Casting Norma Jeane Read Free Page A

was she quite his solid old Norma Jeane, as though the shedding of the darker coloration had shifted some weight off her feet and lifted her partway up into the air.
    Nor was anything else the same when their eyes met. There was no sending forth her rollicking laugh or throwing her arms up to hug him as in the wonderful days of the past. Too much had happened since then. Instead she chose to avert her look and stick out her lower lip like a sulking child.
    “Why did you cut off my allowance, Jimmie?” were her first words as she drew a flimsy wrapper around herself against the chilly air. Her face was devoid of makeup. She’d come to the door straight out of bed, where obviously she hadn’t been sleeping too well.
    “Look, kid, you don’t pay for anything unless you’re getting it,” replied Jim, affecting an unfeeling face.
    Norma Jeane gave him a sharply pained look as if her ears had just heard something too unbelievably crass. Now here, thought Jim with delight—despite all this new blondness and sleekness—here was his same old Norma Jeane! So very proper. So easily shocked. He felt a constriction in the area of his chest and throat before the reappearing sparks of her old life and loveliness. Notwithstanding that now she had the nerve to launch into a sob story about being in the hospital in Las Vegas with a terrible mouth infection just when the government letter arrived telling her the allotment money was ending.
    Jim laughed out loud as sarcastically as he could. “Well gee, Norma Jeane,” he broke in, “I’m so sorry I had that money cut off when you were sick! How thoughtless of me! Umm—I wonder, since we happen to be on the subject of surprise letters…”
    This was the amazing thing, he was thinking. Here was this girl, so quick-witted and perceptive in every other way—who’d proven herself, in fact, even as far back as the day she’d married him at the age of sixteen, to be more levelheaded and adult than Jim himself had been then at the age of twenty-one. Yet at certain times, he was always having to spell out the most basic things to her.
    “…I wonder,” he went on, “if you maybe gave any thought to my feelings when you had that letter sent to me on board ship?”
    Norma Jeane stared at him blankly for a moment and then just looked away. She couldn’t answer.
    “From a lawyer, for God’s sake!” he pursued, his already-big voice growing louder. “You couldn’t even have the decency to let me know in your own words that you were going to dump me!”
    The booming of his voice caused her to tilt her head to one side and indicate behind her in the direction of their old bedroom. “I think my mother’s getting sort of upset,” she said softly.
    Jim leaned inside the door to take a look. Staring up at him apprehensively from the one bed in the apartment was Norma Jeane’s mother—the strange, petite Gladys who only a few months before had been released from a mental hospital. He immediately said to himself, There go my hopes of settling everything in bed. Which was a shame because, no matter what, everything between them always turned out perfectly in bed.
    Norma Jeane seized on the distraction to start looking him over carefully while allowing a bit of the old twinkle to come into her eyes. This was a look that he loved above everything else. Never had it failed to melt his heart.
    “Your suit doesn’t fit,” she said.
    “I know. But I wanted out of that sailor suit,” admitted Jim.
    Saying so was tantamount to offering her a white flag of surrender after the terrific row they’d had in January. The truth of it was that since then, he’d spent most of seven months at sea in deep reflection. And now he saw that Norma Jeane—however far off the track she may have gotten in this madness of hers about modeling—had been right about something else. That purely for the sake of a little financial security in shaky times, Jim had been stretching his wartime stint with the