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EXCERPT
The Child
1932 - 1938
The Kiss
This movie I've been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion.
Almost she might say This movie is my life!
Her mother first took her when she was two or three years old. Her earliest memory, so
exciting! Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This was years before she'd
been able to comprehend even the rudiments of the movie story, yet she was enthralled by
the movement, the ceaseless rippling fluid movement, on the great screen above her. Not
yet capable of thinking This was the very universe upon which are projected uncountable
unnameable forms of life. How many times in her lost childhood and girlhood she would
return with yearning to this movie, recognizing it at once despite the variety of its
titles, its many actors. For always there was the Fair Princess. And always the Dark
Prince. A complication of events brought them together and tore them apart and brought
them together again and again tore them apart until, as the movie neared its end and the
movie music soared, they were about to be brought together in a fierce embrace.
Yet not always happily. You couldn't predict. For sometimes one knelt beside the deathbed
of the other and heralded death with a kiss. Even if he (or she) survived the death of the
beloved, you knew the meaning of life was over.
For there is no meaning to life apart from the movie story.
And there is no movie story apart from the darkened movie theater.
But how vexing, never to see the end of the movie!
For always something went wrong: there was a commotion in the theater and the lights came
up; a fire alarm (but no fire? or was there a fire? once, she was sure she smelled smoke)
sounded loudly and everyone was asked to leave, or she was herself late for an appointment
and had to leave, or maybe she fell asleep in her seat and missed the ending and woke
dazed as the lights came up and strangers around her rose to leave.
Over, it's over? But bow can it be over?
Yet as an adult woman she continued to seek out the movie. Slipping into theaters in
obscure districts of the city or in cities unknown to her. Insomniac, she might buy a
ticket for a midnight show. She might buy a ticket for the first show of the day, in the
late morning. She wasn't fleeing her own life (though her life had grown baffling to her,
as adult life does to those who live it) but instead easing into a parenthesis within that
life, stopping time as a child might arrest the movement of a clock's hands: by force.
Entering the darkened theater (which sometimes smelled of stale popcorn, the hair lotion
of strangers, disinfectant), excited as a young girl looking up eagerly to see on the
screen yet again Oh, another time! one more time! the beautiful blond woman who seems
never to age, encased in flesh like any woman and yet graceful as no ordinary woman could
be, a powerful radiance shining not only in her luminous eyes but in her very skin. For
my, skin is my soul. There is no soul otherwise. You see in me the promise of human joy.
She who slips into the theater, choosing a seat in a row, near the screen, gives herself
unquestioningly up to the movie that's both familiar and unfamiliar as a recurring dream
imperfectly recalled. The costumes of the actors, the hairstyles, even the faces and
voices of the movie people change with the years, and she can remember, not clearly but in
fragments, her own lost emotions, the loneliness of her childhood only partly assuaged by
the looming screen. Another world to live in. Where? There was a day, an hour, when she
realized that the Fair Princess, who is so beautiful because she is so beautiful and
because she is the Fair Princess, is doomed to seek, in others' eyes, confirmation of her
own being. For we are not who we are told we are, if we are not told. Are we?
Adult unease and gathering terror.
The movie story is complicated and confusing, though familiar or almost familiar. Perhaps
it's carelessly spliced together. Perhaps it's meant to tease. Perhaps there are
flashbacks amid present time. Or flash-forwards! Closeups of the Fair Princess seem too
intimate. We want to stay on the outsides of others, not be drawn inside. If I could say,
There! that's me! That woman, that thing on the screen, that's who I am. But she can't see
ahead to the ending. Never has she seen the final scene, never the concluding credits
rolling past. In these, beyond the final movie kiss, is the key to the movie's mystery,
she knows. As the body's organs, removed in an autopsy, are the key to the life's mystery.
But there will be a time maybe this very evening when, slightly out of breath, she settles
into a worn, soiled plush seat in the second row of an old theater in a derelict district
of the city, the floor curving beneath her feet like the earth's curve and sticky against
the soles of her expensive shoes; and the audience is scattered, mostly solitary
individuals; and she's relieved that, in her disguise (dark glasses, an attractive wig, a
raincoat) no one will recognize her and no one from her life knows she's here, or could
guess where she might be. This time I will see it through to the end. This time! Why? She
has no idea. And in fact she's expected elsewhere, she's hours late, possibly a car was
scheduled to take her to the airport, unless she's days late, weeks late; for she's
become, as an adult, defiant of time. For what is time but others' expectations of us?
That game we can refuse to play. So too, she's noticed, the Fair Princess is confused by
time. Confused by the movie story. You take your cues from other people.
Excerpted from BLONDE: A Novel (c) Copyright 2002 by Joyce Carol Oates. Reprinted with permission from the Fawcett Books, Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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