The men talked about playing high school football during the Depression, and made jokes about how old and fat they had grown. Somebody asked Uncle Jarv about the four hotel rooms and the four bottles of whiskey. Everybody laughed except Uncle Jarv. He smiled instead. Night had just started when somebody found the bears.

They were on a side street sitting in the front seat of a car. One of the bears had on a pair of pants and a checked shirt. He was wearing a red hunting hat and had a pipe in the mouth and two paws on the steering wheel like Barney Oldfield.

The other bear had on a white silk negligee, one of the kind you see advertised in the back pages of men’s magazines, and a pair of felt slippers stuck on the feet. There was a pink bonnet tied on the head and a purse in the lap.

Somebody opened up the purse, but there wasn’t anything inside. I don’t know what they expected to find, but they were disappointed. What would a dead bear carry in its purse, anyway?

Strange is the thing that makes me recall all this again: the bears. It’s a photograph in the newspaper of Marilyn Monroe, dead from a sleeping pill suicide, young and beautiful, as they say, with everything to live for.

The newspapers are filled with it: articles and photographs and the like – her body being taken away on a cart, the body wrapped in a dull blanket. I wonder what post office wall in Eastern Oregon will wear this photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

An attendant is pushing the cart out of a door, and the sun is shining under the cart. Venetian blinds are in the photograph and the branches of a tree.

Pale Marble Movie

The room had a high Victorian ceiling and there was a marble fireplace and an avocado tree growing in the window, and she lay beside me sleeping in a very well-built blonde way.

And I was asleep, too, and it was just starting to be dawn in September.

1964.

Then suddenly, without any warning, she sat up in bed, waking me instantly, and she started to get out of bed. She was very serious about it.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

Her eyes were wide open.

‘I’m getting up,’ she said.

They were a somnambulist blue.

‘Get back in bed,’ I said.

‘Why?’ she said, now halfway out of bed with one blonde foot touching the floor.

‘Because you’re still asleep,’ I said.

‘Ohhh … OK,’ she said. That made sense to her and she got back into bed and pulled the covers around herself and cuddled up close to me. She didn’t say another word and she didn’t move.