THE EDGE

T H E S H A R P E S T M A G A Z I N E I N T H E W O R L D

SHORT STORY

Strand Used Books 1956

by Joyce Carol Oates

In Strand Used Books on Broadway and Twelfth one snowy March early-evening in 1956 when the street lights on Broadway glimmered with a strange sepia glow and we were two NYU girl-poets drifting through that warehouse of treasures as through an enchanted forest. Just past 6 pm. Above the light-riddled city of New York, opaque night. Snowing, and the sidewalks encrusted with ice so there were fewer customers in the Strand than usual but there we were! Among other cranky, brooding regulars. In our army-surplus jackets, our wool trousers and zip-up rubber boots. In our matching knitted wool caps (knitted by you) pulled down low over our pale foreheads. Enchanted by books. Enchanted by the Strand. No bookstore of ‘new’ books with pristine displays and neatly shelved books and heated interiors drew us like the drafty Strand, those bins of books untidy as merchants’ bins on Fourteenth Street, NEW THIS WEEK, BEST BARGAINS, WORLD CLASSICS, ART BOOKS 50% OFF, REVIEWERS COPIES, HIGHEST PRICE $1.98, REMAINDERS 25c-$1. Hardcover and paperback, spotless and battered, beautiful books and cheaply printed books, crude paper-bound galleys with pages scribbled in mysterious annotations. And to the rear and sides in that vast echoing space massive shelves of books rising to a hammered-tin ceiling fifteen feet above! Stacked shelves so high they required sliding ladders to negotiate and a monkey-agility (like yours) to climb and the courage to reach up for a book risking light-headed-ness (if like me you had low blood pressure). We were enchanted with the Strand and with each other in the Strand overseen by surly young clerks all of whom were poets like us, or playwrights, actors, artists. In an agony of young-love I watched you as always these romantic evenings at the Strand prowling the aisles sneering at books unworthy of your attention, too-easy books, too-popular books, books too American and middle-class, books lacking strangeness, books without esoteric reputations. We were girl-poets deeply enamoured of TS Eliot but scornful of Robert Frost whom we’d been made to revere and memorize in high school, slyly we conversed in code phrases from Eliot in front of obtuse others in our dining hall and dormitory, we were admiring of but confined by the verse of Yeats, we were yet more confined by the lauded worth of Pound, more enthusiastically drawn to the bold metaphors of Kafka (that cockroach!) and Dostoyevsky (Raskolnikov and the man ‘beneath the floorboards’ were our rebel-heroes) and Jean-Paul Sartre (‘Hell is other people’) and had reason to believe we were of their lineage though American middle class, and white, and female. (For didn’t we, as females, share male contempt for ‘the female’? Surely this would make a difference?) Brooding above a mumbled bin of hardcover books contemplating Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Crane Brinton’s The Age of Reason, Margaret Meade’s Coming of Age in Samoa, DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Mann’s Magic Mountain and there suddenly you glided up behind me to touch my wrist almost shyly and whisper, ‘Come here!’ in a way that thrilled me for it meant I have something wonderful to show you; as often in those days we surprised each other with found-gifts, sunlight pouring through a leaded window in our lecture room in Bobst Hall, a graceful dark-skinned child skipping rope in Washington Square, on West Broadway a mounted policeman’s sleek, sculpted-looking bay horse whinnying and shaking his magnificent mane. Found-gifts! Like poems these were, fleeting and magical and unexpected. And eagerly I turned to follow you though frowning, ‘Yes? What?’ because you were not to be trusted, your mercurial moods, your sulky silences, your resentment over my high grades, your weakness for showy superficial people, yes you were childish and self-absorbed and I adored and feared you, knowing you’d break my heart, so eagerly and yet with dread I followed you through that labyrinthine maze of book-bins, free-standing bookshelves, and stacks to the ceiling ANTHROPOLOGY, ART/ANCIENT, ART/RENAISSANCE, ART/MODERN, ART/ASIAN, ART/WESTERN, TRAVEL, PHILOSOPHY, COOKERY, POETRY/MODERN where the way was treacherous lighted only by bare sixty-watt light-bulbs and customers as cranky as we two stood in the aisles reading books, or sat huddled on footstools glancing up annoyed at our passage, and unquestioning I followed you until at POETRY/MODERN you halted, and pushed me ahead, and around a corner, and I stood puzzled staring not knowing what I was supposed to be seeing until impatiently you poked me in the ribs and pointed and now I perceived an individual in the aisle pulling down books from shelves, peering at them, clearly absorbed by what she read, a woman nearly my height (I was tall for a girl, in 1956) in a man’s navy coat to her ankles and sleeves past her wrists, a man’s beige fedora hat on her head, scrunched low as we wore our knitted caps, and most of her hair hidden by the hat except for a six-inch blonde plait at the nape of her neck; and she wore black corduroy trousers tucked into what looked like salt-stained cowhide boots. Was this someone we knew? An older student from one of our classes? A girl-poet like ourselves, in disguise? I was about to hiss at you, ‘What’s this? Who is- ‘ when the blonde woman turned to take down another book (always I would remember this slender volume of poetry though I’d glimpsed it for but a fraction of a second: ee cummings’ Tulips and Chimneys), and I saw that she was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe! In the Strand. Like us. And she seemed to be alone.

Marilyn Monroe, alone!

In Strand Used Books, a snowy weekday evening in March 1956.

The blonde actress was wholly absorbed in browsing, oblivious of us and oblivious of her surroundings. You could see she was a reader. She was one of those who reads. With concentration, With passion. Oh, with her very soul! It was poetry she was reading, so her lips moved silently. She frowned, she grimaced, she stalled, she nodded, she sawed and wiped her nose absent-mindedly on the edge of a hand, so intense was her concentration; for when you truly read poetry, the poetry reads you.

Still, this woman was Marilyn Monroe! Despite ourselves, our repudiation of the sorry clichés of romance, still we half-expected a man to join her, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Marlon Brando (we adored, for a man); in fact, we’d read that Brando was in New York, might be rejecting Hollywood for New York and returning to the stage.

But no man joined Marilyn Monroe in the Strand. No tall handsome leading-man. No dark prince.

For which, thank God!

How differently this story would end.

For what seemed like a very long time, but was probably not much more than a half-hour, Marilyn Monroe browsed in the POETRY/MODERN shelves as, from a discreet distance, two girl-poets watched covertly. The ‘Marilyn Monroe’ we’d have said we knew was a garish blonde showgirl, a Hollywood-glamour ‘sexpot’ of no interest to us except maybe to denounce, if we’d troubled to think about her, which we had not; this ‘Marilyn Monroe’ was as unlike that woman as (almost!) we were unlike her. We were dying of curiosity, what were the books she was examining, who were the poets? Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Harry Crosby, Louise Bogan, HD, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser . . . A few of these Marilyn Monroe made a decision to buy, closing a book with that satisfied expression that means I’ll be reading this soon, in private. She’d chosen maybe six books of poetry. Then she moved on, a leather bag slung over her shoulder and her fedora tilted on her head. We couldn’t resist, we followed her! Careful not to whisper together like excited schoolgirls, still less to giggle wildly as we were tempted, a ticklish sensation like feathers in my nose, you poked me in the ribs to sober me, gave me a glare meaning Don’t be rude! Don’t ruin this for us both. In fact, I acknowledge: I was the clumsier of the two of us, a tall gawky Rima the Bird Girl with my springy red hair like an exotic bird’s crest while you were petite and dark-haired, wavy dark hair smooth and shiny as varnish, and your long-lashed sloe eyes, you the wily gymnast and I the aggressive basketball player, our contrary talents bred in our bones.

Which of us would marry, bear children (three strapping sons!) like our fore-mothers, and which of us would persevere into young middle-age before blossoming into a poet’s true career, could anyone have predicted, that snowy March evening in 1956?

As Marilyn Monroe drifted on through the maze of books and we followed in her wake. As through a maze of dreams. Past SPORTS, past MILITARY, past WAR, past HISTORY/ANCIENT, past a muttering bewhiskered old man we’d often seen in the Strand prowling the stacks like an obstreperous ghost, past several surly yawning bearded clerks who took no more notice of the blonde actress than they ever did of us, and so to NATURAL HISTORY where she halted, which surprised us, and there again for unhurried minutes (the Strand was open till 9 pm.) Marilyn Monroe in her mannish disguise browsed and brooded pulling down books, seeking what?, at last crouched leafing through an over-sized illustrated book (curiosity overcame me! I shoved away your restraining hand, politely I eased past Marilyn Monroe murmuring ‘Excuse me’ without so much as brushing against her and without being noticed), Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in a deluxe edition. Darwin! Origin of Species! We were poet-despisers of science, or believed we were, or must be, to be true poets in the exalted mode of TS Eliot and William Butler Yeats; such a choice, for Marilyn Monroe, seemed perverse to us. But this book was one Marilyn quickly decided to purchase, hoisting it into her arms and moving on. That rakish fedora we’d come to covet, and that single chunky blonde braid. (Afterward we would wonder: Marilyn Monroe’s hair in a braid? Never had we seen Marilyn Monroe with her hair braided in any movie or photo. What did this mean? Did it mean anything? Had she quit films, and embarked upon a new, anonymous life in our midst?)

Suddenly Marilyn Monroe glanced back at us frowning as a child might frown (had we spoken aloud? had she heard our thoughts?) and there came into her face a look of puzzlement, not alarm or annoyance but a childlike puzzlement: Who are you? You two? Are you watching me? Quickly we looked away. We were engaged in a whispering dispute over a book one of us had fumbled from a shelf, A History of Botanical Gardens in England. So we were undetected. We hoped!

But, wary now, and sobered. For what if Marilyn Monroe had caught us, and knew that we knew?

She might have abandoned her books and fled the Strand. What a loss for her, and for the books! For us, too.

Oh, we worried at Marilyn Monroe’s recklessness! We dreaded her being recognized by a (male) customer or (male) clerk. A girl or woman would have kept her secret (so we thought) but no man could resist staring openly at her, following her and at last speaking to her. Of course, the blonde actress in Strand Used Books wasn’t herself, not at all glamorous, or ‘sexy’, or especially blonde, in her inconspicuous man’s clothing, and those salt-stained boots, she might’ve been anyone, female or male, hardly a Hollywood celebrity, a movie ‘goddess’. Yet if you stared, you’d recognize her. If you tried, with any imagination, you’d see MARILYN MONROE. It was like a child’s game in which you stare at foliage, grass, clouds in the sky, and suddenly you see a face or a figure, and after that recognition you can’t not see the hidden shape, it’s staring you in the face. So too with Marilyn Monroe. Once we saw her, it seemed to us she must be seen – recognized – by anyone. She might’ve been naked, moving languorously along the aisles. If any man saw! We worried she’d be endangered. She’d quickly become surrounded and mobbed. It was such poor judgement on her part to come to Strand Used Books alone. Maybe she could shop at Tiffany’s, maybe she could walk through the lobby of the Plaza, maybe she’d be safe from unwanted admirers in certain cases of privilege on the upper East Side, but not here. Almost, we were angry at the woman. She was an adult woman, not a girl, wouldn’t you expect an adult woman to have more common sense? Perplexed, you stared after her and gripped my wrist with talon fingers as sometimes you did, thrilled with discovery.

‘Y’know? She’s like us.’

You meant: a human being like us. A female like us. Amid the browsing customers (who were mainly male) of the Strand, like us.

But it wasn’t true, and I think you must have known it. Even then. In the excitement and confusion of that hour. For after our deaths, I mean the three of us, the three of us in the Strand that evening, yet ‘Marilyn Monroe’ would remain. She’d entered history, at least American history. Twentieth century history. Who knows why! As if an actual bolt of lightning had struck, of the Strand’s customers that evening, her. And only her. You could argue that such a destiny is unfair, unjust, undeserved, and maybe that’s so, but such an argument is irrelevant. Maybe TS Eliot wasn’t the great poet we’d thought him, either. Yet ‘Monroe’ and ‘Eliot’ were American history. In this very bookstore (next time, we would check!) in the stacks marked FILMS/HOLLYWOOD, there were books containing ‘Marilyn Monroe’, books about Hollywood movies and Hollywood ‘stars’. For all we knew, ‘Marilyn Monroe’ would turn up in other books, in other stacks. And of course in her films. In such archives, well into the twenty-first century she would endure. She would never die. Even if she should wish to die, Marilyn Monroe could not.

By this time she was carrying an armload of books. We thought (we almost hoped) she was finished and would be leaving the store, but she surprised us by leading us over to JUDAICA. (Even the word was exotic to us!) In that formidable aisle there were books in Hebrew, German, Russian, French. Some of these looked centuries old. There were complete sets of the Talmud and cryptically printed tomes on the Cabala. The titles Marilyn Monroe sought were all in English: Jews of Eastern Europe, The Chosen People, A Concise History of the Jews. She set her books and handbag on the floor and sat on a footstool and turned pages frowningly, as if searching for something; in this uncomfortable posture she remained for at least twenty minutes, often wetting her fingers to turn pages that stuck, and frowning more deeply, yet smiling too; we drew near enough to observe her moist parted lips, and her flushed, feverish cheeks. We worried the reckless woman was seated too near a main aisle, bright overhead light fell on part of her face, her plaited hair. Customers and clerks were continuously milling past.

At one point a clerk called out angrily, ‘Hey you!’ – and the three of us started.

(It had nothing to do with us of course. He’d caught someone trying to slip a book into an overcoat pocket.)

After this jarring interruption, Marilyn Monroe began to glance over at us. She met our eyes, and she knew. But stubbornly turning back to the hefty book on her knees with an actress’s serenity, as if, aware of a camera trained upon her, she would take no heed. What poise, we were thinking. What professional control. And what beauty. Marilyn Monroe’s skin was naturally luminous and her eyes a clear washed blue. (In that instant we’d seen. We’d never forget!) She was beautiful without makeup, her mouth was a beautiful mouth without lip-stick. Does beauty matter? Why does beauty matter? Is beauty a kind of immortality, of the body? In images, at least? I ask only out of intellectual curiosity. Rima the Bird Girl was no beauty as a girl, nor would she be, as a mature woman!) Her hair in a stubby braid. And that navy surplus coat, and corduroy trousers, and cowhide boots. Beauty was a flame you wanted sometimes to hide, or even to smother. It wasn’t for us to understand, yet we understood.

For some time she ignored us, leafing eagerly through A Pictorial History of Jewish Culture. Then she began to glance at us sidelong, seeing that, yes, we were still there, in the aisle, without much pretense any longer of looking at books; and We smiled, a fleeting smile to indicate I see you seeing me. Thank you for not speaking my name.

As if it was a game. A girl’s game. Maybe it was?

Never would we two have betrayed Marilyn Monroe’s identity in the Strand that evening. Yet it’s conceivable we might have spoken her name. But we did not.

I’m proud of us. We were so young.

We were young, headstrong, arrogant and pretty smart. Though we didn’t think of ourselves as young. You were nineteen, I was twenty. You were the more mature of the two of us (maybe); unless it’s more accurate to say, I was the less mature of the two of us. We were patient watching over Marilyn Monroe amid the JUDAICA stacks until at last she shut the unwieldy book with that decisive look that meant she’d be buying it, and gathered up her things and headed for the front counter to make her purchases, while we followed at a respectful distance. Marilyn Monroe understood we were her escorts. If anyone dared to approach her, we intended to crowd him out. We intended to step between him and her. Yet how oblivious were other Strand customers! It’s a symptom of used-book lovers, we’re oblivious of one another, usually; even Marilyn Monroe in her disguise which was in fact a kind of sexy-boy disguise, passed by unnoticed. At the front of the store, though, clerks were more alert. The store manager was more alert. Were they looking at her? Awaiting her? As she neared the cashier’s counter and the bright fluorescent lights overhead, Marilyn Monroe began to lose courage. Out of her shoulder bag she extracted a pair of amber-tinted horn-rimmed glasses, and fumbled to put them on. She turned up the collar of her navy coat. She lowered her hat brim. It was then I stepped forward and said quietly, ‘Excuse me? Why don’t I buy your books for you? That way you wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.’

The blonde actress stared at me through her oversized, slightly crooked horn-rimmed glasses, and blinked once or twice, and smiled. ‘Oh gosh. Would you?’ Almost I couldn’t hear, her voice was so soft.

Which is just what I did. Marilyn Monroe’s purchases that night at the Strand, of sixteen books, mixed hardcover and paperback, came to a staggeringly high total for me – $55.85. Rarely did I hand over more than a few dollars to the bristly-bearded cashier. This time, I may have trembled as I pushed twenty-dollar bills at him, in dread of the man glaring at me and saying suddenly, ‘Who are you?’ and glaring at Marilyn Monroe standing inconspicuously a few yards away. ‘And who are you?’ But as usual the cashier didn’t give me a second glance. Already another customer was pushing to take my place.

At the door, which opened out onto the intersection of Broadway and Twelfth, Marilyn Monroe said to us both in her whispery voice, ‘You’re so sweet, you two. Here.’ She pushed into our surprised hands The Selected Poetry of Marianne Moore (Marianne Moore! we’d hardly been aware of her but would come to love her poetry, in time) and stammered thanks but already she was headed south on Broadway on the ice-rippled pavement, snow flurries like deranged white blossoms blown about her ducked head and shoulders. We waited for her to call a cab, but she didn’t. We watched her walk away in an agony of love. We didn’t follow. We knew we must not follow! By this time giddy from the strain of the past hour or more, laughing breathlessly, grabbing each other’s hands so hard it hurt, ‘Oh, Oh, God. She spoke to us. ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ I touched her hand. ‘Was it real?’

It was real: we had The Selected Poems of Marriane Moore to prove it.

That snowy early-evening in March 1956 of Strand Used Books, Broadway and Twelfth, New York City. That magic evening of Marilyn Monroe, when I kissed you for the first time. •

Prolific short story writer Joyce Carol Oates is the author of various novels and collections of stories. She has recently completed Blonde, a novel featuring Marilyn Monroe. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

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