Norma Jeane Baker and Bucky Glazer's marriage and bodily memories

Norma Jeane Baker and Bucky Glazer’s marriage remains present in the novel through two sharply different traces: a tender domestic life she imagines with him and a physical memory that intrudes on her later marriage. Bucky is at once the companion of an unrealized ordinary happiness and part of the past against which Norma Jeane measures her hopes of becoming a wife again.

An imagined ordinary life

After watching The Seven Year Itch at the Sepulveda Theatre, Norma Jeane imagines how differently the evening might have unfolded with Bucky. He would have enjoyed the film, laughed, and held her hand; afterward, she pictures them making love with the eager, uncomplicated vigor of a young couple. This is not a scene of reunion but a counterfactual domestic intimacy, set against the film’s public image of the blonde actress and the life Norma Jeane is actually trying to escape.

The fantasy sharpens the contrast between Bucky as a remembered companion and the Ex-Athlete, whose pursuit makes her want to disappear from Hollywood. Norma Jeane resolves to leave for New York City, live alone, and begin again as a theater student. In the moment of decision, the marriage to Bucky supplies an image of shared pleasure and familiarity, while her present circumstances make flight seem necessary.

The body as a record of the marriage

Later, beside her new husband, Norma Jeane recognizes Bucky through smell. The Playwright’s sweat-soaked sheets and unwashed odor recall Bucky’s armpits and dirty feet. The memory is involuntary and physical: the earlier marriage survives not only as a story she can revisit but as a sensory association carried into another intimate relationship.

That association informs Norma Jeane’s determination not to repeat past mistakes. She wants her new husband to be proud of her as both an actress and a wife, imagines having children together, and feels almost already pregnant. Her hopes make the contrast with the remembered marriage consequential: Bucky’s bodily imprint belongs to the past, but it shapes the standards and anxieties she brings to a hoped-for future.

Intimacy, absence, and repetition

The two recollections do not settle into a simple account of a marriage that was either wholly happy or wholly failed. In the movie-theater fantasy, Bucky figures as the person who would have shared laughter and affectionate touch; in the later scene, his smell marks an earlier intimacy that Norma Jeane is determined not to reproduce in the same way. The novel places idealized companionship beside an unvarnished bodily memory, allowing the marriage to remain both desired and difficult to leave behind.

Bucky’s role in Norma Jeane’s remembered life is therefore defined by distance as much as by attachment. He is absent from the imagined evening at the theater, yet his imagined hand and presence make the scene emotionally legible; later, a sensory resemblance brings him back without any deliberate invitation. The marriage persists in these fragments as a measure of ordinary closeness and as part of the bodily past Norma Jeane carries into her attempts to begin again.