Hitchcock Blonde by Sharon Dolin

Author:Sharon Dolin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

When I lived in the Bay Area in my early twenties, I went to a party in San Francisco and met a young Frenchman named Marcel. Straight men were such an anomaly back then that it was easy to find him charming in conversation, and so I accepted his invitation to visit him across the Bay in Oakland where he lived.

I take BART from San Francisco to the East Bay one late afternoon to the address in Oakland that he gave me over the phone. He greets me at the door and shows me in. He is thin, with dark straight hair, and he smells strongly of perfumed bath powder, the kind a woman might use. In the afternoon light, he looks very pale, ghostlike. Has he also powdered his face with it? He quickly explains to me that he lives with an older woman who happens to be out of town. I do not ask him more because I do not want to know more. I sense he is a kept man who is cheating on his benefactor while she is away. There is something creepy about him now that I did not pick up at the party the week before. I ask to use the bathroom and find the powder there. A bit odd. It must be the woman’s bath powder.

We sit down at the dining room table and he brings out a bowl of fruit. I glance at the bowl and see a mixture of overripe peaches and bruised apples, the kind of fruit my grandmother might have offered me back in her filthy, roach-ridden house in Brooklyn. is is California, where fresh produce is as easy to come by as a slice of pizza in New York. I start feeling uneasy, a bit queasy, but pretend everything is normal and just say no thank you. Marcel proceeds to tell me a story, a dating story, I suppose apropos of our date.

“I thought you would like this story. There’s a woman I have a correspondence with in L.A. for six months. She put a personal ad in the L.A. Times looking for a woman. So I decide to answer her and I am calling myself Marie. We’ve been writing letters and talking on the phone a lot and I am thinking she is falling in love with me. We’ve never met, of course. Every once in a while, she is asking to me to come up north and visit. And when she calls here, it’s happened two times already, I change my voice and I tell her Marie is out of town. It is sad, is it not?”

Why is he telling me this story? And how am I supposed to respond? I do not remember saying much. I begin feeling a sickening mixture of fear and repulsion. I glance down once more at the rotting fruit. I have seen and heard enough. I get up and tell him calmly that I have to return to San Francisco. I can see he understands and he leads me to the door.

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