby doll.”
Her purse and coat and umbrella spattered with sticky red.
On the phone, she says, “Do you know what this means?”
And again, she asks how best to destroy a video camera.